Our situation is tragic, but because we are also its perpetrators, it
is ridiculous and comical. In describing this tragicomedy through two
tales and analyzing it in terms of an ancient principle, I do not wish
to seem precious or simplistic, nor do I mean any disrespect for the
massive suffering that is being generated.
My purpose is to bring to bear some basic wisdom--easy access to fundamental
moral and spiritual intuition--which is being overridden in our blind
rush toward disaster ...
Tar Baby
The first tale comes straight out of the American heartland and the
wisdom of Uncle Remus. Brer Rabbit has a mortal enemy, the wily Brer
Fox. To entrap this feisty hero, Brer Fox hatches a plan to fashion
a life size doll out of tar, which he fits out real smart with a hat.
He sets Tar Baby out on the road and hides, snickering, in the brush
nearby.
Sure enough,
Brer Rabbit comes sauntering along, “klippety klop, klippety klop,
sassy as a jaybird”. He shouts a friendly greeting to Tar Baby,
but when he finds him unresponsive to his advances, he becomes insistent,
growing more annoyed, until he finally wallops him. When his fist gets
caught up in the tar, he gets real angry and hauls off with the other
fist, which also sticks into the tar. As his rage grows he just keeps
getting more caught up, to the point where he bops the disintegrating
icon with his head, completely entrapping himself in the sticky black
mess.
At this point Brer Fox saunters forth out of the brush, looking “just
as innocent as a mockingbird. ‘Howdy Brer Rabbit’, says he,
‘you look sorta stuck up this mornin’’, and then “he
rolls on the ground and laughs and laughs, til he can’t laugh any
more”. Now
our hero is completely in his power.
The tales of Uncle Remus were brought to us in glorious Technicolor
in the famous Disney classic, Song of the South. Brer Rabbit embodies
the spunk and vigor of the fifties American hero, flush from the idealistic
victories of World War II--the kind embodied in the movies of Ronald
Reagan. Cowboy Bush has now adopted this pose, which the majority of
Americans, disoriented by alarming new realities, find comforting. “Tranquilizing”
would probably be more apt.
Consider Brer Rabbit’s basic modus operandi. If folks don’t
do what you want or what you think they should do, just whop ‘em
up side the head. Brer Rabbit believes that force works...war works.
So does Bush and Company, fat cats who sit in big offices and enjoy
the visceral high of wielding force, but have never experienced the
abject horror of war. They have convinced the majority of Americans
to believe, with Brer Rabbit, in this archaic reflex of force.
The one
restraining exception in this cadre of stupid white men has been Colin
Powell, the only real man of war in the group, who sees force strictly
as a measure of last resort. One senses the wisdom of Uncle Remus, who
gets the whole picture of force and its consequences. Unfortunately,
however, Powell is foremost a soldier, and a soldier always follows
orders from the chief.
There are two dimensions of this belief in force. The first is that
it is effective to follow the aggressive impulse to apply physical force.
We should take heed from the daily spectacle of macho Israelis and desperate
Palestinian youths who share faith in this primitive impulse.
There certainly is an effect, but only in the short term and at the physical level. In the realms of the heart and the spirit, ultimately more determinative, it is completely counterproductive.
In fact, the fable shows that the use of violence just catches the perpetrator up more and more in a cycle that ultimately returns upon his own head.
Furthermore, ever since we invented weapons of mass destruction, physical force ain’t what it used to be. This broadens the fallacy of the second belief--the effectiveness of war.
Except for the ones that have been bought off, world leaders do not in any way support the Bush war effort, (with the exception of Bush Buddy, callow Blair, who is too young to remember.) What these leaders know is that if you look at the whole picture--the devastation, the hideous suffering and death, the infrastructure reduced to rubble, the political upheaval, and the chaotic but fateful way that violence spirals into more violence--you understand that it is not an option. Up to this point, victims of American force have been only tangentially aligned with al-Qa’eda. After this war of aggression upon Iraq, they will all be lined up behind bin Laden, “dead or alive”.
For further
wisdom from Uncle Remus, let us return to our tale. Brer Rabbit was
always outsmarting the shifty and unscrupulous Brer Fox, a kind of praeter
Saddam Hussein. But the fox had his secret weapon: Tar Baby. While a
happy shift in fortunes in a further episode of this tale may provide
a glimmer of hope, the pertinent lesson has to do with how Brer Rabbit
got himself trapped in such a tarry mess in the first place.
It has to do with our addiction to oil.
