May 2023 Archives

Dear America,

For decades now, whenever I have had to declare a religion...thankfully almost never...I have designated Gnosticism as my faith.  I am not steeped in the doctrine and dogma of that faith and philosophy from the millennium before last, but my general knowledge of it is that it posits one God who required no creation.  That God created a being called Sophia, who out of self-indulgence and a desire to know the one God created a petty, jealous inferior god who in turn created a realm of his own: the physical world and thus all of its vagaries.  That is a vast over-simplification, but it suffices to explain the Gnostic doctrine that the one God was and is pure virtue and light, and the physical world and its creator god are essentially vicious in nature; we are all imbued with a piece of the one God to whom we are intended to return, but the false god of the material world constitutes a spiritual diversion from the process of reunification with God.

All that being said, I don't and haven't been one to pray or to worship, but rather I acknowledge the Gnostic framework for existence as a practical explanation of this, and for that matter any subsequent, life or form of being.  I have demurred in my thinking as to the nature of the one God, and I have not regarded it as a sentient being, but recently, that has changed as a consequence of a lapse in my appreciation of our existence on this plane.  The details aren't important, but it comports with an idea with which many people today are familiar: be careful what you wish for.  That consequent personal epiphany crystallized into the idea that didactic Manichean dogmatism that posits an objective and rules based doctrine of right and wrong is fundamentally misguided.  The Gnostic concept of the one virtuous God entails, as I understand it, inculcation in all of us of a sense of right and wrong that is amorphous and demands of us only one thing: that we follow the golden rule.  It has nothing to do with all of the catechism that has emanated from Christian religion and other faiths.  Rather it is an exhortation to each of us--to that grain of the one God in us--to do the right thing out of compassion, sympathy, empathy and simple rectitude.   We don't need rules for that.  We have our intuitions to guide us.

Of course, that opens a giant chasm that we as human beings have to cross.  There is no shortage in history, myth or current events of people who claim to be righteous in ways that most of us cannot accept, some of which are downright maniacal.  But for the most part they can be identified by a single common trait: sanctimony.  In fact, that is how the Gnostics believed that the physical world was created...out of hubris.  And so we are left with an onus on us that will be hard to carry to a satisfactory conclusion if any such thing is possible.  Perhaps life on earth can only be no less fraught than it is and it is the destiny of each of us to cope with it as a means of redemption, not in the sense of ascension to heaven, but simply because it is the right thing, which in turn serves our fellow human beings and comports with some form of wisdom that we can only aspire to until we achieve something akin to Nirvana.  

Rereading all of this, it sounds preposterous and pontifical, but hear me out.  Sanctimony has come to be the party affiliation of those who lead us along with personal ambition and venality as a creed.  Add to that the advent of groups of people who characterize themselves as militias, sects, movements, doctrines and the like.  There seem to be ever-proliferating individuals and groups of individuals who think themselves entitled to redirect our collective course and to bend us to their respective wills and tutelage.  They are everything from Oath Keepers to Tutsi's and Hutu's, and everyone from Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump and their assorted acolytes and sycophants. As I said at the outset, I haven't really believed in the traditional concept of God, but in the Gnostic sense, I do now.  Call it a personal revelation or lunacy, the essence of it is simple.  I hope for the human race to succeed for the benefit of my grand children, and our progeny in general.  And the only way I can see that happening is if we all cleave to the belief that there is some kind of golden rule whether we are Christians or christians, Muslims or muslims, Buddhists or buddhists and so on. We have doctrine to guide us, but in the end, the compelling factor in every decision we make involving others is, what does the golden rule require of us.

