Who is really keeping us safe?

November 19, 2015November 19, 2015 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

“If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative by the time you are forty, you have no brain.” –Winston Churchill

Years ago I read a massive two-volume biography of Winston Churchill. It was with great disappointment that I learned that the author of those first two books had died. The third would have covered the period including World War II, and that would have been fascinating to study the actions and philosophies of the man that ushered Great Britain through the war.

Yet even with Churchill, his strong points as a war leader turned out to be challenges of a sort in the political realm. He was initially defeated for the role of Prime Minister after the war, yet returned to that role again before suffering physical and mental decline that may have resulted from strokes and heart issues.

A wealth of protectors

While obviously a man to admire, Winston Churchill’s determination that conservatism was the ultimate form of philosophical sophistication may have been formed more from his upbringing in a wealthy English family than his own evolution as a military man and spokesman. He was great at both those things, but there is an abiding factor to how these were developed and sustained that made it possible for Churchill to think like a conservative at all.

That factor was the presence and alliance of both the United States and the Soviet Union in World War II. Without that partnership, Great Britain would have been sunk under the pressures of Germany to take over much of Europe.

It was the liberal support of America’s Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and the hard right determination of Joseph Stalin that fought back Germany’s considerable will to conquer and subjugate. That enabled Churchill to essentially occupy an important middle ground from which he could flexibly consider and pursue his necessary options. That is conservative in the good sense of the word, in being considerate.

Modern times

Fast forward to the current world perspective in which we live. America’s President Barack Obama has behaved as a noted centrist on the world stage. And like Churchill, there have been wins and losses, risks and seeming triumphs associated with that centrist position. Obama has been the considerate if quietly brusque leader, not prone to launch off new wars, yet capable of effecting deadly drone strikes that many people protest as cruel and miscalculated.

Such are the risks of all world leaders. The apparently noble fight of America, Britain and the Soviets against the Germans, Italians and Japanese Axis was full of death and destruction. And while Germany clearly committed war crimes, the rest of the fighters were not a group of innocents. America ultimately dropped a massive nuclear weapon on Japan’s big cities, killing thousands of civilians in the process.

During the leadup to that event, America engaged in some rather heinous efforts to protect itself, ushering many of its own citizens of Japanese descent into camps. The object at the time was to “keep us safe” from perceived threats because Japan itself was such a threat.

Fear and strange decisions

Fear drives all kind of strange decisions in this world. And while some of our fears are very real, the collective anxiety of a culture can often be extremely misguided.

Such is the case wth current concerns over America’s possible acceptance of Syrian refugees. While France opens its borders willingly to Syrian refugees even on the heels of the terrorist attacks on its own soil, America’s arch-conservative population wants to ban them from entry into the country. All of this is based on the idea that terrorists will somehow disguise themselves as refugees and come to this country to kill Americans.

Raging debates

Having engaged in considerable political debate with a number of anxious conservatives on social media, a few simple things have emerged in the argument. 1) They don’t trust Obama or the government 2) They don’t trust the government or Obama 3) They really don’t trust either Obama or the government. That’s the substance of their arguments.

In the process of defending those arguments they also engage in considerable name-calling while simultaneously denying that the Bush administration or any conservative before him had anything to do with creating the terrorist problem in the Middle East. We all know that started with the Reagan administration, was fostered by the Bush relationships with the Saudis, and carried on with the patsy treatment of the bin Laden family right through the 9/11 terrorist attacks when our first priority was flying remnants of that family out of the United States when all other flights were suddenly banned. Conservatives also created the Saddam Hussein we overthrew, and set up the Shah of Iran that led to that country being so pissed off at the Western World.

Yet somehow it’s all Obama’s fault that we have problems in the Middle East.

Brotherly love

Of course, Jeb Bush, the equally inept brother of George W. Bush, is now running for President of the United States. And like any conservative worth his radical salt he has publicly claimed that his brother “kept us safe.”

So for the sake of analysis, we should examine what he might mean by that statement. The expectations of conservatives about what “keeps us safe” clearly breaks down into categories that were demonstrated by the Bush administration’s actions in the Middle East. And we’ll get to those in a minute.

But first we must admit there was little resistance by the Democratic Left to any of Bush’s policies overseas. That was a sick and sad chapter in our political history as well. Either by choice or by fear, the Left stood down under considerable pressure from conservative dominance of all three branches of government. That included the power of the Presidency, a willing Congress and Senate and even the Supreme Court that handed Bush surveillance powers that broke every rule in the Constitution about personal privacy.

So Bush and Cheney were given free license to engage in a series of cynical acts of aggression designed, in their minds, to “keep us safe” from terrorism. These included:

Bomb first, ask no questions later. When faced with threats, conservatives love to bomb things because it makes them feel as if they are taking action against that threat. Of course, civilian casualties resulting from those bombings inflamed hatred for the United States as innocents perished. But that’s the apparent price of thoughtless war. “Collateral damage” they call it. The ultimate euphemism of course. Conservatives bomb, and then move on without a second thought about what the real effects of such bombings could be in terms of perception among enemies or friends.
Torture is acceptable. Arguments in favor of torturing Iraqis and potential terrorist focused on the fact that such tactics were necessary to extract information that could “keep America safe.” That connection between information and actionable intelligence really never happened in any substantial way. And yet the apparent thought that our supposed enemies were being tortured made a certain segment of our society feel happy because we were “doing something” about terrorism. Never mind that many of the people we tortured and even killed through torture and mistreatment were in fact completely innocent.
Spying on your own people is desirable. How ironic it is that the political force in America that claims to hate government most and wants to reduce its influence in our lives should choose to open a surveillance program that brought government into the very conversations we all hold over our telephones and cell phones. It seems a common phenomenon that the things conservatives most hate in others they ultimately become themselves. It happens on the social front when people who claim to stand for family values turn out to be serial wife cheaters or sexual predators. This repression haunts the conservative party like a ghost of unvirtuous fact.
Always blame the other side. For all these insane actions and remorseless activities, conservatives have developed denial of responsibility for the evil outcomes into a very fine art. The virtual memo that says “never admit you were wrong” has been hard-wired into the consciousness of political, military and civilian conservatives. In fact, it is perhaps the greatest social conspiracy ever contrived as a political strategy. Its level of secrecy is protected by a devotion to denial and an entire lack of accountability. It is thus quite breathtaking in its scope and effect on civil discourse. Its main mouthpiece, of course, is Fox News, whose claims of being “fair and balanced” as a “news organization” are the absolute expression of the virtue of lying with a smile on your face and putting tits above the fold as a distraction of the very audience you intend to recruit.

There’s a reason for all this aggression, repression and secession going on within the conservative cult in America. Only when a conservative breaks completely free of the party entirely, which means they can never go back, do we hear an ounce of truth and admission about what really goes on behind the scenes. The recent inadvertent confession of a certain Congressman on the real reasons for the Benghazi investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are just one such example of politically motivated use of government to harangue and discredit anyone that dares resist the conservative cartel in America.

It goes back a ways

John_F_Kennedy Resistance to this secret society of Conservatism with a Capital A (and its apparent arm, the CIA) is what got President Kennedy killed back in the 1960s. So the phenomena of killing threats to the cabal is not new.Kennedy was no saint, that’s for sure. But what he also represented as a political liberalism that some perceived as a threat to the security of America. But again, the considerations shown by John F. Kennedy in negotiations with the Soviets in the Cuba Missile Crisis are likely what prevented nuclear war. In other words, his small “c” conservatism kept us safe, just like Winston Churchill’s small “c” conservatism helped guide the Allies through World War II. It is this conservatism to which I believe Winston Churchill is referring in the quote above this column.

But it keeps happening that large “C” Conservatism is trying to kill its perceived enemies. And true to form, the conservative cabal went after Bill Clinton over engagement in a harmless blow job. The ensuing scandal turned into a political spectacle that distracted from Clinton’s ability to do his job, and keep us safe.

At that time, Clinton wanted to take action against bin Laden and potential terrorists in the Middle East, but was discouraged from doing so because it would appear he was attempting to “wag the dog” and escape accusations and impeachment over his extramarital affair. We seriously need to ask what would have kept us more safe in that scenario, the Starr Report or actually paying attention to real threats to our security. Capital A Conservatives clearly chose the former over the latter. America has paid the price ever since for this selfish, politically motivated debacle.

Fear, loathing and power

New House Speaker Paul Ryan

So you see, the goal of conservatism is never really to keep us safe. It is to gain and keep power, and that is all. Conservatives use fear to accomplish that mission all the time. That is why the call to war is so strong among them. War creates a deep tide fear in the populace, accentuated by methods such as “terror alerts” that the Bush administration turned on and off as needed to sway political will and push the perception of power in their direction. These are all tricks to get people to fall in line. Authoritarian thinkers on both the proactive and responsive side love these methods because it gives them a sense of control in otherwise chaotic circumstances. Of course it is all a ruse, but that does not matter.