Bush failed to garner support for his war on Saddam Hussein, because
most of the world outside of America has been on to the fact that the
good guy/bad guy rhetoric has been basically a pretext. After all, there
are enough unscrupulous dictators in the world fiddling with instruments
of mass destruction to justify war on every continent. (Persons of discernment
should be grateful to the pipsqueak in North Korea for exposing this
inconsistency.) No, the substantial advance against Iraq has had to
do with this black goo, which is at once vital and deadly. The objective:
control Tar Baby.
Let us be clear about the larger picture. Our addiction to this energy
source is destroying the atmosphere of our planetary home. We are dependent
upon it, but we do not need to be. The technology of alternative energy
sources is already sufficient to replace this mess.
What is
required is bold vision and the enormous expense of retooling the infrastructure
to these new energy sources, starting with America. It would take the
kind of energetic visioning we are putting into our warring, plus a
substantial chunk of our military budget to pay for such a change. If
we did not have to control the world sources of oil, however, we could
probably afford it. This way we would free ourselves from our dependency
upon oil and from our leaders’ smarmy hidden agenda to control
the oil producing areas, primary among which is Iraq. This is a bold,
but entirely workable strategy that also addresses the more fundamental
problem of the planetary toxicity of this energy source.
In actuality, our leaders are in even greater peril than Brer Rabbit,
and the situation is considerably racier. With all of their personal
fortunes and political commitments to the oil industry, they are also
in bed with Tar baby. (These are the moral leaders chosen in reaction
to Clinton’s indiscretions.) Where there is so much addictive passion
and greed, a violent lovers’ quarrel is bound to ensue. The government
throws our money at military domination as a strategy to control the
planetary oil sources.
(HOT STOCK
TIP!! All Oil Companies associated with the Bush Family and Cheney.)
For all the righteous rhetoric, the powers of Europe, Asia, and the
United Nations are on to this ludicrous charade. Because we’re
the big boy on the block, some of the leaders are willing to go along,
but we have no real moral allies among them.
The oil rich Middle Eastern countries are deeply unstable. Most of them
were arbitrarily created after the First World War by the British Empire
to serve its oil interests. The people of the consequent nations know
that their governments are in bed with our leaders. The collective resentment
of all who do not directly benefit from this infamy enflames all the
other, deeper discontents. With each incursion into the Tar Baby Middle
East in the hypocritical name of democracy, we become more and more
entangled in the mess of reinforcing oppressive anti-democratic regimes.
The tide of mendacity and injustice will simply be too great.
Each blow that falls on Tar Baby is destined to increase our entanglement
in the mess of oil and the mounting archaic rage of the dispossessed
sons of Mohammed. We will end up like Brer Rabbit, entangled in this
gooey mess by our need for control, our addiction to this energy source,
our own stupid aggression and the fierce spiraling vengeance of the
rest of the world.
David and Goliath
The second tale goes to the Hebraic roots of our Christian culture.
One of the great inspirational stories in the Old Testament is David
and Goliath.
Way back
in the Bronze Age, the ragtag armies of Israel were under siege by superior
forces of the infidel Philistines, whose great weapon was Goliath. This
giant was nine feet tall. He wore “a helmet of bronze, a two hundred
pound coat of mail, bronze leggings, and he carried a bronze javelin
several inches thick, tipped with a twenty five pound iron spearhead.
His armor bearer walked ahead of him carrying a huge shield.”
Hurling arrogant insults at the paltry soldiers of Israel, the invincible
giant challenged any among them to come forward and do battle with him.
The Israelites turned and fled in fright. A fresh faced shepherd boy
from Bethlehem, young David, destined to become the great, if horny
King of Israel, stepped forward to take on this challenge. It seemed
inconceivable. Yet, inspired by the righteousness of God, David, armed
only with his shepherd’s staff and sling, shouted, “You come
to me with a sword and spear, but I come to you in the name of God.
The Lord does not need weapons to fulfill his will.” One well-aimed
stone to the forehead of the giant knocked Goliath senseless.
The invincible one fell to the ground, and the red-cheeked boy beheaded
him.
To comprehend the relevance of this story, we have to perform a feat
inconceivable to flag waving Americans--to imagine that in the greater
picture (that regarded by most of the rest of the world) we ourselves
may be the bad guys. I realize that to suggest such a thing in God’s
country is heretical to say the least, but to make any sense at all
of the miasma of our unfolding fate, we may find ourselves called upon
to rise to this odious, but more objective view.
