In case any of you think from the title above I’m about to return to scratching my well developed Bush itch, you’d be wrong. I’m not going there. I freely admit I knowingly indulged myself last year, and in the run-up to the US Presidential election last November, to the extent that I did wonder quite why I relished attacking Bush to the extent that I did. Sure, I don’t warm to the man and I genuinely worry where the world and the US is headed while in the hands of a cabal who seem intent on returning America to the raw pre-FDR capitalism of the 1920’s. But why the charge?
Interestingly, as soon as the election was lost and Bush returned, I no longer had any desire to attack him further. The fight was fought and lost and as Bali Bubba, founder member of the Bali chapter of the Texicans for Ralph Nader Society, sagely observed, the world won’t stop turning with the re-election of George W. Bush. In any event, from the minute Bush got back in he became a lame duck as far as I was concerned. In less than four years from now he’ll be history.
It was a simple process to spot my projections on Bush, the easy adolescent superficiality, the propensity to inflation and make-believe. Qualities I have of course long ago owned, redeemed and put behind me. Except that is, when I haven’t. Harder is to reclaim my feelings toward the forces that are financing and running Bush and redeem the robber baron in me. Much more interesting than both processes is to delve into the collective projections at work with the pro and anti-Bush forces that are coming forward so powerfully and divisively at this time.
Last year, what I had a hard time understanding was why so many middle class and lower income Americans voted against their own self-interest. I mean you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that Bush et al are bent on rolling back social legislation to a pre New Deal era and skewing the social equation to the benefit of the seriously rich. But why do the very people who are going to lose out not only acquiesce but support the process? Herman Goering observed to his interrogators during the Nuremburg trials what an easy thing it was to bend the masses to your will through an appeal to patriotism and the fear of an external enemy. Add God to the mix and you have a potent trinity that virtually trumps all in its way. The lower middle classes may have been the bedrock of National Socialist support in Germany, with the army, business and the haute bourgoisie relatively easily co-opted, but the interesting fact to recall is how many of Germany’s socialists and inteligentsia came to go along. America today is not Germany in the 1930’s and to equate the two makes no sense. Nonetheless, in very different circumstances many of the same forces of manipulation are abroad in the world, and not just in the US. It is good to be aware of this so we can have some idea of what these forces are in service to, and maybe get some idea where we are headed.
What the liberal and Democratic centre/left of the American political spectrum, which is broadly speaking a rational and intellectual process, failed to understand about Bush junior is that unlike his dad, he is all about feeling, not thinking. As such, all kinds of people related to him. Enough voters in America today are “feelers” not thinkers, enough that is to swing a presidential election. That is why Bush beat Gore (if indeed he actually did) and Kerry, both of whom come across as very much in the head. To know the truth of this you have only to recall Bill “I feel your Pain” Clinton, a flawed pol who seemed able to bounce back from almost any unsavoury situation. Unlike the vocabulary mangling Bush, Clinton combined a first class mind with an instinctual empathy for people, much to the fury of the Republican Right who loathed him every bit as much as Democratic rationalists now detest Bush.
If anyone was in any doubt before, it should now be clear to most of us that the world as we knew it is now well into uncharted waters. The old verities no longer prevail as they once did. Three hundred years of scientific rationalism has given way to something new, the shape of which is not yet known. There is no going back to a golden Age of Reason, any more than there is to denying the essential facts of evolution and a simplistic religiosity, though many will struggle very hard to do both.
Too many genies are now out of the bottle. The political world is returning to a multi-polar order, the science of Newton and Einstein, just as we were getting a grasp of what relativity was about, are gone or going, replaced by quantum physics, string theories and parallel universes. The secrets of our genes is being explored and we stand on the threshold of a post-human or transhuman world with all that this means in terms of health, longevity and the social upheaval that this will inevitably entail. The boundaries between what is physically “us” and machines will become blurred. And all the while the endless debate about what we are doing to the planet will rage until the answer becomes all too apparent.
As reactionary and progressive forces contend I would say we are in for a very interesting next few centuries, until some new zeitgeist prevails. A “feeling” world does not have to be one barbarism or repression, but it very well may be if we disown our personal and collective shadow. If greater feeling, as opposed to emotion, can mean a far greater knowledge of the body and its innate wisdom, for “bodyfullness” no less than mindfullness, we might really be getting somewhere. The body is a truly amazing piece of work, far far older and more intricate than our minds. It embodies knowledge and wisdom that is far more profound. Over the past 3000 years we have become dazzled by our minds, to the extent that we actually believe we are our minds and our body is just something that carts us around. If we could actually regain that quality of bodyfullness that was ours a mere 100,000 years ago and which is still within us, and combine that with mindfullness, that too would really be something. Why, we might not actually need to evolve into human/cyber beings.....
Meantime I find it salutary to ponder on certain things relating to the species. The planet moving through space will look after itself and can shrug off anything we do here as if we never had been. To think that we have ceased to evolve is a pretty fond idea and we could actually develop into an intelligence that is only part human. In any event the history of the planet tells us that is folly to think we are it and are going to be around forever. For those of us on a psycho-spiritual path I would like to suggest consideration of agnostic-nihilism for a year and see where that gets you. It could be a valuable corrective for all those concretised metaphors proliferating on the spiritual path and the prop that is reductive re-incarnation. Certain it is we are recycled, but I wouldn’t take that too personally if I were you. Somehow I suspect the Mystery is a lot larger, more impersonal and a lot more wonderful than our self-important guesses allow for. At the end of a year you can always go right back to where you left off on whatever path you were on, but if you are very upwardly mobile on such a path, you might just have saved yourself a Dark Night of the Soul experience down the pike apace.
As I’ve said before, I’m a long term optimist. We are privileged to be alive today at the very start of something new and wonderful. We are not “it” and we won’t be around when whatever “it “is comes to pass. Nonetheless we are, all of us playing a part in what is now coming forward. And that goes for Dubya too.
