What Will It Take...
A couple of recent shows got me thinking about those words above, one show being the second season of the hit Australian series, Secret City, in which a house in a quiet neighborhood blows up as casually as a gas leak gone wrong only there's more; before long the Aussie government is contacting its military and soon the U.S. arrives and the story gets murkier and murkier until one begins to wonder what exactly is real and what isn't. The other show was the Oscar winner for Best Picture, Green Room, a shocking and yet uplifting look at our country (the U.S.) some fifty years ago (and to which some would say, is still our country today). Both of the shows vividly depict the undercurrents that now flow and perhaps have always flowed throughout history, something concurrent with the previous post of labeling people and locking them (and ourselves) into compartments or cages of our own design. It was one of the featured thoughts in the recent issue of the Washington Spectator when professor Patricia Roberts-Miller wrote of an earlier analysis by Kenneth Burke of the rhetoric of Adolph Hitler, a process he described as "strategic misnaming," employing: ...ways of thinking common to Western European Christianity: unifying a diverse group by identifying a common enemy, projecting and scapegoating, appealing to “inborn dignity,” claiming a symbolic rebirth, and toggling between material and spiritual ways of explaining events...--simply accusing the out-group of doing what the in-group is actually doing. Because it is so pleasurable, as Burke notes, to shift your flaws onto someone else, this profoundly dishonest strategy tends to work.
The drive for more, no matter the means --more influence, more power, more money-- has apparently spread from individuals to entire societies and countries and has become the subject of books on this subject, a subject labeled kleptocracy. A recent review in the London Review of Books noted just one example of how money can influence the withdrawal of investigations (the subject of the Aussie series mentioned above): Any action to curb money laundering should be welcomed. But when anti-corruption policy is founded on national security considerations, it can cut both ways. One example of this is the Al Yamamah arms deal, a contract worth £43 billion to supply British jets and missiles to Saudi Arabia, signed in 1985. Following allegations that BAE Systems had paid Saudi royals as much as £1 billion in kickbacks, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) launched an investigation in 2003. Yet after the Saudi government reportedly threatened to cancel another arms contract and end intelligence co-operation, the SFO’s director closed down the probe in 2006, citing the risk of ‘real and imminent damage to the UK’s national and international security’. Three top Saudi officials implicated in the scandal went on to buy mansions in the UK through offshore companies. Until his death in 2011, Sultan bin Abdulaziz, a former defence and aviation minister described by Private Eye as ‘instrumental in the Al-Yamamah and other corrupt deals’, owned what was then the most expensive property in the UK, a £300 million Knightsbridge mansion, through a Curaçao shell company. Another review in the same magazine, this of the failed Theranos fraud led by the elite Elizabeth Holmes, showed that even the wealthy --big pharmacy chains, Rupert Murdoch ($125 million), Betsy DeVos (the billionaire now Secretary of Education in the U.S. and an advocate of the government providing subsidies to private schools), Carlos Slim, the Waltons (of Walmart inheritance) among others-- can be lured in; all bought in without proof or results of the efficacy of her new simplified blood "test."
Of course Billy Joel reportedly wrote the lyrics to Just the Way You Are with his wife Christie Brinkley in mind (they divorced nine years later); but I had to wonder if his questioning was something even grander as his lyrics went on to say: What will it take 'til you believe in me, the way that I believe in you. Did figures such as Gandhi or Buddha or Christ ask much the same question? And for that matter did Roman emperors or medieval kings ask that of their peasants? Has much changed since those times? Believing in the "right" cause, that your morals and beliefs are worth pursuing and possibly worth fighting for, can be a knife-edged sword. How far would you be willing to go to defend or stand up for those beliefs? Would you lose a friendship? Spend most of your savings? Risk the lives or living standards of others? And at what point would you feel or recognize that you are stepping over the line? Or would you realize that? And what if the issues were not about oil or cheap labor or politics but were instead about climate change or racial or gender equality? How far would you go until you would also ask "believe in me the way I believe in you." As one birthday card (in the children's section no less) showed the famous Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru monkeys of Japan's Toshogo Shrine, the words on the front showed the saying "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil;" but opening the card had the phrase, "Which leaves 'Do No Evil' wide open." Semantics or a loophole?
Thict Nhat Hanh is dying. The 92-year old Vietnamese monk is known for his compassion and for finding "happiness in the simple things -- in mindfully peeling an orange or sipping tea." But even as he now shuns further medical treatment and wants to quietly "transition," he is not without controversy, said an article in TIME. Yet despite criticism from other Vietnamese spiritual leaders, Nhat Hanh's "simple" version of mindfulness was to: just become aware of your breath, and through that come into the present moment, where everyday activities take on a joyful, miraculous quality. If you are mindful, or fully present in the here and now, anxiety disappears and a sense of timelessness takes hold, allowing your highest qualities of kindness and compassion to emerge.
