Spring Passover Moon
Category Archives: Politics
Semiotics. Up Close and Personal.
Spring Passover Moon
In a long ago TV program, the name of which I can’t remember, a character said of his Porsche, “It’s my carapace.” Yes. The vehicle we choose is a statement about us, carmakers learned this from the carriage makers. Kate and I drive a Rav4. It’s functional, unexciting, and a mostly serviceable way of moving from point A to point B. We bought it in a hurry when our Tundra had a fatal seizure not long after I’d given the Celica to charity.
But we’ve added a bit to it. First, there’s that damage to the front end, unrepaired. Long unrepaired now, maybe 2 years. That’s a statement. We also have two stickers on the back: Our House Runs On Clean Energy and Fin Del Mundo: Ushuaia. During the presidential campaign, we also had a Bernie Sanders sign. There is a small sticker on the side window for the planetarium in Boulder. Gertie and Rigel ride with us from time to time. Another statement.
I mention the Rav4 and the Porsche first because these thoughts often occur to me while I’m driving. Vanity license plates. Fancy wheels. Political bumper stickers. Coexist. Rainbow pride. If you’re going to ride my ass, at least pull my hair. Keep honking I’m reloading. Flagpoles on the back of the pickup: the red white and blue on one side, the yellow, Live Free or Die flag on the other. Gun racks. Lowriders. Bentleys and Priuses. The occasional Maserati or Ferrari. Maybe you’re on a motorcycle wearing colors. Maybe you’re pulling a boat, or a camper, or a horse trailer.
As a culture we have chosen our vehicles as a prominent way to signal to others who we are, or who we would like to be. I read an article that said the political leanings of a particular area could be sussed out by the number of pickup trucks on the road, the more pickups the redder the politics. I’m sure you could find a similar metric by counting Cadillacs or Hummers or expensive sports cars.
I used to have a ponytail and I’ve had a beard almost all of my adult life. Look at a woman’s nails, at earrings, necklaces, bracelets. All semiotics.
At home. Even the dogs with whom we live. Semiotics. Furniture. Art. Books. Rugs and window treatments. Semiotics. Both to others, but also, and often more importantly, to ourselves. Reminders of who we are. Or aspirational signals about who we want to become. Or, false flags, representing how we wish others to see us. The solar panels on our roof. The well maintained exterior of our home. Even the stumps of the trees cut down for fire mitigation. All messages to the world.
We are opaque. Who we are, what we mean in the world, is not evident from our bodies. We want to know, need to know, what others are like, but we’re very poor judges. That’s why stereotyping exists. It attempts to add semiotics to skin color or body shape. Because we want some advance clue as to the nature of the other. Are they are a threat? Are they a potential mate? Might we agree with them on something important? Could they be trusted?
We all know this, at least at a subconscious level, so we offer clues. Those Grateful Dead Dancing Bears. The menorah lit in the window. The stylized fish. The stylized fish with legs and Darwin in the middle. A Bronco’s sticker. A Viking’s sticker. A lacrosse stick. Somehow we feel these things reveal a portion of who we are. Make us less opaque, perhaps a bit more transparent.
As a long ago student of anthropology, these kind of things fascinate me. I offer no conclusions, other than what they reveal about our essential opacity and our desire to be known in spite of it. The wide range of these semiotics are perhaps more necessary in a diverse nation with no tribal traditions, no single ethnic heritage, no long history as, say, Franks or Germans or Spaniards.
Ratzon
Spring Passover Moon
On the art regret. (see post below) Realized that to solve this problem I need an intention, a purpose. I have an intention with writing Superior Wolf. I have one with translating Ovid. I’m developing one at Beth Evergreen, what Rabbi David Jaffe calls a ratzon, a deep motivation. I don’t know what my ratzon for art is, not yet, but I’m searching for it.
