Motivation

I don’t understand. But yeah, I do. There’s a rationale behind our president’s behavior. Twisted? Yes. Ugly? Yes. Unpatriotic? Yes. Un-Christian. Yes. Effective? We’ll see.

Take last week, for example. The stock market took a breather from its plummet, stabilized, and rose a little. There was much oohing and aahing.

What did our president do?

He announced plans to apply additional tariffs against China. Seems they started the Covid-19 Virus in a lab and sent it here to hurt his, the president’s, reputation, standing, and re-election chances. Let’s beat them up for it with tariffs. I know. I know. It’s lunacy, reminiscent of the scene from the movie Blazing Saddles where the new sheriff thwarted the angry crowd by threatening to “Shoot the …” Well, you remember. We also remember one of the more famous quotes from my generation’s war, “It became necessary to destroy the [village] to save it.” So the prez threatened to start another trade war right in the middle of a global epidemic in order to save us.

What did the market do?

Plummeted. There was much gasping and wonderment.

Here’s the deal. Somewhere along the line, the president and his followers discovered the power of hate. The idea probably grew from the success of the so-called “Southern Strategy.” It’s like this: Haters gotta hate. It doesn’t always matter whom or what they hate. It may be minorities. It may be immigrants. Hell, it may even be the idea of health care for everyone. It’s hate that is the sine qua non. That’s all you need to control the crowd.

Hate gets them moving toward a goal, gets them going. It may be to the state capitol with rifles strapped in front of them for maximum show. It may be to sit in front of the Fox channel to get a fresh infusion of rage. It may be to the streets in an effort to scare people.

Heaven help us if it is ever to the town square with their “penis-elongating” rifles, this time in their brown uniforms, hats, and faux military insignia to complete they fantasy.

Yep, it’s hate. Get people hating hard enough and all you have to do is provide the object of the hate and yell, in Southern parlance, “Sic ‘em.”

The hate is what makes their system work. The objects of the hate are interchangeable. Right now, they’ve decided that it’s China. Look for it to focus here in America as November approaches. Sadly, many of us see lots of target groups ahead of us and figure we’ll be okay as long as the trains run on … uh … as long as the barber shops stay open. Indifference is a major catalyst for hate.

I guess it’s time for each of us to start figuring out how far we are down on the list.

Funny in a movie.
Hell of a way to run a country.

Darkness

In the world’s greatest gallery of sinners, I’ve always held my own. I doubt if I’ve ever been used as a role model. Friends tell stories about me around campfires. My relatives call me an anarchist and won’t let their kids come near me. The word “potential” never appears in a sentence about me without the ubiquitous “squandered.” Through it all, I pressed on, hoping for some ray of hope, as William Faulkner said of Boon Hogganbeck from The Reivers. “No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the un-virtue of any given moment, any more than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it."

I persevered, and I think I changed some for the better. My attitudes changed on numerous topics.  For example, I entered the United States Navy with a churning belly full of resentment. Now, I wouldn’t take a million dollars for those four years. In other ways as well, I have altered my attitudes. I’ve even learned to like English Peas and poetry.

A friend once said of me, “I love you for you don’t have a 24-hour and attitude about anything.” But I think he was wrong.

Now that I’ve offered my mea culpas, let me argue that I don’t think the “better angels of my nature” have changed over the years, and, if they have, the direction was for the good of humanity. When I was a teenager, I believed in the equality and sanctity all races and backgrounds of people. I still do. When a college student, I came to believe that The Sermon on the Mount was a sublime piece of literature and righteous guidance. I still do. I believe in honesty, good government, striving to help others, truth in advertising, not trusting Russia, and the paramount superiority of turnip greens and cornbread over escargots or kidney pie.

I did flirt with a wee bout of conservatism once when I became seduced into believing it would further my career. Mike Huckabee cured that when he threatened to close migrant worker center in south Arkansas. For those who should have been paying attention, that was a preview of things to come. The road to Hell is not one hidden long from view.

Anyway, about this idea of core beliefs. I see examples of change for the worse every day in friends I have known for years, some for a lifetime. These are folks I once knew to be kind, generous, and caring people. Or they seemed to be. Now, it seems as if a dark cloud settled upon them. They post bad things about good people on social media, and good things about bad people. Something or someone seems to have stolen their sense of righteousness. There is no example of avarice and mendacity for which they cannot find praise if the offeror claims the right political initial after his or her name.

These are not the people I once knew. Or, are they? I don’t know. Dark monsters hide deep within us are monumentally patient. Something rose in my friends, and it isn’t pretty.

They appear, from all aspects to worship a serial divorcee, liar, swindler, adulterer, cheat, and hatemonger. They even boast that the possibility of upsetting me about it is funny.

I’m bemused. The Galilean must be nauseated.

That’s the darkest irony involved. Many, if not most of whom I speak, claim to be Christians. Not Galilean ones, mind you, but followers of the part of the old and new books of faith that espouse despising gays and supporting slavery. Some even claim to be preachers of the Christian faith. Their only core belief lies in the topic of abortion. They want it to be criminalized, but it eludes them that a heavy concentration on sex education, availability of contraception, elimination of poverty, and male accountability would be much more effective (and good for the country) than electing political scoundrels who pretend to be on their side.

Yes, they attend, or lead, services on Sunday mornings and then spend the afternoon on Facebook bearing false witness against Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama (and his wife), Jimmy Carter, and others.

