Peridyd's Progress

The country that I grew up in is officially dead. It's died by its own hands, and largely because it was too full of fear to turn and face itself in the mirror. By authorizing torture, indefinite detention, secret evidence, by suspending habeas corpus, and by abrogating the Geneva Convention, we are now the enemy of freedom, and, chillingly, we are the world's lone superpower. This is now a dictatorship. The most powerful dictatorship in the history of the planet. None of us, unless we are the President himself, has any real rights, and his rights know no limit.

If I believe that this is so, if I declare that we have become our own worst enemy, if I avow that the President and his cabal are the moral equivalent of Stalin, or of Mao--which I do, and don't get me started with the comparisons to Hitler--I can now be seized; I can now disappear forever, and there's not a court anywhere in the world that can challenge my disappearance. That, my friends, is the definition of absolute power. And what did Abraham Lincoln teach us about absolute power?

With apologies to T.S. Eliot:

This is the way [my country] ends
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

A bit too modest about who is telling the truth here, Olbermann channels Bill Clinton, and, in doing so, puts together most of the pieces, revealing the lies and the real agenda behind the War on Terror. Although he stops short of telling the whole truth (noting that the entire dispute with Al Qaida is the result of our all-too-feeble attempts at foreign policy would go all the way), Olbermann tells so much of it that I'm beginning to think that we have a successor to Edward R. Murrow.

It's longish (almost 11 minutes), so be sure to watch it when you have enough time to savor the experience.

Now the question is, am I becoming an Olbermann fan boy?

Thanks to Greg for sharing this with me.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay. Given the design of this site, one might well think that I like baseball a bit. Yet I have not blogged a single post on any topic related to America's other pastime (is there any doubt what our primary pastime is?). There's a mere week left in the regular season, and the team that I followed for most of my adult life, the San Diego Padres, is battling for a playoff spot against their nemesis to the north, the evil Hollywood (nee Brooklyn and erstwhile Los Angeles) Dodgers. As of the time I'm writing this, my beloved Padres are maintaining a game and a half lead on the Dodgers. The Dodgers have the best offense in the National League, and the Padres have the best pitching. We have all-time saves leader, Trevor Hoffman; Woody Williams; Dodger castoff, Mike Piazza; Jake Peavy; and one of my favorite players, Mike Cameron. They have Greg Maddux, Derek Lowe, Brad Penny, and Nomar Garciaparra. Based purely on the cast of characters, I'd have to give the advantage to the Pads. However, baseball has defied my sense of justice more than once. I try to accept its judgments with humility—as long as inherently evil teams like the Yankees and the Braves aren't the beneficiaries. More of that in another post. Suffice it to say that the post-Ruppert Murdoch Dodgers have shaken off the shackles of unmitigated evil.

If it were two and a half game lead with only a week to go, I'd feel a bit more comfortable, but with ninth inning heroics like Nomar's walk-off grand slam today (not to mention the infamy of the four consecutive home runs on four consecutive pitches in the bottom of the ninth of Monday's game), it's clear that evil won't go quietly into that dark night.

Of course there are more important things than baseball, some of which I've written about. Don't ever forget that innocent people are dying because of the actions of a government that purports to speak for each and every one of us (it does not speak for me). However, even the most terrifying narrative needs some comic relief. The poetry of baseball provides that for me. It's this kind of dogfight that makes for storied rivalries. This is the ideal way to head into October.

Here's how a perfect week in baseball would shape up for me:

Padres: NL West title
Phillies: NL Wild Card (can you say Ryan Howard?)
Dodgers: Eating Tommy Burgers in Santa Monica on October 1

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The most powerful myths are about extremity; they force us to go beyond our experience. There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before. Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence.... [M]yth is not a story told for its own sake. It shows us how we should behave.
--A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong

For the past few months, I've been reading Robert Jordan's fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. I began reading book one, Eye of the World in April. I finished book seven, A Crown of Swords, just the other evening. That's several thousand pages in a few months. I've read other, more serious and traditionally academic texts interspersed with the Jordan, but Jordan's constituted the bulk of my reading during this time.

For those of us who are academics—I run the Writing Center at Oregon State University and have a Masters Degree in English Literature—being seen with a fantasy novel, especially more than once, will sometimes engender “the look,” wherein a student or a colleague calls you to task for reading something lighter than, say, Andrew Delbanco's new Melville bio (which by the way, is on my shelf of books to read, and I will read it, but only after I finish book eleven of The Wheel of Time).