FlagWaiver Indeed, Conservatives with a capital “C” want Americans to behave like Pavlov’s dogs in response to the call for war and acceptance of violence as status quo. They wave flags as patriots in fear until the very meaning of the flag is all worn out. Our flag has come to represent a national attitude of fear and a worn out ideology as a result.

Witness the marketing methods of the NRA, which flouts fear about race and crime as reasons to arm American on claims that more guns will “keep us safe.” Again, these are lies of massive proportions. More Americans have died from gun violence on American soil that all the soldiers ever killed in foreign wars. This is not “keeping us safe.”

Money kills

In the end, the sad thing about all this fear and terror and power is that it is all about money. Conservatives simply love money and all that it gives them. That’s why so many conservative whine about high tax rates and complain about giving their dollars through any social programs that might help the poor or elderly. This is the brand of conservatism that has evolved in America; selfishness as a life philosophy. It stands in direct opposition to the Christian call for charity and even giving away all you have to serve God and Christ. But modern conservatives (oxymoron intended) ignore all that real Christian stuff. That part is old-fashioned to them.

And we must return to the fact that top level Conservatives have always liked war because it enriches them. Former Vice President Dick Cheney used the Iraq War to increase the value of companies like Halliburton in which he has long held financial interests. The snarling visage of the man who almost singlehandedly leveraged America’s fortunes into his own while ruining our reputation overseas is like the Ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge, who without ever having gone through the happy change that made him into an advocate for the Christmas Spirit acts instead like the Grinch Who Stole America.

No Churchill

dick-cheney Cheney was no Churchill, let’s all agree on that. He seems to have envisioned himself that way, but where he falls short is in the ability to recognize the advantage of being a smart conservative with a small “c.” That is one who knows that conservatism actually involves consideration. Cheney appears to have none of that capacity, and as a result his version of “keeping us safe” turned the Middle East into a morass of angry terrorist hornets hoping to break free and sting the invader of their nest.

So let’s stop pretending that stirring up the hornet’s nest in the Middle East with bombings, torture and boots on the ground is a conservative strategy at all. It is not a conservative strategy, and it does not keep us safe.

And as for hornet’s back home, we’ve already got a system in place to detect their angry buzz. Typically they can’t keep quiet. Not if we open our eyes and ears and pay attention. And let’s not ignore those clear warnings this time, as Bush did back when he and Cheney were plotting to take over the entire Middle East to steal the oil and get some archly conservative kicks. That was stupid. And we’re getting stung as a result.

The only thing that isn’t fake

October 21, 2015October 21, 2015 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Somehow I stumbled on this propagandistic video about Dr. Ben Carson, a Republican candidate for President of the United States. I found the video stunningly obvious in its structure and production values. Then when I looked at the comments, they all seemed manufactured. And as you’ll see if you visit the comments section, I asked the people who commented if they were fake.

Turns out they’re real people. Sort of. Which surprised me a little. But the nature of their comments and the banal, surface level responses to the video still strike me as very fake. In other words, I have my suspicions whether these particular self-described “millennials” are “real” in the sense that they are not paid for their comments on the video.

Listen, public relations in the video age is a highly crafted art designed to sway public opinion. But the one thing that isn’t fake in this video is how patently disconnected from reality Dr. Ben Carson truly seems. Now understand, I voted for Barack Obama twice, and I am proud of both of those votes. So this is not some hidden racial meme or dog whistle call to sink the lone black candidate on the Republican side.

Personally I’d love to see a conservative black candidate succeed. If someone in America can proceed with an agenda that delivers on ways to acknowledge and value the contributions of black Americans to society, I’m all for it.

Basic coherence

But Ben Carson is not the guy I’d like to see running our country. That’s a disturbing thought. His inability to proceed on any subject with consistency or even basic coherence is a problem. His mental health has even been raised as an issue.

Right away, Internet resistance was raised against the idea of calling Dr. Ben Carson mentally ill. This was one of the points of contention: “There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that rises to the level of evidence of a diagnosable behavioral pathology cited by Palmer. And yet, the piece plays into the all too readily accepted narrative that any person with whom we disagree on a vitally important issue must be a flawed, damaged, and ethically compromised human being.”

Get help

Here’s the difficult part in all this. For people experiencing the effects of mental illness, the most important thing anyone can do is to help them get help.

Many years ago a friend and runner from another community near my hometown was experiencing the first stages of a mental illness that would come to dominate his life. He showed up at our school with a bag of bread and tracked me down in the hallway. “I’m feeding the foxes on the bridge,” he told me. The foxes on the bridge were made of bronze.

Later this fellow went on to become an individual All-American runner. But he did so by engaging in some extreme behavior, training up to 250 miles per week as preparation for racing just 5 miles in cross country competitions. One could make a compelling observation that to this young man, the only thing that didn’t seem fake in his world was his running. Because after college his mental illness took on a different form, making it difficult for him to function in work and other activities. He did get help but as his mental illness progressed, even medications could not harness some of the delusional qualities manufactured by his brain. But the fact that he got help was the most important aspect of his particular journey. Without that, he likely could have harmed himself or others.

Because I had another running friend that tried to take his own life. And we all know that with accessibility to guns, people in that mental condition can certainly harm others.

And so can politicians whose mental state gravitates to extremes.

Loving the extremes

I think there’s a compelling case to make that for some people, politics is both their sport and their passion. And just like my friend with mental illness who ran 250 miles a week just to compete in a five-mile race, there are people with a propensity to go to extremes in an effort to make their point, and create a reality in which they feel more alive.

In fact I’ll argue there are many people in politics who think their extreme views are the only thing that feels real in this world. That’s how we’ve gotten the long list of extremists running for the Republican nomination. And there’s little doubt that on some days, men like Donald Trump talk and act a little insane.

We also know there have been plenty of zealous religious believers whose obsession with the end of the world has led to manic predictions and even death rituals. Entire cultures get caught up in these visions, as much of the world did with the y2K obsession.

Making it real

There are high-level officials here in America whose obsession with a Zionist vision of Israel have made them hunger for war in the Middle East, and Armageddon, which might bring on the apocalypse. So there is both inherent and operative insanity at work in this world.

Sometimes, and to some people, the only thing that isn’t fake is either that reality is out to get them or there is an opportunity through politics to create a reality that suits their particular brand of economic or cultural prejudice. That explains the KKK, the Third Reich and the threat we call ISIS in a nutshell. These are people pissed off to the point of world domination. And they’re everywhere.

Haters and baiters

We see people who hate the rich and we find people who despise the poor. We see people who fear for the climate because of human activity and we see people who think that no one but God can alter a single thing about the world.

It’s the longtime struggle between the willingness to change and the fear that change will ruin everything. The very state of the human condition is one of madness in dealing with his dichotomy. When people say things like, “The world has gotten crazy,” this is what they’re talking about.

And when we selectively view politicians such as Dr. Ben Carson or Bernie Sanders, we see them through very different eyes as a result. Both are obviously passionate people. Both are struggling to change the status quo. There are people who call both of them crazy. And there are people who take the bait.

Hard-liners

Extremism is a byproduct of trying to make sense of this dichotomy. People simply choose sides and gravitate to the far ends of the spectrum. Standing somewhere between the will to change and fear of change is known as being a moderate. But those voices can barely be heard over the screams of the extremes.

Perhaps more commonly, people choose candidates who represent their views or fears, and somehow Dr. Ben Carson has attracted a fair number of followers. But what creeps me out about the guy is not his potential mental illness. It is crazy ideological statements such as this: “No body with bullet holes is more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” And granted, that might be some form of hyperbole. Even Jesus Christ was known to exaggerate to make a point. But there’s no way Jesus Christ would equate the right to bear arms as more important than human life. So I think Ben Carson is the one that’s talking crazy talk.

And statements like those are why Ben Carson deserves to be scrutinized from every perspective possible. Because they evidence that fact that when it comes to issues of moral gravity, Ben Carson is either a fake, or he’s purposely faking it. Which is even more disturbing. Because what is his true agenda? No one can really know for sure when the “real” statements he makes cannot be separated from the supposedly playful manner in which Carson takes issue with serious social issues.

Fox News “reality” show

Consider that even in the cloistered environment of Fox News, where conservative viewpoints like Carson’s are cherished and promoted, things get strange when talking about standing your ground during a mass shooting or running away.

As reported on Salon.com: “On “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning, he (Carson) said that “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’” When asked about the remarks by ABC News later that day, he repeated his assertion with a smile, which Kelly said many people would take as an evidence of callousness. (italics by the author)

Carson disagreed, saying that “I was laughing at them, at their silliness. Of course if everybody attacks that gunman, he’s not going to be able to kill everybody.”

Actual military veterans who were armed and on the campus while the shooting occurred didn’t abide by the dictates of Carson’s assured tactical acumen, but that’s beside his point. “If you sit there and let him shoot you one-by-one,” Carson said, “you’re all going to be dead.”

This is a man operating in an imaginary world, where his ideology rules the day, and reality be damned. That’s why people are questioning his mental fitness. It’s not because he’s a conservative. Or he’s black. Or any other reason. He simply refuses to make sense.

