It were better to be of no church than to be bitter for any. - William Penn, some fruits of solitude, 1693
There’s a coffee shop in Federalsburg Maryland, where the eggs are served on styrofoam plates and they never heard of half and half. I was down here for a few days, maybe five years ago; my brother Jim threw me some work, fixing the roof for a friend of his from church. It was nice, seeing him again. His two children lived on the mainland, closer to Baltimore with their mother and his second wife was away for a spell. It was twenty years since the two of us talked; really shot the shit, without the pretense of our mutual dispositions as husbands and fathers; my wife having filed for divorce over a year earlier and my daughter now adjusting to living in a residence home for the disabled. Poking holes in the foam plate with my rubber fork, trying to pick up a wedge of pancakes and watching the syrup ooze through onto the countertop, I was reminded how effortlessly I was still able to find and tease the most vulnerable, well-concealed catacombs of his pride.
We were from a pretty large brood, six kids and three adults, living in a small Levittown-style home; it was a pressure cooker and teasing was simply a rite of passage. So it was pretty difficult for me to digest how thoroughly transformed my younger brother had become since he left New York over twenty years ago; the irreverent prodigal had laid down the bottle and was now serving the Church on his free time; repairing gutters, fixing faucets, attending Bible study groups and talking openly, to me no less, about his faith and the Lord. It was well known by that time, that I held no tolerance for the Church, or scripture in any form for that matter; a fact which silence on such matters served to preserve the peace for almost half a century. Jim’s introduction of the issue was no subtle confession. It was a challenge. There seemed to be no way to cut through the sausage without slicing through the plate. The counter was by this time a sticky mess. There’s no question I was an ass; but I was an incredibly clever ass and the humor runneth over. To his credit, he was patient, almost graceful for sure, which I naturally understood to be condescending. At some point he finally asked if I thought of myself as a spiritual man. It came as no surprise to me that I did.
But let me now ask the analogous question: What do I think of the beautiful face of the Chesapeake Bay? Is there a single correct response to either question? Can you accept through this comparison my perfect right to see the water in my own terms? Spirituality on my terms, for the purpose of this first composition regarding it, will remain a snapshot of the bay on one particular day, at one particular hour, an invention of the events that lead to a morning of experiences that place my humor in a specific context. For as the bay remains a fixed, charted mark on the landscape, a metaphor for the spiritual constant piloting my morality; it is my relationship to it that is daily reevaluated or in the vernacular of the faithful, reaffirmed. Growing up on the ocean’s edge could never alone stand as à cause de raison of one’s matured reverence of it. For this, the answer lays outside of the obvious, somewhere caught up with other deeper, correlated mechanisms inside the mind. So what is my concern with my own relationship to God?
The original answer to this is sort of humbling. To my impatient ear, you were simply giving it all over to the Christian Church. It is no secret that I despise the church for its role in co-orchestrating the fundamentalist conservative movement in contemporary America; for its reckless influence in our policy decision making process; for using insidious tactics to restrict the rights of individuals with less power and a fragile social standing. Your place in these ranks stunned me to react with my wits instead of acting with my mind. As my a.m. chat buddy for these many years, as my brother, ex-roommate and friend, I understand that a caricature of the shallow soldier for Christ is incongruous with your debating skills. So I want to better explain myself to you and figure out whether, in the end, you care for my spirituality, which like all the others, appears at its core, more comfortable in Kevlar than a collar.
Like a house, a life is measured in periods, from moving-in day to moving-out day. Born into darkness, we explore each room and outfit it with the trophies of our accomplishments. One wick is lit in the science room, another in the social skills antechamber while yet another light is lit on the night of our wedding. My spirituality is available for scrutiny by anyone who cares to look into my windows and experience the glow of goodness they find there. I am content to recognize that same light in the homes of my friends and neighbors without having to ask for a tour of the house. My yard is likewise outfitted with enough lamps to help a visitor find the way to my door through the dark.
An even glow throughout the home, most desired, is achieved by remembering the importance of keeping the candles fresh in every room. This would be analogous to Plato’s search for a harmony of human forces competing at all times for the reins of control within the soul of an individual. This would require the “I-am” who runs my affairs be diligent, within reason, to the needs of each chamber and supply fresh tallow when and wherever needed. With greater confidence in one’s own spirituality, analogous from my perspective with the light of knowledge and wisdom, the job of juggling the lamps becomes less of a chore and risk and, like the long distance runner who finds her stride, more of a joy; an almost effortless high. The proof of the journey is in the glow of the karma one detects from the individual. Whether it comes in the form of words or behaviors, the simplest of gifts requires the concept of the act only after the inspired invention; the form or realization of the reaction must first be conceptualized. In this I believe is one extremely important measure of a body’s spirituality.
