Chilly is a Nervous Stuffed Snowman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lady Miss Kier's Wager

A few years ago I was manning the grill in our backyard on the day of the Preakness Stakes, run quite literally across the street at Pimlico. As I tended to the burgers, frankfurters and BBQ chicken I was buffeted by a blast of noise from the sky that was immediately distinct from the single engine props tugging their advertisements for surprisingly affordable auto insurance and no recovery-no fee legal representation. I looked up in time to see a trio of warcraft in formation, including a vintage WWII fighter and, ominously, a B-2 Stealth Bomber. Given my pedigree as the son of two peace activists, as well as the pro-peace positions I had clearly staked out in high stakes debates with the Republican wing of my personal coterie, one might have expected me to react, if not with the bout of actual (i.e. not existential ) nausea that my father succumbed to on the night of Ronald Reagan’s decisive 1980 election, then at least with a pause to consider the fates of all those on the receiving end of the Stealth Bomber’s payload in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. (Just how many have been killed by the Stealth’s delivery of over 1.5 million pounds of munitions, we may never know, though the dead do include several staff from the Chinese embassy mistakenly targeted in the Kosovo operations in 1999. Other “mistaken” targets lack the clout to merit inclusion on Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit ) Instead, I ran around the backyard, in the presence of my wife, her cousin Jason, and my three daughters whooping and hollering as if UNC hoops had just beaten Duke at the buzzer. I was, for the brief duration of the flyover and its immediate sonic aftermath, alive.

Power’s hook is all in the feeling. As the shadow of the Stealth Bomber touched my kith and kin I exalted in the visceral sense that since this was America’s plane it was also my plane, one that might drop bombs on homes far, far away, but never on mine. The strangest thing about the American empire is that we are a really existing democracy, making all of us voting taxpayers into little emperors. My “Yee-Haww!” as the planes flew over may have sounded like Bo and Luke Duke jumping over yet another creek in their politically incorrect Dodge Charger, but was actually a direct translation of Leonardo DiCaprio’s “I’m the king of the world!”

Power seduces. Much more importantly, it is all that seduces. This was Nietzsche’s great insight:

“--do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?--This world is the will to power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and nothing besides!”

At first blush, Nietzsche’s diagnosis is cause for nothing but despair, at least for the believers among us, seemingly aligning with his more famous but much less consequential proclamation that “God is dead.” Inconsequential because, as I will hope to demonstrate in a moment, these two concepts, the will to power and the death of God, are mutually exclusive. (Strange, the jokes one remembers. I can remember approximately three, one of which was delivered by a long forgotten stand-up comic on cable TV in the early nineties, when, upon moving to New Jersey, my parents finally got cable, enabling me to spend my first summer home from boarding school, when I was still too young to work at McDonald’s, watching Yo! MTV Raps and, apparently, stand-up comics. The joke went: “Jews for Jesus. That’s like vegetarians for meat.” Funny, though not remarkably so. Nevertheless, I will carry “vegetarians for meat” with me to the grave. It is my archetype for the mutually exclusive. Because few things give me greater pleasure than apologizing, I almost tacked on a “with apologies to any actual Jews for Jesus” after that sentence, although I must say it would make extending such an apology a lot easier if everyone connected to Jesus, “Jewish” or otherwise, would just leave the Jews alone…awkward pause…except when marrying them… and agreeing to raise the kids Jewish….)

But before turning to fun with metaphysics, a few thoughts on how the left is constantly shooting itself in the foot in its distaste for the realities of Nietzsche’s will to power. The first way, of course, is in the cloying insistence on alternative, non-hierarchical social structures. The best way to find a really hierarchical left-leaning non-profit is to find one that touts itself as non-hierarchical, as anyone knows who’s ever worked in one. I would note that the givenness of will to power and the inevitability of hierarchy make my job as a democratic socialist harder, but not impossible. Hierarchical democratic socialists are not vegetarians for meat. Instead, to describe hierarchical democratic socialists I would borrow Tina Fey’s line that “Bitches get stuff done,” except that in the case of hierarchical democratic socialism, “Bitches get stuff done for everyone.”

