Poem: The Stars

This poem was inspired by my brother, whose name was Elisha, but we called him by his middle name, which was “Gudger.”  Affectionately, he was known as “the Gudge.”

I wanted to write something that wasn’t gloomy, wasn’t weighed down by human violence and abuse.  I asked Gudger for inspiration, and so emerged the draft of this poem.  The last line is based on a phrase he was considering for his own novel, “Fly Envious Time.”   

==============

The Stars

the stars,

so rich in seeds that grow our minds.

we blossom because the universe

blossomed.  that vast great garden

nurtures our gaze.

in our hearts dwell the fierce burnings,

strong because of our wonder.

ancient the candles perch,

cradling our trust. 

in the gleam of our awe

they lift us, among ballets of galaxies,

the many peaks our dreams to refresh.

how lucky yet brief our eternal

bridge of sleep, chasing such ecstasies

beyond the envy of time.

==============

Trump and Psychological Werewolfism

The Trump phenomenon has evolved my view of the human mind even further.  We are masters not only of deceit, but also of self-deceit.  We actively work against the truth by spinning the most plausible yet specious arguments possible.  The implications are almost impossible to bear.  Ordinary, functional, everyday citizens are capable of balkanized brains that foster division, delusion and denial.  This is not an outlier situation, but rather a pervasive norm.

These conclusions are based on the phenomenon of millions of Americans bowing down to the ignorant, lie-spewing, messianic bravado of Trump.  They accept it as fact.  They are throwing away the ideals of their country, democracy and freedom, and even pushing the risk of world war, while chanting for the construction of a great wall, and the banning of all Muslims.  These are people who, outside the context of politics, are kind and funny, hospitable and giving.  They are you and me.  And they are also the muscle working to foment a great catastrophe.

How can the soul-splitting power of fear and hate be neutralized?

As a lad, I thought it was as simple as using reason.  Reason, I believed, was efficacious; that once things were explained in transparent terms, people would ‘see the light’ and alter their behavior.  Although I must have been disabused of the pure notion relatively quickly, I clung to the postulate that rational arguments could win the day, if presented in earnest, at least in relation to most people. 

The ‘smart’ part of the human mind outweighed the stubbornly psychological.  This was my root.  A lot of social paradigms are built on the concept of the ‘rational, autonomous person.’  Democracy rests on the good sense of individuals to make choices that foster the common weal.  Economic theory embraces ‘rational, self-interested agents’.  And so on.  I was spurred in my assumptions by the theoretical paragons of our time.

It’s all a lie.  This paean to human clarity, embodied in our ideals, is hideously wrong.  Trumpism epitomizes what I should have known already.  Even a casual study of fascist states reveals it.  Humans are far more psychological than rational.  They can be drawn under the banner of a “great lie” at certain critical times, when currents of frustration and fear merge into a seething undertow. 

What this means is that the truth can be right before us, even the most basic empirical evidence, and we won’t see it.  We can’t see.  The psychological bends perception and reason to its preferences.  In bland professional jargon: confirmation bias occurs.

Denial of such magnitude takes vast internal machinery.  What I have come to realize is that we are all far more like those with multiple personality disorder than we think.  Minds split into warring internal factions.  Mental balkanization allows us to know the truth but also to lie and embrace, not the truth, but the lie.

It follows that humans can be rational in some ways and irrational in others.  We are selective, subconscious and stubborn. 

There even can be awareness of the contradiction.  The addict knows their behavior is wrong, and yet just can’t stop.  One part of the mind sees a cliff ahead; another weaves counterarguments, injects exemptions--and pushes down on the pedal.

Consider dreams.  The mind spins scenarios much larger than the individual self.  It creates dream people, dream places, quasi-realities and moods.  Dreams demonstrate that the mind is much bigger than the self.  It forms alter-selves, cousins of the “alters” that affect those with dissociative disorders.

It is not that the followers of Trump are stupid.  One part of their mind knows he is a snake oil barker, a narcissist without conscience, a virulent racist, a trafficker in fear.  This part of their mind knows he could start a world war, one likely to end civilization as we know it.  They know all this. But another part of them shuts down this discernment.  It keeps truth out of the spotlight.  It holds the keys to the penitentiary of repression.

The mechanism of this denial is evolutionary.  If fear is great enough, the focus of that fear becomes extraordinarily important.  I suppose this worked well when humans were commonly threatened by sabretooths and cave bears.  It worked absurdly and slaughterously during the thousands of years in which city states and nations warred against each other.  In the nuclear age, it won’t work at all.