I know a great many people who believe in God. I have found a wide degree of unevenness in the glow from their windows. I also know of an equal number of people who cannot say that there is definitely a Creator, a God behind the events and miracles of life, with a comparable degree of unevenness to the glow of their compassionate intelligence. It is in the end, a skillful compassion, a savant-humanity that we prize highest in the platitudes of Spirituality, isn’t it? The belief in a supreme being neither insures nor precludes this state of grace or awareness within one’s soul. So, again in the interest of explaining my behavior on the phone, I will return to the area(s) of Spirituality that leave me cold, spiteful and cold.
The following anecdote is not intended to insult your intelligence or reduce the scope of my take on the complexity of the issue of religion. It’s simply a way of advancing to the next stage of my analogy, permitting me to refresh my hypothetical model with a flesh and blood illustration. Please bear with me. Delores' Uncle Cedric found his answer to a life of agitation and unrest in Christ. Twenty years ago, he began filling a hole, hemmed by a feeling of suffering and unease he could not soothe. His story is just one of a number I have had the opportunity to watch unfold, much in the same way, though the details of his progression are more available. This is not a take-down of Cedric. He was a pretty cool guy with a charisma that shot like beams of positive enthusiasm from his eyes, his shoulders and the corners of his smirking lips. Cedric would do anything within his power to help Delores and me, should the occasion call for it. He met his wife, a beautiful woman of Argentinian and Basque decent, at a church function. The church was an evangelical denomination, founded in Manhattan, which outgrew at least two locations, finally reaching tens of thousands of worshippers via cable TV from its “temple” stadium in midtown,, capacity five thousand or more.
He once blushed during a Thanksgiving dinner with thirty or so family members, as he retold the story of how Yolanda and he waited in the rain for over an hour to get front row (pew?) seats to one particular Sunday’s “performance”. Drying off and finally in their prized trophy seats, Cedric and his wife were just settling in for the sermon when an usher wheeled a crippled man down the aisle and over to our two heroes. “Would you two mind exchanging your seats with this man? His wheelchair isn’t allowed to be blocking the aisle. It’s a fire-code thing you know. I have two seats saved for you up a bit . . . . around row twenty or something.”
“Jeff, we looked at each other, still lightly soaked and felt cheated. This couldn’t be happening to us. So we stood our ground and told the usher that we worked hard for the seats and they were not available.”
Yet, ironically, Cedric would devalue the thesis of this essay with a quote from the very same, very Good Book; oblivious to the infected contradiction of such a compromised example. I believe there’s even a line he recited from some scripture, absolving his need to feel connected to the responsibility or impulse a less “indoctrinated” human being would feel to support word with deed. Perhaps it was that scene from JC Superstar, where Christ finds himself overwhelmed by the scale of suffering in the world and pushes past the blind and the lepers clinging to his robes for the cure and maybe a little salvation.
Like I said, this story was not repeated to express my take on the sum gains of religion. That evening, over a bountiful spread of traditional Thanksgiving plenty, I saw the dark window where a light once shone in the room of this man’s objective reason. This candle it appears was moved to join the growing collection of lamps in the great hall of his religious fervor, leaving the darkness to replace it. It’s been many years since I’ve spoken to Uncle Cedric. Not over any falling out or the like, but more because his calls simply stopped and my calls became an intolerable collection of unreturned messages. Delores on the other hand was a guest of his, out in beautiful Witchita, about seven or ten years ago. God had set him up with a marvelous job as a tennis-pro and blessed him with two daughters. A vote for George Bush was a vote for Christianity and Democracy’s final push to abolish the threat of Muslim tyranny from all four corners of the globe; May the sword of Christ not fall into the hands of cowards unwilling to do the Lord’s work.
He hasn’t invited Delores back to visit in ten years. I would have found it difficult to imagine, growing up as a teen in the seventies, to believe that somewhere, somehow, a straightjacket was not being fitted for this guy. By the standards of the pre-Jerry Falwell era, a time when most people kept their religious extremism closer to the vest, Cedric would have been considered a harmless eccentric, a danger only to himself; someone to keep a healthy distance from but not necessarily threatening. But things have changed. Ministers from the evangelical heartland of America promised Washington that there were votes out there, a lot of votes and the Leaders of the Christian ministries were prepared to deliver them, for a little bit of the old quid pro quo. Yes, there was legislation desperately needed, waiting to save America from threats to core Christian and hence, family values. To a young guy raised in the progressive North East, this movement was like watching a cartoon overtake the country like water filling a sponge. At least the spiders have come out from hiding, where we can see them, I would think. But they just kept coming. Purchasing radio broadcast frequencies en masse’ at the lower end of the FM radio dial to ensure seamless coverage of Church Radio from Portland to Portland while strategically preempting noncommercial alternative music and news radio programs, “the godless, heathen alternative”, in a single blow. The message to the desperate, the family scared by unemployment and drink, the sermon of Salvation was a perfect fit for the New Prosperity of the God and Country eighties. Simply substitute the “Please, Jesus” with a “Thank you Jesus” and the remaining sermon survived intact.
