The Most Important Book Ever Published

Painting by Tom Ferguson, oil on canvas 1987, Throw-away World

Herman Hesse was the first writer I encountered who dealt with the subject of consciousness. A book on Hinduism was next and, over the next 40 years, a series of authors, teachers, psychologists, artists, philosophers, musicians followed who examined this subject with varying degrees of opinion and clarity.

The recognition that, as a species present course is dead-on toward extinction - we are fouling the nest, polluting essential-to-life air, soil, water with our consumption, over-population and war-making toys, so high tech that even their limited use could put an end to the whole opera - this knowledge is fairly widespread. And among people of good will there is the desire to incorporate it into business and government policy, yet taking an opposing view is risky - those who run things tend to be in deep denial, uninterested in questioning assumptions, and their influence goes way beyond their numbers. Democracy does not fare well in the hierarchal workplace.

Explanations vary as to how we arrived at this precipice - greed, sin, capitalism, short-term thinking, communism, democracy, propaganda, in-breeding, stupidity, folly, the immaturity of a young species… and depending on definitions, they all more or less point at the problem. But the most important book ever published, Eckhart Tolle’s, A New Earth, earns the half-serious title because it succinctly and eloquently sketches both problem and solution. It doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Rather it acknowledges among the great traditions, glimpses expressed mostly in poetic, philosophic or metaphoric, thus obscure, language. Understandably, for ultimately the subject is extremely difficult to articulate, referred to in some traditions as ineffable. No less a personage than Oprah Winfrey has remarked on the clarity Tolle has brought to this discussion, describing a ten-week televised conversation she conducted, one for each chapter in the book, as “the most important thing I’ve ever done.” Someone who makes $78 million dollars a year can’t be wrong, right? If Oprah isn’t your idea of credibility, take a look at those videos, still available on her website (under book club, Eckhart Tolle). She gets it.

Tolle allocates about a third each to three topics: Ego, Pain Body and Awakening, this last including a prescription for doing, being in the material world in a way that transcends the first two, what has brought us to the edge of extinction and what can bring us back.

Ego: the author uses the word ego unattached to psychoanalysis. One way to get at what he means is to close your eyes… take a breath… let it out… watch for the first words to cross your mind. That is not you, you are the observer of those words. What you are observing is the unawakened you. So the words in the head, what he calls mind-chatter, is the ego, creating, in its ramblings, a mental construct of the world, an identity, a pseudo entity that dominates the individual, a role the individual mistakes for themselves, what is at the root of the dysfunction of our second paragraph. Like other entities, ego clings tenaciously to existence, is super-sensitive to perceived threats to its dignity and longevity, and ever-seeks confirmation of its importance in the eyes of others. Ego believes that we are separate, isolated, vulnerable individuals. Awakening happens and ego dissolves, when we feel interconnection, ONEness - which experience the frightened ego does everything in its power to prevent. This manifests in rigid ideology, intolerance of diversity, attacks on difference - the ego in defensive mode. But wakening is not about believing anything, it is about experiencing it, what Tolle calls presence. “To feel, and thus to know, that you are: and to abide in that deeply rooted state, is enlightenment.”

Pain Body: related to Karma, pain body is the residue of negative experience that awaits opportunity to release, a trigger where it can explode in anger, self-righteousness, condemnation. There is personal karma, accumulated and fed all one’s life and social karma, inherited from the milieu one happens to be born into. The Hatfields and the McCoys, the Israelis and Palestinians. The U.S. invades Vietnam, killing millions of people. Can those born into this culture escape the negative energy of that massacre? Can the Vietnamese? The whole nation is founded on destruction and plunder of the native population. Military spending is now beyond 50% and the U.S. spends more than the rest of the world combined on so-called defense. Thought of as energy, negative pain body seeks compatible energy forms on which to feed. It is repelled by unlike forms, drawn to those which nourish its longevity. So we have the abusive relationship, whether spousal or national, which continues so long as unconsciousness goes unchallenged. We have to live with the karma we’ve inherited, personally and socially, and it will play out but we needn’t feed it when it comes around. Nor need we create new negativity.

Awareness: we have obsessive thoughts, they trigger emotions, we are caught in this karmic dance but the good news is that ego, what sustains this dysfunction, withers in the light of consciousness. When we witness this process, negative thoughts triggering negative emotions, and we remain the observer rather than feeding and identifying with the thinker/feeler, ego begins to dissolve and what remains is the conscious self whose profound beauty and unfathomable depths have been obscured by the frightened ego acting out. To begin to explore those depths we need consciousness. A by-product of the conscious person is influence. The concerned citizen who bangs their head against the city hall wall may have more effect by simply becoming conscious, reversing the ratio of time spent in mind-chatter to consciousness in favor of consciousness. Put in terms of frequency: thinking is a state of a certain vibration, consciousness is of another and since consciousness is aligned with rather than blocking or distorting the source of energy it is much more powerful than the efforts of thinking. Anger and resentment come out of karmic dysfunction whereas being is aligned with the intelligence at the root of reality. Physical form, as Tolle calls it, emerges out of and returns to, a term to avoid religious dogma, the unmanifest. The unmanifest, field of being, primal source… whatever word you want to use to point at this felt reality, is eternal, is ONE, is the essence of who we are. Identifying with this connects us in a way that dissolves the delusion of ego which identifies with the passing pageant or illusion. Anyone can see the apparently solid, enduring objects that surround us, including of course people, are in fact rapidly disappearing and so ego, unaware of the eternal, frightened by mortality, seeks safety, in wealth, prestige, superiority, conquest – as in our day, in the three Ps: power, profits and privilege.

