THE 'WHITE HEAT' EPOCH?

“Look Ma — top o’ the world!!”

Then, ka-BOOM! A deafening and blinding explosion at the top of an oil derrick in Los Angeles back when there were working oil wells within the city limits!
That scene from the film White Heat has been on my mind for a while. I’ve been asking myself, how much might the current rulers of today’s politics and economics (especially the fossil-fuel barons and all their boughten political and media slaves) have in common with Cody Jarrett? The answer coming through to me right now is, too dam’ much!
I’m serious. Just think about it.
Where are the fossil-fuel barons who are ready to turn their coats to a ‘greener’ side, start to divorce their companies, either quietly or with more publicity, from their original functions and begin to seriously power a ‘greening’ of the energy and agricultural spheres of the world’s economy?
There are commercials on TV which show them doing just that, true, but how much is really behind those ads? Considering these corporations’ abysmal record in doing the right thing (remember, they knew what was going on as early as the early 1970s!) give me leave to doubt that there’s really that much change!
One political party is officially denying the existence of climate change at the behest of its fossil-fuel masters. But those masters know the reality of what’s happening; I’m willing to bet few know that reality better than they! Which means, the subtext bears a very uncomfortable resemblance to Cody Jarrett’s death scene from White Heat. These obscenely greedy, and mentally lazy, 21st century barons mean to go on pumping until either they are stopped by the preponderance of humans who actually want to live (how dare they!)on an actually living planet or until it’s literally impossible to maintain any semblance of civilized life and both the human and animal population plunge off an apocalyptic cliff at whose base will be a barely livable planet, if at all.
It’s up to all of us to STOP this death-march before we reach that cliff! People like the Extinction Rebellion are working towards this end and we need to join in and/or support those efforts however we can. First thing is, don’t let the fossil-fuel media deceive you further: there is a climate crisis and the news of natural disasters the world over is making that clearer all. the . time!
Second, get news from organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, EcoWatch, the Rocky Mountain Institute and other ‘greener’ sources of news. These are also good organizations to contact when you’re not sure what you can do in your situation. Third, join up with politically ‘green’ organizations and don’t vote for anyone who tries to pretend that there is either no crisis or that we still have plenty of time. WE DON”T!!!! Fourth, and maybe most important, connect with other local groups and form regional ‘hubs’ and keep organizing and educating. Both Bernie and Elizabeth are doing this; join with either campaign depending on what you feel the market/utility balance needs to be.
To return to the White Heat analogy, we — yes, we — are the cops in hot pursuit of this psychopath with a ‘mother’ fixation, and we need to move fast! So — let’s roll! Now!

OPEN LETTER TO THE TRUMPOLATERS

I understand that many, and perhaps all, of you are Trumpolaters because he makes you feel OK with the manifold hatreds on which it seems you live.
Like anyone who doesn't bow down to your white 'Aryan' maleness or, in the case of women, to your white 'Aryan' menfolk. Anyone who doesn't see and treat you as, essentially, a hereditary noble.
I may have black (black and grey now) hair and brown eyes, but I'm still one of y'all and I know what a fantastical lie that is! We are about as noble as cockroaches and quite possibly worse!
Another thing you worship about Trumpelthinskin is his addytood, as we say around Philly Town. And that he makes you think y'all 'own' us liberals because you so-o-o-o wou-ou-ou-ound us! Wrong. Quite wrong. One thing y'all don't get about us, in much the same way darkness cannot comprehend light, is that our hearts almost never bleed (those hearts that do bleed; not every liberal heart does) for ourselves. Our hearts go out to others outside ourselves. Other people, some of whom look like us and many more that don't; some who live here and others that don't. To animals who don't know what we're causing to happen to their previously stable environment but they know it sure isn't good, to other living things we put in danger. And for the generations of our children and grandchildren (whether we actually have them or not) who will have to, willy-nilly, clean up the mess we're leaving them--or lose civilization, and maybe life itself, altogether.
And our hearts bleed and rage for what Trump and all you who are his minions are making of our country: an openly hypocritical laughingstock of a pariah nation. A country which is now hated and derided around the globe except by other pariah nations, nearly all of whom are dictatorships of one kind or another.
You may notice I say 'our' country. That's another thing about us. We try to use 'mine' less often and 'ours' more often. I guess 'mine' marks the limit of what y'all understand because it seems none of y'all care what happens to anything, or anyone, else until and unless it hits you between the eyes! And then you howl like nobody's business and as if y'all are the only ones to whom such misfortune, deserved or not, ever happened! Now just who are the real 'snowflakes' here, I 'wondah'!
Yes indeed. I guess 'mine, mine, MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!!!' is indeed the outer limit of your understanding! Well, let me tell you something. There are many more of us than there are of you and we care for what is ours. We're waking up, getting organized and we. will. win the next big election. And we will go on winning elections. If I have anything to do with what happens, I will do everything I can to break your hearts of stone until they are utterly pulverized, which means, reduced to dust!
Then I will pray to the real God (not the god of Franklin, Junior, Jeffress and other phony 'religious' charlatans) of nations and generations that He give you all hearts of flesh for your destroyed stony hearts. It may hurt to have hearts of flesh for a time, but that is the only way that any of us grow spiritually and otherwise. We will lay your patriarchy in the dust and go on to assail other patriarchies such as the Islamist one! And if need be we will meet you at a Reims schoolhouse where you will 'sign' something like an Unconditional Surrender.
When it's all over, I'll be glad to kick in a bit so that former 'nobles' can have good booze on the bar shelves as they mangle Wae's Me For Prince Chairlie any number of times as they get drunker. But they'll get home. After all, there'll be no more military-grade weapons in private hands!

