Saturday, February 8, 2025

I’ve become Rip Van Winkle

 



The world has changed so much that I feel like I’m living on a different planet from the rural  Yankee town where I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s.


 To gauge how the U.S. Has changed, I watched a documentary on PBS examining those exact years that featured Walt Disney, who was then building Disneyland to show “America's future.”⁠1 


In terms of predicting new inventions, Walt got a lot of things right: “Disneyland, made up of four "lands," opened in July 1955. One of the four, Tomorrowland, featured rocket rides "to the moon"; the Monsanto House of the Future, made entirely of plastic and displaying cutting-edge kitchen appliances; and a futuristic replica of Los Angeles' emerging freeway system. Tomorrowland was imbued with optimism for the future and confidence in American superiority.”⁠2


Indeed, we accomplished most of those things: We rocketed to the moon but now find ourselves submerged in plastic and choked by highways, cloverleafs, and high-tech gadgets. Paradoxically, despite achieving the future we thought we wanted, we’ve lost our spunk and optimism: in fact, a majority of us now believe our country is heading in the wrong direction.


What the show missed were the cataclysmic changes that erupted between then and now, totally upending our societal norms and former way of life.  Growing up in the early 1950s, I lived in radically different circumstances before the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Woodstock, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and all the other major historical shifts that transpired – all the way up to this week when we swore in our new president who spurns the constitution and pretends he is our king.


Thinking back on it now, I feel like a modern-day Rip Van Wrinkle who fell asleep in third grade and woke up nearly 80 years later living in this strange new land. The last thing I remember was sitting at my desk practicing cursive penmanship at my old Northwood Narrows school, which had two classrooms downstairs and a meeting room upstairs. 


My only reference material was an old set of encyclopedias housed in the local library. The town contracted with a neighborhood farmer to transport us kids who lived on Jenness Pond to school in his old Jeep station wagon that smelled of hay and manure. We didn’t get our first TV until I was in the fourth grade. 


Jenness Pond Road was dirt and often impassible during mud season. When that happened, we had to leave the family car half a mile away from home and walk in. During those times, our ancient neighbor, who we called Tib, would save time by cutting across the ice rather than taking the longer route by land. We were a little afraid of him, thinking he might have magical powers because he never fell through the crumbling, rotten ice and drowned.


After growing up in the sparse simplicity of rural New Hampshire, a significant chunk of what has happened since seems like a bad dream. While we had to practice ridiculous ‘duck and cover’  drills designed to protect us from an imminent Russian nuclear attack that never came, today, we are facing existential dangers on multiple fronts, many of them unimaginable in the 1950s.


The original Rip Van Wrinkle, written by Washington Irving, was a fable about how America was founded. I’m afraid that I am presiding over its unraveling – along with the Earth itself.

xxx


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1 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tupperware-future/

2 Ibid.

Can fairytales have Sinister motives?


The election of President Trump made me want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head. Instead, I decided to do something utterly unpolitical by turning to fairytales, in particular, the work of Marie-Louise von Franz. She was a Swiss psychologist and a leading collaborator of Carl Jung, who specialized in the psychological interpretation of fairy tales. She argued that these stories are parables about how the unconscious mind interprets reality.


Of course, I understood the danger of immersing myself in the enigmatic world of fairy tales because one never knows what will happen. I might get the opposite of what I expected, and that’s precisely what happened after I read a chilling piece about fairytales by Scott Harshbarger.


 He critiqued the fairytale Hansel and Gretel⁠1 in the journal “Narrative, Social Neuroscience,”⁠2   pointing out that the original story had a long history in German folklore before it was written down and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. He then gave his take on the plot.


The story takes place during a great famine. A woodcutter and his abusive wife banish their two children, abandoning them in the deep woods because they couldn’t afford to feed them. Without the children to care for, the parents selfishly think they will now have a better chance of survival. The wicked witch comes across Hansel and Gretel and lures the starving children into her gingerbread hut with a candy roof. However, instead of being a good Samaritan, she is salivating over the prospect of eating them. 


The point of  Grimm’s fairytale is to portray the witch as the enemy. Thus, when she burns in horrible agony after Gretel pushes her into the oven, "everyone lives happily forever after." 


According to Harshbarger, Grimm's fairytales like Hansel and Gretel acted to promote German nationalism by switching attention from the Kaiser's ruthless treatment of his people to a more fundamental evil.


That evil, in the eyes of that patriarchy, were women they couldn’t control.  The men were afraid of their mysterious powers rooted in nature, including, they claimed, their secret ability to turn into witches.


This scapegoating of women quickly escalated to deadly violence, resulting in the execution of thousands of women.  Modern scholars estimate that between 35,000 and 60,000 women were burned at the stake between the 15th and 17th centuries, the most being in Germany. The typical witch was the wife of an agricultural laborer "well known for a quarrelsome and aggressive nature."⁠3 (Note: Don’t forget we burned witches in America, too. Remember the Salem witch trials?)