“Getting” Carson and Cain

Some claim that he’s so smart the rest of the world doesn’t “get” Ben Carson..because he’s a brain surgeon, you know. And a Christian, apparently. And who knows what else?

Well, the Republican Party keeps trotting out ostensibly conservative black guys as evidence they “get” the needs of so-called minorities.

Herman Cain was the last iteration of this brand of conservative, running on grounds that people did not “get” his message. But he had other axes to grind as well. “I honestly believe that there’s an element in this country, in our politics, that does not want to see a businessman succeed at getting the nomination for the Republican party, and does not want me to succeed at becoming President of the United States of America.”

Well, now that’s a bit of news isn’t it? How many millionaires do we now have in Congress? And why does Wall Street throw millions of dollars behind candidates like Mitt Romney, the businessman and massively callous job-killer whose main professional accomplishments were delivering profits to shareholders? Or Donald Trump, an erstwhile businessman who now leads Republican polling?

But Cain was delusionally obsessed with his inability to convince people he was right. So he blamed others.

Blame and shame

Again, the methods of extremists are always to blame others for their failure to get elected, or to govern. Right now the brother of the former President of the United States of America, candidate Jeb Bush, is busy denying that his brother GWB bore any responsibility for preventing the attacks.

This is mental illness as a political ideology. This is imagined reality superimposed on reality. This is why extremists and political ideologues such as Dick Cheney and perhaps Dr. Ben Carson cannot be trusted. They made not be mentally ill, but they certainly act like it. And that’s the only thing about them that isn’t fake.

The Confederate flag is the perfect symbol for angry losers and selfish winners

June 29, 2015June 29, 2015 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Some people in the American South seem to think the Confederate Flag stands for freedom and the will to put up a fight in the face of tyranny. They also conveniently like to ignore the fact that the Confederate Flag came to represent the interests of people who happily enslaved other human beings to get cheap labor and enrich themselves.

It’s a rather disgusting fact that the Confederate flag has continued to hang over states in the South.

But it makes a perverse kind of sense. What other flag has been used to celebrate getting your ass kicked in a war? Well, from that perspective perhaps the Confederate flag does have more in common with the United States Stars and Stripes. America’s track record since World War II is decidedly mixed when it comes to winning and losing wars.

Vietnam was arguably a disaster in terms of lives lost and public relations for the United States. Fears over communism drove the war, but so did an obsession with world dominance that has bled into wars in Iraq a couple times. And let’s not even talk about Afghanistan. We’re still over there shooting at people in an act of presiding over a Civil War in a nation that has nothing to do with our real national interests. We could have pulled out of there the weekend after we “missed” getting Osama bin Laden and the world would not be any worse off than it is now.

America missed warnings about terrorist strikes, then tried to make up the difference by bombing and torturing people that had very little to do with the real reason why we got hit in the first place. Which was sticking our nose into the business of Middle East. Our devotion to Israel stems from moneyed interests that further want to protect a Confederate country formed from political actions back in the 1950s. Don’t believe me that Israel is a Confederate state?

confederate

ADJECTIVE

[ kənˈfedərət ] joined by an agreement or treaty:

NOUN

a person one works with, especially in something secret or illegal; an accomplice:

VERB (confederated)

[ -ˌrāt ] bring (states or groups of people) into an alliance:

We don’t traditionally think of Israel as a Confederate state because the Judeo-Christian tradition refuses to accept that anything other than nationhood is acceptable for the Jewish state. But let’s not forget that Israel got is ass kicked several times by other forces in the Middle East. God apparently approved or let these things happen. The temple in Jerusalem got leveled a few times if Bible memories serve.

To be frank, Israel was reformed as a nation out of human will and in response, in some measure, to the outright massacre of millions of Jews during World War II. The argument over whether re-establishing Israel as a state or nation has raged ever since. Millions of Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East wish they could put an end to Israel. Its confederated status flies in the face of a history in which Israel appeared and disappeared over the course of history. As a result, key cities such as Jerusalem clearly share multiple roots in faith and tradition. The Crusades never really settled anything. They basically acted as a combined religious and civil war over jurisdiction of the region. The installation of the Israeli confederacy has resulted in permanent civil war in the region.

Home bound

If America had accepted or enacted a similar outcome on its own soil, the Confederacy would still exist. The Confederate flag would fly in place of the stars and stripes.

And some people might like it that way. Had history taken a different course, the Confederacy might have been able to permanently refuse equal rights to black slaves in the South. After all, in the wake of the Civil War the South still enacted virtual slavery with Jim Crow laws enforced by lynchings, torture and discrimination.

Groups such as the Klu Klux Klan, which still claims to be a Christian organization focused on purity of the white race, played a major role in the ugly drama of the Old South.

Slowly these forces lost primary influence in the South. The Confederacy lost the Civil War. Civil rights movements struck down racist laws and granted black citizens of the United States full rights.

The Confederacy lives on

Yet the determined spirit of the Confederacy refused, in many respects, to die. The allegiances that drove the original Confederacy live on in full relief. The defiant response to America’s first black President in Barack Obama was in full evidence with statements by leading southern politicians such as Mitch McConnell, who vowed behind a white veil of innocence to make Obama a “one term President.”

It’s all the same stupid, confused logic of the Confederacy reborn. In the name of freedom the neo-Confederates ignore the history of the racist roots of the Confederacy and all its claims to “states rights” and “less government.” But really there is no logic behind the claim that less government equals better government. Because the less our government stands for human equality and opportunity, the more egregious the offenses become against those whose status is less than white or privileged by law in some other respect. We’ve already witnessed the greatest transfer of wealth in American history from the middle class to the richest 1%. That happens to be the same percentage of slaveholders in the South. Do you see the picture now? The neo-confederacy would prefer to make slaves of us all. That is why the Confederate Flag should offend every one of us.

We’ve seen the actions of racists for more than 200 years. We’ve seen corporate interests ignore the impact that pollution has on the environment. We’ve watched discrimination according to sexism and sexual orientation. We’ve seen all this falsely supported by claims that the Bible supports such views, and that God favors a political party that claims to represent freedom even as it works tirelessly to limit or remove the freedoms of others.

We’ve even watched the neo-Confederacy try to tie all this to national and individual prosperity, all while protesting social programs such as Social Security and Medicaid that clearly leverage the nation’s collective wealth to protect the elderly and sick in times of needs.

But the neo-Confederacy seeks to secede from a nation dedicated to helping others. Because just like the conservative causes that claimed to protest the second World War while secretly funding the Nazis with weapons in acts of clear war profiteering, and like the neo-Confederates who leveraged the Iraq War into a mercenary profit machine, the neo-Confederacy is a mean-spirited movement to divide America and reap profits from its hulking corpse.

Symbols of ignorance

All this seems to be lost on those who believe the Confederate flag stands for anything other than fighting for the cause of selfish interests and ignorance. And as for the battle to keep Israel afloat in a sea of resistance, the only true solution lies in recognition of other culture’s claims to the same historical claims of territory.

That’s how the United States converted from a Union and Confederacy to a single nation. Rather than the divisions of ignorance, race and selfish interests, it was respect born of mutual needs that ultimately brought reconciliation and peace.

You can wave all the flags you want, but in the end it is the white flag of peace that truly matters.

Daring to imagine what John Lennon would think of the world today

January 29, 2015January 29, 2015 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

The iconic lyrics of the song IMAGINE by John Lennon have for 30+ years served as an idealistic reminder that the world can be a better place. Yet none other than Elvis Costello took a shot at those lyrics with his own song “The Other Side of Summer” when he wrote,

” Was it a millionaire who said “imagine no possessions”?

Costello was far from the only person who questioned the verity of Lennon’s philosophy. Or should we call it a theology? John Lennon’s god was what at times what he could discern from a mix of anger, insanity and common sense.

Insane people

For example, John Lennon once said, “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”

Well it turns out Lennon was pretty accurate about that. The field of psychology has discovered that psychopaths really are running the world. The Atlantic for example ran an article in its July 12, 2012 edition titled “The Startling Accuracy of Referring to Politicians as Psychopaths.” It bore these words:

“Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, which include lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others. Psychopaths are not all the same; particular aspects may predominate in different people. And, although some psychopaths are violent men (and women) with long criminal histories, not all are. It’s important to understand that psychopathic behavior and affect exist on a continuum; there are those who fall into the grey area between “normal” people and true psychopaths.”

Actions louder than words

So we can say that at some level John Lennon was right. He hit the nail on the head all those years go when he saw insanity in the actions of world leaders conveniently taking nations to war to satisfy their need for manipulation and confrontation.

Lennon might easily have pointed out the inhumanity of using drone fighter planes to shoot people dead without engagement. It’s a pretty crazy capacity that now exists to fight wars. A drone is the psychopath’s perfect weapon because it objectifies people as targets (from a distance) and then removes them from existence. How clean and neat is that? Pretty insane.

But the fact that such drones became essentially necessary to fight terrorism in a part of the world where economic interests have long trampled human rights is the real issue. There’s also the fact that these conflicts are all mixed together with religion and grudges–– new and old––that makes it all truly insane.

