Return to the Beginning

I had my first “Oh shit, this is really happening,” moment in regards to the fallout from climate change this week as three weather-related stories stacked up in my mind like three consecutive flights approaching Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. In no particular order, the trifecta of scary weather is as follows:

• The American south, where winter is typically more of a fashion opportunity than an actual season (why do home sapiens look so good in layers?), is covered in up to an inch of ice, with nearly a half million homes out of power. And where “It’s not unreasonable to expect that Atlanta- sometimes known as ‘the city in a forest’- could lose a quarter of its trees in this storm.” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/02/12/atlanta-trees-ice-storm/5432571/)

• The rainiest winter in 250 years “has left parts of southern England under water,” where, it is interesting to note, the climate change doubting Conservative party Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has overseen a 40% cut in funding for adapting to climate change. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/13/uk-floods-essential-guide)

• A record summer heat wave on the heels of “Australia’s hottest year on record.” And not just the humans are suffering: “Bats are said to be dropping from trees en masse and kangaroos are collapsing.” (http://rt.com/news/record-heat-australia-animals-388/)

Given my personal history, it is perhaps no surprise that, for me, climate change is finally starting to sink in. Baltimore has been my home now for over twenty years, but, if I may be permitted to deploy the cliché that “home is where the heart is,” I have at least three more: the American south and North Carolina in particular, where I was born and where the paternal side of my family still lives, and where one of the enduring loyalties of my life, Tarheel basketball, lives and breathes (I still have the certificate from my participation in Dean Smith’s basketball sleepaway camp which pronounces me a member of the Carolina basketball program forevermore; if the forevermore part wasn’t on the certificate it was implicit, and overrides my subsequent failure to obtain admission as a UNC undergraduate.); England, where I traveled with my father and Bucky (his Mom) during my eighth grade year to explore the Gaither family genealogy, and where, not inconsequentially, I visited Wimbledon’s Centre Court, a pilgrimage that left its lasting imprint in the form of my steadfast commitment to serve and volley tennis despite never once having set foot on the grass courts for which it (my serve and volley game) is ideally suited (I play hard court tennis, a sport built from the forehand up; that my forehand is roughly as reliable as the Millenium Falcon’s hyperdrive unit explains why, despite a semi-booming serve, a steady slice backhand, and a poor man’s McEnroe feel at the net, I have yet to beat Steve. Hope, though, springs eternal; I may not have a new forehand, but I do have a new racquet!); and Australia, especially Western Australia, where I spent my junior year abroad, and where, having gone to boarding school with my sister and then to college with two buddies from boarding school, I was, for the very first time in my life, alone. Making Australia my introduction into the (solo) art of dying.

Up until now my approach to news of climate change had been that of a faithful initiate into The Tao of Pooh:

“ ‘How… will you know what’s going on in the world?’ I said.
‘By going outside,’ said Pooh.
‘Er…well….’ (Click.) ‘Now just listen to this, Pooh.’
‘Thirty thousand people were killed today when five jumbo airliners collided over downtown Los Angeles…’ the Radio announced.
‘What does that tell you about the world?’ asked Pooh.
‘Hmm. You’re right.’ (Click.)”

It is, however, more difficult to ignore the news when it’s about one’s very own assorted Hundred Acre Woods, and even more so when one can catch the (bad) news simply ‘by going outside.’ So while, like Pooh, I remain very interested in what’s for breakfast, I am also increasingly inclined to sleep with one eye open and fixed upon the existential threat of climate change. (I would note, before moving on from The Tao of Pooh, that ‘five jumbo airliners collid(ing) over downtown Los Angeles…” is eerily similar to the events of 9/11, as if the author, Benjamin Hoff, foresaw the 21st Century’s foundational event; in clicking the narrative off at precisely this point, Hoff as prophet would seem to preemptively cancel the preemptive wars that followed, but really just descends into the ultimate solipsistic act of closing one’s eyes in order to undo the world beyond one’s eyelids. Taoism’ s Wu Wei, or not doing, is no excuse for not paying attention.)

The problem with recognizing climate change as an existential threat is that it’s not the first such threat to our species in this epoch when there have been enough of us around to weather even e.g. the Black Death. That problem has to do with the nature of that first threat, nuclear annihilation. Having staved off the most likely nuclear doomsday scenario, the escalation of the War between the United Sates and the Soviet Union from Cold to Hot, existential threats of the man-made variety, which climate change most certainly is, just don’t seem particularly threatening. We have already gazed right into Nietzsche’s abyss, it gazed back into us, and we didn’t blink.