A graph line on a chart depicting our descent toward extinction may cross at some fortunate point with a line depicting the evolution of consciousness, ascending from ego to awareness, the end of dysfunction and the arrival of A New Earth.

The Seduction of Convention

Michael Parenti, in his book The Face of Imperialism (2011), attempts to persuade the reader to look without flinching at their own opinions, to consider whether they derive from sources outside themselves. The old saw, “the truth shall make you free” is echoed, suggesting that openness to new information can free one from the dominant paradigm with its boundaries of permissible opinion and deviance from reality.
We are all raised within the social conventions of our time and those conventions are shaped by forces largely determined by the distribution of power, influence and wealth. Once inculcated into the dominant view there is great resistance to change. Why does the church want to “teach” the young? Why is patriotism, meaning allegiance to the dominant paradigm, instilled in our schools and other institutions? What if our children were taught skills of critical thinking and allowed to use those skills to arrive at their own notions of religion, ethics and political/economic organization? If advocates for convention are confident that their view is correct surely they can trust that reason will bring children, as they mature, to the desired conclusions, right? And if conventional ideology is simply arbitrary, well then we’d want to do away with it, right? As it is, when an acculturated person encounters a view that challenges the dominant one, the near automatic reaction is denial, argument, attack. Once we adopt it we’re identified with the dominant value and so interpret questioning as a personal criticism against which we must defend.

Parenti provides ample information for the conventional to deny, and for the critical thinker to consider. The U.S. for example spends nearly 50% of world military expenditures. China is second with 7%. This is for two reasons: the rulers wish to dominate not cooperate with other nations, imposing their self-advantaged rules of the game which are aimed to maximize material gains for themselves. Citizens of other nations, given an equal say, are not going to accept impoverishment and misery so that the 1% can live in continuously expanding luxury. Like the victims of a protection racket, they must be offered a deal they cannot refuse. The second reason is that military spending creates a conduit directly into the U.S. treasury for those with the proper resume. Spending on education might do the same but that would incidentally empower the wrong people, and promote possibly the dangerous threat of critical thinking.

Since the end of World War II. the boogie man of Communist (gasp) Russia has been used to justify huge military programs. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union other enemies had to be conjured. The war on drugs was pretty thin stuff though still, for a population kept distracted by either poverty or consumption it was do-able. Better though is the Islamic threat to institute Sharia law across the west and otherwise attack our way of life. As Goebbels remarked, keep the population scared and you can get away with anything.

Many critics of U.S. policy claim that, as Parenti says, the intent is “…to promote the interests of transnational corporations and make the world safe for free-market capitalism and imperialism.” Now the President, Secretary of State, Defense etc; will claim as their intent the promotion of freedom, democracy, human rights, our ‘national security’ apple pie etc; How are we to determine which of these views is correct? Ah, let Parenti speak: the government consistently attacks the “left” and supports the ”right”. Defined – “The Left… encompasses those individuals, organizations and governments that advocate egalitarian, redistributive policies and human services benefiting the common people and infringing upon the privileged interests of the wealthy propertied classes. The Right is also involved in redistributive policies, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upward direction advancing the privileges of private capital and the wealthy few.” In support of this view Parenti lists right wing violent, fascist regimes that the U.S. has supported, even installed, often overthrowing democratically elected governments. He documents that after World War II. throughout Europe and Asia former collaborators were outrageously installed to suppress nationalists who had valiantly fought the Japanese or Nazi occupation forces. We can see today great hesitancy to condemn human rights violations in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt etc; but hysterical demonizing of Chavez in Venezuela. Georgia hosts the infamous School of the Americas (Assassins) at Fort Benning where relationships with Latin American military officers are nurtured under the preposterous claim of promoting democracy. Taking full advantage of the World Trade Center attack the Patriot Act mangled the Constitution and recently SB 1867, granted the military power to indefinitely detain any U.S. citizen. The rulers are perhaps getting a little nervous, hedging their bets, afraid perhaps that as they go for broke citizens are beginning to notice. In the third world select killing, torture and imprisonment are depended on to demoralize the opposition. If that doesn’t work just add more of the same. With Obama’s claiming the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens it seems everything is now in place to apply the same techniques here at home. And since they don’t hesitate abroad, why would they here? Well, they have already targeted certain troublesome figures such as George Jackson and other Black Panthers but there now seems a ratcheting up. As “globalization” policies expand third-worldization into the U.S. itself it becomes more and more difficult to shape public opinion with the usual slogans. Other methods may be needed. We cannot count on a spontaneous outbreak of sharing among the ruling elite.