This possibility having been opened, please indulge one more bit of
heresy. Have you ever taken a good look at bin Laden? That is, when
his photographs have not been retouched to suggest the embodiment of
evil. In his traditional white dress and geffiah framing his noble features
and prominent nose, he looks (but for some little rifle held in his
fine hands) like central casting for a fifties Jesus. This bin Laden
is no impoverished discontent, smoldering with resentment at our luxuriant
freedoms; on the contrary, he is a man of surpassing wealth to whom
all the richness of Western life has been offered on a golden platter.
The awful truth is that he is a renunciate of passionate moral and spiritual
conviction, who, with one bold stroke, brought down the giant towers
of Mammon, throwing the entire world of bottom line profit motive into
complete disorientation.
Since 9/11 bin Laden, designated the evil enemy actually responsible
for our national catastrophe, is nowhere to be found. For all of Bush’s
twanging rhetoric and the gross superiority of our military prowess,
he miraculously eludes the Superpower. The greatest danger, however,
would be that we should find him or kill him. In fact, what could we
possibly do to him that would not elevate his messianic status to the
state of divinity, his martyrdom rallying inspiration for the counter
force-- sympathizers with the battered dispossessed of Palestine, freaked
out Iraqis, moral discontents with the plastic American hegemony, impoverished
losers in the Globalization system.
In fact, our massive armory, designed for technological and military
ascendancy over other sovereign states, is practically irrelevant as
far as the real adversary is concerned. Yes, in a spectacle compared
in Parliament by one British Lord to watching the World Heavyweight
Champion beating up on a disturbed child, it did rout the regime of
the Taliban in Afghanistan (killing incidentally far more innocents
than the 9/11 attacks). The Taliban, however, like the armies of Israel,
just dispersed into the hills. There they hide under different names,
regrouping to continue the next phase of the war on Satan.
Even strategically, the massive armory is irrelevant, because the terrorists
will never engage it directly. On the contrary, the major terrorist
attacks will always be directed where that force is not looking, as
has been the case in New York, Washington, and Bali.
We are
a giant flailing about in disorientation--a war here, a war there…
The actual situation is even worse. The deployment of our massive armory
is more than irrelevant; it is counterproductive. Wherever it is used,
it breeds more anger and antagonism than it can possibly dispel. In
fact, its deployment only feeds the hatred of the traumatized victims
and survivors of our military might.
This gross irrelevance constitutes what is probably the gravest danger
to the American agenda. We should take heed. Fearless David, infused
with a relentless faith in God, brings down the unbeatable giant with
one true, well-placed shot.
It is the strength of this phenomenon of integrity versus mass that created
America in the first place: a ragtag bunch of passionate patriots was
able to defeat the massive military machine of the British Crown.
America has already suffered defeat through this phenomenon in Vietnam. Our vastly superior armed forces, whose leaders trumped up a geopolitical war to fight the paper tiger of communism, were vanquished by the inexorable passion for national self–determination on the part of the Vietnamese people. We should expect the same vehemence from the Iraqi people, as we demolish their national integrity.
Look at America’s
great epic, Star Wars. Every American child knows that it is precisely
this kind of integrity on the part of a few righteous warriors on a desert
planet that destroys the hi-tech forces of the Universal Empire.
The massive defense masks the greatest weakness: our inordinate and sentimental
valuation of life. The seminal fear of all is the fear of death. The dedicated
terrorist, committed to martyrdom out of his devotion to God, becomes
a formidable enemy of a culture preoccupied with its own power and drugged
on sex, movie stars and sentimental trivia.
Righteousness of conscience is a greater power than hi-tech might. Like
David fighting Goliath, it strikes not to destroy, but to disorient. The
disorientation undermines the very massive complexity of the behemoth
and its system, a weakness in its own right. Eventually it collapses of
its own weight and inherent contradictions.
In fact the very massiveness of the giant is a distinct disadvantage.
Disoriented by the true shot, the giant is distracted as he flails about
trying to apply his massive force, thereby exposing his weaknesses at
every turn.
The greatest weakness is the true tragedy of the present situation. The
absorbing spectacle of our Texan cowboy naming his axis of evil and moving
upon it in massive aggression is effectively a distraction from the greatest
threat of all: the ecological juggernaut of unconscious technological
development fueled by oil, hurtling with ever increasing volition towards
rendering the field of battle, the planet itself, uninhabitable.
