Barry Spector's Posts

Barry’s Blog # 44: The Innocent American is the Violent American

Posted by Barry Spector on December 23, 2017 at 3:00pm

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“What might happen,” asks my friend Carolyn Baker, “if instead of talking about gun control and the war on terror, we spent the next 48 hours just GRIEVING. No shopping, no TV, no Internet. Instead, we come together in our neighborhoods and communities and wail and sob – not just for the children in Newton, Connecticut (and, I would add, the dozens of mass shootings we have endured since then) but for the planet that human beings are killing; for the 200 species that are becoming extinct every day; for wars everywhere on earth; for millions of humans who go to bed hungry every night. We can’t answer ‘what might happen?’ until we actually do it. Nothing else has changed our planetary suicide. I believe two solid days of grieving would.”

After that, and after the usual expressions of outrage that the Democrats are too afraid of the NRA to enact real gun control, we might look at the mythological elements in American culture for some insight, as I did in Chapter Nine of my book:

One of our most fundamental values is social mobility, or the opportunity to get ahead. However, the likelihood of advancing in social class in America has actually decreased significantly since the 1980s. But fifty-six percent of those blue-collar men who correctly perceived George Bush’s 2003 tax cuts as favoring the rich still supported them.

Why? Because the myth of the self-made man is as deeply ingrained as our wild, naïve optimism; in the year 2000, 19% believed they would “soon” be in the top one percent income bracket, and another 19% thought they already were. Two-thirds of us expect to have to pay the estate tax one day (only two percent will).

But when our long-ingrained, American assumptions of social mobility are revealed as fiction, the hero encounters his opposite – the victim – within himself, and we become what we really are (except perhaps for Nazi Germany), the most violent people in history. gun-violence

Violent crime is a natural by-product of our values, an alternative means of social mobility in a society where “anything goes” in the pursuit of success.

In this context, mythologist Glen Slater of Pacifica Graduate Institute wrote an excellent piece in Spring Journal (# 81) a few years ago. “America,” he writes, “has little imagination for loss and failure. It only knows how to move forward.” We go ballistic when we can only imagine moving forward and that movement is blocked. Then guns become the purest expression of controlling one’s fate. As such, they are “the dark epitome of the self-made way of life.”

Americans may well dream bigger dreams than other peoples. With great possibilities, however, come great risks. Gaps between aspiration and reality – the lost dream – are also far higher here than anywhere else. When we don’t meet our expectations of success, when that gap gets too wide, violence often becomes the only option, the expression of a fantasy of ultimate individualism and control. In this sense, the Mafia is more American then Sicilian, and the lone, mass killer (almost all of whom have been white, middle class men with no criminal background) is an expression of social mobility gone bad.

Our frontier myths and terror of the Other prevent the gun-control legislation common in most countries. Forty percent of American adults own 260 million legal and 25 million illegal firearms.

Here is where our mythology enters the conversation: Twenty-four percent of us believe that “it is acceptable to use violence to get what we want,” a far higher number than in any European country.

We suffer 15,000 gun murders, 18,000 gun suicides and 1,500 “accidental” gun deaths per year. America’s adult murder rate is seven times higher and its teen murder rate twelve times higher than in Britain, France, Italy, Australia, Canada and Germany. These nations together have 20 million teenagers; in 1990 a total of 300 were murdered. That same year, of America’s 17 million teens, 3,000 were murdered, while thirty of Japan’s ten million teens were murdered, a rate one-fiftieth of ours.

Slater concludes that gun violence “keeps the national psyche in a holding pattern, preventing it from a more conscious encounter with more soul-wrenching issues.”

In response to such violence, America murders criminals (especially if they are men of color) to show that killing is wrong. However, the impulse to scapegoat the Other clashes with the temptation to deny our darkness. Executions, though common, are private affairs; the state no longer displays the grizzly results publicly (as commonly happened up to the 19th century). The result is that capital punishment has no deterrent effect.

Meanwhile, constant, massive, fictional death in film and TV reduces the emotional impact of actual death. By age eighteen, an American will have seen 18,000 virtual murders. “Harmless violence where no one gets hurt,” wrote James Hillman, “breeds innocence…the innocent American is the violent American.”

History, too, has conspired. No one alive can recall the Civil War, and there are no movie records of its carnage. There had been no warfare on American continental soil for well over a century until the recent terrorist acts. The U.S. has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. It lost comparatively few soldiers and fewer than 2,000 civilian war deaths during the twentieth century. Except for the World War II generation, we have little memory of loss comparable to other countries. Consequently, America is one of the few nations in which public figures glorify the military.

Given our beliefs about using force, it follows that we rarely object to externalizing our violence. The U.S. spends more money on arms than the rest of the world combined. Calculated accurately, annual military expenditures typically exceed $1.2 trillion, over half of the federal budget. What are these beliefs on the international scale? Forty-two percent of us (compared to eleven percent of Europeans) strongly agree that, “under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice.” Only 46% of us believe that bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are never justified.

Bullets and bombs: Apollo was the Greek god whose arrows killed from afar. We are talking about Apollonian (and therefore often emotionless) violence at a distance, where we remain insulated from the human consequences.

Forty years ago, the sociologist Philip Slater identified the pattern: “America has developed more elaborate, complex, and grotesque techniques for exterminating people at a distance than any nation in the history of the world…perhaps the distance itself carries special meaning.”

American exceptionalism: What is extraordinary about us, wrote historian Richard Hofstadter, is “our ability to believe that we are a peace-loving and law-abiding people.”

And what about the rest of us, the non-violent, the pro-gun control, the pacifists, the average people? Who among us hasn’t said something like this: “I just don’t understand how that person could have done that, how he could have killed those children.”

The shocked reaction is understandable. “No sane person,” we say, “would commit such heinous crimes. He must have been mentally ill.” But in a culture of violence, our disbelief is primarily a measure of our own innocence and a way of distancing ourselves from the darkest truth: in this time, in this nation, we are all capable of such actions, because we choose to remain innocent. As long as “we” don’t acknowledge what we as Americans subtly condone by our inaction, “others” will have to carry our darkness.

The myth of innocence allows us to perpetrate mass destruction while simultaneously denying death’s reality. Until we as a nation can go to that dark place and grieve together, the violence will continue.

Barry’s Blog # 224: The Hero Must Die, Part Four of Four

Posted by Barry Spector on December 18, 2017 at 5:30pm

PART FOUR – THE PARADOX OF THE OUTSIDER

The redemption hero, like the Christ, always comes from outside the community. And like the Christ, he leaves once his work is done. He must leave; redemption mythology requires that since he came from somewhere else, he must return. But this leads to a paradox. The innocent community defines itself by what it is not – the external Other of terrorism, and the internal Other of race. We know who we are because we are not them, the others. The Other is the evil, threatening outsider. Or: evil (that which is not-Eden) comes from the outside – but so does redemption.

By riding off into the sunset, writes James Robertson, “…the cowboy hero never integrated himself with his society.” This hero has much in common with his villainous antagonists. Each rejects social comforts and conventional rules of law to further his aims or serve his cause.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the birth of the national security state coincided precisely with the peak of the Western in film and TV. Our classic example of the outsider hero who leaves once his work is done is Shane, which was produced in the same year (1953) that the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratic government. And our classic examples of the unity of hero and villain

are John Wayne’s character “Ethan Edwards” and his enemy “Scar” in The Searchers (1956). Although Edwards and Scar serve opposite ends of the moral spectrum, their methods are surprisingly similar.

Here is the final scene of Shane:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtoCw2iOTSc

Ultimately, a characteristic of the American hero is his willingness to become an outlaw in order to defeat evil. Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600 -1860 writes that as early as the 1820’s the standard, fictional frontier hero was rescuing white captives by fighting the Indian “on his own terms and in his own manner, becoming in the process a reflection or a double of his dark opponent.

To this day the public often admires the outlaw nearly as much as the lawman (queue Trump again). Jesse James pulled off an 1872 bank hold-up so skillfully that the local newspaper described the exploit as “…so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators.” Perhaps more so: Al Capone received standing ovations when he appeared at ball games, and gangsters from the fictional Tony Soprano to the actual John Gotti (who had his own TV show) were idolized in the press. For more on this, An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America, by George De Stefano.

Robert Warshow writes that the gangster is “what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.” Both share still another characteristic: the villain’s rage is a natural component of his pleasure in violating all boundaries, while the hero is also full of rage. Only by killing the villain, writes William Gibson, can he “release the rage accumulated from a life of emotional self-denial.”

The Puritan zeal for order always clashes with our equally mythic desire to accumulate wealth through any means necessary, and the American psyche has long had to hold both of these themes together in a very unstable mixture. Thus, writes Joel Kovel, “The law enforcer and the law-breaker express contradictory impulses which have been joined in the American character.”

Lewis Lapham suspected that G. W. Bush (and, I would add, Trump) owed his popularity to our inclination to romanticize criminals:

Whether cast as the hero or the villain of the tale, the man at ease with violence bends the rules to fit the circumstance…Bush (feels) entitled to his cocksure swagger by virtue of his having stolen his election to the presidency. The robbery…admits (him) to the long line of America’s criminal ancestry.

Though the hero chooses a life outside of society, he is hardly alone; the desperado and the corporate raider whom we can’t resist admiring are out there too. And, curiously, they are joined by all of the assorted Others – Indians, blacks, Asians, Latinos, youth, gays, Vietnam veterans, terrorists, the disabled and the homeless – those who have been exiled, pushed beyond the walls or into the underworld, into the territory of the repressed. Indeed, the term “underworld” was first used to describe organized crime in the 1920’s, just as the movies were establishing themselves as the prime purveyors of American culture, and alcohol (liquid Dionysus) was being banned.

But America’s re-telling of Biblical redemption stops short of the profound truth conveyed in Euripides’ The Bacchae: the “evil other” and the redeemer, the “good other,” are one and the same, existing together in the mythic figure of Dionysus. In the original Greek, Xenos (root of xenophobia) means both “stranger” and “guest,” depending on the context.

Such a polytheistic culture could hold the tension of these opposites, but monotheism cannot. Christianity had to split Dionysus into two antagonistic images, Christ (himself both mortal and immortal) and the Devil. American myth turned them into the hero and the villain, and American capitalism turned them into the winner and the loser.

From the perspective of authentic initiation, we can see the destructive element that religious, economic or political fundamentalists perceive as evil is actually the revival of long-repressed energies, arriving now as the symbolic death, the redemption, necessary for rebirth to occur. Older figures like Dionysus and Osiris died and were reborn repeatedly, personifying the masculine aspect of the changing, natural, organic world. They were the original dying gods who preceded Jesus. For much more on this theme, see The Jesus Mysteries, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.

But in monotheism, the savior dies only once, not as the world but as a sacrifice for the world. In the context of patriarchy the redemption of the fallen world requires no death into greater life, but only the sacrifice of a child for the benefit of the father. Or: the child’s death equals the redemption of the father’s world.

The empty tomb implies that Christ has returned to the ultimate abstraction, pure spirit. He refuses (or his father won’t allow him) to stay in the ground, in relation to mater, matter, the mother, relationship, Earth.

Certainly, the tradition of tragic literature has offered us some protagonists, such as Hamlet, who actually die. Such heroes typically gain some self-knowledge, so their deaths can have symbolic and initiatory meaning.

But that tradition has its roots in a pre-Christian world, unlike the American hero, who emerged out of monotheism. This hero is willing to die in order to save the innocent community, but he rarely does. John Wayne’s characters, for example, die in seven of his 156 films, usually after having saved his comrades from danger. Are these deaths conceived as sacrifices, and to what? Or are they simply a return to the spirit world, the realm of the distant father gods?

Much more often, after restoring innocence to Eden, the Western Hero rides off into the sunset, leaving the feminine community. Either way, he chooses union with the father over the anxiety or tedium of life among the women and children. Or: dying to the world and attempting to unite with his distant father, he becomes an alcoholic, chasing after “spirits.” He may leave by conscious choice (in much tribal lore the sunset in the west is the land of the dead), or by his father’s choice (“fate”). No wonder that American funerals are so unemotional. Why cry for someone who has gone to a “better place” than this one?

Unlike the universal hero who lifts the veil between the worlds to bring awareness of eternal values to humanity, the redemption hero pulls the veil back down, confirms our innocence, and puts everyone back to sleep.

In literal terms, the real danger is that he may well be forcing us all (think North Korea and nuclear weapons) to join him in returning to that “better place” of pure abstraction and pure oblivion.

But we must always remember that both traditional hero myths and traditional initiation rituals require that something must be sacrificed – the interior identity of the adolescent macho hero – in the course of the hero’s journey. Even though he must leave it for a while, he is bound both to his community and to the Earth, the actual place of that community.

Redemption mythology does get one thing right: the hero must die before he can become the archetypal warrior, who is native to, lover of and defender of the realm. But without the return to that realm, to community, to relationship with the feminine, his initiation remains incomplete, and his tendency toward heroic action – whether literal or vicarious – becomes addictive, and thus repetitive. Such heroes (and their vicarious admirers) long to die into something greater, so they compulsively challenge the world to give them that literal death, in Bush’s words, to “bring it on.”

The tragic tradition says: the hero must die so that he can grow into deeper knowledge. Tribal initiation says: the boy/hero must die so that a real man may return to his community. Psychology says: the hero must die so that the child in the background may finally be put to rest and space can be made for the archetypal Warrior to emerge. Religion says that the Redemption hero must die so that so that the world can have a new imagination of heroes who live for the world instead of heroes who die for it. History says that the idea of the American hero must die so that women and oppressed peoples everywhere can have their full rights in the human community.

The final chapter of my book includes these words:

Heroes certainly won’t disappear; the earth needs real heroes like never before, but we will prefer “peace heroes” to “war heroes.” As we support ritual containers for initiation…we will feel the hero’s journey within ourselves. We will no longer be fascinated by men who risk their lives crushing the Other to restore the peace of denial. We will applaud those who commit to the hard work of relationship with the feminine, men who don’t ride off into the sunset…Rebirth will hinge upon replacing Rambo with Odysseus, who leaves home a hero but returns transformed by his initiations at the feet (and in the beds) of goddesses. Having encountered many small deaths, he returns as the saved rather than the savior. As they say in Africa, when the big death finds him, it will find him alive.

May this nation learn, before it is too late, to see this challenge in symbolic terms and to awaken from this dream of separation.

Barry’s Blog # 223: The Hero Must Die, Part Three of Four

Posted by Barry Spector on December 15, 2017 at 5:32pm

PART THREE – THE PRESIDENTIAL HERO

Enter George W. Bush the Cowboy, as he often did in public appearances. We saw him staged, the first President to appear this way (and each of his successors has retained this public style), typically striding out onto a great stage,
with a crowd of supporters or soldiers sitting behind him. A huge American flag or patriotic motto typically loomed above them, completing the scene that had been carefully composed for television.

US-CRIME-POLICE-SHOOTING-OBAMA https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/bush-dallas-memorial-speech.jpg?w=346&h=248 346w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/bush-dallas-memorial-speech.jpg?w=150&h=108 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/bush-dallas-memorial-speech.jpg?w=300&h=216 300w" sizes="(max-width: 173px) 100vw, 173px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="173" height="124" /> https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/51707036.jpg?w=368&h=246 368w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/51707036.jpg?w=150&h=100 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/51707036.jpg?w=300&h=200 300w" sizes="(max-width: 184px) 100vw, 184px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="184" height="123" />

It evoked a bizarre mix of images: a Protestant church with chorus; the Fascist strongman who declared himself a “war president”; and a TV game show master of ceremonies, softening up the crowd with one-liners (queue Trump).

He was attempting to embody the myth of the lone savior, called forth, as always, by the unprovoked attack of pure evil. This ground had been well prepared. Dozens of action/disaster films had culminated in two films – Independence Day (1996) and Air Force One (1997) – in which American presidents personally piloted jet planes, killed villains and saved the entire world. In 2003 Bush’s handlers certainly had this mythic background in mind when they had him (appear to) land a plane on an aircraft carrier https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/2009-10-22.jpg?w=143&h=150 143w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/2009-10-22.jpg?w=286&h=300 286w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/2009-10-22.jpg 344w" sizes="(max-width: 187px) 100vw, 187px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 0px 12px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: right; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="187" height="197" /> and proclaim, “mission accomplished” in Iraq. Nearly fifteen years later, of course, no one can pretend to know what that ongoing “mission” is.

Like each of his predecessors (in a modern pattern initiated by Jimmy Carter), Bush came from an outlying area to wage moral battle against the insiders of the eastern establishment. He was both outsider and a man of the people, playing both the savior of the innocent and an innocent one himself. Like Reagan, he cavorted at his ranch doing physical work. Like Reagan, Bush perfected the act of not appearing to be a consummate politician. Even his malapropisms – “They misunderestimated me” – and Texas drawl (some say they were contrived) worked in his favor: he seemed genuinely inarticulate, just like the rest of us, unlike eloquent patricians like John Kerry. His people wanted John Wayne, not Adlai Stevenson.

When the occasional reporter got past the handlers (and his or her own editors) and pointed out the disconnect between his rhetoric and reality, Bush simply ignored the charge, as if sharing the joke with his fraternity buddies (again, queue Trump). And it was this apparent comfort in the world of pure fantasy that made his lies, like those of Reagan’s, all the more convincing.

Thus Bush combined the image of the lone savior with another one: the unsophisticated country boy – Parcival – who comes to the city, competes with the effete intellectuals and succeeds by tweaking their noses. In America, this pattern goes back at least as far as Davy Crockett. But Bush, of course, was no Indian killer; his famous smirk was the passive-aggressive gesture that adolescents make while enduring Mom’s lectures on proper behavior. https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/795fc0169ab7e0dea3d3279de0ded754-george-w-bush-quotes-ridiculous-quotes.jpg?w=570&h=406 570w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/795fc0169ab7e0dea3d3279de0ded754-george-w-bush-quotes-ridiculous-quotes.jpg?w=150&h=107 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/795fc0169ab7e0dea3d3279de0ded754-george-w-bush-quotes-ridiculous-quotes.jpg?w=300&h=214 300w" sizes="(max-width: 285px) 100vw, 285px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="258" height="184" /> Ultimately, with the War on Terror temporarily propping up his poll numbers, perhaps he was so persuasive because, like Reagan, he played himself – a grandiose, uninitiated male, alternating between hero and clown. Queue Trump for the third time.

That so many people could be – and can still be – moved by such patently false displays speaks to our refusal to question the roots of our innocence; our enduring racism; the mythic depths of our longing; and the deep study of these things by politicians, especially the Republicans.

Barack Obama presented a very different brand. He endeavored to embody the archetypal King. And this, of course, is precisely what horrified countless whites and motivated them to tear him down by any means necessary, including attacks on his place of birth and his religion. For a Black man to do this was, in their eyes, to call into question the very basis of their own identities. Trump, of course, could see that.

You can read essays I’ve written about Obama here, here, here and here.

By 2016, after economic collapse and no recovery, another eight years of war, a black President and a media culture that had succeeded in blurring any distinction between news, politics and pure entertainment, enough of the public was ready for – longed for – another redemption figure who would not even bother to hide the fact that he was an unrepentant sexual predator, crook and con man.

However, he was also a celebrity, and he knew his audience. Trump and his handlers learned well from Reagan and Bush, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/170915174518-trump-marks-pow-day-super-tease.jpg?w=576&h=324 576w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/170915174518-trump-marks-pow-day-super-tease.jpg?w=150&h=84 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/170915174518-trump-marks-pow-day-super-tease.jpg?w=300&h=169 300w" sizes="(max-width: 289px) 100vw, 289px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="275" height="154" /> as well as from American mythology, which prioritizes identity in terms of the racialized Other. Although he couldn’t claim to be a traditional outsider from a western state, he converted the mainstream media in the eyes of a third of the country into the hated insiders that his followers perceived as the source of their misery.

This wasn’t difficult. Southern whites, his primary supporters (imagine Southerners voting for a New Yorker!), have a very long memory that stretched back to the days of Reconstruction when Yankee carpetbaggers, newly enfranchised Blacks and radical reformers had turned their world upside down for a time. In the past twenty years they had laid the groundwork, through voter suppression and gerrymandering, for that to never happen again. For more on this, read my blog, Did the South Win the Civil War?

Trump is an easy target for liberals. But what does it mean that many who condemn him in the media, especially comedians, do so by impugning his masculinity (“small hands”)? Isn’t this style yet another reference to Hero mythology? It’s great theater but it certainly has no effect on Trump’s base; the racial hatred, the insecurity below it and the anger at elites are too strong. And, since most of the criticism leveled against him by the Democrats and the mainstream media comes in the form of “Russiagate,” it also partakes of old, useless mythologies of anti-communism (fear of the external Other) and witch hunts (fear of the internal Other).

It all rolls off Trump’s back, because he and several generations of conservative ideologues before him have conditioned the base to perceive themselves as victims of those same elites. The Paranoid Imagination is not concerned with logic or consistency. It receives much of its nourishment from vicarious – and alternating – identification with both the Hero and his mirror opposite, the victim. Or in more contemporary terms, the winner and the loser. Or the hero and the villain.

Barry’s Blog # 222: The Hero Must Die, Part Two of Four

Posted by Barry Spector on December 14, 2017 at 1:11pm

PART TWO – THE REDEMPTION HERO

Joseph Campbell found his three-phase “monomyth” of the hero in almost all cultures; everywhere, that is, except in America. Why is this so? America lacks its own indigenous myths, except of course for the Native American myths that were actually nurtured by this land. But European conquerors and settlers, long alienated from their own indigenous roots, brought only the stories of Puritanism, materialism, progress, chosen people and hatred of the “Other” with them. Conditions were ripe for the creation of something new. And that is exactly what happened: the American myth is the story of something distinctive and original.

Four hundred years of unique historic circumstances, idealistic story telling, preaching, movies, advertising and deliberate propaganda have created an American monomyth, with its own American type of hero. He is individualistic, lonely, selfless, possessed of extraordinary powers – and, as I mentioned above, surprisingly sexless. Though he first appears as the frontiersman and matures into the cowboy, he reappears as the detective, the Lone Ranger, the superhero and Rambo.

Campbell’s classic hero of a thousand faces is born in community; he hears a call, ventures forth on his initiatory journey and returns, often sadder but wiser. But the American hero comes from elsewhere, entering the innocent community so as to defend it from malevolent attacks that also originate elsewhere. The leaders of this community are weak, incompetent or corrupt. Though the hero cares deeply about them, he is not one of them.

Often his very identity is a secret; he may wear a mask or bizarre costume. Unknown https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/unknown.jpeg?w=150&h=114 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/unknown.jpeg 257w" sizes="(max-width: 196px) 100vw, 196px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 0px 12px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: right; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="196" height="150" /> He is usually without flaw but also without depth. Perhaps he fears the public exposure of that secret identity – that he really isn’t very special.

The classic hero often meets and weds the beautiful maiden or princess, enacting the ancient (and inner) union that the Greeks called hieros gamos. They produce many children; indeed, aristocracies everywhere legitimize themselves through genealogies that claim to descend from gods and heroes.

But the American hero (exceptions include James Bond parodies and Woody Allen-type antiheroes) woody-allen-cinematheia.com_ https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/woody-allen-cinematheia-com_.jpg?w=452&h=254 452w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/woody-allen-cinematheia-com_.jpg?w=150&h=84 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/woody-allen-cinematheia-com_.jpg?w=300&h=169 300w" sizes="(max-width: 226px) 100vw, 226px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="226" height="127" /> doesn’t get or often, even want the girl. Even Bond, in his hyper-sexuality, remains a bachelor. More often, the hero must choose between an attractive sexual partner and his sense of duty to his mission; he cannot have both. Some, such as Batman and the Lone Ranger, prefer a comical male “sidekick.”