There is much else in this book to challenge the denier, who likely didn’t get this far, and inform the critical thinker. The WTO, World Bank, trade agreements, foreign aid, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and a focus on Cuba demonstrating the thesis by pointing out that the U.S. had no problem when gangsters and dictators were running the island but when a regime comes into being questioning corporate rule then it is suddenly demonized, now U.S. concerns for “freedom and democracy” are stirred. Parenti points out that reality is radical, that its denial in order to keep an elite in luxury is not sustainable, that either the people rise up, wake up, align with it or it, reality, will put a stop to the whole shebang. We, none of us, can ultimately survive in a polluted life system that the status quo is hell bent on creating.

Volunteer Billboards

Naomi Klein’s 1999 book, No Logo (full title, No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo), like her later important book, Shock Doctrine, considers the impact of the corporation on society. This one studies the phenomenon that transformed the corporation from an entity that sells merchandise to a brand - and that brand has a manufactured “meaning” for the consumer beyond the utility of the object. Klein examines the implications for we who live now in a branded world. Ironically, Klein herself became, if not a brand, very well known, No Logo selling 1.2 million copies.

The title sums it up: business has taken over our space, our choice, our jobs and sold us meager compensation, a logo. Not our logo, their logo. This book makes me realize why, when I see people wearing the Nike “swoosh”, I want to ask them how much Nike is paying them to advertise their company. These are what Klein calls, volunteer billboards. Depressed at the Republican successes in the mid-term elections I sought solace. Opening a book of Gore Vidal’s essays I found this line,

“To get people to constantly vote against their own interests is manipulation of the highest order.”

Nike has convinced people that it is “cool” to wear their logo, sometimes even on their bodies. Nike employees began to get the swoosh tattooed on their thighs and tattoo parlors around the time of the book reported that the Nike logo was the most popular image in their stocks. This too is manipulation of the highest order.

Klein, like her fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan, stands as an observer of culture. Reading this book you’ll never experience Starbucks in quite the same way. The 60s questioning of authority, as symbolized by Woodstock, even though that project was a commercial venture, has been co-opted by now, as seen in the 25th anniversary Woodstock concert where merchandising and promotion had much more of a presence, aimed at an audience of younger people for whom merchandising had become absolutely normal, for whom price was basically no object if the merchandise delivered promises of cool. Klein describes the anti-materialist hippies becoming yuppies but then the charms of consumerism began, for them, to wane or perhaps they simply ran out of storage space. This began a panic in the advertising and merchandizing world, solved by targeting the next generation.

Elements of the 60s did and do survive, shopping at thrift stores, living simply but these folks, supplemented by factions in the newer generation, were under the merchant’s radar.

The merchants began to study the full age-range of the new generation, often hiring consultants, searching for what they would deem cool. Nike was the avant garde of this movement, hiring Michael Jordan and other sports heroes to hawk their wares but also, and this was new, making superstars out of some, certainly Jordan, taking him way beyond his sports context. Jordan even made a movie, Space Jam, which was more a vehicle for his endorsement products than a traditional movie. Jordan was out to become a brand himself. This brought him into conflict with Nike who were not about to be upstaged. The tax-deductible fees paid Jordan and others of course came out of the immense sweatshop savings.

Here’s an important shift, according to Klein. Nike lead the pack in transforming from a company that manufactures shoes to a company that sells a brand, a self-enhancer, farming out the actual production to others –the infamous sweat shop. Graffiti artists tagged themselves on the urban environment but once corporations got the idea they tagged themselves across the whole culture, even on the graffiti artists. Shoe companies and fashion designers like Tommy Hilfiger took to studying inner city style and testing their products there, simply dumping a box of new shoes to see what reaction they got. They had noticed that their products, originally designed for affluent white youths were being taken up in the inner city. They discovered, and capitalized on the fact that

poor black youths were fetishizing white wealth and
white youth were fetishizing black style.

They were persuaded that, as with Jazz, blues and Rock n’ roll, black culture goes mainstream. One of the convincers was the rap group Run-DMC writing a song called Adidas. Their manager approached the company suggesting they should be paid. When executives saw a concert full of fans throw their Adidas up in the air for the song, they were sold. So what originates on the street, manipulated or not, is scooped up, tweaked, sold back and now the originators are walking advertisements for Nike, Reebok and Levis. How cool is that? And further, companies hired students to promote their products, Budweiser at frat parties for example.

Marketeers, in their search for space lacking the aesthetic enhancement of advertising, noticed and were frustrated by their exclusion from schools. Their entre turned out to be budget shortfalls. They could sponsor sports teams, getting that swoosh on jerseys, gym bags, sweats, provide mandatory ad-rich and tame current affairs programs and exclusive product infiltration, especially of soft drinks and fast food.