Secondly, the left is constantly digging its own political grave by making people feel less powerful, rather than more. The perfect example is the left’s response to the insane rate at which Americans are offing one another with guns. Just today, while watching the 12:00 news in the office cafeteria I learned of yet another school shooting, this one in a middle school in New Mexico, as well as the case of a retired cop who shot and killed someone for a violation of movie theater etiquette (texting during the previews). The left’s response, of course, is to take away all of the guns, which makes sense if the people have genuine fealty to you as a benevolent despot, but in a democracy whose very life blood is fear only makes Americans feel more threatened, i.e. less powerful, and actually ends up contributing to the vicious cycle of a) isolated mass shooting incident, b)mass media circus, c) leftist calls for gun control , d) citizens who fear their countrymen (who might kill them) and their government (which might take away the only means of protection they believe in) in equal measure, and e) increased gun sales.

If the left ever hopes to achieve its vision of peace and justice it needs to take its cue from unexpected quarters. My very first compact disc was Deee Lite’s World Clique, which included their breakout hit “Groove is in the Heart.” But my favorite Deee Lite number was always “Power of Love” (not to be confused with Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Power of Love,” which easily slots into the top ten all time movie soundtrack songs somewhere behind Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky,)” which is a unanimous #1). Lady Miss Kier opens “Power of Love” by stating and restating her belief in the power of love six times, six, perhaps not incoincidentally, being the Kabbalistic number for love. (www.voxxthepsychic.com/kabb-numerologyynbr6.html ) Having established her power of love bona fides, her very next line, “Feel the power,” may well prove the three most insightful words uttered about love since Shakespeare’s “Love is blind.”

Just as Friedrich Nietzsche was the first properly Darwinian philosopher, Lady Miss Kier is the first truly Nietzschean lover. Her enjoinder to feel the power of love is the light at the end of the tunnel we’ve been crawling through since natural selection begat the will to power. Lady Miss Kier’s great gamble is that feeling the power of love is the most powerful feeling of all. It is the inverse of Pascal’s Wager re: belief in the existence of God, where “if you gain, you gain all; if you lose you lose nothing.” With Lady Miss Kier’s Wager we may still gain all, but if we lose we lose the world to a will to power forever unredeemed; we lose the world to the Stealth Bomber.

If the wager is won, Lady Miss Kier is proven right, and Nietzsche is proven both right and wrong. Right in that the will to power is with us forevermore. In which case “Come on Feel,” to borrow a line from the vastly underrated Lemonheads (“It’s a Shame About Ray” is the shiznitt, if you will), becomes the left’s trump card in its new project to make people feel more powerful, rather than less. Wrong in that reports of God’s death turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Because if the wager is won, Nietzsche can’t have it both ways. If the wager is won, “This world is the will to power--and nothing besides!,” is nothing other than “A Love Supreme.”

Of course, one can’t tout universal love in a discussion of Nietzsche without reckoning with his theory of master-slave morality. While never explicitly endorsing “master moraility,” Nietzsche reserved his fiercest criticisms for “slave morality,” the Judeo-Christian moral calculus he understood to be the weapon of the weak in the struggle against their powerful overlords, or masters:

“As master morality originates in the strong, slave morality originates in the weak. Because slave morality is a reaction to oppression, it villainizes its oppressors. Slave morality is the inverse of master morality. As such, it is characterized by pessimism and cynicism. Slave morality is created in opposition to what master morality values as 'good'. Slave morality does not aim at exerting one's will by strength but by careful subversion. It does not seek to transcend the masters, but to make them slaves as well. The essence of slave morality is utility: the good is what is most useful for the whole community, not the strong.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master–slave_morality )

What if Nietzsche is correct, and we turn to love not out of love but simply in order to beat back our oppressors? Might we still not find, like Alexander Fleming mistakenly leaving out a petri dish of Staphylococcus and, voila, discovering penicillin, that we had, with our “slave morality,” won not merely a round in the never ending war of all against all, but instead, and quite miraculously, uncovered the singular instrument that could win the peace once and for all, for “slave” and “master” alike?

But if feeling the power of love is so potent, to the point where as one approaches pure love one comes equally close to omnipotence, then why are Americans using handguns to shoot each other in movie theatres and drones to kill brown people in what can no longer justly be called the theatre of war (just as the Global War on Terror cannot justly be called a war unless we recognize it as what French philosopher Alain Badiou has termed “The war against nothing.”)? The answer has everything to do with fear and its management.