But, re: climate change, the comfort taken from winning the Cold War is as false as a Hoff-ian sticking of one’s head in the sand. In taking this comfort we are making the same category mistake lamented in the old Valvoline commercials: “Motor oil is motor oil.” I.e. all existential threats are not created equal. Nuclear annihilation, unlike climate change, had a built in solution in the form of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Once both sides had enough nukes, neither side could ever use them. Nuclear weapons existed in order not to, twisting Shakespeare’s most famous line into “To be is not to be.” However irrational the stockpiles of nukes that could incinerate the planet umpteen times over appeared, the stockpiles existed precisely because the players involved were all rational actors.

But if the world gone MAD was essentially rational, then climate change is an altogether different form of madness: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This Narcotics Anonymous slogan fits the current form of our addiction to oil to a T (an addiction acknowledged by none other than George W. Bush!). That form is the expectation that we can go on consuming mass quantities of oil over and over again and get different results as long as we reduce, reuse, and recycle, which is like a heroin junky pinning his hopes on the needle exchange program. Harm reduction is well and good, but us oil junkies need to go cold turkey. Which isn’t hyperbole. A sustainable climate would require Americans to leave a carbon footprint just 3% its current size, which cuts close enough to cold turkey to count like so many horseshoes or hand grenades. (http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/quota_GHG.html)

Narcotics Anonymous and its cousin Alcoholics Anonymous, with their emphasis on surrender to a higher power (Step 3), work for so many because, in the words of Carl Jung, “Sobriety requires a religious or spiritual experience or ‘conversion.’” Like cures like. Just so, addiction, an irrational disease, requires an irrational cure. And the varieties of religious experience, as documented by William James, meet precisely this criterion: “Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.” This is no discredit to religious experience; if nothing succeeds like success, then nothing cures like a cure. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

The question, then, is where does climate change’s “irrational” cure lie? The various great spiritual traditions may offer a clue. In my own tradition, the clue reads thusly: “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” In the Tao Te Ching, as quoted in The Tao of Pooh, the clue reads “Return to the beginning; become a child again,” and something similar is likely to be found in each of the traditions. Following this lead in search of a cure for climate change brings us to a children’s picture book, the very first line of which is:

“I am part of all I see,
And all I see is part of me.”

It is, of course, all too easy to dismiss the book, All I See Is Part Of Me by Chara M. Curtis with illustrations by Cynthia Aldrich, as so much “New Age claptrap,” to borrow a phrase from Terry Eagleton. The beauty (or curse) of such labels is that they enable us to categorically dismiss entire schools of thought in one fell swoop, leaving our own Weltanschauung unquestioned and completely intact. The Weltanschauung in play here, the one that automatically labels “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me,” as daft, is that lynchpin of modern western civilization, Cartesian Dualism.

When Descartes, with his famed cogito ("I think, therefore I am") split the mind off from the body, he set in motion a way of “being in the world” that can be boiled down to the seemingly harmless two-letter word “in.” (Heidegger’s use of the term “being-in-the-world” tells us that much of contemporary western philosophy, far from being a “footnote to Plato,” is actually a paraphrase of Descartes). Take away the “in” and you take away Descartes. Take away the “in” and you are left with “being the world”; more precisely, you are left with “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me.” The bet here is that the choices one makes “in” the world will diverge from those made “as” the world.

As everyone knows, “The Lord Giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Under the cogito’s lordship we have been blessed with the fruits of the scientific method, e.g. penicillin and electricity. It is nice to be able to turn on the lights, the heat and the internet while not having to worry about polio. But in the bargain, we are losing our ecosystem. It is also nice to have a planet to live on. But if our still-accelerating carbon footprint is any indication, the cogito’s signature accomplishment, the scientific method notwithstanding, is a great forgetting. We have, rather manifestly, forgotten the whole taketh away part of the equation. In our “addiction to oil” we are like a scratched record constantly (and, per Al Gore, “conveniently”) repeating “The Lord Giveth,” leaving the earth looking much like the mutilated stump at the end of The Giving Tree. In our devotion to the cogito we have “forgotten” that “the Lord taketh away,” even as the cogito’s scientific method reminds us that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Which makes the cogito’s great forgetting more accurately a great repression (and climate change the return of the repressed). What we’ve repressed, what lies outside our current probables and possibles, is that “We are the World,” a proposition that can only be put forward in pop music and children’s books. (To the degree that “We are the World” worked, i.e. raised money for Live Aid, it had much more to do with our love for Michael Jackson than for our neighbor, much less our enemy. When I was in the second grade I wanted to be Michael Jackson, which meant being able to moonwalk, wear fabulous zippered jackets, and be adored by millions of fans, and had nothing to do with feeding millions of hungry people, many of whom, if “Weird” Al Jankovic’s cover of Jackson’s “Beat It” (i.e. “Eat it”) was to be trusted, lived in Japan.)