Artful men with questionable agendas became powerful men with a technical prowess. What do I mean by “questionable agendas”? I mean the use of corporate tactics with Madison Avenue savoir faire’ to build the stadium sized halls of worship that populate the suburbs of Colorado, Utah, Texas and Montana among many other locations; whose Wal-Mart style efficiency continues to spread into areas like New York the way our eastern seaboard Malls spread into the Midwest back a few decades ago. Men, ordained by god knows who, are traveling as Spiritual Leaders in privately owned Corporate jets; contacting their representatives in Washington who eagerly drop calls to answer them. It is a well-documented consequence, which befalls the hapless resident of Salt Lake City who leaves the Church of Latter Day Saints.
The worshippers of the New Life Church, an evangelical Christian denomination in Colorado Springs, (congregation 14,000 and growing), have developed a separate and distinct community within the city. They have literally segregated themselves from the general population by a systematic land purchase operation with money generated specifically for the greater goal of augmenting and micromanaging New Life’s control over its flock. Employment, education and peer support are rewarded and withheld in accordance to one’s status in the congregation. It was reported in Harper’s magazine back in May, 2005, (in the article “Inside America’s most powerful Megachurch” by Jeff Sharlet, a church founded by the later disgraced pastor Ted Haggard), that direct phone communications between Pastor Haggard and G.W. Bush were not a rumor, not uncommon and not without effect.
Similar strategies are employed in ever evolving varieties in many, many other locations throughout the country. What I find questionable is the popularity of these tactics among people who are reading the same book as you and Pastor Pete; people who, though equally intelligent, apparently fail to bring a healthy skepticism to the work at hand and consequently fail to grasp the true word of the Gospels. If the Lord wanted mindless automatons he would have contented himself with the animal kingdom and been done with it. Our very freedom of choice is apparently so sacred a gift that His decision to leave Chance a two-sided coin was necessary to preserve the odds. Emily is Emily so that I might wrestle with both my freedom and her fate. God smiles over both.
And in this fashion, the lamps move from one room to another; imperceptibly, cautiously, inevitably. It reminds me of the drunk, whose love of a drink is so strong that he musters control enough to insure his privilege to imbibe will never be revoked. It is through this back door that many men are seduced from their principles; replacing them with unsound axioms which sound good, which please the moment, yet trip the fuses of reason, the patriarch of logic. Slowly the lights dim. But why waste so much time and effort on an aberration of the Christian code; the very principles you and I were raised to recognize and trust. The faith or reliance with which we regard each other is based in no small part on a secure knowledge and confidence of our similar tastes, ethics and distinctions. When I tell you I’ve just been disrespected, you simply listen to the how, not questioning why. I trust you and I believe you feel the same. But when you ride with the bible in your saddlebag, you invite my impulse to defend my ideals from those who ride with you.
Not all people who worship are the same. Not all religions are the same. Every statement in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran is not about nice things happening to nice people. Followers of all these texts are confronted with thousands upon thousands of pages of statements propounded many millennia ago by individuals who have over time transcended their flesh and blood humanity for an intimidating makeover. Decisions to obey, interpret, edit or abide these words have segregated Sunnis from Shiites, Catholics from Unitarians and Orthodox from Progressives, while the holy war between the three major religions have crowded the headlines for every day of the five decades I have been alive. Yet individually, no one actually believes the fundamental service of religion is to withhold a message for shared love, trust and brotherhood; to obscure the strategies of effective communication across the line of vulnerability surrounding the nuclear or extended family. These issues tread very dangerous and highly guarded waters. It is no small wonder that tomes of metaphorical intrigue, expertly laced with tantalizing ambiguity should be employed to navigate the passage. Too much is at stake to leave to contracts. Many seekers will read the same verse and inevitably arrive simultaneously, at different interpretations and hence, conclusions. Some more subtle than others, like what was the place of Mary Magdalene among the disciples; and most regrettably, some inciting one neighbor to despise another, like who is the real Messiah? A difference so profound it is apparently worth disrespecting the fundamental truth over; (or as Asimov would tell it, the “Prime Directive”.)
Just for laughs, what is the thinking here? :
I will . . . a] cheat thee, b] lie to thee, c] lie about thee, d] cuckold thee, or e] murder thee . . .to achieve my superiority in the name of (pick one: Allah, Yahweh, Krishna, God, Jehovah, Other), and return to the primary directive immediately after.
This fact does not need another two or three thousand years to figure out. Get over it. Just take it back to the fundamentals: If you do not believe in me, believe in the things I do; which leads nicely to the greatest commandment; the Prime Directive: Love thy neighbor as you would be loved. It’s this exacerbating preoccupation with the words! Jesus himself would marvel at the creative license taken with the Prime Directive in His name. One can only wonder if Benedict XVI would give up his bed for one night to an unwashed homeless man fresh in town from a forty-day jaunt in the wilderness.
