Making the Unpredictable Inevitable

As I make my daily internet check of the news headlines, of which the outbreak of Ebola and the brutal beheadings by ISIS followed by the subsequent renewal of perpetual American bombing are but the latest typical installments, I am now realizing that I can’t even imagine a potential major news event that would qualify unequivocally as good news. The only recent exception, and an exception exactly because its glad tidings were so unexpected, was the announcement by LeBron James that he would be returning to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers after publicly jilting them four years prior in one of the biggest PR blunders of all time, pursuant to infamously “taking (his) talents to South Beach.” Perhaps there were just enough overtones of the Parable of the Prodigal Son to evoke that quintessential book of good news, the gospels. I would also venture that LeBron’s return to Cleveland qualifies as one of Alain Badiou’s events, which are described by Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins in Religion Politics, and the Earth thusly: “when a singular event occurs, it is an event, because there is something completely unpredictable or unforeseen, and it enables people to invent new ways of thinking and living in response.” Just so, LeBron’s return to Northeast Ohio from South Beach contains the radically new (for us) perspective that the best and most important place in the world is wherever one’s soul happens to be rooted. Before LeBron, moving from Northeast Ohio to South Beach and then, voluntarily, back again to Northeast Ohio was as unthinkable as reversing the flow of time. And while LeBron hasn’t reversed time, the event of LeBron’s return to Cleveland has shifted the flow of this particular river of spacetime that we call home in a slightly, but also noticeably better direction.

But outside of LeBron, the daily rundown of news headlines has begun to feel like a countdown to The End, each news item the tick of one more second off the fast expiring clock. When the news media, and the world, is experienced precisely this way, one particular piece of bad news mutates into the exception that proves the rule found in the inverse of “no news is good news,” i.e. all news is bad news. That exception, the bad news which gets translated into good news by the filtering effect of all the other bad news, is, of course, climate change. I know this because when I scan the daily headlines I always click on the articles about climate change in the hopes of hearing the good news that there is more bad news about climate change. And I know this because the people writing these climate change update pieces can barely contain their glee, too. Case in point, a recent Salon article reporting that the oceans are heating up more quickly than previously realized. (http://www.salon.com/2014/10/06/the_oceans_are_heating_up_a_lot_more_quickly_than_we_thought/) The article was subtitled “New data is bad news for anyone who hoped global warming was on hiatus,” but is understood by the Salon readership to actually mean “New data is good news for anyone who feared that global warming was on hiatus.” After explaining how the slowing of global warming is more than offset by a rise in the oceans’ temperatures “about 24 to 58 percent more quickly than models suggested,” the article quotes oceanographers Gregory Johnson and John M. Lyman’s assertion that “One could say that global warming is ocean warming.” (Oceanographers renaming global warming as ocean warming does sound a little bit like a football team’s offensive coordinator exclaiming that “the best defense is a good offense.”) From there, it is short work for article author Lindsay Abrams, whose byline identifies her as “reporting on all things sustainable,” to close by declaring that “In other words it (climate change) isn’t over. It’s just getting started.” Which, like her subtitle, comes off like appropriate handwringing about climate change, if, that is, one ignores the subjective heartbeat thrumming throughout the entire article. Subjectively speaking, Abrams closing thought is, quite simply, ecstatic.

This ecstasy is grounded in the political left’s understanding of climate change as the guarantor of the left’s belief that the future belongs to us. It is a vision grounded in the mythological narrative that the left has conflated with the brute facts of climate change. This mythology pictures climate change as the flames of late capitalism burning itself down, and then, rising from the ashes like a phoenix, voila, a new democratic socialism. Or anarcho-syndicalism, which is fine because it isn’t capitalism. As someone who traffics in this teleological fantasy as often as I scan the news headlines, “It’s just getting started” sounds like a battle cry of freedom. The fantasy hinges on the seemingly commonsensical logic that since it is abundantly obvious that globalized capitalism caused climate change, and since climate change is horrifically bad, then capitalism will at last be seen for the malignant cancer that it is and, at long last, be consigned to the dustbin of history.

The problem with this is that it ignores the first axiom of commonsense, which is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Which makes it highly probable that capitalism will be able to succeed in turning climate change into yet another business opportunity, e.g. by commodifying “sustainability” via a “green economy.” This process is already in full swing at your local Whole Foods and Toyota Prius dealership. Which is not to say that eating organic or conserving energy are bad in and of themselves, but that, like recycling, they not only won’t save us, but will also pave the road to hell with good intentions. (That intention, of course, is a “free market economy” that works for all of us, which is akin to running on a platform of “Elitism for everyone!”, making us the gullible fools who really believe the carnival barker when he says of capitalism, “Step right up, everyone’s a winner!”) This is not to say that climate change won’t ultimately render the earth uninhabitable, but to say that climate change may not present a “limit to growth” until that rendering is a fait accompli. Two metaphors may help. The first is of a giant balloon that keeps expanding right up until the moment it has sucked in the very last drop of air. Or, if you prefer, the Blob, which continues expanding until it has consumed every last molecule.

In short, we should be seeking our own liberation, and hope that in the process we save the earth, as opposed to counting on the death of the earth to save and liberate us. The problem is that just as I can’t imagine any good news other than more climate change, we can’t think of anything we can do to liberate ourselves. Our challenge, then, in imagining our liberation is in thinking the inconceivable. We should ask ourselves, “What is an impossible future?”, and start there. And if we lose our nerve, recall that LeBron is already back in Cleveland. So, because it would only be appropriate to close by putting a paradoxical spin on Badiou’s events with a line inspired by a sports movie, Field of Dreams’ “If you build it, they will come,” I would say this:

If we can think it, the completely unpredictable and unforeseen event is inevitable.

Definitely Maybe

You know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. Case in point: the Baltimore Sun recently reported on a City Council bill to outfit all 3,000 BCPD officers with body cameras. (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-09-22/news/bs-md-ci-police-cameras-20140922_1_body-cameras-police-brutality-baltimore-police-officer) The bill comes on the heels of several instances of alleged police brutality, including the death of “44-year-old Tyrone West, who died while he was in police custody,” (ibid) and an incident in September in response to which “Baltimore police officials suspended an officer shown on camera beating a man at a North Avenue bus stop.” (ibid)

To get a sense of how the proposed body cameras fit into the ideology of total surveillance, one must first situate the police within the structure of the surveillance state. Police officers contribute very little to the actual surveillance of the American citizenry; that function is filled quite capably by a slew of other actors, most notably the NSA by way of its monitoring of our email and cell phone accounts, but also by corporate America through the monitoring of its employees’ and consumers’ behavior. Regarding the former, if your job involves a computer your boss essentially knows your every move. And as to the latter, cameras are ubiquitous in brick and mortar stores, and every click on the internet is reduced to raw data. So, whether one is on-line, at work, or in the (“virtual” or “real”) marketplace, or even just in range of a cell phone camera, one is essentially in Bentham and Foucault’s panopticon, where a “single watchman (can) observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon) But if the police aren’t the panopticon’s “single watchman,” what, then, is their role? Which is where police violence, exponentially increased by police militarization, comes into play. Because if surveillance is the brains of the operation, police are the muscle.

Foucault was perhaps most famous for Discipline and Punish, a work exploring our panopticon culture. Playing off the title of that work, I would say that if we are disciplined by surveillance, then we are (corporally) punished by the police. Violence always carries a message. Where domestic violence says “This is our little secret,” and where terrorism of all stripes (i.e. including State terror) says “This could be you,” police violence now says, to borrow a famous phrase from George Orwell, “Big Brother is watching.” Police violence must needs only explode intermittently to serve its purpose; like the watchman’s gaze in the panopticon, just the fact that it might happen upon you is enough. Because, as Orwell explains in his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… you had to live… in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.” The NSA might be watching, and the police might decide to treat me like Abner Louima. The whole point of which “mights” is that it is, as Orwell astutely points out, safer to live in the assumption that maybe is, paradoxically, definitive.

You know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. This is just a fancy way of saying if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. By pinning our hopes for relief from police brutality on police body cameras, we are endorsing the very surveillance that police brutality announces. In doing so we are continuing to follow Orwell’s script, retreating from the rushing darkness by escaping into an enveloping darkness.

The old question, “Where are the police when you really need them?”, has taken on new meaning in our surveillance state cum militarized police. Once a rhetorical question, it now has an answer. They are on camera. And if you’re wondering whether this means you should be preparing for your big close up, check out the title of Oasis’ (bitchin’) first album, Definitely Maybe.

