Unsung American Heroes

There are so many unsung American heroes out there, but let us sing of just two today: James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Selflessly these two psychologists, awarded a government grant of $180 million dollars to help the nation in the desperate times after 9/11, charged only $81,000,000. These two men were the brains behind the coercive interrogation program that some, including them, claim kept us safe in the years after the hellacious attacks of September 11, 2001.

Mitchell and Jessen, given pseudonyms in the Congressional report, reverse engineered the SERE program, a grueling series of tortures used to train our own special forces to resist enemy torture. Mitchell and Jessen’s work allowed enemy prisoners to be interrogated in ways that would otherwise have been regarded as torture, wink, wink. Having psychologists and doctors in the room when prisoners are being subjected to things that can cause death makes all the difference between brutality and civilization, some argue. Mitchell and Jessen’s key roles as designers of “enhanced interrogation” are detailed in the recently completed five year, $40,000,000, 6,700 page, almost 8% public, report on America’s use of torture in the decade after 9/11.

I will let Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban take the wheel:

As the report makes clear, some of the worst corrosion occurred in the ranks of America’s psychologists, who, like many medical professionals, are charged with doing no harm. It was two C.I.A. contract psychologists with no experience with real-life interrogations. Instead, as described in the report, they promoted the tactics to the C.I.A., employed them indiscriminately, earned money to do so, and lied about their effectiveness.

I was the first reporter to enumerate the roles of the two key psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, as architects of the coercive interrogation tactics, in a 2007 story inVanity Fair. The pair had previously been Air Force trainers in a program called SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), which subjected military members to mock interrogations—interrogations that ironically had been used by the Communist Chinese against American servicemen during the Korean war in order to produce false confessions.

Historically, the C.I.A. knew the tactics would not be useful. In 1989, the C.I.A. informed Congress that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” In the desperate months after 9/11, the C.I.A. willfully ignored its own findings.

As the president recently admitted, to the horror of those who support rough treatment of possibly evil bastards, “we tortured some folks.” Although unsung American heroes James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, now very wealthy men, might beg to differ with Mr. Obama’s characterization of what was done to those folks.

Bankrupt Democracy

The air is toxic in this sweaty mine shaft where we scratch for the ore democracy used to be made of, my fine feathered friends. The federal government, once a defender of human rights (as when, a century belatedly, it battled the Klan) and keeper of many valuable public institutions (schools high on that list) and much of the nation’s infrastructure, keeps begging these days to be drowned in a bathtub. The Free Market, the private sector, is constantly held up (by those with the money to know best) as the best arbiter of what is important and what is worth drowning in a bathtub. After all, mustn’t we all admit that it’s the extremely wealthy and successful who have the expertise and proven success to tell the rest of us the best thing to do in every sector of life?

A few days before Christmas, when lines in the post office can be an hour or more long, I got a nice symbol, in my mailbox, of our tax dollars at work. A large envelope from the post office, with a clear plastic window on one side, showing me the partially mangled envelope I’d sent to my landlord with my rent check for December a week or two earlier. My landlord’s printed address clearly visible through the window, as is my return address. The stamp has been cancelled. The reason my landlord did not cash my rent check this month is that the U.S. Post Office was keeping it, after it was partially ruffled in a government machine, to considerately return to me with this important message on the back:

So, this citizen will spend perhaps $15 on Monday to let Fed Ex do, overnight, the work a 45 cent stamp, and the full faith and credit of our U.S. Postal Service, could not accomplish in two weeks. And resist the foolish, if understandable, urge to do anything whatsoever to respond to the moronic government robot that signs itself, with sincere regret, after an appropriately Newspeak arbeit macht frei taken directly from the Free Market best practices book, my postmaster.

A Gentle Story

I try to walk at least five miles a day and I have a device clipped to my shirt that encourages me to do so, recording every step and hundredth of a mile (20 steps). Some days lately walking this distance is about all I manage to accomplish, but, I’ll take my accomplishments where I can and as my father always said of such things “it’s better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.”

Walking in the Bronx last night, looking for a new route around the part of my usual path that takes me under ear shattering elevated trains, I walked down a street I’d never been on. This empty street, a block or two long, is named Adrian Avenue. As I reached the end of it I heard cries for help coming out of a window over my shoulder.