My point is not to suggest that the words are either useless or the instigator of all the trouble and confusion. It is rather, the imposed infallibility of these Holy texts in the grip of certain influential and very powerful albeit imperfect men. This has proven repeatedly over many centuries to be a deliriously toxic cocktail:
infallible Tool > imperfect operator.
The image of a six year old with his father’s 38 caliber comes to mind.
More walls have been erected with bricks stamped “LOVE”, right here in the United States, in the name of God and Country than I can continue to tolerate silently from the sidelines:
• There is no place for same sex, adult relationships in our communities
• The plague of undocumented immigrants, bringing a non-English speaking culture into this country is an affront to America and therefore, the Christian values that congeal our community
• The teaching of evolution in our classrooms is an affront to God
• Research for cures to tragic disabilities like Parkinson’s disease, M.S. or autism using stem cells from harvested embryos is a sin in the eyes of God and will be stricken from the law books . .
just to name a prominent few. The issues come right down to wars over the display of Holiday season dioramas in public spaces.
So where are the humble men? The seekers who simply want a serious discussion with their spiritual selves; who wish to allow God into their lives, privately working within their families and among their neighbors for the Lord. (“For blessed are the undercover agents; the spooks.” - Jesus, somewhere in the Gospels.) The men and women who have asked for healing and were healed, who asked for guidance and began to walk a little differently, a little taller, with a little more confidence; the philosopher who asks what he might accomplish within the remaining days of his life to repay the Lord and leave some mark of positive change to inspire from the quiet side of the grave? Where are these men and how did they get caught up in all this trash talk?
It is the irony of our situation, yours and mine, that the image of religion in America, as expressed by observers both at home and abroad, is not regrettably, that of the Temperate Majority but instead, the ego-crazed, money fueled technocratic children of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. In earlier times he would have simply been considered “the town zealot”, a tolerably eccentric man whose enthusiasm for a congregational interpretation of the word convinced provincial communities that pleasing the deity would stave off bad karma. Poor access to education in these times left a vast majority of the people ignorant of the rules or laws of critical analysis, a skill whose continuous exercise is essential to its development and maintenance; hence, ill prepared to identify let alone challenge the corrupted rhetoric.
“But the crops failed anyway!” they cried.
“No matter,” sayeth the Zealot, “Someone from this village must have failed us! This is what remains obvious. Let us find who and punish them accordingly. That is what the Lord wishes! Only then will things be set right again.”
Unintended to draw attention to a specific individual or event from history, this tongue-in-cheek exchange was presented as an example of a flawed style of dialectic reasoning employed in both religious and secular polemics from the period immediately following the fall of Roman influence in Europe. A strange Christ from this movement arose, a spiritual doppelgӓnger, the UberChrist whose invention preempted the passive and insipidly vulnerable Primary Directive, subordinating it to a more masculine, a more impenetrable cover of laminated tidbits, quilted from the valance band of Gospel minutia, one whose aggregate importance and moral utility amount to little more than philosophical excrement when measured against the fundamental, Controlling Principle. These were the progenitors of the modern Evangelists, the moral voice of the West; self-proclaimed guardians and protectors of an ideal which they either misinterpreted or, contrarily, understood too clearly and systematically de-clawed in the interest of advancing an alternative, more personal agenda. Just picture your High School gym teacher coordinating the Invasion of Normandy.
Yet these same guys, the “Zealots” or the “Fundamentalist Evangelicals” are the ones with the bull horn!
• Have children for Christ. Lots and lots of them. We need more “Christian soldiers” because our intel from the field is that Hajji’s giving seventy virgins per fatwa and our enrollment has to respond
• Proselytize, proselytize, proselytize . . .
• The homos are coming! The Homos are coming!
• Eden was located somewhere in South Dakota
• God rewards good Christians with financial prosperity
• Scientific research and related publications are composed with a distinct bias toward the exclusion of Divine intervention
- and so on . . . The compatibility of religious observance and critical, legitimately analytical thinking has been rent by a tragic history of alternating dominance and distrust waged in the public arena by ham-handed extremists from both sides. A wariness of scientific arrogance by certain religious leaders might be traced to a conditioning of thought begun from the earliest period of spiritual infancy and assimilation into a community of similar, inherited attitudes and theological positions toward the two. Man’s special place in God’s heart before all the terrors and delights of the sensory confusion that is our inheritance; the Church’s prime source of authoritarian intoxification, (i.e.: All heavenly bodies can be observed to circle the sky above earth. We are reminded in this therefore, of man’s importance as the center of God’s creation.), was being undermined by keen eyed “philosophers” with new and powerful tools of computation and measurement. Books of irrefutable evidence bearing witness to the obsolescence of liturgical dogma were successfully censored; in no small part a result of their ironic complexity.