It almost takes a psychopath to ignore these facts enough to try to impose an ideology over the surface of it all. That’s what America did under Bush and Cheney. And of course it did not work. Because it was crazy to think it would work.

Insane cheerleaders

The entire enterprise was cheerleaded by a nation and a media that at the time lost its senses in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. Seeking any sort of enemy at all to attack, the United States lashed out in Iraq and Afghanistan without a real plan. Those who questioned these actions were branded weak or unpatriotic, especially by media sources that aligned themselves with the so-called war effort. A brand of jingoistic fervor bent on revenge burst forth from America’s wounded bowels.

Terror and revolution

We can only imagine John Lennon taking to the streets of his chosen home in New York City to question all that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s unlikely he would have sided with the terrorists and their choice of slamming planes into buildings. Lennon was not necessarily a liberal in that regard. In fact, that’s an easy one:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out

Instead Lennon might have encouraged Americans to look inside their own minds to discover whether their nation was acting in good conscience in the first place. The first Iraq War was ostensibly meant to deal with a political nemesis in Saddam Hussein. Yet America helped establish that despot and a few others around the world. Our CIA is always mucking about in the business of other countries. Our own FBI investigated and tormented John Lennon for years about his political views.

Secrets and lies

Lennon understood that’s how the world works. It’s all secrets and lies until someone points it out. Then when the truth is known, the psychopaths try to change the rules to cover up their actions and point the narrative in their own favor. He predicted that behavior in his song Revolution as well:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You’d better free your mind instead

Liberals and conservatives

Hence we find ourselves in a cultural war between so-called liberals and so-called conservatives. One is trying to change the Constitution by using the Supreme Court to form the nation around a contradictory ideology of a corporatized and moralistic oligarchy that claims to hate government while trying to rule it. It doesn’t take much political savvy to identify the madness in that formula. Lennon would have called it insane.

Liberals meanwhile view forward progress in terms of leaving troubles behind. That’s not always true of course. And if you pile troubles onto troubles, that does not constitute a better whole.

It’s the philosophy of how to deal with those problems that gets us all into trouble. Conservatives seem interested in hacking the pile to bits and keeping the parts they like. Liberals seem focused taking time to sort it all out. Meanwhile the pile gets bigger.

Faith and all

We’re also facing a religious battle over whether America was formed (or not) as a Christian nation. The Constitution is pretty clear about that. It states clearly that America shall establish no state religion as a requirement of citizenship. It’s freedom of religion and freedom from religion that the nation was founded upon.

That gives us all room to operate with freedom of belief. But some people, primarily those who act like psychopaths, are not happy with the simple liberal principle that we should all be free to believe what we want. Lennon tried to reduce all that to simplicity. IMAGINE if none of that was an issue. If all we needed was cooperation and love to co-exist.

Naive or knowing?

Some call him naive for those lyrics. But what a better imagining that actually constitutes than the world in which media companies owned by a very few despotic individuals feel compelled to preach a religious, political and economic ideology that is contradictory at its heart? Imagine instead that our media went back to genuinely reporting on the facts to the best of its ability. And how ironic: America now gets better and more truthful information about the world from sources such as Al Jazeera and the BBC than Fox News or MSNBC.

I heard the news today, oh boy

John Lennon lamented the manner in which the daily news itself seems to dominate the mind. “I heard the news today, oh boy…about a lucky man, who made the grade…”

His prescience in recognizing that temporary and petty thoughts distract from real values was one of his almost Christ-like qualities. Of course that leadership ability got him into trouble when he warned, not claimed, that the Beatles were becoming more popular than Jesus.

The conservative Christian worlds went nuts on that one, burning records to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with Lennon’s ironically truthful statement. Of course it was John’s point all along that people were out of whack with the whole popularity thing. He ultimately withdrew from the public eye to heal himself from the madness that was Beatlemania. So he was no hypocrite in that regard. The real hypocrites were the obsessive Christians who refused to hear his real message and learn something about themselves, and their children, rather than burning records.

Insights

We all know Lennon was no perfect soul. No one is. However his own psychopathic tendencies may have given him particular insight to the machinations of those trying to gain control of the world at any cost.

That’s why it’s funny that John Lennon loved advertising and its ability to convey complex themes in simple messages. That’s how he came up with brilliant songs such as “All You Need Is Love” and “Give Peace a Chance.” His lyrical mastery was the ability to cull complex messaging down to simple symbols by which people could access the sanity and dispense with the insanity of this world.

In that regard, John Lennon was very much like a certain Jesus Christ, who used simple (often organic) metaphors to teach spiritual principles to all those who would listen.

Listen

It’s no small lesson for all of us…that those who really chose to listen were often not those with the most power. Jesus ran afoul of the religious leaders of his day because his message was far too liberal for their tastes. He questioned their methods and their authority. They conspired then to capture and kill him.

And when Jesus was delivered to the Roman authorities it did not go much better. But according to the Bible, we read that Pontius Pilate at least tried to question Yeshua about the contentions that he was a king. We learn that Pilate then turned the Jewish enigma over to be flogged and crucified. Jesus’ fame as a teacher got him killed, in other words.

No better now

The world likes to think of itself as more sophisticated than the leaders in biblical times. Yet we can readily see the same patterns of people religious control and political force at work today. We still have our Pharisees and our Pilates to contend with. Witness the conservative media backlash toward Pope Francis for being “too liberal” when the man is basically just preaching what the Bible actually tells people to do. The insane fact is that many so-called Christians have gotten so far away from the roots of their faith they no longer recognize it even when they see it. They are insanely concerned with power and pathetically unable to control their own zealotry. They are the modern-day betrayers of Jesus and His message.

Identities

John Lennon did not identify with the Christian faith, per se. But he surely recognized the insanity of the world and what it can do the hearts and minds of those who are trying madly to do the right thing, but for all the wrong reasons and by all the wrong methods.

That’s how we got where we are, for example, with an American population generally claiming to value life while tens of thousands of people die from unregulated gun violence every year. That’s how John Lennon died. An insane person bearing a gun walked up to him in 1980 and shot him dead, in the head, with a handgun.

Since that time it’s become easier than ever to own and carry guns these days. Even military caliber weapons are available to people who feel a need to shoot them.

Certainly if John Lennon had miraculously survived, as did Congressman Gabrielle Giffords, he might have a few things to say about how insane it really is that this country can’t escape its addiction to guns and the carnage they produce.

And had Lennon actually lived––yet lost his gift of producing music thanks to the brain damage he might have suffered––perhaps he would still find a way to tell us all how crazy the world (and especially America) stil really is.

And if you can’t see or accept that, then you’re one of the insane people trying to make thing happen through insane means. And you need to stop.

The Genesis Fix is written by Christopher Cudworth, author of The Right Kind of Pride available on Amazon.com.

What we can really learn from attempts to attack the President

October 4, 2014 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

By Christopher Cudworth

Obama to Lincoln: “It’s a lot harder being President these days. People can’t be civil.”

So much of history depends on chance. Recently a man named Omar Gonzalez jumped the White House fence and entered the building. He was armed, but not with guns. The Las Vegas Review–– a media company based in the gambling mecca––carried the story online:

“President Barack Obama and his daughters had just left the White House by helicopter on Friday evening when the Secret Service says 42-year-old Omar J. Gonzalez scaled the fence, darting across the lawn and through the unlocked North Portico doors before officers finally tackled him.”

It’s only speculation to wonder what might have happened had Obama been home to encounter an intruder carrying a knife. Surely the fit and adroit President would not just have stood there and waited for an attack. They must train the President to protect himself in some ways? Yet even if the Secret Service does not provide such training, good old gut instincts would take over for Obama, a man young enough to stay fit playing sports on a regular (but not excessive) basis.

Suppose the intruder had stumbled onto Obama working at his desk. The two might have scuffled and knife or not, Obama likely could have overpowered the man eventually. There might have been blood spilled and shouts, whereupon the Secret Service would finally arrive and the intruder would indeed have been subdued.

If such personal heroics had ensued, what would the reaction of the media have been? We might recall the coverage given to the incident in which George W. Bush reportedly gagged on a chunk of dry pretzel. The President almost succumbed to a salty snack. It made the headlines for sure.

But a President fighting off an intruder by his own power? That would have made major headlines. And had there been video released by the White House that showed the President in action saving his own life, such footage would go viral. Experts would scrutinize its verity. Ultimately someone would accuse the President of wagging the dog, trying to shore up his reputation as a tough guy in the latter stages of his presidency.

The conspiracy theories would have dominated coverage by Fox News especially. Already during Obama’s presidency the news network has demonstrated a major propensity to lead with specious questions about Benghazi and complaints about whether Obama actually deserved any credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

It is a unique point in American history when news media wielding the power and scope of Fox News invest so much time and effort digging into such non-stories, and presenting speculation as fact while simultaneously giving so much time and support to people whose ideologies serve as “real news” and “fair and balanced” ideas about issues such as global climate change or teaching religion public school classrooms.

Such topsy turvy “reporting” has created a climate in which it is suitable for even a Supreme Court Justice such as Antonin Scalia to spout the opinion (and it is his own) that the United States Constitution serves the purpose of religion over the rights of all others.