I'm no one to talk.  I have made my share of selfish and misguided decisions and undertaken cognate acts.  And believe me I don't intend to be anyone's critic, much less anyone's inspiration.  But I feel that we have to change our way of inhabiting the earth.  At some point, we have to cease to be guided by dogma and doctrine, self-serving allegiances, myths and superstitions.  We have to begin to think independently.  We have to stop following like sheep.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I watched Kevin McCarthy's news conference with the same kind of dismay that usually accompanies my viewing of Republicans in action, but more so.  His dogmatic adherence to Reagan supply-side economics and the conservative "any tax is a bad tax, especially if it's on the rich" creed are odious to me.  But his continual attempts to disabuse us of the opinion that he is a party hack, and an idiot at that, has already gotten tedious, and he's only been Speaker for a matter of months.  For me it is easy to identify his naked attempts to unify the Republican mantra with virtue, but I worry about how persuasive his attempts are to those who want to believe them without thought.

McCarthy kept issuing the Republican battle cry of "it isn't us, it's them" behind which he continued to utter half-truths and prevarications about how we got to have $31 trillion in debt as a nation.  He ignored the role in racking up that debt played by "W's" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which continued to cost us lives and fortune through the Obama administration into the Trump years.  At a couple of hundred billion dollars a year, that accounts for a few trillion, and speaking of Trump, the last tax reduction, which benefited the rich and obscenely rich far more than it did us working people, added trillions to the debt and will continue to do so for as long as it lasts; if it is up to the Republicans, that will be in perpetuity.  Meanwhile, McCarthy refused to acknowledge that our budget is an equation--revenue versus spending--which can be addressed from both ends.  Thus, cutting social programs--what the Republicans like to call discretionary spending such as Medicare, SNAP (food stamps), veteran's benefits and various social programs--is the only way Republicans see out of our deficit spending ways and he never mentioned what President Biden and the Democrats prefer: tax increases on the rich.  The Republicans never seem to realize that the "trickling down" that Reagan predicated his policies on never has occurred and never will.  Through the Trump years, and for that matter ever since Clinton left office, the rich have gotten richer and the rest of us have gotten nowhere.  Adjusted for inflation, real wages have stagnated for decades while the proportion of our collective wealth held by the top .1%, that's right, one tenth of a percent, or 350,000 people, continues to grow their wealth.  Thus people like Jeff Bezos can have a $400,000,000 yacht built just for him and Donald Trump can buy a country club with an estate comprising tens of thousands of square feet of living space, 62,500 of them to be exact, but we can barely afford our mortgages and now we have to buy used cars instead of new ones and send our kids to state colleges because we can't afford the Ivy League.  Mind you, I have no objection to leading a middle class life with the commensurate life-style, and in fact, I like my life and my suburban home better than I would life in Trump's would be presidential palace. No one gave my wife and me anything, so I feel no shame about our modest but comfortable life, but Trump and Bezos should feel some.  And my family is lucky, but there are millions of families and individuals who, despite working all their lives can barely keep body and soul together, especially in their latter years.

In 2001, George W. Bush took office and inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton with a national debt under $6 trillion.  Since then we have suffered two foreign wars, one of them the longest war in American history, a "great recession" starting in 2008 that waxed into something close to a depression, a pandemic and Trump's tax cuts, which add $1 trillion per year to our budgetary deficit, which in turn adds in the same amount to our accrued national debt.  Yet, Kevin McCarthy blames the debt on Democrats' spending.  He ignores the periods during which the Republicans controlled one house or the other, or both for awhile (remember Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan thanking Trump for the tax cuts with a bunch of others joining them in paying obeisance to Trump outside the White House).  But that's just politics: ignoring the truth.  However, his refusal to acknowledge the availability of a tax increase on those who garnered ill-gotten tax gains in the Trump era is a prevarication: a lie by omission.  That's not politics.  It's deceit.  It is villainy.