How common is this unattached hero? Here are some others:

Hawkeye, the Virginian, Josey Wales, Paladin, Sam Spade, Nick Danger, Mike Hammer, Phillip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Dirty Harry, John Shaft, Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon, Mr. Spock, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, the Man With No Name, the Hobbits, Gandalf, Mad Max, Superman, Green Lantern, Green Hornet, Spiderman, the Hulk, Iron Man, Human Torch, The Flash, Dr. Strange, Hellboy, Nick Fury, Swamp Thing, Aquaman, Daredevil, Lone Wolf McQuade, Sargent Rock, Braveheart, Conan the Barbarian, Jack Sparrow, Captains Kirk, Picard, Atom, Nemo, Phillips, Marvel and America and the heroes of Death Wish, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, Pale Rider, Unforgiven, Under Siege, Lethal Weapon, Blade, Casablanca, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, No Country for Old Men, Gran Torino, Walking Tall, Delta Force, Missing In Action, Avenger, Extreme Justice, The Equalizer, Terminator, The Exterminator, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Million Dollar Baby, Open Range and The Exorcist.

All are single, divorced or (especially in John Wayne’s movies) widowers. Jewett and Lawrence write, “The purity of his motivations ensures moral infallibility,” but denies both the tragic complexity of the real world as well as the possibility of healing through merging with and incorporating the values of the Other.

Indeed the sexual impurity of others often seems to invite evil into innocent Eden. In recent decades the hero often enacts his savior role in disaster films (Earthquake, Jurassic Park, Towering Inferno, Tidal Wave and especially Jaws). Commonly, the sexual license of certain (usually female) characters seems to trigger the destruction, and such sinful figures are the first to be destroyed. Nature responds with a moral cleansing, reminding us again of the Puritan underpinnings of our culture. The pattern was set in the Old Testament: “Sexual improprieties provoke natural disasters, from which only the pure and faithful will escape.”

The first victim in Jaws is a sexually provocative woman. v1.bjsyMTk4MzA7ajsxNzU1MjsxMjAwOzU3Njs0MzI https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/v1-bjsymtk4mza7ajsxnzu1mjsxmjawozu3njs0mzi.jpeg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/v1-bjsymtk4mza7ajsxnzu1mjsxmjawozu3njs0mzi.jpeg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 186px) 100vw, 186px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 0px 12px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: right; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="186" height="186" /> And the final scene, in which the hero (who has refused to make love to his wife) destroys the giant shark, perfectly recreates Marduk’s ancient killing of Tiamat. Four thousand years after Babylonians first told that myth, the male hero must still conquer the feminine serpent.

The classic hero undergoes the torments of initiation so that both he and his community may suffer into knowledge, that the world may be re-created. It is a pagan and tragic vision; something must die – his old self – in order for new life to grow. But the American hero cares only for the selfless redemption (Latin: “to buy back”) of others. Born in a monotheistic vision, he saves Eden by combining elements of the sacrificial Christ and the zealous, omnipotent Yahweh. Both he and his community begin and end in innocence, because evil, defeated or not, is out there.

The American psyche has been preoccupied for centuries with the question of salvation. And the triumph of the secular world did not eliminate the Puritan’s longing for redemption; it merely displaced it onto fictional heroes – or onto the inhabitants of the lands where we take our crusades for democracy, people who are in need of our help.

I cannot emphasize this basic insight too strongly. The redemption hero is the logical conclusion to a process of abstraction, alienation and splitting of the western psyche that has gone on for millennia. He is utterly (and proudly) disconnected from relationship with the Other, whom he has demonized into his mirror opposite. Because the Other is irredeemably evil, there is no reason to bemoan the level of violence employed in his destruction, nor to mourn his death (nor, as we will see, to mourn the death of the Hero himself).

The hero’s unwillingness to confront these emotional realities continually reinforces that other American myth, the denial of death.

As Jewett John Lawrence have taught, this hero requires no emotional nurturance, doesn’t grow in wisdom or create anything, and teaches nothing but the resolution of problems through violence. His Puritan renunciation and self-control justify his unlimited capacity for vengeance, which clearly has had a modeling effect on millions of adolescent males. His appeal lies deep below the level of rational thinking. He offers “vigilantism without lawlessness, sexual repression without resultant perversion, and moral infallibility without the use of intellect.” And – this is critical – claiming to love democracy, he never practices citizenship, resorting regularly to unlawful means.

In a parallel tradition, heroines perform their redemptive roles non-violently. Ranging from Heidi and Pollyanna to the heroines of The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, Little House On The Prairie and the Nancy Drew mysteries, they are the secular replacements for a culture that has lost faith in the Virgin Mary and her angels. Untainted by sexual passion, they transform villains with cheerful love, always producing happy endings, regardless of real human complexities. Like their male counterparts, they restore the moral order and avert the threat of random, Dionysian chaos.

These images are the popular expression of civic religion, or national mythology, or in Campbell’s terms, the sociological function of myth. What academics call the “secular displacement of religion,” a pagan like Caroline Casey would call the “toxic mimic.”

To summarize: American literary, religious, political and mass media traditions created and continue to sustain an image of the hero which is the inversion, or literalization of the “Hero With a Thousand Faces.” Rather than growing out of rites of initiation – dying and recreation of the world – it combines the figure who dies for the world with his all-powerful and vengeful father. Superhuman abilities reflect a hope of divine redemption that science has never eradicated, as well as the idea that democracy can be redeemed by anti-democratic means, that peace comes through violence.

History leads to mythology, and the constant repetition of mythic images socializes new generations of young people, some of whom will work in careers that help to directly perpetuate the myths – and history. Another generation learns that their community (we,the “not-others”) is completely innocent, and exceptional. Nature remains outside, of no potential help, except as moral cleansing agent.

The hero, instead of losing his own innocence and bringing wisdom to integrate into his community, remains one-dimensional as he restores the innocent community. Neither grows in wisdom. There is no meaningful suffering, no initiation, and nothing new is created to pass on to future generations. Such communities are compelled to repeat their unconscious, vicarious search for the Other. They will find it behind every bush, in every slum that breeds more terrorists. It is as if Campbell’s hero has become an anonymous and pathological killer in search of an enemy with a thousand faces.

Barry’s Blog # 221: The Hero Must Die, Part One of Four

Posted by Barry Spector on December 13, 2017 at 2:53pm

PART ONE – THE AMERICAN HERO

In the 1950s the birth of the national security state coincided precisely with the peak of cinematic and television westerns, which have been America’s primary image to itself and the world. Westerns had been central to the movies from the beginning. In 1910, they comprised more than 20% of American movies, and the trend continued well into the second half of the century. As late as 1959, westerns comprised a quarter of all prime-time network hours.

Who is the western hero? Besides his willingness to engage in extreme violence, what are his primary characteristics? Surprisingly, many films, novels and comic books cast him as widowed or divorced, as John Wayne is in many of his best-known films: Red River, The Searchers and The Horse Soldiers, but also in non-westerns such as Sands of Iwo Jima.

Other heroes in our literature – dozens of them, as we will see – are loners who reject any enduring erotic relationships.

Seen from the perspective of Depth Psychology, these characters lack a balanced connection with the feminine. They symbolize the man who has not had – or failed – an initiatory confrontation with the feminine depths of his soul. Such a man carries a sense of danger that is undeniably attractive – he is the “demon lover.” Through him, we vicariously live out our own longing for symbolic, initiatory death, which he approaches literally. Yet, considering this description, we must ask: how different is he from the suicidal terrorist / martyr? Robin Morgan writes, “In that he seeks (or risks) exalted annihilation, and threatens (or promises) the same, he magnetizes us as an avatar of power.” Except for the presumption that he is on the side of “good”, perhaps there is little difference.

These western images convey the myth of violent redemption. “Most viewers,” write Robert Jewett and John Lawrence, “…are not aware of being ritually instructed, because myths derive from and appeal to the unconscious rather than the conscious mind.” The issue to understand is violence. In myth violence can be meaningful; it moves toward symbolic death and renewal. But stories in our demythologized world are themselves demythologized, conveying only what Joseph Campbell called the sociological level of myth. In American popular culture this implies innocence. The lone hero never initiates the mayhem, although he reluctantly gives it back many-fold. He may be imperfect, wounded, comic, self-parody or complicated anti-hero, but both he and those he saves remain innocent of any complicity in the problems that he solves; thus his violence is rarely symbolic of deeper meaning.

American English has cheapened the word hero and diluted its potency. Consider that for at least four generations, the media have associated fictional heroes with the actors who portray them. In the culture of celebrity there is very little difference between Sylvester Stallone and Rambo, or between Arnold Schwartzenegger’s political persona and the high-tech vigilantes he portrays (yes, he still portrays them).

What does it mean that these men and others such as Harrison Ford and Chuck Norris continue to portray macho heroes well into their seventies? Have they helped lay the groundwork for national acceptance of an adolescent president?

But at least these men are actors, who have made art of a sort. At least they have done something creative. But we are in a different world now.

Ronald Reagan was a celebrity, an expert at portraying derived values rather than anything heroic or creative that he himself had achieved. Of course, he too had been an actor, but we are talking about his second career as a commercial spokesman that led to his third as a political spokesman.

Celebrities are famous simply for being famous; we often have no idea how they entered our awareness. We admire them for being who they are, not for what they have done for us. Joel Kovel argues that Reagan in particular was so persuasive (other actors had entered politics without attaining his status) precisely because he could barely distinguish his life from his role. As President, he “played Ronald Reagan.” Reagan himself, with rare candor, once admitted, “The camera doesn’t lie. Eventually you are what you are.”

The greatest example of the pathological confusion of actor and image, of course, is John Wayne. https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/john-wayne.jpg?w=686&h=388 686w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/john-wayne.jpg?w=150&h=85 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/john-wayne.jpg?w=300&h=170 300w" sizes="(max-width: 343px) 100vw, 343px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" width="343" height="194" /> Where did the man end and his stereotyped patriotic role begin, especially with his public persona as right-wing spokesman? Those images were overwhelmingly present in the psyches of three generations of American men, and even today his films are required viewing for recruits at military academies, where his name is so common as to be a figure of speech, an adjective or a verb. Even liberals are entranced. Jimmy Carter eulogized Wayne: “He was bigger than life…He embodies the enduring American values of individualism, relentless bravery and perseverance in pursuit of what is right.” Robert Bly, on the other hand, used to joke at men’s conferences that the only images of masculinity available to young men coming of age in the 1960’s were Wayne and his reverse-image, the “wimpy” Woody Allen.

The heroic image is now not merely American; it follows the media everywhere. Barbara Ehrenreich writes of “Rambo culture”: in the 1980’s and 1990’s soldiers in Chechnya, Serbia and Liberia affected Rambo-style headbands and sleeveless muscle-shirts. She observes that the old warrior ideal has become a commodity in global consumer culture:

With Rambo…Hollywood offers up a denationalized, generic warrior-hero, a man of few words and limited loyalties, suitable for universal emulation.

Politicians further cheapen the image by assigning it to persons who have done nothing courageous but have been arbitrarily victimized in the normal course of their jobs. As a result, we confuse heroes and victims. When we do hear of individuals, such as the firefighters of 9/11, who actually do sacrifice themselves to save others, we are left with only this de-potentiated, over-used term – hero – to describe them.

Contemporary expressions of actual heroism tend to fall into the patriarchal trap – the erasure of feminine values – regardless of what cause the hero serves. Feminists can cite countless examples of how they frequently initiate progressive political movements, only to be pushed aside once men become involved. Then, writes Morgan,

A fatal shift in tone occurs – a slide from…spiritual integrity (now regarded as sentimental, idealistic, womanly) into self-righteousness.

Predictably, the men become obsessed with a higher abstract good, and soon the tone shifts from “living for a cause” to “dying for a cause.” They take something that was conceived in images of integration and turn it into a heroic duality: with us or against us.

The hero myth underlies the fields of surgery and emergency medicine as well. To the degree that doctors focus on the single goal of prolonging life – to the exclusion of qualityof life – there are two myths operating. One is the denial of death. The other, closely related, is the hero myth. In extreme cases, the doctor affects a shift, from an event that centers on the patient to one that centers on him, as the individual savior, intent, like the mythical Achilles, on achieving fame and honor. It becomes less about the patient’s desire to heal and more about the doctor’s heroic quest. By contrast, palliative care, with its goal of alleviating pain and facilitating a good death, expresses other mythic images: Hermes,as guide between the worlds; and Artemis, patroness of childbirth, that other most fundamental of transitions.

The hero disdains the feminine because, in his uninitiated state, he has never fully separated from the orbit of his mother. Unlike classic heroes such as Heracles, who servethe mother goddess (“Heracles” means “Glory of Hera”), the modern hero reacts against his fear of (or longing for) engulfment by constructing a thin veneer of machismo. But his shadow hides just below: the needy, dependent and vulnerable child. For every hero, said James Hillman, there is a child in the background.

So the cult of the hero and the myth of innocence merge to create a culture of victimization: perpetually wounded and/or angry “adult children” who prefer the kinds of political and religious approaches that please children, writes Lyn Cowan. These include “simple solutions, literal thinking, and singularity of viewpoint.” A grand circularity: literal thinking produces people who can only think literally (and vote, if they do at all, for similar people). The child in the psyche, as Hillman argued, does not want deepening into mystery; all it wants is a return to innocence. Thus, whether one identifies as pop hero or as victim is to return to innocence.

Or as loser: when individualism and competition are the highest values, we make the hero – the winner – into our greatest mythic personification. But in this mythology, for every winner there must be many losers. It is a zero-sum world; no one can win unless someone else loses. Altruism and compassion become signs of weakness. Some go on to compete in other arenas – work, hobbies or activism – and find some satisfaction. Or they are told that the mere effort of “trying” has made them winners; it’s the effort that counts. Some get promoted, win money in Las Vegas or find love. But these victories are not initiations, nor do we perceive them as such.

The masculine culture of competition always searches for challenges, because competition itself (the toxic mimic of the quest for knowledge) is addictive. Consider the sad spectacles of the newly retired sports star, suddenly lacking challenges; or the former executive, moping around the house, disturbing his wife’s feminine world, until she pushes him off to the golf course.

Thus, with both the feminine and the child existing in the shadows, heroes live with the constant fear of losing.

And what becomes of those of us who can’t succeed or find regular satisfaction? Our puritan heritage reminds us that it is our own fault. In the society of the meritorious, many feel at the deepest level that we don’t merit approval. We have no one else to blame, unless (in therapeutic mode) we blame our parents, because the myth of individualism prevents us from seeing the systemic causes of poverty and dissatisfaction. We internalize shame, which builds in intensity until it demands release in scapegoating, the vicarious violence of heroic action movies – or support for war (from a safe distance).

In the mythology of redemption through violence, the only way out of victimization is the quest for revenge that turns the victim into its mirror-opposite, a perpetrator. It is action that changes from a paranoid imagination into a predatory imagination (two concepts I write about in Chapter Seven of my book). When the only choice is between fear and rage, there is no room for compassion or self-knowledge.

Barry’s Blog # 220: Redeeming the World

Posted by Barry Spector on November 29, 2017 at 11:29am

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions. ― T.S. Eliot

Hell is paved with good intentions. ― Samuel Johnson

We’re on a mission from God. – The Blues Brothers

My wife and I spent some time in Austria and the Czech Republic last summer. It was a delightful vacation, with great food and art and fabulous scenery. Still, as Jews, we both had the odd sensation (in Austria) of seeing those blond, Aryan faces and hearing German spoken all day. Although we knew very well that it was entirely our own projection – everyone we encountered was quite friendly – still, it felt a bit eerie. We also passed the death camp of Mathausen and visited the concentration camp / “model ghetto” of Terezin.

Months later, it was the scenery and the food that lingered in my mind, that is, until I picked up a short, sparse, partially autobiographical and thoroughly disturbing novel by the Israeli Aharon Appelfeld titled The Iron Tracks.

The plot is quite simple. A Holocaust survivor named Erwin Siegelbaum has been riding the trains around Austria continually for forty years. ”The trains make me free,” he tells us ironically.

He rides them because he has two goals. The first is to make his living by searching the markets of tiny villages, identifying and buying old books, sacred wine goblets and other antique Judaica, then selling them to collectors who send them to Israel for remembrance of the culture that is no more in Eastern Europe. It’s a living, but it’s also a mitzvah, an attempt to heal the world (Tikkun Olam in Hebrew).

The second is to find and execute Nachtigel, the now aged Nazi death camp commander who had murdered Siegelbaum’s parents, both secular Jews and devoted communists.

All well and good, for a plot. Will he find the man? Will he actually kill him? How will the act affect the life of this wandering Jew? Spoiler: the ending proves to be (deliberately) unsatisfying. But it forces us to confront many conflicting values and presumptions. Don’t we all want to repair the world? Didn’t his parents, who had clearly transferred their spiritual longings into a secular crusade, want to do that? How much do we value revenge, forgiveness – and, as Americans – extreme violence?

For me, the story gets more complicated as Siegelbaum, long after the war, experiences the latent anti-Semitism of people he otherwise has respect, even affection, for. And, riding the trains and eating in rural taverns, he meets several old men who brag about their youthful service in the German army – “service” because that’s exactly how they remember those years. Despite the defeat and all the deaths and post-war suffering, , they unanimously express pride in the fact that they had “served” in the east, and happily, personally participated in murdering Jews, lots of them.

They feel no regret whatsoever, because they had all been and remain absolute believers in their own quest to remake the world for the better. Spiegelman confronts the evil perpetrated by those who deeply believe that they are doing good:

“What made him (Nachtigel) a professional?” I asked.
“His faith that the extermination of the Jews would bring relief to the world,” he answered, short and swift.
“You also believed.”
“Certainly. Without belief, you don’t kill.” His blue eyes looked directly at me. There is no regret in his heart. On the contrary, the years and the suffering have only intensified his faith. I overcame my muteness and raised my voice: ”It is forbidden to kill.”
“That’s true, but we had to kill the Jews.”

I have been writing about “othering” for years; it’s one of my primary themes. You can read several of my blogs on the topic here, here, here, here, and here.

But reading The Iron Tracks, I understood othering at a different level. We don’t choose to “other” other people or groups. Othering chooses us. The need to do so seems to enter us quite early on, as parents and society gradually persuade us to identify as part of the larger tribe – to know ourselves, as the ancient Greeks implied – only as we gain the absolute knowledge that we are not one of them, the others. In this modern world we are established in the first knowledge only because of the second.

One of the objectives of indigenous initiation rites, curiously, is to destroy that sense of identity and replace it with another that is more authentic and much more useful to the community. For boys, this typically happens at puberty, when the new identity brings the knowledge that one is now an adult male, with all the freedoms and responsibilities this entails.

After this, many indigenous societies offered mystery rites that extended all the way through life, in which each participating adult encountered the ongoing question of who he/she was at deeper and deeper levels. As I write in Chapter Four of my book:

Initiates periodically undergo new transformations. No single event awards permanent status. Each initiation is a temporary qualification to enter the next period of change, when something new will break open. Although the core of the Self doesn’t change, initiates keep being made, unmade and remade…This is possible, however, only if individuals are rooted in communities which in turn are held in broad, mythic containers

And the lack of those containers has been the source of our greatest problems for hundreds of years, since long before modernity. Suffering a legacy of a demythologized world, we can trace our dilemma at least as far back as the ancient Hebrews, who knew who they were because they were not gentiles, and vice versa.

The loss of initiation rites – the symbolic killing of the children – produced our most fundamental mythic narrative, the literal sacrifice of the children, which has manifested in every war throughout history. Both Abraham and Isaac knew their place in the cosmos because they were willing to play their parts in Yahweh’s sacrifice. I wrote about one of many twentieth century manifestations of this myth here.

Eventually, the willingness to die for a cause so as to prove oneself to the fathers and their god (see Chapter Six) became indistinguishable from the willingness to kill for a cause, so as to make the world a better place. In 1209, Papal legate Arnaud Amalric wrote, “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” prior to the massacre at Béziers, during the Albigensian Crusade in Southern France. A direct translation from the Latin would be “Kill them. For the Lord knows those that are His own.” Less formal English translations include “Kill them all; let God sort them out.”

This was the thinking of the Inquisition, a Western institution that is utterly unknown among tribal people. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “…those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Much later, after a long history of witch hunts, an American officer in Viet Nam said, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

In the late nineteenth century, ideology – belief in a grand, overreaching cause – shifted from its religious basis to a secular one, and nationalism became the new source of both othering and the willingness to murder, to “serve” something greater than one’s self. Others chose a different thinking that specifically countered nationalism with a belief in international solidarity, but it was still an ideology. And as it solidified, it became a faith in universal progress, but a faith nevertheless.

This brings us back to our story. In the twentieth century, countless Eastern European Jews exchanged their religious identity with either Zionism or communism. And a similar loss of religion among German Christians led to faith in a Fuhrer and his crusade to rid the world of those who make it impure.

It was a faith with scientific trimmings: for twenty years, Germans continually heard that Jews were an infection and the ideology of National Socialism was the antibiotic necessary to heal the great illness, to make Germany pure again (MAGPA in contemporary terms). But on the other side, Spiegelman’s father had led idealistic communists in burning down small factories, self-defeating actions if there ever were.

Neither I nor, I think, Appelfeld are making equivalencies here between communist organizers and Nazi death camp sadists. One group wanted to bring out the best in humanity, though it failed, and the other, as with their contemporary American mimics, arrogantly drew out the worst. But it is terribly important to understand the three thousand year old mythological foundations of this desire to remake the world – often against its will – that begins in monotheism and reaches its nadir not among those competing ideologies but in America.

The “impurity,” of course, is within us all, to the extent that we believe. But to James Hillman it was clear that all inheritors of the Western tradition, especially Americans, are subject to this legacy, regardless of our value systems, which are essentially superficial. Deep down, we are all believers:

Because a monotheistic psychology must be dedicated to unity, its psychopathology is intolerance of difference…we are each…like it or not, children of the Biblical God. It is a fact, the essential American fact…We are all psychologically Christian.

And a world that constantly threatens to undo our sense of who we are without offering us living myths and rituals forces us to cling all the more desperately to our outmoded identities and religions, as both the old Nazis and the old communists reveal to Spiegelman (we don’t learn his last name until quite late in the book), or in a mirror-reversal, to replace them with addiction to “spirits.” I try to make sense of this mystery in another essay here.

How do we redeem the world? By proudly slaughtering the Others? By collecting old books to remember those who were slaughtered? By organizing the workers of the world and overthrowing the bosses? How? To redeem means “to buy back.” How do we buy back? What do we buy back? How do we gather the money or goods to do that? What are we willing to let go of in order to make that transaction? Perhaps by paying attention.

Perhaps we redeem the world by re-membering it, by bringing back all of its rejected parts. Perhaps we begin by welcoming back all the parts of ourselves that we have disowned. And perhaps we begin that by acknowledging the value of the Others of the world. As certain Mayan Indians still say, “You are the other me.” As the Hindu sage Ramarna Maharshi said, “There are no others.”

Nacht: Night, or darkness.

Nachtigall: Nightingale. The Ukranian Nachtigall battalion perpetrated war crimes during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Spiegel: Mirror

Spiegelman: Mirror-man

Barry’s Blog # 219: Thank You For Your Service

Posted by Barry Spector on November 11, 2017 at 4:15pm

I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. – General Smedley Butler

I laughed to myself… “Here we go. I’m starting a war under false pretenses.” – Admiral James Stockdale, on the Gulf of Tonkin incident

I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are. – George H.W. Bush

We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine…whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. – David Rockefeller

If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied. – Rudyard Kipling

The Greatness of War

Veterans Day became an official national holiday in 1954, after a multi-decade evolution. It coincides with Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, celebrated in other countries that mark the anniversary of the end of World War One.

The Great War slogged on for over four years.

Estimates of the casualties range from a low of eleven million dead combatants – which translates to 7,000 dead per day, every day, for those four years – upwards to 41 million total casualties, including perhaps eight million civilian deaths. These numbers do not include the “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918, which resulted in the deaths of another 50 to 100 million people (three to five percent of the world’s population).

The date of November 11^th commemorates the formal ending of hostilities at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, when the armistice went into effect.