Asking the Impossible

I should be clear from the start that football has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. More to the point, it has been a pleasure, a source of joy, even. As a kid, I played back yard football whenever I could, which was more often than you might think given that the closest pick-up game was over a mile way, most of which was down a long dirt driveway. When I couldn’t get a game I spent hours punting and kicking back and forth across the front yard, which wasn’t much smaller than a proper gridiron (we lived in the country). During this same period a picture of the Heisman Trophy cut from a magazine hung from my bedroom door for years. In high school I finally got to play organized football, and I can still remember the twinge of melancholy whenever our coach got us focused in practice by reminding us that these eight or nine games a year were the last football games in which almost every last one of us would ever get to play. (We weren’t bad, top ten in Delaware my last year, but Delaware isn’t Texas so only a couple of us would go on to play Division III college football, and I wasn’t one of them.) I have watched football on Saturdays and Sundays in the fall since at least 1980, the year of the first Super Bowl to enter my consciousness, XV between the Raiders and Eagles, when we still lived in Pennsylvania. (My childhood dog, Riggins, was named after the hero of Super Bowl XVII.) And now that we haven’t had a TV in nine years, I’ve still managed to watch football on Sundays at my mother-in-law’s house. And any time my favorite teams win, I get a blast of dopamine in my head. I listen to sports radio, which is at least 75% football-focused in-season or out, every day that I drive my car. I check the sports page on the internet every day, and probably 75% of the content is similarly devoted to football. Most years I have a (losing) fantasy football team. (Like sands through the hourglass, so far this year my squad, Aqua Velva, has one win to two losses.)

I once heard it said that one shouldn’t make a religion out of literature, because it is at the same time both more than and less than a religion. Without knowing exactly what that means, I would both agree and say that this is also exactly how I feel about football.

All of which is to say that for me, like tens of millions of other Americans, football matters. It has emotional heft and occupies significant chunks of the synapses in my brain. Which has made the revelation in the last several years of the brutal head trauma suffered by so many professional football players, a pattern of trauma which simply isn’t captured by the word concussion, more than a little troubling, twisting football from a pleasure into a guilty pleasure, and not the kind we mean when we say we get a guilty pleasure out of watching Jersey Shore; i.e. we don’t think “Isn’t it funny that I’m watching this,” but instead think “Maybe I shouldn’t really be watching this anymore.” And that was before this month’s epochal scandal, the video footage of Ray Rice’s explosive domestic violence, through which we have arrived at a defining moment. But the question remains: definitive of exactly what?

The phrase looping around and around in my head as I try to come to grips with the punch Ray Rice threw at his beloved is this: the compartmentalization of violence. We expect professional football players to engage in ultraviolence on the field of play, and comport themselves as gentlemen everywhere else, which means that we expect the impossible. In a schizophrenic arrangement (as the term is used colloquially), one compartment holds David Banner, the other the Hulk. Unfortunately, aggression leaks and eventually someone pisses off David Banner. There is an old saying that if you keep going to see a surgeon, eventually you’re going to get cut (i.e., it’s what they do). By the very same logic, if you hang around professional football players long enough, you’ll see someone get hit. Inside and outside the lines. (The latter of which, ironically, is the name of the ESPN news outlet which has alleged that the NFL’s league office and the management of the Baltimore Ravens have engaged in an ongoing cover-up of what they knew about Ray Rice and when they knew it, which, if true, is a topic for another day. I would only point out here that the fact that the cover up is always worse than the crime is the universe’s way of insisting that we learn from our mistakes instead of denying and/or burying them. Okay, I will also point out that I don’t know which is worse, if I am Roger Goodell’s employer: that Goodell knew the videotape of Ray Rice punching his fiancé was in the league office -note that it has been factually established that the tape was in the office- and he has been lying about it, or that the tape was in the league office without Goodell having a clue, i.e. he’s a liar or a fool, as in a commissioner from the planet Krypton who supervised underlings without expressly warning them about the possible effects of Kryptonite on their beloved boss is foolish, indeed. But I digress. Okay, okay, one more digression- Another tragic aspect of all of this is that prior to the incident Ray Rice would have been the very last Baltimore Raven anyone would have imagined punching his significant other’s lights out. He seemed to be the embodiment of the ideal of compartmentalization, lethal on the field and a model citizen in the community, an officer and a gentleman, if you will.)

If the logic of “if you hang around professional football players long enough, you’ll see someone get hit, inside and outside the lines” is valid, it would stand to reason that the arrest rates for NFL players involved in violent assault would be off the charts. When, in fact, the arrest rate for NFL players in cases of non-domestic assault is only 16.7% of the national average. (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/) So, at first blush, pro football players seem to be the kind of guys you actually would want your daughter to bring home. But that picture drastically and tragically changes when you account for domestic violence:

“Domestic violence accounts for 48% of arrests for violent crimes among NFL players, compared to our estimated 21% nationally. Moreover, relative to the income level (top 1 percent) and poverty rate (0 percent) of NFL players, the domestic violence rate is downright extraordinary.” (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/)

Given that the rate at which American domestic violence cases are reported is found in research studies to be as low as less than 1% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_United_States), and given that the economic incentive alluded to above (“top 1 percent”) provides the victims of domestic NFL violence literally millions of reasons not to report, the depth and breadth of the NFL’s domestic violence problem could very well be unthinkably vast. The tendency of domestic violence victims not to report is also a stark reminder that the NFL players are, in one very grim sense of the term, rational actors in the perpetration of domestic violence; “we only hurt the ones we love” has been replaced by “we only hit the ones who won’t press charges.”

Although perhaps “rational actor” is a bit of a misnomer, implying as it does the process of conscious reasoning, when what’s really in play here is the unconscious process of displacement, defined by Norman A. Polansky in Integrated Ego Psychology as “turning one’s impulse aside from its original unacceptable target to one that involves less anxiety.” And, it goes without saying, there is certainly less anxiety involved in targeting those who won’t call the police, i.e. players’ wives/girlfriends, then everyone else they have the impulse to punch in the mouth. The classic example of displacement is the worker who takes crap from his boss all day, only to come home and take out (displace) his anger on the family dog with a swift kick. It is, then, the cruelest of ironies that the women getting punched and kicked by professional football players are also tagged by machismo locker room culture with the moniker “bitches.”

I am left wondering how to dole out the blame between the pro football players throwing the left hooks and we adoring masses. It is we, after all, who expect (and reward) the compartmentalization of violence, which is akin to expecting water to flow uphill. If we can say anything definitive about violence it is that aggression spreads. In this, it is no different than love. Violence, it turns out, cannot be compartmentalized; the closest it can come to disappearing is to be aimed at the vulnerable in the hopes that their invisibility will rub off on the violence. Which is why it is no surprise that within days of the release of the Ray Rice videotape, pictures surfaced documenting star Minnesota Viking Adrian Peterson’s alleged felony abuse of his son. In the National Football League, the compartmentalization of violence is code for violent displacement onto women and children. If Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson have accomplished anything, it is the removal of every last shred of our collective plausible deniability about that. Meaning Hannah Storm’s eloquent question to the NFL can be asked of all of us who love the game and feed the machine: What exactly do we stand for?

When Safe is Just a Feeling

Two key markers have appeared in what is almost certainly a response to the waves of school shootings that crested first at Columbine High School and then again in New Town, Connecticut, but which have lapped steadily at the national consciousness since that fateful April morning in Littleton, Colorado: 1) We have begun the process of arming our teachers (or, as we shall see in at least one case, they are arming themselves, or at least their vice principal is), and 2) We are beginning to militarize our school police, who, it should be noted, already come equipped with the standard issue Glock sidearm.

As to #1, The Washington Post reports that “The Argyle Independent School District in north Texas has started the 2014-15 school year, as KDAF-TV noted, ‘with guns blazing’ — or, rather, with newly armed teachers who have been given the right to use them ‘to protect our students.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) The Post adds that “In fact, nearly 20 states have laws allowing adults to carry licensed guns into schools.” And where schools aren’t proactively arming teachers, individual school personnel may be taking matters into their own hands, as, per Salon, in the case of one California public school administrator:

“Kent Williams is the vice principal of Tevis Junior High School in Bakersfield, California, and ever since he got his concealed-carry permit in 2010, he’s been bringing a handgun with him to work. Until recently, this wasn’t an issue (chiefly because other school administrators didn’t know he was doing it).” (http://www.salon.com/2014/09/10/middle_school_administrator_fights_for_right_to_bring_handgun_to_work/)
The Salon article goes on to explain that while Williams is currently on paid leave while the Panama-Buena Vista Union School District investigates matters (even as Williams’ lawyer threatens a lawsuit if Williams isn’t returned to the job), Williams faces no legal recriminations, with authorities “having concluded that his permit did not have any restrictions.” (ibid)

And regarding #2 above, the militarization of the school police, The Washington Post has also reported that “some school police in Compton will be permitted to carry semiautomatic AR-15 rifles — the same kind of rifle used in a recent Oregon school shooting – in schools… ‘in response to situations that clearly evidence a need or potential need for superior firepower to be used against armed suspects.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/21/in-compton-school-police-can-use-semiautomatic-weapons/) One can only imagine the potential crossfire, and wonder as to exactly how much better off we will be when our schools are battlefields instead of killing fields, i.e. will the post-battle carnage be any less than post-massacre?