It says here that love is omnipotent precisely because true love is fearless; if God is love, then the presence of God is simply the absence of fear. It gets confusing because aggression, in both the threat and the use of force, feels powerful. The seeming paradox is that the aggressor doesn’t feel afraid at all (I certainly didn’t feel an ounce of fear as the Stealth Bomber flexed its muscles on my behalf), even as the use or threat of force is rooted deeply in fear. To explain the pseudo-fearlessness of aggression it will help to define a relatively obscure Kleinian psychoanalytic term, projective identification:

“Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein to describe the process whereby - in a close relationship, as between mother/child, lovers, therapist/patient - parts of the self may in unconscious phantasy be thought of as being forced into the other person.
While based on Freud's concept of psychological projection, projective identification represents a step beyond it: in Laing's words, ‘The one person does not use the other merely as a hook to hang projections on. He strives to find in the other, or to induce the other to become, the very embodiment of projection.’ Feelings which cannot be consciously accessed by the one person are defensively projected in such a way as to evoke in the recipient precisely the thoughts or feelings projected.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_identification )

An “example can be seen in a person who doubts his/her own intelligence level and attempts to manipulate others’ perceptions/opinions by discourse with ‘elevated airs’ or by referring to themselves as having a high IQ or implied superior knowledge /expertise. They attempt to lead others to feel unintelligent by their complicated intellectual-sounding verbiage, due to their own doubts about their own intelligence,” ( http://guiltedgirls.tripod.com/id9.html ) (… second awkward pause… this example has nothing to do with this blog, which is clearly just a vehicle for my artistic self expression… we now return to the regularly scheduled complicated intellectual-sounding verbiage…)

What does projective identification have to do with handguns, drones, and Stealth Bombers? At the risk of engaging in what my favorite British public intellectual Terry Eagleton likes to call New Age claptrap (a risk which is admittedly immaterial given that Blogspot.com lists but one follower for this blog, who is much more likely my mother than Terry Eagleton), I am going to suggest that projective identification isn’t confined to interpersonal relations between homo sapiens. In fact, I am going to suggest that it isn’t even confined to relations between what we typically think of as sentient beings, e.g. between a man and his dog, as in the case of my yelling at Sy the Dog for once again pooping in the house, which is really my attempt to make Sy the Dog carry around the shame I feel for some relatively prolonged bed wetting and once pooping my pants at choir practice in 4th grade (might have been 5th, but 4th feels just slightly less shameful).

The New Age claptrap I am suggesting is that human beings can engage in projective identification with inanimate objects. In the grand tradition of New Age speculations, I am going to utilize both the word “energy” and reference advanced physics without really understanding the physics involved. Here goes: According to Wikipedia, it is a true fact that matter and energy are one and the same, mass simply being a highly concentrated form of energy. See E=MCsquared. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence )And, as anyone who has spent 5 minutes in the New Age section at Barnes and Noble can attest, consciousness is energy. (What the hell, here’s a link to a New Age site explaining exactly how to recognize energy as consciousness: http://m.wikihow.com/Recognize-Energy-as-Consciousness ) The upshot of all this, none of which, all joking aside, seems stranger to me than the materialist notion that consciousness is a chance byproduct of matter, is that projective identification between people and material objects is a process occurring between two energy systems, just as it is when it occurs between two human beings. In fact, there is an entire tradition within western philosophy, panpsychism, which holds that all entities in the universe, from the soup of the animate to the nuts of the inanimate, have some kind of mental life. Being a panpsychist, which I am, (which makes me a panpsychist hierarchical democratic socialist, which I think has great potential as a conversation starter at parties) makes this whole projective-identification-with-weapons thing easier to swallow.

Because the fear at the heart of aggression gets projected right into all the varieties of ordnance: guns, bombs, ammo, bazookas, Stealth Bombers, etc. This, advanced physics notwithstanding, is how all weapons work; they are nothing other than projections of fear, each explosion a detonation of disowned terror. The historic advance in weaponry, right up to The Bomb itself, is representative of the fact that we have a) become technical savants, and b) cultivated enough fear to blow up the world five times over. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/do-we-really-need-to-blow_b_491367.html ) Not feeling it? Neither am I, which is the whole point. We’ve projected our fears into our warheads and their magnificently expensive delivery systems (weaponry is an expensive anesthetic- one Stealth Bomber costs 2.1 billion dollars) so that we don’t have to feel a thing.