So much for the numbers. Now for the mythic implications. Indeed, only a deeply- and widely-held mythology can even begin to explain the numbers. Chapter Six of my book discusses the Sacrifice of the Children, which I consider to be the most fundamental mythic narrative underlying all of Western Culture:

Ultimately, sacrifice – dying for the cause – became as important as physical survival. Martyrdom became an ethical virtue that every believer must be prepared to emulate. “Uniquely among the religions of the world,” writes (Bruce) Chilton, “the three that center on Abraham have made the willingness to offer the lives of children – an action they all symbolize with versions of the Aqedah (the sacrifice of Isaac) – a central virtue for the faithful as a whole.”…This is how Patriarchy perpetuates itself. In each generation, millions of abused children identify with their adult oppressors and become violent perpetrators themselves. In a demythologized world, they have no choice but to act out the myths of the killing of the children on a massive scale…And what of those who direct the carnage? War allows the old to enact the sacrifice of the children. They project their ambivalence toward their own uninitiated, “inner” children onto actual soldiers, while safely and vicariously experiencing Dionysian intensity. War is an end disguised as a means: deferred infanticide, the revenge of the old upon the young.

What led to this state of affairs? In Chapter Eight I write about the decline of religion in the late 19^th century and the ideology of nationalism that replaced it in all “developed” countries:

Ouranos and Kronos ruled the unconscious of modern man. Now everyone was judged by how useful they were under capitalism. In 1900 George Simmel wrote that existence in the urban factories had diminished human passions in favor of a reserved, cynical attitude. This had created a compensatory craving for excitement and sensation, which for some was partially satisfied by the emerging consumer culture. But others needed something even more extreme, more Dionysian, to make them feel alive…This damage to the soul occurred along with the most rapid technological changes in history. One Frenchman fated to die in the first weeks of the Great War said that the world had changed more since he had been in school than it had since the Romans. In the thirty years between 1884 and 1914, humanity encountered mass electrification, automobiles, radio, movies, airplanes, submarines, elevators, refrigeration, radioactivity, feminism, Darwin, Marx (who wrote, “All that is solid melts into air”), Picasso and Freud. It is particularly ironic that just as modern people were learning of the unconscious, they were forced to act out the old myths of the sacrifice of the children. The pace of technological change simply exceeded humanity’s capacity to understand it, and the pressure upon the soul of the world exploded into World War.

How did this play out on the battlefield? Any honest military historian will admit that the generals, or in this context, the ritual elders, learned absolutely nothing in those four years. They began in August 1914 by exhorting the troops with Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori (It is a sweet and noble thing to die for your country) and then sending wave after wave of nineteen-year-old infantrymen against massed, fortified machine guns. Hundreds of thousands died in the first four months. Yet in late 1918 the generals were doing exactly the same thing. The great poet Wilfred Owen wrote this poem to describe the soldiers’ experience:

DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

On November fourth, a week before the already-planned armistice, the Generals sent Owen’s unit in yet another daylight – the common descriptor is “suicidal” – frontal assault against impenetrable defenses. Owens and most of his comrades were, predictably, mowed down.

Then came November eleventh, when all across the Western and Eastern Fronts, everyone was to lay down their arms at precisely 11:00 AM. You can read about that morning in Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, by Joseph Persico.

While many soldiers refused to fight at all, others took their last chance to get revenge – and officers everywhere took their last opportunity to achieve post-war promotions. It was one of the most savage days of the entire war, resulting in another eleven thousand casualties.

Terezin

The Germans kept November eleventh alive as a shameful reminiscence of defeat. Sadly, it seems that in this demythologized world, such memories tend to bring people together – to reinforce their mythic tales of national identity – more than memories of victory (Ask any Serbian nationalist about the battle of Kosovo, which took took place in 1389). A new German mythology arose soon after the armistice that served this purpose for the returning soldiers (and the industrialists): the defeat had been caused not by the failure of the army but by treachery behind the lines. The mythmakers designed this story to uphold German masculinity and nationalism as the ideology that had replaced religion and would soon lead to totalitarianism and genocide.

On November eleventh 1943, the Nazi S.S. memorialized the 25^th anniversary of the armistice with a display – uncommon even for them – of gratuitous cruelty. They forced the 40,000 residents of the Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia

to stand at attention in a freezing, rainy field all day for a head count that didn’t happen until late afternoon. Anyone who moved was shot. Three hundred collapsed and died before they were allowed to return to their barracks.

Why do I write this? To remind you that many of those S.S. officers went home at the end of their shifts to spend quality time with their wives and children – as did real-life American CIA officer and torture supervisor Dan Mitrione (in the 1972 film State of Siege).

These people were not inherently evil; to make them so in our imagination is merely to reinforce our own fiction of pure innocence. It is to point out the mythic and ritual realities behind our behavior in wartime, and the reasons the elders send the young to war. It is to acknowledge that such circumstances are designed, consciously or not, to take impressionable people and inject them into situations that bring out the worst in them, not the best.

Viet Nam

Progress: At least the generals had finally learned that it was useless to send massed infantry against machine guns, right? Wrong. Throughout the war, the army’s primary tactic—“search and destroy”— was the sacrifice of infantry units in order to push out the concealed enemy. This tactic was also called target acquisition. Helicopters dropped troops intentionally into “hot zones,” where they were often pinned down by enemy fire. They suffered until air strikes hit the enemy positions, and then the American survivors left the terrain to the enemy’s survivors.

Sociologist William Gibson writes, “Story after story…concerns commanders who knew large enemy formations were in a given area, but did not tell their subordinates because they did not want them to be cautious.”

In countless other examples, the Army spent massive expenditure of material and lives to force the North Vietnamese off of steep mountains for no discernable purpose. The 1987 movie Hamburger Hill depicts the nine-day assault on “Hill 937”, designated as such from its being 937 meters high. It ends with the Americans celebrating their victory. What it doesn’t show, however, is that the American abandoned the hill two weeks later.

Abandonment and betrayal became the primary metaphors for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Psychologist Jonathan Shay quotes one veteran: “The U.S. Army…was like a mother who sold out her kids to be raped by (their) father…” The soldier’s common experience, says Shay, was violation of the moral order, or betrayal.

American conservatives would twist the idea of betrayal and use the old excuse of treachery at home to rationalize defeat after the war. Nevertheless, the mythic image of the twentieth century is the sacrifice of the children. And the emotional experience of the common foot soldier is betrayal. My article Memory, Myth, and the National Mall brings the story into the 1960s:

The trauma of the Vietnam veterans was complicated by their sense of betrayal. Most returned to their urban streets and small towns alone, mere days after being in the field. There, as we know, many were treated disrespectfully—but not, as it turns out, by antiwar protestors. After exhaustive research, sociologist and Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke concludes that the spitters and hecklers touted by the media were hawkish veterans of World War II, who regarded the young men as losers. It was their fathers—in hundreds of VFW and American Legion posts scattered across small-town America—who were attacking the Vietnam vets. One World War II vet observed an anti-war march and snarled, “…we won our war, they didn’t; and from the looks of them, they couldn’t.” At another rally, a Vietnam vet read the names of Texas men killed in the war, while (reported by Life magazine) pro-war hecklers yelled, “Spit at those people, spit on ‘em”. (Fred) Turner quotes a Korean War vet, as recently as 1992: “I can’t understand these Vietnam guys. They’re always crying. When we came home, we kept it to ourselves and did what we had to do”. Turner also reports that forty years after Korea, this same vet’s children fear his repeated flashbacks.

Lembcke (The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam) concludes that the Nixon White House deliberately disseminated the “myth of the spat-upon veteran” in order to counter the fact that the Vietnam veterans were actually among the leaders of the antiwar movement. By 1970, a major argument for continuing the war was to protect the troops who were already there—and to free those who were allegedly held captive by the North Vietnamese. Similarly, Bruce Franklin argues that, following the cataclysmic year of 1968, Nixon deliberately introduced the issue of the issue of the MIA/POWs to evoke strong emotional support for a war that was becoming universally unpopular.

My article goes on to note how American elites, with the assistance of Hollywood filmmakers, made a determined effort throughout the 1980s and 1990s to rehabilitate the memory of the war as (at worst) an honorable crusade and (at best) a tragic “mistake.”

I invite you to consider, however, whether the war was really a mistake, in either economic or mythic terms. Hint: read some of the many excellent articles that historians and activists have written in response to Ken Burns’ recent PBS series here, here and here.

However, most Americans, then and now, have been quite able to separate the politics and economics of the war from the suffering of those (mostly poor and ethnic minorities) whom the fathers sent to fight it. Hence the phrase we hear so often, especially every November eleventh: Thank you for your service.

All this leads me to suggest that when you consider saying these words to a veteran today, think before you speak. What precisely will be your intention? Will it be, as veteran James Kelly writes, “…an empty platitude, something you just say because it is politically correct”? Will it “…massage away some of the guilt at not participating themselves”? Will it be “…almost the equivalent of ‘I haven’t thought about any of this’”?

Kelly also writes:

After all, despite the various reasons that people join the military, from free college, to a steady paycheck to something much more patriotic or idealistic, there is one thing we all have in common: Our passion for our country and your rights and freedoms that we swore to protect.

The Sacrifice of the Children

Full disclosure: I want to acknowledge that I am not a veteran, and I have no concrete, felt understanding of a veteran’s experience, let alone the experience of combat, wounding or trauma, or even of his or her family’s pain. But I have to tread – lightly but firmly – into this “morass” (to coin a phrase). I sincerely hope that Mr. Kelly will support this statement: We fought to defend your free-speech right to completely disagree with our reasons for fighting.

The Viet Nam War was a children’s war.

Again, from Memory, Myth, and the National Mall:

…this war was fought not by reservists or the National Guard (as in Iraq) but by teenage (disproportionately African American or Latino) draftees. One of every two Hispanics, for example, served in a combat unit, and one in five were killed. Corresponding percentages for whites were much lower. Their median age was 19: For every 21-year-old, there was a 17-year-old. Lyndon Johnson chose to maximize support by minimizing its impact on older citizens. And there were few domestic sacrifices such as increased taxes; thus the war’s debt fell on future generations. Nearly half of Americans who died had been sent to Vietnam as teenagers; 14,000 died in combat before their 21st birthdays. On the other side, 40 percent of those killed by American incendiary and antipersonnel bombs were children. And because dioxin (the active ingredient in Agent Orange) remains in the body’s DNA, 35,000 Vietnamese babies are born with birth defects annually.

These figures do not take into account the suicides or the hundreds of thousands on disability. Nor do they not take into account the “economic draft,” the real reason why most young, poor and working-class people “volunteer” – or the obvious truth that their only alternatives are gangs, pregnancy, jail or living at home into their mid-thirties while working at MacDonald’s.

No one knows how many of these people have “passion for their country,” or how many believe that it is “a sweet and noble thing to die for your country.” But the mythmakers, the gatekeepers and the warmongers will go to extraordinary lengths to convince you that they do.

Here’s my alternative to Thank you for your service:

I can never know what you went through, but I would like to hear about it, and if possible, I’m willing to share your grief.

Barry’s Blog # 214: Paying Attention, Part Two of Two

Posted by Barry Spector on September 10, 2017 at 12:57pm

Many indigenous societies believed that the dead were always close by at the times of the greatest celebrations. The festivals of mid-winter, as well as the November first celebrations in the Celtic world, looked forward to the annual restoration of the world that would come in springtime. But the elders taught that renewal would be unlikely unless due attention were paid to that which must die, as well as to those who had already died and become ancestors, and those – like Dionysus – who had died and been reborn.

Certainly in repressive and feudal systems the political and religious elites have often understood the importance of allowing the common people to let off a little steam for a few days once a year. Jervis notes that “the symbolic inversion revealed the absurdity of a real one.”

Modern culture has long since literalized carnival to its “toxic mimic:” the secular, consumer-oriented spectacles of Mardi Gras, Halloween, Las Vegas, “Spring Break” and Superbowl weekend.

But even today, the citizens of certain Greek towns such as Monoklissia celebrate a festival called the Gynaekokracia (“rule of the women”) in which the women and men trade their traditional roles for one day. Like all carnivals, it serves the two-fold purposes of releasing the tension produced by traditional repressive cultures and also re-affirming their rules, revitalizing the social order by reenacting its conception. Patricia Storace describes the scene: “The transvestism here is a social, even a political transvestism – the men are not just dressing like women, but being treated like women by women mocking men’s behavior.”

But the original carnival, the Anthesteria, was – or at it least recalled – something very significant from the more ancient past. Most important, for our purposes, the basilinna, the wife of the religious king of the city, or archon bassileus, engaged in a highly publicized, ritual copulation with Dionysus. The conventional scholarly explanation of this holiday is that, in addition to maintaining the social order, it celebrated and recapitulated the original marriage of Dionysus and Ariadne and was a fertility ritual intended to ensure good crops.

This may be accurate on a sociological level, but it is also undoubtedly true that many of the citizens were consciously re-enacting the hieros gamos, a mythic union that had its roots in the pre-patriarchal Minoan era. Why is this ritual marriage so meaningful? Karl Kerenyi wrote that just as Dionysus was the embodiment of zoe, “the archetypal image of indestructible life,” so Ariadne was “the archetypal reality of the bestowal of soul, of what makes a living creature an individual.” The union of this divine pair thus represented the “eternal passage of zoe into and through the genesis of living creatures.”

It was the sacred marriage of goddess and consort, or the inner king and queen who met each other in the sea of the unconscious. It was a reminder of the ultimate unity of opposites that lies behind the mask and the apparent dualities of the world.

The indigenous knowledge was still barely alive in classical Athens: the proximity of fertility and decomposition, of the goddess Persephone and her husband Hades (who was known as Ploutos, or “wealth”) – and also of Dionysus in his many roles of divine child, mature initiator and, as the perpetual “Other,” threat to the social order. The polytheistic imagination could still hold such paradox, even as the age of the rationalist philosophers approached and religion declined into literalism.

We cannot know what occurred when the queen met Dionysus, or what meaning the citizens saw in it. Whether she lay down with the king himself or a priest of Dionysus, or if either man was dressed and masked as the god, or whether their union was consummated literally, does not really concern us. The important thing, according to classicist Richard Seaford, is that there was an “…invasion of the royal household by a publicly escorted stranger who symbolically destroys its potential autonomy by having sex with the king archons’s wife.”

Dionysus Lusios – the “Loosener”– suddenly appeared at the head of a great procession, announcing his presence at the palace of the archon to claim the Queen for his own! And that night, all over Athens, men donned masks and impersonated the god at the doors of other men’s wives. For one night, everyone ignored the conventions of gender, class, fidelity and possessiveness. But soon after, in daylight, the citizens swept through the streets chasing the keres, the spirits of the dead, out of the city for another year.

Perhaps, just perhaps, we have here a partial record of an advanced urban civilization that recognized the absolute necessity of welcoming in the shadowy, wet, irrational, uncivilized stranger (xenos, the root of xenophobia, can mean both “stranger” and “guest”) along with the spirits of all those who had died unreconciled and ungrieved.

Perhaps the people hoped that their rituals might minimize the possibility of any violent eruption of the repressed energies that might topple the twin towers of religion and state. Perhaps they had reason to believe that, because of the ritual attention they paid to the Lord of the Darkness, there might not be an unintended, overwhelmingly destructive, literal return of the repressed, in the city or in their souls.

By the time of The Bacchae’s first performance (405 BC) Athens had been in a constant state of war with Sparta for over twenty-five years. Public life was characterized by rigid class and gender roles and the militaristic vigilance necessary to sustain an empire. Clearly, people felt deep tension and anxiety that institutions such as the Anthesteria and other occasional opportunities for release could only partially resolve.

Dionysus stood squarely at the center of this paradox, serving both the needs for release of the under-classes as well as pointing the way toward participation in the greater mysteries of the soul. And so, writes Arthur Evans, Dionysus represented the return of the repressed in several senses:

…return of the religious needs of the lower classes, return of the demands of the non-rational part of the self, and return of the (ancient) Minoan feeling for the living unity of nature. And so in return he threatened several repressors: the aristocracy of well-to-do male citizens, the domination of intellect over emotion, the alienated ethos of the city-state.

Perhaps the subtle balance between citizen, psyche and city – the world’s first experiment with democracy – could not have been expected to survive for long in such a world of slavery, misogyny and constant warfare. Eventually the repressed would return in the form of barbarians from without as well as demons from within.

Like Athens, the U.S. has been at war – in Afghanistan – for sixteen years, with no letup in sight. A unrepentant misogynist is President, and our class and racial hierarchies are as rigid as they were in 1860. Millions are self-medicating with opioids, and Facists march in the streets in a twisted parody of the ancient processions.

But the communal ritual of invoking and welcoming the spirits of madness, ancestry and the irrational remains an alternative, imaginative model for our American culture that is based so deeply on the denial of both madness and death.

Reviving such festivals in all their paradox of chaotic ecstasy mixed with deep sadness – holding the tension of the opposites – could be a first step in drawing back our obsessive national projection of the Other from gays, women, terrorists and people of color. Paying attention to Dionysus could be a step in awakening white America from its four centuries-long fantasy of innocence.

Barry’s Blog # 213: Paying Attention, Part One of Two

Posted by Barry Spector on September 9, 2017 at 4:00pm

Spiritual and mystical literature often speaks of the need to pay full attention, to be present moment to moment. In addition, what we might call “soul-work” asks us to focus our awareness of both the outer and the inner worlds with a detached, witnessing perspective, even while, as Joseph Campbell wrote, “participat(ing) joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

A large part of the self is normally hidden from us. Indeed, cognitive linguist George Lakoff claims that only five percent of our thinking is conscious. So paying attention (attention: from the Latin, “to stretch”) forces us into the awareness of infinite complexity and mystery. Resisting the temptation to resolve the big questions of life into simple, black-white dualities – the legacy of monotheistic thinking – we hold the tension of the opposites. Otherwise, we risk a disruptive return of the repressed.

Most people throughout history have not become yogis meditating in caves. Far more have chosen the way of the indigenous, creative imagination: turning life’s tragic contradictions and impossible choices into the images of art.

But what about social groups? Is it necessary or even possible for an entire society to hold that kind of attention, if only for a brief but intense period of time, to acknowledge the presence of its own shadow? Communities cannot enter psychotherapeutic relationships; they can only approach the unconscious through communal ritual within a broad mythic container.

In highly structured societies, such as classical Athens, that emphasize logic and rational thinking, the shadow is the unreasonable, violent and uncontrollable force of natural life. Like the ivy plant in a garden, it continually threatens to creep stealthily across the carefully contrived boundaries of the social role or mask – the persona – that we show to the world.

For the Athenians the mythic image that expressed the irrational, the paradoxical and the mysterious was Dionysus, the god of the extremes of both ecstasy and madness. In his inebriated yet exalted state, he could bring joyous celebration as well as chaos and violence. He was paradox: the only god to suffer and die, and yet to always return. For a few centuries Greek myth and ritual struggled to hold the tension, the mystery and the tragedy of life that he represented. Classicist E. R. Dodds acknowledged that the rationalist elders of Athens “were deeply and imaginatively aware of the power, the wonder, and the peril of the Irrational.”

Ancient wisdom had told of the price that the psyche – and the community – paid for ignoring the mad god and his passions. Many of his myths told of the destructive vengeance he visited upon those mortals who denied the truth of reality – his reality. In story after story, Dionysus arrived from afar with his retinue of dancing maenads (related to mania) and drunken satyrs, only to be rejected by such

mythic figures as Lykourgos, Minyas, Proetus, Eleuther, Perseus, and most famously in Thebes by Pentheus (in The Bacchae by Euripides.)

And time after time, Dionysus punished the unbelievers or their kin with madness. We are not talking about neurosis or depression. We are talking about madness so extreme, so severe that it caused them to unknowingly slaughter their own children.

Consider the three daughters of King Proetus of Tiryns. They refused to join Dionysus in his wild revels; in response he struck them mad. They infected the other women with their insanity, and all left their families. Some wandered as nymphomaniacs; others killed and ate their own children. One of the daughters died before the others were purified. Similarly, the women of Thebes who had rejected the God (including his own relatives) went violently mad.

The Athenians themselves told an old story: once in the dim past they did not receive the statue of Dionysus with appropriate respect when it was first brought to the city. Angered, the god sent an affliction on the genitals of the men. They were cured only when they duly honored him by fashioning great phalluses for use in his worship. After that education in proper respect the Athenian empire required its colonies to send phalluses (along with tribute) as part of the annual celebrations of the City Dionysia.

Scholars call these legends “myths of arrival,” implying that they explain the spread of a new cult. We, however, are looking for the archetypal implications. Why does the gentle and effeminate god of ecstasy arrive so often with such ferocity? Like alcohol itself, he loosens inhibitions. He was known as Lusios, the “Loosener.” James Hillman points out that the word is connected to lysis, the last half of the word analysis, which means “loosening, setting free, deliverance, dissolution, collapse, breaking bonds and laws, and the final unraveling as of a plot in tragedy.” A catalyst is an agent, chemical or otherwise, that precipitates a process or event, without being changed by the consequences.

What lies below the surface has great power because, like a diamond, it has been compressed by time. Like all of the “Others” of the world, the god has experienced the shame of having been cast out of the city, beyond the pale, among the barbarians, into the underworld, to lick his wounds and nurse his resentment. Are we really surprised that when he is invoked unconsciously, passively, or literally (by consuming spirits!) he is as likely to bring rage as he is to bring ecstasy? It would seem that when he comes back – and he always does, like ivy – the psyche experiences his arrival as the violent return of the repressed. But it need not always be this way. Psychologist Nor Hall comments on the daughters of Proteus:

Their bodies become covered with white splotches, and they are set out upon the hills to wander like cows in heat. Only now are they fitting partners for the God in bull form. Had they joined the Dionysian company willingly they would have enacted this state of wild abandon within a protective circle.

Indigenous ritual seeks to retrieve a state of balance that has been lost. To do so, it may involve – within such a protective circle – the symbolic enactment and emotional experience of our deepest conflicts and irreconcilable opposites, with the intention that such discord might not have to erupt – and disrupt – literally.

The Athenian religious and political leaders were faced with the question of how to pay attention to Dionysus – something they would rather not have done. How could they consciously invite this mad, unreasonable god of vengeance and wild emotional extremes – the “Other” – into the center of the city in the hope that he wouldn’t take vengeance? One way they accomplished this was in the Dionysia, the annual productions of tragic drama in March,where the entire city endured the tension of holding irreconcilable opposites together, as enacted onstage. These productions, by the way, were traditionally held in the Theater of Dionysus. The mad god was the patron saint, so to speak, of the Greeks' highest art.

Another method was to celebrate a late winter (the previous month, in early- to mid-February) festival called the Anthesteria – the festival of flowers – during which the new wine was opened. The city invoked Dionysus “as a purifier, not as a destroyer,” writes Charles Segal. The God arrived “bringing the life-enhancing benefits of viticulture and the drinking of wine.”
The Anthesteria was one of the earliest European all-souls’ festivals, in which the citizens annually welcomed the spirits of the dead, and along with them, Dionysus, back into the city for three days of drinking and merry-making. But, difficult as it may seem to modern consciousness, historians tell us that the joy alternated with deep somberness, even grief. Apparently, the people retained a memory of the ancient knowledge that it was impossible to invoke one extreme of experience without also accepting the presence of its opposite.

Dionysus, played by one of his priests, ceremonially returned from his annual sojourn in Persephone’s palace in Hades.

They towed him, wearing a bearded, two-faced mask, into the city on a ship on wheels that was crowned with vine tendrils and pulled by panthers. The citizens welcomed the god together with his wife Ariadne, the two of them returned from the sea, that universal symbol of the collective unconscious. We recall how Ariadne had helped save the hero Theseus from the Minotaur, the dreadful monster of the labyrinth; how Theseus had returned the favor by abandoning her on an island; and how Dionysus had saved her and married her. To celebrate their sacred marriage – the hieros gamos – Dionysus gave her a jeweled crown, which he later placed in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

Dionysus is also the source of the tradition of wearing masks in these processions. As Walter Otto wrote:

Because it is his nature to appear suddenly and with overwhelming might before mankind, the mask serves as his symbol and his incarnation in cult…(the mask) is linked with the eternal enigmas of duality and paradox.

The Greek word for mask was persona, and the mask reminded everyone of the untamed forces of nature that lay just below the surface of appearances. And yes, our modern words person and personality derive from that same source.

Similar festivals were held in mid-winter in Egypt and Rome. In Later centuries Christian Europe celebrated carnival during this same season, despite the disapproval of the church, and to this day masked revelers often tow the carnival King and Queen through the streets, just like Dionysus and Ariadne, on a ship on wheels.