Still, we’re used to cops with guns, and, increasingly, cops with military grade weaponry; the American police state is something of a fait accompli, sold to us as the cost of doing business in the post-9/11 world, and part and parcel of the national security state. No one says “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am” anymore, but we all know how to say “Yes, officer.” But putting guns in the hands of your friendly neighborhood seventh grade social studies teacher, whose private life could heretofore be politely ignored as long as the teacher’s use of social media stayed within certain unspoken boundaries but whose every sick day must now be parsed for hints of distress and/or despair, gives one pause. Does Mr. Johnson have a nasty head cold, or does his recent break up with his fiancée have him reaching nihilistic conclusions about the point of it all such that I think I will just keep the twins home from middle school for the rest of the week? How many of America’s 3.1 million public school teachers could hold it together long enough to e.g. meet the Argyle Independent School District’s requirements to “obtain a license to carry it (the gun), pass a psychological evaluation and get training in how to use the weapon,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) but who have absolutely no business packing heat on lunch duty. (Anyone who can effectively run lunch duty will have long since mastered the Jedi Mind Trick, and, it goes without saying, guns are much too “clumsy and random” for Jedis.)

When one reads, again in The Washington Post, that an Idaho State University “instructor carrying a concealed gun accidentally shot himself in the foot in the chemistry lab,” and that “students were in attendance at the time but luckily none of them were hit,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) one begins to get a sense of how misguided the effort to protect children by arming their teachers really is. One is immediately reminded of the infamous data, accessible via a quick Google search, that a gun in the house makes homicides 2.7 times more likely. (The pro-gun websites pooh-poohing this data are just as easy to find on Google, but the critiques are robustly parried here: www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm) And since there’s no reason to think that the schoolhouse is immune to all of the contingencies of the household, as exemplified by the accidental shooting in the Idaho chem lab, making it obvious to any rational observer that we don’t actually know how to make our children safe from school shootings and instead choose to place them at increased risk, then what are we really on about when we arm our teachers?

The answer, praise Jesus (or the Sacred of your chosen tradition ☺), is not that we want to place our children at increased risk, but that this increased risk is a (still deeply troubling) side effect of the adults’ own efforts to feel safe. We are pointed to this conclusion by two further Google-accessed data points. The first of the two involves a classic case of belief’s conquest of the facts on the ground; pace “2.7 times more likely,” “for the first time a majority of Americans say having a gun in the household makes it a safer place to be, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By a wide 51 to 29 percent margin, more people say a gun in the house makes it safer rather than more dangerous.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/) In other words, guns make those who possess them feel safer, even as gun ownership increases the risk of gun violence (e.g., “for every time a gun in or around the home was used in self-defense, or in a legally justified shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven attempted or completed homicides. That’s one self-defense shooting for twenty-two accidental, suicidal, or criminal shootings, hardly support for the notion that having a gun handy makes people safer.” (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/purple-wisconsin/184209741.html))

Our second follow-up data point highlights an inverse relationship between gun owners’ feelings and those of everyone around him: “By a margin of five to one, Americans feel less safe rather than more safe as more people in their community begin to carry guns.” (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/firearms-archives/) Apparently, “2.7 times more likely” means different things to different people. The confusion even extends into the home of the gun owner:

“Drill down on the 75% of the people in gun-owning households who think it makes their house a safer place to be, which leaves 25% who do not. Of those people who live in gun-owning households, 31% do not own a gun themselves. If you make the fair assumption that almost all of the people who actually own the guns think they make their home safer, that leaves almost all of the people who don’t personally own a gun, but live in a household with one, don’t think it makes them safer.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/)

In sum, school shootings are horrifying, and teachers faced with the possibility that such an event could happen in their school and in their classroom understandably reach for the feeling of safety that comes with a gun, most likely telling themselves that the aura of safety fills the classroom, when in fact they have only ramped up the fear for the children they believe they are protecting. This process, coping with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, is, tragically, the common coin of our stunted social realm. It is elemental, to speak in the Christian idiom, to our fallenness. It doesn’t have to involve guns or even physical violence; as part of our everyday human scenery it is called blaming. I do it all the time, especially around the house, no matter that when I am whining yet again about who moved my stuff where I can’t find it almost invariably I discover that I moved my stuff. And even if it wasn’t me, big deal, let’s try for some perspective here.

Since perspective is in such short supply when one is busy blocking out pain by offloading it onto others (see the whining), I have in the last few weeks started a daily practice for some help in this area. Each morning I visit www.random.org to receive a randomized number between 1 and 59, which is how many Lojong slogans there are. These slogans are, according to the dust jacket for Always Maintain a Joyful Mind, the collection which houses all 59 slogans with commentaries by Pema Chodron, “a collection of 59 pith teachings to help… develop wisdom and compassion amid the challenges of daily living.” Random.org promises me that the numbers it provides are truly random, not, for example, like the random function on my old CD player which always cued up the same sequence of songs on Tom Petty’s masterpiece, Into the Great Wide Open. Nevertheless, in the first weeks of my new practice several of the numbers have been repeating, i.e. I am hardheaded and need to hear things more than once before getting the point. (I think the Buddhists call this ego.) Yesterday, I got #34 for at least the third time. It is a pithy prescription for those who would otherwise cope with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, i.e. for teachers who would carry guns and for forty-year olds who can’t shut up about who had the audacity to move their cell phone charger cord.

So, for all of us, #34, with Pema Chodron’s commentary in parentheses:

“Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the cow. (Don’t transfer your load to someone else. Take responsibility for what is yours.)”

What's in a Name?

In the current edition of ESPN Magazine, Howard Bryant’s column delves into exactly why, in the wake of the events surrounding Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, so few professional athletes, including the many African Americans in their ranks, have spoken out. Bryant’s piece is highly recommended, touching lucidly on “fault lines of race and class,” and “the growing culture of militarism that is now everywhere in America.” But I’d like to use one peculiar, provocative element in Bryant’s column as a jumping off point for an entirely different conversation, if one that also sits unsteadily on “fault lines of race and class.” That subtle provocation occurs smack in the middle of Bryant’s report on the near-silence from pro jocks re: Ferguson:

“In the wake of curfews, arrests and tear gas, the St. Louis Rams offered tickets to the youth of Ferguson; some of the Washington football players held their hands up as they emerged from the tunnel before a preseason game, adopting the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ symbol of protest in solidarity with a community roiling.”

How ironic that virtually the only professional athletes in America willing to take the risk of making public their support for the Black folks, and especially the young Black males, of Ferguson, Missouri are the very athletes who play for a team whose mascot Bryant cannot in good conscious even mention: the Washington Redskins.

The controversy surrounding the Washington football club’s mascot has reached a crescendo during a summer which saw the team lose its trademark protection from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (a ruling the team is, predictably, appealing), fifty United States senators sign a letter urging the NFL to take action and force a name change, and the announcement this week by the New York Daily News that it will no longer include the word Redskins in its newspaper (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/sack-article-1.1926865), an announcement that follows on the heels of the hometown Washington Post’s editorial page announcing that it will no longer print the word Redskins either (though the Post’s sports page will continue to refer to the team as the Redskins). (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/washington-post-editorials-will-no-longer-use-redskins-for-the-local-nfl-team/2014/08/22/1413db62-2940-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html )

But before delving into the reasons that 71% of Americans still believe the team should not change its name (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/new-poll-says-large-majority-of-americans-believe-redskins-should-not-change-name/2014/09/02/496e3dd0-32e0-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html), and that team owner Daniel Snyder has, per NBC’s Al Michaels, stated that the team will change its name “over my (Snyder’s) dead body,” some personal history is in order. I have been a Washington Redskins fan since moving within their TV broadcast territory as a 6-year old just at the dawn of the team’s golden age, a ten year burst in which the franchise would bring home three Super Bowl championships under the guidance of likable obnoxious rich guy (team owner) Jack Kent Cooke, California surfer dude (general manager) Bobby Beathard, and nascent NASCAR kingpin (head coach) Joe Gibbs. Everything about the team was fun, especially the winning, but also the nicknames (Hogs, Smurfs, Fun Bunch, etc.) and the cast of characters, e.g. the performance art of Hall of Fame running back John Riggins passing out drunk on the floor of a White House dinner after telling Justice O’Connor “Loosen up, Sandy Baby.”

But all good things must come to an end, and before long Cooke was dead, Beathard was guiding the San Diego Chargers to their first ever Super Bowl appearance, and Joe Gibbs was winning the Daytona 500. The Daniel Snyder era, with perpetual mediocrity punctuated by brief bursts of total incompetence, had begun. Not even Gibbs, in his brief second run with the team, could put things right; he got the hell out of Dodge after squeaking into the playoffs enabled him to leave with his dignity, and reputation, largely intact. It hasn’t been much fun to be a Redskins fan for the last twenty years, and without the fun to distract you, there’s that name. Just sitting there. On my 1987 Super Bowl t-shirt. On my 1982 Super Bowl Coke bottle. Talking to me. Telling me that the reason I was a Redskins fan for all the good years without once even thinking about the implications of the team’s name was because I could. Which doing things because you can without even thinking about them is the very definition of white privilege. And I continued not even thinking about it even several years into the losing, until a girlfriend (now ex) who had worked actively to change the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek mascot as an undergraduate at Champagne-Urbana, looked at me a certain way whenever I used my MBNA Washington Redskins Visa card. Which is how my ’87 t-shirt is looking at me right about now. My privilege, singing “Hail to the Redskins” without ever once thinking about the words coming out of my mouth, was undone because my girlfriend made me think. Getting white folks to stop and think, and then hopefully feel, is the only way we ever change, and was the chief strategy of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance movement.