Two women were piteously calling from a window in an alley, their necks thrust out into the night. “Please help us, we’re locked in!” the younger of them cried as I turned to face them.

I took out my cell phone. “Who can I call for you?” was my first idea.

“No,” said the desperate woman, “come into the lobby and let us out!”

It was after 10 pm, the unfamiliar street was empty and quiet. Two helpless women lure unknown man into lobby where accomplices wait to rob and beat him, I thought, tabloid style. “How will I get into the lobby?” I asked the women.

“We’ll buzz you in,” the younger one said.

“And how will I be able to get you out if the door is locked?” I asked.

“We’ll throw the key out,” said the woman.

“What apartment are you in?” I said. She gave me a number on the first floor. They buzzed me into the small apartment building. I saw their door and noticed there was no door knob on it. I heard them inside. There was no sign of anyone waiting with a blackjack.

Within a moment or two the key slid out under the door. I turned the key and the door opened. Both women were so happy to be rescued from their predicament they were practically giggling. The older woman, in a dressing gown, beamed a grateful smile. The younger one also beamed gratefully, pumping my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and thanking me profusely. I smiled too, told them they were welcome, and went back to walking.

Less than 200 steps later I was at the end of Adrian Avenue, and looking left, realized the street did not go through in the direction I needed to go. There would never be another reason to walk down Adrian Avenue, I realized, which made the odd coincidence of being there to do a good deed a little bit cooler.

The Whole Story is often elusive

Getting the whole story about anything requires more work than most hardworking people are willing or able to do at any given time. This struck me again just now reading Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, a tome from the library I’ve been reading, a few pages at a time, for a couple of months.

I read today how Anwar al-Awlaki, US citizen of Yemeni descent eventually killed by US government drone for vociferously hating America, was grabbed and detained by the Yemenis and held in solitary for nine months, without charges or sunlight (his small cell was in a dark basement), pen and paper, exercise or visitor, by request of the U.S. government. Relying on Scahill’s account, and just about every other source I’ve looked at, his eighteen month imprisonment occurred before he was seriously considered a danger to anyone, before he made a single video calling for violent jihad against Dick Cheney.

It appears that, in the manner that the former Cat Stevens was put on the no-fly list, angering some and delighting others, Awlaki was marked as a cautionary tale. In Awlaki’s case, as a dangerous radical worthy of lethal retribution, a symbol to be summarily executed without any sort of judicial process, and his sixteen year-old son, too, a couple of weeks later, without any explanation whatsoever for the murder of the American kid who’d gone to look for his father.

The ideologues around Dick Cheney have Awlaki, the go-to moderate cleric after 9/11, a telegenic and reasonable American Muslim, grabbed in Yemen for expressing anger that the US, from all appearances, was waging brutal, endless, worldwide war on Islam. They stick him in a hole in the ground for nine months, keep him locked up, still without charges, for another nine, and, “whoa! look at that! This fucking radical cleric hates our freedom!” Cue the reasonable sounding post-racial front-man and the Predator Drone and Tomahawk missile. Got one for his American teenage son, too, a few weeks later. Hey, we droned some folks, ya know, this, uh, happens.

Wikipedia is somewhat conclusory, presenting an apparently convincing case for why this radicalized Muslim got what he deserved, though less than completely informative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

If you rely on the account on Wikipedia, you will know, based on a 2009 piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican, in turn based on an American government document created after Awlaki’s release from prison that

On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a US military attaché.^[15][81]He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007, reportedly under American pressure on the Yemeni authorities.^[61] He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects, and John Negroponte, the US Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki’s detention

You can read the cited May 2010 NY Times article, FN 61, Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad, reporting that not only did America “not object” to Awlaki’s detention, but that he was rendered, imprisoned and kept in prison for many months, even after his “interrogation” by the FBI, under American pressure here.

That article gives another, more vague, reason for his arrest by Yemeni authorities:

In mid-2006, after he intervened in a tribal dispute, Mr. Awlaki was imprisoned for 18 months by the Yemeni authorities.

The article also states:

But by the end of 2007, American officials, some of whom were disturbed at the imprisonment without charges of a United States citizen, signaled that they no longer insisted on Mr. Awlaki’s incarceration, and he was released.