Traditional European carnival was a time out of time, emphasizing both the liminal betwixt-and-between state as well as the cyclic nature of existence. It was a period of humor, paradox, wild behavior and a temporary inversion of the social order with a breaking of taboos that bordered on subversion. Anthropologist John Jervis writes that the people celebrated the body “… in all its messy materiality: eating, drinking, copulating, defecating, procreating, dying…” To an extent almost unimaginable today, entire communities participated – briefly – as equals, with little distinction between performers and audience, many of whom wore death masks. Amid the merriment, one can still observe the ancient theme of welcoming the spirits of the dead back to the world of the living for a few days.

But now, in the Christian context, the joy precedes the austerities of Lent, which is itself followed by more celebration. And the people invoke a different god of suffering and love – a spiritual god who is utterly disconnected from his dark, physical twin. And that twin remains in the underworld plotting his revenge. In the Protestant, Jewish and Moslem worlds, he is disconnected – unlike Dionysus – from his mother as well.

Barry’s Blog # 206-209: The Dionysian Moment. Trumps Lets the Dogs Out, Parts One-Four of Seven

Posted by Barry Spector on July 30, 2017 at 2:48pm

Part One

…Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
– Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato,
knock the crap out of ’em, would you? Seriously. Okay?
Just knock the hell…I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.
I promise. I promise. – Donald Trump

July 20th, 2017 – half a year since the inauguration. I don’t need to remind you how stunningly weird our public life – and for many of us, our dreams – have been, these six months. Or perhaps I do: Consider Rolling Stone’s compilation of “100 WTF Moments From Trump’s First 100 Days”.

Of course, Trump’s arrival in the White House is an arbitrary point in time. If you have read my book or many of my articles, I’m sure you’ll agree that life in the United States has been straight-out, uncompromisingly, bat-shit crazy for a very long time. And yet, it seems to be in our nature as Americans (at least as middle-class, white Americans) to swing back, like elastic bands, into our familiar mode of denial. It can’t happen here.

So in the course of this blog series I am going to itemize for you, in rather detailed fashion, what’s been going on, if you’re willing to stay with me. I could suggest that you skip the meat of these articles and just head toward my conclusions. But that would be to treat you like a child who can’t tolerate your necessary and inevitable confrontation with reality.

Coming to consciousness often – perhaps always – involves dropping or being forced to drop our sense of specialness or uniqueness and privilege, our naiveté, and/or our innocence, and painfully accepting the reality of the darkness that surrounds us – as well as our own dark potential. This process is almost always necessary before we can fully accept that other reality: the light that both surrounds us and is within us. No dark, no light. The brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.

To go into the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark, go without sight.
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
– Wendell Berry

There’s no doubt that the current version of our national madness began before the election. Perhaps it began when Trump entered the Republican primary and immediately proceeded to debase that lofty tradition.

Or was it when you realized that he was openly articulating the racism and demonization of people of color that the other candidates had only been addressing in euphemisms? Clearly, plenty of these things were already being said long before the election season. They had been happening (depending on your degree of privilege) forever. Let’s be clear about this: nothing he said was new. His rivals and his predecessors had been articulating the same hatred and intolerance for decades. The only difference was that they had been limited by some vague consensus about good taste, so they (at least as far back as Ronald Reagan) had been forced to use the coded language of implication, which had always provided them with “plausible deniability” and allowed them to say that they had not been saying what everyone knew they were saying.

But in 2016 countless white people were thrilled that Trump could “speak his mind,” without concern for “political correctness.” The phrase, writes Moira Weigel,

…conjured powerful forces determined to suppress inconvenient truths by policing language…The term is what Ancient Greek rhetoricians would have called an “exonym”: a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it. Nobody ever describes themselves as “politically correct”. The phrase is only ever an accusation.

Or was it when it dawned on you that our political system (even Trump bragged about this) is so broken that the Democratic establishment really did steal the primaries from Bernie Sanders?

Perhaps it was a few years earlier, when you heard Hillary Clinton chortle about Muammar Gaddafi’s death: “We came, we saw, he died!” Or when Obama wept about gun deaths in America while raining death all over the Mid-East. Or the insanity of Bush’s wars, or the election of 2000, or…I could go on indefinitely.

In book talks I often ask members of the audience: When did you lose your innocence?The answers often go to the events of 9-11, or with older folks, the Kennedy assassinations. Then I ask, when did you lose your innocence the second time, and the third time, etc…The point I then have to make is that in our demythologized culture, in which true initiation rites have long been lost, the default mode that we all lurch back to at every opportunity is the denial and the desperate desire to remain innocent – in both senses, childlike and untainted by guilt. Once again, we have permission to ignore what is right in front of us. So the next time our innocence is punctured, it feels like the first time.

In a (very) different context, I could also ask: When did you get radicalized? When did it feel OK to hate? When did you feel permitted to act? When did your sense of (pick one or more) loneliness, alienation, anger, entitlement, privilege, etc, rise to the point that released your inhibitions about inappropriate speech or action? Or: When did your Dionysian moment happen?

I don’t think I need to refer to the surface level. You already know about the 3:00 AM tweet wars with Arnold Schwarzenegger; the misogynistic insults; the juvenile bragging and veiled threats; the three million fake voters; the golf weekends; the smarmy, fake religiosity; the casual statements about missile attacks; the appointment of corporate toadies to destroy the regulatory and protective federal agencies; Sean Spicer’s and Kellyanne Conway’s surrealistic interviews; the ghoulish Stevens (Miller and Bannon); the vampire Trump siblings and Jared Kushner; the scandals; the refusal to address global warming, the attacks on Syria (nothing new there), the allegations of fake news, the actual fake news; certainly not the new Cold War and harping about evil Russians (did you notice when Democrats and the media began to refer to “the Russians” as “our adversaries?”). Even if you avoid the news altogether, you still get much of this from Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show or Facebook in easily digestible form.

No, infuriating or depressing as it is, that’s all on the surface level. But it – and especially Trump himself – have been expressing a certain mythic role that I’ll have to take some time to unpack. And that time will be filled with the list of what else has been going on. But for now, I’ll think of this surface level as the most obvious expression of permission – letting the dogs out, or what some have called the “Trump effect.” My list has four categories: prominent hate statements; specific acts of hate; government policy; and local police actions. The list is neither perfectly chronological nor complete; indeed, I fully expect to add plenty of items before I complete it. But I have to start somewhere. Eventually, I’ll try to put all this into a mythic context.

Part Two

“Free Speech”, Provocations and Threats

– Within 24 hours of Trump’s victory, there was a burst of “celebratory” incidents. “We actually counted 1,094 different hate crimes and lesser bias incidents in just the first 34 days after the election,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center:

And in 37% of those incidents, the perpetrators actually named Trump, his slogan, ‘Make America Great,’ or his comments about grabbing women by the genitals…It was a real wave of incidents that washed across this country in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, and I would describe it as celebratory violence and hatred.

The SPLC found that many “patriotic” or militia groups became dormant in 2016. But Potok said that was because Trump was “so revered” by the people in these groups that they no longer needed to operate independently and simply joined his campaign. On the other hand, Trump’s white nationalism led other previously shadowy groups to emerge publicly, and the emergence of the so-called alt-right was nothing but a “rebranding” of white supremacist ideology aimed at luring younger adherents.

– Before the inauguration, the Ku Klux Klan celebrated with a parade in North Carolina.

– A prominent hate group leader bragged that his allies are now “…very well placed in his administration.”

– The White House’s Holocaust Memorial Day statement failed to mention Jews. Later, Trump responded to a question about anti-Semitism by bragging about the size of his election victory.

– Florida’s first black state attorney received a noose in the mail. Later she was racially profiled by Florida state troopers.

– Other nooses were found inside Washington’s African American Museum and in various work places.

– An Asian American family found ‘Chinks’ painted on their garage door after moving into a new neighborhood.

– A Flint, Michigan official resigned after blaming the water crisis on “fucking niggers”.

– Trump terrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka is a sworn member of a Nazi-allied Hungarian group.

– News surfaced that James Mattis, briefly considered for Defense Secretary, had dismissed evidence that troops under his command had slaughtered dozens of Iraqis at 2004 wedding party.

– A Tennessee politician created a billboard that said, ‘Make America White Again’.

– Alabama Police called It an ‘honor’ to protect the KKK at an LGBTQ pride march

– Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, briefly considered as Trump’s DHS secretary, proposed that a million people should be sent to Guantanamo Bay if they use “jihadi rhetoric” online.

– “Anti-Sharia law” rallies occurred in 30 cities.

– Televangelist Jim Bakker claimed the victims of the bombing in Manchester, England “literally invited” the attack by mocking God.

– Arizona Trump supporters called for ‘Liberal Genocide’ and deportation of Jews:

– No professional team would hire the black football star Colin Kaepernick because of his political views, despite re-hiring several convicted felons.

– A Neo-Nazi blogger raised $150,000 after being sued for harassing a Jewish Woman:

– 48 Jewish community centers received bomb threats. In late February, Trump suggested that these threats were coming from within the Jewish community. Did he have inside information? Nearly a month later, an Israeli Jew was arrested for sending them.

– Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins told supporters on Facebook to ‘hunt And Kill’ Muslims.

– On the second day of Passover, Sean Spicer said that even Hitler didn’t “sink” to using chemical weapons like Bashar al-Assad. Later, he said Hitler “was not using the gas on his own people” the way President “Ashad” did, and referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.”

– NRA board member Ted Nugent called for Hillary Clinton to be hanged.

– A Binghamton, N.Y. mayoral candidate and an Iowa democratic candidate pulled out of their races after being threatened.

– African-American professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor canceled her book tour after Trump supporters threatened to lynch her.

– California State University Fresno halted its Middle East Studies search due to outside pressure.

– California Assemblyman Rob Bonta introduced a bill to remove a nearly 70-year-old statute that makes it illegal for members of the Communist Party to work in that state’s government. The statute was an obvious violation of free speech rights, and the Supreme Court had already declared similar laws unconstitutional in 1960. Conservatives quickly mobilized to oppose the bill, and Bonta withdrew it.

– The FBI caught a number of white supremacists who were allegedly planning hate crimes.

– Harvard University rescinded admissions for at least 10 prospective students over offensive Facebook posts.

– A Muslim woman wearing a hijab headscarf was refused service at a gas station by an attendant who announced, “I don’t need to serve you anymore. We’re trying to make America great again.”

– Trump pointedly laid a wreath on Andrew Jackson’s tomb.

– Over 50 reports from 26 states indicated that schoolchildren were using Trump’s words to bully Latino, Middle Eastern, black, Asian, and Jewish classmates. The Southern Poverty Law Center claimed that over 90% of educators reported that school climate had been negatively affected by the election.

– Boston baseball fans hurled racial slurs at Black players.

– HUD Secretary Ben Carson said publicly that public housing is too good for poor people.

– Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks claimed to support covering pre-existing health conditions, but only for people who ‘lead good lives’.

– Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador told a town hall meeting that nobody dies due to lack of access to health care.

– In the San Francisco Bay area, four Albany high school juniors punished for their roles in a racist Instagram posting incident sued the school district, alleging their free speech rights were violated. Racial slurs were reported at nearby Piedmont and Berkeley High Schools.

– Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi told school children that men in dresses are “asking for” violent beatings. Fox News pundit Erick Erickson concurred.

– Alaska State Representative David Eastman said that women in Alaska get pregnant to get a “free trip to the city” for abortions.

– Fliers appeared at the University of Maryland claiming ‘America is a white nation’.

– Missouri State Representative Tila Hubrecht called rape-induced pregnancy God’s ‘Silver Lining’.

– A white man in Texas taunted a Muslim family with “Donald Trump got you motherfuckers!”

– Oklahoma Representative Mike Ritze suggested handing 82,000 non-English speaking kids over to ICE.

– In Charlottesville, Virginia a torch-wielding mob protested the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

– Mississippi State Representative Karl Oliver publicly called for the lynching of anyone attempting to remove Confederate monuments in his state.

– A Texas judge recommended on Facebook that a Black defendant be lynched.

– At the confirmation hearing of Jeff Sessions, activist Desiree Fairooz was convicted of disorderly conduct for laughing when Senator Richard Shelby claimed that Sessions had a track record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” The verdict was reversed on appeal.

– Trump publicly threatened James Comey and Robert Mueller and regretted having hired Sessions.

– The city of Berkeley was rocked repeatedly when white supremacists claiming to support free speech battled anti-fascists after the University refused to allow provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak there. After the second event, an anarchist café’s windows were shot out. After similar events in Portland, local Republicans invited militia groups to provide security at public events.

– Trump proposed that Americans who fail to report their suspicious neighbors should be ‘brought to justice’.

– Theaters bearing William Shakespeare’s name reported a surge of abusive messagesfollowing a New York production of Julius Caesar in which the title character was dressed to look like Trump.

– Fox analysts called for Muslim internment camps.

– Former Arizona state senator Russell Pearce suggested sterilizing poor women as a condition for receiving food stamps.

– New Hampshire state representative Josh Moore said that if a law to ban topless female nudity fails, men should be able to squeeze exposed nipples in public.

– A Connecticut trump supporter admitted to vandalizing a school with left-wing slogans in order to frame liberals.

– An Ohio sheriff refused to carry an opioid overdose reversal drug in a county (Butler) where 150 people died of heroin- or fentanyl-related overdoses in 2016.

– The NRA called for white supremacy and armed insurrection.

– A Florida Teacher said that black students were ‘rats’ that could infest her classroom.

– Iowa Representative Steve King proposed using food stamp funds to pay for the border wall with Mexico and tweeted his support for a Dutch white supremacist.

– On Independence Day Trump tweeted a video that endorsed violence against journalists.

– Trump’s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz threatened a stranger in an email with ‘Watch Your Back, Bitch.’

– The office of Nevada Senator Dean Heller, one of the few Republicans who hadn’t yet endorsed the “healthcare” bill was broken into and a threatening note was left.

― Tennessee State Senator Mark Green withdrew his name from consideration to become the next Army Secretary after comments he had made about the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community surfaced.

– Education Secretary Betsy DeVoss spoke to a men’s rights organization and defended those accused of campus rape. Then the top civil rights official under her at the Department of Education said that 90% of women who make rape accusations are lying about them.

– A black Mississippi high school valedictorian was forced to share the honor with a white student who’d received lower grades. She was attacked online with multiple hate statements.

– An Ohio teacher was fired for dragging a black preschooler down a hallway:

– The head of Cleveland’s largest police union asked Governor Kasich to temporarily ban Ohio’s open carry gun laws during its Republican Convention due to the arrival of armed black protesters.

– Fox pundit Brit Hume claimed that giving health insurance to sick people “defeats the core ethic values of this country”:

Now, crude and ignorant as these statements were (and as often as they undoubtedly occurred prior to the inauguration), they were not physical acts. But clearly the people who uttered them felt empowered by Trumps’ ascendancy to power, and just as clearly their viral presence on social media encouraged – gave permission to – those who were more literal minded to commit actual crimes.

Part Three

Specific Acts of Hate:

Demagogues understand that they don’t have to exhort their followers directly to violence. They are masters of the art of innuendo and coded messages – and of American mythology. Chip Berlet says:

…history tells us that if this message is repeated vividly enough, loudly enough, often enough, and long enough…it is only a matter of time before the bodies from the named scapegoated groups start to turn up.

Granted, during any six-month period in the Internet era, simple research would discover large numbers of hate acts in America. This list for the first half of 2017, however, is for Trump’s first six months, and it is by no means comprehensive.

– A white man attacked a black man with a machete in California.

– Another California white man, an admitted Trump supporter – murdered a black manafter a political argument.

– A white man attacked a black woman in Virginia.

– Vandals attacked a memorial to Anne Frank in Idaho.

– At least fifteen trans persons of color were murdered in these six months, four in one week, and at least four trans community centers were vandalized.

https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/demarkis-stamsberry-x750.jpg?w=642&h=482 642w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/demarkis-stamsberry-x750.jpg?w=150&h=113 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/demarkis-stamsberry-x750.jpg?w=300&h=225 300w" sizes="(max-width: 321px) 100vw, 321px" />

Black Trans Man Demarkis Stansberry Killed in Louisiana

– A white man beat a Muslim woman unconscious In Ohio:

– Vandals burned four American mosques in January and February.

– Two people in Georgia were convicted for terrorizing black children at a birthday party with a shotgun:

– A white Oregon Driver, shouting racial slurs, backed his car over two Native American men, killing one.

– Jewish Defense League thugs brutally attacked a Palestinian-American outside an AIPAC conference in Washington, DC –

– In Washington, D.C., President Erdogan of Turkey watched as his bodyguards beat up non-violent protestors. Local police did not charge them with any crime for over three weeks:

– A Brooklyn man beat a woman unconscious during an anti-gay subway attack.

– A white man shot a Sikh man in Washington, and two other Indian immigrants were shot and killed in Kansas and South Carolina.

– A Texas lawmaker threatened to “put a bullet in (the) head” of another lawmaker.

– A Black Army sergeant found “Die Nigger” spray-painted on his car in Texas.

2017_0303cemetaries.jpg?w=240&h=160&width=240

– Vandals desecrated dozens of headstones in a St. Louis Jewish cemetery.

– A Muslim teen was found hanged in woods near Seattle.

– A white supremacist traveled from Maryland to New York City with the express purpose of killing a black man, which he did upon arriving. The New York Daily News smeared the victim as a “career criminal.”

– The District of Columbia logged 22 unsolved cases of missing juveniles, most of them black or Latino girls, in the first three months of the year.

– United Airlines apologized for the forcible removal of a paying passenger, a man of color, from one of its flights.

– An African-American judge was shot dead outside of his Chicago home:

– An African-American judge was found dead in New York.

– Anti-Asian hate crimes in Los Angeles surged:

– A member of a racist group stabbed a Black ROTC cadet to death in Maryland.

– Two white men were stabbed to death in Portland while trying to stop Anti-Muslim harassment.

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Taliesin Namkai-Meche, murdered while trying to protect a Muslim woman from a white nationalist

– Two Black Men were murdered in Jackson, Mississippi. One was found hanged in his own yard. Two weeks later, a second was found decapitated and burned.

– A Muslim teen was murdered by a white man outside a Virginia mosque in a road rage incident. Friends built a memorial shrine to her, and vandals set fire to it.

– A Portland white man followed a Muslim couple in his car, shouting threats for 20 blocks and attempting to ram them.

– A Los Angeles Airbnb host canceled a reservation after learning that her guest would be Asian.

– In a road rage incident in Pennsylvania, a white man shot and killed a black teen girl.

– Charleena Lyles, a pregnant black woman was killed by the Seattle police – after calling them to her house.

Part Four

Government Actions – and Inactions

This behavior, of course, did not occur in a vacuum. The federal government and several state governments, sometimes quietly and more often quite publicly, were actively broadcasting the new state of permission and removing the doors from the white supremacy dog kennel. Trump’s attempts at banning Muslim immigration, even unsuccessful, served to keep the issue of race – the Other – in the news and remained wildly popular among his base supporters, the very population that had been waiting for this new state of permission to enact the most brutal fantasies. Of course, not all of his people are overt racists. But if you still think that “the Russians” or “the economy” rather than racial animosity and fear was the primary factor in the election, please read here or see my Blog series on the election.

– In May, the Brennan Center For Justice summarized actions on the state level since the election:

Five states have already enacted bills to cut back on voting access, and one more is on the verge of doing so. By comparison, three states enacted voting restrictions in 2015 and 2016 combined. Overall, however, more bills to expand access to voting were introduced this year than bills that would restrict voting access. Still, of the legislation making the most substantial impact on voting access, more legislation to limit participation is advancing toward passage. Moreover, governors in Nebraska and Nevada have vetoed the bills that would expand access to the franchise… Overall, at least 99 bills to restrict access to registration and voting have been introduced in 31 states. Thirty-Five such bills saw significant legislative action (meaning they have at least been approved at the committee level or beyond) in 17 states.

– Trump’s nomination of the unrepentantly racist thug Jeff Sessions as the highest cop in the land – and his unanimous defense by the Republican Senate (some of whom had joined the Democrats in refusing him a federal judgeship in 1986) – was the clearest of messages, both to people of color and to the haters. Sessions’ entire life had been devoted to excluding more and more people from the lists of the saved. In 2000, he had brayed that protecting the rights of disabled students might be “…the single most irritating problem for teachers throughout America today.”

cbsn-jeff-sessions-full-speech-1261827-640x360.jpg?w=300&h=158&width=300

“We have a lot of bad leaders around the world that operate in ways we would never tolerate in the United States.” – Jeff Sessions

But much else was happening. Chris Hedges refers to these the early actions as “The Return of American Race Laws:”

Racial profiling. Random police stops. Raids at homes and businesses. People of color pulled from vehicles at checkpoints. Seizures of individuals with no criminal records or who never committed a serious crime. Imprisonment without trial. Expedited deportation hearings and removal proceedings that violate human rights. The arrest of a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Daniel Ramirez Medina, 23, who along with the program’s other 750,000 successful applicants had revealed all personal history to the government in applying for DACA status. Parents separated, perhaps forever, from their children. The hunted going underground. The end of the rule of law. The abandonment of the common good…White Europeans who are undocumented are not being targeted. The executive orders of President Trump are directed against people of color.

– The Department of Justice civil rights division issued verbal instructions through the ranks to seek settlements without consent decrees — which would result in no continuing court oversight. Other Federal departments (Labor, Education and the EPA) scaled back the power of their internal divisions that monitor racialized abuse.

– Sessions fired the dozens of Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys who still remained on the job. A month later, none of them, nor the 47 who had already left, had been replaced. Sending another clear message to people of color, he called for reviving the war on drugs, and Trump withdrew Obama-era protections for transgender students.

– In July, Sessions gave a closed-door address to a hate group. Then he announced a plan to boost the controversial practice of asset forfeiture, yet another policy that targets people of color.

– Sessions’ nominee to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Eric Dreiband, was best known for defending Big Business against discrimination lawsuits.

– The Department of Homeland Security withheld grants it had previously awarded to groups countering white supremacist violence.

– Emboldened by Trump, U.S. border officials were lying to asylum seekers and illegally turning them away.

– Outraged that New Orleans was removing Confederate Monuments, Alabama officialsmade such actions illegal in their state.

– Montana Congressional candidate Greg Gianforte slammed a journalist into the ground and was elected anyway.

– Alaska state senator David Wilson slapped a black reporter.

– West Virginia state police arrested a reporter for repeatedly questioning Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

– Capitol police arrested a professional photographer who was recording the protests at Trump’s inauguration. As of May 1st, he was facing a potential seventy years in prison for rioting.

– Over half of 2000 elementary and high school teachers surveyed reported increased racial and ethnic slurs and general hostility among students.

Barry's Blog # 2010-212: The Dionysian Moment. Trump Lets the Dogs Out, Parts Five-Seven of Seven

Posted by Barry Spector on July 30, 2017 at 2:30pm

Part Five

The Local Level: Policing in America

Let’s clear up one issue quickly. If mental illness (you know, the old “single shooter” trope) were the sole cause of these actions, people from all over the political spectrum would be committing them. Instead, it is the radical right that consistently enacts them. And we should also acknowledge that people with mental illness are much more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent acts.

Crazies got to be crazy. But as merely unofficial enforcers of the new madness, some of these loonies risked occasionally getting caught and punished. Their sense of permissiveness was not (yet) entirely sanctioned by law – as, we should note, it had been for generations during slavery and Jim Crow. The real work of enacting what I have described as ritual sacrifice fell, as usual, to local police departments, which, we recall, began as Southern slave patrols.

Indeed, the sacrifice of American Dionysus saw a new upsurge, ranging from the sadly ridiculous, such as Police at the National Mall handcuffing three Black teens for selling water on a hot day,

or a Jacksonville, Florida cop ticketing a Black man for crossing a street without identification, to the fully tragic, such as Arkansas’ announcement that it would execute seven people in eleven days.

The fully tragic. The number of fatal shootings by police officers in the first half of 2017 is nearly identical to the number of shootings recorded during the same time period in 2016 and 2015. That number? 492 people. Police killings are set to reach approximately 1,000 for the third year in a row. The authors of the report write: “These numbers show us that officer-involved shootings are constant over time” (not realizing that in saying this they are indicting Barack Obama as much as Trump).