Fast forward to 2014 and, slowly, more folks, white and otherwise, are beginning to stop and think about the name of the football franchise that represents our nation’s capital. While 71% of Americans still think its hunky dory if the Redskins keep their name, that number is significantly lower than 1992’s 89%. And, his “over my dead body” stance notwithstanding, Daniel Snyder may be starting to see the handwriting on the wall, as rumors have begun to circulate that Snyder may be willing to change the name for the right stadium deal (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/shutdown-corner/former-gm--dan-snyder-might-drop-redskins-name-for-new-stadium--super-bowl-144942689.html). But given that the latter is currently mere internet speculation, as well as the fact that Snyder and his minions have been mounting an aggressive defense of their beloved mascot, including a creepy new charity campaign aimed at select American Indian tribes, the task of answering the arguments floated in favor of keeping the name is still at hand. The four most oft repeated arguments turn out to be, respectively, false, (almost) real, stonewalling, and ironic.

The false argument, and one put forward in bad faith, is that the name Redskins is intended to honor American Indians. This is patently absurd, mirroring other lies such as segregation’s “separate but equal” and Fox News’ “fair and balanced.” In all three of these cases, the lie functions to announce the real intentions (i.e., respectively, making sport of a dominated civilization, terrorizing Blacks, and shilling for the neoliberal militarists) in a socially acceptable manner. The truth is that using and maintaining the name Redskins is just a perpetual game of Cowboys and Indians, a game that has never been about honoring American Indians, but about casting them as brutal savages to be overcome by western civilization. Cowboys and Indians is the children’s version of a ritual, here being played by grown men and women, the sole purpose of which is to absolve (European) Americans of any lingering guilt over genocide.

The only (quasi) real argument being made in favor of keeping the name goes something like this: “You’re just a bunch of uptight liberals trying to ruin our harmless fun.” Real as in honest, if only honest to a point. Honest that it is a lot of fun playing Cowboys and Indians (Redskins fans claim to hate the Cowboys, when really we’re all Cowboys fans too, enjoying with our Dallas brethren the thrill of a victory that delivered an entire continent; the only difference is that we get to play the Indian while our Dallas brethren get to play the Cowboy), but deeply disingenuous in its denial of the incalculable harm done to an entire people.

The (not quite) real argument is closely related to the argument that is used more frequently than all of the others combined, i.e. the stonewalling maneuver of stating some version of “Man, I’m not into all that political correctness stuff.” This strategy depends on the logic that 1) all reasonable people recognize political correctness for what it is- a liberal mind control device that deflects our attention from attending to matters that are actually important, 2) and therefore anything judged to be politically correct can be dismissed out of hand, 3) and furthermore the concern over the Redskins name is a classic case of political correctness run amok. Repressed and implicit in this logic is the nefarious belief that the bloody history between European colonists and indigenous American Indians, not to mention the current relations, are of negligible importance. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter because the victors have already accrued their spoils.

The final, ironic argument is perhaps the darkest: “We must keep the Redskins name because it is a source of unity for the people of the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs.” Putting aside the fact that this so-called unity is entirely non-contingent on the name Redskins, i.e. it has been just as readily provided by the Ravens in Baltimore despite the city’s historic connection to the name Colts, let us note what we are really saying when we claim that the price of the unity between Blacks, Whites, Latinos and Asians is paid with the name Redskins: It (North America) is ours now.

Back Soon

If, like me, one’s spiritual foundation was laid down in the Christian tradition, one must reckon with a number of events which are, if one is in a religious mood, plainly miraculous, or, if one is feeling secular and (post?)modern, rather kooky. Among these are, of course, the virgin birth, walking on water, sundry healings, the resurrection, and the second coming. All of these, save the last, are in the past tense, the upshot of which leaves Christianity hanging on a prediction which can be paraphrased in two words: Back soon. Which two words, interestingly enough, are also at the center of a rather amusing passage in The House at Pooh Corner that may help sort out whether Christianity leans over into the abyss or leans back to pull us out of our own.

But, before we get to Pooh, a brief summary. Jesus’ account of the end times and his prophesy of “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven,” i.e. the prediction of his very own second coming, appears in all three synoptic gospels. The denouement at first seems to find Jesus putting all of his chips in the middle of the table as he tells us exactly when this will all go down: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” But then, one sentence later, it devolves into what can only be described as history’s biggest mixed message: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” A few verses later, the confusion is compounded: “the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” “Back soon” is scrambled into a garbled mess before the ink of “Truly I tell you…” is even dry; we are seemingly left to make do with “hurry up and wait.”

It is the garbled mess which brings us to Pooh. Twice. Because the key words, “Back soon,” don’t just appear in A.A. Milne’s second volume of Pooh stories, published in 1928. They are back again, one might say with a vengeance, in the 2011 animated film, Winnie the Pooh. And strangely enough, the two different readings of “Back soon” in the Winnie the Pooh universe just might inform our reading of Jesus’ own “Back soon,” which reading, on a grand enough collective scale, just might in turn help make the difference in the direction our material universe makes as we (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, Seculars, etc.) stand at the proverbial fork in the road.
On our first pass we turn to the passage in The House at Pooh Corner, in which Christopher Robin leaves his garbled version of Back Soon in a note, happened upon by Rabbit:

“GON OUT
BACKSON
BISY
BACKSON
C. R.”

Rabbit takes the indecipherable Message to Owl, whose modus operandi is to maintain an air of deep wisdom. Since putting on these kind of airs always depends on making things up (see all of western philosophy; not that this is a knock on western philosophy, it’s actually what makes it so damn fun and helpful, therapeutic even, as long as we remember that it’s all made up), Rabbit does exactly this:

“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask
you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is
just a—‘
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see
Pooh.”

We should note several crucial elements of this passage before moving on to the return of the Backson in 2011. Perhaps most importantly, there is nothing whatsoever at all about the Backson that is threatening. In fact, Owl from the very first imagines the Backson as a friend for Christopher Robin. Completely befuddled by Christopher Robin’s garbled “Back soon,” Owl has filled in the gap with something good. But something that is no less mysterious for its certain goodness. The “Spotted or Herbaceous Backson” is a friend, but beyond that we can say no more. Even Owl must admit “I don’t know what they’re like.” (Happily, Owl isn’t quite as far gone as your standard outfit narcissistic humanities professor.)

Fast forward eighty three years, and the scene in the Hundred Acre Wood has taken an alarming turn. With boss man Disney now calling the shots, both the Backson and his back story have mutated beyond recognition. To begin with, Rabbit has been elbowed to the periphery; with apologies to Piglet, it is Pooh who brings home Disney’s bacon, so it is Pooh who has the honors of discovering Christopher Robin’s note. Apparently Pooh is now the early Michael Jordan, and has to take every big shot, making Rabbit into John Paxson. (Tigger would have to be Dennis Rodman, and I think Eeyore would make a really convincing Bill Cartwright.) This much I could stomach; would that our only problem was the celebrity cult of personality. For a moment it even seems like we’re back in safe, familiar territory, as Pooh consults Owl about Christopher Robin’s mysterious note.

But then we remember that it’s the second decade of the 21st Century and violence is the air we breathe. We should note that it’s not as if A.A. Milne wrote the original version of the Backson story in the Garden of Eden; 16 million had died just a decade before in World War I. But if violence was already the out breath then, it is now also the in breath. Where Tolstoy once wrote of war and peace, we now have war and war, i.e. wars hot and cold and a subsequent peace dividend in the form of the war on terror. And where Owl once pictured Christopher Robin “gone out somewhere with Backson. He and Backson are busy together,” Owl now informs Pooh and friends “of their new enemy. He is a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/The_Backson) That the torture is put in Hundred Acre Wood context, the Backson is “responsible for holes in socks, broken teeth, aging, theft, catching colds, etc.,” makes not a lick of difference. Winnie the Pooh now lives in the same world as us, which is where Abu Ghraib and ISIS are. So, not surprisingly, Pooh and friends make their martial preparations for the Backson, preparing to trap it (evoking extreme rendition and Guantamo), or “to battle the beast if necessary” (evoking Iraq and Afghanistan). If this sounds daft or melodramatic, I would but ask if it is really mere coincidence that a 1928 Pooh story rewritten in 2011 includes torture as a central narrative element? (If Phase 1 of the American shift to the techniques of violence without limits was accomplished in the foundational act of the Cold War, i.e. the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima qua shot across Moscow’s bow (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7706-hiroshima-bomb-may-have-carried-hidden-agenda.html#.VASeFaCdCFI), Phase 2 began with the establishment of western democratic state-sponsored torture as the boundary condition for the Global War on Terror; in considering that the US was the first to think both of these unthinkables we should acknowledge that the first is rarely the last, and secondly hope that this week’s revelation of ISIS’ use of the waterboarding they learned from watching us (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/captives-held-by-islamic-state-were-waterboarded/2014/08/28/2b4e1962-2ec9-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html) is not a foreshadowing of a similar symmetry with Phase 1, i.e. ISIS, with its terrifying the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense stratagem, doesn’t seem likely to follow the logic of nuclear weapons as deterrent that we’ve all been clinging to, despite evidence to the contrary from 8/6 and 8/9/45.)