A student in Evans, Georgia was suspended for wearing a Pepsi
T-shirt on Coke Day when everyone else was wearing Coke t-shirts.

The best of all worlds – teaching students and building brand awareness. Channel One charges twice the going rate for commercial television advertising since they guarantee a captive audience with no mute button and no skipping off to the kitchen during ads. Computers used by students track net-surfing, harvesting the elusive “cool”. School contracts with corporations usually include gag clauses that forbid negative statements directed toward the company. Thus Amnesty International might be barred from speaking on campus about corporate misdeeds abroad. Research funded by drug companies can be suppressed if unflattering, even dangerous results are revealed. Part of the branding phenomenon is the expansion-on-steroids of the idea of franchising, taking a brand, say Wal-mart or Starbucks and saturating a market, running the local guys out of business then sitting back and enjoying the profits – while of course expanding into the next town. The trump card of the chain operation is the discounts a volume buyer can demand – locals can’t possibly compete and they’re soon gone. Before long, to get in the game at all, you have to be BIG.

So Klein’s sociological analysis of trends in the western world and beyond are broken down into the four sections of her title, Space, Choice, Jobs and a section, No Logo, which sketches resistance to the dehumanization of those developments, notably the unexpectedly large demonstrations against globalization in Seattle the same year of publication . She optimistically sees the resistance growing and, though we know not where it’s going, the Occupy Wall Street movement surely confirms her prediction. Her more recent, more important book, Shock Doctrine, confirms that this is a writer we can go to for insight into what’s going on in the money-chasing, consequential world of commerce.

Onward Christian(?) Soldiers

Michael Parenti’s, God and His Demons, review part 2:
Do secular and religious conservatives walk hand in hand to advance their privileged positions in the social order? Of course they do. And often enough they get caught, a little too often to dismiss as just a few bad apples, kind of like the catholic priests and pedophilia.

Pope John XXIII’s relatively progressive reign provided an opening for those in Latin America concerned for the extremes of wealth and poverty prevalent there, giving rise to the Liberation Theology movement, soon squashed once John’s successor, right winger Pope John Paul II, took over in the late 70s. Ordering priests to focus on “spiritual” affairs and stay out of politics he commenced to push right wing politics, stacking the church hierarchy with conservative clergy and taking hysterical positions on abortion and birth control. When Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered in El Salvador by right wing death squads the Vatican refrained from denouncing the perpetrators, calling the death “tragic”, having only days before respectfully received high-ranking members of the Arena party, the legal arm of the El Salvadoran death squads, complaining about Romero’s public statements on behalf of the poor.

The following quote gives a sense of Parenti’s eloquent and incisive writing, “Holy Hypocrites, both lay and clerical, crow a devotion to traditional morality while pursuing material and emotional plunder more rapaciously than any of us ordinary infidels and libertines.” Examples abound. The three main republican presidential contenders for 2008, Newt Gitrich, John McCain and Rudy Guiliani had between them five divorces all involving infidelity. Numerous anti-gay crusaders turned out to be gay themselves, notably J. Edgar Hoover of FBI fame, Roy Cohn, McCarthy-ite crusading investigator and Cardinal Francis Spellman, often known to party together with choice male escorts. Earl “Butch” Kimmerling, an Indiana anti-gay republican activist was sentenced to 40 years in prison for raping an 8 year old who he had intervened to prevent a gay couple from adopting. One investigator catalogued over 100 cases of sexual criminality and misconduct committed by republican officials or supporters in recent years including at least 44 involving children. Democrats are of course not immune but they are far fewer and tend not to be known as anti-sex crusaders. The Republican Party apparently offers a more hospitable climate for hypocrisy. The Catholic Church pedophiles, and Vatican cover-ups, are well known but it’s worth mentioning the recent revelations involving 30,000 children sexually and physically abused over 60 years in Ireland by priests and nuns. These sad stories are of course not limited to catholics. Protestants in the U.S., especially the southern U.S., have their sordid tales as well. Can you say, Jimmy Swaggert? He’s not alone.

Parenti compiles a list of Devout Swindlers: Tom Delay, who led Washington prayer breakfasts, was indicted for criminal conspiracy and money laundering. Jack Abramoff, close to Delay and President Bush, pleaded guilty to bilking Indian tribes of $20 million, promising help in opening or preventing competitive casinos. Involved also were Rev. Louis Sheldon, James Dobson and Ralph Reed, all who, in addition to the usual right wing hypocrisy, were nationally known opponents of the evils of gambling. Charles Keating, founder of moralistic censorial groups netted $200 million in the savings and loan scandal, serving only four years. The Hunt brothers, devout Jesus freaks, ran into legal problems in their attempt to corner the silver market. There are plenty more fun stats like this in Parenti’s book but he offers only a primer due to space limitations.