I’m reading Rabbi Jaffe’s book, Changing the World from the Inside Out. He’s coming to Beth Evergreen at the end of this month. His book is a mussar focused way of considering social change, utilizing this Jewish method of character strengthening to undergird work for social justice. A worthwhile read even for those who are not Jewish. Mussar, like kabbalah, looks at the world from a human perspective but through a Jewish lens.
My ratzon for political work, which I critiqued in a past post, needs sharpening, focus. Part of my problem with Fighting Trump, my previous title for articles I saved in Evernote, was, I realized, that being against something is a weak ratzon for me. I need to be for something and the Trump resistance tends to focus on opposing him. He demands opposition and resistance, no question about that, but I need to be working toward a just society, an equitable society, a sustainable society, a compassionate society, not only, not even primarily, saying NO.
As I do for art, I need a clear ratzon. Don’t have it right now, for either politics or art.
Scraping Sharp Blades Across My Soul
Spring Passover Moon
Modulating the call and response occasioned by Trump era politics in my own head has proved daunting. I’m not going on a “news cleanse” or planning to ostrich myself in the several inches of snow we just got. (though that last one sounds sort of good)
I did uncouple from the Idiocy of Donald Trump facebook group. It became too much though the posts were really funny. I also changed the name of my Evernote file where I save material relating to the Trump presidency from Fighting Trump to just Trump. Felt like I was scraping a sharp blade across my soul each time I saved an article.
All that feels right for me, so far. Yet. There is reading the Denver Post and the New York Times, both morning rituals. Today I noticed Trump doomed the planet by weakening compliance with the Paris Accord’s goal to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by 30% by 2030. That’s a key number because a global reduction to 50% by 2050, then zero by 2100 is the main hope the world has to stave off dire temperature rises.
There’s also the recent attempt by the GOP, with Trump’s assist, to kill 43,000 Americans a year by denying them even mediocre healthcare. Of course, as a cartoon I saw pointed out, bad healthcare is no problem if the planet gets fried to a crisp.
The lesson for me is this. Shut down the barbed rhetoric, Fighting Trump and the Idiocy of Donald Trump. No need to scrape those sharp blades across my soul. But don’t ignore, don’t forget. Stay aware and be ready. The danger is ever present as the climate change policy reversal makes clear.
State Sponsored Violence
Spring New (Passover) Moon
This disturbing documentary from the New York Times made me remember a long ago lecture on violence by Bob Bryant, my professor of Constructive Theology and my friend.
The gist of the lecture was this, violence exists on a continuum. At one end is extreme trauma meted out by instruments of destruction like bombs and bullets. At the other end of the continuum is violence perpetrated by neglect, by public policy, by omission.
President Duterte of the Philippines bends the continuum into an Ouroboros-like circle where his policy results in extreme trauma. As “I’ll kill you.” gets carried out by police, military and vigilantes, the rule of law, the notion of a system that can make mistakes and must be checked by the courts, gradually dies, too.
It would seem that Duterte is an outlier in both his rhetoric and the results of his policy. Yet consider this. Estimates by policy wonks about the number of people who would die in the USA without Obamacare suggest that approximately 43,000 a year-a year-would die from lack of medical care if ACA had been repealed and replaced by the Republican “plan.”
What Bob Bryant taught me was that the violence continuum was only about means, about tactics. The results are the same. If you die from a vigilante’s bullet in the Philippines, you are no more dead than a young child in the US who dies because they can’t afford an inhaler for asthma.
This is important to understand. It means the healthcare debate, for example, is not only about medicine but also about state sponsored violence. Even the debate about Meals on Wheels and the school lunch program are also about state sponsored violence. Framed in this way the matter is not one for think tanks and ideological purity but one for those who believe compassion and care are marks of a decent society, who believe government exists to serve, not deprive.
Shifts and Changes
Spring New (Passover) Moon
Writing can lay bare something hidden, perhaps something that needed excavation or something attached to a thread, even a flimsy thread, by which it can be pulled from the inner world. Things get lost in there, pushed behind stacks of unused memories or stored with a faulty label. Sometimes ideas once full and vibrant get partially severed from their context, crucial links of thought go missing and the idea fades away.