Scattered throughout the wiki are quotes from American officials, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others asserting that prior to his imprisonment in Yemen there was no serious indication that Awlaki had any involvement with violent jihad. However, as the Santa Fe New Mexican intrepidly reported, and Wikipedia made a matter of instantly accessible public record, he was imprisoned in Yemen for direct involvement in an al-Qeada plot.

Let’s have a look at another strangely insufficient selection from the wiki on Awlaki (emphasis and annotation mine).

Al-Awlaki was said to have developed an animosity towards the US and became a proponent of Takfiri and Jihadi thinking, while retaining Islamism. While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004 [after being rendered in the dark of night, without charges, to solitary confinement, at the request of the US government–ed.] , al-Awlaki became influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, an originator of the contemporary “anti-Western Jihadist movement”.^[61] He read 150–200 pages a day of Qutb’s works, and described himself as “so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly”.^[61]

Even this small detail of how much of Qutb’s writing he read a day is off in the Wikipedia account, according to the footnoted source Awlaki stated:

“Because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100 and 150 pages a day,” Mr. Awlaki wrote.

I think of the physician Ayman Al Zawahiri, no doubt a despicable, hate-inspired, mass-murdering psychopath, and wonder about him before his years of torture in Mubarak’s prison in Egypt. Zawahiri, and his former close associate and fellow al-Qeada boss Osama bin Laden, also big fans of, and greatly inspired by, Sayyid Qutb. These remaining worst of the worst in Gitmo, the place President Obama closed six years ago? Well, even the innocent ones can’t be released now, you know, they get kind of unpredictable, these folks who get, you know, tortured and stuff. And probably all very sympathetic to the detailed arguments Qutb made and published in the decades before he was tortured and executed in 1966 by secular authorities in Egypt for alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate Nasser.

In the end the U.S. got what it wanted with Awlaki — a high profile, once moderate, articulate, native English speaking Muslim cleric who wound up making videos calling for jihad and giving lone wolf Muslims inspiration for attacking innocent Americans. I wonder if there could have been any connection between these calls for revenge against America for its persecution of Muslims and his imprisonment without charges in a dark hole in the ground for months on end.

I wonder, about this and so much else done in our names, if we will ever know the whole story, except through the lenses of what we are told, and believe to be true.

footnote on “Enhanced Interrogation”

At least some Bush administration officials had opposed the interrogation techniques, including notably Condoleezza Rice’s most senior adviser Philip Zelikow.^[55] Upon learning details of the program, Zelikow wrote a memo to Rice contesting the Justice Department’s Torture Memos, believing them wrong both legally and as a matter of policy.^[55] Zelikow’s memo warned that the interrogation techniques breached US law, and could lead to prosecutions for war crimes.^[26]^[56]The Bush Administration attempted to collect all of the copies of Zelikow’s memo and destroy them.^[55]^[57]^[58] Jane Mayer, author of the Dark Side,^[59] quotes Zelikow as predicting that “America’s descent into torture will in time be viewed like the Japanese internments”, in that “(f)ear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”^[60]

“Enhanced Interrogation” and framing the debate

The recent controversy over releasing details of the torture program, or even whether the brutal practices, as redefined in a secret legal memo, technically even constituted torture, is the most recent, grotesque, example of what has happened to dialogue in our winner-take-all and the rest of you fucking losers go home culture.

One side argues that torture violates our values, however you slice it, rename it, justify it in secret memos, and that the best disinfectant is sunlight. The other side argues that to call coercive interrogation “torture”, and reveal the secret details about how, where and when such tough but necessary things were done, weakens our great nation’s security and makes us more vulnerable to those intent on destroying us — people who deserve to be tortured, in any case.

Instead of discussion there are twitch reflexes conveyed in our black and white mass media and reflected back by the populace. Opponents of torture argue that ten years after the worst abuses by the CIA, with nobody in the administration that engineered and enabled the program ever held accountable (except by lifetime tenure on the Federal Court, appointment to the faculty of a major university, lucrative book deals and speaking tours, etc.), it is long past time to reveal the hideous details to ensure an episode like this is never repeated. On the other side, former Vice President Dick Cheney, architect and proponent of the program, goes on the air and defiantly dismisses the report as a “load of crap”, 500 pages of weak drivel that misses the point entirely, written by partisan wimps who don’t have the stomach to do what must be done.