THE COLD SPOT IN TOO MANY HEARTS

"In the warmest of hearts, too often there is a cold spot for the Jews."
Irving Howe

How many among my gentile readers of Abrahamian background (whatever beliefs they may have or have discarded at this point) will spout vehement and violent negatives to this statement?
True, some among these deniers are also ones who, with equal vehemence, deny any racism in them whatsoever. And we all know what such denials often indicate, don't we?
On the other hand, there are those who, while they will vehemently argue with Irving Howe's observation, will also patiently nod when they are told how deep racism and/or racist structures are within themselves and how much work, both external and internal, needs to be done before they, and the rest of us, are free of such pernicious tropes.
How now?
I could hardly agree more heartily with the urgent necessity for such work to proceed with each and all of us, but tell me this: isn't at least an equal amount of work necessary to rid ourselves of tropes which have been with us for not four or five, but fifteen or sixteen, centuries concerning the Jews?
Are so many of us that deceived by 1) Israel's current military strength, all of which is still necessary to prevent a second Shoah and/or 2) the purportedly high socioeconomic standing of most Western, especially North American, Jews today and 3) the rate at which the latter have been intermarrying with Gentiles? Be not deceived: the Jews of Germany were starting to intermarry and many Christian clerics (there were Nuremberg Laws aimed at them, so there were more than a handful) had some Jewish ancestry. And not only those Jews, but the Jews of Spain in 1492 were also thought to be better off than their hosts. Remember what happened to them? Just about everyone conscious of Jewish DNA in their family tree knows these facts and will never, never forget them.
Allow me to ask a potentially highly explosive question, especially to those who see themselves as 'enlightened'. Are you sure your mind and heart are free of ancient anti-Jewish tropes? How many of you feel seriously uncomfortable knowing that Jews have their state again and that it is a prosperous and militarily powerful state--but one with potentially mortal enemies close at hand?
Let me say here that I've no great liking, or indeed much liking at all, for Bibi and his governments. On the other hand, so long as an Arab plurality dreams of finishing the Shoah, the 'two-state solution' is and will remain unrealizable. And to those who will say with vehemence that they don't dream so, at least not anymore, I say: read the records of what they tell each other when they know, or believe, that no liberal Westerners are listening. (If neo-Nazis are listening, they won't care.) Once you do, I think most of you will be appalled and ashamed.
Jews and other peoples of color--remember, the Shoah gave the lie to any 'whiteness' Jews or others might claim for Jews--need to do a lot of honest airing (which I hope can stay reasonably civil; that's important) of feelings about each other and histories both shared and different. And to look at the Middle East through 'American' lenses is to turn things upside down; remember Arabs have been, and mostly still are, the 'whites' of the Middle East.
Wealth, prestige and non-military power did not protect the Jews of Iberia in 1492 nor those of Germany in the 1930s. If anyone thinks those things will protect Jews in the Diaspora this time, tell me why you think that. I'll probably tell you why you're mistaken, but I'll ask the question anyway and I will expect an answer!
Finally, to all who really do want peace in the Holy Land. The best thing you can do is help those organizations which seek to build real peace from the ground up. Especially those who encourage Jews and Arabs to work together and are doing God's work of giving hearts of flesh for those of stone for both sides. But id we are to be serious about ending racism in ourselves, our society and in our world, I think we'd better start with attacking the very oldest bigotry and the racist tropes that prop it up. I say we're all better off without that cold spot in too many hearts.