“I’ve continued to write and study, my primary passions.” March 21, 2017 This sentence is an example, a recent example. It stares back at me, rather baldly. Oh. Well, that’s right, isn’t it?
I love to read, follow an idea through its growth and changes, learn about something in depth, wonder about it, tease out of it new implications or old truths.
I love to write. I don’t know why. Might be an inheritance from my newspaperman father. Might just be long established habit. Whatever the reason writing is my painting, my sculpture, my photography. I have to do it to feel whole.
Which, speaking of ideas, then links to the idea of the third phase. That quote comes from recent thoughts on the third phase. A primary wondering for me, I think for all third phasers, is this: what am I about in this last phase of my life?
The Trump catastrophe, a miserable wound of our country’s own making, pulled on the 60’s radical thread always near the surface for me. I’ve been trying to put that mask back on, to become the political activist I once was. I felt obligated. You know, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
But it hasn’t been happening. I just haven’t connected with other activists. I haven’t been doing much more than writing about it. (a clue here, by the way) Grousing and complaining, yes, sure. But not acting.
Writing and study. Third phase. Beth Evergreen. With Kate I’ve found a community that cherishes study, scholarship, a community that finds writing an understandable vocation. Right now I’m thinking, wondering. Should I lean into my primary passions? Stay with them. Dig deeper. That feels right.
Here’s a confession, too. I’ve never liked politics. The person I become, the masks I put on then, feel far away from my core Self. Why then have I spent so much of my life in one political arena after another?
Part duty. For whatever reason I came out of Alexandria with fully formed political ideas about justice, equality, fairness. They were strong, rooted in the powerful union movement among my friend’s parents who worked for General Motors, reinforced by the liberal politics of my Roosevelt Democrat parents and then pushed toward action in the turmoil of the 60’s.
Part ego. It feels good to lead, to have people hang on my ideas, to see change occur when something I’ve helped shape makes things happen. But this is part of what feels far away from my core, introverted Self. That ego drive also presses forward an angry, demanding, often insensitive persona. A persona I dislike.
Part religious conviction. The almost random way in which I ended up in seminary, then the ministry came from following political conviction away from graduate academics and toward an institution willing to pay me to organize, to act politically. There was a merger of political passion and the prophetic line of a certain strain of liberal Christianity, even radical Christianity.
No conclusions here. Not yet. Just more of the shifts and changes, movements in my soul. Something will come out of all this. Not sure what. Not right now.
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Tweety
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
So, wiretapping doesn’t mean wiretapping. It means, well, whatever D.T. might have meant if he’d put down the phone, stopped tweeting (D.T.-tweety bird) and thought. Accusing a fellow president of spying on you is just another thing, something done for the hell of it, with no evidence other than a right wing nutjobs rants? God, how long do we have to put up with this guy?
He has allies like Congressman Steve King from Iowa’s 4th district, which includes Kate’s hometown of Nevada:
““We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”
While many politicians, including Mr. Trump, often try to back away from statements that offend, Mr. King amiably doubles down. On Monday, confronted about his tweet, he told CNN, “I meant exactly what I said,” adding that he would “like to see an America that’s just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same, from that.”
Mr. King, 67, represents the most conservative corner of Iowa…” NYT, March 14, 2017
We’ve gone pretty far down the rabbit hole, my fellow Americans. D.T. has made it safe for racist ideologues, smash and grab xenophobic thugs and robber barons. He’s leading the charge for a recision of the very modest health care program instituted by Obama. The current plan would leave up to 24 million, that’s 24 MILLION, souls without health care. This is not politics, this is warfare against the most vulnerable in our society.
Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey had this to say:
“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Hubert H. Humphrey
D.T. and his band of deplorable Congressfolk fail this test. An F. Cruelty is not only a bomb dropped from the sky; it’s a conscious decision to deprive fellow human beings of what they need to live and to thrive.
One Convenient Button
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
The Trump Song (to the tune of YMCA)
Imbolc Anniversary Moon