Summer and the Aloha Moon
“The Iron Age
Last was the age of iron: suddenly,
all forms of evil burst forth upon this time
of baser mettle; modesty, fidelity,
and truth departed; in their absence came
fraud, guile, deceit, the use of violence,
and shameful lusting after acquisitions. (Bk 1: 172-177)
…
Now men demand that the rich earth provide
more than the crops and sustenance it owes..” (Bk 1: 185,6)
Charles Martin, trans. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (published 8 A.C.E.)
By now you’ve seen the latest. (In)Justice Roberts: “…it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.” Answered in dissent:
“Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the dissenters, countered: “The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”” Washington Post, 6/30/2022
This on the heels of Dobbs and the decision making concealed carry not only easier, but paving the way for a possible elimination of any form of gun control. Not to mention the ominous foreshadowing by (In)Justice Thomas about LGBTQA+ rights.
And who knows what may lie beyond them since a friend who knows the law, Cousin Diane, pointed out that Loving v. Virginia is the case that gave the rationale for granting same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws against any one of a different gender orientation. If Loving goes, even (In)Justice Thomas will be in trouble. Course he already is. That Ginni.
A time of rampant unashamed racism tightening governmental control (oh, the irony) over women’s bodies will disproportionately effect poor women and women of color in red states. You know the demographics of the Deep South. Intersectionality on display. Classism and racism combine to grind down ever further the women of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Florida. At least now you can go to school and pray for them.
Groups focused on root causes of racism, classism, climate change, the abysmal state of American agriculture, and immigration get my money, my attention, and my hopes.
The High Country News is a progressive voice in the West, edited and printed out of Paonia, Colorado. In this issue it has a wonderful article by a Native writer, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, titled Environmental Justice is Only the Beginning. Here’s a taste of her thinking:
“Manifest destiny and technology-intensive modernism, amplified by the incentive of capital, have resulted in gross-mismanagement, and in many cases, total destruction of forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, wetlands, watersheds ocean and desert biomes and countless other ecosystems-all within a few short centuries of European arrival.” HCN, July, 2022, p42-43
Black Lives Matter, The Root, and the Southern Poverty Law Project are my go to sources about racism. I’m sure there are other, equally good organizations, but these seem level-headed, aimed at the goal, and actively pursuing racial justice in tangible ways. That tangible ways is important to me. Abstract theorizing is necessary. Yes to Critical Race Theory for example, but if that’s all there is, nothing changes.
Classism.org has an easy to grasp definition with a page full of examples. In many ways this is my core justice issue having grown up in a working class town in agricultural/industrial middle America. Many of my friend’s parents were faithful members of the UAW and got the benefits that accrue from organized workers facing down the bosses of multi-national corporations.
Many of my friends themselves suffered when Detroit did not do well as Volkswagen and Toyota ripped into their sales in the 1970’s. My hometown, Alexandria, as I’ve written here before, was never the same after. Two factories employing thousands of workers went dark over a few years.
Democratic socialism is the answer to oligarchy, but the oligarchs consistently use the boogeyman of communism, which they don’t understand either, to paint socialists as nothing more than Friends of Russia.
So. Why the Devil and the GOP? Because behind each ism I’ve discussed and the horrendous, terrifying decisions of this Extreme Court, lies capitalist America. And not just capitalist America but a few of its most rapacious winners like fellow gangsters Bezos, Gates, Thiel, and Musk. Straight Outta the C suite, brother. The oligarchs.
Our culture’s deepest injustices have their roots in the Golden Calf. Some believe it was destroyed at the base of Mt. Sinai, but it keeps getting rebuilt by frightened individuals who must amass more and more and more to feel safe. Gold is not safety. Gold is a prison, a place to hide from what you fear. Often it’s a place high up, surrounded by glass and looking out on the lights of the city below.
I’m not going to discuss right now how the oligarchs have convinced the white working class to fear the same things they do, but it is not accidental, and the story has it source deep in American history.
That’s it, then. The Devil’s party is the GOP. Not because they’re satanists, no, but because they worship an idol made of bonds and stock options. The GOP is the party of the oligarchs. Money in its diverse guises is their center of value rather than other people and the planet on which we live.