I would suggest that the twinned surges of relativism and fundamentalism (twins explored in the previous post, “Doubt without Doubt,” on this very blog) between 1928 and 2011 go a long way to explaining the link between first Rabbit and then Pooh’s interpretations of Christopher Robin’s “Backson” and the contemporaneous respective interpretations of Jesus’ own “Backson.” In other words, A.A. Milne and Disney were each, without knowing it, doing theology- and doing the kind of theology native to their time and place. In 1928, even after The War to End All Wars, it was still possible to believe without knowing; the Backson could be both Christopher Robin’s friend and, per Owl, something we know absolutely nothing about. And that other Backson, Jesus’ second coming, could still be understood exactly as it was described in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, which is to say our dear friend is on his way, he’s almost here in fact, although he’s altogether the type of fellow who’s likely to get held up at the train station for God knows how long, so we better use this time to get things in as good an order as we can.

By 2011, with relativism and fundamentalism in full bloom, one can either believe that it isn’t possible to know anything at all (relativism), or believe that one knows everything (fundamentalism); and since Christianity has by and large become the purview of the latter, Disney’s Backson is “a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” Which, natch, sounds a lot like the kind of (fundamentalist) Jesus whose “Back soon” involves the Tribulation, i.e. a “period of time where everyone will experience worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth before the Second Coming takes place.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) Except, of course, “those who choose to follow God,” i.e. the fundamentalist Christian God, “will be Raptured before the tribulation, and thus escape it.” Lucky them.

All of which is not to say that there weren’t people before 1928 who believed in the Tribulation, or that there aren’t Christians in 2011 or 2014 who believe that God’s infinite and reckless love and mercy extend to every last one of us. But it is to say that the latter has been divorced from what the word Christian symbolizes in the popular imagination, which I’d like to believe as recently as 1928 was (often) an imagining of a close friend who was nevertheless likely to appear to us as a stranger on whichever road we’re traveling. Instead, the symbol of Jesus on the cross has been reduced to a straw man for the relativists to stick their pitch forks in, and the cross itself has been inverted into the fundamentalists’ sword, whose literal reading of “I came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword,” is roughly as nuanced as understanding the “Open joints on bridge” road signs as an invitation to toke up.

As C.S. Lewis once said, “if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer… Going back is the quickest way on.” In this case that means going back to The House on Pooh Corner (this being a discussion of the second coming, it is hoped that the reader will indulge ending with a bit of repetition):

“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask
you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is
just a—‘
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see
Pooh.”

Doubt without Doubt

With In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic, Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld confront the warring but ultimately conspiratorial twin fanaticisms of cynical postmodern relativism and religious fundamentalism. These twins have become something of a contemporary Yin and Yang, comprising all, or at least almost all of the available social space. Relativism and fundamentalism are so entwined that Berger and Zijterveld go so far as to assert that they:

“are two sides of the same coin. Both are profoundly modern phenomena, and both are reactions to the relativizing dynamic of modernity. The relativist embraces the dynamic; the fundamentalist rejects it. But the two have much more in common than either one would have with a genuine traditionalist. Their commonalities explain why we said… that in every fundamentalist there’s a relativist waiting to be liberated, and in every relativist there’s a fundamentalist waiting to be reborn.”

Berger and Zijderveld have more in common with the fundamentalists than the relativists, if only by virtue of the fact that they reject, rather than embrace, both sides of the coin. Their rejection of relativism and fundamentalism relates to the quantity of doubt in play on either side of the coin: “If the danger of relativism is an excess of doubt, the danger of fundamentalism is a deficit of doubt.” Too much doubt, i.e. relativism, “leads to both individual and collective paralysis,” while not enough leads to “fundamentalism, religious or secular, (which) is always an enemy of freedom.” If you’ve been having the feeling that nothing at all seems to be getting done (exhibit 1, the US Congress), even as the foundations of our free society are slowly chipping away, welcome to relativism vs. fundamentalism (or, shall we say, relativism cum fundamentalism).

Berger and Zijderveld propose their solution in the guise of Goldilocks: relativism’s doubt is too much, fundamentalism’s doubt is too little, but somewhere in the “middle ground” is an amount of doubt that is just right. In fact, in a bit of a semantic sleight of hand, Berger and Zijderveld leave off referring to the quantity of doubt, and begin to identify doubt as a place between relativism and fundamentalism:

“The middle ground of all of this is doubt- a basic uncertainty that isn’t prepared to let itself be crushed by belief or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance. Precisely because it occupies this middle ground, genuine doubt can never end up in the many ‘-isms’ that people have invented and propagated. Doubt can’t be relativistic , since relativism, like all ‘-isms,’ stifle doubt.”

But it remains unclear how a plenitude of doubt is any less “genuine” than doubt in moderation. A glutton is precisely someone who eats too much. Just so, a relativist whose doubt goes a bridge too far is in trouble precisely because of the quantity, not the quality, of their doubt.

Ironically, it is differentiating between the quality and the quantity of doubt that just may deliver a cure for the symbiotic growth of relativism and fundamentalism. Berger and Zijderveld’s solution, for all of us to live on the side of the coin in the “middle ground” of moderate doubt, is troubling because of how easy (and tempting) it will be for us to fall off that narrow band back to either side of the toxic coin. On page 108 Berger and Zijderveld note that “doubt is the hallmark of the agnostic,” seemingly having forgotten that on page 6, in a riposte to the notion of advancing global secularism, they note “an enormous explosion of passionate religious movements” and declare that “it cannot be plausibly maintained that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of religion.” Last I checked, agnosticism was the opposite of passionate religious engagement. So we have a globe full of folk looking for passionate religious experiences who are somehow expected to be mollified by the middle ground of agnostic doubt. This sounds like the perfect recipe for more relativism and fundamentalism.

Berger and Zijderveld’s misguided solution asks us to be neither relativists nor fundamentalists. I would suggest that understanding the difference between quantity and quality of doubt will empower us to be both. Where Berger and Zijderveld ask us to live on the side of the coin, I hope to demonstrate that we can live on both sides simultaneously. The demonstration begins by opening the dictionary. Merriam-Webster offers two definitions of the word doubt:

“1: to be uncertain about (something) : to believe that (something) may not be true or is unlikely
2: to have no confidence in (someone or something)” (emphasis added)

Berger and Zijderveld’s error is in restricting their understanding of doubt and its role in our belief systems to the first definition. For Berger and Zijderveld, relativism and fundamentalism are, respectively, the conditions of being either too uncertain or not uncertain enough about the beliefs in question. The solution, then, can only come with the correct formulation of certainty about. But everything I am going to ague can be boiled down to this: we must learn to be pure relativists about our beliefs, while simultaneously being strict fundamentalists re: confidence in our beliefs. In place of Berger and Zijderveld’s “doubt about doubt,” which is intended to save one from relativism, I proffer “doubt without doubt.” In doing so I would note that Jesus said “Oh ye of little faith,” not “Oh ye of the incorrect faith,” while also noting the research which demonstrates that it doesn’t matter what technique your therapist uses, only how confident she is in using that technique.

In essence, I am suggesting a return to Hegelian dialectics, in which the thesis of relativism has given rise to its antithesis in the form of fundamentalism, and that the only possible resolution of the tension between the two takes the form of synthesis. In recognition of the greatest failed dialectics of all time, Marx’s dialectical materialism, and in solidarity with dialectical materialism’s vision of a class free society, but also in recognition of the genesis of a (brutal) failure in a stubborn blindness to the immanence of an immaterial spirit, I would like to humbly make the grand gesture of naming this doubt without doubt. Ladies and gentleman, I give you dialectical (im)materialism, in which a never ending doubt about means that whatever you happen to believe about God is immaterial, and your unwavering belief in an absolute mystery is the only material with which you can ever work.