Moving on to Church and State, the right often insists that the Constitution established the U.S. as a Christian nation, so claimed in the Texas Republican Party platform and by John McCain in his run for president. In fact, to quote some of the founding fathers: James Madison – “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind.” George Washington urged that all should be free to worship according to the dictates of their own conscience. Ben Franklin doubted the divinity of Jesus. Jefferson was proud a law he saw passed in Virginia “brought freedom for the Jew, the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammaden, the Hindu and the infidel and every denomination.” This was freedom of and freedom from religion. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli negotiated by President Washington and ratified by the senate has the clause, “The government of the U.S. is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” However, in Maryland, North & South Carolina and Texas an atheist cannot hold public office. In Arkansas an atheist “is incompetent to testify as a witness in any court.” And cruelest of all perhaps, atheists cannot join the Boy Scouts of America.

Bush set up bible study groups in the White House, regularly entertaining fundamentalist ministers. A chilling quote you may recall, “I’m driven with a mission from God”… “God told me to strike at Al Qaeda… then instructed me to strike Saddam.” Bush diverted funds from federal agencies to religious charities which blatantly discriminated against “non-believers” and used federal monies to promote religious belief. The U.S. Air Force Academy increased its staff of chaplains to 18, fundamentalist of course, once again using public funds to advance a religion, Christian you’ll be surprised to hear, and predictably anti-Jewish, Muslim… even catholic. The entire class was marched to a hall and forced to watch Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ, standing at attention. This practice spread to the other military academies and was only partially and half-heartedly rolled back when publicized. Another chilling incursion is the FEMA program that trains clergy and other religious representatives to become secret police enforcers, teaching their congregations to “obey the government.” With backup provided, including swat teams. This all in preparation for implementation of martial law and “round ups” of subversives in the event of some unspecified emergency.

To provide context for fundamentalism as sketched above Parenti goes back to the Rome of AD 395. Once Christians came into power they were not satisfied to be the dominant religion, they must be the only religion and that intolerance was put into uncompromising force. We call it the dark ages. Creco-Roman rational inquiry was dead. Feeding Christians to the lions seemed quaint in comparison to what the new rulers had in mind, and carried out. Well, being fed to lions wasn’t a lot of fun, admittedly, but the big difference was in numbers of victims. Until the Enlightenment, and beyond, these folks ran things and we would be well advised to consider whether we want to return to those dark days. John Adams, founding father with unquestionable pedigree, was grateful that religious fanatics could not whip, burn nor mutilate people in the U.S. But he believed they would if they could. We need to make sure they can’t.

An obvious difference today between fundamentalists in the U.S. and Islam is that while in the U.S. they have a definite foothold their dream of dominating, as of old, remains a dream. In many places in Islam the dream is reality. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Afghanistan (under Taliban) are firmly controlled by fundamentalists. Islamic theocrats are a major force in many other countries. What transpires in some of those nations ought to be a warning against complacency here. A student was put to death for printing an internet article questioning why men were allowed to have multiple spouses but women were not. We’ve all heard horror stories of what happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Women were put under the dominion of men and forbidden to engage in basic human behavior. Music was banned, secular writing and worse. In Iraq, previous to the illegal U.S. invasion a fairly secular society, extremist religion has arisen, complicating daily life, especially for women, some being killed for exposing too much skin. In Saudi Arabia a woman lawyer was raped and sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the company of a man who was not a close relative. The rapist went unpunished. I guess she must have been asking for it. Hand amputations, lashing, death, often for activities legal here (so long as the fundamentalists fall short of their goals). A married woman was raped by her brother-in-law and punished for adultery. This fate awaits also those involuntarily forced into prostitution. There have been bombings of girls’ schools, terrorizing students into illiteracy. It should be emphasized that the majority of Muslims, like the majority of Christians, Jews, Infidels, simply want a modestly abundant simple life with friends and family but when the fanatics get power, forget it. The difficulty preventing them coming to power is as nothing to getting out from under when they succeed. Like Jim Crow days in the old south, a minority of fanatics maintain, by terroristic threats, an extremely reactionary social rigidity. What percentage of white citizens supported Jim Crow as opposed to just going along? I was in Georgia in 1962, in the army, witnessing segregated theatres and water fountains, a shocking sight for a Northern Michigan boy. By 1976, when I moved back here, I saw blacks and whites working and dining together in restaurants, suggesting to me that Jim Crow was shallow. Were it not for the threat of racist violence, segregation would have ended sooner, perhaps never been instituted. It is the shock troops who enforce “sharia” as it were and it is the shock troops who must never gain respectability, whether they are Muslim, Jewish, Christian… or infidel.

When the U.S. suppresses movements, as in Central America in the 70s and 80s, that attempt to address gross inequities, opulence on one hand, malnutrition on the other, little is left the survivors but retreat to superstition which result is the intended one. Quiescence and apathy are no threat to the oligarch. Yet, deprived of hope and discouraged from rational criticality citizens become ripe for the demagogue, and his shock troopers.