Another researcher, however, argues that police killings of unarmed people of color increased in Trump’s first six months and names many of the victims: Desmond Phillips, Nana Adomako, Chad Robertson, Raynard Burton, Alteria Woods, etc.

The police had always had basic immunity in the inner city. Ebony Slaughter-Johnsonexplains:

The outcomes of these stories might offer the impression that paid administrative leave is the dominant form of punishment for fatally shooting unarmed people…the prosecution of law enforcement officers is exceedingly rare, due to the fact that they are empowered by law to exercise a wide degree of latitude in using force. Those who are prosecuted need only utter five words that amount to a get-out-of-jail card: “I feared for my life.”

In his new book Mumia Abu-Jamal questions what types of violence are considered hate crimes. He notes the obvious fact that police violence against Black and Brown people is never placed in that category, even as multiple states (over a dozen since the election) have passed “Blue Lives Matter” laws that define the assault or killing of police as hate crimes. Meanwhile, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the state’s hate crime law does notcover anti-gay assaults or any crime committed on the basis of sexual orientation.

In the streets, of course, there has been massive popular reaction to the crimes of the Trump administration, almost all of it limited to trashing of businesses by so-called “anarchists” (many of whom are undoubtedly police provocateurs). According to DHS,however, anger over Trump’s election is a driving force in “domestic terrorist violence.”

Republican lawmakers in at least 18 states introduced or voted on legislation to curb mass protests. Oklahoma passed a new law imposing a minimum $10,000 fine on protesters who might “inhibit” the operations of oil pipelines. It also implicates any organization “found to be a conspirator” with the trespasser, threatening collaborator groups with a fine “ten times” that imposed on the intruder — as much as $1 million.

In this context we should also note that 19 states have enacted laws that penalize the free-speech of those who would support the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement against Israel, and that some 43 Senators (including 14 Democrats) led by Chuck Schumer have co-sponsored a bill that would make it a felony for any American to support this international boycott.

But back to the streets. Jeff Session’s clear lack of interest in investigating alleged crimes and shootings by local police let many municipalities, especially Chicago, off the hook. Emboldened, the Baton Rouge police chief refused his own mayor’s request to fire the officer who had killed Alton Sterling, despite an impending lawsuit by Sterling’s family. Indeed, in countless situations such lawsuits were proving to be the only recourse for aggrieved families, and as we all know, few police shooters are ever found guilty.

Most citizens would probably be surprised to learn that armed white males are the category of people that cops kill most often. However, black men (6 percent of the population) make up about a quarter of police shooting victims. They are three times more likely to be fatally shot by officers than white people.

And what about Black women? Glen Ford writes:

…although Black women and girls make up only 13 percent of the U.S. female population, they account for 33 percent of all women killed by police. In raw numbers, white women outnumber Black women by five to one, but police kill nearly as many Black females as they do white females…U.S. police kill more Black women (my italics) every year than the total of all civilians killed annually by their counterparts in western Europe’s largest countries: the UK, France, and Germany.

While the FBI technically tracks fatal police shootings, its database relies on voluntary reports from police departments and only covers cases of officers shooting alleged felons. Last October, James Comey called the FBI’s system of tracking fatal police shootings “embarrassing and ridiculous”. Rachel Glickhouse writes:

There are a few questions for which answers continue to elude us: How many hate crimes happen each year, and why is the record keeping so inadequate? The FBI, which is required to track hate crimes, counts between 5,000 and 6,000 of them annually. But the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates the total is closer to 250,000. One explanation for the gap is that many victims — more than half, according to a recent estimate — don’t report what happened to them to police. Even if they do, law enforcement agencies aren’t all required to report to the FBI, meaning their reports might never make it into the national tally. The federal government is hardly a model of best practices; many federal agencies don’t report their data, either — even though they’re legally required to do so.

In October 2016, the Department of Justice said it planned to collect more comprehensive data about police shootings. But Sessions, as noted, has called consent decrees a hindrance to law enforcement efforts, and he is most unlikely to follow through on the earlier promise.

Not only has the number of people fatally shot by police remained about the same as in previous years, so has the number of officers indicted for fatal shootings. From 2005 to 2015, just 54 officers were charged, though their brethren killed many thousands during that period, and most were acquitted of all charges. They are agents of a culture of cruelty. Chuck Mertz writes:

As civic culture collapses under the weight of a ruthless mix of casino capitalism and a flight from moral responsibility, crimes against humanity now become normalized in a rush of legislation that produces massive amounts of human suffering and misery while widening the scope of those considered disposable. What is new about the culture of cruelty is that its blend of hate, suffering and spectacle has become normalized. Matters of life and death are now being determined by a neo-fascist government that relies increasingly on punishing apparatuses such as the criminal justice system and budgetary policies that bear down ruthlessly on the poor, undocumented immigrants, Muslims and Black youth.

For more detail on this subject, read Henry Giroux’s article. You might also want to review the issue of the militarization of the police, which has certainly increased under Trump.

Former Black police officer Redditt Hudson writes:

On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

Our concern here is with that second fifteen percent of cops. Who are they, and why are they hired? How does the vetting process, with its sophisticated psychological testing, not identify them early on as sociopaths? Such an inquiry would have to begin with my earlier contention that policing in America began in the South as organized slave patrols. It would end in the present with the new sense of permission since the election.

In late July of this year, almost exactly six months after the inauguration, a Cincinnati judge, after two mistrials, dismissed charges against a white police officer for killing an unarmed black motorist. The story is tragic enough, if common. But what we need to know for this discussion, is that the cop, Ray Tensing, who killed Sam DuBose was wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt under his uniform. A month before, the Hollywood, Florida police department defended a cop who took a selfie as he hugged pro-Confederate protestors in the street.

In between the history of slave patrols and the new permissiveness our inquiry would have to acknowledge that white supremacist groups have been infiltrating police departments (as well as the military) for years. Alice Speri of The Intercept quotes from a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from April 2015:

…domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.

No centralized recruitment process or set of national standards exists for the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. In 2006 the FBI become aware of the term “ghost skins,” used among white supremacists to describe “those who avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.” At least one skinhead group had encouraged ghost skins to seek employment with law enforcement agencies.

That report appeared after a series of scandals involving local police and sheriff’s departments. In Los Angeles in 1991 members of a local sheriff’s department had formed a neo-Nazi gang and habitually terrorized black and Latino residents. In Chicago, a police detective and rumored KKK member was fired, and eventually prosecuted over charges relating to the torture of at least 120 black men during his decades long career. In Cleveland, a number of police officers had scrawled “racist or Nazi graffiti” throughout their department’s locker rooms. In Texas, two police officers were fired when it was discovered they were Klansmen.

The situation got much worse after Obama’s election, and conservative pressure forced his administration to largely dismantle a DHS unit investigating right-wing extremism. In 2014, the Department of Justice re-established its Domestic Terrorism Task Force, a unit that was created following the Oklahoma City bombing. But for the most part, its efforts focused on homegrown extremists radicalized by foreign groups, rather than on white extremists. Trump further emasculated such efforts.

Crazies get to be crazy, especially when they wear badges, and especially now that Trump and Sessions have encouraged them. The dogs are out, in the streets and in the patrol cars.

Part Six: Mythological Speculations

What the hell is going on? One thing is clear: conventional political analysis can take us only so far. We need to think mythologically.

Vera de Chalambert articulates some popular mythopoetic thinking. In August, 2015, well before Trump’s ascension, artists had projected the image of Kali – the Dark Mother, Hindu “goddess of spiritual death, destruction and resurrection” – onto the Empire State Building, “New York’s brightest and most recognizable symbol and capitalism’s earliest totem…” https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/makaliprojectingchangeempirestatebuildingracingextinctionandroidjones01-e1463110709892.jpg?w=91&h=150 91w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/makaliprojectingchangeempirestatebuildingracingextinctionandroidjones01-e1463110709892.jpg?w=183&h=300 183w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/makaliprojectingchangeempirestatebuildingracingextinctionandroidjones01-e1463110709892.jpg 365w" sizes="(max-width: 240px) 100vw, 240px" />

“If you are not heartbroken, you are not paying attention!” this project seems to scream from its illustrious rooftop…Fierce protectress of truth, she tells it like it is, she beckons us to dive into the dark, to face the stark reality of the global ecological crisis upon us, and to let heartbreak be the ground from which we awaken and serve…In our bones we all recognize, we are in the death pangs of the old world, and that we make it through is anything but certain…what is needed now is the fierceness of Ma Kali. A holy oracle of change, her medicine is darkness, her initiation is by fire — she calls upon us to rise from our own ashes, to speak truth to power, take on all our shadows and take up the arms that we have, our own, to hold, serve and protect all life as we would our own child…I think that this moment gives us an opportunity for reckoning only if instead of running for the light, we let ourselves go fully into the dark…Receptivity is the great quality of darkness; darkness hosts everything without exception…Climate change is here, whether we believe in it or not. Politically, with the election of Donald Trump, our country and the world have entered a dark night of the soul. We might still live in a culture of shine, greed, glam and white supremacy, but the Dark Feminine has now reemerged into this cycle, and heaven has no fury like the Great Mother scorned.

My colleague Hari Meyers reminds us that one image of Kali is of her dancing on the supine body of the great God Shiva himself.

But she does not mean to destroy him, only to awaken him. The frightening scene is meant to awaken us, to resurrect our higher consciousness. “Sometimes,” says Hari, “you cannot awaken from a dream until it turns into a nightmare.”

De Chalambert’s article went viral. Astrologer Safron Rossi’s reaction was typical: “What moved me with de Chalambert’s piece was her validation of the falling apart many of us feel and placing it in a

much larger and meaningful frame.”

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I applaud her insights. But we need to go deeper. This is not the first time that someone, moved by a great disaster, suggested that Kali was speaking to the world. After 9/11/2001, some writers suggested that the attacks on the twin towers were a “wake-up call from the Dark Feminine.” But as I wrote in 2009 in Chapter Nine of my book,

The Dark Mother, however, had already been calling on September 10th,when 35,000 children died of malnutrition, as they do every day. With all due respect to the victims of the attack, it is characteristic American narcissism to imply that 9/11 had more personal meaning than the carnage going on in any of the forty-odd wars being waged across the globe.

Eight years later, it seems plain to me that it is also characteristic American innocence to have been in denial for so long. The Great Mother has always been crying for our attention.

Perhaps there are other mythic motifs that can help. One is Pandora’s box. In Greek myth, when Prometheus stole fire from heaven, Zeus took vengeance by presenting Pandora, the first woman, “the all-gifted”, to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus. Pandora opened a box (actually a jar) containing death and many other evils which were then released into the world. She hastened to close the container, but the whole contents had escaped except for one thing that lay at the bottom – hope.

It’s a useful metaphor. Mark Potok, previously quoted, says, “I think what has happened is that the Trump campaign, in many ways, has kind of ripped the lid off Pandora’s Box, and all of these different kinds of hatreds have escaped, and it’s pretty damn near impossible to get them back into the box.”

Michael Meade also uses the image: “Trump has now opened a Pandora’s Box of personal and political problems that have become a national fiasco and a growing international dilemma.”

It’s all now out of the box, like an explosion of gases from the belly of a bloated, rotting whale, and we really don’t know if hope remains inside.

I’m rummaging through world mythology because perhaps we need as many images as possible now. Another one is the Tower.

It had obvious relevance in 2001, and now with Kali’s image on the Empire State Building and Trump’s association with towers, it maintains that imaginal significance. I wrote about it in Chapter Nine:

Many mythologies share the theme of cataclysm (“wash down”) or catastrophe (“turn down”) and tell of disasters such as earthquakes, floods and eruptions. The Judeo-Christian tradition perceives such events as divine punishment resulting from sexual transgressions and reversions to Paganism. The Greeks saw these events as retribution (nemesis) for excessive arrogance and pride (hubris), which is symbolized as towers that reach toward heaven in Egyptian, Mexican, Assamese, Burmese and Native American myths.
The Tower card appears in the European Tarot Deck as a medieval castle, a Babylonian ziggurat, a skyscraper, a prison — or the White House. It collapses in flames from an earthquake or lightning bolt. Sometimes human bodies fall from it, or pieces of it strike the king. Psychologically, it represents the ego defenses that hide our incomplete selves. The Tower, writes Shanti Fader, is a place of “fear and jealous, possessive pride, designed to keep out love…” Recall Pentheus (in The Bacchae) bellowing, “I shall order every gate in every tower to be bolted tight.”…It also represents knowledge swollen out of control, like the Tower of Babel.
Feder sees the Tarot’s destruction of the Tower as “clearing away…outmoded ideas and patterns…which may well have served a purpose at one time.” The Tower is like the Hero, who produces and achieves in the first half of life, but must die into something greater in the second half. Dionysus concludes The Bacchae implying that if uninitiated boy-kings awaken, they might “have an ally…in the son of Zeus.”

Part Seven: Dionysus, and a Worm

I’m going to stick with one of the themes of my book – the return of the repressed – and my most compelling image: Dionysus, the Loosener.

What is the knocking?  What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.  Admit them, admit them.
– D. H. Lawrence

I am pregnant with murder.
The pains are coming faster now,
and not all your anesthetics
nor even my own screams
can stop them.
– Robin Morgan

From Chapter Four of my book:

The god is angry because he has been dishonored. The longer something has been repressed, the more insistent it is, the greater the resistance by centers of power (ruling elites) or of consciousness (the ego). This is why Dionysus has cast his spell on the women, why Pentheus fights him so absolutely, and why his destruction is so savage…Like Pentheus, we can ignore the appearance of an archetype. But it never totally disappears. It returns, charged with more energy, but manifesting in a more primitive way. What was a human impulse can become monstrous. Repressed diversity ultimately reappears as psychopathology, as madness at the gates.

And who is the agent of this return of the repressed? Dionysus, of course. In his literal form as alcohol he is Lusios, the Loosener, “destroyer of the household.” Lusios is related to analysis, which means setting free. A catalyst is a chemical agent that precipitates a process without itself being changed. The destruction of Pentheus’ palace represents Lusios shaking the foundations of identity (personal or collective).

Every night, every tavern and most dance venues are places where people go with the express intention, conscious or unconscious, of receiving permission from the God of madness and ecstasy to let go and let it all out. It can come out as joining the crowd at the ubiquitous TV set and cheering for the home team. More rarely, it can come out as truth-telling, spoken by those who otherwise cannot ignore their inhibitions.

Or it can come out in the release of pent-up violence. For some, the knowledge that others will likely intervene and “break up” a fight before it gets out of hand is part of the expectation that even the letting go can happen in a certain kind of safe or ritualized context.

Why is this “loosening” so tempting? Why do we crave release? Classicist E.R. Dodds explained that Dionysus “…enables you for a short time to stop being yourself…” He could lift the burden of individual responsibility from his devotees. In the process, their sense of being isolated egos dissolved.

The ecstatic mode of spirituality is both ancient and widespread. All Greek initiation festivals included dancing. Indigenous worship everywhere was bodily celebration, a dance of the entire community. In many African languages, the words for music and dance are identical. A Haitian proverb says, “White people go to church to speak about God. We dance in the temple and become God.”

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If this need was so strong in pre-Classical Greece, how much more so in our day when religious fundamentalism, political fear mongering and the constraints of the corporate work environment herd us toward a mind-numbing conformism that we all know? No wonder we crave regular access to the local tavern as well as those occasional escapes to New Orleans, Las Vegas and Spring Break party towns.

Here I must confess to a certain naiveté. In much of my writing I’ve tended to see the return of the repressed as a good thing, as in liberated sexuality, as the return of the Goddess or as political revolution. And I still think that way – in the long run. But perhaps I’ve been ignoring my own text: What was a human impulse can become monstrous.

And one of the most welcome – and most dangerous – characteristics of demagogues from Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler to Reagan to the architects of the Rwandan and Armenian holocausts to Trump has been their ability to “lift the burden of individual responsibility” from their followers, to dissolve their isolated egos. It is to grant them permission to let out the dogs of their most repressed, violent fantasies that had previously been held in control by superficial notions such as goodness, fair play, tolerance, rationality, justice – and democracy.

For four hundred years, white American males have attempted to cover up the continual, massive evidence of their detached, racialized, genocidal violence with the story of their own goodness and innocence. Elites have always managed to keep the lid on the worst of our lesser natures, except of course for our regular wars on foreign ground and the race riots that inevitably follow them at home.

This gambit has generally worked, at least for the winners and those who identified with them.

But sometime around 1975, and accelerating through the next generation, the jobs that gave them the good life and a sense of belonging disappeared. Credit, two-income families, fundamentalism and the vicarious thrills of celebrity culture and militarism carried them for one more generation until the credit maxed out. By the Obama years, it became increasingly difficult to conceal the fact that fewer and fewer white people (let alone people of color) could claim membership in the tribe. And we remember that in American mythology and theology, we hold to the crazy assumption that our suffering is our own fault, not that of a capitalistic system, that the only alternative to the winner/hero is the loser/victim.

The opioid epidemic controlled – and killed – millions of them in this generation. The rest were ready to explode, to turn their self-hatred upon some localized scapegoats. Their patience and their sense of self-control had been stretched as far as possible, and they yearned for the advent of a loosener who would grant them permission to dump it all out, to let slip the dogs of domestic war.

The dogs of international war will almost certainly follow.

I really regret that this seems to be the most relevant mythic image right now. We recall that Pentheus’ own mother and aunts lead the crazed maenads in murdering and dismembering him. With that image in mind, we note that 53% of white women voted for Trump, despite (or perhaps because of) his crude misogyny, and that, ironically, the most common targets of the public hated he let loose have been veiled women, the very image of repression.

The madness will dissipate; such eruptions always do. That is, until the pressure builds up again, or, as in Germany, the resulting destruction overwhelms even national mythologies of exceptionalism. Otherwise, myths do take a long time to change.

And what does this mean for those of us who aspire to being elders who might prepare younger people to step up and become leaders after this society crashes and burns? Are attempts at initiation rituals ultimately meaningless if they don’t involve the risk of showing the young their darkest potentials along with their brightest?

Meade suggests that we view Trump not simply as the problem, but more as a symptom of a greater illness and reminds us that the word crisis comes from a Greek word that refers to a turning point in a disease.

Thus, a genuine crisis signifies a change for better or for worse…The national crisis created by…a pathological presidency can become an opportunity to grow the character of the country and bring a deeper sense of human decency and national integrity.

Trump is a provocateur. But Jung said that the soul is teleological, always moving toward integration. Back to The Bacchae: We carelessly leave the gates unlocked for the Mystery to enter and do its destructive – and perhaps reconstructive – work. We see this when Pentheus orders his henchmen to find Dionysus:

Go, someone, this instant,
to the place where this prophet prophesies.
Pry it up with crowbars, heave it over,
upside down; demolish everything you see…
That will provoke him more than anything.

“Provoke” (from vocare, to call) is marvelously appropriate. At some level Pentheus can choose. He can invoke or evoke his own Dionysian nature, or he can innocently project it outwards, provoking its expression somewhere else. Dionysus says:

If I were you, I would offer him (myself, actually) a sacrifice, not rage and kick against necessity…Friend, you can still save the situation.

“If I were you,” indeed. The two cousins represent mirror opposites within the psyche. Pentheus, in his desperate machismo, speaks his last line before the spell is cast:

Bring my armor, someone.
And you (Dionysus) stop talking.

Now he has provoked the god, called him out, and declared his willingness to engage the mystery. Here a break in the poetic meter of the text occurs that emphasizes the significance of Pentheus’ fateful statement. When Dionysus responds with: “Ahhh…Wait! …Would you like to see their revels…?” he provokes Pentheus’ unconscious sexual voyeurism. Dionysus, masked as a priest, will send Pentheus to his destruction masked as a Maenad. After loosening the gates of the city, he loosens the boundaries of Pentheus’ sanity.

The repressed energies turn deadly. Pentheus might have humbled himself before this immense natural force that was willing to meet him halfway. The Loosener, who – if invited – would have helped his cousin drop his armor and relax, who would rather lie drunk among his maidens, now appears as the Lord of Death. Dionysus had come to refute lies told by his two aunts. Now they and Pentheus’ own mother destroy him. The three sisters, universal symbols of the Great Mother – her again – reveal her deadly features instead of her nurturing face.

What does it mean to be an archetypal story? One thing it means is that it lives in potential within each of us, and that each of us – each nation – may potentially enact it. But our contemporary loosener/provocateur can only permit us to show our worst potentials, not our better angels.

For the present, this means fully accepting the nauseating truth that Trump is us – that he embodies the dark side of a toxic, national mythology that exists in the psyche of every American, just as the Teutonic darkness dwelt in every German in 1933. And this brings me to a final, Nordic myth, the Lindworm.

The king and queen want a child, but cannot produce one. An old wise woman tells the queen that in order to conceive she must breathe her desires into a glass and place it on the ground. From that ground, two flowers will grow: one red, one white. The queen must eat the white flower; under no circumstances must she eat the red one. Then she will bear a healthy child. Of course, she eats the red flower too. She duly becomes pregnant, but gives birth to a black serpent, which she immediately flings in horror through the window and into the forest.

People act as if nothing has happened, and a healthy baby boy is soon born. But when the prince becomes a man, he meets his serpent brother again in the wood, and the huge black snake comes back into the kingdom to wreak terrible damage.

This strange and disturbing story suggests that what you exile will come back to bite you, three times as big and twice as angry. What you push away will eventually return, and you will have to deal with the consequences. But this version of return of the repressed offers a way out that The Bacchae doesn’t.

Paul Kingsnorth suggests that 2016 was

…the year the exiled serpent returned. Many things that were banned from the public conversation – many feelings, ideas and worldviews which were pushed under, thrown into the forest, deemed taboo, cast out of the public realm – have slithered back into the castle, angry at their rejection. Some people thought they were dead, but it doesn’t work like that. Dark twins can’t be destroyed; terms must be met, agreements made. The serpent must be accommodated…2016, from a small, localised perspective here in the wealthy democracies of the Western hemisphere, can look like the year that everything changed. But it isn’t, not really. This is not the year that the queen gave birth to the serpent, and it certainly isn’t the year that she first ate the flower. That happened a long time ago. This is the year that the serpent came back out of the forest and into the kingdom, and we got a look at its face. This is the year when we were finally forced to acknowledge what we have exiled…Our stories are cracking: the things we have pretended to believe about the world have turned out not to be true. And the serpent has a lot more damage to do yet…

What Kingsnorth is calling “the year of the snake” I’m calling the Dionysian Moment. The snakes – or the dogs, if you prefer – have heard the news. It’s open hunting season on all of America’s favorite scapegoats, and you don’t need a license.

In the story of the Lindworm, who saves the realm? Neither the King nor the Queen nor a macho hero. The worm (or dragon) demands to be wed before his royal younger brother can be married. Several noble maidens are offered as brides, but the worm eats them all. Finally, a shepherd’s daughter is given to the worm in marriage, seemingly yet another sacrifice, and what a sad ceremony they have. But the crone – that Great Mother again – has trained her, and she arrives wearing ten dresses in layers and carrying a curious collection of milk, lye and a whip.

In the bedroom, the worm tells her to remove her dress, but she insists he shed a skin for each dress she takes off. Eventually, nine Lindworm skins are lying on the floor, each covered with a dress. Nothing is left of him but an ugly mass of flesh. Then the girl seizes the whip, dips it in the lye, and whips him repeatedly. When he is finally cleansed she bathes him in the fresh milk, drags him onto the bed and embraces him and they fall asleep.

Next morning, the King and his courtiers enter the room, expecting to see the usual carnage. Instead, they discover the girl, fresh and rosy. Beside her lies not the Lindworm, but a handsome prince. They marry a second time, in a much grander fashion, a real celebration, and the younger brother also finds a royal bride. The Realm has been restored. Kingsnorth writes:

It is a young woman from the margin of the woods, who brings new weapons, and new cunning, into the court, and does the job which the owners of the kingdom had no idea how to do. But she does not kill the serpent. Instead, she reveals its true nature, and in doing so she changes it and everything around it. She forces the court to confront its past, and as a result, the serpent is enfolded again back into the kingdom.