If one can define something by what it isn’t, than the meaning of “I think, therefore I am” is simply the negation of “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me,” giving us another answer to David Foster Wallace’s question, “What the hell is water?”:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

Water, for our purposes here, is Cartesian dualism. For us land dwellers, it is the very air we breathe, which is why we literally choke on “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me.” As true believing Cartesians, it is noxious gas. The cure for climate change is hidden in plain sight in a children’s book because children are the last one’s left who haven’t yet internalized the cogito. Children, our only hope, are natural born (Cartesian) skeptics. If we “return to the beginning,” we just may find that “everything old is new again.”

Like Bugs Bunny, with Descartes and the cogito we took a wrong turn at Albequerque. Assuming we can all agree that the destruction of the biosphere is a wrong turn. It is always tempting to conclude that this was simply how things had to be, that this particular human journey was required if we were to learn the necessary lessons. But this way of thinking is a peculiar (convenient?) form of whitewashing which, more than anything, dishonors and disfigures the memories of those who have suffered, as if their suffering was some form of valiant human sacrifice on our behalf when in truth it was and remains a horror story. Not to mention the fact that it is yet unclear if we will learn the preordained lessons in time.

In Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll analyzes the “two-thousand year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism” with the basic assumption that something went horribly wrong and, more radically, it could have gone very differently. Carroll looks to a past that might have been otherwise in order to stake a claim on a future that yet may be: “To ask what was the alternative to European Christianity’s hatred of Jews in the past is to assert that such hatred is not necessary in the future.” Following Carroll, we must refuse to paper over the disastrous legacy of the split between mind and body as some sort of necessary dialectical step. We must assert that it is this very split which now sees us fast approaching a biological tipping point like light accelerating towards the event horizon beyond which lies, inexorably, the black hole. Borrowing from Carroll, to ask what was the alternative to the Cartesian manipulation of the physical world in the past is to assert that such manipulation is not necessary in the future. If the future has always belonged to those asking the right questions, then whether or not we have a human future depends on being prepared to ask just this. And fast.

Chilly is a Nervous Stuffed Snowman

My wife Jen has a friend who explained that should a nuclear attack ever come, and should she happen to survive the initial onslaught, she would immediately take to the outdoors and, along with her spouse and children, breathe in the radioactive fumes as deeply as possible, the better to assure a speedy and timely demise designed to preempt any prolonged exposure to the rigors of post-apocalyptic earth. My wife, on the other hand, is such a force of nature that it is all too easy to imagine her as the matriarch of Thunderdome, taking Tina Turner’s ruthless Aunty Entity in a kinder, gentler, and even sexier direction. All too easy but for, to borrow a line from Miss Piggy, moi.

Behavioral scientists have deduced that there are essentially two kinds of people: dandelions, who will thrive at the same basic rate no matter where you put them, and orchids, who are quite lovely under ideal conditions given their finely tuned sensitivity, but whose sensitivity turns out to be very much like Damocles’ Sword, placing the orchid at the mercy of social and material conditions which have proven rather less than ideal for the “unwashed masses” who make up the great majority of earthlings, past and present. Just try growing an orchid in your living room, much less planting one in a crack in a sidewalk where it can be trampled by people and peed on by dogs, and you will get a sense of the gulf between the world’s orchids and dandelions, a divide which, in comparison, makes the gap between the sexes about as consequential as mods vs. rockers.