One more sacred cow comes under Parenti’s scrutiny, the revered Dali Lama. Actually a mixed bag, his “holiness” has taken conservative as well as progressive stances. Few of his supporters seem aware of the cruel feudalism of the former Tibet, feudal in the full sense of the word: indentured serfs-for-life, rampant corruption among the “lords”, clergy, whatever, slavery, yes, slavery… and an army to police proper obedience and to hunt down those who attempted to escape. The Chinese invasion also netted mixed results. Serfdom was ended, land reform instituted, slavery ended. All unlike the popular notion that a peaceful Shangri La was destroyed by godless hoards. The usual occupational elements not surprisingly accompanied the invaders: bureaucratic domination and insensitivity, corruption etc; One peasant opinioned that, “Life under the Chinese is not easy but it’s better than life under the feudal lords that preceded them.”

After many pages of less than cheerful reading Parenti attempts to end on a positive note. He cites statistics that show 20% of younger adults in the U.S. have no religious affiliation and that specifically secular organizations are growing, including “faith” elements who recognize the need for separation of church and state. The best-selling books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the popularity of their speaking tours are signs of increasing tolerance. Lord knows, we need it.

God Has Demons?

Michael Parenti, in his 2010 book, God and His Demons, joins Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in critiquing what all three would characterize as dangerous superstition. Dawkins and Parenti are careful to clarify that their subject is fundamentalism not all religion. But they do express puzzlement over the appeal of religion even on the less literal level. Dawkins suggests that the comfort, if that’s what is provided, is hardly worth the sacrifice of intellectual honesty required. Parenti takes it a bit further by dismissing even the oft-reported mystic’s feeling of ONENESS as so much self-delusion. So such “spiritual” teachers as Eckhart Tolle, according to Parenti, are at best delusional and at worst preying on the gullible. He does however acknowledge that many so-called people of faith constitute a positive force in promoting a more humane world. But they are not who he’s talking about in the book.

Like Hitchens, Parenti spends a great deal of time gleefully deconstructing biblical passages. His social concerns, beyond both Hitchens and Dawkins, are evident in one of his examples where he claims that the bible mentions homosexuality only 8 times but in one form or another offers numerous injunctions against unfair distribution of wealth. So why then is it commonplace for preachers to rail against homosexuality but nary a tribunal has been appointed to ferret out greedy landowners and financiers? The bible doesn’t mention abortion nor same-sex marriage yet these are the central issues for the majority of fundamentalist Christians. And in the new testament, family values don’t come up. In fact Jesus is a bachelor, by most accounts, hanging out with a dozen guys and in several instances is quite rude and dismissive of women and children.

Logical lapses occur in the great book, something the faithful apparently can skate right over without notice. And creative license with scripture is common. Jews for instance are often hatefully called “Christ Killers” yet very few Jews of the time could have met nor even have heard of Jesus. Why should all Jews be blamed? After all, Jesus himself was a Jew. Yet the formal church, once it came to power, more than occasionally burst forth with deadly pogroms, culminating in the 20th Century holocaust. Pope Pius XII was silent during World War II yet excommunicated all communist party members, world wide, in 1949. Parenti cites examples of wide-eyed individuals spared in natural disasters crediting God with intervening to save them, proclaiming that, “God is great” or such. Yet those who didn’t make it are not mentioned. Many Christians have prayer sessions for those with cancer or other terminal diseases. Do they think that the divine being can be swayed from his “plan” by sucking up? In fact studies by the American Health Journal to ascertain the efficacy of prayer do not support the belief and in some cases actually contradict it. Yes, those prayed for fared worse. The con-artists, for what else can we call someone like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson etc; have proclaimed that natural or other disasters show the deity’s displeasure with human behavior, 911 and Katrina for example being punishment for the tolerance of homosexuality (again) or maybe voting Democrat. The Onion did a lampoon, where God holds a press conference announcing that a recent tsunami was part of his longtime moving-in-mysterious-ways policy.

Speaking of fraud, Parenti has a devastating, for the uninitiated, chapter on Mother Teresa. It seems that she made claims in her fund-raising that turned out to be just a little bit untrue… numbers of schools, hospitals and orphanages her organization supported etc; Seems she spent 8 months of the year jetting around, in a private plane, fleecing the faithful, staying in luxury accommodations and lying about what she was doing in India. After her death her diaries revealed that her professed catholic beliefs were far from how she actually saw things. Never the less, she’s on the fast track for sainthood being as how she was such an effective fund-raiser. Of course she is hardly alone. The Catholic church is wealthier than any corporation you can name. But there’s plenty of competition for those believer dollars. The mega-church con-artists who populate our Sundays and public airwaves may not be in the same league but they’re doing all right. Sometimes they get a little overzealous. A Villanova University research project found that 85% of Roman Church dioceses in the U.S. had been hit by embezzlement over the 2001-6 time period. Jim Baker we all remember, was sentenced to 18 years (served 6) for diverting church funds to personal use. Msgr. John Woolsey of New York City was convicted for stealing $8 million. Even Billy Graham was revealed to have a “slush fund” of $23 million that his flock didn’t know about. Ag Khan, Iman of Islami Muslims owns 600 race horses, several factories, and over 600 “prayer and business” centers. Rev. Moon (why do we call these guys reverend?) was convicted in 1982 of conspiracy and tax fraud serving 13 months (seems when they do get caught they tend to get off kind of lightly… I mean we’re talking about millions bilked from gullible souls). The Moon daughter-in-law wrote a book exposing the family as extremely dysfunctional with drug use, infidelity and the usual lavish life style. In the 1980s 11 top Scientologists were imprisoned for infiltrating, burglarizing and wire-tapping private and government agencies, attempting to stop an investigation. Hundreds of adherents have left, reporting psychological and physical abuse, Some have successfully sued the church.