Here’s the funny thing, though. There is no news in this report. Virtually everything of consequence that this subcommittee took years, and presumably millions of dollars, to compile, and which was released (525 pages of the 6,000 page report, 90% still highly classified) amidst such trepidation and controversy, has already been published, in 2008, in a New York Times best seller and finalist for the National Book Award, Jane Mayer’s chilling The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.*

Reading the book I was chilled to the bone at what was being done in my name. I am chilled today, even as I learn, from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, that the CIA was replaced by the equally secretive JSOC (at the time Donald Rumsfeld’s elite secret force) as the masters of the interrogation and torture program fairly early on– meaning that this revealed CIA torture was the tip of the iceberg as far as torture goes.

At the time this “enhanced interrogation” was going on, and the first public revelations of it were rippling across the media, I was at a concert in Town Hall enjoying David Bromberg’s music. Toward the end of his show he usually does a meditative tune based on the Rip Van Winkle story. The narrator wakes up after a 20 year sleep and doesn’t recognize his home, his town, his country. Bromberg, a humanistic and probably progressive secular Jew from Tarrytown, NY, (where Rip Van Winkle author Washington Irving spent the last third of his celebrated life), improvises a commentary about disturbing current events, his guitar vamping behind him.

As he began musing about the arguably unAmerican things the Bush Administration had been up to, a man in the audience angrily cut him off, shouting that he was there for music, not politics. The disgruntled man, a couple of rows behind me, wore a military jacket. Bromberg looked at him, nodded and shrugged.

He said “we torture people? Now it’s OK to torture people?” and began singing again.

* The book became a best-seller in non-fiction hardcover in the United States, with its author Jane Mayer booked on various news programs for interviews. It later made the New York Times Book Review editors’ list of “10 Best Books of 2008”^[2] and was nominated for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.^[3] The book was a finalist for the National Book Awards.^[4]

It also received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 29th annual book award in 2009, given to a novelist who “most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy’s purposes – his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.”^[5]

A Thought on Frederick Douglass and Justice

If you read the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, you will have no doubt you are in the presence of a towering refutation of the racist lies of American slavery. You will understand, within a few paragraphs, why teaching a slave to read was considered such a serious offense. To compare a man to a barnyard animal when that man can speak and write as eloquently and powerfully as Douglass does, shoves the smug comparison back down the ignorant comparer’s throat.

I received an email yesterday comparing our Founding Fathers to the Jewish warriors, the Maccabees, who drove the forces of Antiochus out of ancient Israel, a rebellion celebrated in the rare nationalistic holiday of Chanukah. The speaker gave the pertinent details:

“The 167 BCE Jewish rebellion led by the Hasmonean (Maccabee) family against the Seleucid/Greek Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanies, who was determined to ruthlessly uproot Judaism and replace it with Hellenic values.”

The Founding Fathers and the Maccabees, he said, were determined, idealistic, brave, visionaries who prevailed for freedom against powerful enemies in spite of the massive odds against them. Their truth goes marching on, the email intimated, as does the connection between American democracy, a light unto the world, and modern day Israel which embodies the ancient code the Jews gave to the world.

As I read the email I thought of the same speech being delivered by any number of true believers. Every true believer believes their cause is uniquely just, that their greatest leaders are determined, idealistic, brave visionaries fighting often impossible odds against evil enemies intent on their destruction. One woman’s freedom fighter is another woman’s terrorist and so on. I replied that I wondered how someone like Frederick Douglass, who gave a famous speech on July 4th, 1852, years after his own escape from an American slavery still heartily underway, might feel about this discussion of American Freedom and the Light unto the Nations bit.

My friend wrote back that she meant to read a bit more about Douglass, but that it was her impression that he was a “‘Jeffersonian-type’ thinker,’ always able to see the whole picture and understand the context of the times.”

I wrote back suggesting she read more from the pen of Douglass and then ventured, in my opinionated way:

For him to have been a Jeffersonian-type during slavery would have been like a guy in Auschwitz taking a nuanced view of Hitler. I think even Jefferson’s most privileged house slaves probably were not enlightened enough to see the “big picture” and be consoled by the idea that in just a couple of hundred years there would be a black president.