Jen is the quintessential dandelion for whom radioactive sludge makes like Miracle-Gro. If anything, she would react to radiation like the X-Men, and develop even greater powers; her finger and toenails are already nearly as strong and sharp as Wolverine’s, and we don’t even have a microwave oven. But, as a card carrying orchid, I am as unfit for the post-apocalyptic landscape as Princess Diana, Emily Dickinson, or Vincent Van Gogh, three famous people on the list of Highly Sensitive People, i.e. orchids (http://www.genconnect.com/health/albert-einstein-nicole-kidman-jim-hallowes-list-of-famous-highly-sensitive-people/), and a trio whose respective biographies make life as a famous orchid sound only slightly more attractive than the post-apocalypse. (Here’s to obscure blogging!) So, if the nukes come, Jen and the kids will be joining me on the surface breathing in the fumes, Jen breathing the deepest , because if you keep spraying a plant with Miracle-Gro its gotta croak eventually. Unless she wants to have a go at single parenting while running Thunderdome, which possibility I refuse to contemplate, preferring to think of her as Juliet to my Romeo, our lives without one another unthinkable. (The Shakespearean fantasy, of course, is much easier to indulge for the orchid, who is almost certain to die first; would-be dandelion Juliets should think twice before marrying their orchid Romeos.)

The trouble with the orchid’s sensitivity is that we are sensitive to everything. Unlike Wolverine’s claws, which can be retracted, the orchid’s radar can never be turned off; we are, always and everywhere, taking it all in, which is why this orchid is always nagging his dandelion wife to leave parties once we have stayed long enough such that leaving wouldn’t be impolite, so that I can go home and recover in a dark, quiet room. My nagging is as ineffectual as everyone else’s (nagging is, by definition, barking up the wrong tree), and my darling dandelion has invariably sunk her roots deep into the party by the time I begin to give her my pathetic looks from the other side of the cheese platter, at which point I cope by retreating to a far corner of the inevitable toy-strewn playroom under the auspices of “minding the children,” none of whom are ever bothered by my self-sufficient parallel play.

One of the things to which orchids are exquisitely sensitive is the constant potential for disaster. At least, I hope other orchids share in this and it’s not just me constantly echoing C-3PO’s “We’re doomed.” This tendency of mine is exemplified by the role I played in a college party planning ritual. Prior to each party we hosted, my friends and I sat down to draft the official “Party Scorecard,” on which potential points were allotted for various celebratory hijinks. Maximum points were typically assigned to behaviors involving the various group totem objects, e.g. if, at the party’s climax, someone became so enthused that they spiked the oversized can of Bruce’s Yams (Bruce being the name of both the yam canning company and our group’s Gladwellian Connector) in the manner of a fullback spiking the football after a touchdown , or if the number of people we convinced to drink National Beer communally out of the National Bear was greater than 7 (in his first life the National Bear was a clear plastic cookie container in the shape of a teddy bear). My main contribution to the scorecard, beyond once suggesting that we see how many total ex-girlfriends we could convince to attend the party, a number I could barely influence given that there was at the time but one such extant ex-girlfriend (as a monogamist I don’t even rate the prefix “serial”), was in always insisting that the first item on the scorecard was “No tragedy.” On my watch there were to be no deaths by alcohol poisoning, gunfight, or drunk driving, nor any unwanted pregnancies. I can’t remember how many points we allotted for “No tragedy,” probably because it was, in truth, a placeholder for “Tragedy,” for which we would never have been able to accurately estimate the negative points. “No Tragedy” was the dot of yin in the party scorecard’s predominate yang.

It’s going on twenty years now since we held the last of our parties at the double-wide Baltimore row house we rented senior year, parties from which, tragedy-wise, we got away scot-free. But the potential for disaster still looms. Each time I leave my house I head back in for a quick check that the oven is well and truly off, lest my house literally explode in my absence. And each time my wife tarries at one of her evening social engagements without texting, I am convinced that she is dead. By the time she arrives home I have made my first pass through the five stages of grief and begun the contingency planning for single parenting. It is tempting to paint my ongoing fear of disaster as life’s constant background noise: death terror. About which death terror, more in a moment. But the interesting thing is that my fear of disaster isn’t limited to the fear that, in the words of Jim Morrison, “This is the end.” See above re: unwanted pregnancies, which are, of course, a beginning. See also my meltdown earlier this week, staged in the presence of all three of my children just to remove any lingering doubts they may have had that Daddy is wound a little tight, when the bag of Chipotle foodstuffs began leaking its juices on the interior of Jen’s brand new Toyota Highlander, a vehicle in which she has outlawed food consumption for just this very reason, leaving me if not in violation of the letter of the law, at least in violation of its spirit. The communicative intent of my meltdown boiled down, of course, to “We’re doomed.” Leaving me wondering whether I am actually afraid of death or, in punishment for violating the law, afraid of being cut off from love. Or, quite possibly, that the two are one and the same thing.