A young woman.

What needs to be folded back into our kingdom? How many worms will crawl out from the sewers and shadows knowing they have permission to speak – and act out – the violence that the myth of American innocence refuses to acknowledge? How many demagogues need to arise before we listen to what they are saying? How many times do they need to up the ante until, exhausted, defenses down, we finally welcome them in, call upon the wisdom of the young and the feminine, offer to remove our own skins and submit to the inevitable chemical washing that might just trump the hatred?

Barry’s Blog # 205: Funny Guys, Fake News and Gatekeepers

Posted by Barry Spector on May 4, 2017 at 5:36pm

I’m just a comedian. – Jon Stewart

This is a revised and updated version of a blog I posted in early 2013. I enjoyed watching Jon Stewart preaching to the choir as much as anyone. However, I never expected any authentic, radical commentary from him, for three reasons. First, the fact that he never mentioned the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were in office) indicated the limits of his criticism of American policies that have been remarkably consistent, if hypocritical, since the end of World War Two.

Second, and perhaps more fundamental, was his policy of regularly inviting creeps like Bill O’Reilly as well as government spokespersons and other representatives of the corporate media onto his show for debate. Stewart was first and foremost an entertainer, and no one should have expected him to jeopardize his own status.

Now I have nothing against “reasoned debate.” Indeed, we could use much more of it. But by doing this, he gave them and their positions legitimacy before the camera and the millions who watched him, a legitimacy that they neither needed (they certainly got plenty of exposure on their own) nor deserved. This expresses what I call “liberal innocence” – the insistence, despite all evidence, that conservatives (I prefer the term “reactionaries”) and liberals will sort out “the facts” in a disengaged, orderly process on a “level playing field,” in which all participants share a common desire for enhancing the public welfare.

Bullshit. The unedited history of the last sixty years should show anyone who is willing to actually look that the Right and its flunkies have never played by the “rules” and never will. Naively hoping that they might do so only solidifies our sense of innocence and leads ultimately to disillusionment with the political process itself.

Stewart had a clear function within the corporate media: to constantly remind his viewers of the limits of acceptable discourse: meaning, from far-right to moderately liberal. Every time he playfully bantered with O’Reilly and his ilk, those scumbags moved a bit closer to the middle in the public, liberal eye. And, given that many young people admit that they got all colbert-700x525-1

their news from Stewart and, perhaps, Stephen Colbert, his role becomes even more important.

For a while I also enjoyed watching Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow trash right-wingers with their devastating wit. However, the fact that they rarely criticized the Obama administration (whose fundamental policies and financial supporters were not significantly different from its predecessors) indicates a similar kind of innocent refusal, even denial, to rock the boat. By skewering right-wingers without acknowledging either collusion by Democrats or authentic left-wing alternatives, they served the function of all the media: to constrict the terms of debate to a fraction of that spectrum and give the impression that we have real freedom of expression in this country.

Eventually, it became clear that Maddow and all her MSNBC crowd had become nothing more than spokespersons for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, as Fox is for the Republicans. The jokes became stale, safe, snarky and predictable.

Ultimately, his corporate bosses deemed Olberman unacceptably liberal and they fired him in 2012. And who received the task of letting the public know just why it was good riddance? Why, John Stewart, who slammed Olberman for his “bombast” and “rage,” thereby solidifying his own position as the arbiter of reasoned discourse.

Here is the third reason why he never offered any real criticism of corporate power in America. Many parents and older people told their activist children in the 1960s, “We approve of your goals but not of your methods.” In attacking Olberman’s style, Stewart was deliberately instructing his audience that, as bad as things may be, one would be wrong to even feel rage, or by extension, to feel anything at all, other than mild (if short-lived) euphoria after having had a good laugh, let alone to act upon it. He rarely spoke truth to power, and when he did, it was from the stance of wounded innocence.

Eventually, with the dominance of Fox News, the Koch-funded Tea Party and the grand con-man Trump, the issue of “fake news” arose to muddy the boundaries between truth and fiction on several levels. But as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky had been arguing for decades, the established, corporate, “liberal” media had always purveyed news and opinion through subtle but highly slanted narratives quite deliberately intended to reinforce the myth of American innocence and the good intentions of the American Empire.

Stewart and Colbert revived an old entertainment form: comedians pretending to be newscasters, as in Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” Perhaps they were simply taking note of how American culture had been changing since the Ronald Reagan years. As (despite the media’s determined efforts) our grand narrative was breaking down, so were all of our institutions. Especially in the realms of politics, education and entertainment, many people were realizing that there was hardly any difference anymore. Who coined the term “edutainment?” Walt Disney, in 1954.

But Stewart the fake newsman never pretended to have values other those of Stewart the wealthy, Jewish (that is, unquestioningly pro-Israel) liberal, or “PEP” (progressive except for Palestine). And for the reasons I’ve mentioned, he could never break out of that bubble, with its gatekeeping function.

Stewart alumnae Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore have carried on the tradition without playing the fake newscaster role, but as straight-up, progressive, comedy. I would argue that Bee and Oliver, angry, persuasive and hilarious as they are (and thankfully not hosting conservatives for “reasoned” debate), have still, on occasion, revealed that they can function as gatekeepers as well. Bee regularly reinforces the anti-Russia narrative that denies the real reasons why Trump won, and Oliver has demonized those who question Big Pharma’s pro-vaccination narrative.

I could be wrong on these issues myself, but we are still talking about gatekeeping, and ultimately gatekeeping always serves the interests of the wealthy. Noah, of course, in keeping with Stewart’s old format, has also proven to be an effective gatekeeper.

The African-American Wilmore committed a more serious sin: he hosted a show with an angry, progressive, mostly person-of-color cast and was openly critical of Barack Obama. He retained the interview format, but his guests were often political activists, and the interviews themselves included members of the cast. There were always at least two Black persons in front of the camera. It’s really surprising that his corporate chieftains kept him around as long as they did. Eventually, they claimed, his ratings were insufficient.

And of course this thought reminds us of a question I regularly pose in these essays: Cui bono? Who profits? Follow the money. Do you remember what CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said of Donald Trump’s presidential run? “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

By this logic, even O’Reilly would turn liberal if the sponsorship or the ratings justified such a change. Up to a point, this seems to be one of the fundamental values of media in late capitalism: if it sells – if there is an identifiable market – keep selling it. Beyond that point, criticism of the system itself, aside from some of the clowns who embody it, becomes intolerable. This, combined with low ratings, spelled Wilmore’s demise.

Colbert the fake newsman actually slipped real criticism into his schtick by creating a raging blowhard persona inspired by characters like O’Reilly. Emily Nussbaum, in the New Yorker writes:

By wearing a mask made of his own face, he (Colbert) inflected every interaction with multiple ironies, keeping his guests—including politicians and authors—off balance, and forcing them to be spontaneous.

I’d take that statement further. By pretending to be a conservative chatting with other conservatives, he was able to reveal them as the thugs they really were, without giving them legitimacy. It was a subtle difference between him and Stewart, and a very important one: parody vs. satire. Colbert was a subversive: he undermined the dominant discourse and got away with it, because he had great ratings. By the way, those ratings provided the answer to the common question: “Why would those people allow themselves to look so foolish?’ The answer: Cui bono. Any publicity is good publicity.

I use the past tense here, because Colbert’s shift from Comedy Central to CBS sucked him straight into the gatekeeper vortex.

One of his very first guests in September 2015 was Trump himself. Perhaps Colbert assumed that a Trump nomination, not to mention presidency, was so unlikely that the comic potential and legitimization would be worth it. Fans who expected him to skewer Trump were certainly disappointed, however, as Trump refused to take his mild baiting and Colbert actually apologized for having criticized him in the past.

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Indeed, like every interview he would do on the new show, it was a typical network-style discussion: long on safe, predictable jokes, short on the old irony and de-legitimizing. The effect was what we would later describe as “normalization.” Nussbaum describes these interviews:

With the irony drained away, Colbert was less vivid. He had a try-hard earnestness, a damp corporate pall; he was courtly with guests, as if modeling bipartisan behavior. Taking off the mask had made him less visible, not more.

Eventually, as Trump ascended, so did Colbert’s anger, but the late-night format continues to dictate the content – and the normalization. Attacking Trump is necessary and provides needed relief. colbertcartoontrump

But it isn’t in itself subversive when everyone is doing it, and when much of the criticism is calculated to support the liberal narrative of Hillary Clinton, the DNC and Russian hacking: If only they hadn’t done that, we’d have a real president.

Under an absurdist regime, intensified by the digital landscape…all jokes become “takes,” their punch lines interchangeable with CNN headlines, Breitbart clickbait, Facebook memes, and Trump’s own drive-by tweets, which themselves crib gags from “Saturday Night Live.” (“Not!”) Under these conditions, a late-night monologue begins to feel cognitively draining, not unlike political punditry.

Nussbaum prefers John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Seth Myers. But it always comes back to gatekeeping, one of the primary functions, incidentally, of The New Yorker. These three are all excellent and progressive comics. Unlike Wilmore and his cast, however, they’re all white.

In 2017, when haters have free rein, from the Attorney General down to violent cops and loonies in bleacher seats, when humor is nearly indistinguishable from government proclamations, angry (even if funny) Black men are still beyond the pale. Keeping them – and their implied assault on American innocence – out there is one reason why gatekeepers do what they do, and why they are paid so well.

Barry’s Blog # 204: Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama, Part Fifteen

Posted by Barry Spector on March 24, 2017 at 3:44pm

Myth # 7: The Unwitting Savior

I have to ask: when did calm, rational discussion ever do us any good? I agree with Michael Meade, who says that anything worth saying is worth exaggerating. I agree with David Whyte, who says “This is not the age of information. This is the age of loaves and fishes.” May it be the age when the gatekeepers can no longer pull the wool over our eyes, when they can no longer serve up “leaders” charged with the assignment to repair the cracks in the myth of American innocence. May it be the age when the predatory and paranoid imaginations that have ruled our consciousness – and our unconsciousness – for centuries fall away to make room for the creative imagination that still resides in our indigenous minds.

I began this long essay by talking about the mythology of the King. As we search for some kind of positive conclusion, bear with me while I stretch out and play with two themes. The first is annunciation, the universal, cross-cultural story of how divine messengers appear to predict the arrival on Earth of a great being, such as the Buddha, or Maitreya, the future Buddha.

In discussing our idealizations and projections onto figures like Obama – and why we’re still so reluctant to see him as he really was, and why our disillusionment may be so overwhelming when we do – I’ve made reference to another related archetype, the longing for the return of the king, such as Odysseus in Greek myth or the Messiah in Hebrew myth. In Christian myth, the birth of John the Baptist (necessary for the later birth of Jesus) is foretold in Luke 1:5-25. And in Luke 1:26, the Angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will become his mother. In Mark 1:3, John preaches, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

A second theme is the holy fool, another universal figure who is innocent, unsophisticated, inexperienced and useless. Yet he appears, as

Parsifal, or as the third, youngest brother in so many fairy tales to complete the task of saving the Kingdom or capturing the Firebird when his two older, heroic brothers fail. He accepts guidance from animal helpers. His intelligence is of the body, and utterly unconscious. But, unlike his brothers, he is “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3).

Bear with me. When we combine these two universal themes – the one who arrives to announce the impending arrival of another (who is still only in potential), yet who is himself utterly unconscious of his actual and necessary role in the drama, who may actually be quite a wounded soul, maybe even embodying the worst in all of us – we find a mythological reframe of Barack Obama. The one in potential, by the way, will be the one who will lift the veils, who will be the enlightened, or self-aware, or no-longer-innocent one within all of us.

Perhaps we need a third mythic theme to put it all together. Again, we find it as a universal archetype: the divine being, or witch, seemingly evil, who demands that the hero perform a series of impossible (almost always three) tasks to save his life, or that of the realm. Often that hero (or heroine, such as Psyche, who must obey Aphrodite’s commands) is that same third sibling who gets help from those same animal spirits. The deity or witch who seems to want nothing but to destroy the hero is, at a deeper level, his initiator, who actually wants him to succeed.

For an excellent example, consider the Grimms Brothers tale called “The Drummer,” in which a truly hideous hag requires a quite incompetent hero to drain a lake, cut down a forest and stack a massive pile of lumber. But at the end of the story, she is indistinguishable from the princess he marries.

In another incarnation, she is the even more hideous hag, Dame Ragnelle, who forces the Arthurian knight Gawain to answer, at the peril of his life, the question “What is it that women most desire?”

Later, after they have married, she gives him the choice to have her beautiful at night, when they are together, or during the day, when they are with others. Instead, he allows her to make the choice herself. This answer lifts the curse for good, and Ragnelle’s beauty returns permanently.

Still with me? We’ve arrived at the seventh and final myth, or way to grade Obama – and, for that matter, all the bankers, industrialists, militarists, fear-mongers, idle rich and all of their politician stooges, media lackeys, gatekeepers and mendacious academics who have contributed to so much human suffering in their pursuit of power and influence.

Caroline Casey says, “The situation is so dire we can’t afford the luxury of realism.” Indeed. In Chapter Twelve of my book I suggest:

We need to use sacred language, in the subjunctive mode: let’s pretend, perhaps, suppose, maybe, make believe, may it be so, what if – and play. This “willing suspension of disbelief” is what Coleridge called “poetic faith.” Then, says Lorca, the artist stops dreaming and begins to desire.

If we combine these archetypal themes – annunciation; the longing for the return of the King; the holy fool; and he/she who poses the impossible tasks – we have something I’ll call the Unwitting Savior.

Here I’m reminded of a critical point in the Bacchae, as I write in Chapter Four of my book:

…Jung said that the soul is teleological, always moving toward integration. We carelessly leave the gates unlocked for the Mystery to enter and do its destructive – and perhaps reconstructive – work. Grandiosity and innocence evoke betrayal and alienation. Usually we respond with “inauthentic suffering” – bitterness, depression or addiction. Sometimes, however, we fall into humility and grief. This may lead to repentance, compassion and wisdom, which the Greeks personified as the goddess Sophia. She could only be approached through authentic suffering. Aeschylus wrote: Sing sorrow, sorrow, but good win out in the end. We see this deeper motivation when Pentheus orders his henchmen to find Dionysus:
Go, someone, this instant, to the place where this prophet prophesies.
Pry it up with crowbars, heave it over, upside down; demolish everything you see…
That will provoke him more than anything.
“Provoke” (from vocare, to call) is marvelously appropriate. At some level Pentheus can choose. He can invoke or evoke his own Dionysian nature, or he can innocently project it outwards, provoking its expression somewhere else.

As I have written several times in the course of this essay, myth is not interested in motivation (or in psychological terms, conscious motivation). Myth is concerned with action, with the mythological facts, with what needs to happen in order to bring the story forward, or with what action that will provoke what must follow.

What if Obama, Trump and the rest of them, completely unaware of their deeper intentions, have really been asking questions such as these, and American culture has been (so far) unable to hear them:

– How can we provoke millions of Americans to wake up from their dream of good intentions and exceptionalism?

– What can we do to provoke new gaps in the veneer of the myth of innocence so broad that they can never be shored up and re-sealed? How can we make the dam burst?

– What can we do to provoke a situation in which conditions become so difficult, so irreparable that the system will respond by producing a fascist strongman – or in mythic terms a Dionysian figure – who will tear the entire system down permanently so that something much better may arise?

– How can we best provoke enough people to so completely suspend their belief in conventional political and religious thinking that they begin to remember the old ways of mythological thinking and learn to reframe their sense of who they are and what they are truly capable of accomplishing?

– What is needed to prepare the way for the return of the Goddess?

Wouldn’t such questions bring us back to where the myth of America itself wants us to go? And who would be speaking now? The hag? The billions of repressed, humiliated and tortured common people who long for peace? Or perhaps the ultimate “grader” herself – the Earth?

Barry’s Blog # 203: Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama, Part Fourteen

Posted by Barry Spector on March 22, 2017 at 3:11pm

Obama’s Legacy:

Obama arrived in the White House promising a new era of democracy and positive change for the common man. In 2008, the Republicans were deeply unpopular, and Sarah Freaking Palin could have been a heartbeat away from the Presidency (that doesn’t seem so bizarre anymore).

In 2012, all the GOP could muster was the grinning idiot Romney. Still, Obama won with a smaller margin than four years before. From a 2016 perspective, it was Black Tweedledee vs White bread Tweedledumb. He left Washington that year with the Democratic Party on the verge of irrelevancy and the common man supporting a fascist.

Certainly, the Republican-caused log jamb of the federal government led many to blame both parties and lose interest in politics, and (well-financed) others to organize on the right. But the major factors were the Democrats’ own failure of imagination, their indebtedness to their corporate sponsors and their blatant ignoring of both a failed economy and widespread discontent. Micah Sifry writes:

As we now know, that grand vision for a post-campaign movement never came to fruition. Instead of mobilizing his unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his campaign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National Committee. It was the seminal mistake of his presidency—one that set the tone for the next eight years of dashed hopes, and helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed…“We lost this election eight years ago,” concludes Michael Slaby, the campaign’s chief technology officer. “Our party became a national movement focused on general elections, and we lost touch with nonurban, noncoastal communities. There is a straight line between our failure to address the culture and systemic failures of Washington and this election result.”…a sin of imagination, one that helped decimate the Democratic Party at the state and local level and turn over every branch of the federal government to the far right.

These political decisions – along with, of course, Obama’s actual policies – had much to do with the massive disillusionment that set in among young idealists, few of whom transferred their Bernie Sanders loyalties to Hillary Clinton, supporting her only because they feared Trump. But the damage, as Sifry says, happened much earlier. By 2016 the Democrats had lost over a thousand spots in state legislatures, governor’s mansions and Congress.

“What’s happened on the ground is that voters have been punishing Democrats for eight solid years — it’s been exhausting,” said South Carolina State Senator Vincent Sheheen, who lost two gubernatorial campaigns…“If I was talking about a local or state issue, voters would always lapse back into a national topic: Barack Obama.” After this year’s elections, Democrats hold the governor’s office and both legislative chambers in just five coastal states: Oregon, California, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. Republicans have the trifecta in 25, giving them control of a broad swath of the middle of the country.

I have argued that despite all this incompetence, it still took massive voter suppression and outright computer fraud to win the 2016 election.

But consider if Clinton had actually won: another 4-8 years of obstruction on domestic policies and empirical wars abroad, balanced at best by a moderate on the Supreme Court, and another generation of disillusioned young people. And amid the faux-feminist self-congratulation among liberals, no need for hagiography about Obama. At worst, if Clinton actually fulfilled her campaign rhetoric and established a no-fly zone over Syria and ordered “military responses” to the alleged Russian cyber attacks, we’d be at war with Russia.

In December the White House worked to recruit the centrist Tom Perez to run against and ultimately defeat the more liberal Keith Ellison as DNC chairman. Had they learned nothing from Clinton’s defeat? Or, as Greenwald writes,

…it seems Democratic leaders prioritize ensuring that the left has no influence in their party over strengthening itself to beat the Trump-led Republicans…

We can only understand this mess by reverting to our mythological view: Obama played the inspirational role of the King in order to get elected. But it was only a role; and it was played by a trickster. The King imagines for us all; the Trickster (a poor version of the Trickster – the Con Man) is out for himself.

As Gary Younge writes, this latest transition is not simply a matter of sequence – one bad president following a good one – but consequence: one horrendous agenda made possible by the failure of its predecessor.

I’m sure you could offer all kinds of counter-arguments to what I’ve been saying from your own grading perspective. And you should; we all need to step back occasionally and consider what motivates our strong opinions. And I’m suggesting that our position within the myth of American innocence is a strong motivator. From outside the myth, others see us more objectively.

Perhaps Obama really has tried but been unable to reform a dreadfully wasteful and brutal militarism that has remained remarkably consistent, regardless of who has occupied the White House, for seventy years. We’d still like to believe that notion, because to think otherwise would be to call into question our most fundamental assumptions about who we are as Americans. To ask about our own collusion in perpetuating the story of American goodness and exceptionalism – despite all the evidence – would be to ask how we cannot see that the President has perfected the art of appearing to embody the Archetypal King – while actually enacting its, and our, shadow.

I certainly can entertain this possibility: perhaps Obama’s con-act was not a conscious process. His tears for American victims of gun violence were real – and so were his war crimes.

In this sense, from the empire’s grading point of view, he was a complete success. To bring this discussion back to mythological thinking, we remember that we all inhabit a story. In this story Obama was a hired gun, brought in to shore up the cracks in the myth of innocence that had appeared during the Bush years, and he succeeded for a while. In this grading perspective, even the Republicans (speaking honestly for once, off the record) would give him a straight-A.

Once again we need to address the fundamental question that progressives constantly dance around without really examining: good-intentioned mistakes rising from incompetence vs. deliberate, cynical policy. How many times have you heard this assessment (shared by almost all politicians, pundits and historians) that the Viet Nam war (please feel free to substitute Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) was a “mistake”? High school students all across the country learn the story, how our leaders had the best of intentions – defending freedom and stopping the spread of communism (feel free to substitute “Islamic terrorism”) – and it was only their own incompetence and changes in American popular opinion that defeated them.

Noam Chomsky, however, reminds us that America invaded Viet Nam, to prevent it “…from becoming a successful model of economic and social development…” It was the Vietnamese people who won the war, not the Americans who lost it. This is one reason why Chomsky’s name almost never appears in the New York Times. And the only level on which this and all the other horrors I’ve been detailing were mistakes was the moral level.

They were crimes. They were intended as crimes, planned, prosecuted and perpetuated by Harvard-educated criminals. These were and are the crimes of imperialism, not innocent blunders, and Obama is as complicit as any of his predecessors.

What if we were to drop our assumptions of American innocence and ask our grading questions but from a different perspective, that of the Deep State and the actual managers of policy and public opinion? Questions such as:

1 – How can we direct public opinion and policy so that the military – and its ever-increasing budget – remains permanently in a certain part of the world?

2 – How can we direct increasingly greater shares of the nation’s resources towards the military-industrial complex, the education-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, Big Pharma and the financial and insurance industries?

3 – How can we best manipulate the levels of irrational fear and anxiety so as to distract common people from such policies – and eventually choose a more blatant demagogue?

4 – How can we vet prospective political candidates and journalists to make sure that none of them ever question these policies?

5 – How can we serve up pliant legislators for lobbyists to shape?

6 – How can we make most Americans so utterly insecure about jobs, housing, education, health and the future in general that they will acquiesce to any of our demands?

7 – How can we make the rest of the population so tired, depressed and disillusioned that they simply stop bothering to vote?

Now from that point of view, let’s ask another basic question. After eight years, have the one percent come to accumulate as much wealth as the bottom fifty percent despite Obama’s policies or because of them? In mythology, we recall, motivation doesn’t matter, only actions. Mythology looks at what happened and asks what needed to occur in order for the story to move on.

Our one consolation is that if we pay attention, it also asks how we might reframe the story.

Once again, what about those signs of mild, incremental progress? Consider that for those who actually control the American Empire, policy decisions have only two potential consequences. The first as always – Cui bono? – is financial: who pays and who profits? The second is political: how much political capital is gained or lost?

Saving the auto industry? Why not ask: what is the price of keeping these inefficient and failing corporations alive even though they’ve outsourced most of their jobs to the Third World, when the obviously better solution is to buy them out at bottom-dollar prices and create worker-owned collectives? Answer: keep a few of those jobs in this country.

Health care? Why not ask: What is the price of delivering vastly more wealth and influence to the insurance industry? Answer: mandate expensive health coverage for some of the people.

Cuba? Iran? Why not ask: What is the price of opening up new consumer markets totaling nearly 90 million people in countries that were never any threat to our safety? Answer: Take actions that conservatives would never (claim to) support anyway. Nothing risked, nothing lost.

Supporting gay rights? Why not ask: What is the price of securing some nine million potential voters for the Democratic Party, especially when we’ve done nothing to repair the fact that several million African-Americans remain disenfranchised? Answer: Nothing at all. Again, nothing risked.