“I believe in the power of love (I believe), I believe in the power of love (I believe), I believe in the power of love, Let them call me naïve, But I still believe”

When Nothing Falls Apart

What do you do when your spiritual efforts aren’t just in conflict with your politics, but, in fact, in congress with the political opposition? I should back up for a minute and explain that despite, or perhaps partly because of being raised by politically and spiritually progressive Christian parents, the spiritual efforts that I am alluding to frequently come wrapped in eastern philosophical and/or religious packaging. I met my Jewish wife on a Buddhist meditation retreat (she has moved on from her interest in Buddhism, returning to her Jewish roots, but, thankfully, still lets her uptight WASP husband hang around), when I don’t know what to do I consult the I Ching, and on those (thankfully few) occasions when my life feels like it is about to fall apart I read the matriarch of Western Buddhism, Pema Chodron.

However tempting it is to make like the kid in the famous anti-drug commercial from the ‘80’s, (his “I learned it by watching you” achieving the impossible by matching the infant’s cry in both power and vulnerability), my eastward gaze is only partly due to my parents’ explicit endorsement of spiritual pluralism. Because if I had only learned it by watching them I would be consulting the I Ching on my way to church every week. But instead of becoming a Christian by trade and a pluralist by inclination, I have ended up a pluralist by trade and a wannabe eastern sage by inclination. The apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree, but it seems to have rolled in a ditch.

Apparently, I am not alone. Number two on the list of Stuff White People Like is “Religions their parents don’t belong to.” More specifically, “White people will often say they are ‘spiritual’ but not religious. Which usually means that they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus. Popular choices include Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, and, to a lesser extent, Scientology. A few even dip into Islam, but it’s much more rare since you have to give up stuff and actually go to Mosque. Mostly they are into religion that fits really well into their homes or wardrobe and doesn’t require them to do very much.” (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/18/2-religions-that-their-parents-dont-belong-to/) The folks at Stuff White People Like are, on the surface, rather critical of the educated secular white folks they are satirizing. We seem to be nothing more than lazy, vain consumerists caught up in a perpetual adolescent rebellion against our parent’s core beliefs. On one level all that can be said is that the truth hurts.

But an alternate reading destabilizes the satire, recasting our throwaway “spirituality” as something of a cry for help. This reading hinges on the last, most damning words of the critique. Our search for meaning may occur on our tasteful living room couch not because we are so damn shallow, but because we lack the time and energy for absolutely anything else. Like dogs, #53 on the list of Stuff White People Like, our tasteful sofas cater to our needs and ask nothing in return. (Since men are nothing if not selfish, just ask any woman, it is no wonder that dogs are officially Man’s Best Friend. Sofas are a close second.) And, each day spent laboring in late capitalism like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill, when we return home to our fashionable apartments we know the boulder is already rolling back down, leaving us disinclined to give up stuff and go to Mosque (or Church). Because a) why give up stuff when everything is already lost and will be lost afresh again tomorrow, and b) our sofas are much more comfortable than church pews and we at least deserve a break before rolling the boulder back up the hill again tomorrow.

If all this sounds rather maudlin and indulgent of a generational weakness of character, e.g. it wasn’t that fun living through the Great Depression and they didn’t have any paying jobs or fancy apartments to retire to at the end of the day, then we should close the book and let the satirists at Stuff White People Like have the last word: two generations removed from “The Greatest Generation,” we are their complete opposite. They survived the Great Depression and then saved Western Civilization, while we overpay for coffee and are, essentially, decorators. I would only point out that America responded to the Great Depression and WWII with, respectively, the New Deal’s sundry Tennessee Valley Authorities and Rosie the Riveter. Confronting two existential crises, Western Civilization built stuff. Whereas now, Western Civilization is full of Stuff White People Like, none of which we built. We all have jobs making nothing. The verb decorate is defined as “to make something look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.” Just so, we spend our lives making nothing look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.

Note that the fruit of Sisyphus’ efforts is also always nothing. This nothingness at the center of our productive lives has its doppelganger in our spiritual lives in the form of Buddhism and its concept of no-self. As Pema Chodron explains, “’Examine the nature of unborn awareness.’ Who is this ‘I’? Where did it come from? Who is it that’s aware? The slogan points to the transparency of everything, including our beloved identity, this precious M-E. Who is this ME?” (http://lojongmindtraining.com/Commentary.aspx?author=3&proverb=3) While Chodron wants nothing but our liberation, in dissolving the self she has unwittingly cemented a connection as rigid and troubling as the vice grip on our beloved identities. Minus the self, our outward material condition is matched by our deepest inner truth: “there is no there there.” That Chodron would substitute the open space of big mind for the missing identity is completely beside the point; Western Buddhists have already filled that space with discriminating home furnishings.