WHAT CAN ANYONE 'TELL' ISRAEL?

What can any state tell Israel what to do or how to live? To give credit where it's due,  it looks as if none of the Far Eastern countries would think of giving such advice, including India. But for India, the realization that it and Israel face something of a common foe seems to be eclipsing any Gandhian moralizing streak it might have had.
In any case, Israel has more to concern itself in this respect from other Abrahamian countries, in many of which at least a sizable chunk, if not always an outright majority, of their peoples believe that God has forsaken the Jews and has chosen them. Even many Christian minorities in an otherwise Muslim part of the world seem to believe that. Assyrians and Copts, I'm looking straight at you.
Apart from that, the status of Muslim nations toward Israel need hardly be discussed at the moment as the best relations Israel now has with any of them is either a cold peace (Egypt and Jordan) or an under-the-table-but-generally-known entente with other countries who fear Iran. (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman and Bahrain).
As to Christian-majority countries, their case is considerably more complicated as, at least according to a Dane who Caroline Glick debated, they now claim Israel as 'one of us'.
Excuse me?
Well, maybe Denmark can make such a claim in light of their heroic measures to save the Jews of Denmark from the Nazis during the Shoah. But in light not only of nearly all the 'Christian' countries shutting their doors to Jews before the war but also in light of the readiness of too many of their peoples to 'take water and wash their hands' in the lead-up to the Six-Day War in 1967, I can't see any other 'Christian' country that can legitimately lay claim to such a role.
When Jews needed help and had neither a state of their own to protect them nor any other state willing to do so, the 'civilized' world treated them as outsiders, as 'non-whites'. In the West, Jewish 'whiteness' is and remains quite conditional. And no Abrahamian country should expect Israel and indeed Jews worldwide to forget this. Not for centuries; perhaps not even for a thousand years.
Between the general hostility of the Muslim world, Christendom's pathetic lack of moral authority where Israel's concerned and general slanting of on-the-ground reporting, none of these have any business lecturing Israel. The only communities which can speak with Israel with some moral authority are those communities which have historically been oppressed themselves and have been forcibly removed from part or all of their homelands and have been in effective exile such as the African-American (referring to the whole Western Hemisphere here) communities. But they need to speak as one community of exiles (or occupied people) to a returned and self-liberated community of former exiles.
When it had the most consequence, Jews were mostly not seen as 'white'. Quite the contrary. And Jews themselves should treat being called 'white' as an insult. From anyone of any skin tone. And I would ask other occupied indigenous communities, and other communities of exiles, to bear this in mind when speaking of or to Israel or Jewish people over the world.
However, it is worth noting that, so far as I can discern from the news and 6500 miles' distance, that most of the Israelis who concern themselves with preventing what being 'in occupation' over another people does to the occupier from happening to Israel are either from long-established sabra families or have returned from Europe or North America. I'm very sorry to say I don't see many Mizrahis or former residents of Russia among them, although that too could be due to a news-slant.
But it cannot be stated often enough that, from the beginning of this return almost 140 years ago (before modern Zionism even) Jews have been, and still are (for the moment--how much longer?) much more willing to share the land, its fruits and power over it. The Arab majority has not been willing to share to date as have the Jews. This is not a characteristic of most indigenous peoples; it is a trait of colonial settlers. Indigenous peoples are usually much more willing to share the land while they and the newcomers can both live comfortably. Colonists cannot live with anyone but themselves holding all, or nearly all, the land and all the power.
I wouldn't be too surprised to learn the Mizrahim in Israel have been affected by that colonist mentality 'on both sides'. Meaning, while they're resolved to have no other people over them again but how much they grasp of freedom's principle is open to question.  And until and unless the Arabs show, on a continual and persistent basis, a willingness to share the land on an individually equal basis, it's all too likely to remain so. While the Arabs persist in mimicking the behavior patterns of a formerly dominant majority still smarting over being reduced to equality and lower, they'll never get anywhere except to deserved oblivion. And no one, with the exceptions enumerated above, has any business lecturing Israel about what it needs to do to continue to live and flourish. Certainly no current or former imperial power has any such right.