Here is the heart of the speech Frederick Douglass delivered on Independence Day 1852:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

The whole speech is here.

footnote on Messianism

These days it is easy for a person with any scholarly inclination and an internet connection to almost instantly clarify shaky memory and insert a citation, as here:

The readiness of the Jews to believe the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi may largely be explained by the desperate state of European Jewry in the mid-17th century. The bloody pogroms of Bohdan Khmelnytsky had wiped out one third of Europe’s Jewish population and destroyed many centers of Jewish learning and communal life (Cohen 1948). There is no doubt that for most of the Jews of Europe there could not have been a more propitious moment for the messiah to deliver salvation than the moment Sabbetai Zevi made his appearance.

If you click on the Khmelnytsky link above you will learn, among other things, that a town less than 100 miles from Vyshnivets, where the families of my maternal grandparents were shot and left in a ravine, is named after the famous Ukrainian nationalist. I had previously known Khmelnytsky only as an infamous murderer of Jews, though it turns out he did many other notable things in his life. The killing of Jews, in the larger account of his notable life, can be relegated to a footnote.

I was tickled, if I might say, by the deadpan, almost New York Times-like, objectivity of the beginning of this description of the dim Jewish view of Cossack hero Bodhan Khmelnytsky, situated at the very end of the Wikipedia account of his distinguished life and career:

Jewish history[edit]

Main article: Khmelnytsky Uprising § Jews

Jewish history‘s assessment of Khmelnytsky is overwhelmingly negative because he used Jews as scapegoats and sought to eradicate Jews from the Ukraine. Between 1648–1656, Khmelnytsky’s rebels murdered tens of thousands of Jews.^[29] Atrocity stories about massacre victims who had been buried alive, cut to pieces or forced to kill one another spread throughout Europe and beyond. The pogroms contributed to a revival of the ideas of Isaac Luria, who revered the Kabbalah, and the identification of Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah.^[30] Orest Subtelny writes:

Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.^[31]

and, speaking of footnotes:

Whether Khmelnytsky was or wasn’t a noble is still uncertain. He himself claimed nobility when it suited him, and it wasn’t often disputed by his contemporaries. Chmielnicki himself once wrote in the letter to King Jan Kazimierz that he was “born Chmielnicki”–however, that surname was never associated with the Abdank Coat of Arms hesed. His father, a noble himself, was married to a Cossack woman and according to the Polish Statute of 1505 that might have put Bohdan’s szlachta status under scrutiny. There are other theories: that his father or grandfather were stripped of their noble status or–perhaps most controversial–the theory of 19th-century Polish historian Tomasz Padura, who claimed (without giving sources) that Chmielnicki’s father was a Jewish convert to Catholicism.

Bummer

Forty years ago it was not uncommon for teenagers, in the shifting winds then blowing, to believe the miraculous was about to happen. You didn’t need a weatherman, as the song said, to know which way the wind was blowing. The world was changing for the better, many, young and old, believed, the proof of it seemingly at hand.

Few gave a thought to, or even knew about, the many Jews in the mid 1600s, certain that the Messiah was among them, who’d sold all of their possessions and waited excitedly to be delivered to the World to Come. The Messiah, a charismatic mystic named Shabbtai Tzvi, faced with a sword, chose forced conversion to Islam over completing his proclaimed mission, and so, instead of the blissful End of Times, the Jews endured hundreds more of years of persecution. (footnote in following post). Nobody in those heady days before the dream collapsed was dwelling on the death of idealism that so often follows the intoxicating flush of inspiration.

The reader will forgive, perhaps, the depressing digression. Such digressions were commonly forgiven at the time I am writing about, the very early 1970s, the days of excess we think of now as the 60s. If you were to take a time machine looking for the sixties, you’d probably want to go to around 1970 to find those colorful days in full flower. Set the machine to 1962, say, and you’d find most white males still had crew cuts. The songs played on the radio in 1963 would provide another shock. In 1964, to give but one example, you could still be killed for advocating integration in parts of the country that insisted they had the right to treat their Negroes as they saw fit and to hell with the Supreme Court and the so-called Department of Justice.

