Democracy

I've been meaning to come back to this blog. It's still useful as a journal, but I'm not sure I would have known what to write these last few weeks. I've needed to allow some things to redefine themselves. A lot of this was prompted by the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, as I've written about before dropping out of sight. But, honestly, I've also been quite ill. I've been started on a new treatment, and though it seems to be working less well today, on Sunday and Monday I started feeling much improved, so I'll give it time. I'd love to feel like I could get out and do more things. I certainly have a wish to be more active. The spirit is willing. We'll see.

So much has happened in the last few weeks that I couldn't review it all here even if I wanted to. There's more torture in the headlines, of course. That stuff just never seems to go away once it gets started, does it? Part of my paranoid brain wonders if the "torture tape" revelations weren't as much a distraction from the NIE scandal as anything else, although the administration is still doing a dance around that issue. In any event, as usual, when things come out, there's almost too much to process, and practically none of it is dealt with in any depth. Meantime, we're still spilling oil, killing monks, and raping young women in Baghdad, with no end anywhere in sight.

So, how've you been?

I still can't rekindle any enthusiasm for presidential politics, or even for Oprah, although I taped the Iowa rally on C-SPAN, and watched it afterward. I'm not sure why my disgust hadn't hit critical mass before now, but allowing Mukasey's confirmation without a fight was the last straw. I'm not ready to tear down everything, but I'm convinced there are an awful lot of seriously compromised people in government now. That's not really a big surprise, I guess, but this level of compromise, on these kinds of issues -- torture, corruption, lying, etc. -- this close to the awareness level of the general public puts things into bold new territory. If things happened as they should, an awful lot of people would go down hard. That shouldn't be a huge tragedy. We have 300 million people in this country. We can find people to take their places. I don't think most of that is going to happen, of course, barring more surprises, but just because the corruption may be around for some time to come doesn't mean I should give up. It's going to be a long struggle, and at least some of the candidates are still better than others. Just hold your nose next November, and go ahead and vote for somebody.

I've been reading plenty, and again, there's too much to review. I finally got around to reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I highly recommend. I've continued to read Noam Chomsky's books extensively, as well as watching some of the massive amounts of video featuring Chomsky on the internet. I've gotten to know his thinking much better, and Naomi Klein's work is an excellent extension of that effort. There are, and have been, so many actions that are difficult to view as anything but rapacious greed and powerlust that it does seem like a conspiracy. Fortunately, thinkers such as those mentioned here realize it's a lot more complicated than that. There are bad people, of course, and we see some of them on television every day, but there's also just the whole mechanism, larger than any one of us, driving corporations to profit or die, driving reporters to toe the line or be ignored, driving politicians to compromise or be smeared. It feeds on itself, and some of the worst offenders just want to be rescued, I think.

I'm still searching for redefinitions, and I don't know yet how regular I'll be with blog entries, but it feels like these entries are worth doing, and I'll just have to play it by ear. I've been meditating, of course, both koan and pure zazen styles of meditation. Koan meditation still presents issues for me. Perhaps there's a way to take an orderly approach to koan meditation, but I'm not so sure. Its intention, for me, is to focus so intently on the question as to force a mental crisis. I've had these crises in small ways before. They're like the Eureka! moments when we've examined a problem from all sides, and just when we're about to give up the answer pops into our heads. I've had those moments in theater after agonizing about an interpretation for my character, and many times in programming when the third rewrite of a module left me in despair before I suddenly saw the problem. That's koan meditation. But I'm having trouble taking "Mu" seriously, I'm ashamed to admit. It's a very serious question after all, because it's like asking Who am I? Perhaps because it's so serious, and not a programming problem or an alter ego on stage, that I'm still reluctant to give myself to it fully. I'm 60 years old, folks. I may have had all the mental crises I'm going to have. That's not my final word on this topic, but meantime, my pure zazen has an element that I'm tempted to call satisfying. I feel a sharpness to my attention that feels useful in helping me to collect myself, and every little bit helps.

Here are a couple of short Chomsky videos I plucked off YouTube. I may come back later and add comments for them. But Chomsky speaks very simply about politics. He leaves the linguistic scholar behind when he talks about propaganda and democracy, and he gets right to the point. The videos -- approximately 9 and 7 minutes, respectively -- present a Chomsky overview. If you want to know the gist of what Chomsky is saying, it's right here. It's very important to flesh it out with the details, as I have, but the basic message is very straightforward, and extremely thought-provoking, if you haven't heard it. In both videos, Chomsky quotes James Madison from The Federalist Papers (which I'm also reading, albeit slowly) when he says "the primary function of goverment is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority", then proceeds to explore the implications of that approach as it's filtered down to our lives today. As old as the story seems, it's still a class struggle in our society. It's a lot of other things as well, of course, but the class system is a primary obstacle to a more reasonable sharing of responsibilities, and it's a very important part of the problem.

I just finished watching an excellent video on LinkTV featuring the Dalai Lama. It was made back in 2003, but it's fascinating, as journalists, politicians, business people, and environmentalists discussed ethical issues with the Dalai Lama. It's in the spirit of people such as the Dalai Lama I would like to base my continuing quest for a positive way forward through the dilemmas we're facing. I think we're going to have to deal with some very tough things. I think I've been a little bit guilty of naivete, thinking that we might be close enough to really positive efforts that just a little push here or there might be enough to cause dramatic results. It's disheartening to think that, difficult as it already seems, it's even harder than you thought, and there aren't many real saviors on the horizon. As Gandhi once said when asked what he thought of western civilization, "I think it would be a good idea."