CHIMING WITH OSWALD ON SPIRITUALITY

“Spiritual selfishness always wants repeated moments on the mount. We feel we could talk and live like angels if only we could stay on the mount.” Oswald Chambers

I don’t know about anyone else, but those lines make plenty of sense to me. Indeed, one thing about which I’ve been pondering this week is about the sacralizing of everyday life. Which is also to say, spirituality cannot stay in the clouds. It must descend into our everyday business in our particular valley. But this is never to say that spirituality will make all our acts, still less our thoughts, Weighty and Powerful.
No. The closest this mortal can come to describing how we need to take hold of spirituality (however we do so; my handle is Jesus Christ but you won’t catch me using Him as a club) is to see the special quality in each and every line of our world, including the healthy things we do day by day.
That’s not an easy thing to do, nor is such special quality an easy thing to handle, to ‘digest’ if you will, for we who move in mortal flesh. And Chambers realizes this; he continues thus:

“We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle.”

Again, I couldn’t agree more: spirituality rolls up its sleeves and gets its hands dirty in the everyday muck which it sanctifies thereby. But the process requires work on our part. One of, and debatably, the most primary point about doing so, is to always remember that, when we try to gussy things up we usually show ourselves on one of error’s paths. This is why we are called to be open-hearted. Not simple-minded, but open-hearted.
“Do justly; love mercy, walk humbly with your God.” “Treat others as you would want them to treat you.” And so forth. The ramifications of these commands can become difficult to figure out but, once that’s done, they look pretty plain so long as one’s heart is open and doesn’t draw lines between ‘us’ and ‘THEM’. Unfortunately, there’s always been, and still is, too much of that going on!
“There is a great snare in asking — What is the use of it? In spiritual matters we can never calculate on that line.”
Chambers was on the mark when he wrote that too. And, as anyone who knows more than a smidge or two of history knows well, when we try to so calculate, too often we get the sum horrifically wrong. Another reason why the Almighty seems to keep actual commands simple and minimal. We humans are the ones adding, literally, God-knows-what-all to them in the forms of footnotes, asterisks, codicils, sub-sub-clauses, canon laws, congregational bylaws and He only knows what else.

“The mount is not meant to teach us anything [although that’s always possible], it is meant to make us something.”

Indeed yes. It’s part of what makes us into clean prisms through which God may illumine the world. It can also clean us after what’s been some hard labor in those vineyards in which we all must work from time to time. May God save each and all of us from selfishness, spiritual and otherwise, but especially spiritual. I hope what I write here may prove nourishing and strengthening to those who read and share it, with God’s help.

FELLOW BOOMERS, OUR RECKONING IS UPON US!

This post is especially for all my fellow-Boomers so enduringly proud at calling out the sins of our elders in the days of our youth. Payback time for us is now here. It started to take shape in the wake of the Parkland shooting when students at the Stoneman Douglas High School roared, “Enough!” and started to organize for an actual state of sanity where firearms are concerned. They are still organizing to that end and this aging Boomer cannot shower enough cheers, blessings and other aid on them rapidly enough.
Then Greta Thunberg came along and, while it’s a bit early to state this for certain, at least started to put the capstone on our time to stump up for our payback!
After being (let’s be honest here; we really didn’t do much of the heavy civil-rights lifting) a minor player in that mighty struggle for equal rights, some of us were more central players when the struggle expanded (or re-incorporated, depending on historical opinion) the fight to end discrimination based on sex and, for the first time, based on sexual orientation as well. And nearly all of us except the New Victorians (many thanks, Rene) and incels who mostly hid behind hollowly religious virtuous talk, were enthusiastic participants in the Sexual Quasi-Revolution.
And many of us were honestly opposed to the war in Indochina because some of us saw whence this had come and where it could lead. But I won’t give up on brutal honesty here, so let’s admit that many opponents of that war really only wanted to save their precious skins. I’m looking straight at you, P.J.!
And some of the war’s opponents also ‘greened’ into the Earth Day/Ecology movement, now needed more than ever by all of us. Then, three years later, in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, came Energy Crisis I.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall that crisis giving the great push to the ‘Greens’ then that might have been expected. When I look back, I sort of wonder why not and I have to shake my head over what might be a large lost opportunity.
Mind y’all, I was only a high school senior then even if I was one of my school’s current events/political wonks. Apart from the fossil fuel companies already knowing what was going on and their part in it, I don’t know a whole lot about how much was scientifically known then that we know now. I remember Watergate was also in full swing and ol’ Milhous actually tried to take that ball and run with it! Anyone remember his speech on ‘energy independence by 1980’? Carter tried to push that program forward and was greeted mostly by Congressional snores, as I recall. At least until Energy Crisis II which came in the wake of the Iranian revolution. And there was much more ‘grab the oil!’ talk among those who would become the ‘neocons’. As a neocon and a Boomer I do blame Elliott Abrams for his part in this, not to mention a bloodthirsty trench-dodger. Bad back, Elliott? Yeah, right!
While I can’t blame the rest of us for that mess, what I can and do blame most of us for is: when, the next year, we were faced with a choice between 1) politics as usual, which Carter was not making look very good, 2) a truth-teller in the person of John Anderson who said honestly that this would be a long, possibly hard, slog but it would prove worth the effort and 3) a Grade B actor essentially selling us Dr. Feelgood’s narcotic, most of us chose the third choice. And with that choice the chance to catch climate change while it was still early on evaporated for the most part.

