I am convinced more than ever that we all need to turn off our TV sets. At the gym this old fart works out in, I get angry voices if I choose not to watch ESPN; after all, sports are the thing in a gymnasium, not news. I have to courteously ask if I can put on CNN instead of Fox News(?). Glen Beck rules. The dumbing down and deadening of the American populous is a done deed. As I watch snippets of Palin being interviewed from the right and left, I catch her holding her special needs child (what jargon we use) in one arm and not closely at that, as if he were a thing. Her body language reveals a sleek bullet of low caliber, the arrogance that if she can run Alaska she can negotiate with the Iranian leadership. Hubris leaks from her like diaper crap. The women I speak with view her as an embarrassment, a gender anomaly. Her husband, the Alaskan sphinx, stands ready, harpoon in hand. She pushes a book that she did not write but in the world of Oprah this is of no issue. Palin is the physical grease that makes this country a laughingstock. I believe she really is the best we can offer — I see a Palin/Beck ticket down the line for the yahoos of this nation. I must say we have become very shabby as a country.
Krishnamurti in several places in several lectures over his years of teaching made it very clear that all societies are essentially corrupt. It is one of my abiding principles when I look about me and about the world. How does one stay morally clean and principled when society is brown shoe polish, the color of shit? How does one endure in a society that has seen the failure of capitalism? Isms are the bane of civilizations throughout the millenia. When and if a person deconditions himself of beliefs, institutions, parental injunctions, of unconscious and conscious shackles, of moribund religions in which celibacy is a value, with jihads and fatwas as threats rooted in religious violence, then, perhaps, one may become free. And if you do become free the existential threat to self is monumental, truly a stranger in a strange land. As best as I can say it, the free man or woman is in a state of continual insurrection. (I find that terrific.) No where in the public school system of this country are we taught to question authority or how to go about deconditioning one self. After all, teachers are bureaucratic dullards and slaves. For many of us we come to our deaths as rigid and stone-frozen as the giant statues of Easter Island.
When I worked with clients, I struggled to have them see. It takes balls rubbed in grit and baked in the deserts of the Southwest to divest oneself of the shellac this culture lays on us with giant rollers. I really believe, deeply so, that the greatest gift you can give children or clients is to assist them to see, to realize they have been steamrolled over, that they will live lives of deflated balloons unless there is an awakening of intelligence. I pose a question to you: if you have seen or if you are willing to see Citizen Kane, answer this question: — What is your rosebud? Begin here.
Too hard. OK. When was the last time you markedly, significantly changed an aspect of your character or personality?
And why are you most often an amalgam of the thoughts and ideas of all your teachers, spouses, colleges, bosses, politicians, and especially religious “leaders”? By the by, what makes you think you need a leader of any kind? Why do you need a church to expedite your prayers ritualistically to God? And why in the world do you need a God unless you are shaky and need the belief that there is an after life? Oh, I see, if I am good in this life which I will piss away being a conditioned slob and slave, I will have pomagrantes and whores in the next one. And have you ever examined, moment to moment, why you resist a new idea or a new way, that is, what idols of the mind step in front and ward off these changes? Why do you believe in anything? What makes you think that beliefs improve you, make you better, improve your lot? Beliefs only provide security, and brother, you should go into that and examine why you need such security to begin with.
I think a lot — excuuuuse me. I suppose, as I have been labeled, that I am a seeker. Well, that is a load of shit to begin with. I can seek inside a hall pantry closet. I deserve a sharp answer, I don’t know you so that is a non issue. I speak to myself when I write. You are welcome to grab hold of the kite’s tail. I seek to end my life, rather, I seek to understand my life, moment to moment, not with a method or some how-to or ism. I am free of that malarkey, many will never be. I used to remind clients that their task after treatment was over was to first be free of me because whether or not they realized it, I had used methods to assist them in an imperfect world to decondition themselves. And part of that freedom was to be rid of me. To be a disciple of anything sucks — look at Jesus’ crippled twelve.
For me an epiphany would be to see what is, reality, moment to moment, to die to the past and die to the future, to be here now as Eastern thought describes it. I have had glimmers of the promised land. I may never enter, but I know pollution when I see it. And Palin is the very worst kind, unawakened, narcissistic, ignorant, and stupid; for her heaven and hell is the good and plenty of life. It is beyond sadness.