The Church was indeed threatened by attacks from the scientific community. Science’s impatience with religious dogma has had its own dark history, with countless examples of empirical research being used as evidence for the prosecution of prominent scientists at illegitimate trials; courtroom travesties served cold by a vengeful history. And somehow, throughout the long, bloody, illustrious story of man and his recorded relationship with some form of higher power, good men, numbering in the billions, have maintained a private relationship with their higher power. Unconditional respect for the prime directive has forced many of these men to leave the church, the synagogue, the mosque or the like, because of a refusal to include as dogma, specific articles of vestigial ritual incongruous with either the prime directive or established scientific developments. I am one of these men.
Another class of worshippers, a more pragmatic group, neuters the contradiction between scientific method and scriptural discipline by assuming a duality of faith, which has provided a workable, if not technically flawed détente between the inner engineer and the spiritual servant. I would go out on the limb here and suggest that this community represents a considerably large slice of the overall pie. For this individual, a statement of scriptural importance, for example the raising of Lazarus from the dead, inexplicable from a scientific perspective, is accorded to faith, enough said. The Bible’s shaky take on chronological passages however, say a seven-hundred year old man or a six thousand year old planet Earth, are dismissed as quaint and insignificant details easily corrected by science’s application of carbon dating and DNA techniques. Neither inconsistency challenges the Prime Directive. Albert Einstein would remain a Jew with strong religious convictions until his death. Newton on the other hand died believing that science had not yet explained the existence or need of a god.
The heavy hand of financially backed Religious propriety, in the case of Newton, born during Cromwell’s war on the English Church and Crown, and the severe religious backlash facing the Einstein family were both proportionate to the social dynamics of their separate times. Newton was an outcast from the prestigious Oxford brotherhood, an obstacle to his occupational ambitions, and Einstein, a refugee of the socialist fascism of Nazi Germany, an exile. Men with media outreach and superior political power, dangerous men of fractional talent, achieved an influence of exponential advantage over these two individuals whose wisdom both landed a man on the moon and created the modern nuclear age. Unfortunately, their story is agonizingly repetitious. Examples from Socrates, through Galileo to Darwin and beyond, pepper the story of an alpha-class’s struggle to tame the common rabble with a digestible explanation of natures grip on man’s understanding of his being and consequent, infuriating vulnerability. Madison Avenue simply elevated the evangelist’s options by micro-analyzing the fallout of the post world war prosperity in America’s newly created and vacuous middle class of the late forties and fifties, by providing the Corporate Barons and some attentive clergy with sophisticated, highly localized target coordinates.
The challenge of the deeper questions of both God in the new complex capitalist community and the post-quantum age of Science were still the domain of a marginal stratosphere of the population. This much can never change. The masses however, needed plainspoken answers to questions of immediate moral and practical dilemmas. This much also, can never change. These answers however, were not the direct products of these great and rare, minds preoccupied with contemporary, cutting edge research or discovery. A population exhausted from a hard days grind at the office, the factory or the construction site wanted, and in many cases demanded, bold sensible advice to immediate moral dilemmas involving pubescent teens and community relationships. Advice from the local church or armchair psychoanalysis from a trusted friend was more than adequate to the task, and processed seamlessly with network television programming, it rounded out the profile of a reasonably informed citizen from the late twentieth century America through today. The insidious perfection of the media’s skill at packaging information of no consequence in the guise of legitimacy was the focus of a 2008 publication by Curtis White called The Middle Mind. Parodies of the media’s role in replacing a person’s pre-television agenda of activities (i.e., hobbies, reading, interacting or simply ruminating) with a prepackaged stream of choreographed, digital methadone, are used by companies like Hulu to further spread their coverage by insulting the victim (ref. Alec Baldwin as other-worldly “rancher” harvesting the softened brains of human TV addicts as alien delicacy). Time on this prohibitively restrictive medium is terribly expensive, so the data by needs, must be refined to target its audience with every attention to detail. Nothing is left to chance because the financial wardens have their stalwart margins of cost effectiveness. The importance of this development to our conversation cannot be underestimated.
To mine the fields of subliminal influence psychologists, sociologists, visual artists and screenwriters have been drafted by the Corporate, Political and Religious generals to form an army of technicians who in turn use actors, voters and priests like rifles. Every time you shop, the electronic scanning machines cross-reference your “Discount Membership Value cards” and credit cards with the items you buy, gathering information about your individual lifestyle. Organizations like Google and Optimum On-Line intensify the profiling effort by tapping into fresh areas of personal and intellectual property adding it to the biographical “genome”. The invention of Super-Computers has increased the value of this incredibly daunting amount of information by reducing the ratio of excessive to inclusive data by employing ever superior, more powerful computation-management techniques, euphemistically called data-mining. This progression will continue on a natural course of improvement and efficiency, rounding-out the “humanity” of the model by further refining the sketchy caricature of its subject to a representation of ever increasing focus.