A section on cults documents abundant instances of serious abuse. The Jim Jones People’s Temple massacre may be the most spectacular but is hardly alone in sadistic psychological and physical practices, usually targeting women, always children and as often as not the men too. Parenti highlights the Mormon church for its sexist and racist beliefs but concludes the section with the thought that maybe the mainstream churches are just cults that have been around a longer time.

The book goes on to demonstrate how secular and religious authorities have worked hand in hand to advance their privileged positions in the social order but that is for my next post.

An Adult Fairy Tale

The persistence of a fairy tale portraying the United States as a benevolent force in the world, promoting freedom, democracy, health and happiness for all is attributable in part to the fact that embracing the belief is often prerequisite to substantial material abundance, while questioning it can bar the road to such rewards. This would of course hold true, in one form or another, for any of the many empires littering the historical landscape, an insight that might be tolerable if held toward other societies, though it is probably wise to keep it to oneself, but never is it to be seen/said to apply here. Chomsky calls this view U.S. Exceptionalism.

Those who rise in the mainstream (corporate) pundit journalism profession are not those who point out inconsistencies in the tale, no more than those in the church who rise to Cardinal, Bishop etc; are those who question basic assumptions. No, it is “faith” that elevates one to the higher reaches. Those with little (or no) faith must apply only to the marginal congregations, the fringe journals that pay writers in the high two figures.

So reading Noam Chomsky demands a certain suspension of belief in order to consider evidence normally excluded as unduly disturbing to received wisdom. There in the UNwonderland one encounters some surprising notions – Power and Terror, Conflict, Hegemony and the Rule of Force, the Chomsky book under discussion here. The U.S. for example, as an Imperial Power, is a “settler-colonial society” meaning that the native inhabitants were not integrated into the colonial project but were rather exterminated or driven out. An even more unspeakable truth in the world of the mainstream pundit, or intellectual class as Chomsky likes to phrase it, is that “settler-colonial society” applies equally to one of the United States’ chief allies, Israel. This view, though at extreme odds with convention, has the advantage of evaporating the difficulty understanding the puzzling lack of progress in the Israeli/Palestinian “peace process”. There is no progress because the U.S. and Israel are “settler-colonial societies, standing in the way of a world-wide consensus for a two-state solution.

In 1967 Israel, in a quick little war, expanded it’s territory considerably. The United Nations in Resolution 242 called for a peace settlement where Israel would return to it’s borders. Egypt later expanded upon the resolution, adding the idea that a Palestinian state would reside in the occupied territories with security guarantees for Israel. In the U.S. a rivalry between Henry Kissinger and the State Department ended in Kissinger’s favor which meant a veto to support Israel’s decision to choose expansion over security, militarism over diplomacy. A consequence of this decision was the 1973 war with Egypt, a very close call for Israel. For a U.S. pundit, politician or policy maker, to perceive this account is dangerous, to speak it is a career killer.

But lest we stray into the treacherous charge of anti-semitism let’s consider the fairy tale as it applies elsewhere. Iran was “good” after its parliamentary democracy was overthrown (by the U.S. and Britain in 1954) and the Shah installed as a vicious dictator with one of the worst human rights records on the planet. Then it was “bad” when the people overthrew the puppet (unfortunately leading to a medieval theocracy). And it gets “badder and badder” as it continues to refuse to follow orders. It interferes with the internal affairs of Iraq whereas, in the fairy tale remember, U.S. presence is solely for the purposes of promoting freedom and democracy, nothing to do with oil or empire. This by the by also accounts for U.S./Nato bombing of Serbia – failure to follow orders! – but in the fairy tale the bombing was to stop ethnic killing. Even Molly Ivins fell for that one (see Chomsky’s The New Military Humanism).