It was with the first of these possibilities, death terror proper, in mind that I recently encountered my cartoon double, and the implicit suggestion of a Buddhist solution to my hypervigilant death watch. Chilly is the stuffed toy snowman magically brought to life by Doc McStuffins, the lead character on the eponymously titled Disney cartoon. Chilly is described thusly on the inside flap of each Doc McStuffins book: “Chilly is a nervous stuffed snowman. He’s constantly worried that he will melt. But Doc always reminds him that he’s not a real snowman.” This is easily translatable into the following: “Chris is a nervous human being. He’s constantly worried that he will die. But Thich Nhat Hanh always reminds him that he’s not a real self.”

Buddhist sage Thich Nhat Hahn’s No Death, No Fear, is one of the most important books I’ve ever read in that it simply and straightforwardly outlines how the Buddhist experience of no-self means that the concepts of birth and death are just that, mere concepts, leaving death terror to dissipate like so much steam. Given that my death terror remains intact, my grasp of the book’s message clearly hasn’t translated into any meaningful progress on the actual eight-fold path, but Thich Nhat Hahn’s explication of the Buddhist encounter with death remains the most seductive of the approaches to death and its aftermath on offer in the three religions I know absolutely anything about. Full disclosure: I am not sure my wife would agree that I know absolutely anything about Judaism but for a few vocabulary words, and I’m not sure I would disagree with her, which we are attempting to remedy with reading assignments, an approach that, thankfully, spares me from actually having to talk with anyone other than my better half. That said, take anything I say below about Judaism with a grain of salt.

So in reviewing my affinity for each of these three religions’ potential as therapy for death terror, I may as well start with Judaism’s take on what happens after death, which, as best I can tell, is to not have a take on what happens after death. Judaism’s approach to the big questions about death’s end result appears synchronous with Wittgenstein’s “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” a synchronicity amplified by Wittgentstein’s “pass over” and Judaism’s Passover, as well as the fact that Wittgenstein was of ¾ Jewish descent. Judaism’s silence on questions of life after death has one significant advantage over that of Christianity and Buddhism, in that it is far and away the most intellectually honest of the three, Buddhism’s claims to direct experiential knowledge of no-self notwithstanding, because unless one has awakened to the insight of no-self for one’s self (Ha-ha!), no-self must be taken on faith every bit as much as Christianity’s promise of eternal life. Reading between the lines of Judaism’s silence on the matter, Judaism’s commentary about life after death appears to echo Socrates’ famous “I know that I know nothing.” As such it is not only honest, but accurate, and of little obvious value in the face of death terror. Because if there is anything we fear, it is the unknown. Judaism’s silence is, if anything, a call for courage. Meaning I’ll come back to that if I can’t find anything easier.

At first blush, Christianity appears to speak about what Judaism has passed over in silence, with its promise of eternal life. The first step of understanding eternal life is to set aside the idea of an eventual bodily resurrection for all true believers, marking it off as inaccessible, at least to those of us disinclined to fundamentalist readings of scripture. ( In the words of Jon Stewart, “That’s Episcopalian for ‘Shut the fuck up,’” i.e. a literal interpretation of the Rapture, with its bodily resurrection of those saved by Christ, necessarily also involves the Great Tribulation’s “worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) for the billions who don’t happen to be Christian, making the celebration of such a Rapture indecipherable from celebrating Hiroshima or Auschwitz.) Thusly understood, eternal life has as little to do with the Rapture as it does with the fantastic old Woody Allen line that “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” We can only define eternal life by what it is not, which is anything but immortality through not dying. Even God, it seems, can’t undo death and taxes. So eternal life involves death. After that, it’s pure mystery. So, is the difference between Christianity’s de facto definition of eternal life as mystery and Judaism’s silence in the face of life after death, at the last, stylistic?

If, then, death is a problem for which Judaism offers no solution, and for which Christianity offers no solution in the packaging of a solution, then perhaps neither is really all that different from Buddhism, which responds with something of an Alfred E. Newman’s “What, me worry?” in its assertion that there is, per Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Death, No Fear, no problem to solve. Which religion you prefer, at least as far as death goes, becomes a matter of taste: do you like your lack of information straight up (Judaism’s “Socratic” silence), on the rocks (St. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus built his church, is also the one who meets you at the pearly gates, which legend is another fancy way for Christians to say they have no idea about what happens after death), or with a twist (the Buddhist twist, of course, is that you can’t say anything about nothing). But whichever of the three you choose, if you want answers you still have to wait until you die. Which leaves me and Chilly still feeling a little unsettled.