Buying a skill saw at Home Depot, for example is mundane enough, an act that generally raises no red flags in the mind of the average consumer. This single, innocent purchase however, is enough to distinguish an otherwise identical pair of profiles from one another. The simple purchase of the power-saw now expands the study to suggest Profile A, who bought the saw, has an increased probability of independent initiative toward activities involving the fashioning of materials, than would Profile B, whose record indicates the now-conspicuous purchase of no saw.
The paranoid stigma of this frame of skepticism evaporates when you begin to zoom out from the specific purchase of a skill-saw by an individual and extrapolate the implication of its expository potential by the number and variety of purchases by the individual over the week, the past ten weeks and the past five years. Patterns and trends materialize; psychological inferences abound, and perhaps most unsettling, future actions may be anticipated.
Now multiply the individual’s profile by the number of people who shop using credit cards or “preferred customer” discount cards, (issued by almost every Supermarket and drug store chain in the country) and you have the most potentially dangerous database ever assembled. Part of its brilliance lies in its use of the eager subject, who actively updates and maintains its relevance. One flattering tribute to its effectiveness is the birth of data piracy by criminals; identity theft, computer viruses upsetting the smooth cross-pollination of gigabytes, and unscrupulous “spam” swindlers. These low-life bottom feeders are traditionally the bell weather of brewing storms.
The next step toward mass indoctrination is to have the community view the individual who refuses to provide his personal information with suspicion. I bought a pack of cigarettes at Pathmark two nights ago. The clerk informed me that she was required to see my I.D. Being thirty-one years over the state’s age limit, I laughed and showed the lady my driver’s license. Without looking at it to inspect the date of birth, she scanned it into a machine, smiled and handed it back to me. I was stunned. I asked her why she needed to scan my license. She looked at me like a deer caught in the headlights.
“I have to scan your license to sell you the cigarettes.” She choked.
“You had no business doing that without telling me” I replied.
“But I couldn’t sell them if I didn’t swipe your license.” She said, beginning to wonder if I was hiding something or just rude.
“You swipe broccoli and tampons” I snapped, “You don’t swipe a guy’s driver’s license. You just scanned my license without even warning me!”
“But I had to.” She explained.
“No. You should have asked me first. Pathmark is not a government agency. I would have politely declined and gone next door and bought the fuckin’ cigarettes without providing your database with any more of my personal information. Doesn’t it seem a little weird to you that you need more than a look at my birthday to sell me a pack of cigarettes?” I asked.
“No” she said.
The guy behind me had his license out and ready, looking at me like I was wasting his time and was probably a shady freak with something to hide. He got his Newports and put his license back in his wallet. I left the store feeling like I was just hustled. I drove home pissed off.
The individual, though not yet an endangered species, appears to be the target of much interest. Try owning a home in suburban America and refusing to fertilize your lawn. The chemicals used by your neighbors to kill the indigenous plant life and promote a healthy carpet of thick green grass, an alien plant, have been traced to damaging effects on the aquifer and, in the case here on Long Island, the clam and mussel beds of our coasts. This information is not secret knowledge. To the contrary, perfectly reasonable homeowners, concerned about Greenhouse gasses and deforestation, still continue to fertilize their lawns in keeping with an unspoken mass-schizophrenia; promoting an imposed, eccentric aesthetic ideal before a science-based tale of caution. Exchanging the current toxic junk for organic alternatives does not address an individual’s preference to cultivate a yard of native wildflowers and plants.
The growing complacency I sense in my community is not necessarily a new thing. The crucifixion of a homeless man, whose only crime was speaking truth to power, was cheered on by the same community he gave his life to heal. The persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany is a grotesque illustration of neighbor turning on neighbor; answering the call of nationalism by betraying old, established bonds of trust and friendship for the security of community acceptance; the current suspicion of contemporary Americans toward brown-skinned worshippers of the Koran; the tide of angry, otherwise rational, functioning Americans against those working to shine a light on acts of “war time” torture and prosecuting those responsible; the looks of disdain and groans of disgust from an audience watching Susan Boyle take the stage in a British singing competition; a reflexive, negative verdict of a woman who hadn’t lifted her voice to yet sing her first note, based solely on the association of performance and appearance instilled and reinforced on our generation from our earliest days.
From direct television viewing of cosmetic ads to beautiful actors in unlikely situations, our experiences are formed and reformed by the changing styles and instructions we receive by interacting with friends who are watching from the same television choices as us. Susan Boyle’s performance is now another entry in the book of remarkable events.
A human is a societal animal, preferring the company and conversation of others to solitude. As a matter of fact, solitude is a weapon, employed by prison guards to punish inmates when all other methods fail. Many people seek companionship from their pets when human company is unavailable. A person rarely chooses to be lonely. It is not my purpose to draw through these examples, a case against the concept of community, but rather, to ask you to step outside the “circle of trust” and evaluate the condition of the community, in much the same way as a nutritionist would evaluate the health of an individual by identifying the content of her diet. Television my friends, is the mayonnaise of America’s intellect.