Something changed them. Maybe the aliens who pick through our smoldering remains will figure it out.

The Tragic Stretch

Sometimes I think of American decency as a rubber band. That is to say that once it is stretched to the limit, it may never go back to its original shape. And sometimes it might not go back to any recognizable shape.

At other, more positive times, I think of our more decent moral foundations as rocks along a wild seashore. Flood tides may cover them, but comes the ebb and they break the surface and stand again in all their strength and glory.

For example. It was my luck to have served in the United States Navy during the high tide of disdain for the military. Having lived through it, I figured, at the time, that it was a permanent trend. No, the tide receded following America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and a long period of respect has followed. Of course, feelings come easy when, for more than 99 percent of Americans, serving your country during war or peace is merely a vague and fuzzy abstraction. It is something that other people and other people’s children do for us.

The point is that our perspectives and attitudes seem to change with time, or do they? I think it was Thomas Hobbes who said, “Our passions don’t change. Only the objects of our passions change.” If this is true, does it mean that our passions are consistent, but guide us toward changing goals? That may have some kinship with the beliefs of William James, the so-called “Father of American psychology.” He was reported to have said, “We don’t sing because we’re happy. We’re happy because we sing.”

This makes me tend more toward the rubber-band theory of moral and ethical behavior. America, it seems to me, is governed at this time by a large group (actually a modest but consistent percentage) of political scoundrels led by a man without a shred of social decency, moral compassion, or ethical underpinnings. Has he stretched our sense of propriety to the point from which it may never return? I fear so.

In the 1950s and 1950s, we discriminated against minorities and women, blew up recruiting centers, assassinated our leaders, destroyed legally constituted political conventions, bombed countries that had never made a threatening gesture toward America, illegally sold arms to a country that had, and murdered college students, among other disdainful acts.

These seemed, in most cases, to have sparked some sense of moral outrage. That had begun to create positive change. Then a likeable old presidential contender chose to announce his candidacy in the southern city where four civil rights workers have been murdered by racist thugs. The message was tragically clear: “Hey, vote for me. I hate the same people you do.”

Out passions—our ugliest passions—perhaps did not change as much as they were legitimatized. We didn’t change immediately. But our moral high-water mark was the election of an African-American president. Passions that stank like rotten garbage rose like Sci Fi monsters of the Cold War films. That led us to the current situation.

Where is the moral outrage this time? It’s there. Those passions for morality, ethical behavior, compassion, peace, love, and harmony are there. It just seems that the power junta has figured out new methods of neutralizing our outrage. They have done it and continue to do it. Our band of righteousness is being stretched beyond its limits by greed, avarice, misogyny, bigotry, and an unquenchable thirst for power.

I question whether we can snap back from it this time.

On honoring honor …

Yesterday, a friend and I discussed the phenomenon that has accompanied death of Senator John McCain. It has been amazing, nearly causing a psychotic episode with at least one of his enemies. Overall, the outpouring of respect and admiration has been grandly comforting and reassuring. But why?

One can’t simply apply the usual explanations to this unusual situation.

We must, I think, avoid the temptation to under-symptomize our analysis, that is we shouldn’t seek one overlaying reason for the national outpouring of respect for John McCain’s life. It isn’t based on any uniform set of catalysts.

There are those who respected his military service but didn’t care for his political views.

There are those who scarcely know of his military service but resected his career as a senator.

There are those that believe he was following noxious orders when shot down but exhibited sublime heroism as a POW.

There are those who simply believe he was an orchid growing from a cesspool.

We could go on and on, and add greater complexity, but let me add a reason of my own to the mix.

First, I recall that someone once commented, I think it might have been Thomas Hobbes but I’m not sure and too lazy to research it, that “Our passions don’t change, just the objects of those passions.” Add to this my belief that our passions can either be good or evil “monsters of our Id.”

This reference to the film Forbidden Planet responds to my lifelong fascination with the science fiction films of my youth. In many, the Earth harbored subterranean monsters of cosmic threat and danger. Something (in the 1950s it was nuclear testing) unlocked these monsters, often mutations of insects or reptiles. The monsters rose to surface and threatened to destroy our way of life until some hero, often as not B-Actor John Agar, pronounced the ubiquitous phrase “It just might work.” He would then save us all from the monster-of-the-day.

In a social, but horrific, negative example, we witnessed, with the election of Barack Obama as president, such a seismic release of our national monster. We thought we were conquering the lingering rot of racial hatred. Alas, that monster only lay buried, awaiting a nuclear bomb-like explosion in the form of the election, to our highest office, of an African-American. In contrast to the movies, though, society was not united in defeating the monster and sending it back to the bowels of the earth.

No, evil people fed and nourished the monster. Worse, they set it upon their enemies and opponents, enlisting the services of a foreign enemy and the foreign owners of an influential television show. It worked. The monster grew and began consuming us. Would we survive? Where is our John Agar?

Perhaps we see hope. Can goodness lay buried in a subterranean tomb? Can some event loose it from its captivity? Can the better monster of our nature rise to fight the other?

Enter the phenomenon of John McCain’s death. Has it freed forgotten forms of decency and respect for honor that have lain buried for so many years? If so, how can we find ways to nourish it and make it grow? Can our salvation await us, birthed from the contemplation of this brave man’s life?

Perhaps it can if we realize that we are our own John Agars.