Blood Libel and All That Jazz
Impressions. Since Sarah Palin does not write her own books — nor credit the ghosts who do, I suppose her “Blood Libel” talk was composed by speechwriters. I also suppose that ignorance is usually surrounded by ignorance, the undereducated in league with the undereducated. Quite likely that team Palin had no idea about the loaded meaning of that term for Jews. And that is point one. Palin comes to us without historicity. She dwells in the present abandoned by cognition of the past. In short, she doesn’t know gradations of feelings or emotions. What drives her is pure unadulterated narcissism which is as American as apple pie. The dynamic of her family and her relationship to Todd, the capon, is fascinating to observe and what can be derived from that is very little, alas. What we are given is mirrored images and so appropriate for a narcissist. Pundits, left and right wingnuts, ask what is the hold she has on her detractors. I think she is the new American, poorly educated, grandiose, having broken through to her “real” self so that she has the chutzpah to declare that ignorance is bliss, that ignorance is strength, for she is hatched from Orwell’s world. She is dangerous, mark my words, as she barrels throughout the culture, for she has made it safe and secure, she has made it honorable and appropriate to be blazingly stupid and yet go for the holy grail — the presidency. A quick survey of our present legislators reveal an appalling group of stupid men and women which only reaffirms Palin’s belief system that anyone can run for office. The days of Harry S. Truman are long gone. I wouldn’t trust the man in the street with my nail parings.
Impressions. I have observed her, from time to time, growing more facile with the language as she is being prepped and prepared, more certain. Doubt, for her, is indecisiveness. That is why religion is up her spine. People who do not doubt ultimately damage others. And as she learns it only serves to make her feel more commanding than ever. That speech pattern and sound of her voice is grating and pressured as if she has a ton of verbal garbage she has to emit, for she is on automatic and every day as she gathers more data and “learnings” it will become a steady stream of sound, like a flat tire endlessly flapping its tread on pavement. Some men find her attractive, physically, that is; some women admit she has a way about her, perhaps like a doped up cheerleader. I find her to be encapsulated, as if ensconced in a cloud of nothingness. She is Alaskan ice, pristine and pure, but a confection of temperature and water. And Palin is a hard personality which makes some women enthralled with her and some men envying Todd’s tool. Palin is not so much a castrator as she is a chilled presence, for her warmth, look carefully now, is manufactured, for I think this is how she has managed to get as far as she has and what an interesting defense that is. Growing up, one can imagine how she figured out how to behave in order to sustain her own vapidity. Perhaps she subliminally concluded to make pretend, to choose a self and play it out for all time. We all do a variation on this.
Impressions. I cannot say, I don’t really know, I can only imagine and I don’t have all the facts to render an intelligible interpretation or conclusion. Having learned from Sarah that this is in no way an impediment, in fact, it is an energizing kind of self-actualization, I will go on with other observations, emboldened by Sarah, my culture hero. Her children. I see them as an extensions of her own narcissism and her own planetary self worlds. The shabby presentation of her teenage daughter to the media, the lack of parental restraint, of protecting and securing for a child a parental “hold” does not apply for Saran (notice the Freudian slip, Saran instead of Sarah; I love our minds, for she is cellophane) for her children are “things,” apparently in her eyes. When she struts her retarded child on to a stage, having him in her left arm as if he were some kind of doll, I associate to Michael Jackson’s stupid behavior with his child on a balcony, such an inept man-child. That child is part of a twisted narcissism, see how I can make him part and parcel of my world, my very extensive world; Palin should be home with her children, attending to them in loving ways. What appalls me is the using of children to further her image of the magnificent mama grizzly. What she lacks is grace.
Palin’s monumental inability to put aside her own political shenanigans in order to disinfect herself of “blood libel” gets me to my final impression. If there is any spine to this blog, it is the one I will give now and that is her inability to empathize, for I find her inordinately hard and unfeeling as a person. My intuition tells me so. And narcissists, of course, are notorious for not seeing the other person’s difficulties, anguish or pain. A mirror has no depth, it only reflects. In the old movies of the fifties that dealt with flying saucers and such, the classic line was “Watch the skies!” In the years ahead watch her children, for in that will be the real testament of her as a human being. “Watch her kids!”
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Posted in Commentary, Culture, Politics
Tagged blood libel, ignorance is strength, mama grizzly, narcissism, Orwell, Sarah Palin, Todd Palin