I admit that I am a Democrat by default.  I suspect that all of us 60's hippies are.  And I concede that some of what I have just said sounds politically liberal.  (I won't use the new Republican-conservative pejorative "woke" because I don't know what it means, if anything.)  But ask yourself this question.  When you are contemplating your financial prospects, do you consider only what you spend, or do you compare it to what you earn before deciding what to do?  That's all I ask of the Republicans like McCarthy.  Look at both sides of the equation.  Be honest with yourselves and us.  A little honesty; that's not too much to ask, is it?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The most recent spate of multiple murders of strangers occurred in Texas and elicited the usual preposterously specious response from the gun lobby and enthusiasts, in particular, Texas governor Gregg Abbott.  Once again he intoned the abjectly inadequate observation that the problem isn't guns; it's mental illness.  So this letter goes out to all Americans, but it is addressed particularly to him, and it's gravamen is this: if you know what the problem is, why haven't you fixed it?  After all, you're a governor in a state populated by people who agree with you, so why haven't you addressed the problem effectively?  Of course that's a rhetorical question in that we aren't the only country that experiences mental illness.  But we do have more guns per capita than any other country in the world, and more multiple murders by far than any other nation.  In fact, U.S. News reports that we have twice as many guns per capita as the next most armed nation--that's Yemen where civil war is raging.  It is true that there are other nations with higher rates of gun deaths per capita, but the U.S. proudly ranks forth among the 40 largest nations world-wide in that report.  All that being said, the statistical analyses that are available today are not categorical in attributing mass murder, even in the main, to the sale of assault rifles and large magazines for them.  After all, a ban would only prevent the wackos from buying them, which would not address the wackos who already own one or more.  Without some way to retrieve the ones already in the hands of those who menace society, no remedy can be even predominantly successful in preventing mayhem and murder.  But that isn't really the issue, is it?  Even if we can't prevent all atrocities, shouldn't we at least try to prevent some of them?  Governor Abbott?  Shouldn't we?  And as a follow-up question, what have you done in that regard?  Have you done anything?

And there are some things that can play a roll in reducing mass murder.  For example, the Sandy Hook massacre was perpetrated by a mentally impaired 20 year old.  He shot and killed twenty six-to-seven year old children and six of the adults who educated them at their school.  But just before he did so he murdered his mother with one of several firearms she owned and allegedly left unsecured about the house.  There was at least one report that she had bought her son the assault rifle he used at Sandy Hook, and apparently, she shared here enthusiasm for guns with her two sons, one of whom then lived with his father in another state.  With all that in mind, a law requiring that firearms be stored in locked containers might have kept the murderer from gaining access to the murder weapon, assuming that is that the mother would have obeyed the law, which the authorities might have made her do if they had been made aware that she did not.  That combined with a "red flag law" that authorized the confiscation of guns under such circumstances might have prevented at least the extent of the assailant's villainy, if not the event in its entirety.

And the perpetrators of such killings often advertise on the internet their intent to commit their heinous acts.  There are frequently reports after mass murders with assault rifles in particular of pictures of the killers posing  with their weapons whilst bloviating about their intentions and motivations.  Requiring social media companies to track and report such occurrences, and laws inculpating, either civilly or criminally, those who are aware of such public statements of evil intent who don't report them to authorities with the power to confiscate the weapons in question could serve to prevent some and possibly many of these tragic events.  Parents who provide weapons to their children are already liable for the damage they do under civil law if they knew or should have known of the potential for their progeny to commit such acts, but criminal liability statutes could also be fortified to include those who knew of the child's potential to act malevolently but took no action.  Governor Abbott knows about such laws in that he pushed one imposing civil liability on those who help young women obtain abortions, even out of state where they are legal, and he empowered everyone in the state to bring those civil actions like vigilantes. He claims on that ground to be pro-life.  Is he not pro-life to the end of preserving the lives of those killed by assault rifles?

So back to the beginning.  Abbott knows how to curtail conduct he doesn't like by imposing the force of law against those who commit such acts.  And with the power to promote taxation to allow Texas to effectively address the mental illness to which he attributes mass murders with weapons like the Sandy Hill Bushmaster automatic rifle, he could at least be attempting to address mental illness that is potentially fatal to his fellow Texans.  But has he done anything that we know of that might be of the use he says is needed?  No.  To me that renders Abbott one of two things: at best a moron, or at worst more likely, a hypocrite.  Neither is a credential for high office...except apparently in Texas.

Your friend

Mike