Perhaps counterintuitively, in this era when faith is conflated with fundamentalism, doubt about is inscribed in the world’s various wisdom traditions. Doubt about is so central to faith that it makes up the first four lines of the Tao Te Ching:

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things"

It is also etched into God’s self-proclaimed definition, “I am that I am,” which in Christian tradition is understood as “at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name, and hence it better expresses God as what he is- infinitely above everything that we can understand or say: he is the ‘hidden God’ , his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.” (emphasis added) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am) It is only when we accept that our doubts about God should be “infinite” in scope that our belief in God (or the Sacred of one’s chosen tradition) escapes the orbit of relativism and fundamentalism. Thusly untethered, blind faith miraculously avoids all blind alleys, and the blind leading the blind means everyone feeling their way slowly forward in the dark together.

And none of this is an intellectual parlor game. Being human beings, we will still build institutions and craft rituals to buttress our belief in; the hope is that disarmed by doubt about we will refrain from killing on behalf of these institutions, but that our belief in will run so deep that we’d willingly die for it, again and again and again, as in this Lojong slogan: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.”

Being a human being, I can’t resist having a go at constructing my own edifice in order to have something to doubt about. Because I am constantly doubting about but always struggling to believe in, my edifice is in perpetual flux but ever present. Sometimes it hovers over me like the giant UFOs suspended above the world’s cities in V, at other times it’s more like a sore throat. This week it is a word, teleology, which is my way of saying that this universe is going somewhere. Outlaw theologian John D. Caputo rightly points out in The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps that “life is not telic because life is cyclical and circles have no end, and it is not teleological because any possible causa finalis is finished off by a final terminal blow. Life is and can only be its own ‘because.’ Life is lived for itself not for an end.” To which I would reply with my own outlaw definition of teleology, taken straight from my Dad’s favorite Joe Ely lyrics: “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.”

So my current belief about the universe is that it is going somewhere, and that it has extended us an invitation to a timeless party, which we will either accept or decline by virtue of our collective choices, i.e. we can contribute to where this is all headed if we so choose. But my current belief in the universe is that Ely’s lyrics are true, even if, to paraphrase the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we choose… poorly. (i.e. There’s gonna be a party, with or without us.)

"Welcome to the (food) desert of the real"

It’s official: my wife, Jen, and I don’t like to travel (although it goes without saying that we love seeing the ones we love so much that we travel to see them). Ours is not an aversion born of social conscious, like e.g. the folks I’ve heard tale of who will never again leave Oregon in the hopes of I’m not sure exactly what, but which almost certainly involves undoing the legacy of the Enlightenment while simultaneously forestalling climate change (whereas if I threatened to never again leave Baltimore I’d likely be deported to Canada, spiritual home of all threats related to one’s putative location). No, ours is a red blooded American antipathy grounded in the fact that everything we want and need is right here at home, i.e. this is where we’re comfortable. (Note the obvious irony in the fact that the initials for the old Soviet Union, U.S.S.R, when spelled in Russian letters, C.C.C.P., align precisely with what the initials U.S.A. stand for in 2014: Comfort, Convenience, Cat videos, and Pizza.)

So it was on a recent trip to North Carolina that, save for the fact that one can travel back and forth between Chapel Hill and Durham from La Quinta Inn on Rt. 15/501 without making a single left or right turn, I might as well have been in Rangoon. (GPS was invented for me, as my fear of getting lost is such that e.g. when travelling I typically like to give myself a four hour cushion when trying to find the airport, which makes my lack of any 21st century navigation devices either masochistic or evocative of Joseph Campbell’s observation that “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”) And save for the Kroger grocery store, located just one straight shootin’ mile from La Quinta on 15/501. Dazed by the combined effects of spending 6 hours in the car with my three children, the younger two of whom spend the full 6 hours combining the hijinks of Moe poking Curly in the eyes with weeping and gnashing of teeth, and passing the night in La Quinta Inn with our dog Sy, which felt strangely like sneaking into the girls’ dorm at boarding school (or at least what I imagine that feels like, given that the closest I ever got to the girls’ dorm at St. Andrew’s came during my visits to Ms. Blenkensop’s dorm-abutting apartment for help with my pre-calculus), entering through the Kroger’s automatic doors felt as comforting as checking to see whether I turned the oven off before leaving out of my house.

There is something about grocery stores. I submit that that something is the pinnacle of western civilization. In many ways the secular west is just a grocery store chain with a slogan: “Man cannot live by bread alone, but it’s a damn good start.” The secular west is also in many ways just an army, and armies, as we all know, march on their stomachs. And one cannot walk into a grocery store without feeling, even if just a little bit, that the world is at your fingertips, which feeling is, of course, the whole point of the secular west. The world is your oyster, at $19.99 a pound. And though I was far from home, the Kroger warped space and time with the very same assortment of Little Debbie products available to me in Baltimore, especially the Oatmeal Creme Pies and Star Crunch (which tellingly, like money, is a noun that can’t be made plural). Like Foucault declaring “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” the Kroger assured me that, appearances notwithstanding, “Ceci n’est pas North Carolina.”

But if we are to assert that grocery stores are the pinnacle of western civilization, remapping its coordinates by the logic to be found in “home is where the food is,” then we must go one step further and confront the mystification rendered by that elusive adjective, western. Go west, young man. To which we may reply, like the legendary Bostonian blue blood asked where she would most like to go in all the world, “But darling, I’m already here.” Unless, after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there,” there is no west here.

Case in point is Baltimore City, where you will find tens of thousands of civilized folks enduring sans (western) civilization, where “there’s no place like home” has given way to “there’s no place near home with any food,” a reality that has entered the popular imagination under the moniker of food deserts: “populated areas with little or no food retail provision… where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) This straightforward, intuitive definition can be found on Wikipedia, where, a few paragraphs later we learn that:

• “Remaining food retailers in inner-cities are gas stations, convenience stores, tobacco stores, drugstores, and liquor stores. A diet based on foods from these locations consists primarily of processed foods high in calories, sugars, salt, fat, and artificial ingredients.” (ibid)

• “Fringe food retailers in food deserts can have a 30-60% markup on prices, provide a limited selection of products and a dominant marketing of processed foods.” (ibid)

• “Areas with a majority of convenience stores have a higher prevalence of overweight and obese individuals, compared to areas with only supermarkets.” (ibid)

• “The availability of supermarkets in African American neighborhoods is 52% of their prevalence in white neighborhoods.” (ibid)

I.e. in food deserts you pay more for toxic foods that will make you obese and give you diabetes and heart disease, all because you happen to be Black. Or, as we say in western civilization, “Prevalence of food deserts in poorer neighborhoods is driven by lack of consumer demand, as the poor have less money to spend on healthful, nutritious food. From an economic standpoint, low demand does not justify supply.” (ibid) The logic in that statement, which is the logic of western civilization, boggles the mind: “Low demand does not justify supply” is just to say “You can’t be hungry unless you have money.”

Because you can’t be hungry unless you have money, Wikipedia goes on to suggest that “adding neighborhood supermarkets may have little benefit to diet quality across the income spectrum,” which is a fancy way of saying that food is not the solution to hunger, and that “the study of food deserts requires further research, including longitudinal studies of food environments, to support associations with obesity and to support neighborhood interventions,” which is a fancy way of saying “Let them eat (Hostess) cake.”

Note that “We now know that agriculture first evolved in the world’s harsh, hot, arid deserts, then spread to more temperate climes – not the other way around, as one might expect. All civilizations first took root in the deserts of the world.” (http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/du_peo_ancient.html) I take this to mean that as western civilization fast approaches its zero hour, (“zero hour- noun- the time at which a planned operation, typically a military one, is set to begin”; at this point is there any other possible ending?), we may find the roots of a new way of life in a most unexpected place, where we too might learn to endure in the desert of the real, where the demands of hunger are universal and, necessarily, graciously, so is the food.

Buckle Up, Indeed

Hilton Als’ remarkable genre blending and bending work, White Girls, in which memoir, essay, and fiction seem more like different musical instruments than different forms, includes a discussion of Richard Pryor, by way of a fictionalized first person account from Pryor’s sister, which asserts the following: “Everyone looks for someone to tell them what to do.”

Three pages later, looping back to the kernel of a thought much like Pryor returning to a joke from the first half of his set, Als’ (not Richard) Pryor expands:

“In actual fact, no one can handle vast quantities of power or fame. Richard couldn’t. It nearly burned him alive. He was always looking for something bigger than himself to tell him what to do. We all are. Being an actress is one of the few jobs on earth that tells the truth about this need that exists in humans- to be told what to do.”

If one followed the scientific polling practices of The Family Feud and surveyed 100 people as to what everyone is looking for, it is doubtful that you would get the two necessary responses out of the hundred in order for “Someone to tell them what to do” to appear on the Feud’s board. The number one answer, of course, would be love. Money might be the number two answer, but it would be a far distant second. Just turn on the radio. There is the occasional song about money, one thinks of classics such as Madonna’s “Material Girl”, Liza Manelli singing “Money Makes the World Go Around” in Cabaret, or Snoop Dogg’s refrain- “With my mind on my money and my money on my mind,” but at least ninety percent of popular music is devoted to love and its various leitmotifs: not having it, having it and then losing it, waiting for it, looking for it, looking for it in all the wrong places, etc. The Beatles go so far as to say that “Love is all you need,” which would limit the Feud’s board to two answers (not needing money in no way prevents one from looking for it; no one looks harder for more of it than those who already have an excess of it), leaving no space at all for “Someone to tell them what to do.”