My first reading assignment to expand my general fund of Jewish knowledge beyond its current meager mish-mosh is James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a history of “the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism.” In his reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust and its implications for Christianity, Carroll writes the following about death:

“The alternative to thinking of God as a ‘cosmic sadist…an eternal vivisector,’ … is to stand before the unfathomable mystery of death- the death of Jesus, the death of one’s own son, the deaths of the six million- without attempting to understand it, and also without attempting to deny its character as a terrible outbreak of evil. It is here that these questions break out of any narrow reference to religion, Christian or Jewish, to press against the awful anxiety that every human must feel in the face of death.”

Carroll clearly hasn’t been reading his Thich Nhat Hanh. But if we momentarily set aside the possibility that one can overcome death terror via awakening (making enlightenment something of an Odd Couple with the previously tabled Rapture; I see Jerry Falwell as Felix Unger and Thich Nhat Hanh in the role of Oscar Madison), then we can locate my constant Chilly-an fear of death in the understanding of death as “a terrible outbreak of evil.”

Humans seem incapable of perceiving the presence of evil as anything other than the absence of God; see the failure of every attempted theodicy as well as Jesus’ own “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Death as understood by Carroll, death as evil, then, is death as abandonment. Bringing us right back to my earlier question of whether the fear of death and the fear of being cut off from love are the very same thing.

Wait for it…wait for it… Enter, stage left, Sigmund Freud, by way of his signature “Tell me about your childhood.” Because it is in early childhood and its inevitable encounter with all too human parenting that we first experience the withholding of love, that we get our very first taste of death. Becky Bailey, in her brilliant manual for managing children’s difficult behaviors, Conscious Discipline, captures this process succinctly (just substitute “parent” for “teacher”):

“Most teachers accept the premise that when a child makes a decision an adult likes, the child has earned encouragement. This is demonstrated by teachers praising children for ‘good’ behavior. The underlying message is, ‘When you do what I want, you earn my love. When you ignore what I want you to do, I will withhold my love.’ Many adults have internalized this kind of thinking. Many of us desperately seek approval and try so hard to please for this reason. We act appropriately not because we love others, but because we fear they won’t love us.”

By this same logic, I would argue that we desperately seek God’s approval in the hopes that we will never die, even as we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that abandonment, and the concurrent outbreak of unfathomable evil, is inevitable. Even as we earn God’s love, “We’re doomed.”

Which combination of aspirational worthiness and inevitable abandonment is perhaps an even deeper source of Chilly-an anxiety in its collision with an obscenely reliable God. David Foster Wallace describes the latter in his novel, The Pale King, problematizing “the religious confidence that one is ‘loved unconditionally’ by God- as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with you, so it’s hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God.” It would seem that you can either have a personal relationship with a God whose love must be earned before She inevitably abandons you, or receive unconditional love from a God who doesn’t love you in particular, or even enough to abandon you. The latter God, whose unconditional love has nothing to do with you, may even explain the popularity of Western Buddhism; how can God have nothing to do with a self that isn’t even there. Seen from this angle, Western Buddhism can be defined as “You can’t fire me, I already quit!”

If it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all, then I would argue that it is better to have been a self and died than never to have been a self at all. This may just be my way of saying I prefer my religion on the rocks, and not with a twist. Given my particular bias, the best antidote I’ve yet encountered for death terror may at first seem exceedingly facile. It is the observation that if we are terrified by the prospect of death, why aren’t we equally horrified by the retroactive annihilation of our absence from the universe prior to our birth? Hidden in this question is the insight that death itself is the much lauded “ground of all being,” is, therefore, hardly evil, and, assuredly, nothing new; if we fear the unknown then death is nothing to fear. “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return.” Moby, of all people, implies the very same thing: “We are all made of stars.”

As for the fear of withheld love, I can only say, as I did when a then 2-year-old Jessie Pearl spilled root beer on herself in our booth at the deli, there’s nothing to be done. (There’s always something to be done- Bubby sorted Jessie Pearl out with a single, well placed paper napkin. It’s just that, in the case of fearing withheld love, I don’t know what’s to be done.) And as for God, I would argue that Her unconditional love is a lot like Meatloaf’s “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” “That,” of course, is allowing you to live on in your apartment.

What's in a Name?

