Five element spirituality, Earth (metal), fire, air, water, Spirit. Each altar piece contains candle holder, incense burner, water basin, inset feng shui coin.

Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Spirit. Figure standing in Water, stone base (Earth), Fire (candle), Air surrounding, Spirit is everywhere and in all things.

Basin, 2 1/2 inches in diameter, overall height, 6 inches.

IDEALOGICAL WARFARE

What a loss we have suffered to ignorance, prejudice, and cultural deficiency. Hillary Clinton was eminently qualified to assume the office of the Presidency of the United States, qualified by education, experience, and cultural sophistication. She is preeminent  as a citizen of the world, a woman and high time it is that the United States have a woman president. All of which is why she poses such a threat and raises the ire of the ignorant and poorly educated among us, those among us dragging the country down  to this low and disgraceful state of the Union.

Now we are pitted one against the other, the educated, informed and culturally sophisticated… and the other.

How are we ever to escape this dilemma, an egalitarian ideology in the grips of an unsophisticated uneducated polity? A consequence of the “information age”and the social media is that access and emersion in random information has presented the uneducated with the illusion of historical and worldly erudition, empowerment without preparation, an illusion of historical perspective from an accumulation of two minute news bytes.  

Make no mistake, we are engaged in idealogical warfare. 

In warfare, know the enemy. The Koch empire, the Devos and extended family empire, the two or three hundred millionaire/billionaire cohorts have known this and acted accordingly and successfully in that mode for fifty years or more and that empire in total and the right/altright/religious right “think tanks”, political action committees that it built organized financed and spread through our institutions is the enemy. 

Fox News is their mouthpiece and an enemy of our democratic Republic.

We are presently on the losing end of this warfare because we did not recognize that we were at war for our progressive, democratic, egalitarian values. We have allowed ourselves to be bullied. There is no placating a bully, an enemy. In so doing is to confess weakness and encourage further abuse.

Resist all means, and it’s difficult to know what that means isn’t it, we resist. By all means at the polls for every elected contest. But though we may gain some leverage back, we leave a beast at the gates of our weak and troubled Republic, a Fox in the chicken coop.

By all means we must pit beast with beast, a counterforce of our own making.

Onward Together

2/7/18

Indeed, how are we ever to escape this dilemma, an egalitarian ideology in the grips of an unsophisticated uneducated polity? 

I am an old man now. I graduated from my high school just outside Northwest Washington, D.C. the year that Jack Kennedy was elected as the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America. Eighteen year olds were given the right to vote in that election, a very proud moment for me, just eighteen, to cast my first vote for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. 

Our class divisions across the polity existed then… but not the enmity. Class, in fact was not spoken of, as class mobility was assumed as an American perquisite. Then too in regards to that election there was Lyndon Johnson as our Vice President, “a man of the people”. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Boston Brahmin, Lyndon Baines Johnson, former school teacher, Texas, what shall I say, commoner, I suppose.

Camelot, you would have to be of my generation to relate to the esteem conferred on the first family by that appellation, and conferred world wide and with the conferral of dignity to it by the press. 

From the years that followed and into my thirtieth year, at least, it was a usual thing to see Jack Kennedy’s portrait on the walls of ordinary working class, blue collar family homes. My extended family’s homes. The class mobility open to ordinary young people came my way, youngster of a modest home, at thirty dollars a credit hour from my state university, the University of Maryland and on to graduate school at American University. In todays’ political climate, that makes me an elitist. I accept that, I earned it clerking at the A&P weekends and after school,  construction work in the  summers.

Then to now, how are we ever to escape this dilemma, an egalitarian ideology in the grips of an unsophisticated uneducated polity? If one speaks in full sentences is well read, to face a condemnation as an elite. 

Hillary Rodham Clinton, young woman of a fairly ordinary middle class family rises by her convictions and diligence, Wellesly College, Yale Law, Juris Doctor, if anyone cares to read the full biography, a lifetime of service to her country, to the vulnerable and disadvantaged, to states person of world wide respect and distinction.

Hilary  Clinton was maligned by her lessors, by corporate imperialism and rapacious, venal, “free market” ideologues. She continues to be so maligned. The sophistication and erudition our country once sought for our highest order of leadership has become an Achilles heel. That enmity, that prejudice and insecurity was exploited by an unscrupulous well organized and obscenely financed machine. Hillary Clinton deserves respect and gratitude. She has mine.     

How are we ever to escape this dilemma?

2/8/18

Ah, the days of Camelot. I come from a family of carpenters, plumbers, steamfitters, and a first generation Newfoundland immigrant Free Methodist preacher. Pretty much all of them voted Republican in the Eisenhower mold. They all admired John Fitzgerald Kennedy, grieved his passing, honored his memory. Among us was class awareness but not class enmity. 

The “Free Market” ideologues have transformed class identity to class enmity. This purposeful strategy of exploiting class differences and simplistic Christian moralism to create a state of unchecked corporate imperialism and rule by stolen wealth, a one percent oligarchy, has given us idealogical warfare and the impending ruination of our democratic Republic.  

A different ostensibly simpler time, the days of Camelot, an idealogical focus on Cold War and races in space, the beginning of the great divide. 

It is interesting and instructive to focus on the University of Virginia in those formative years of the great divide, James Buchanan. James Buchanan, the intellectual predecessor to Charles Koch, the Koch Brothers, the implementors of the “Free Market” strategy to replace democracy with a rule of wealth.   

What the progressive, social evolutionist, humanistic side of our body politic was slow to recognize and late to effectively publicize and resist was the insistence of the  “Free Market” strategist on their right to kill a river, poison an estuary, log and strip mine  a national monument for private industry profit, profit as theft.

So, this “Free Market” ideology, fifty years in the making, now politically dominant and ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is life threatening. A condition of idealogical warfare is not a dramatization of speech for effect, it is our current state of being.