Somehow, people have to learn to embrace the truth, even if it is intensely painful.  We have to stop blaming and scapegoating others.  When contradictions are exposed in our belief systems, too often the resultant ‘cognitive dissonance’ fosters prejudice, sweeping self-doubt and self-loathing into the darkest, most untouchable depths.  The sensitive ego flees from the agony of real understanding.

As millions of people line up behind Trump, sacrificing their freedom, dignity, and democracy to his complete lack of virtue, his bottomless and destructive need for attention, his addiction to endless, escalating conflict, it exposes, in a monstrous way, not only the fragility of the human grip on wisdom, but also a propensity to capitulate to fear.  The Trump spectacle is the most tragic example of human folly I have witnessed in my lifetime.

I understand that politicians like Clinton and Bush are incredibly corrupt.  And it is intensely anger-provoking to watch them lie to us with pleasant faces, offering fake assurances, while channeling more and more money to the richest one-tenth of one percent.  Under Bush, the economy crashed worse than it has since 1929.  People are suffering due to entrenched oligarchic avarice.  I’m hornet-hive mad about this.  We all should be, and yet--

The answer is not Hitleresque fascism.

In other circumstances, it would be intriguing to ponder the mind’s plasticity, its ability to split into various houses.  But right now this compartmentalization is a national menace:  the dominant part of the Trumpite mind is immune to clear reason.  It also thrives on any misery inflicted on liberals.  Fear and hate reign in such a psyche.  That part which could hear has withered like a flower without sunlight.

Although I don’t believe in Biblical Revelation, if there were a Satan, wouldn’t his surrogate be someone positioned at the head of an Empire, someone capable of destroying all humanity by fire?  Someone who lacked any virtue, who debauched hundreds of millions of hearts, co-opting them into a crusade of violence, despair, and murderous abandon? 

I haven’t even mentioned the anti-science of the Republican view that global warming is just a hoax.

I’ve never seen anything like the Trumpian descent before.  I feel I am watching the end unfold quite rapidly.  It’s very sad.

Lost Between Ant and Angel

            At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US had racial segregation, and yet the Civil Rights Movement was going strong.  Today, the rhetoric of Donald Trump is dragging us back in an immoral direction.  Not only that, he promises torture of our enemies, and he hasn’t ruled out nuclear options.   We can’t afford this mentality.  We can’t keep saber-rattling and rolling the dice of war.   Sooner or later, the numbers will add up to BOOM.  A single Russian submarine captain, acting on his own initiative when communication  was disrupted, saved us in 1962.  It was that close.

Even though our very existence is at stake, we are stuck in habits that override our ability to think clearly.  It makes us pitiable.  We seem hell-bent.  When I say “we” I mean Trumpism most of all; but there are plenty of levels of falsity and misperception.  Hillary Clinton serves the Wall Street status quo.  It is this corruption, the obese inequality, that laid the soil of frustration cultivated by Trump.  If Clinton beats him, and nothing changes (the rich keep getting richer while the rest of us sink), the next Trump-like contender will likely win.

In this election, don’t be sure that Clinton’s softer deceptions will win out over Trump’s violent ones.   Hate is strong and he is a master at bulking it.  Democracy everywhere is under assault by black-and-white thinking.  Demonizing the other.  Look at what just happened with Brexit.

The status quo (Clinton) wears the mask of togetherness and warmth, then turns around and stabs the masses in the back, say, with international trade deals that take jobs away.  At the expense of US workers, corporations become attractively ‘leaner’ and their stocks rise.  Clinton’s is a pleasant-faced treachery.  Give the rich cuts.  Hide the loopholes or argue that everyone will benefit.  Meanwhile many Americans can’t afford a doctor.  A few stitches costs many hundreds of dollars.

Trump points out the corruption, and coarsely hammers home the racism that Republicans have long used on the sly.  The white masses he commands don’t trust the old school Republicans anymore, not to carry out the segregationist deeds they crave.  They trust Trump, due to his virulence, to make good on his bigotry.  None of them, of course, will dare admit they are actually racists, even to themselves.  In this sense, they are as cowardly as they are selfish.