That’s where all this is going, and it has poisoned the flow of reason in public discourse. So much so that had an intruder reached President Obama, and had he fought for himself in the face of Secret Service failures, no one would have believed the event. Not completely.

It may be that the game is played both ways. As a result of so much falseness in the media, there is no doubt that Presidents long ago learned to play the media game to the point where Americans cannot really trust what anyone, not even the President, has to say about anything.

We’ve never gotten the full truth even about the Kennedy assassination back in 1963. Recent releases from the Kennedy library reveal that Jackie Kennedy Onassis believed the then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had motive to kill her husband and assume the Presidency.

That was Democrat vs. Democrat. Or was it really? Could a man with such bully motives and methods as LBJ truly be grouped with any particular political party? There were so many interests that wanted JFK dead it was truly no one man that did it. The mob or the CIA certainly had their reasons to participate (cooperate?) in such actions.

But that remains speculation until that day the one line of evidence is revealed that points a finger at the exact incident or moment where the motives and actions are revealed.

That’s why Fox News can get away with what it does these days. Because lacking hard evidence that such conspiracies actually do have consequence, and without proof that both liberal and conservative causes have the audacity to ignore reason and law in pursuit of power, the rest of us are left guessing about the truth.

Even our fullest sources of truth such as the Bible are subject to gross speculations and wild interpretations. Some of these are anachronistic in their literalism while others engage in flat-out denials of modern knowledge to the point of insincerity. Yet some 30% of Americans still believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible and millions fall prey to ridiculous theories about the Rapture that the Bible itself clearly debunks as sinful and stupid to abide.

News outlets such as Fox know they can exploit and manipulate such naive and cynical, angry and feckless minds to their own advantage. It has occurred to such a degree that half the Fox audience would have questioned the verity of any report of a President defending himself while the other half might have welcomed a different, less positive outcome.

Have you any doubt this is true, simply visit the websites where Obama-haters regularly reside. Try the Tea Party News Network for starters, whose very headlines contain a leading bias in many cases. Then witness the barely disguised racism in the commentary on those stories, and absorb the hatred for our current President. It would obviously not take much for a person driven by the hatred apparent in such places to take up arms and make a charge for the White House on his or her own.

Ask Gabby Giffords about how anger-driven violence can enter your life, changing it forever. And consider how other politicians fail to act even when challenged again and again by violent forces to legislate change in our nation.

What we can really learn from recent attempts to attack the President is that its hard to believe how far we’ve come from that day in 1963 when the nation and the world stood in shock at news that Kennedy had been assassinated. Those were not more innocent times, we all now know. Instead what we know now is that corrupt influences have become more bold and adept at the lies they are willing to tell and the acts they are willing to perpetrate in order to gain and maintain power.

Sometimes it only takes one man and one “lucky” shot at murder to change history. Abraham Lincoln fell to such a shooter, but it was an uncivil society that gave birth to his motives and the courage to act.

Because it is never just one man and one gun who does the killing. It is all of us, and how we abide by truth or accept something far less as fact. That’s the lesson we have long failed to learn.

There’s a bumper crop of hatred out there

September 9, 2014September 9, 2014 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

By Christopher Cudworth

On my way to a business networking meeting this morning I took a shortcut through the neighborhood where I’d recently been hired to paint a fire hydrant for a community contest. The gentleman that paid me for the gig called to let me know that the fire hydrant I’d painted was one of the utilities scheduled for replacement. That meant the old fire hydrant was torn out and a new one installed.

As I parked my car to take an iPhone picture of the new hydrant, the headlights of another car appeared in my rear view mirror. I snapped the photo as quickly as I could since I was parked in the middle of the street. Before I could put the phone away the vehicle behind me came ripping past at about 30 mph headed for Route 38 two blocks ahead.

His vehicle got stopped by passing traffic. As I rolled up behind him at the intersection, the image on the bumper of his car caught my eye. It featured one of those bratty looking little kids taking a piss. The object of his aim was hard to read at first in the early light, but I held up my camera and tried to take a photo anyway. In light press-on letters the words FAGGOTS, LIBERALS, OBAMA, CHASE BANK were printed on the bumper.

Piss on all those, I guess?

Piss on faggots. Okay, we get that this guy doesn’t like gay people and prefers to refer to homosexuals by a derogatory name long since abandoned by most of civil society.

Piss on Liberals. Okay, that could mean a lot of things. Many of the Founding Fathers were quite devout liberals, and our Constitution is by definition quite a liberal document focused on the guarantee and protection of civil rights. But piss on those too.

Piss on Obama. Well well well. Perhaps this is getting to the core of things here. If this guy didn’t like gays and liberals, then a president that supports equal rights including those guaranteed for people of his own race, then piss on him too.

Pretty consistent pissing so far, you might say.

But then comes Piss On Chase Bank. Now that’s downright confusing unless your local Chase banker is a gay liberal who voted for Obama. That’s pretty hard to tell in your average teller. So the hatred for Chase must come from something deeper. Perhaps this guy is an Occupy Wall Streeter? That doesn’t make sense. Most of those folks are fairly liberal. Some people even call them socialists for seeking to have the banking industry actually abide by the existing regulations by which financial management is supposed to occur.

The Chase is on

Interestingly enough, I had plenty of time to consider all these options as I entered traffic behind the Piss On Faggots, Liberals, Obama and Chase Bank guy. He happened to be turning the same direction as me at the next stop light. His vehicle next took a strange diagonal across the intersection.

Another 6 blocks later his turn signal pointed where I was headed as well. This time he cut close to the curb on his turn and swung weirdly into the other lane before righting his car. I wondered if he was busy texting. Three blocks later he was turning left again, the same direction I was also headed. This time he nearly cut off the headlights of the car parked in the lane waiting to turn left.

Perhaps he was a little spooked by now that I might be following him. He hit the gas hard through a neighborhood where I knew the speed limit was carefully monitored. The street cuts through a residential neighborhood rife with kids. Piss On Little Kids, I guess.

His frantic speed made me think that perhaps he’d seen me taking an iPhoto of his rather hateful bumper decoration and wanted to avoid any potential confrontation. But that was probably just my imagination working overtime. When he took off at high speed on the next right turn I literally gave him a wave goodbye.

Can’t get no…no no no…

It struck me: What satisfaction could he possibly derive from driving his old Toyota around with that mean message on his bumper? When does one bend over and stick that little mean kid bumper sticker on there and then hand press the words FAGGOT, LIBERALS, OBAMA AND CHASE BANK onto one’s bumper?

His satisfaction must come from expressing his hatred. Yet you can only hate so much before the satisfaction drawn from that hatred begins to drain out of you. Or perhaps he also spends nights on the Internet trolling liberal websites and posting racist or partisan comments about Obama. With a bumper crop of hatred out there perhaps it is true that the line between Blue and Red is permanent, inhumane divide.

Human interest

Three out of four of the things Mr. Piss On claims to hate are actually human beings of one kind or another. His hatred of Chase Bank only qualifies as hatred for other human beings if you abide by the Mitt Romneyesque pandering ploy that “Corporations are people too, my friend…”

Frankly one wonders why the Piss On fellow limited his list of hated things to such a short list. Could he have not added Muslims to the list given the seemingly categorical partisan hatred of all things different than Christian, White, Straight and Republican in America.

Piss On, Brother

As indicated by the intellectual gravity of the fellow with the Piss On logo, there’s a bumper crop of hatred out there. While people like me can and should admit our disgust with George W. Bush, and I’ve written at length and frequently about frustrations with the seeming lack of conscience in the modern (catch the irony) batch of conservative, I did not go to some truck store where they sell stickers of naughty little boys and mount them next to the words GOP or any other group of people with whom I might disagree.

Liberals usually take the long way home and the long way around to express their opinions. Yes, there’s hatred being expressed from the liberal side as well, and I keep an eye out for liberal bumper stickers that cross the line. But you just don’t see many. Instead you might see that sticker that says COEXIST with all the religious symbols intermixed.

What would Jesus piss on?

But is it conservative or liberal to sport a bumper sticker that says KNOW JESUS. KNOW PEACE? That depends on how you interpret knowing Jesus, of course. Liberals would say you need to embrace the social justice aspects of his ministry and stewardship of the earth. Conservative Christians have claimed that knowing Jesus is the same as respecting God and Country. So there’s a critical divide based on interpretation of the very same words of the Bible.

The scary part in all this is that some people might brand the list posted on the bumper of the Piss On vehicle a statement in keeping with Christian values. People who hate on homosexuals or even ‘love the sinner an hate the sin’ are effectively saying the same thing as “Piss On Faggots.” Either way the subject of the criticism is ostracized based on anachronistic interpretation of a very few bible passages.

Going down the list, justifying conservative hatred for Obama opens some very sore wounds in America. He’s black, which opens up the entirely racist can of worms. He’s a Democrat and ostensibly a liberal, although people who disagree with his kid glove treatment of Wall Street bankers might argue with the lack of accountability demanded from financial interests that bent the law and bankrupted the country.