In a particular type of fairytale, there must be a villain, and that’s the kind Trump has propagated his whole career. The only question is, who will be the scapegoat in his new administration?


It’s unlikely Trump will launch witch-trial persecutions against women because that would likely backfire. In spite of that, he has waged a long-standing vendetta against women who dare challenge him, like belittling debate moderator Megyn Kelly with this unbelievable misogynistic slur: “You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”⁠4 


But the ultimate villain in Trump’s nationalistic fairytale will most likely be immigrants, who he calls an invading army of illegal aliens: rapists and murderers from "shithole" countries. 


He will make immigrants his scapegoat to divert our attention from his authoritarian push for total power. If he pulls this off, he will destroy our democracy while ripping away the safety net from regular folks everywhere. The only beneficiaries will be Trump and his autocratic buddies.


America has to be careful about blaming innocent groups for the sins of others.: Look at what happened when a German Nationalist named Hitler started scapegoating the Jews.

xxx


Illustration from Showbiz CheatSheet: https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/gretel-hansel-why-isnt-there-a-gingerbread-house-in-the-movie.html/


anImage_5.tiff

1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.47.4.490

2 Vol. 47, No. 4, Narrative, Social Neuroscience, Plus Essays on Hecht's Poetry, Hardy's Fiction, and Kathy Acker (Winter 2013), pp. 490-508

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt#:~:text=Modern%20scholarly%20estimates%20place%20the,in%20European%20society%2C%20although%20in

4 https://time.com/3989652/donald-trump-megyn-kelly-blood-wherever/

Sunday, January 19, 2025

We can't give up now!

John A Powell

We hear it whispered that our cherished American experiment in democracy – which we used to be so proud of – will soon go belly up. Neersaysers say that either our rapidly rising national debt will bankrupt us or that newly powerful nations like China will crush us.   


But, to me, the biggest danger to our survival is our raging cultural wars, which are destroying us from within – the same way an autoimmune disorder destroys the human body from the inside out.


I’m acutely aware of how important the human body is right now after recently returning home from Concord Hospital, where they magically replaced a faulty valve in my heart through a catheter, sending me home the very next day. My recuperation is a powerful reminder that a person is pretty useless without a healthy body, just as a country can’t fight itself out of a paper bag if it is divided against itself.


 Thirty years ago, the sociologist James Hunter came up with the term “cultural war” to describe this widening societal divide that is turning neighbors into enemies. Since then, the situation has worsened so much that he has written a new book warning us how “culture wars have so thoroughly poisoned American politics that they’ve  made authoritarianism dangerously attractive to too many.”⁠1


Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, NH was already starting to divide into camps, but I was still able to talk to acquaintances on the other side of the divide, engaging in amiable conversations about politics as if we were talking about which is better, a Chevy or a Ford. My arguments didn’t gain any converts, but I didn’t hate my opponents, and they didn’t hate me.


Hunter notes that such exchanges, even though they didn’t change minds, were valuable in enabling each side to view each other as fellow citizens, not the enemy. Now that has changed: Nothing is a laughing matter; everything has taken on life or death importance, as Hunter notes:


“America's culture wars have metastasized so that many groups believe they are in a maximalist battle against their own extinction. Whether it's far-right [white nationalists] panicking over the declining white birth rate, or academic theorists popularizing the belief that words are violence...”


We are increasingly viewing each other no longer as neighbors but as enemies. The gap is becoming unbridgeable. In this new cult of the individual, old community guidelines and aspirations have been trampled in the dirt.


We are exhausted from the continuing rancor and distrust while bracing ourselves, after the results of the election, for more hard times ahead. Enough is enough. Under the circumstances, it would be tempting to roll over and give up. But we can’t. There is more at stake than we realize.


What our founding fathers held dear was the  Latin phrase embedded in our national motto, E pluribus unum, which translates to “out of many, one.” According to Hunter, this was the “founding aspiration and glue that holds our country together.” A crucial part of this agreement that makes Democracy work is  “that we will not kill each other over our differences, but instead, we’ll talk through those differences.”⁠2


The key phrase is “we will talk through our differences.”


Throughout history around the world, there has never been a civil war that didn’t start as a culture war. To forestall that possibility, we have to regain the fortitude and discipline to work through difficult issues in a responsible manner without flagrant lies and grandstanding.


Throughout our history, we have a decent track record in bridging our differences democratically, except, of course, for our Civil War. That exception led to the unimaginable slaughter of 620,000 of our fellow Americans, our own flesh and blood.


Tragically, we are approaching that danger zone once again as politicians like Trump delight in dividing us one against the other, paralyzing our democratic way of life, and replacing it with a transactional society where the person in power always wins; you know that  person: the one, screaming in your ear, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ 


It’s time for calmer heads to prevail. 