Author Deborah R. Coen's new book on climate science, Climate in Motion, was recently reviewed in the New York Review of Books: "In the nineteenth century," Coen writes, "the scaler imagination was restless" -- new and newly precise microscopes, telescopes, cameras and clocks brought both the very small and the very large into view, changing peoples' perceptions of themselves and their relationship with the world around them. These developments, Coen finds, affected not only the era's science but also its art and literature: Victorian novelists such as George Elliot and Thomas Hardy, who were familiar with the astronomical discoveries of their time, used shifting perspectives and complex plots to suggest worlds in constant motion, landscape painters elaborated grand horizons with new levels of detail...While scaling is part of any scientific or artistic endeavor, it is also, Coen writes, "something we all do everyday," whether we're comparing the price of bulk rice with that of packaged rice or comparing the enormous scale of the changes described by Secretary General Antonio Guterres (of the United Nations) with the tiny scale of our own influence. In this general sense, certainly, our own time is at least as restless as the nineteenth century, and popular writing about climate change reflects this dislocation -- though most tends to dwell on the size of the problem while exhorting its readers to individual consumer and citizen action, inevitably if unwittingly emphasizing the difference in scale.
So there's hope? I present that as a question when perhaps I should present that as a statement. Despite seemingly being blasted on all sides by corruption and inequality, there is movement towards a blance, perhaps on a scale so small that it almost seems cellular...but it is there. Undercurrents of Green Book are still there, but things have changed a bit. Power and greed and old ways may give way incrementally, but just as a tiny weakling of a weed can break through concrete, so too can our world right itself.* Hidden inside each of us might be things so massive that they are beyond our imagination, much as the hidden caves now being mapped on the island of Borneo, and this strong swing to an extreme state might be the necessary thing that makes us look inward. The review on Deborah R. Coen's book concluded with this" These are hidden, nearly invisible currents, discovered by Coen in almost illegible letters and diaries. But they are a powerful reminder that understanding rarely comes quickly or easily, especially when the mysteries are both larger and smaller than previously imagined. Judgements about the relationship of human actions to planetary currents "have not derived from a unique perceptual faculty, nor from personal wisdom," Coen writes. They are, she says, "the result of a process" -- a process of calibration and reorientation that unsettles both mind and heart, and never ends.
*If you happen to be following our changing world I meant this from a geological perspective as scientists now note the again-changing shift of Earth's magnetic core. What causes this massive liquid iron core to shift in timescales of hundreds of thousands of years is unknown (it does provide our protection from solar radiation, after all); but this recent change is proving even more puzzling. Said Nature: Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth’s north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet’s core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move. On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. A video from NOVA in 2003 proved both prescient and fascinating to watch, saying in part: Ancient lava flows from the Hawaiian Islands reveal both the strength of the field when the lava cooled and its orientation -- the direction of magnetic north and south. "When we go back about 700,000 years," says geologist Mike Fuller of the University of Hawaii, "we find an incredible phenomenon. Suddenly the rocks are magnetized backwards. Instead of them being magnetized to the north like today's field, they are magnetized to the south." The show also mentioned: At the present rate, Earth's magnetic field could be gone within a few centuries, exposing the planet to the relentless blast of charged particles from space with unpredictable consequences for the atmosphere and life. Such an event is but one theory of what destroyed life on Mars.
The drive for more, no matter the means --more influence, more power, more money-- has apparently spread from individuals to entire societies and countries and has become the subject of books on this subject, a subject labeled kleptocracy. A recent review in the London Review of Books noted just one example of how money can influence the withdrawal of investigations (the subject of the Aussie series mentioned above): Any action to curb money laundering should be welcomed. But when anti-corruption policy is founded on national security considerations, it can cut both ways. One example of this is the Al Yamamah arms deal, a contract worth £43 billion to supply British jets and missiles to Saudi Arabia, signed in 1985. Following allegations that BAE Systems had paid Saudi royals as much as £1 billion in kickbacks, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) launched an investigation in 2003. Yet after the Saudi government reportedly threatened to cancel another arms contract and end intelligence co-operation, the SFO’s director closed down the probe in 2006, citing the risk of ‘real and imminent damage to the UK’s national and international security’. Three top Saudi officials implicated in the scandal went on to buy mansions in the UK through offshore companies. Until his death in 2011, Sultan bin Abdulaziz, a former defence and aviation minister described by Private Eye as ‘instrumental in the Al-Yamamah and other corrupt deals’, owned what was then the most expensive property in the UK, a £300 million Knightsbridge mansion, through a Curaçao shell company. Another review in the same magazine, this of the failed Theranos fraud led by the elite Elizabeth Holmes, showed that even the wealthy --big pharmacy chains, Rupert Murdoch ($125 million), Betsy DeVos (the billionaire now Secretary of Education in the U.S. and an advocate of the government providing subsidies to private schools), Carlos Slim, the Waltons (of Walmart inheritance) among others-- can be lured in; all bought in without proof or results of the efficacy of her new simplified blood "test."