I take no pride in this. It isn’t about venting my frustration or expressing gratuitous cynicism. It is about waking up from the dream of innocence, exceptionalism and good intentions. Before we can begin to reframe our stories, we have to realize that we have inhabited a very toxic one for our entire existence as a nation, and it still holds us by the short hairs.

Ultimately I don’t care if you come to agree with my assessment of Obama. I do hope that you come to realize how much of your thoughts are determined by the mythology of innocence that we all subscribe to, how much your longing for the return of the King in your own heart determines the idealizations that you project onto politicians and entertainers.

Is there any difference any more between them? Trump knows the answer. And here’s something that everyone in Washington (including its 50,000 lobbyists) knows about con-men: while you fretted as his right hand (Trump) promised to move the cups on the table, his left hand (Obama/Clinton) had already been in your pocket. Perhaps you deplore my hyperbole. Yes, I’m a curmudgeon, and yes, as George Carlin said about the American Dream: “You have to be asleep to believe it.” My next post will conclude this essay.

Barry’s Blog # 202: Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama, Part Thirteen

Posted by Barry Spector on March 21, 2017 at 2:45pm

“Missile Defense”

Do you remember Reagan’s spaced-based “Strategic Defense Initiative”, known derisively as “Star Wars”? It was never built because it was costly, provocative and consistently unreliable. Since then, however, each successive administration has continued to lavish vast resources on it, with the total costs over $180 billion so far.

Any normal person could ask why, and the truth comes down to this: the defense industry, knowing a cash cow, has never relinquished its hold on elected politicians.

And this: despite the fact that even the newest version of the program has less than a 50% success rate under even the simplest of scenarios, the generals have always coveted a workable missile defense system that could be an indispensible part of a first-strike threat against either Russia or China. They have always known that, rather than protecting America from some mythical, unprovoked attack, the system would actually be insurance against retaliation by anyone the U.S. might choose to attack first. For this reason, the Obama administration expanded the program.

Presidential Powers

Even Time Magazine wonders:

Future historians will ask why George W. Bush sought and received express congressional authorization for his wars…and his successor did not. They will puzzle over how Barack Obama the prudent war-powers constitutionalist transformed into a matchless war-powers unilateralist…Although he backed down from his threat to invade Syria last summer, President Obama proclaimed then the power to use unilateral force for purely humanitarian ends without congressional or United Nations or NATO support.

Should the government be able to kill its own citizens without explaining to a court why and what it’s doing? This awesome power is no longer subject to any judicial oversight. Now, with Trump in office after a campaign in which he promised to revive the torture program and carry out war crimes such as killing the families of suspected terrorists (and at the date of this posting he already has), we have to wonder what box of horrors Obama – the assassin-in-chief – opened up. If he could order the murder of radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, what limits will Trump recognize? John Knefel writes:

For the past eight years, critics of Obama’s secret assassination programs and mass surveillance operations have made two critical points. The first is that…these kinds of broad authorities invite abuse, mistakes and errors, even if those calling the shots are operating in good faith. But the second point, now made painfully relevant, is that someday you might not trust the people calling the shots. You might realize, instead, that they are terrifying. That day has come.

Trump has inherited not only the drone assassination program but the Special Forces units that Obama expanded so greatly, essentially the President’s private army – 70,000 men, many of them Christian extremists and blatant racists – operating in secrecy, seldom discussed in the media except in action movies. Tomdispatch reports:

Now, in these last weeks of (Obama’s) presidency, his administration has given JSOC new powers to “track, plan, and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe” and to do so “outside conventional conflict zones” and via “a new multiagency intelligence and action force.” As a result, whatever this new task force may do, it won’t, as in the past, have to deal with regional military commands and their commanders at all. Its only responsibility will be to the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and assumedly the White House.

Arms Dealer in Chief:

Obama stood on the high ground of moral righteousness, publicly weeping as he decried gun violence in America. But behind the sanctimonious finger-pointing, he discreetly brokered and authorized the sale of more arms to foreign governments than any president since World War II. Arms exports totaled over $200 billion, exceeding the amount Bush had approved by $60 billion. Over half of that amount went to the Saudis. Cui bono?

The U.S. did temporarily ban some of the worst human rights offenders from these weapon deals. However, when Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Republics and Qatar “donated” to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s foundation, she waived those restrictions.

Nuclear Proliferation:

In April 2009 Obama pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons.” Six months later, despite having escalated the war in Afghanistan, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. In a bizarre twist on the “Watch what we do, not what we say” theme, the Nobel Committee cheapened itself by rewarding someone for things he said he might do, rather than for actually doing any of them. But even in his acceptance speech, Obama could not resist defending American militarism.

The truth became clear soon enough, as he announced plans to build redesigned nuclear warheads (smaller and thus much more likely to be used), new bombers, submarines, land-based missiles, weapons labs and production plants. Under Obama nuke spending rose higher than under any other president. The cost over thirty years would exceed $1 trillion and violate the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Indeed, he reduced the nuclear arsenal far less – about 5 % – than any of his three immediate predecessors had.

In 2015 his belligerent and costly policies led a member of the Nobel Committee to openly regret awarding him the Peace Prize. Two weeks before leaving office, and with the obviously unstable Trump arriving, Obama still ignored requests to take the nuclear attack program off its provocative and dangerous “hair-trigger alert” status.

Waste and Corruption:

Obama’s final year was a festival of self-congratulation for the waste and corruption that took place on his watch. In May he presented the Distinguished Public Service Award to the war criminal Henry Kissinger.

In June the Defense Department’s Inspector General admitted that the Army – the Army alone, not including the Navy and Air Force – made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year, and that it lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up. Dave Lindorff writes:

…the Pentagon has been at this dodgy game for decades. In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring all federal agencies to comply with federal accounting standards, to produce budgets that are auditable and to submit an audit each year…two decades later, the Pentagon has yet to comply…the only federal agency that is not complying or, the IG’s report suggests, even trying to comply.

And in December, he very publicly added fuel to the “blame the Russians for hacking the election” fires with feeble and purely symbolic sanctions, including deporting the chef of San Francisco’s Russian consulate. These actions, of course, were merely the beginning of what would be daily media attacks on Trump, and this story is certainly not over. I’ve already dealt in great detail with the real reasons why the Democrats lost the election here. Juan Cole offers a few fundamental questions about this charade:

…if the charge is that the Russians influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, then either they did or they didn’t. If they didn’t, they aren’t very good hackers and might have been safely ignored. If they did, then why no demand that the results of the election be set aside and new elections held? Why are no specific effects of the Russian hacking demonstrated?

Meanwhile, as I mentioned above, Obama signed into law the Defense Authorization Act that further strengthened the repressive capacities of the state. He could have closed the Guantanamo prison by executive order but didn’t. And he quietly ensured that the Senate’s investigation into the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11 would remain classified for at least another 12 years. No one would be prosecuted for torture (or for causing the financial collapse), and none of Trump’s thugs need worry about future war crimes.

Barry’s Blog # 201: Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama, Part Twelve

Posted by Barry Spector on March 20, 2017 at 2:54pm

Sub-Saharan Africa:

American troops swarmed over the continent during the Obama years, allegedly to fight terrorism. They were also there to prop up friendly regimes with horrific human rights records, such as Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda. And they were driven by a new scramble for resources – such as the rare-earth minerals so crucial to producing cell phones – and by intensified competition with China, now Africa’s, as well as Asia’s, largest trading partner. But it was mostly about oil.

Africa has about 10% of global oil reserves, and imports from Africa to the U.S. equal those from the Mid-East. Huge reserves have been discovered in Uganda. South Sudan now controls about three-quarters of the formerly united country’s oil production. The Guardian claims that in Somalia the “potential is comparable to that of Kuwait, which has more than 100 billion barrels of proven oil reserves,” and that “if true, the deposits would eclipse Nigeria’s reserves and make Somalia the seventh largest oil-rich nation.”

As always, securing access to oil underpinned Obama’s security concerns. Bush had created the AFRICOM military command in 2007. Yet under Obama, AFRICOM’s budget rose to $302 million, almost tripling since its launch. And these funds don’t include vast sums spent on training, arming and financing African militaries, which climbed to about $1 billion, plus another $1 billion for private military contractors.

Lee Wengraf writes: “It is no exaggeration to say that the U.S. is at war in Africa. The continent is awash with American military bases, covert operations and thousands of Western-funded troops.” U.S. troops are now in Uganda, Mali, Chad, Burundi, Niger, Ethiopia, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Congo, the Central African Republic, the Seychelles, South Sudan, Nigeria and several other African nations.

There is a secret network of drone bases in East Africa, especially Somalia, which has suffered over two decades of civil war. One Somali told David Axe, “You Americans, you’ll destroy an entire city to get three people.” Both Kenya (which receives a billion dollars in U.S. aid) and Ethiopia have launched invasions into Somalia. The U.S. now has its largest military presence there since it left the country in 1993. The conflict has generated hundreds of civilian deaths and thousands of refugees.

But the death toll was far higher in South Sudan, where tens of thousands died and three million people joined the refugee flow toward the Mediterranean. The U.S., predictably, was the source of this misery. According to Thomas C. Mountain, the CIA was funding a dirty war “little different than the wars the CIA funded in Angola and Mozambique” to overthrow the government. As it had done in those countries, it used a “rebel leader” with arms funneled from U.S.-friendly Ethiopia to wage an ethnic-based war, pushing for regime in the name of a doctrine called “Responsibility to Protect” (much the same rationale as in their war against Libya).

Why? Because South Sudan was doing business with China. The oil fields there are the only Chinese owned and operated in Africa. Despite horrifying tales of black on black tribal violence, the U.S. was the only beneficiary, having been able to repeatedly damage or shut down the Chinese oil fields as a result of the rebellion. As Obama left office, South Sudan, despite its oil riches, was on the brink of an all-out ethnic civil war and famine. “It’s that simple,” writes Mountain, “…the war in South Sudan is about denying China access to Africa’s oil.” Cui bono?

Latin America:

The region has been under Washington’s thumb for nearly 200 years, and again Obama’s policies were completely consistent with those of the past: protecting Wall Street’s investments, training and supporting thugs who promised to return their countries to the old authoritarian rule, and destabilizing democratically-elected leaders who opposed it. Bush’s attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, with its own vast oil reserves, are well known. Less known perhaps is the fact that both before Chavez’ death in 2013 and since then, against Chavez’s elected successor, Nicolas Maduro, Obama pursued the same actions.

Tactics included speculation that led to collapse in the price of crude oil and subsidization of protestors and anti-government media. Once again, the mainstream media functioned as cheerleaders for this effort, as the Washington Post trumpeted, “How to derail Venezuela’s new dictatorship.”

During the Obama years the U.S. meddled repeatedly in Haiti, Guatemala, Suriname, Guyana, Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Ecuador (fomenting a failed coup),

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, claiming that the CIA was trying to overthrow his government

Bolivia, Colombia (where $450 million per year was widely seen as merely a cover for U.S. military power projection in South America) and Brazil, where the new President Michel Temer openly boasted that he’d led the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff not for any crime but for her refusal to implement a right wing economic plan. Paraguay experienced a similar parliamentary coup in 2012, and the U.S. tellingly refused to join the rest of the hemisphere in condemning it.

But Obama’s worst Western Hemisphere crime – and this was not a continuation of something Bush had begun – was crushing democracy in Honduras and turning it into a narco-state that now serves as a primary transit point for drugs into the U.S. In June 2009, the Honduran army seized President Manuel Zelaya and whisked him away in a plane that refueled at a U.S. military base. The OAS, the U.N. and others refused to recognize the subsequent sham election, but the U.S., predictably, did. The coup leaders, like so many others, had trained in the U.S. at the notorious Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, which had formerly changed its name from School of the Americas because of its long-term association with torture.

The tiny country, formerly used by Reagan in the 1980s as a base for the Contra war, now has the highest murder rate on Earth. The Obama administration cynically provided the military with plenty of aid for fighting the drug trade ($18 million in 2016 alone), knowing full well that it is used to repress indigenous activists such as Berta Caceres,

Berta Caceres, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize

who, shortly before being murdered in March 2016, quite specifically blamed Hillary Clinton for the coup. Indeed, Clinton openly boasted of her role.

The causes were America’s insatiable demand for resources – in this case, cocaine – and its stubborn refusal to let nations determine their own destiny. Once again we see a tragic pattern. The U.S. destabilizes an independent country, causing violent coups, civil wars, repression or large-scale, drug-related violence, even famine. Thousands leave, unable to find work or basic safety, and add themselves to the vast flow of refugees attempting to enter Western Europe or the U.S., where right-wing groups demonize them and blame them for our internal problems.

Was this some kind of cruel joke? Did he do this just because he could do it? As one of his very last acts, a week before Trump’s inauguration, with no evidence of any threat and months after the opening to Cuba, Obama signed an executive order renewing the status of both Venezuela and Cuba as “national security threats.”

Barry’s Blog # 200: Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama, Part Eleven

Posted by Barry Spector on March 18, 2017 at 12:05pm

“Others”: Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Cuba, Korea and China:

It’s instructive to see how consistent Obama’s “regime change” strategies were with those of his predecessors, and how culpable he was in the destruction of nations. Evidently, the threat of Muslim terrorism was not enough on its own to justify the ongoing state of fear in America. The Deep State needed another external Other and it found it by rekindling the old enmity that had seemingly disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Now, Russia is as fully capitalist as the U.S., but it represents an economic competitor as well as an opportunity for more military engagement. I do not use the word “opportunity” lightly. As the old Irish joke goes: Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?

Washington planned and funded the classic destabilization and regime change in Ukraine as part of a larger strategy to surround Russia with NATO-allied and nuclear-armed states. Once again, Ukraine is a pawn in big-power games.

Ukraine illegally annexed Crimea in 1991, and repeated attempts by the Crimean people to redress this injustice met with opposition from Kiev. Crimea voted to rejoin Russia in 2008. When the Ukraine government refused to sever ties with Russia in 2014, the U.S. fomented a violent coup, led by Neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. As with Syria and Libya, the covert money expended by U.S. intelligence is staggering, allegedly some $5 billion.

Ukrainian Neo-Nazis

That year, the Crimeans (84% of whom speak Russian as their native language) again overwhelmingly voted to rejoin Russia, which already had military bases there and offered them help. The U.S. denounced these actions as Russian intervention and, as it always does in these situations, quickly recognized and funded the new government.

Clearly, the Russians were neither innocent nor pacifistic, but this U.S.-sponsored coup happened on their doorstep, in a region that had been part of Russia for centuries. Russia was lured into involvement, just as it had been in Afghanistan in 1979. The U.S. generously supplied Ukraine with military aid, and the madness of civil war was on. Over 8,000 have died. In addition, Ukraine’s decision to sever all economic and political ties with Russia caused living standards to fall by more than 50%, and inflation to rise to 43%. The mainstream media, of course, simply blamed the Ukraine crisis on the new bad guy du jour, Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. and the E.U. placed costly sanctions on Russia, and the Cold War rose again from its grave. Soon the media and liberal politicians were commonly referring to Russia as an “adversary” once again and to Putin as a dictator and master manipulator, with reverberations that continued into the 2016 election and beyond. Again, as with Assad and Gaddafi, Putin’s character and motives are utterly irrelevant to this inquiry, unless you still believe that Obama’s intervention was for innocent and humanitarian reasons.

In the spring of 2016, NATO troops began military exercises in Estonia, right on the Russian border, timed to start immediately after the Russian Victory Day commemoration of their victory and massive losses in World War Two. “If this doesn’t qualify as a provocation,” asks John Wight, “what does?”

Why is the West…intent on pursuing a cold war strategy when it comes to Russia? How can it possibly profit Western countries and their citizens to experience a return to the decades of enmity previous generations endured, with all the dangers that such a state of mutual antagonism brings?…Are these people actually mad?

In the fall, Obama announced that 6,000 more U.S. troops would deploy, initially in Germany and Poland, and eventually to Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania and Slovakia, as well as to naval units in the Black Sea. All this, he said, was “to reassure Eastern Europe.” The U.S. planned to deploy its dubious “missile defense” system (actually part of a first-strike strategy) throughout these countries, offering the comic justification that their missiles were intended to defend against attacks from “rogue states like Iran.”

Again the Russians took the bait – who wouldn’t? – and responded by deploying their own missiles around Moscow. All this was happening just before the U.S. election. Was this costly and frightening theater of the absurd more about Russia or more about Trump? In either case, it was cynical in the extreme. Obama, accusing Trump’s candidacy of being a Russian plot, demanded that Russia “act responsibly.”

Of course, we mythic commentators cannot be privy to the complex machinations of great powers. But sometimes things are simpler than they seem. Everything we know about Obama’s attitude towards Russia and much of what we know about the election seem to point towards a major conflict between two forces within the Deep State: those who want to dominate or even make war on Russia, and those who want to attack China. But Obama’s fear-mongering backfired; the second group would win the election.

Iran and Cuba:

Ever since the Russians removed their missiles after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, no honest, intelligent person has ever suggested that either Cuba or Iran was an actual threat to America. Of course the Iran deal was a good thing, but as I wrote earlier, it was “characterized by the stench of mendacious bloviating, grandstanding, preaching to the choir and absurd political theater…”

This included continual statements that the deal would rein in the Iranians’ nuclear ambitions, despite the fact that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies – as well as the Israeli Mossad – agreed that Iran had given up any intention of building a bomb many years before. Obama had continued Bush’s painful sanctions on Iran in full knowledge of this information. And his rhetoric was horrifying: “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war.”

Eventually, the temptation of investing in these two new markets, before other countries could monopolize trade with them, exceeded the value of fear-mongering. Obama mollified conservatives by claiming that long-term Cuba strategy remained regime change. But these were business decisions, dictated by Wall Street, which had grown immeasurably richer during the Obama years, and so was his support of the Trans Pacific Partnership. Similarly, in the 1970s, Nixon’s opening to China had been dictated by Wall Street’s desire for new markets. Fifty years before that, Calvin Coolidge had preached: The business of America is business.

North Korea:

From this perspective, America will never stop provoking North Korea until Wall Street desires new consumer markets and the Deep State identifies a different “other”. For some background, consider that In the Korean War the U.S. destroyed all of North Korea’s 78 cities, and thousands of villages, killing three million people, nearly a third of the population. Over sixty years later it still keeps 29,000 troops in the south, along with nuclear weapons, in its bogus campaign to restrain this “rogue state” and charter member of the “Axis of Evil.”

Once again, the character of its “erratic” and “irresponsible” (Obama’s words) leadership is irrelevant. Indeed, they make warlike statements so often and so inappropriately that it almost seems that they’re working for us. But seriously: who could blame them for maintaining a state of militarized readiness and even suppression of civil liberties in the face of what they have long perceived as threats from the American empire?

It’s very complicated. But if you’ve stayed with me this far, please understand that over these years the two Koreas initiated many attempts at peace and reunification, and that every time they did, the U.S. sabotaged their efforts. For his part, Obama did nothing to reduce either the tension or the money drain, but, like his successors, kept the Korean threat alive in the public consciousness. In April 2016, he chastised Kim Jong-un for testing a missile, warning that America’s nuclear arsenal could “destroy” his country.

China:

Russia was not the only power that the Pentagon was encircling. Global competition drove Obama’s battle with China for worldwide economic preeminence. The aim was to contain China’s growing reach. The Economist reported a Department of Defense announcement that by 2020, 60 percent of American warships would be stationed in Asia, along with “a range of other ‘investments’ to ensure that despite China’s fast-growing military might, America would still be able to ‘rapidly project military power if needed to meet our security commitments.'”

More background: the U.S. has over a thousand overseas bases. China has only one, but it does have over a trillion dollars in U.S. treasury bonds, and it has replaced the U.S. as the biggest trading partner of all Asian nations. The Deep State remains conflicted over whom to demonize, Russia or China, and whether pushing either too far risks the two of them becoming allies again. But the short-term interests of the arms merchants, the energy corporations, the generals, the opportunistic politicians and the need to maintain fear of the Others prevailed under Obama and set the stage for Trump.

Barry’s Blog # 199: Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama, Part Ten

Posted by Barry Spector on March 17, 2017 at 3:07pm

Further American Complicity in the Mid-East

After the Israelis, the Egyptian military have been the greatest recipients of American military generosity. In 2012 they responded to the Arab Spring uprisings with another brutal coup. Regardless, the Pentagon continued the aid.

Two years later, despite warnings from some officials that the U.S. could be implicated in war crimes, Obama sent massive weapon sales, intelligence and troops to the Saudi thugs for their war in Yemen. The campaign has killed over ten thousand people, wounded 40,000, made two million children malnourished and created yet another massive refugee flow. Ninety percent of Yemen’s ten million people now require humanitarian aid. In terms of American consciousness, this tragedy is a textbook example of mainstream media neglect and obfuscation. And the Saudis, writes Vijay Prashad,

…have begun to rely upon al-Qaeda to conduct the ground war…So the West has tacitly allied with al-Qaeda in this conflict.

The Kill List:

Prior to the 2012 election, Obama told the media about “Terror Tuesday.” Each week on that day his advisors submitted a list of foreign terror suspects. Many of the entries had no names, but were based solely on metadata (such as which SIM card was calling whom, when, and for how long).

Each Tuesday he signed the list, condemning people halfway across the world, some of them American citizens, to extrajudicial execution by drone attack. The CIA made it clear in late 2014 that this murder-by-drone program was counterproductive, but Obama continued it. Jakob Reimann summarizes the implications of a policy that has killed over 5,000 people:

The bitter irony herein is self-evident: the studied constitutionalist Obama is acting as prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time, thus abandoning the separation of powers — the cornerstone of a constitutional democracy…authorized the execution of people who often happened to be in their family circle or in public places when the drones struck. Time and again, the U.S. has bombed wedding parties, as well as, most cynically, a funeral ceremony of drone victims. As an act of retaliation, the children of alleged terrorists are also killed by drones…(to which) former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs once so despicably declared, “…you should have a far more responsible father.”…The proportion of civilians killed in drone strikes is inevitably extremely high. In Pakistan, for example, only 4 percent of casualties were confirmed al-Qaeda members. Because of this blatant injustice, drone killings are widely regarded to be the main recruiting tool for new terrorists. This is Obama’s legacy: he has made the illegal drone war the norm…

The obvious metaphor here is trying to douse a fire with gasoline, and it leads once again to the basic question: naïve, ignorant and colossally stupid policies – or cynical, deliberate and colossally stupid policies? Either way, says Noam Chomsky, the drone program is “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.”

Libya:

In 2011 the African Union offered a plan to avoid further violence in the internal struggles of oil-rich Libya. As with Syria and Ukraine, the U.S. ignored it, opting instead to escalate hostilities. It sent 26,000 air sorties costing over $1 billion, allegedly to intervene for humanitarian reasons. Obama dismissed criticism from Congressional liberals, saying that his unilateral actions didn’t amount to a “war.”

But it was yet another case of regime change, and it was easily sold to the American public because even though Muammar Gaddafi (whom Obama had met with only two years before) had become an ally in the war on terror, the media had cultivated his Arab bad guy image for decades.

As I wrote in Chapter Eight of my book, “It is as if the U.S. keeps them on ice, allowing them to quietly do their work until it needs to reveal them as the Devil’s latest incarnation. Then they become expendable…” Hillary Clinton crowed, “We came, we saw, he died.” Her emails, later released, revealed that her concern was less about human rights and more about oil and about blocking Gaddafi’s plan to harness Libya’s funds to establish independent financial organizations located within the African Union and an African currency that could serve as an alternative to the dollar.

Predictably, as with Saddam Hussein, the strongman’s death led to chaos. Libya, which formerly had the highest standard of living in all of Africa, is a failed, impoverished state. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have fled hoping to reach Europe. Of the 2,500 refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean in 2016 alone, most had taken this route. And the power vacuum has allowed ISIS to expand into the country.

Obama eventually admitted that Libya was his “biggest regret” – but not because he had destroyed a nation and killed thousands of civilians but because he hadn’t planned for “the day after.” Again we have to ask: good-intentioned mistake or deliberate policy?

