The man simply can’t stop talking about himself. In the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, there is a large marble wall. In the wall are engr…
Source: Who We Are and Whose We Are
The past week brings back memories of visiting inmates of state mental hospitals, including a state hospital for the criminally insane. I was their pastor.
As we sat together within these secure institutions, it was clear to them and to me which of us was free to leave. I was sane. They were not. I could leave. They could not.
On the way home I pondered the similarities between life outside the gates and inside the secured walls of these institutions, and the slim thread of difference that separates the outside from the inside.
During the last two weeks, it feels as though the thin thread line has disappeared.
We are all in the insane asylum now.
The difference between Ken Kesesy’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and America today is that Randle McMurphy, who organized the inmate revolt, is in charge, re-writing all the rules, ordering a lock-down that appalls the rest of the world.
The world looks on with horror. No visitors allowed. And we’re all inmates locked inside without a vote or effective voice.
Who will be our pastor now?
Richard Willmsen of Infinite Coincidence offers this reflection from a different angle worthy of a larger audience: “I … offer up this short account of my own personal emotional development, and then explain why I think it helps explain why Trump is heading for a breakdown very, very soon.
I believe that rather than smashing our own glass houses to pieces in the act of destroying Donald Trump’s Presidency, we need to be aware of our own inner Trump, to reflect on our own tendencies to think and behave in catastrophically immature, venal and insecure ways. I therefore offer up this short account of my own personal emotional development, and then explain why I think it helps explain why Trump is heading for a breakdown very, very soon.
I used to suffer from a quite disabling insecurity, particularly when it came to things like being creative and forming relationships with other people. I got better, partly by virtue of living in and studying Portugal, learning about its people’s tendency to swing between moments of self-aggrandisement and self-abnegation, from ‘we are great’ to ‘we are nothing’. I also learnt about my own habit of projecting my own feelings onto…
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Originally posted on Serendipity – Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth:
“Yesterday is another country, all borders are closed.” It was a wonderful piece of dialogue from “MidSomer Murders.” In the episode, Chief Inspector Barnaby is questioning a murder suspect about his…
Today’s email from a respected friend calls attention to a British opinion piece on the American Inauguration.
Today I wish I could find a single line in this post-inaugural Guardian piece (God, even a phrase) that strikes me as false.
I can’t.
I can’t either.
Click to read The Observer view on bullying, aggressive, nationalist Donald Trump
Yesterday was at once heartening and frightening.
The Women’s March participants refused to Echo, the tragic nymph of the Greek myth who, enchanted with Narcissus’ charm, loses her own voice except to echo Narcissus’ words as Narcissus stares at his own reflection across the pond. Meanwhile, on the same day, Narcissus, despairing of Echo’s recovered independence, went across the river to visit the CIA – the intelligence community he had scorned – in hopes they might become the new reflecting pond and echo that would confirm his claims to singular greatness as the new Commander-in-Chief.
The President is disintegrating before our eyes. Mental health is about integration – the spiritual/psychic process by which a person brings together the disparate parts of the self and the various conflicting sorts of experience into a greater psychic wholeness. This process requires a center that does not depend upon the adulation or negation of others.
Yesterday we saw a lonely, frightened man with neither the Echo nor the reflecting pond into which he stares to be reassured of his real self. He is a sick man deserving of prayers and pity. But when a threatened narcissist has access to the nuclear codes no one else in the world has, prayers for this president become prayers for ourselves and the planet that reflect a greater glory than Narcissus’ reflection.
“The whole Earth is the theater of God’s glory.” – John Calvin.
As a member of the Confirmation Class at First Presbyterian Church of Jamaica in Queens, NY, a young Donald John Trump learned by heart the first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
Question: “What is the chief end (i.e. aim or purpose) of man?”
We have need to hope and pray the 70 year-old Donald remembers the antidote to the psychic integration and disintegration of Narcissus:
Answer: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.”
The Book of Common Worship (1946) in use at the time of the President’s confirmation includes this Election Day:
Almighty God, who dost hold us to account for the use of all our powers and privileges: Guide, we pray Thee, the people of these United States of their rulers and representatives; that by wise legislation and faithful administration of the rights of all may be protected, and our nation be enabled to fulfill Thy purposes. . . . Amen.
Something is dying today at noon Eastern Standard Time.
Not everyone holding their breath on Inauguration Day is . . . a liberal, a radical, an anarchist, a socialist . . . a whatever. Click “Trump is the waterbeetle of American politics and he’ll keep on flabbergasting” to read conservative columnist George F. Will‘s Washington Post opinion piece. Wednesday’s Washington Post is worth a read today. So is the NYT photo of the President-Elect and new First Lady in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln (look closely at Lincoln’s face) at the Lincoln Memorial.
I believe in the resurrection of hope. But I experience today as a Good Friday and Holy Saturday kind of day, a day when collective madness delivers the Oval Office and the nuclear codes into the hands of a waterbeetle.
“Drain the swamp” had a nice ring to it, until you realize that a swamp is an essential part of nature. Think Everglades. Think nature undisturbed. Think the spaces that have been drained and filled by real estate developers – pristine places we humans once regarded as wasteland waiting to be cultivated by a more civilized, more cultured species than tadpoles, frogs, alligators and crocodiles.
When Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp, some hearers believed he was talking about the human swamp of Wall Street and corrupted politicians.
Now we know he meant something else. His cabinet appointments are Wall Street billionaires and corporate executives with histories of destroying the natural swamp for the purposes of real estate development, fossil fuel industry profit, and profit.
The Oxford online dictionary defines “trumpery“as:
“Showy but worthless: ‘trumpery jewellery’
“1.1 Delusive or shallow:
“[as modifier] ‘that trumpery hope which lets us dupe ourselves’”
Before getting excited about draining the swamp, ask for clarification about which swamp will be drained, who is going to drain it, and for what purpose. Otherwise, it’s all trumpery, and we’ve been duped.
Returning from a week with thoughtful speakers from The Nation magazine, including Vegans Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich, took this guilty but yet-to-repent meat-eater back to a guest commentary that aired on Minnesota Public Radio in
2010.
Back then, the Affordable Care Act had just become law. My, O, my, how things do change! And not always for the better, although Elizabeth still hopes it’s a matter of time before the world wakes up to the industrial agricultural devastation that contributes to climate departure. As for health care? Who knows?
Click Commentary: Processed foods making us sick to listen to MPR’s “All Things Considered” guest commentary of May 22, 2010 when we assumed believed passage of the Affordable Care Act had put the national health care issue behind us.
Until University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler shared with the university football players (“the Gophers”) the investigation report of alleged sexual assault that led to the suspension of 10 of their teammates, the team was ready to boycott the Holiday Bowl. The grizzly details — and lots of parent tweets urging them to protect their own futures — put the young Gophers between a rock and a hard place: stand with your 10 teammates and be tagged forever as condoning sexual assault, or reverse the decision to stand together — all for one and one for all — and admit that some things go far beyond “boys will be boys”.
Early yesterday morning, team spokesman Adam Wolitarsky announced the team’s decision to play in the Holiday Bowl.
Rumor has it that the Gophers immediately received a tweet from someone in New York:
“Win one for the Groper!”
Views from the Edge 