Of course Billy Joel reportedly wrote the lyrics to Just the Way You Are with his wife Christie Brinkley in mind (they divorced nine years later); but I had to wonder if his questioning was something even grander as his lyrics went on to say: What will it take 'til you believe in me, the way that I believe in you. Did figures such as Gandhi or Buddha or Christ ask much the same question? And for that matter did Roman emperors or medieval kings ask that of their peasants? Has much changed since those times? Believing in the "right" cause, that your morals and beliefs are worth pursuing and possibly worth fighting for, can be a knife-edged sword. How far would you be willing to go to defend or stand up for those beliefs? Would you lose a friendship? Spend most of your savings? Risk the lives or living standards of others? And at what point would you feel or recognize that you are stepping over the line? Or would you realize that? And what if the issues were not about oil or cheap labor or politics but were instead about climate change or racial or gender equality? How far would you go until you would also ask "believe in me the way I believe in you." As one birthday card (in the children's section no less) showed the famous Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru monkeys of Japan's Toshogo Shrine, the words on the front showed the saying "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil;" but opening the card had the phrase, "Which leaves 'Do No Evil' wide open." Semantics or a loophole?
Thict Nhat Hanh is dying. The 92-year old Vietnamese monk is known for his compassion and for finding "happiness in the simple things -- in mindfully peeling an orange or sipping tea." But even as he now shuns further medical treatment and wants to quietly "transition," he is not without controversy, said an article in TIME. Yet despite criticism from other Vietnamese spiritual leaders, Nhat Hanh's "simple" version of mindfulness was to: just become aware of your breath, and through that come into the present moment, where everyday activities take on a joyful, miraculous quality. If you are mindful, or fully present in the here and now, anxiety disappears and a sense of timelessness takes hold, allowing your highest qualities of kindness and compassion to emerge.
Author Deborah R. Coen's new book on climate science, Climate in Motion, was recently reviewed in the New York Review of Books: "In the nineteenth century," Coen writes, "the scaler imagination was restless" -- new and newly precise microscopes, telescopes, cameras and clocks brought both the very small and the very large into view, changing peoples' perceptions of themselves and their relationship with the world around them. These developments, Coen finds, affected not only the era's science but also its art and literature: Victorian novelists such as George Elliot and Thomas Hardy, who were familiar with the astronomical discoveries of their time, used shifting perspectives and complex plots to suggest worlds in constant motion, landscape painters elaborated grand horizons with new levels of detail...While scaling is part of any scientific or artistic endeavor, it is also, Coen writes, "something we all do everyday," whether we're comparing the price of bulk rice with that of packaged rice or comparing the enormous scale of the changes described by Secretary General Antonio Guterres (of the United Nations) with the tiny scale of our own influence. In this general sense, certainly, our own time is at least as restless as the nineteenth century, and popular writing about climate change reflects this dislocation -- though most tends to dwell on the size of the problem while exhorting its readers to individual consumer and citizen action, inevitably if unwittingly emphasizing the difference in scale.
So there's hope? I present that as a question when perhaps I should present that as a statement. Despite seemingly being blasted on all sides by corruption and inequality, there is movement towards a blance, perhaps on a scale so small that it almost seems cellular...but it is there. Undercurrents of Green Book are still there, but things have changed a bit. Power and greed and old ways may give way incrementally, but just as a tiny weakling of a weed can break through concrete, so too can our world right itself.* Hidden inside each of us might be things so massive that they are beyond our imagination, much as the hidden caves now being mapped on the island of Borneo, and this strong swing to an extreme state might be the necessary thing that makes us look inward. The review on Deborah R. Coen's book concluded with this" These are hidden, nearly invisible currents, discovered by Coen in almost illegible letters and diaries. But they are a powerful reminder that understanding rarely comes quickly or easily, especially when the mysteries are both larger and smaller than previously imagined. Judgements about the relationship of human actions to planetary currents "have not derived from a unique perceptual faculty, nor from personal wisdom," Coen writes. They are, she says, "the result of a process" -- a process of calibration and reorientation that unsettles both mind and heart, and never ends.
*If you happen to be following our changing world I meant this from a geological perspective as scientists now note the again-changing shift of Earth's magnetic core. What causes this massive liquid iron core to shift in timescales of hundreds of thousands of years is unknown (it does provide our protection from solar radiation, after all); but this recent change is proving even more puzzling. Said Nature: Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth’s north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet’s core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move. On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. A video from NOVA in 2003 proved both prescient and fascinating to watch, saying in part: Ancient lava flows from the Hawaiian Islands reveal both the strength of the field when the lava cooled and its orientation -- the direction of magnetic north and south. "When we go back about 700,000 years," says geologist Mike Fuller of the University of Hawaii, "we find an incredible phenomenon. Suddenly the rocks are magnetized backwards. Instead of them being magnetized to the north like today's field, they are magnetized to the south." The show also mentioned: At the present rate, Earth's magnetic field could be gone within a few centuries, exposing the planet to the relentless blast of charged particles from space with unpredictable consequences for the atmosphere and life. Such an event is but one theory of what destroyed life on Mars.
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