Which brings us again to the very interesting subject of Chase Bank, one of the few massively large financial institutions deemed “too big to fail” lest our nation and our world economy go into turmoil.

So our friend that wants to piss on Chase Bank either likes the bushes behind his local branch office or else he agrees with liberal economists that companies like Chase should have to straighten up and fly right or pay the penalty.

But the question we have to ask from the perspective of the Judeo-Christian tradition is this: What would Jesus think of the Piss On bumper sticker and the hate it communicates?

Well, Jesus was not recorded as having said anything about homosexuality in the Bible. So the Piss On Faggots attitude is manufactured from something outside the words of the Son of God.

And Jesus loved liberals because he loved himself, tender of the key liberal idea that all humans are deserving of equal rights. So that that, Mr. Piss On Liberals. Jesus thinks you suck.

As for Obama, Jesus might call into question some of the things that Obama does. But taking steps to provide better health and human services is not one of them. Nor is protecting the environment against anthropogenic change (look it up if you don’t know what it means). And for all the hatred pointed at Obama by Tea Party Conservatives that “He’s a Muslim,” well, guess what? Jesus is a key figure in the Muslim tradition too.

Was Jesus a greedy bugger?

Meanwhile one of the biggest problems Jesus addressed in his ministry was the abuse of trust and love of money produced by those with greedy lack of conscience. And what do we find out there dominating conservative ideology these days? Crybabies whining about how the 1% are so persecuted.

Screeching politicians who owe their careers to political investors (you read that right…) are simply not going to behave in good conscience on behalf of the public when behind closed doors they have already shook hands and struck deals with the companies that own them.

If Chase Bank is just a symbol for all that ugly greed, dismissal and manipulation of the social good for profit, then perhaps the Piss On guy might have a small point.

But don’t tell him that, because he’s probably pretty sensitive about the size of his pointer, if you catch my drift. These hateful guys are always compensating for something, it seems.

Nice hydrant, dude

Which brings us full circle to the whole reason I was parked along that road where the Piss On guy blew on past me and caught my attention with his angry, small-minded bumper sticker.

The new fire hydrant I’m supposed to paint sticks much farther out of the ground than the original implement. That means it will make an even more inviting target for dogs to come along and piss on. I’ll be painting the new hydrant with that fact in mind. I plan to paint some targets with dog prints along the base. And I hope no dogs are offended. But that’s their business.

From Django Unchained to Men In Black, a critical take on American Exceptionalism

May 12, 2013 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Django. Making escape from slavery look good.

The Academy Award-winning movie Django Unchained, written and directed by the always violent mind of Quentin Tarentino, has a simple plot line. Slave gets rescued by a bounty hunter who needs him to identify some bad guys. Slave learns ways of bounty-hunting and takes it to a naturally new level. Slave earns possible freedom for himself and the love of his life if he helps pull off a ruse with a sickeningly manipulative and violent Southern plantation owner. Things go awry and people get shot. Things blow up. And Django, well, we wouldn’t want to spoil the ending.

“The difference between you and me? I make this look good.”

The plotline of Django Unchained closely resembles another movie in which a black character emerges as an eminently good student. That movie would be Men In Black, with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. One of the key similarities is that the Jamie Foxx character in Django and the Will Smith character in MIB take their roles seriously with a compelling flair. I paraphrase, but the Smith character states, upon putting on the MIB suit, “The difference between you and me? I make this look good.”

The parallels are interesting because one movie is about the very earthly fact of slavery as a scourge upon the American conscience, while the MIB series is all about the fact that aliens live on earth without 99.99% of the population knowing. Even Dennis Rodman, Elvis and Sylvestor Stallone are implicated as aliens in the plot.

It is interesting to realize that one movie, set in the past, points out that American history is not so exceptional as it is sordid. While the other movie, set in the present, lampoons the notion that our government and our culture are somehow superior by nature.

In other words (and other worlds) American Exeptionalism is a literal and figurative bunch of hooey.

In fact what you realize upon comparing these two movies is that America is exceptional despite its supposed superior foundations and conservatively interpreted Constitution. The only thing that has made America great over the years is a deep willingness in its most liberal citizens to an ultimate sense of justice. Liberalism, not exceptionalism, has been the true expression of America’s finest values.

Django Unchained and Men In Black both illustrate that America’s black citizens have had to be exceptional models of patience and ingenuity with an almost magic flair for perseverance and creativity. The object of Django’s affections and the entire goal of the venture is to rescue his enslaved wife, a German-speaking woman named Brunhilde, which happens to link with the German legend of overcoming seemingly insurpassable odds in the name of love.

What better characterization of black culture can there be, except that it somehow must be defined by a legend from a primarily white culture. It is the ugly fact that both movies pair an initially clueless black character with an obvious savvy white character to educate an unleash the powers of the black man. And ultimately, the black woman.

That’s the problem with the attitude toward equality of black people. It still needs nurturing somehow? Not at all, in truth. Nor does the equality of gays in America need a mentor. Or women. Or Mexican people. Immigrants of any kind. Yet that is our national narrative in some respect. The melting pot somehow harkens back to a white chef.

And that is the sad underlying fact of so-called American Exceptionalism. That whites are the true core and fiber of American success. It held that blacks could fight in World War II and still come home to a highly segregated society where equality did not exist. And it still held that the 1960s were the ruination of a society with all the liberation of social and sexual mores. It holds that a certain religion has driven the God-given, blessed existence of America.

American Exceptionalism then held forth that 9/11 was the greatest affront, an event that gave us permission to do whatever we wanted in the world, even to torture terror suspects in so-called “black sites” around the world. Do you start to see it all circle back into a cesspool of “exceptionalism” that is exceptional only in its arrogance and supposition that Americans can do no wrong. Not even when we enslave. Torture. Discriminate. Oppress. Even legislate these same evil practices into law. And in today’s culture! Years removed, we should be, from the need to use our government for religious and social prejudices. Yet some persist, denying basic civil rights and running political parties that make very public attempts to suppress the vote of minorities so that they can remain in power. And then complain about why people are not attracted to their “party.” Some party it is that cares only for its own right to rule without granting even basic human rights, denying health care coverage to millions under the so-called free market laws that also discriminate by conveying unfair economic advantage to those already in power.

And what of the supposed unnecessary or gratuitous violence depicted in Django Unchained, and to a certain extent, even in Men In Black. Well, when you consider that our gun laws have led to a culture where more Americans have been killed––or killed themselves––through gun violence than all the soldiers that have died in our combined wars over the years, there is nothing gratuitous about the violence in Django Unchained at all. At least the movies showed those who got shot writhing in pain and cursing desperately. That’s the reality we seldom see in the movies. Gun violence maims and kills, and that is celebrated in video games that splatter brains and even the 5:00 news, where it leads when it bleeds.

It’s about time we figured out that the glossed up image of America as a free society is still an illusion. There are people living in chains to this day.

You can hear the fear in the voices of those who want to keep it that way. The increasingly shrill call by Rush Limbaugh to suppress women’s rights, and the barely disguised racism he shows toward President Barack Obama, to whom Limbaugh refers as “The Magic Negro.”

That is exactly how dismissively the character played by Leonardo di Caprio speaks of black people in the movie Django Unchained. He speaks of the fact that only 1 in 10,000 “niggers” is exceptional, worthy of his respect in any way. The rest he sees fit to serve to the murderous dogs who tear apart a runaway slave in retribution for costing the di Caprio character his “investment” of $500.

If that’s still the value of human life in the eyes of some who portend to lead America, then we’ve got enormous problems of exceptionalism that cannot be wished away by claims of patriotism or supposed righteousness. That kind of exceptionalism is the most disgusting form of hubris imaginable.

It has taken years and decades and centuries of liberal salvation to bring America somewhat out of its own pit of racial selfishness and greed. Still we suppress minorities, and still we crash the economy through lack of jurisprudence so that the wealthy can gain more for their appetites.

We’ve still got to make up our minds whether the nation is a plantation or reasonable place to live for the so-called “aliens” among us. The arc between Django Unchained and Men In Black has a lot to teach us if we care to learn the allegorical lesson.

Falling short of that enlightenment would only be exceptionally stupid.

America’s concussion problem just won’t go away

February 24, 2013 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

by Christopher Cudworth

America is seeing stars, and stripes, but not the way we’re accustomed to seeing them. Painting by Christopher Cudworth

The news about concussions is everywhere in pro sports. Retired football players are suing the NFL for failing to protect their noggins, while active players are taking concussions far more seriously. America’s favored game of football may be at risk all the way from youth leagues up to the NFL. And no one seems to know just what to do about it yet.

It is no coincidence that America’s favorite game involves bashing heads to the point where players suffer brain trauma. That’s how Americans live. We smash and bash and crash our way through history without apology. We even have a fancy name for our concussive obsession with being #1. It’s called American Exceptionalism.

Violence has a cost

But the habit of a nation so absorbed with its own violence comes with a cost. America as a nation has a concussion. We can’t seem to stop thrashing about even as our minds grow fuzzy from the slam-bang practice of imperialism.

