Myths: The Danger

Up early and have some time on my hands. I’m thinking about myths. I’m not thinking of myths in the sense of the late Joseph Campbell who sequestered himself in Woodstock, NY for five years while he read about them.

 I’m thinking of myths in terms of why so many people are willing to believe in them despite physical and empirical contradictions.  It may determine the future of America, maybe even the planet.

 What purpose do they serve? Perhaps they allow control. Yuval Noah Harari. an Israeli public intellectual, historian and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem thinks so. In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he posits that while direct contact only allows an individual or group to control a small number of people, myths allow that control to spread to unknown limits.

 During my lifetime are vivid examples. Consider the fact that on November 22, 1963, a deranged former Marine and immigrant to Communist Russia, remained for lunch at his job in a high-rise depository in downtown Dallas, and with a rifle snuck in as “window shades” needing repair fired at a motorcade killing President John F. Kennedy.

 Today in America, there are college-educated adult Americans walking about us who don’t believe, despite contemporary—repeat contemporary—eye-witnesses and a preponderance of evidence, that it never happened. Oh, it happened all right, they admit. Only a few join the 32 percent of their colleagues who believe that Elvis is still alive and place the former president alive on a South Sea island. No, they believe, without a shred of reliable evidence and using ludicrous claims, (20 year-old repressed memories coming to the surface and such) that a coalition of city, county, state, CIA, FBI, U.S. military, mafia lords, and Cuban leaders led by then Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, carried off the greatest conspiracy in American history for specious reasons and were so powerful that no deathbed confession has ever disclosed its existence. Oh, and some believe that the coalition carefully and specifically chose and employed Lee Harvey Oswald to carry out the mission. It would have been an odd choice at best.

 Now consider a real conspiracy, say the one, by the Ronald Reagan administration to illegally sell weapons to Iran for money with which illegally to fund our side of a foreign war in South America. That real conspiracy, involving probably no one outside the administration, unfolded in a matter of months, not years.

 Results of mythology in America? Well hell, read today’s legitimate press.

The End

 My military career ended on November 11, 1970. I had started the four-year experience a bitter, hostile, unwilling participant. Why four years and no accepting the draft? They were sending Army draftees to Vietnam. Besides, if I had to go, there was no choice but he U.S. Navy. When I was fifteen years old, a cousin came home from the Navy and, oh, the stories he could tell. Gunnels awash! I spent that year collecting all the info I could, just waiting for the day I turned old enough to enlist.

 Time past, my fervor for the military dwindled, but not my sense that sailors were just a step above and the sea as a siren still called. Why enlist? Found out to my dismay that I couldn’t pass some of the color blindness tests. The Navy didn’t take too willingly to line officers that couldn’t distinguish some shades of red. Oh, and that Vietnam thing? I learned not to piss the Navy off. They had ways.

 Anyway, I ended in a much better frame of mind, having decided along the way that I could change my attitude much easier than I could change my circumstances. So, I spent the night of the 11^th in a cheap motel in Starkville Mississippi with an old Gibson guitar and a commendation from my Fleet Admiral, daring the future to meet me on my own terms. All my belongings in the world fit in a 1967 Chevy Impala. I was ready.

 It’s been a roller-coaster ride since, mostly ups. I’m somewhere between a mediocre fish in a large pond and a second-tier fish in a small pond. I’ve seen lots, but I never thought I’d see a United States of America in the condition that I, personally, feel it is in today. We have a leader of a party that has deeply dishonored two of my Navy’s best, John Kerry and John McCain. We have a leader of a party that has branded all my brother and sister veterans as “suckers and losers.” Because of my personal experience, I was a bit used to it, but the young ones who have come after didn’t deserve it.

 I have seen the leader of a party mock a disabled person, an act that hit close to home. I have seen a level of discourse sink to depths that would have embarrassed some of my fellow Bosun’s Mates. I have seen us turned against voice of reason, then decency, then one another. I have seen the statue’s torch grow dim, evil called to readiness, and the “madding crowd” inflamed with lies and chants. I wonder if I dare to call a friend.

 I think the low point came early in this administration when the leader of the party addressed a group of police officers. I have, do, and will support the vast majority of fine men and women who serve as public safety members of government, both the police officers and fire fighters. They do the jobs that we are afraid to do and then hang crucified for actions of a few. These include actions that are misguided to say the least, but easy to condemn by those who have never ridden the mean streets of America at midnight or sat in terror expecting the unexpected.

 I have lost friends over my support for the police officers and former police officers I have known.