The Libya intervention marked the third time in a decade that Washington embraced regime change and then bungled the consequences. Are our leaders really that stupid? Or – again we ask, cui bono? Who profited from yet another ratcheting-up of instability in the Mideast? Certainly ISIS did. And if they did, then media coverage and American public opinion grew more fearful and more willing to support the continuation of the same stunningly ignorant policies. In this perfect, impenetrable, vicious circle of cause-and-effect, the ultimate winner was Obama’s primary sponsor, the Deep State. And Trump.

It is important to acknowledge that any presidential servant of these corporate powers would have pursued the same policies across the globe – Romney, McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore and especially Hillary Clinton. It’s a very old story, as old as the American empire. General Smedley D. Butler wrote:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business…I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

But this truth does not absolve Obama, and I continue the criticism because of the lingering, naïve, liberal idealism that still insists: At least he wasn’t as bad as ______. Remember please: when we speak of the mythic image of the King (or at least the man upon whom we have projected that image), we are speaking about ourselves and our own desperate quest to make sense of our complicity in violence, to convince ourselves of our own innocence. The King embodies us. What we’re really saying is: At least we weren’t as bad as ______.

Israel / Palestine:

For eight years Obama perpetuated the obscene lies of his predecessors – that Israel is a democracy; that his government sought a peaceful solution to the conflict; that the Palestinians deserved human rights and their own political autonomy; that the illegal expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank was inappropriate; and that its apartheid policies, its ongoing siege and its ethnic cleansings in Gaza were regrettable, yet always justified by Palestinian provocations.

For most of those years he was part of the chorus warning about Iranian nuclear goals, while ignoring the open secret that Israel possesses 200 nukes. And for eight years, just like his predecessors, he gave the Israelis – even as they became increasingly belligerent and mendacious, insulted him personally and intervened in the Iran negotiations – all the money and arms they requested.

His celebrated feud with Netanyahu may have been based in personal animosity, but it meant nothing in practical terms. Watch what we do, not what we say. After each of the Gaza invasions – including the 2014 atrocity that killed 550 children – Obama quickly resupplied the depleted Israeli arms.

Gaza

Behind this charade are three simple facts. The first is that Israel has served for decades as the American empire’s primary surrogate in the Mideast, and successive U.S. governments of both parties have fallen over themselves to richly reward it for its services. The second is that Israel’s genocidal policies – indeed, its entire economy – are greatly dependent on American aid. The third fact is that the U.S. – at any single moment in the last forty years – could have immediately brought peace to Israel/Palestine by simply threatening to plug this financial pipeline.

The U.S. had already been giving $3.1 billion every year to Israel — more than any other country by far — more indeed than all other countries combined.

And, as a 2012 Congressional Resources Service report documented, “Almost all U.S. aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.” But in September of 2016, with no need to appease the domestic Israel lobby because he wasn’t running for re-election, he raised that amount to $3.8 billion/year and guaranteed it for ten years, even though Israeli citizens enjoy state benefits such as universal heath care that U.S. citizens would literally die for.

The White House bragged that it was the largest military aid deal in history. Immediately afterwards, Israel announced news, “deeply troubling” to the State Department, of increased settlement construction. “So,” writes Greenwald,

…Israel — in the words of its most loyal benefactor — is moving inexorably towards cementing a one-state reality of perpetual occupation…And the leading protector and enabler of this apartheid regime is the U.S. — just as was true of the apartheid regime of the 1980s in South Africa…(and it) has attempted to render illegitimate all forms of resistance to it. Just as it did with the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela…

That same month, Obama told the U.N., “Surely, Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.” Ali Abunimah, however, pointed out that “It was classic Obama: tricky and deceptive language that seeks balance where there is none – equating alleged Palestinian ‘incitement’ with real Israeli colonialism and occupation – and floating lofty goals belied by his actions.”

This is false equivalency, a topic I’ll return to in a future blog. The aid deal sent seven messages to the world, writes Zeina Azzam:

Might makes right.
A shot in the arm for the Middle East arms race.
Israel = Impunity.
Palestinian lives don’t matter.
Funding Israel’s military is more important than funding American social programs.
Destruction trumps construction.
US citizens’ public opinion doesn’t count.

In December 2016 the illegal demolition of Palestinian homes in the occupied territories for Israeli settlements reached a 10-year high. Obama’s decision to abstain on the U.N. vote demanding a halt to settlement construction angered Israel and the war hawks, but it had absolutely no practical import. John Kerry’s final speech as Secretary of State bewailed the problem – which had been removed from the Democratic Party platform five months before at Clinton’s insistence.

I cite these events and quotes partially because we could easily insert them into the narrative of any administration going back to Jimmy Carter, but also because Obama was simply the most hypocritical – and, given the two slaughters that occurred in Gaza under his watch, the most deadly – of them all.

But sometimes things are simpler than we think: any child could look at what radical Muslims, religious or secular, have been saying, quite publicly, for decades about why they fight – Stop raiding our homes. Stop funding autocrats who steal everything. Stop bombing us – and ask, why don’t we just get the hell out of there and let them make their own destinies?

But the Mideast was by no means the only area where the American empire was working overtime under the cover of a benign, rational and caring president.

Barry’s Blog # 198: Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama, Part Nine

Posted by Barry Spector on March 16, 2017 at 3:57pm

Syria, Iraq and ISIS:

For several years the media have persisted in telling us that the U.S. “won” in Iraq because of the troop surge that Bush began in 2007 and Obama continued into 2011, when he announced a formal end to the occupation. However, this included maintaining 5,000 private security contractors and 16,000 State Department “civilian employees” there. Knowing their history of engaging in war crimes, he tried unsuccessfully to pressure the Iraqi government to grant them immunity from prosecution.

Full-scale war, of course, never stopped, nor did massive American expenditures. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz contends that the total, including hidden costs, will exceed $3 trillion. It is now a civil war between Shias and Sunnis, who are the main leaders and supporters of ISIS. Major Danny Sjursen, an Iraq veteran, writes:

…the surge was incapable of addressing, and barely pretended to face, the true conundrum of the invasion and occupation: any American-directed version of Iraqi “democracy” would invariably usher in Shia-majority dominance over a largely synthetic state. The real question no surge cheerleaders publicly asked (or ask to this day) was whether an invading foreign entity was even capable of imposing an inclusive political settlement there. To assume that the United States could have done so smacks of a faith-based as opposed to reality-based worldview – another version of a deep and abiding belief in American exceptionalism.

Cui bono? Do you remember when the embarrassed Bush administration changed the title of the invasion to “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (OIF) after someone noticed the acronym formed by the letters of its original name, “Operation Iraqi Liberation”?

Obama claimed that his wars were legal under the 2001 and 2003 authorizations for the use of military force to pursue Al-Qaeda. But Syria has nothing to do with 9-11. How did this war, with its half million dead and seven million refugees, begin? First, let’s acknowledge that Bashar Assad’s cruel regime is irrelevant, unless you still believe that the U.S. intervenes in other countries for “humanitarian” reasons. Cui bono? We are talking about “regime change” – and oil pipelines. Bush had planned to overthrow Assad as far back as 2006. Obama’s second major foreign policy crime – war crime – was to deploy Bush’s plans. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes:

Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria…was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective…In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.

In August 2012, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency warned that the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda were “the major forces driving the insurgency. But Obama preferred a different narrative. All it took was an alleged massacre – by the old standby “gassing – weapons of mass destruction” – for him to threaten missile attacks on the Syrian government. The media happy complied. All Things Considered claimed that he “…has done everything he can to avoid another foreign military involvement, but he can’t avoid it after the widespread use of chemical weapons on this scale.” Chemical weapons? Were we really going down that rat hole once again?

Let’s be real clear on this point: Obama, like Bush and Lyndon Johnson before him, was lying to the nation to get it into another war. And he was also distracting it from the real history of American involvement in mass atrocities. He did this because, as I wrote:

Americans, though naïve, are no more inherently violent than other peoples. The state must regularly administer massive dosages of indoctrination to reanimate our sense of innocence. Propaganda merges with belief; every student learns that America never starts wars but always aids those in need. The mythic appeal is so fundamental that occasional disclosures of the truth – cracks in the myth of innocence – do little to alter popular consciousness…Still, the narrative of innocence requires constant ceremonial maintenance, including the regular creation of new images of “evildoers.”

A year later, the U.S. reached further heights of hypocrisy when it demanded that Syria eliminate all chemical weapons by June 30, 2014. Around the same time it requested an extension for itself to 2023 of the U.N. Convention on Chemical Weapons, a treaty it had ratified in 1997. The Syrians had already proposed years earlier to get rid of these weapons. The Russians made a similar proposal, which Washington rejected. When the Syrians called Obama’s bluff and did remove them, Congress restrained direct intervention.

Undeterred by public opposition, the administration gave the green light to the Saudis, who began to funnel massive aid to their Salafi jihadist surrogates. The U.S. itself was spending a billion dollars per year arming and training these “ moderate rebels”. Without this aid, Assad – for better or for worse – would have crushed the rebellion quickly. With it, the carnage increased, and so did the refugee flow.

Let’s be clear (as clear as we can) about another thing. The world is experiencing the greatest refugee crisis since at least World War Two. Many thousands have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Literally tens of thousands of unaccompanied child refugees are wandering the streets of Europe. And the resultant backlash and scapegoating among Islamophobic Americans led directly to the fiasco of the 2016 election. We have Trump not despite Obama but because of him.

This crisis has many causes. But Obama’s decisions to destabilize Syria and Libya (see below) were the major factors. Let’s be clear about this as well: his wars of regime change and his refusal to leave Afghanistan directly contributed to the growth of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS.

We have to see American policy – and Obama’s role in it – in the proper context. The only states in the Muslim world that are not U.S. puppets are Iran and Syria, and the U.S. labeled them as threats only because they resisted American hegemony. And for quite a while, Syria was the only such state actually fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda. After visiting Syria, Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard accused her own government of funding and arming ISIS. Glen Ford bluntly argues:

The U.S. claim that it is waging a global “war on terror” is the biggest lie of the 21st century …In reality, the U.S. is the birth mother and chief nurturer of the global jihadist network …deployment of jihadists has become central to U.S. imperial policy…And, there is no question that “internal rivalries” do abound in the U.S. war machine, with CIA-sponsored jihadists attacking Pentagon-sponsored jihadists in Syria – the point being, the U.S. backs a wide range of jihadists that have conflicts with one another…the general aim of the Obama administration’s jihadist policy, now deeply in crisis: to preserve the Islamic State as a fighting force for deployment under another brand name, under new top leadership. The Islamic State went “rogue,” by the Americans’ definition, when it began pursuing its own mission…Even so, the U.S. mainly targeted top ISIS leaders for elimination, allowing the main body of fighters, estimated at around 30,000, to not only remain intact, but to be constantly resupplied and to carry on a vast oil business, mainly with NATO ally Turkey.

Even with such dubious intentions, the Pentagon admits that it has spent over $11 billion on the air war against ISIS. In 2016 alone, it dropped at least 26,171 bombs – three bombs per hour, 24 hours a day. Each combat drone required a team of at least 150 people to maintain and prepare to fire it. While most of these attacks were in Syria and Iraq, they also killed people in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan (the same seven majority-Muslim countries from which Trump has tried to ban immigration). Medea Benjamin reminds us that

We have no idea how many civilians have been killed in the massive bombings in Iraq and Syria, where the US military is often pursuing ISIS in the middle of urban neighborhoods. We only sporadically hear about civilian killings in Afghanistan, such as the tragic bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz that left 42 dead and 37 wounded …Pushed to release information about civilian deaths in drone strikes, in July 2016 the US government made the absurd claim it had killed, at most, 116 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya between 2009 and 2015…The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has tracked drone strikes for years, said the true figure was six times higher. Given that drones account for only a small portion of the munitions dropped in the past eight years, the numbers of civilians killed by Obama’s bombs could be in the thousands.

The administration’s response to these reports was that they may have been marred by “terrorist propaganda.” Indeed, since Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria were areas of “active hostilities” it excluded them from the calculations. In June 2011, John Brennan claimed “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” But the Pentagon had defined as a terrorist any male between the ages of 20 and 40 exhibiting “behavior deemed suspicious” and thus liable to what it euphemistically called “signature strikes.” Daniel Lazare writes:

…the President had in fact signed a secret Executive Order allowing such strikes to continue in Pakistan, directly contradicting his public stance. In June 2016 evidence also emerged that signature strikes were ongoing in Yemen as well, likely through a similar secret policy.

Even the Military Times admits:

The American military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted over several years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan…The enormous data gap raises serious doubts about transparency in reported progress against the Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Taliban, and calls into question the accuracy of other Defense Department disclosures documenting everything from costs to casualty counts.

Of course, all recent presidents have been aware of unpublicized CIA assassinations. However, as Tom Engelhardt writes:

In previous eras…presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or practiced a kind of plausible deniability…We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors, and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief… assassination has been thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president…

What the administration did “disclose” was the existence of yet another “other” – the “Khorasan group”, which CBS News called “a more immediate threat to the U.S. homeland.” It was worse than ISIS, which was worse than Al Qaeda, which was worse than the Taliban (even if they were all fighting each other). But when no evidence of this threat was offered, it quickly disappeared from view.

Consider for a moment what these people are doing, their rationales, their religious belief in their own moral purity, their autocratic sense of privilege, their unlimited budgets, their confidence in knowing that they are accountable to no one, and the fact obvious to any idiot that such policies were creating far more new terrorists than they were killing (by one count 10-15 civilians killed for every militant), and then place them into a slightly different context:

…thought about another way, that “terror Tuesday” scene might not be from a monastery or a church synod, but from a Mafia council directly out of a Mario Puzo novel, with the president as the Godfather, designating “hits” in a rough-and-tumble world.

Or consider another perspective, the mythological. We are in the realm of Apollo, who can kill from a distance with his bow and arrow. This god – at least a poor version of him – opposes the inevitable Dionysian upswelling of revolutionary energy by repressed people. Or, as James Hillman noted in discussing the detached, Apollonic consciousness that characterizes all of Western Civilization, “…his distance kills.”

Apollo had reigned ever since our ancestors realized that they could harm each other, and minimize danger to themselves, by throwing rocks and then inventing spears, archery, catapults and guns. American pilots had destroyed inconceivably vast areas of Viet Nam in their B-52 bombers, where they’d been too high in the sky to even hear the explosions.

It was merely another step in advanced battlefield technology to have men with joysticks in air-conditioned offices commanding drones to destroy people of color at wedding parties hundreds of miles away. And who better to serve as the face of this modern, unemotional carnage than the calm, detached, cerebral Obama?

Could any strategy expert have invented a scheme more likely to create more enemies and extend more wars into an infinite future? At what point do we begin to ask: was this really the purpose?

Tragedy or farce? In October 2016, Obama sanctimoniously warned that in the future “…you (could) end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.” But he claimed that the accountability and transparency measures he was instituting would make that less likely. “By the time I leave here, the American people are going to have a better sense of what their president is doing.” Indeed.

Deliberate design or incompetence? Again, what was he doing in (to) Syria? Was he actually in charge? Former CIA officer Ray McGovern reveals that the Pentagon and the CIA had created various groups of “moderate rebels” who were in fact fighting each other:

It has been sort of a helter-skelter choosing process, reminiscent of the people we chose to go into Iraq and set up a government more amenable to our influence. The “moderate” rebels that we are allegedly supporting – you know it is really bizarre because the President of the U.S. two years ago said: ‘There are no moderate rebels. This is a fantasy’. Well, if it is a fantasy and there are no moderate rebels, whom we are supporting there…once you have a covert action program with 500 million dollars like the Defense had, you’ve got all this money and people say: ‘Let’s find some moderate rebels because we have all this money.’

And though the administration claimed that the main fight was against ISIS, some of the CIA-backed groups were affiliated with Al Qaeda and primarily fighting against Assad.

Meanwhile, lest we forget the crucial fact, ISIS was receiving most of its support from U.S. allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It is absolutely inconceivable that the Pentagon and the CIA were not aware of this.

U.S. support for a particular group changed from one part of Syria to another. The Pentagon backed Kurdish YPG forces in eastern Syria but not the YPG in northern Aleppo. Indeed, the YPG north of Aleppo has attacked U.S.-backed forces.

In January 2017, American airstrikes “mistakenly” attacked Syrian army positions, killing 62 soldiers. For an analysis of the complex machinations and internal backstabbing that led Russian U.N. ambassador Vitaly Churkin to ask, “Who is in charge in Washington? The White House or the Pentagon?” see Gareth Porter’s article.

At best, Obama could not control the murderers. At worst, he was indistinguishable from them, and thus utterly complicit in the fix. The administration wanted both to limit the influence of ISIS and to overthrow Assad, and the military and CIA were backing – and on the ground with – opposing camps. And this certainly led to the possibility of U.S. forces (more likely mercenaries) shooting at each other. Who was the only group to profit from this mess? Cui bono…Ford expands on the four-decade-long history of the U.S.’s creation of Islamic terrorism here:

ISIS did not exist when President Obama took office and put Hillary Clinton in charge at Foggy Bottom. His (and her) regime change in Libya and massive, terroristic pivot to Syria “created” ISIS…the U.S. did not reject the jihadist death cult that became ISIS; rather, the Islamic State divorced itself from the U.S. and its European and royal allies. Yet, it still took the Russian intervention in Syria in September of last year to push Washington to mount more than token air assaults against ISIS.

I hear your voice: Perhaps Obama ended up as a war criminal, but he began with such high ideals. Let’s move on.

Barry’s Blog # 197: Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama, Part Eight

Posted by Barry Spector on March 15, 2017 at 3:16pm

OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY

A reader posits: If presidents are so completely bound, can we really blame them for being complicit? Isn’t voicing soul and decency at least superior to abandoning it altogether? Or, as you say, is it better we face the monster unmasked, as we are doing now? These are precisely the inquiries that lead to the kind of soul work – for ourselves and our world – that I’m trying to provoke. And of course, struggling with them is more important than answering them.

Just as with his economic policy appointments, Obama’s initial pick of cold warriors Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton signaled that there would be no change in foreign policy from the Bush years. He came into office making two promises: to end the Iraq War, which he dismissed as “the stupid war,” and to win in Afghanistan, “the necessary war.” But he retired having been at war longer than any president in U.S. history, and the only president to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.

One could certainly frame his domestic and financial decisions, harmful as they were, as part of the old liberal story, as well-intended failures – a phrase, by the way, that conventional historians used to describe the mad, genocidal atrocity of the Viet Nam war and now use to describe both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But even a cursory investigation of Obama’s foreign policies reveals his true roles – the functions he was originally vetted for – in maintaining the influence of the American empire and restoring faith in American innocence.

Any honest discussion of American foreign policy in this century must begin with 9-11. We don’t need to argue about whether it was an inside job or whether the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the impending attacks; after 15 years you have your own opinions. My own writings on the matter have always tried to focus on its implications for the myth of innocence – how Americans responded to it.

But few can deny that Bush’s crowd happily used the tragedy and manipulated public opinion to support their imperial aims in the Mideast. And few can deny that this included how the “intelligence community” (the same people now put forth as Trump’s noble opponents) lied to justify invading both Afghanistan and Iraq. What did Obama do after inheriting these policies? He served George W. Bush’s third and fourth terms.

Whatever you think about 9-11, it is abundantly clear that Saudi Arabia provided operational and financial support to the hijackers and that the U.S. government – half of that time on Obama’s watch – covered up that fact for fifteen years.

In July of 2016, when the infamous 29 pages on ties between the hijackers and Saudi officials were finally made public, Obama’s only response was that he stood by the investigation of the 9/11 Commission. And in October, he vetoed the “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act” that would have made it easier to sue Saudi Arabia for its complicity. For eight years, he criticized Syrian despotism but ignored Israeli, Saudi and Qatari repression, misogyny and religious intolerance at home and warmongering throughout the region.

How do we re-invigorate outdated myths? In 2012, he put his personal stamp on the narrative of American exceptionalism by announcing a 13-year, $65 million commemoration of the war against Viet Nam, praising the veterans who had been “fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans.” So much for learning from the past.

That’s all mere background to his conduct of the War on Terror, which was now being fought not primarily by the regular Army but by high technology and by specialists with no accountability. Nick Turse describes Obama’s use of “special operations” units whose annual budget approaches $20 billion. Bush had deployed them to around 60 nations; Obama ultimately raised that number to 138:

…a secret force (functionally the president’s private army) cocooned inside the U.S. military – now at almost 70,000 personnel…carry out operations almost entirely unknown to the American taxpayers…far from the scrutiny of the media or meaningful outside oversight of any kind. Everyday, in around 80 or more countries that Special Operations Command will not name, they undertake missions the command refuses to talk about.

Afghanistan:

We have no strategic plan. We never had one. – Anonymous senior military commander.

I have argued that the gatekeepers of the empire vetted Obama to re-invigorate the myth of innocence. Part of that role was to be the symbolic, if seemingly reluctant, face of the empire’s wars. One of his first acts, barely a month after being inaugurated in 2009, was to order a massive troop surge in Afghanistan, after claiming that the surge in Iraq had “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

Let’s get some terminology straightened out. When we hear the phrase “intelligence community”, please substitute “the CIA, which has been overthrowing democracy everywhere for seventy years”. And when we hear about “private defense contractors” we are really being told about mercenaries who are paid far more than regular soldiers.

Tens of thousands of these private contractors remained in Iraq, which was collapsing into civil war. But this would become the new strategy to limit popular resistance at home: fewer American military personnel would be dying. Another early act that year was to convince a Spanish court to stop prosecuting Bush and his team as war criminals. Mark Karlin reminds us that for Afghanistan,

The original impetus was, ostensibly, to punish the Taliban government in the wake of the 9/11 attacks for harboring Al Qaeda. Yet it would be hard to define why we are there now except for the imperatives of U.S. hegemony and military empire.

People get rich from war, legally or otherwise. Lest we forget, Afghanistan is (not was) the longest war in U.S. history. We hear little about it these days because it is overshadowed by conflicts elsewhere – and because there have been more contractors than U.S. troops there since the middle of 2011. Their deaths and injuries are not part of the official count, which accordingly appears smaller than it really is.

117,000 contractors and 88,000 U.S. troops were deployed there in 2012. As of March 2016, there were still approximately 28,600 contractors and 8,700 U.S. troops, despite Obama’s claim in December 2014 that the U.S. military’s combat mission in Afghanistan had come to a “responsible conclusion.” From 2007 to 2015, the U.S. spent roughly $220 billion for private contracts there and in Iraq. By that point, over 1,600 Americans had died in Afghanistan since he had taken office — well over half of all the dead during the entire war – along with countless Afghans. Over 115,000 troops were suffering from traumatic brain injuries and half a million had applied for disability benefits.

Some three million Afghans are refugees. Tens of thousands have attempted to enter Europe, and thousands have drowned trying. The Taliban control about 10% of the population and half of the land, more than at any time since 2001. Only about half of the 1.5 million guns given to the Afghan government can be accounted for. The war killed 3,500 civilians in 2016, the highest toll since 2009. Nation building? The U.S. was spending $100 billion annually on the war and only $2 billion on sustainable development, much of that siphoned off by the corrupt Karzai government.

Those of us old enough to remember the endless “quagmire” of Viet Nam, our loss of innocence about America’s good intentions, and the optimistic statements by U.S. officials right up to the final evacuation observed a succession of NATO commanders – 17 of them – issuing their own pronouncements that “We’re making real progress.”

Why – after having created, funded, supported and trained the Afghan Army for some 15 years – why hasn’t the U.S. handed the war completely over to them? Why are we still there? The answer, of course, is resources, including a potential natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean, as Brzezinski has admitted. A J.P. Morgan mining expert claimed that “Afghanistan could be one of the leading producers of copper, gold, lithium, and iron ore in the world…”

And then there are the drugs. Since the American invasion began, heroin production has increased 40 times. And, since a million people worldwide have died from Afghan heroin since 2001, I invite readers to investigate the long history of the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade.

In 2009, writes Tariq Ali, NATO’s Secretary General gushed over the possibility of “a permanent NATO presence in a country that borders the ex-Soviet republics, China, Iran, and Pakistan (that) was too good to miss.” In 2010 Gates assured the Afghans, “…we’re not ever leaving at all.”

The next year even Karzai denounced the Americans: “They’re here for their own purposes, for their own goals.”

Next: Syria, Iraq and ISIS