And, the Devil has taken control.
Friday gratefuls: Blue Sky over Black Mountain. A fading contrail. Sun hitting the solar panels. Wind. Muscles still healing. Luke. A sweet guy. So talented. Rabbi Jamie smiling, easy. Mussar. Kate’s yahrzeit tonight at CBE. Her plaque on the yahrzeit wall lit up. Kya. The road trip to meet her tomorrow. Ode on the Road.
Saturday gratefuls: Kate, always Kate. Pete and the chandelier. Better than I thought. More exercise. Call from Ode. Breakfast with Alan on Monday. No Mouse in the kitchen Rat zapper! Cool night. Wild dream. New Acorns. Still reading Amanda Palmer. Qin Empire: Alliance. TV. Outer Range. TV. High Country News. P-22, the Mountain Lion of Griffith Park in LA.
Presentation tomorrow for Groveland. Zoom. Quite the thing. Something I couldn’t have done otherwise. Devolution. Trying to follow David Sanders advice. Write as I talk. Still working on reimagining faith after all these years. Getting very close to what I saw originally. The key move may be asking why privilege faith in the unseen when the seen has as much power in our daily lives? Our whole lives. I will post Devolution after I’ve presented it. Happy for critiques, thoughts.
Ode called from the road yesterday. On his way to Taos. Blown away by the West. His sketchbooks, my blog. A daily discipline. Influenced by life in the moment. A confidant. To whom we tell our story. While other people listen in. Or see. Native to each of us. Over many years. A friend. He saw this similarity.
Healthspan. Asked Kristie about it. She said I could live 10 plus years with the treatments available for prostate cancer. Kristen, my PCP, said 90 was reachable with my current health conditions. Both positive and sobering. I mean, geez, even fifteen years. That would get me back to only 60. Not that long ago.
Saturday gratefuls: Award Winning Pet Grooming. Beautiful Rigel. Shaggy Sheep’s carnitas taco. South Park and the Continental Divide. Beautiful with Snow. McKesson Biologic. Erleada. Happy Camper. Cheeba Chews. Making dreams come. Driving on a Snow packed highway. Like old times. Park County. The Mountains. The Valleys. The blue, blue Sky. Warmer. Getting stuff done.
In a very real sense I don’t live in Colorado, I live in the Rocky Mountains. Colorado is the Denver Metro, the big ranches on the Eastern Plains, and the even bigger ranches in the Western part of the state. Here the dominant reality is Mountains. Streams. Valleys. Pines and Aspen. Mule Deer, Moose, Elk. Mountain Lions and Marmosets. Sudden changes in weather that can breathe bone chilling cold, bursts of vehicle covering Snow, hot and dry winds, and glorious clear blue Sky.
Wednesday gratefuls: David Sanders. Rebecca. Claire. Bonnie. Elisa. Snow. Coming down hard. Shingles vaccination. Safeway pickup. Rigel’s meds. Kep’s good appetite. Kabbalah Experience. Their classes. The kitchen. Mostly remodeled. The Mountain roads in the Snow.
It also allows for the sort of love I have with Kep and Rigel, with my ancient brothers, with Jon, Ruth, and Gabe. The sort of love that CBE has shown to me.
Next up tomorrow: getting started on kitchen reorganization. I plan to savor the opportunity to organize plates and silverware, herbs and spices, bread box and coffee maker. Getting them in places that will not recreate the clutter I had before the work began. When I see how long that will take, not long I imagine, I’ll call Modern Bungalow and schedule the furniture delivery.
The ADL’s comments on these revisions, which I have read and with which I agree, make me remember the adage that history is written by winners. While this may be true in the short term, the job of historians and educators is to balance the winner’s version with the facts of how others were affected by the winner’s victories.
This is far from trivial. The history that we learn in school becomes the bedrock against which we measure the veracity of competing claims in political campaigns, in discussions with friends, in making business decisions.