Watch any mindless exchange on a third rate sit-com, complete with canned laughs and a soft, upper-middle class living room set, and you can be sure that a targeted message is woven into information related to the dramatic context as influential in its omission as if it had been actively addressed. Mistakenly innocuous to the sensibilities of the vast majority of the viewing population, which now includes virtually every single person in the nation, this subliminal technique reinforces its audience’s analytical numbness through a conditioned reduction of quality choices. Cattle are herded and then steered to the slaughterhouse using analogous techniques. We are now into the fourth generation of compliance. What began as a technological novelty of the elite has become, by the twenty-first century, an appliance of ominous ubiquity. A few years ago I was standing on the street outside the Carpenter’s Union hall on Hudson Street, down in Tribeca, when I saw the bright blue glow of a battery powered television set shining out of a cardboard refrigerator box sheltering a homeless guy. The number of TV’s per household in America is 2.1, up from 1992’s paltry 1.6. These, mind you, are color TVs, not the old black and white variety.
In the earliest days of independent, non-commercial radio, Lew Hill, the founder of Pacifica Radio, offered free FM receivers as premiums to listeners who donated money to help keep his fledgling station on the air. The concept was to promote listenership and hopefully improve the effectiveness of fund raising. If the lights stay on, Lew will get his message of pacifism out. If the station gets its message out, more people, statistically speaking, will support it. If more people support it, Lew Hill will continue to improve the odds that Pacifica will remain on the air. Lew Hill’s message got out, people now have enough FM radios and sixty years later, the people are still willing to pay for it.
This is a quaint synopsis of a similar strategy used by corporate, political and religious leaders over the past half-century or more. Lew’s budget back in 1949 was six thousand dollars. FM radio was inaccessible to most Americans; (Lew incidentally, was denied an AM license. These were, after all, the salad days of McCarthyism.) and America knew nothing yet of Arab strikes on U.S. soil.
What do you call a magician who performs an illusion while explaining to the audience every step of the trick? I suppose if the act is seductive enough, you simply call him to perform his act at your home. The skill of a palmed quarter or a dove produced from the air has been trumped by a force of persuasion so psychologically scripted, so insidiously administered as to separate the audience from its connection to a more natural buffet of emotions, like shock, surprise or even disappointment and anger. Whoever first observed that “TV is the opiate of the masses” understood this. “I don’t care about the content. Just give me more.” Television producers are candid about their skills and often brag during interviews about how brilliant the system actually is. We watch and hear, but no one is listening. We fold our clothes, flip through channels and talk about a sale on ground chuck at Pathmark, all while keeping our eyes glued to the screen.
After fifty some odd years of refining this stream of data, shooting out of a virtual window into America’s living room, the Twenty-first century aristocracy, with unprecedented access into the heart and mind of Everyman, has patiently, methodically achieved a maximum control of his own destiny by writing the scripts we, the tired, intoxicated proletariat perform, like dancing bears. The genius of this program is two-fold: first I suppose would be its innocuous presence. Could Caesar himself have dreamed of a system of control so perfectly effective, that any attempt to disarm it would have been met with opposition from its victims? Second is the multiple utility of the system. Swords and tanks do not promote retail spending. The Television however, explained to me last year that my tax dollars being used to support an illegal war in Iraq was the best bang for my “family-values” buck while seamlessly urging me to improve my self- image by getting over to Sears immediately to kick the tires of a riding lawn mower before the Easter Sunday Blowout Sale Extravaganza is over! I’m sure the lines wrapped around the building.
The coverage of professional sports in America is near impossible to distinguish from serious issues concerning political and economic stability at home or internationally. A degree of importance to sporting activities has been carefully cultivated by frat-boy heirs to the Nation’s nobility class, grooming athletes from the dregs of the lower and middle classes like thoroughbred stallions, whose progress is monitored with the scrupulous attention of an astronomer; statistics accurately memorized by individuals who would fail an eighth-grade English or Math exam and, like the aforementioned Pragmatic Worshiper, has incorporated an acceptance of belief in two contradictory principles in the name of compromise and serenity. Yes, the country and the planet need our help, but only after the Red Sox win the World Series. Yes Mr. Pettite, God has cancelled all His other appointments to observe you kiss the crucifix on the chain around your neck. Your split-finger is now covered by the Christian Magic Insurance agency; any and all claims are automatically nullified by our “infallibility clause”, details on the back of the Cross.