Although I usually respond to these well-intentioned quasi indictments about how far my reading has fallen with a semi-pat answer about needing to read for enjoyment (and although it's true that I do enjoy reading the Jordan series), there's another reason that I relish the Jordan series (but which I'm less sanguine sharing with my colleagues and associates at the university): reading the Rand books will occasionally induce a very powerful spiritual experience, often accompanied by important spiritual insight(s). Experiences and insights that rival some of my deeper meditations.

How is such a thing possible? In addition to being great stories, the Wheel of Time series borrows heavily from the mythic. In my experience, there are times when mythic tales resonate with a spiritual issue that I'm attending to in my practice, and when that happens, dislodging me from the mundane and entering a place where insight can occur is a natural by-product of reading.

I don't mean to suggest that everyone who reads fantasy will experience spiritual states or achieve spiritual insight. However, for those of us for whom spiritual states are a reality, the mythic elements in fantasy, their ability to defamiliarize commonplace experience can trigger states which then, in turn, trigger insight.

I bring this up as a way of beginning a conversation (hopefully not just a monologue) on the possibilities of reading beyond logos, logic, and reason, each of which can give us the how of our daily lives, but which will not provide much depth or discovery into who we are. In my experience, it's the mythic, the contemplative, and the meditative that provide the latter. Though it might be controversial for some, I want to suggest that reading can be a vehicle for the latter as well as for the former.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Of course there have been progressive voices who have spoken thoughtfully about 9/11. None perhaps has spoken as eloquently as this genius poet/lyricist, Ani Difranco.

I listened to "Self Evident" again a couple weeks ago. It had been several years since I had last heard it; too long. As much as I would never want a work of art this powerful to get stale through familiarity, I'm not sure that this piece could ever lose its fierceness. The experience of listening to it again was positively sublime.

Difranco not only "gets it," she deftly negotiates the poetic and the political. She's searing and tender, impeccably alternating between the two.. She kicks ass. She respects the dead. She speaks of a redemption that all can share in, no matter what continent they might inhabit, be they among the living or dead among the rubble. She knows, she sees, she's not fooled by Amerika. She's afraid of neither fear, nor terror, nor the blue-blood violence that our so-called leaders unleash upon the world: dark, besotted fools.

Download it. She's providing it for free. (Prophets nearly always do.)

It's so worth the time you'll spend waiting for it to wend its way into your music collection.

5 star recommendation.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 06:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As my somewhat infrequent posting to this blog would seem to demonstrate, I would never want the responsibility of having to write on a daily basis. Nonetheless, a part of me is envious of the platform that journalists have to speak the truth to power. It's one of the primary bullet points in their job descriptions, after all, isn't it?

Alas as we all know, the 4th estate has largely shirked its duty to speak the truth in the years since the Bush administration has been prosecuting its ill-advised "War on Terror." More frequently now, there are some exceptions to the rule of silence, compliance, and complicity that envelops those whose job it is to monitor the Beltway. Two of my favorites are Garrison Keillor and Keith Olberman.

This is Olberman's principled and well-crafted response to the abomination that is Donald Rumsfeld's (or is it Ronald Dumbsfeld's?) most recent thought piece, the one that he uttered most ingloriously this week in front of "his" troops in Salt Lake City. The excerpt is longish (almost 7 minutes) but well worth the time it takes to watch. Olberman finishes with an understated, yet appropriate, use of an obvious influence, Edward R. Murrow. It's appropriate because it's clear that Olberman is attempting to pick up the torch that Murrow carried two generations ago when he nearly singlehandedly ended the McCarthy era by repeatedly exposing the vain senator's fear mongering and trampling of the truth in front of a national audience. Although today's media are much more fragmented in terms of sources (and therefore audiences) than during Murrow's era (as this blog is an apt example), let's hope that those few like Olberman and Keillor can do the same to those who, today, dare to usurp democracy while claiming to support it.

Despite the fact that both Keillor and Olberman are utterly mainstream (which means that I'll end up disagreeing with them once the political tide in this country returns ever so slightly to the left), it behooves progressives to voice support for them precisely because they're part of "the broad political middle," and they dare to contradict the doublespeak that passes for news and political discourse in some circles.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)