Wednesday gratefuls: Cousin Diane of Clan Keaton. Hanwoo beef. Seoah. Bulgogi. Backsplash ready to go up. Slight snafu in my bank account. Oops. My error. All better now. Bowe. Marina Harris. Being right, being wrong. Tom’s theme. American Day of Atonement. Missed it. Kate and her handiworks. Luke and Elisa, Torah and the Stars. David Sanders, Sefer Yetzirah. Voice and letters as creative powers. Kabbalists. Judaism.
The filibuster. You know. Gumming up the works all by yourself. Of the Senate of the still most powerful nation on Earth. Sure, there’s a risk. Always. If and/when the GOP controls the Senate, the Democrats would not have the filibuster. But. Voting rights? The Build Back Better bill? Standing up for decisions as opposed to obstruction. Right now that looks pretty good to me. Ditch the filibuster.
This morning I had my first Winter semester classes. Torah and the Stars: Astrology and Kabbalah, Pt. II and Sefer Yetzirah, chapter 2. One starting at ten and ending at eleven fifteen, the next starting at noon and going until one fifteen. Both dense. Astrology is dense because folks have been fussing with it since early China, India, and Mesopotamia. Houses, planets, sun signs, north and south nodes, aspects. Natal charts laid out against the chart of the day. Telling stories with Uranus the renegade and that emotional Moon conspiring to challenge a stolid Taurean. Still learning, still unsure how I feel about it.
Bracket the comparison to esoteric physics and the Sefer Yetzirah, a very early Kabbalistic text, stands on its own. We dipped a toe in the idea that voice and sound, especially when combined with letters, can create reality. The underlying question is the creation of something from nothing. If God spoke the universe into existence, what came before God’s speech? In this case God equates to the ein sof, the infinite, the unending. God as undifferentiated, alone, eternal.
The implication of the shattered vessel is that all things contain a shard of ohr, of divine light. The great work of the creation involves reuniting those shards of ohr with their holy source. The Kabbalist’s Tree of Life shows both a downward emanation from the crown, or keter, that part of creation closest to the remaining ein sof, to malkut, this world, and an emanation in the other direction which bears those shards of light back to their source.
Our form of government, far from the only one, is in danger right now of losing the mandate of heaven by basing its survival on the mandate of money. The weird part is that many folks most damaged by the mandate of money are the ones rebelling against the old democratic regime. Yes, it was a center right thing all along, but at least some progress got made and people weren’t dying by the thousands. So here we have the strange circumstance of rebels insisting on more corporate influence, more oligarchic rule, yet rebels whose own jobs are often in jeopardy.
In the U.S. however the oligarchs have a situation where the white population sees its share of the population shrinking, the sort of jobs its middle and working class depended on disappearing, while increasingly restive ethnic politics like Black Lives Matter strengthen the influence of the non-white population. The road to power still runs through the valley of white privilege though for how long is anybody’s guess. Uncertainty feeds the politics of ressentiment. Ressentiment is “a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon…” Oxford online dictionary.
African-Americans and perhaps to a lesser extent Latinos look to different Mandates. African-Americans had the mandibles of slavery instead of a Mandate of Heaven. Latinos had sufferance for agricultural work, but met resistance to permanent immigration. Both hope for a new Mandate of Heaven whose arc of acceptance would include them. In the eyes of these communities the American Mandate of Heaven, its Manifest Destiny, has brought them suffering and oppression, not good crops and disease free villages.
It may be time to give up the shibboleth of democracy and ask the hard question: Is this an effective form of government for our time, for all of our people? If the answer is no, as I think it must be, then what form of government will serve all of us? This might be the real question rather than trying to prop up a republic with arcane rules that serve the rich and not the poor.
Friday gratefuls: Tina at Morry’s Neon. Master Benders. Fun. Making the house mine. Finding Morry’s Neon, an urban pathfinding adventure. Jon. Cardio. Gut bombs. Jodi coming today. New washer coming on Monday. None too soon. Cities. I love them. But no longer want to live in them. The Pandamndemic. Orgovyx. Prostate Cancer.
Then, when Tina flipped a switch, look what showed up. Could have been Times Square or the Vegas Strip. I love neon and neon signs.