In his novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, in the space of less than a half-page, uncloaks the logic behind consecutive Reagan landslides in 1980 and ‘84:

“’In other words we’ll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We’ll have a tyranny of conformist noncomformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it’s so empty makes everyone terrified- they’re small and they’re going to die, after all-‘

‘Christ, the death thing again.’

‘- and whose terror of not really ever existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt.’”

Wallace shows us Reagan as Mobius strip, a surface with only one side; Reagan was never the rebel he played on TV, and everyone knew it, making his outsider persona part and parcel of the “tyranny of conformist noncomformity.” If I am reading Wallace correctly, we elected Reagan because we hated what we wanted, the safety of the herd, and wanted what we hated, commodified dissent. In sum, Reagan made it safe to go shopping. At the end of this passage Wallace, in so many words, reformulates Descartes’ cogito for the world Reagan presided over and which we still inhabit: “I shop, therefore I am.”

Reagan’s Mobius strip was on full display in, of all places, the United States Football League (USFL), a professional football league that operated for three seasons during the peak of the Reagan era from 1983 –’85. Like Reagan, the USFL purported to be one thing, a spring time football league existentially distinct from the National Football League (NFL) by virtue of its seasonal remove, while behaving like the opposite, a direct competitor for the NFL’s star players (e.g. Doug Flutie, Herschel Walker, Steve Young, Jim Kelly, and Reggie White) and its fans’ dollars. Soon after the 1985 season and under the influence of its majordomo franchisee, one Donald Trump, the USFL scrapped its spring football formula and prepared to compete head to head with the NFL in the fall; the league subsequently folded before playing a down of fall football.

The USFL existed as the reverse image of Reagan’s one-sided deception, promising something that people weren’t ready to admit they wanted, spring football, while actually delivering a real rebellion. But when the USFL dropped its charade and owned its rebelliousness, it stepped out of Reagan’s mirror and off the stage of history. With the USFL’s move to the fall serving as an announcement of exactly who and what it was, it was as if the ’84 Reagan re-election campaign had chosen its actual guiding ethos as its campaign slogan: “Greed is good.” Instead, the Gipper went with “Morning Again in America,” continuing the winning gambit of blatant deception, the image of morning sunrise as duplicitous as that of the rebel; everyone knew that Reagan’s morning was when you had to get up to go to work, which was all anyone had time for since, under Reagan, “Real weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers… took a beating, declining even more quickly than they had during the 1970’s. Today, the average real earnings of nonsupervisory workers remain far below those of 30 years ago.” (http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0704miller.html)

“If an ant were to crawl along the length of this (Mobius) strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip… without ever crossing an edge.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip). We are all ants, and, clearly, we are all still walking.

The tension between Reagan’s role as rebel and his function as puppet, which tension held together our “conformist noncomformity,” is illustrated by the USFL’s sundry mascots. There were a total of 19 mascots, and if we set aside the three franchises with animal mascots (Birmingham Stallions, Jacksonville Bulls, and Michigan Panthers), we are left with 16 mascots that can be equally divided into rebel and establishment categories, with the rebels the place holders for Reagan’s fiction, and the establishment teams representing his fact, both in plain sight where the truth is almost always found.

Several members of the USFL’s “rebel alliance,” if you will, took their inspiration from the mythic “wild west,” according to which myth the ultimate freedom may well have been the freedom from government bureaucracy (which is perhaps why Reagan, the ultimate anti-government governor, was a self-styled cowboy who was frequently photographed on horseback). These teams included the Arizona Wranglers, Oklahoma Outlaws (who merged with Arizona to become the Arizona Outlaws, in a kind of proto-Brokeback Mountain-with-gay-marriage moment, which, given that homosexuality is one of the ultimate forms of rebellion, makes perfect sense), San Antonio Gunslingers, Tampa Bay Bandits, Houston Gamblers (in the image of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” a solitary voice of wisdom who brings to mind that ultimate rebel figure, Socrates, not to mention the fact that the establishment is, if nothing else, risk averse, which is why the establishment is the house, and never the gambler, given that the house always wins) and the Orlando Renegades (which Renegades, of course, rebelled against the genocide of their people, which, bizarrely, means that the White team owners were honoring those who rebelled against their (the owners’) people’s efforts to accomplish that very genocide).

