R.J., I'm feeling better.

10/10/07

I’m feeling much, much better than I have in a long, long time.

Hi everybody. I know I haven’t posted anything of late, but please don’t abandon my blog. Health-wise, things are going well. As many of my lymphoma colleagues know, during the 3 week cycle between treatments, the 2nd week is typically the most uncomfortable. Lo and behold, this time through has been the easiest (knock on wood). It may be that the 25% reduction in the chemicals was just enough to lessen the deleterious effects of the therapy. Who knows?


“In times such as ours there is a great pressure to come up with concepts that help men understand their dilemma; there is an urge toward vital ideas, toward a simplification of needless intellectual complexity. Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensions and make it easy for action to move forward with just the rationalizations that people need.” Ernest Becker

No wonder people have been taking a look at Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death of late. In terms of his psychological thesis that “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,” what better explanation is there for why the public would skip the “needless intellectual complexity” and swallow the “big lie.” “Vital ideas?” What is more vital than the belief that we Promethean, Western Sages were destined to bestow the gift of democratic fire, a precious spark that springs to life in Iraq and spreads through the Middle East, causing those backward cultures to see the error of their ways and embrace peace, justice, and the American Way. We’ve always known what’s best for women, so why shouldn’t we rescue them from their sexist and chauvinistic male oppressors. Shed your Burkas and put on your bikini’s, you too might be the next Brittney Spears. Praise God! Political “rationalizations” were certainly in full sway following 9/11. The evil ones’ have weapons of mass destruction; Sadaam and Osama are same sex deviants who, satanically inspired, conspired to destroy Western Culture, starting with those twin towers of peace, justice, and the American way, the World Trade Center; if we don’t stop terrorism in Baghdad, they’ll blow us up in Kenosha; the Crocodile hunter wasn’t really killed by a Sting Ray, he was the victim of a poisoning perpetrated by “Big Nuts” Ahmadinejad and his “meth-head” Sarazens. Ah, but that “resolution of tension,” doesn’t that make it all worth it? “Simplification” rules! Long live American Idol” We know who the “biggest loser” really is, and it sure makes life easy. And so, “action moves forward.” Kill, pillage, torture, we don’t care, as long as we all keep making money. Foreclosure crisis? Diminishing health care for the middle class? “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” said Mr. Bush in July, “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

How dare the Saudi 11 stick a fork in an over-cooked myth: that America is an enlightened culture which epitomizes peace and justice; that it occupies a moral high ground on the bluffs of the city of God; and that it is intrinsically superior to
Other societies.

We wanted things “simple” after 9/11. Conceptually, “simplification” provides absolution from having to adopt an alternative perspective. Sympathetic imagination requires “intellectual complexity,” and how much easier it is to do away with this moral anguish when the enemy is demonized and cast as the Other. Heroism was abundant immediately following 9/11. To not wrap oneself in the flag was tantamount to treason. Here’s what Becker has to say on the heroic as an innate human trait: “In the more passive masses of mediocre men it is disguised as they humbly and complainingly follow out the roles that society provides for their heroics and try to earn their promotions within the system: wearing the standard uniforms—but allowing themselves to stick out, but ever so little and so safely, with a little ribbon or red boutonniere, but not with head and shoulders.” The fear of death (a universal in the human condition), which 9/11 rudely thrust into America’s collective consciousness, is what the World Trade Center came to signify an archetypal symbol. Hence the public as a whole donned the mantle of hero. As President Bush told us immediately after 9/11, go out and shop, be a hero. Rather than address the complex issue of why other cultures might hate America, weave a web of illusion: we’re under threat, they envy our freedoms, they hate our freedoms, they’re non-Christian. Little wonder than that a speech given by Robert Fisk in 2002, then Britain’s foremost Middle East correspondent, was ominously titled, “September 11: ask who did it, but for heaven’s sake don’t ask why.” The guiding strategy of the New Regime has been to bring down a “curtain of fantasy,” as Jose Ortega Y Gasset describes it, which obscures the painful truth of what actually happened. Regarding this worldview, Gasset writes, “It does not worry him that his ‘ideas’ are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”



We wrestle with our heroic strivings: “We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children.”

Albert Camus was always suspicious of his fellow liberals zeal for ideological driven/justified violence as and abstraction/at a distance: “Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.” (Quoted from NYT 10/07/07)



“But it also makes for the slow disengagement of truths that help men get a grip on what is happening to them, that tell them where the problems really are.” Ernest Becker

“It is one of the meaner aspects of narcissism that we feel that practically everyone is expendable except ourselves….Our organism is ready to fill the world all alone, even if our mind shrinks at the thought. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him.” Ernest Becker



The western myth is central to the American consciousness. Shane, come back.

Blackwater cowboys, ain’t they grand! So…heroic.

Bush, like all film cowboys (that is to say dime-store cowboys), must violently annihilate the evil (given its intractable nature it can only be eradicated). Only through violent redemption can social progress and the advance of civilization be secured. Defender, vindicator, savior, that’s your garden-variety western hero. Screw the Redskin, Gook, or hummos eater that gets in the way. Road-kill like you require nether respect or regret, your evil forfeits the benefit of human worth.