Haiti, another example: Woodrow Wilson had Haiti invaded in 1915. Its parliamentary system was destroyed, 15,000 Haitains killed and slavery re-instituted. A brutal, murderous national guard was created, a force that has pretty much run things ever since. Two interruptions of note: the ascendancy of populist leader Aristide, twice, both ending in U.S.-supported coups (no U.S.-supported coups during the murderous regimes). How is this presented in the fairy tale version? The U.S., frustrated in its attempts to bring democracy to a backward nation that is perhaps not ready for such advanced ideas, plows on in its maybe naïve mission, to bring enlightenment to the dark corners of the world. By the way: Haiti hosted the first successful slave revolt. A French colony at the time, France, supported by the U.S., demanded reparations, re-payment for loss of its “investment”, a payment plan that kept Haiti impoverished right up until Wilson’s coup de grace.

More fairy tale: during Ronald Reagan’s presidency Nelson Mandala and the African National Congress (ANC) were branded terrorist organizations while South Africa, virtually enslaving the majority of its citizens and invading nearby nations to deadly effect (1. 5 million deaths) were participants in “Constructive Engagement”. Examining Amnesty International’s records on torture and U.S. foreign aid, Prof. Edward Herman reveals an interesting correlation. Not that the U.S. is interested in torture per se but it seems to accompany the kind of regimes the U.S. favors, regimes that just happen to have close (dependent) relations with U.S. corporations whose operations are so unfair to the general population that it turns out to be more economical to suppress and terrorize the population than to compensate properly for extracted resources and labor.

Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement we have very handy shorthand with which to characterize the long tradition of who rules in the U.S. and for whose benefit. And we can look to another slogan, slightly modified, to see what can be done about it - 99%-ers of the world, unite!

The Big Boys

For their book, The Big Boys, Ralph Nader and William Taylor lined up interviews with U.S. corporate CEOs to get a sense of the mid 1980s business world as viewed from that lofty perch. In a way, little has changed since. The basic motivation remains, profit. But the presence of greed has undergone what could under-statedly be called an amplification. Manufacturing an actual non-sweat-shop product was still an on-going operation in the U.S. You could buy U.S.-made shoes, tools, autos, dishwashers, VCRs… Steel Plants were still forging those ol’ I-beams, but not for long. The more lucrative short cuts of the casino-financial world had not yet fully kicked in, where profit is generated by manipulating or betting on market fluctuations.

Corporate raiders were the rage in this time-frame, not quite as damaging or sexy but still, you could turn a few million and devastate a community of workers. Take out huge loans to buy a company, sell off select assets, downsize workers, shifting the company’s primary focus to servicing its debt. Very lucrative fees involved. A family-owned lumber company in the Northwest which prided itself on its labor relations and ecological sensitivity was taken over. The tried and true pattern soon brought the company to cutting old growth forest and laying off workers. As expectations for profits increase for one class, damage to workers and other “losers” naturally must make up the difference.

Big Boys does a series of nine portraits of movers and shakers, based on interviews although three CEOs refused interview requests. The elusive Roger Smith, he of the Michael Moore film Roger and Me, and two others had to be sketched from comments in the media, their public speeches and other sources. Moore’s film pointed out that GM moved profitable(!) plants to Mexico, leaving Flint, Michigan, Moore’s hometown, a near ghost town. Greed is camouflaged with a euphemism – Globalization. To illustrate the corporate, top-down mentality, the book describes General Motors, under Smith, using its clout to locate a new plant, with its massive parking lot, in the middle of an old established working class Detroit neighborhood. Other options were clearly available but the air up in the GM boardroom was obviously too rarefied for such considerations. Smith’s fleet emphasis was profits of course but on flash and style rather than reliability and safety. Nader credits Smith with delaying the introduction of the airbag by years through his dogged and obstinate opposition. The cost in lives was real and substantial but neither Smith nor GM was ever held accountable. As with the tobacco companies, literally murderous policies face, at worst, monetary settlements.

What GM did for Detroit, David Roderick of U.S. Steel, did for Chicago and Pittsburgh. Facing “reality”, as he saw it, Roderick made decisions that devastated neighborhoods with job lay-offs and plant closings, even demolishing rather than sell plants to workers who tried to organize to that end. This experiment was not to be allowed. Apparently tycoons will instinctively oppose the rise of any non-hierarchal institution, even if it hurts profits. No surprise really. Their political bed-fellows in D.C. fear the same in third world nations and will rush to crush any serious questioning of the “free market”.

Now you can imagine when we get to Dow Chemical’s Paul Oreffice that there’s going to be some impressive practice of the fine art of denial. Again, comparing the tobacco companies, when profits are threatened by reality reality is going out the door. In its place is summoned well-paid “experts” who can attest to this or that mirage in long-winded pseudo-scientific verbiage – just think Global Climate change debate on Faux News. The remaining personalities in this book are all very interesting but they none of them stray more than centimeters from the notion that Milton Friedman’s economic theories are figurative tablets of self-evident God-incised wisdom. Sort of mirror-images of Soviet Union officials at the same time in history maintaining the infallibility of Karl Marx… or was it Mother Russia? Somebody’s going to have to take the Question Authority bumper sticker seriously here and steer us away from Lemming Cliff, and soon. Occupy and Roll!