I will never forget my dismay when, on the night of November 4. 1980, I saw which way the country was going. A TV had been set up in what was then the main room of the Christian Association on Penn campus.
And so much for what I thought about how informed a citizenry we had. I had actually believed that we Boomers might have a longer-term view and choose a way other than the GOP’s lying promise to take us to, yea that we could all live in….Disneyland!

The current usurper of the Oval Office is (I certainly hope so, anyhow) the culmination of that lie with the added virtue (I’m serious here; bear with me) of not lying about who will be allowed to live in that Disneyland. In the end, no one is welcome there aside from straight and propertied white males and all their slaves and helpers — but only as slaves and help! And we Boomers owe that to ourselves.
I admit that part of the climate change problem is the vastness of it and the difficulty of ‘getting a handle’ on it, but I can’t get away from that, when faced with the choice between something difficult and fruitful and something which allowed our adolescence to continue, most of us opted for the latter. And now our children and, in some cases, our grandchildren, are present and telling us where and how we’ve fallen short. So be prepared for it, and let us not be ‘wise in our own eyes’, to use a Scriptural admonition.

CHAPTER ONE

At last. An impeachment inquiry is beginning. The crucial ‘straws’ appear to be Trump’s attempt to strong-arm a phony scandal our of the Ukrainian president concerning Joe Biden, generally conducting foreign policy like a racketeer — and, perhaps, that Biden is a figure venerated among the establishment. He represents those who either actually believe (God help them!) all was well before Trump and if we can only get back there, all will be well again, or those who know that all was not well for most of us, but since they were doing so well, want those days back again.
But a possible phony scandal involving such a Respected Figure such as Biden and the blatant quality of Trump’s misfeasance seem to be the two factors which seem to have tipped the fence-sitters and Blue Dogs over the line with Speaker Pelosi leading from the rear. Some of us think that it’s the coverup that was the last straw (and to paraphrase Billy Joel, they may be right). After all, that’s what brought ol’ Milhous down. When I mull that over, it seems to me that the coverup is the maraschino on this toxic sundae, true, but I’m not sure if the sundae itself, if it was less toxic to this particular aspect of government and person long involved in it, would have had the crashing weight of the actual scandal to those who now see the need to impeach.
Make no mistake here: for the sake of any future for the rule of law, democracy and our Constitution as a living document, Trump’s impeachment is (and has been almost since day one) an absolute necessity! It must be made crystal clear that no one, not even a sitting POTUS, is ever above the law!

But the above is only chapter one. I do not expect the formerly ‘Republican’ party to purge itself of the probably (and, to me, hopefully) terminal degree to which Trump has brought corruption already long festering in that particular party.
Trump is not the bringer of corruption; he is the culmination of such corruption which is bigoted against just about anyone who is not a property-owning white, straight, nominally Christian (and, probably, the more nominal his Christianity is, the better they like it!) male with plenty of money with which to buy political slaves who offer themselves with sickening eagerness. This disease is present in the Democrats too but, praise be, nowhere near terminal as the Democrats have antigens to such corruption. They are known as progressives.
So much for the former GOP. The Executive Branch, if not the whole federal government (not to mention many a state government) will also need a thorough cleansing. And that will be up to you and I to see to. It’s our government, folks; it’s up to us to give it the cleaning-out it badly needs. That will be chapter two. Subsequent chapters will deal with the necessity of making an ‘eco-nomy’ that works for as close to everyone as we can get on this planet and for as many species as we may still have with us once the great Anthropocene extinction is over. Such a system is will be far less consumption-driven than is currently the case.

But those chapters are for another time. While we press forward with impeachment as the absolutely necessary first chapter, let’s just remember that it is only that. Other chapters must and will follow.