Unless, that is, the need for love and the need for someone to tell you what to do are one and the same. Consider “God is love,” the definition of that final authority, God, which meets the following two criteria: 1) It is announced in scripture (see 1 John 4:8) and it would be the number one answer if the definition of God were queried on The Family Feud, i.e. it has both de jure (legal/scriptural) and de facto (popular) status. “God is love” would outdistance the second most popular definition of God by at least as much as love outdistanced money above. That second most popular definition, “God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent,” is simply, at the last, too fraught for a world with this much suffering. We just can’t bring ourselves to believe in an omnipotent, all powerful God who allows (dare we say, causes) this much suffering, but we just barely can believe in a God of infinite love who never stops loving us even as we suffer (and, we must add, even as we turn our back on that love). Our ability to believe in the latter begins to make sense if we flesh out the definition of love (and thereby God, and thereby authority) with an observation from Marie Luise Knott in her book Unlearning with Hannah Arendt that is equal parts accurate, tragic, and hopeful. To “God is love,” then, we add Knott’s “And although it (love) may fail, it is inexhaustible.” Inexhaustible. Those five syllables contain countless worlds in which to wander through and wonder at this fallible God, in which, to quote John D. Caputo, “religion is risky business, no guarantees.” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/deconstructing-god/?emc=eta1)

To be clear, I am suggesting that “God is love” be read like a mathematical equation such that Authority=Love and Love=Authority, and that when looking for someone (or something) to love, one is always at the very same time looking for someone (or something) to tell you what to do. Many men meet these twin needs by getting married. Unfortunately for the women, after telling their husbands what to do their own needs for love and authority remain unmet, which helps to explain why 61% of American churchgoers are women. (http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-10/why-do-men-stay-away) But the decline of religious beliefs and practices in an increasingly secular age, paired with an American divorce rate that hovers around 50%, has rendered the social institutions of religion and marriage insufficient to meet a need that is as insistent as hunger.

All of which helps explain the road signs in Maryland which, in a sublime formulation of love and authority, say “Buckle Up: We care…and it’s our law.” Because in the absence of God and/or our wives, when we look for something to love us and tell us what to do we increasingly turn to the State. In particular, the secular left has in many ways simply substituted the State for God, e.g. only a left-leaning news outlet could sub-title an article thusly: “I hated government—even as it was the only thing trying to save me. Here’s how, one day, I finally saw the light.” (HTTP://WWW.SALON.COM/2014/07/16/I_WAS_POOR_BUT_A_GOP_DIE_HARD_HOW_I_FINALLY_LEFT_THE_POLITICS_OF_SHAME/)

As we move towards taking “Buckle Up: We care…and it’s our law” to its logical conclusion, we would be wise to recall that in recent history when a modern State has been absolutely identified with God, ironically evidenced by an explicit and official atheism, totalitarianism has never been far behind. This is not to give the religious right and its own logical conclusion of theocracy a free pass; recent history is every bit as emphatic about States that are absolutely identified with God by way of an explicit and official theism.

When we go looking for something to love us and tell us what to do and it seems like we have found a branch in the road between empty secularism and corrupt fundamentalism, we are really just walking in (the same) circles.

If we are ever to meet our need for love and authority in a way that isn’t pathological, i.e. in a way that insists on some degree of autonomy (as when my Dad used to always tell me I was not allowed to move back in after college in order, at least in part, to prevent himself from engineering precisely such a move back in), we must be at the same time radically secular and deeply religious. The failure of contemporary (left secular) multiculturalism originates in its insistence that no one choose a side, leading to what Slavoj Zizek describes in God is in Pain as “the paradox of the tolerant multiculturalist universe of the multitude of lifestyles and other identities: the more it is tolerant, the more it is oppressively homogeneous.”

The future will be radically secular when everyone chooses a side, i.e. when everyone is deeply religious. If, that is, there are enough different religions to make the world safe for religion. (The old line “Ask two Jews, get three opinions” hints at the notion that it is only within an unaccountable, miraculous excess of religions that we are ever safe and secure in the one that we choose, even when the excess and the choosing occurs within one religion.) An authentic multiculturalism, which is the only possible contemporary secularism, requires the deeply committed adherents of multiple faiths to act as checks and balances on one another. It requires these multiple faiths to have clear boundaries even as they are equally clear allies. Allies whose collective action, informed by each faith’s naked self interest, never allows any single group to make the otherwise inevitable thrust towards theocracy. In this future, all faiths will love their enemies, if only because the enemy of their enemy is their friend. Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to go ask my lovely wife what she needs me to do.

Pick a Side

On walks around the neighborhood I have recently taken to saving the lives of still-squirming worms stranded on the sidewalk. The proximity of worms to sidewalks and driveways is a great reminder that we live life “in the foothills of death,” a brilliant turn of phrase from philosopher Mark Johnston. Worms have been dealt a rotten hand; to put things in perspective just imagine if mice spent their entire lives adjacent to a gigantic glue trap that expanded towards them in the rain. So far I have rescued at least three worms.

But I still swat mosquitoes with the lethal accuracy and superhuman speed of Stephen King’s gunslinger Roland Deschain, and I don’t think twice about drowning the scores of ants who, forming a division of the army invading my kitchen, have pushed the western front forward into my dishwasher. My approach to the pesty members of the lower animal kingdom who encroach upon my person or my real estate, perhaps best embodied by my practice of using the aforementioned glue traps to catch mice whom I immediately euthanize, is one of certain speedy death with a minimum of suffering. So, it seems, for the worms I wear the mask of Vishnu the maintainer, and for the ants et.al. I portray Shiva the destroyer, all of which reveals my basic philosophy to be “I bidthe old joke goes, Catholic Lite (as in Miller Lite), then I am also Diet Thich Nhat Hahn, i.e. Peace is (not quite) every step.

If a philosophy is to be considered truly basic, however, it should be universal. When gaps open up it means you still don’t know why you do what you do, which is ultimately to be in the same position as the worms, ants, mosquitoes, and mice. Which is why I found it so unsettling to encounter a bug squirming in a spider web on my porch the other day. “I bid you peace on two conditions…” was, in this case, about as useful as “When lost, never ask directions from strangers; get your wife to do it, or failing that, panic” which, while also basic to my approach to life, wouldn’t have filled in the gap left by the bug squirming in silk. If I bid peace to the bug, by freeing it, I starve the spider. And if I bid peace to the spider, I kill the bug. (And, to state the obvious, neither the bug nor the spider gave a rat’s ass about me or my house, meaning that “I bid you peace…” wasn’t nullified by its qualifiers, just merely meaningless.)

I once had an acquaintance whose basic life philosophy was “When in doubt, do nothing.” It was on the back of this philosophy that he gave his heart to a woman with whom he technically did nothing. “When in doubt, do nothing,” is both convenient (my married acquaintance had a “best friend,” not an emotional affair) and, as a means to choosing while pretending not to, bad faith par excellence. Just so, after I left the bug to die I rationalized that since I hadn’t known what to do I had simply chosen to let nature take its course. In pretending not to have chosen the spider over the bug I was simultaneously lying and suspending disbelief, which is known in the vernacular as believing your own bullshit. Believing your own bullshit will likely get you through the day, but it will just as reliably maintain your soul vibration at a low enough frequency such that you keep managing to piss off your wife.

Determined to stay married ‘til death do us part because a) my wife Jen is a badass sexy mensch who is the best thing that ever happened to me and whom I love with an OCD reckless abandon that involves a lot of checking (imagine the staccato rhythm of the Verizon guy’s “Can you hear me now?”, but substitute “Do you love me now?”) , and b) because I would never grant my enemies the schaudenfreude of my divorce, I have just recently, for the first time in my life, decided to begin aiming my bullshit detector at myself in a concerted effort to address what my shaman, who seems to have momentarily forgotten that flattery will get her everywhere, likes to call “my arrogance.” In fact, I used my bullshit detector in this novel fashion for perhaps the very first time when I caught myself pretending to let nature take its course with the spider and bug, leading, inevitably, to thoughts that I might just be a natural at this self-BS-detection thing (i.e. to more BS). But, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The unvarnished truth is that I chose the spider. If its captive had been, say, a ladybug or a lightning bug, I would have chosen differently. But this was an average bug, in no way special or glamorous, completely lacking e.g. the erotic danger of the praying mantis, the mystical overtones of the butterfly, or even the grotesquerie of the cockroach. It was only too easy to imagine the generic bug in the web as the equivalent of a pale orange tomato pressed between cellophane and light green Styrofoam.