Two additional teams rounded out the band of rebels. If you look up the definition of the Memphis Showboats mascot one finds that it is both a) “a river steamboat on which theatrical performances are given,” and b) a “show off.” And while the Memphis franchise had the image of the river steamboat on its helmet, the mascot was really a celebration of “showboating” on the playing field, an act that was both a) Black, and b) outlawed by the NFL after its Black players began taking too many liberties with their end zone touchdown celebrations, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson’s “Funky Chicken” end zone dance proving the point that for rich white men nothing is more frightening than the funky. The Memphis Showboats were a celebration of the freedom inherent to all displays of funkiness. Interestingly, by playing it conservative and putting the river steamboat on their helmets, rather than, say, a picture of James Brown, the Memphis Showboats were amplifying their echo of Reagan’s undisguised misdirection.

Bringing us to the final rebel squad, the Pittsburgh Maulers, whose mascot was the figure of a hard-hatted worker wielding his mauler, i.e. a heavy long-handled hammer used for driving stakes or wedges. The hammer is evocative of nothing other than the hammer and sickle, and the wedge the worker is preparing to drive is between the establishment and the proletariat it seeks to extract its surplus from. This being Reagan’s America, the Maulers only managed to stick around for one season. Pittsburgh was allowed to keep the NFL’s Steelers, but only after agreeing to give up the Steel industry and its jobs, proud blue collar workers being consigned to the fantasy realm of giants and fierce dolphins.

In sync with Reagan’s up-is-not- down universe, the most prominent of the establishment teams were head-rebel Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals, which, of course, represented that signature American institution, the military-industrial complex. The Generals were flanked by the Chicago Blitz, symbolizing the American war machine, and the Oakland Invaders, who echoed Vietnam and presaged Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II. And since war is as much about treasure as it is about blood, the establishment teams included the Denver Gold, who also represented the Reaganite version of the golden rule: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” Joining the Gold were the Los Angeles Express, whose mascot, evoking American Express, was a reminder that a man is no longer as good as his word, but instead as good as his credit rating.

The Washington Federals, like the Showboats, play off of Reagan’s knack for obvious subterfuge, Federals seeming at first glance a repudiation of everything the doyen of smaller federal government stood for. But, of course, Reagan, the “symbolic outsider,” was in truth the ultimate federal insider, his legacy cemented by the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, the second largest federal government building in greater Washington. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Building_and_International_Trade_Center) Governments don’t erect monuments to those who mean them any harm.

The Philadelphia Stars, who later relocated to the DC suburb of College Park but were, nevertheless, renamed the Baltimore Stars, symbolize the mass media, whose job, with apologies to Casey Kasem, is to keep us reaching for the stars while never keeping our feet on the ground; any feet on the ground that aren’t army boots on the ground are at risk of organizing a union and going on strike.

The last of the USFL’s establishment teams, the Breakers, who played one season each in Boston, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon and whose mascot was a wave breaking on the shore, would seem a candidate to join the three neutral animal squads on the sidelines. But, again like the Showboats, the Breakers name had a double meaning, and one that was explicitly linked with the Pittsburgh Maulers. If the Maulers represented labor, Boston, New Orleans, and Portland were each in turn home to the (Strike) Breakers. It is no surprise that the (Strike) Breakers took up consecutive residences in respective American hotbeds of intellectuals (Boston), artists (New Orleans), and progressives (Portland); a (Strike) Breaker always goes where the work is.

I just started my USFL t-shirt collection. As a child of the Reagan years, it is only appropriate that my first t-shirt, purchased from Amazon, which as of December of 2013 had consistently and successfully prevented any of its US workers from unionizing, features one of the rebel teams, the San Antonio Gunslingers.

All hope, however, is not yet lost. Plans for an eight team revival of the USFL in 2014 are afoot. The very first city the new USFL visited was Akron, Ohio. (http://www.cleveland.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/06/akron_could_have_a_team_in_rev.html) Akron is known as the “Rubber Capital of the World,” is still home to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and “is considered the polymer manufacturing center in the country,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akron,_Ohio) meaning they still make stuff there, which, in post-Reagan America, is nothing short of a miracle, making it the perfect place to start a worker’s rebellion, if not a revolution. The stadium is already called the Rubber Bowl, and Akron Rubbers has a nice ring to it for a football team. Just got to be careful with the logo on the helmet. Some blatant deception, a la the Memphis Showboats, may be in order. I’m thinking rubber boots. (I also like the image below, available at http://www.awesomesportslogos.com/Montunos-Del-Interior-Cool-Tshirts-Funny-Tshirts-Awesome-Tshirts-Hilarious-Tshirts-Prodlist.html)