I recommend “The Power of Bridging” by John A. Powell, a law professor and civil rights advocate. It is “an insightful and moving exploration of belonging, bridging, and interconnectedness, challenging readers to embrace empathy and understanding in a world where everyone deserves to feel valued and accepted.”⁠3 


Powell makes one feel as if you are in the presence of Ganghi, as you can appreciate listening to this interview: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101907966/john-a-powell-on-polarization-and-the-power-of-bridging.


xxx



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1 https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/08/09/culture-wars-james-davison-hunter-politics

2 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/20/culture-war-politics-2021-democracy-analysis-489900

3 https://www.amazon.com/Power-Bridging-Build-World-Belong-ebook/dp/B0D12W25YY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3754IUHSQKGN4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vFoJ4QWnWak1ifLbpz6N-H5-u5qJkvZZbLlyxG-Iw2kRU6vKENiTaPhBnyzC-9afOS-3k6kQ1OES4qGJ7vizaOpHiFy7Syoyqv_EbvsPo5Z1tjDIcRgDGIjNaPYNmRirJ9krKK7-pD4ISVotya8U8tv0fsrRxbjjz_oP_U9fcTUJd2Ee0UvbNtevDlb5biyZAz70NATVXhL4r7qsjaLjazATyW73wu6rTTq_BYqdnzY.5velM9ggHV9-5htpr4vVirEC7cRLZ7_PMbvFnPXKxvo&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+power+of+bridging&qid=1737258282&s=books&sprefix=the+power+of+bridging%2Cstripbooks%2C111&sr=1-1


Photo credit: www.johnapowell.org


 

Thursday, January 2, 2025

What's happening to our mojo?




I’ve always had a terrible sense of direction, and with the advent of smartphones and  GPS, it’s gotten worse. In the past, to avoid getting lost, I had to pay close attention to the physical landmarks along the way. 


That’s a long-winded way of saying I had to be mindful, aware of what I saw as it whizzed by my windshield: the picturesque decaying barn on the hill, the adorable little girl with the big backpack waiting for the school bus, a ray of light illuminating the church steeple in a spiritual glow…


Now, I only have to program in my destination and then zone out in a high-tech slumber, robotically following Siri’s directions: “Stay in the center lane, take a right at the next light, proceed to the route.” It’s like time travel: Getting in my car is now like entering Dr. Who’s phone booth like magic, I find myself transported to my destination with no recollection of how I got there.


I feel like I’ve been shortchanged: 


Eliminating my self-directed quest to plan my route deprives me of the satisfaction of plotting my own course through life, making me utterly dependent on technology that’s a foreign language to me. It makes me feel more like an autotom and, regrettably, less of a human being.


It’s not just when I’m driving. 


While I don’t get an endorphin high shopping in a supermarket, I throb with a surge of well-being whenever I work in my garden, even if I’m just pulling up weeds. In the same way, I feel a certain sense of satisfaction when I cook a good meal rather than going out, a real sense of mastery when I successfully complete even a minor home repair, or the sense of accomplishment I feel admiring the walkway I just shoveled.


But, sadly, every way we turn, new labor-saving devices are encroaching on us, determined to immobilize us, turning us into couch potatoes as sedentary as our houseplants. Rather than taking a chance of breaking out in a sweat, we have recently fallen for a new breed of mechanical aids like high-tech vacuum cleaners that suck by themselves. 


Rather than using the time saved by these labor-saving devices to practice new skills like cooking, gardening, or home repair, we choose, instead, to spend big money on spas and gyms, which, sadly, only makes us feel worse when we discover that we can’t magically grow perfect bodies like we see advertised on TV.


Worse news is on the horizon: Elon Musk is designing robotic personal assistants in the shape and size of real human beings, which are anticipated to make their debut in 2026. They will take care of everything – probably even sex – so that we never again have to get out of bed.⁠1


It all leads to the question: What are human beings good for? What is our purpose? Is it just to shop until we drop or marathon-watch every new series on Netflix? The key question is, where is our agency? That’s according to  L.M. Sacasas, in his substack post “Life Cannot Be Delegated.”⁠2  


He cites Lewis Momford’s definition of what makes a person’s life full and whole: it is one “in which we might find meaning, purpose, satisfaction, and an experience of personal integrity. This form of life cannot be delegated because, by its very nature, it requires our whole-person involvement.”⁠3


What makes life memorable and indelible is what we choose to pursue whole-heartedly with total body and soul involvement, “not through technologically mediated distraction and escapism.⁠4


Full-person involvement has a spiritual component, as Rainer Maria Rilke gently reminds us: Not only is it the only way to self-actualize, but it’s also the path to finding God– using whatever name we might choose to label the pinnacle of life.


“Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor;
it thinks us out of our world.”⁠5

xxx


Illustration credit: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-robots-are-entering-the-public-worldwith-mixed-results-4ff8d11a



1 https://www.mountbonnell.info/elons-austin/elon-musks-humanoid-robot-the-game-changer-set-to-transform-everyday-life-by-2026

2 https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/life-cannot-be-delegated?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6980&post_id=153663623&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ktp62&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid

5 https://www.lauriedoctor.com/musings/2020/8/18/only-in-our-doing-can-we-grasp-you-rilke