Clinton’s plastic smile can’t validate the people’s need to hear the muckraking truth about their government.  Trump gives them that, which generates trust.  He then manipulates that trust into a dark, unreasoning place.  His fascism will take our country, if not the world, down fast.  He will make the establishment’s twisting of the thumbscrews, carried out since Reaganomics, look relatively benign.  Trump might increase manufacturing, but fascist governments, historically, are disgustingly corrupt.  And they require hate, kind of like a drug.  The people’s anger must be diverted onto scapegoats:  immigrants, foreigners, liberals, feminists, and so on.  At the core is the strong insinuation, or sometimes straight up, of a superior race.  The superiority of the nation above all others is loudly trumpeted and taken for granted.

That’s what Trump will bring us, in all his narcissistic, reckless, delusional glory. 

He may not hew to something like Hitler’s Final Solution--gas chambers in concentration camps that starve inmates down to twigs--but he will be tyrannical and power-crazed.  By his own words, he will torture enemies, a net he casts broadly, and he will kill their spouses and children.  He needs the spotlight, and his preferred method is the immature aggression of the schoolyard bully.  Imagine someone with the temperment of the Queen of Hearts in Wonderland backed up by the might of the US military.

The one who has it right is Bernie Sanders.  He exposes both the fascist and the corporate shill.  Following the Scandinavian mixed model, he would directly subsidize the people, thus providing for basic needs and promoting dignity and self-actualization.  The standard mantra today is “jobs, jobs, jobs.”  No one asks about the quality of those jobs, whether they are soul-demeaning.  Whether they debilitate pride and extinguish the little candelabra of one’s hopes and dreams.

Indeed, those jobs, jobs, jobs often contribute to global warming, massive pollution and extinction.  The  short-sighted, greedy corporations don’t care.  Those jobs, jobs, jobs could be manufacturing the tools of war, that is, mass slaughter and death.

Scenario:  Trump starts a war to boost the American economy.  Roll the nuclear dice.  Rinse and repeat.

This is a terrible time to be alive, not because humans are worse than they ever have been before--in fact, there have been some fantastic advances in ethics--but rather because (a) global collapse is quite possible, (b) democracy is succumbing to fear, and (c) because of all this, whatever advances we have made in our collective awareness could shatter.  Human rights are a fragile thing. 

Are Trump’s followers simply so sick of humanity that they’ve given in to the desire to see it all blown up?  Do they embrace an obvious narcissist to make a statement about something broken inside us all?  Perhaps they have very low self-esteem and project their self-loathing onto others, but it’s not a matter of conscious choice. 

Research on obedience has shown that people not only hide from the truth, but actively fight it.  In so doing, they build cognitive filters that add up to specious worldviews.  Hence, if you point out the racism of Trump’s platform, you are called the racist.  You are taunted.  Any weakness in anything you say or do is used as a fulcrum to belittle and hurt you.  Anything to keep from looking at the truth.

There was a study in which  two lines were placed together on a chalkboard.  One was much shorter than the other.  Under peer pressure from strangers, however, subjects would say the lines were equal in length.  They repeated the obvious lie.  Further research showed that subjects were not just dissembling to fit in.  They came to truly believe that two lines of very different length were actually the same.  This is the kind of creature we are, capable of deluding our perceptions.  In evolutionary terms, solidarity with the group can sometimes be more important than the actual truth for survival.
Our neural nets are adaptive.  But such plasticity can ossify.  Some belief systems help to keep the mind open and questioning.  Others work to shut curiosity down.

 Trump is an ossifier.  Under his deceptions, millions upon millions of people can be made to walk over the proverbial cliff of doom, without even seeing the obvious edge.

We're all vulnerable.  Most sadly, once we become locked in knee-jerk, know-nothing, unethical habits, how are we any different from ants?

In this fashion, we are judged by how we think, and what that makes us become.  There are many possibilities, both for flourishing--to truly seek after the ways of angels--or wilted desecration.

---------------------

           

Poem: Last Ride

This poem is from my chapbook, Cantabile of Whims.  My friend Jon Wing Lum liked this little collection.  He died recently.  He was a great man.

--------

Last Ride

a vole scrabbles

to unlock a cactus nest,

leans into the hush of owl talons,

seeing with a last glimpse

an earth-brown rattlesnake

swallow a blue egg;

and a moon that rears parched,

hissing over a pilgrimage

of tarantulas.

beyond gallows of racked joshuas

and tanblack capes,

somber mesas confer,

as close to a Great Judge

as doomed squeaks will ever get.

and farther away,

tawny as sand,

a dislocated cougar

slouching through the heat waves,

prowling their miles.

--------------------------