To put a metaphorical point on the idea that America is concussed, consider this description of the effects of concussion from the Mayo Clinic:

The signs and symptoms of a concussion can be subtle and may not be immediately apparent. Symptoms can last for days, weeks or even longer.

The most common symptoms after a concussive traumatic brain injury are headache, amnesia and confusion. The amnesia, which may or may not be preceded by a loss of consciousness, almost always involves the loss of memory of the impact that caused the concussion.

The definition goes on to describe concussion as a ‘temporary loss of consciousness, followed by confusion or feeling as if in a fog.”

Welcome to a concussed America.

9/11 a big blow to the head

One could argue that the most recent big blow to our national consciousness was the terrorist strike on 9/11. America didn’t know what to do at first. We wandered our quiet streets trying to figure out exactly what hit us. By the time we figured out it really was just a lucky band of religiopolitical extremists, our President had dragged us into a war in Iraq. That’s where the blows to the head of our American self-image started with a display of Shock and Awe that, unbeknownst to most US citizens, would lead to a percussive series of events that would further destroy our credibility worldwide. It started with stark images of unmanaged chaos in the streets of Baghdad, wrought by the lack of an American plan once we knocked Saddam Hussein off his pedestal. That debacle was followed by images of tortured Iraqi civilians that struck us in the head like a force from a blunt instrument. And it was just that. The strike-first ideology of a leadership bent on world domination bounced right back and hit us in the cranium.

There were plenty of people who recognized what was going on, who had the guts to stand out of range of the war-mongering and media blitz that promoted war while giving Bush & Co. a collective pass in questioning the motives of an illegal and unnecessary war. Recall that America was still reeling from 9/11, but some of us cleared our brains quicker than others.

In an editorial written by Walt Williams 2004, the early warnings of political concussion were already being documented, “Sound presidential decision-making structures do not guarantee a successful policy. But the worse the decision process, the greater the danger that the policy devised will fail and wreak havoc on the nation when it is a major initiative.”

“President Bush’s decision to launch a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq is as good an example as I’ve seen of a severely flawed decision-making process producing an ill-thought-through decision that quickly became a nightmare as that misbegotten policy was put in place.”

Concussion. That’s what it was. And it kept on going for 8 more years.

Pulling back

Barack Obama has since pulled the majority of troops out of Iraq. Yet the damage wrought be mercenaries hired to run the operations in Iraq all those years is not easily repaired. Mercenaries are like the brain aneurisms brought on by concussion. They bleed us out from within. Just look at the billions spent and lost somewhere in the fog that was Iraq. We don’t even know where all the money went. We never will. Some of it apparently fell into the hands of our enemies. Nice work, fellas. But it was just a precursor of the loose-ended fiscal policy of an era with no accountability. We were punch drunk and stupid. Banks were running America into the ground and the mortgage industry was behaving like a manic-depressive on speed. It all had to hit us somehow. Then came 2008. The economy crashed. Was it really a surprise. Not to those of us who have doubted the apparently mad doctrine of close-fisted politicians from the start.

Concussion of debt

That whole doctrine put America is in fiscal and philosophical debt. Now it keeps pounding on us like a mean-ass middle linebacker with a grudge to keep. We’ve already wandered around for 10 years or so in a concussive state thanks to the original thumping dealt by Bush and Cheney who kept on hitting America with warnings of fear and terrorism while telling people to “go out and spend money” that no one really had. If Bush and Cheney had been football coaches instead of President and Vice President, they’d have been fired and kicked out of the American stadium for life for abusing the players. Instead we still have listen to Cheney being trotted out to criticize the American team strategy. That’s like the last place coach in the NFL pointing at the winning coach of the Super Bowl and saying, “He’s not doing it right!”

But it’s America. Even the losers get to speak out. The right to free speech is in our Constitution. That doesn’t mean we need to listen to our key abusers.

Through all that abuse of the Cheney years we simply couldn’t arouse ourselves from the national nightmare and brain-dead policies of neo-conservatives concocting their world domination schemes under shrouds of darkness. They even depended upon “black sites” to extract information from those they most feared. When darkness and confusion are allowed to rule, only darkness and confusion make sense to those who rule. That is the concussive mentality. We’ve seen it for years in the practice of sending football players with brain trauma back into the game. But American needs to be smarter.

National brain trauma

It is darkly comic that President Obama is supposed to fix all this national brain trauma with a wave of his hand. The Republicans who so vehemently oppose him started out by saying their only goal was to knock him out of office. More concussive talk. So ugly and stupid.

It’s no wonder their nominee in the last election amounted to the last man standing. They beat the hell out of each other for so long, no one on their side could believe what really happened. They still can’t. Romney stalked around believing he couldn’t lose, blathering on in debates, never worried whether what he or his running mate Paul Ryan said was the truth or not. “Fact checkers come to this (campaign) with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” said Ashley Connor, one of Romney’s aides.

It’s because the Republicans don’t know how to play nice. They’d rather die than tell the truth if it contradicts their aims. Democrats often fall for the same self-sustaining ruse. Americans can hardly recognize the truth anymore. That’s the result of our concussive state of existence.

That brand of hit first politics is beating the hell out of America’s confidence in its government. Of course that’s the way conservatives like it. They hate government because it actually requires the ability to slow down, consider the options and stop running back into the free market game without wearing a helmet.

Neo-conservatives want to privatize everything because they know that a smashmouth culture delivers great advantage to those with the biggest clubs, and we’re speaking both literally and rhetorically here. The clubbishness of America’s oligarchy is like one big fraternity set on hazing the plebes into submission, even if it takes a few strong blows to the head. If a few people die along the way or the economy teeters and falls over in a concussive stupor, so be it.

Leading with the other cheek

Perhaps it really is time to hit back rather than absorb the blows. Despite the admonitions of Jesus Christ to turn the other cheek, it is the current brand of killer Christians we need to fear most in some cases. The recent convergence of concussive smashmouth conservative politicians with an American Taliban determined to stone all those who disagree with their brand faux-Christian crusades… against science and civil rights, to name a few of their targets, is the worst concussive force of all in the American landscape.

The butt of a pistol

The other force of concussive politics is the gun lobby. Despite the recent and revealing documentation that more Americans have been killed within our borders by guns in civilian violence than have been killed in all our wars should serve as a patent illustration that we’ve lost our minds over the Second Amendment. The right to bear arms is a political brickbat in America. The concussions of repeated gun violence in Connecticut, Virginia, Illinois, Arizona, Colorado, what do they all mean? Here’s what they mean: Each slaughter of innocents throws us farther into the fog of violence. We are concussed beyond recovery perhaps. America may soon turn and shoot itself in the chest, to put ourselves out of concussive misery.

Sequestering our minds

Perhaps it is about to happen. The Sequester threatens to gut the economy, sending the nation reeling as if we’ve run into a glass wall of our own making. We’ll be bleeding out the ears and nose, puking our own economic theories of trickle-down economics and unrestricted spending (don’t forget corporate welfare and the military industrial complex, Eisenhower warned us) and the world will have little to say as we drag the rest of them down with our neo-nothing self-absorption.

We need help, people. We need to stand up and say, “Who caused this national concussion in the first place, and why do they keep doing the same things to us over and over again.”

Here’s a hint. It’s not Obama. Although his fondness for drone strikes might speak otherwise, they really reflect the need for America to pull backs its forces and gather our wits rather than throwing soldiers and fortune at the double-vision we’d have in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s time for America to get its wits back together again. America’s game of football is teaching us a lesson or two about what it means to recover from concussion. We can either listen or win up on the sidelines for good.

Note: This material is also published by Christopher Cudworth on Redroom.com

He’s changed my mind. Why Mitt Romney should be king.

October 22, 2012October 23, 2012 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Yes, Mitt Romney has finally changed my mind. After campaigning for what, 4 long years, or maybe 8, he has convinced me that he wants and deserves to be King. Of somewhere at least. We’ll talk about that later.

Clearly, he has all the qualities that the great kings in history have exhibited. He is clear about his convictions, despite the fact that they are prone to change at the drop of a hat.

The red hats of Bartholomew Cubbins vexed the King

In fact, do you remember that Dr. Seuss story Bartholomew Cubbins and the 500 Hats? Bartholomew was a humble kid who showed up at the court of the king and was instructed to remove his hat. But when poor Bartholomew tried to do so, another hat popped up in its place. This happened over and over again.

The king thought Bartholomew was being disrespectful in not removing his hat in the king’s presence. So the king ordered Bartholomew to be taken away and have his hats removed while the scribes kept track of all the hats that came off the head of Bartholomew.

If you think carefully about the core of this story, it is all about the perceived value of social rank and class. After all, does it really matter if one person takes their hat of in the presence of another? Only if we allow social rank to rule our conscience. Yes, in many circles, removing our hat it is a sign of respect. We all take our hats off at church, or when the Pledge of Allegiance is recited or the National Anthem is played. But it’s not that common anymore to remove our hats in the presence of another person. Unless they want to be considered royalty.