Weapons of Mass Destruction, indeed.
Hubris and Nemesis
A deeper level of analysis of these tales and of our tragedy takes us
back beyond the relative comfort of Good and Evil to the Greek roots of
our culture. The Greeks understood our human reality, the Kosmos, to be
mercilessly self-regulating. From the highest perspective, it is about
balance and equilibrium. Any tendency that leads away from this equilibrium
automatically sets up a compensatory force that brings the tendency back
upon itself, thus reestablishing the balance. Observing the intransigence
of this law convinced the Greeks that reality is divine.
Our Greek ancestors observed the dynamic of this equilibrium in the law
of hubris and nemesis. Hubris is always an excess of self-confidence,
small scale, like the feckless arrogance of Brer Rabbit or big scale,
like the massive bravado of Goliath. Hubris, seen by the Greeks as arrogance
before the gods, defies the divine equilibrium and pushes one tendency
to such an extreme that it creates, out of nowhere, nemesis, the inevitable
counter tendency in which the violated equilibrium re-establishes itself.
In this sense, Brer Rabbit creates Brer Fox, just as Goliath creates David.
There is no hi-tech way of fixing this. Humans are not the authors of this compensatory tendency. Because it is prior to them, they are entirely subject to it. Force, the unfortunate, but understandable reflex of excessive self-confidence, just intensifies the excess. No amount of force can counter nemesis, because it has a power as inexorable as a physical law. Humans who use their power to commit and enforce their hubris always fortify nemesis and suffer from it.
Human beings have to learn to live in harmony with this equilibrium; otherwise there is hell to pay. This is what tragedy is all about.
The hubris of the Bush administration in its arrogant disregard for the wisdom of the world is but the tip of the iceberg. The White Man has committed hubris on many levels: the first relatively recent, but based on others that are far more fundamental.
The recent hubris is geopolitical economics. The age of colonialism has
intensified and become planetary through American led corporate globalization,
or market imperialism, fortified as it is by America’s military might.
You will not find this reported by CNN or any other organ of the other
American media, as they are the broadcast intelligence and self-congratulation
of this imperialism.
In the last decade things were looking very good for the intoxicated winners on the stock market, so good that no one in this country noticed the general trend, unfettered by yucky Communism, of an ever-widening gap between the winners and the losers in our glorious global game.
Recently, however, the appalling spectacle of our own disappearing wealth has given pause to notice that the cadre of winners is becoming smaller and smaller. It will soon comprise only a few multi-millionaires in Washington and a handful of CEOs reaping vast profits by making their godlike decisions in super skyscrapers.
The system of globalized economy is in fact market totalitarianism producing
an ever-growing infestation of poverty and dispossession around the globe.
There are countless examples of this that you will not see reported on
any American network.
When the corporate authorities recently stopped importing coffee from El Salvador, there was massive starvation. (Did you see anything about that on CNN?) We assume we are the good guys because (up until now) we have not been into naked military expansionism like the Romans or the Nazis, but in our intoxicated stupor, we overlooked the rampant victimization of the systemic violence inherent in market totalitarianism. The system itself is violent. With awful justification, the losers in this game hate it.
The rule of a handful of fat CEOs is only theoretical. It will not go that far. We do not have to look back to the Greeks to understand how this works: we can look to Karl Marx, who had his own understanding of hubris and nemesis. Unfortunately Marx has been discredited. His proposed solutions to economic imbalance were screwed up in the Twentieth Century by the tempting hubris of totalitarianism: his analyses of the dynamics at play however were right on. He demonstrated the physics of exploiter and exploited, and showed how such economic imbalance inevitably produces violent historical adjustment. Bottom line: you exploit in the short term, you pay in the long run.
But Marx
was looking at the relatively contained Nineteenth Century phenomenon
consequent upon the industrialization of Europe. In the present world
this imbalance has reached staggering proportions. The hubris is massive
and planetary, and its inherent instability is manifesting in every way.
The present world crisis is the activation out of the soil of things as
it were, out of the core of the dispossessed, the nemesis. Consider the
most significant terrorist targets and contemplate their meaning: the
gravity defying assertiveness of the Twin Towers of Mammon, the seat of
military might in Washington, and the den of exotic Western pleasure in
Bali. These are the tokens of our hubris.
Bin Laden is the prophet of our nemesis.