Now we smile or smirk at the quaint beliefs that animated the hippies, the rejection of materialism, the belief in peace and love, the embrace of brotherhood. When we want to mock people we speak of them sitting down with people who hate them to sing “Kumbaya”. Back then, large groups of people sat around a singer with a guitar, their voices rising in a chorus to sing the African song of friendship and brotherhood. We no longer speak of “brotherhood”, except ironically. It’s a word from a bygone era, quaint as a windmill.

The bummer I am thinking of was a bad LSD trip I witnessed in around 1972. The house was empty of parents, the trip had been planned out, the drug secured. The acid was dropped. The potential of this drug to open the doors of consciousness, to expand the mind, was well known and in those days many pursued it avidly. Robert Crumb is among many who attribute their radical shift in consciousness to LSD. Crumb reports that he ate it regularly in the late 60s and he describes it as fueling his mad creativity. Jimi Hendrix is another who credited LSD with unlocking his consciousness. Purple Haze was a love song to the psychedelic named for a popular form of LSD.

The drug reputedly unlocked creative centers of the brain, disinhibited the mind in a way that led to amazing discoveries, revelations, enlightenment. Of course, it had a famous downside: the bad trip, or bummer, hours of intensely painful suffering instead of a transcendent opening of the doors of perception. The CIA had used this feature of the drug to derange the thoughts of people it suspected of being spies and more than one of these deranged suspects leaped through plate glass windows not caring whether they could fly or not. There was a tent at Woodstock where empathetic people quietly talked down people suffering from bad trips. Bummer, a word still in common use, and with good reason, is a relic of those days.

As this bummer I am thinking of progressed, the young man in hell, a hell as real as any, desperately turned on the TV and began staring at an insipid program. He sat close to the screen and watched the show intently. The insipidness of the program, and the desperation of watching it, were more than I could bear at the moment and I went over to flick the TV off.

“No, please…” the young man bumming out said, reaching forward to cling to the television set. “Please,” he said with an abjectness difficult to describe, “I need it.” Nothing I said could persuade him otherwise. I don’t recall how long he sat there, literally hugging the TV. It may have been only moments, but in the memory of a man with a proneness to metaphor, it is a deeply seared metaphor.

We live in a culture narcotized by TV where drugs are now routinely prescribed to treat every ailment known to man, woman and child. Higher consciousness is no longer a subject of discussion, except winkingly, in air quotes. Literally millions of children are given drugs like Ritalin to make them calm the fuck down after a quick diagnosis of “pain in the ass”. It is for their sake, and the common good, that they are medicated. Some of them no doubt benefit from it. Others, well, there will always be others. We are no longer sitting around singing Kumbaya, my friend.

A final note on the bummer, the nature of our minds and our minds on drugs, from an address given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., physician father of the famous jurist. The quote has been rattling around my mind as I wrote this entry, and I provide it here for the wise to ponder, although, of course, one is equally free to enjoy a childlike laugh over it:

Here is an extended excerpt from the 1870 lecture of Holmes which was published in 1879 [OHMT]:

I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.”

source

Marketing Genius Seth Godin speaking of faith

Krista Tippett has a show on public radio that used to be called Speaking of Faith. It has an updated name I’m too lazy to google at the moment (time is money).* Recently she interviewed ever quotable thought leader Seth Godin.

Seth spoke of his idea of ten.** Send your idea to ten people you think will care. If a couple of them send it to ten others, your idea begins to take life in the world. If none of the ten forward the idea, or even reply, your idea probably has no legs.

And as we all discover, sooner or later, an idea without legs will always be stepped on and mashed into obscurity, no matter how simple and effective that idea might otherwise have been.

Keep it snappy and ready to ship, if you would find and sell to your tribe in our vastly interconnected world.

* it’s called On Being. My time really isn’t money at the moment.

** from the transcribed Seth Godin interview:

So tell 10 people — there are 10 people who trust you enough to listen. And if you tell your thing to 10 people — if you send your e-book to 10 people — if you do your sermon to 10 people or show your product to 10 people and none of them want to tell their friends, and none of them are changed — then you failed. That you didn’t really understand what was good. But if some of them tell their friends, then they’ll tell their friends, and that’s how ideas spread. So it’s this 10 at a time — 10 by 10 by 10. How do you put an idea in the world that resonates enough with people if they trust you enough to hear it. That then it can go to the next step and the next step.