It is likely that my “I bid you peace on two conditions…” is as self-delusional as “When in doubt, do nothing.” Where the latter denies the inevitability of choosing, the former, as in the case of the bug and the spider, denies the inevitability of choosing sides. Note that Jesus said “Love your enemies,” not “Don’t have enemies.”

And re: my choice of the spider over the bug because the bug basically looked like someone who might be sitting next to you on the bus, there’s clearly still plenty of grist for my shaman’s mill in our next session.

Plus, my math was all wrong. Since when is missing lunch the equivalent of becoming lunch? That’s some bullshit.

Between You, Me, and the Lamppost

In 2004, just as he was launching a spectacularly lucrative NBA career, albeit one bereft of even a sniff of championship hardware, Baltimore native Carmelo Anthony got caught up in something of an imbroglio after appearing in the infamous Stop Snitchin’ “homemade DVD.” (One should note that “homemade DVD” is the terminology proffered by Wikipedia, presumably because the makers of the homemade DVD came off as poor and Black, which meant that they were categorically incapable of producing a documentary, documentaries being the purview of those who sympathize with being poor and Black; whatever one thinks of the message contained in Stop Snitchin’, which message we will get to in just a moment, stripping it of its medium is but one more example of how we allow Black males to talk without really granting them freedom of speech. Witness LeBron James, who entered the NBA the same year as Anthony, and who will never be forgiven for an appearance on a talk show, “The Decision,” that was, at worst, tacky.)

It would be easy to sit in judgment of Anthony and Rodney Thomas, Stop Snitchin’s creator, given the film’s ethos of violent vigilante justice, an ethos perhaps best captured by its corresponding slogan: “Snitches get stitches.” Except it is better captured by the actualization of the violence contained in those words:

“National examples of violence due to ‘snitching’ include Angela Dawson of Baltimore, who was killed along with her five children and husband on October 16, 2002, when their house was firebombed after she alerted police to illegal activities in her neighborhood. Another example is Terry Neely of Phoenix, Arizona, a 46-year-old man confined to a motorized wheelchair, who was tortured for days and then killed by Angela Simpson in August 2009. A third example is Michael Brewer of Deerfield Beach, Florida, a 15-year-old who, in October 2009, was doused in rubbing alcohol and set on fire after assailants yelled, ‘He's a snitch, he's a snitch.’” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Snitchin')

Easy to sit in judgment, that is, until one gets a sense of exactly how Stop Snitchin’s Pandora’s Box was first pried open. The history is laid out, point by point, in Tom Farrey’s excellent article for ESPN.com, and it is a story that begins, coincidentally, with another local basketball player. Farrey pieces together a narrative beginning with the fatal cocaine overdose of Maryland basketball star Len Bias shortly after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics, a tragedy harnessed by Boston’s man in the US Congress, “Tip” O’Neill:

“As his constituents raged over the death of Bias, O'Neill sensed a political opportunity to make the Democrats look tough on drugs, according to Eric Sterling, a former counsel to the House judiciary committee, who explained the legislative machinations in a PBS Frontline report. Mandatory minimum sentences were introduced, stripping judges of the ability to consider mitigating circumstances. Getting caught with five grams of crack (25 doses), for instance, meant five years behind bars, and that was that.” (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?id=2296590)

Unless, as Farrey goes on to explain, you “become a confidential informant. A snitch.” (ibid) The upshot of all of this was a) numberless Black men either incarcerated or otherwise bound up in the justice system, and b) a sub-population of Black men turned against their neighbors and neighborhoods in a desperate attempt to avoid hard time. Farrey’s article draws on the work of former Baltimore public defender turned law professor Alexandra Napatoff to summarize the end results thusly:

“The policy has helped fill up penitentiaries, while inducing a state of paranoia in high-crime neighborhoods that she (Napatoff) likens to the former East Germany under the secret police. On street corners and at family barbecues, anyone's a potential rat.”

Stop snitchin’, indeed. Except, of course, snitches get stitches. One seems caught between the rock and the hard place of either condoning state terrorism (i.e. the “war on drugs”) or vigilante terrorism (see the firebombing of Angela Dawson and her family).

It is all troubling enough to make the rush to judgment even more urgent, judgment establishing distance. If the violence, which is first institutional and then reactionary and then both all at once on every side, is endemic to the poor and the state that police’s them, then it isn’t my violence. It is precisely this logic that enables one to know that there are two to three hundred annual murders in Baltimore without thinking they actually happen. I am reminded of the time my old next door neighbor explained to me that “We don’t turn around in other people’s driveways in this neighborhood,” which, of course, is not the kind of thing one says in a neighborhood where people actually don’t turn around in one another’s driveways. (I was mature enough to 1) only think, and not say, “But I just did,” and 2) never turn around in her driveway again, maintaining a relationship that would ultimately prove to be of great comfort when my other next door neighbor repeatedly leaf-blowered his leaves into a pile in front of my house.)

The distance established by believing “Snitches don’t get stitches in this neighborhood” also reminds me of the stickers you used to see in driver side mirrors: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The comforting distance is pure illusion, and not just because the violence can erupt at any time and any place. (In my twenty years in Baltimore, most of which have been spent indoors, I have been robbed at gun point in a fast food drive thru lane in addition to walking from my car to my then-apartment only to see someone pull out a gun and start shooting, thankfully not at me, a block away.) The illusion is that Stop Snitchin’ is an ethos circumscribed by class and race, when, in fact, it is a national mythos that informs every station of society, from the very top to the very bottom, and everywhere in between.

To understand how “Snitches get stitches” operates outside of the environs with which it is explicitly associated, one must both recall that a) the pen is mightier than the sword, and b) there is more than one way to skin a cat. Combining them reminds us that there is more than one way to make a snitch bleed, most of them having to do with words. To wit, Edward Snowden. Whatever one makes of Snowden’s epoch making decision, it has resulted in at least two indelible outcomes. Before Snowden, everyone knew we lived in a surveillance state, we all just figured they were watching e.g. the vaguely ethnic guy who lives on the corner who smokes and never cuts his grass; now we all know they are watching each of us. Secondly, Snowden has left this plane, emerging as the Platonic form of 21st century American snitch the moment Secretary of State John Kerry branded him a “coward” and a “traitor,” (who knew the Platonic realm was in Russia?), making each of us Snowden’s flawed copy. “Each of us” because they are reading everyone’s email, i.e. we are all potential snitches, and “flawed” because, based on our collective non-reaction, we consider the NSA’s clinical filtering of our personal data on par with a “friend’s” perusal of our Facebook page.

Although it should be said that our collective non-reaction also functions to establish distance. If I say out loud to my kith and kin that I have nothing to hide and that if the NSA wants to waste its time reading my boring emails they are welcome to have at it, then I’ve used magical thinking to once again establish the illusion of comforting distance. It is the belief that by simply saying “Snitches don’t get snitches in this neighborhood,” one can prevent the NSA from ever showing up on one’s doorstep. All of which functions to repress the intolerable thought that they wouldn’t be reading one’s email if one weren’t already a suspect and, prima facie, a snitch.

But even if we grant that it is possible to keep one’s thoughts, words, and deeds pure enough not to raise any of the NSA’s red flags, perhaps by keeping every last online transaction linked in some way, shape, or form to one’s fantasy football team, one still has to make a living. Which, per a report last week in The Washington Post, increasingly involves “tak(ing) an unusual oath.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/workplace-secrecy-agreements-appear-to-violate-federal-whistleblower-laws/2014/06/29/d22c8f02-f7ba-11e3-8aa9-dad2ec039789_story.html) These oaths are “nondisclosure agreements” which, e.g., prevent “contract employees at the Hanford plutonium processing plant in Washington state… from reporting wrongdoing at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear facility without getting approval from an agency supervisor.” (ibid)

And, it goes without saying, workplace snitches get stitches, too:

“Donna Busche reluctantly signed the agreement. ‘It was a gag order,’ said Busche, 51, who served as the manager of environmental and nuclear safety at the Hanford waste treatment facility for a federal contractor until she was fired in February after raising safety concerns. ‘The message was pretty clear: “Don’t say anything to anyone, or else.”’ ” (ibid)

In a strange echo of Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” it is as if every employee is being required to declare “I am not a snitch,” precisely because, like Nixon, it is already an established fact that you actually are.

In the Salem Witch Trials, suspected witches had their hands and ankles tied together before being lowered into a lake. If they survived and floated to the surface it proved that they were witches, which meant that they were then put to death. If they sunk to the bottom and drowned, it proved that they weren’t witches after all. Just so, if there is one thing we can say about the Stop Snitchin’ world we find ourselves thrown into, it is this: All of us are gagged, and we all get stitches anyway.

The violence will end when there is nothing left to hide or when there is no one left to hide it. Which means the only path forward is truth and reconciliation, even, and especially, when the truth is irreconcilable; the only available future is an impossible one, which is a marginally better deal than the Salem witches got. I suggest we accept the offer, and, taking our cue from the old Master Card slogan, master the impossibilities.