True to the tenets of caricature or a lampoon, I have exaggerated the primary distinguishing features of the issue to place in your mind a model from which to work from. By substituting sports for politics, religion or science, I am attempting to dissect the anatomy of a significant capillary of the arterial indoctrination technique and display its distraction potential and ease of assimilation. By fragmenting the individual American citizen into hundreds of separate cells of independent, often conflicting convictions, the subject’s brain is ready to perform its natural gravitation toward an order of decreasing complexity, a procedure metaphorically observed throughout the studied physical universe, wherein a multitude of activities is reduced, like a quadratic equation, into fewer and fewer cells, and hence fewer and fewer contradictions. With the help of television, our contemporary viewer has been raised with far less proficiency and experience or even confidence in his own meditative skills, trading the effort of creative, talent-building activities for Television viewing. Having spent far more time taking data from the tube into his mind than sorting it, the idea that our hero might rely on preordained services to steer the process is more than compelling. It is much easier to leave the hard work of self analysis in the same coma, in the same dark cell of one’s own numbness, where it lay, ignored for decades; to vend out our analytical responsibilities than to confront a hard-won principle that could very well introduce little more than an upsetting inconvenience.
And here we have come at last to the final turn of this rant. I don’t even pretend to know if the names of the Leaders behind the manipulation of America’s “middle mind” are the same names we have been taught by the media to associate with their respective empires. To borrow one last time from Mr. White, a revolution of covert techniques has silently been born to the post-Nixon world and used to considerable effect by the second Bush administration. We no longer “stonewall” the uncomfortable details of our trespasses, but rather, we inundate our media and citizens with more information than they can bear. By exceeding the threshold of reliable data processing, troubling information can now been laundered, the public anesthetized and the perpetrators free to rapidly engage in the next operation. Thirty years of polishing the brains of its citizens to a waterproof sheen has allowed G.W. access to indulgences that would have made Nixon sob with envy.
With this in mind, the probability of a nameless face behind the controls loses its attraction, utility and sounds simply paranoid. The mechanics of America’s growing dichotomy however is not.
- Turning to established political parties is easier than inventing a set of principles which define you as a conscientious, voting individual.
- Turning to a religious organization that imposes any series of axioms beyond the Primary Directive, the Single Controlling Principle, consistent with religions across the globe and cultural spectrum, namely: Love one another, share with one another is an intolerable compromise and one which Christ himself would deny.
- Buying a Bratz doll for your four-year old will accomplish little more than perpetuating the ideal of caste distinctions, preventing access to dreams for individuals on the metrics of superficial chromosomal arrangements. This is a vestigial, inappropriate and medieval character building exercise and has no place being passed along to our next generation. It is nothing but a stain on our collective report card.
But in each of the three cases above, there is a motive to include the contradictions, an established method of effective delivery and worst of all, a complicit public. Our inevitable maturation as a species has been forever altered by the discovery of an effective mass hypnotic propaganda technique, dwarfing the influence of the church over the previous two thousand years. King Henry IV was forced to wait outside the the church in the snows of Canosa for three days by His Holiness, the Holy Roman Emporer, who wished to humiliate him. Barak Obama has been given the responsibility of repairing a global financial mess he did not create while bearing the pressure of opposition media to explain the tremendous waste involved at the expense of “Main Street’s” kitchen table, ala symbolic “Tea Parties” and public outcries fueled by FOX News-style information. His ability to perform as an autonomous leader has been apprehended by an instrument of profound and unprecedented immediacy, capable of supporting or undermining any effort at the speed of electronic signal transmissions. Facts, cherry picked, edited and re-proportioned are the creative plaster of both the Liberal and Conservative media. All our hero need do today is come home, pour a beer and sit down in front of his TV. The most taxing decision left to make is which preordained service he prefers and let them recharge his belief system. It’s all very efficient, very tidy and extremely far gone.
So in conclusion, I ask you where the Prime Directive fits into the mix. Have the churches apprehended the bible from its original, useful intention as an instruction primer of prepubescent civilization (whose propaganda outreach was an uncontestable success, but whose contemporary legitimacy is found less within its words but in its implications) and reenergized Scripture through modern techniques to conscript the availing population, anxiously searching to resolve the numbing conflict of a thousand separate compromises without losing one’s tee-off time at the club?
Walls need to be built; homo’s to scare back into the caves they came from; foreign influences that threaten our American/Christian way of life; atheists telling our children about evolution. The size and structure of these walls are clearly available to any devout seeker with enough intensity, with enough tenacity to scour the scriptures for the details.
This is not a Christian sickness or a Muslim sickness. This is the illness of every worshipper who trades their love of God’s greatest gift, our individual intelligence and creative potential, for the acceptance of any organization that subjects the Greatest Commandment to a subordinate position to any other testament. Given the modern state of the media’s influence, too many occasions have been documented where religious leaders with personal political agendas, with discriminatory perspectives and financial investments at stake, have identified their seekers, tailored their techniques of mass hypnosis accordingly and injected a “Bible” platform into the secular, political debate using the flock as a very effective voting block of little more than dumb muscle.
A man’s right to throw a punch ends at the point where another man’s nose begins. I hope this helps you understand my spirituality. My fear of the Bible is actually my fear of the use of the Bible for purposes other than telling beautiful stories that emphasize the importance of our need to truly share the planet and learn to love each other.
© Jeff Thomas 2009
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