In the light of these considerations, the strategy for dealing with the
present situation through military force is ludicrous. In its rigid support
of exploitation and ever widening persecution and destruction of the exploited,
force is irrelevant and profoundly counterproductive. To date, terrorist
attacks have only been thwarted by a combination of sensitive infiltration
and Intelligence work. But this is just a more subtle use of force. Ultimately,
it too will prove ineffective, unless it is backed up by a concerted international
effort led by America to redress the terrible imbalance between exploiter
and exploited in corporate globalization, with a concerted eye to forms
that serve local communities, the common good, the well being of humanity,
and the course of circumstances that threaten our true home.
Things always ended happily in the Fifties. In a follow up episode in
Uncle Remus’ saga, Brer Rabbit has the last word by tricking Brer
Fox into throwing him into the briar patch, which is his true home, his
“laughing place”. Would that we could be thrown back into the
nature that is our true home.
But this
is unlikely to happen. The present hubris of economic totalitarianism
is rooted in another more fundamental, archaic, and systemic one: the
arrogance of the White Man over nature. Over the last centuries, with
the approbation of humanism, He has dominated the earth and its peoples.
This is the hubris of Christian culture. In the arrogant conviction that
it is the one true religion, and the unfortunate fusion of bottom line
profit motive with the name of the Champion of Unconditional Love, our
ancestors explored, colonized, dominated, plundered and destroyed the
cultures of the earth, whose indigenous wisdom was rooted in delicate
participation with this earth.
This rapacious arrogance is in turn rooted in the Christian belief that
Man is superior over all of creation, and that because spirit is good
and flesh is bad, Man has necessary dominion over gross earth and its
progeny. Instead of inspiring true responsibility, this belief has entitled
Him to satisfy His greed through the vicious exploitation of its resources
and peoples, and to rape the intrinsic balance of the biosphere to satisfy
His greedy ends. In His superior hegemony and in the name of progress,
He has inspired the deracinated cultures of the world to do the same.
Now the cowboy, when he is not preoccupied with making war, is busy satisfying his corporate bedfellows by rolling back our feeble attempts to control the tide of greedy infamy against our planetary home.
All of this
constitutes the hubris of the White Man, the most monumental in human
history, the nemesis of which is finally revealing itself in the horror
of plague, overpopulation, planetary destruction and terrorism so desperate
it has no fear of death.
This is why we are losing our Great War. We have only ourselves to blame.
Statement from the
Author:
I am a patriot of the planet. I have been educated at the premier Universities
of the United States and Europe, and have spent many years as an academic
in California, India and Indonesia. As a philosopher I have devoted my
studies to the processes of transformation that make up the spiritual
nature of mankind, and as a psychologist, I have been able to use what
I have learned to affect significant and beneficial change in the life
course of many individuals. I spend as much time with non-Americans as
I do with my own countrymen, and I am a devoted America watcher.
Until the advent of this administration, I have never been politically
minded, though I was once a Fellow in a California think tank concerned
with the nature and function of the institutions of democracy. Because
of long time connections established there with visionary European thinkers,
I have recently found myself close to the formulation in Europe of a new
movement, called the Social Forum, which seeks an alternative to exploitive
globalization, racism and war. It started a few years ago as a groundswell
of discontent and protest, but things are developing rapidly in response
to the wayward leadership of America.
Instead of working towards global unity and peace, American leaders are
defying the will of the world and boasting about how many fronts we can
war on. Instead of joining the world efforts to turn the tide of biospheric
destruction, they are rolling back all environmental policy, breaking
treaties and offering no alternatives at all. In the face of this fuck-you
political impulse and in the conviction that America is no longer going
to provide vision and leadership, the Social Forum is rapidly galvanizing
into a fervent movement of significant proportions. It is defining its
stand in favor of peace, localization of economies, radical environmentalism,
and civil society. In November 2002, I was invited to participate in what
was to be a small conference in Florence. It ended up being a massive
demonstration for peace pouring through the streets of the birthplace
of the Renaissance. This demonstration is now flooding out into the streets
of the world.
There is slender hope for the world, but America, under its present guidance,
is not leading it.
**********************
William Pennell Rock is a therapist and philosopher living in Northern California and working all over the world. (See: www.sacredperformance.com) This article is copyrighted, but permission is granted for reprint or posting for non-commercial ends in print, email, blog, or web media, so long as this credit is attached and the author is informed via email at pennellr@aol.com. The article is frequently updated. If any commercial interest wishes to publish the article, please contact the author at pennellr@aol.com.
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