But poor Bartholomew had no control over the circumstances of his supposed show of disrespect. He tried desperately to remove his hat(s) before the king, but to no avail.

The king showed little compassion for poor Bartholomew. Rather than take an interest in the process by which the hats kept appearing, as would a scientist, for example, want to know how it works, the king simply grew impatient with Bartholomew and had him hauled off for disobedience and insubordination.

I won’t spoil the ending of the story for you. It’s always fun to dig up and read a little Dr. Seuss on your own. And while you’re at it, give The Lorax a try too.

Was Dr. Seuss a bleeding heart liberal?

But perhaps some people might label Dr. Seuss a liberal for writing a story about the apparent lack of respect Bartholomew Cubbins showed for tradition and authority. Yet that seems to be a common theme in America today. So maybe Dr. Seuss is just out of touch with today’s more sophisticated partisan politics.

But just for fun (in the spirit of Dr. Suess) let’s flip the tale of Bartholomew Cubbins around for a moment, and consider the behavior of the king from a metaphorical perspective. The king, after all, already had all the authority he could ever want on his side. He could do anything he wanted with Bartholomew the moment he saw that the young man could not, or would not, remove his hat before the king. In fact the king could order the executioner to cut off the head of Bartholomew Cubbins if he wanted. Kings have been known to do just that. Or have people tortured in an attempt to get at the truth. The king could have put little Bartholomew on the royal rack and had him stretched like a rope until his bones cracked and his joints popped like water balloons. Kings have done that as well to people over the ages. They have done so in full compliance with the church, in fact. And the church itself with its inquisitions and witch hunts has behaved in royally brutal fashion.

Romney does his angry King impression

Authority when tested gets testy. Hence the angry looks given by certain political personalities when their authority and worldview has been challenged. King Romney cast just such a look during the political debates.

Interestingly, King Romney in a strange, reverse twist seems to have much in common with a certain Bartholomew Cubbins, who could not remove his hats before the king. King Romney, by comparison, seems to take great delight in donning hats for a moment to please his subjects, then casts them off without a thought. He seems to care not whether the hats he dons represent the true nature of his beliefs. They are hats of convenience, suitable for a moment’s impression before his partisan and loyal subjects, or those he seeks to make into peasants for his policies, then thrown away without a thought. These hats are often the products of lies about King Romney’s true intentions. But appears not to care about that. King Romney has one mission and one mission only: That is to attain the status King, when he can no longer be questions or held accountable to anyone.

His own campaign refuses to allow facts to get in the way of his efforts to be King of America. That is a clear sign of a lack of confidence in the King to be truthful with his targeted subjects. Romney has developed the art of laughing off his critics and fact-checkers to a royal degree. His self-proclaimed attitude toward 47% of America is that they are lazy, unmotivated slackers who have no place in his kingdom.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

That is the language of a man who wants to be king, the man who literally states that there are 5% or 10% of the population with which he concerns himself, not the 47%.

Oh, sure, he backpedaled that comment later on, in full view of the public. But by then he was an Emperor With No Clothes. Because people saw how the king actually regards his intended subjects, with disregard for their humanity.

Yes, it is possible for a religious man like Romney to lose sight of his own core convictions when tempted with the potential to be king. He may have done great things in his life; rescued a fiscally trouble Olympics, crafted a health care policy based on practicality and compassion, and raised a family with full love and care.

But he has also disowned those very accomplishments, traveling overseas to criticize the London Olympics organizers, while also disowning the very structure of the health care policy that he helped draft in Massachusetts that provided a foundation for Obamacare. As noted, King Romney has also criticized millions of good citizens and family leaders with his disparaging statements about the “47” percent.

For Mitt Romney is a king who would rather knock the hats off people with whom he disagrees rather than consider the reasons they might need or choose to wear a hat in the first place.

King Mitt has clearly labeled the hat of Social Security an “entitlement” when in fact it is an investment-based insurance program. But King Mitt wants to hand over all that government-managed money (in other words: safe) to risky Wall Street Dukes who frittered away half of America’s wealth in the last great financial crash.

Or should we say financial crass? Because that is the plan behind the plan of Mitt Romney. Crass strategies hidden behind smiling facades of royal promise. American Recovery indeed. King Mitt has nothing but plunder and riches on his mind, the same manner of governance he applied at Bain Capital, that pillar of Social Darwinism and capitalistic gluttony. Steal the wealth. Dump the workers. Sell off the assets for a profit. Then claim you did it all for the good of the company.

He’ll take the same approach to running the nation as he did to running Bain Capital. Prince Ryan is is hopeful heir to the kingdom. They’re lining themselves up and even cheating the election process by buying voting machines, stifling votes among the poor and elderly. Anyone who stands in the way of the King and his murderous soldiers; men like Karl Rove, John Bolton, the whole lot of them.

We are all Bartholomew before King Romney. Our liberal hopes of social justice and economic parity are just so many hats the king wants to see knocked off our heads. And when the hats do not satisfy him because our mouths keep on talking, King Romney will let the executioner do his work. Cut programs. Slash budgets for Medicare and the EPA,

King Romney has already threatened Big Bird

public radio and the post office. Mitt hates hats. You can see the red glare in his eyes. He wants to be King. And that’s that.So let’s let him be king somewhere. He likes to store his money offshore, so let’s let him be King of his own little island somewhere. It can be a pretty place. He can have all the toys he wants. Ann Romney can play with her precious horses and Mitt can give his kids all the funny names he likes.

Just don’t elect him President. He’d rather chop off all our heads than listen to what Americans have to say about social justice and equity. And went he’s done he’ll pillage the countryside looking for the last person who thinks they’re entitled to hoe their own garden and sell their produce at a roadside market. Because we all know vegetables are too well-loved by liberals. Real Americans keat red meat and live in red states. The King says so. Long live King Romney. He sure acts the part.

A short letter to Billy Graham on his endorsement of Mitt Romney for President of the United States

October 14, 2012 / Christopher Cudworth / 5 Comments

The inscrutable Mitt Romney meets the intractable Billy Graham

Let’s deconstruct what Billy Graham has to say about endorsing Mitt Romney:

“It was a privilege to pray with Governor Romney—for his family and our country. I will turn 94 the day after the upcoming election, and I believe America is at a crossroads. I hope millions of Americans will join me in praying for our nation and to vote for candidates who will support the biblical definition of marriage, protect the sanctity of life and defend our religious freedoms.”

Well, Mr. Graham. You left out a lot, didn’t you? No mention of protecting the poor, a favorite topic of Jesus. NO mention of holding the wealthy accountable for exploitation of the country and its resources. No mention of protecting the earth as God’s creation. No mention of holding our former President and VP accountable for unbudgeted, illegal wars and torture.

Especially no mention of the inscrutable lack of accountability by Mitt Romney, who has changed his stated positions on every single position he claims to advocate, and obscured facts about his personal business and finances that more accurately reflect his cutthroat disregard for his fellow human beings. These acts make him either an untrustworthy leader or an outright liar. Or both. The recovery Mr. Romney needs to focus on is his credibility.

Billy Graham has endorsed an ideological chimera in Mitt Romney, and as such has sided with powerful special interests and a brand of prejudiced thinking that impinges on real American rights including freedom FROM religion as guaranteed by the US Constitution. Graham completely ignores that fact of law. His assumptions speak volumes about his anachronistic brand of religion and its lack of scriptural substance in an age of rational faith and Constitutional interpretation based on human equality, not religious prejudices.

Graham proves through his endorsement that a vote for the Romney/Ryan ticket is a vote to misappropriate American rights and freedoms in favor of a stilted worldview that sadly is also a misunderstanding of the very faith Mr. Graham and his ilk have long claimed to represent. The best illustration of this desperate grab for power and respect is the scrubbing of his own website to remove the claim that Mormonism is a ‘cult.’ Like Joe Paterno, we might be seeing another hero embracing power over principle.

It is possible to lose perspective in life when your legacy is bigger than your ability to sort out your priorities. Perhaps the influence of his now infamous son Franklin Graham has jaded the Rev. Billy Graham’s once famously wise counsel. Of course, fame ultimately has a way of corrupting judgment. Position has a way of undermining the will to discern what is truly right and wrong. And time has a way of destroying the patience for change.

All in all, Mr. Graham, you have gotten it wrong, made a spectacle of yourself and the presidential race, and intimated that our current President is not a moral and considerate man. That may be the most damning of all references in your endorsement of Romney.

Supposedly, Billy Graham, you have provided wise counsel to many Presidents. Perhaps you’ve even spoken with Barack Obama at some point in time. But what you have done now is reveal the sad political prejudice of this age, which is disturbingly ill-informed single issue voting as the premise for political loyalty. One would think a man of your stature would see beyond the narrow-minded views you express. But having heard what you now have to say, we can write you off as the product of a different age. One that never really aligned with the true path of faith, forgiveness and fruition outlined in the Bible. Perhaps you should read it again.

It really doesn’t say some of the things you apparently think it does. Or have you only read it in the presence of those who agree with you, and therefore have much to gain by doing so?

Jesus didn’t like those types of religious leaders. It says so in the Bible.

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