That is, if they still have a job making nothing (but money). Which is where the second key element of Western Buddhism, groundlessness, comes into play. Again per Chodron, with groundlessness “we are moving further and further away from concretizing and making things so solid and always trying to get some ground underneath our feet. This moving away from comfort and security, the stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky- that’s called enlightenment, liberation.” It’s also called Neoliberalism, which is defined as “a (supposedly) moderate form of liberalism that modifies its traditional government policies, as on labor unions and taxes.” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Neo+liberal) This supposed form of moderation is actually spectacularly radical and explicitly does away with taxes for the wealthy and labor unions for the workers, who find themselves moving away from comfort and security while stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky. And that’s called freedom. (See the Right to Work Acts, which “guarantee” workers the freedom to benefit directly from collective bargaining without contributing to the collective, which taking without giving is the perverse, and, ultimately, mysoginistic fantasy at the core of Neoliberal capitalism. This Freudian reading is that Neoliberals treat their workers like they treat their women, i.e. as means to their own satisfaction, which is exactly why Miley Cyrus is waltzing around semi-nude and exactly why every post-pubescent girl at the summer camp I visited this summer wore jean-shorts that were little more than thongs. With Neoliberal capitalism, workers don’t get to have unions, and women don’t get to wear clothes.)

Slavoj Zizek has noted the congruence between Western Buddhism and neoliberal ideology, describing it thusly in his work On Belief:

“Although ‘Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain an inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement….Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination- one should, instead, ‘let oneself go,’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being…. One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the ‘opium of the people,’ as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while maintaining the appearance of mental sanity.”

So, granting all that, if I am after more than just the appearance of mental sanity why don’t I take after my wife and return to my own religious spawning ground? The answer is found in the second most important line from Stuff White People Like: “they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus.” When exactly the religiously moderate form of Christianity died is open to debate, but I have my suspicions that it died on the same night that truly moderate forms of liberalism died, the night that Ronald Reagan was elected, which was the self-same night that Neoliberalism and evangelical Christianity were born again. Moreover, the death of religiously moderate Christianity spelled the death of religiously moderate religion. For fun, check the rolls of those bastions of religious moderation, the Episcopal Church and the Jewish Conservative Movement, which if you are inclined to religious moderation will either make you wonder what the religious version of threatening to move to Canada is, or leave you mouthing the delusion that “these things go in cycles.” Because the moderates who would have been in the pews or sitting next to their spouse at synagogue are now busy not meditating, i.e. busy not really practicing a religion (Western Buddhism) that isn’t really a religion.

Because it has, since 1980, become impossible to say the word Jesus without feeling like Pat Robertson, Christianity, for the religious moderate, is foreclosed. But since it is impossible to say the word atheism without feeling like Dick Cheney, who, despite being a Methodist, brings to mind a universe absent a supreme being, I am left with Western Buddhism. And since I don’t seem to be able to convince myself that I am not a self no matter how hard I try (Not sure which religion is technically harder- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which require one to believe in the existence of something impossible to believe in, i.e. God (See “I believe because it is absurd,” which I translate as “If it’s too good to be true, it’s probably true”), or Buddhism, which requires one not to believe in the existence of something it is impossible not to believe in, i.e. the self. This leaves us with Neoliberalism- believing in one’s self at the exclusion of all else, making a doctrinal belief in free markets a form of solipsism.), my only option is to redeem the Western Buddhist version of groundlessness.

That redemption takes the form of struggle. We don’t know whether our efforts to finally cut the one constant thread of human history, the war of the powerful few against the huddled masses, will amount to anything whatsoever. There are at least as many reasons for pessimism as there are for optimism. It is a struggle. And, if I may be permitted in a paragraph about groundlessness to reach back over the gap between myself and my faith, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The gap reasserts itself in the shifting ground beneath our feet. No matter how hard we wrestle, we may lose this struggle. And yet we may win. And still we may lose. The gap of groundlessness, for me, is the gap between a victory already won, in an empty tomb, and a battle that yet teeters on the brink.

If the victory is already won, we are on firm ground. In the last speech before his assassination, a speech explicit in its condemnation of economic injustice and its call for unified struggle, Martin Luther King attempts to plant us in that ground:

“Like anybody, I would like to live- a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

He was shot dead the very next day.

Where is this mountain, this protrusion of solid ground? Down here in the lowlands of Western Buddhism, it’s all groundlessness. I hope we win. I will try my very best. I pray that my best, our best, is better than nothing.

What's in a Name?

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

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

‘Christ, the death thing again.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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