 But when the President of the United States told an assembled group of officers “not to be so gentle with suspects,” i.e. those who are presumed innocent until proven guilty, told them it would be okay to bang their heads against a car door opening, it made me nauseated. When the group, in their blue uniforms and dainty white gloves laughed and clapped, I felt a sadness overcome me like a cloud of the stinging grief. I’m sure they were hand picked for the occasion and they weren’t the fine men and women I’ve known. Still, it broke my heart.

 That’s what the current leader of our county has done for me. I want everyone to vote. I want everyone to vote for the candidate they believe will bring dignity to this country that I and so many others have served. I will abide the outcome. It may, as some of the more divisive stickers suggest, make me cry, but I won’t cry for myself. I’ll cry for those who are still young enough that they will have to live with bad choices.

 For me, I’ll survive. I won’t say that I’ve survived worse, since I wasn’t around for the Civil War, the two World Wars, or the Great Depression. I have faith in my ability to function. As they used to say in one of my previous lifetimes, “It ain’t no bigee.”

Primal Fear

Fear is an odd thing. Webster defines it as “an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.” The genetic condition of fear must have been helpful to our ancestors who lived on the Savanah alongside predatory creatures. I remember it from dark nights in a foreign land.

American neurologist and physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon added, in the early 1900s, a condition known as “flight or fight response.” It describes a response to an acute threat to survival that is marked by physical changes, including nervous and endocrine changes. It may prepare a human or an animal to react or to retreat.” This one I remember well from an encounter on a winter’s night with a stranger who stopped me on a city street and placed a hand inside his coat. To my relief he produced a note with an address, and asked directions.

The most fascinating member of the family of fears, to me, is called “primal fear.’ This is the highest level of fear that most people do not experience, usually related to the feeling of impending doom. Anyone raised in a rural protestant church knows this as evidenced by the lifelong and unshakeable terror that their precious body may burn in an everlasting fire for eternity upon their death. I personally consider this as a form of child abuse but will save that thought for another day.

Today, it is the “Gotterdammerung” facing the country I love and have tried to serve faithfully during my adult life that darkens my hope. I see it now as a great ship headed directly into an iceberg as friendly passengers dance around me. It is my tragic and primal fear that we may lose America as we know it in two more days.

How did this happen? Better minds than mine wrestle this question daily. Unbelievably to me, the country may re-elect a man whom I believe, based on my upbringing, education, experience, and reflection, to be the most evil and degenerate president in American history.

The question is not how nearly one-half of Americans support what may occur. Over half of that percentage contains the group of Americans, almost a reliable percentage, who believed Elvis was alive 20 years after his death and that professional wrestling is conducted under strict rules. This segment contains the ones who would be dead today if it were not for the Affordable Care Act pushed through by an African-American president. (Not the term they use.) This segment is largely immune to reason or factual data.

Of the remaining 20 percent of Americans are the “single-issue voters” who would vote for Charles Manson, brought from the dead, for president if he promised to make abortion illegal, allow citizens to use bazookas to settle arguments, or banished anyone to whom nature had provided a different genetic makeup. They may be educated but have used their education merely to sharpen their weapons of bigotry.

We can shave off another ten percent of those who believe that unlimited wealth and no restrictions placed on how to obtain it will produce a perfect society. This society would be, one must suppose, much like, the American South of the 1850s. Some use their education to create false doctrines supporting this goal.

Then there is a layer of supporters who somehow believe their profession is best protected by a liar and false prophet. Some are educated and some are not. All reject any internal logic that doesn’t support their need for self-preservation. They are loyal to a man who thinks loyalty is a one-way trait.

That leaves the remaining sliver of supporters who augment the primal fear that haunts my sole and interrupts my sleep. These include many old friends who are educated, some highly so. They don’t carry any apparent burdens that would tarnish their thoughts. In a crowd they would appear normal. Individually, they appear fully capable of critical thinking, until the subject of politics emerges. What logic have they neglected?

Some may have even read William Shirer’s masterpiece The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Some, I know, have seen the film Schindler’s List.

A few may have read It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

A few have attended the Holocaust Museum in our nation’s capitol.

Some attend church and worship the man who told us to love another and not to judge.

Some have read The Grapes of Wrath. I know this for they attended college.

Almost all know the words to This Land is Your Land.

In short, and in conclusion, these friends matured under the same conditions as I but have developed diametrically opposed beliefs as to what is right and what is wrong. I may be guilty of illogic. They might be.

That’s what scares the living hell out of me.