My father was born and raised in Mississippi, and then moved to Chicago as a boy with his family. I never, ever visited Mississippi because of this story. I viewed Mississippi as a terrible place. In fact, the US South in general. My White German mother and Black American father were both very active in the Civil Rights movement, and inv…
My father was born and raised in Mississippi, and then moved to Chicago as a boy with his family. I never, ever visited Mississippi because of this story. I viewed Mississippi as a terrible place. In fact, the US South in general. My White German mother and Black American father were both very active in the Civil Rights movement, and involved me too. I marched, I fundraised, and I was for the cause of King, the integration of our society. Now I live mostly in Germany and I am always aware of the racist goings on in both countries and elsewhere because of growing up in these times in the United States. I agree that what is going on with SCOTUS, aided by Clarence Thomas, is setting the USA back into the last century if not to the Middle Ages.
Linda, 2 thoughts. First, Germany was the world leader of civilization, until Hitler and reverted to Mean afterwards. I could never understand how this could be, until MAGAs. 'It happened there (Germany), it can happen anywhere', if each generation fails to meet the democratic challenge of its day. Similar thoughts, experience? Second, if if if Trump loses, it will be the beginning of the end of our generation's brush with Facism. After an election loss, all the pending cases against the Orange Clown will catch up to him, he will be convicted. The sordid details will sicken much of America and that POS will spend much of the remainder of his life in jail. If Trump is elected, then our generation will have been the first generation since 1776 to have dropped the torch of freedom, with unimaginable consequences.
A Biden win in 2024 will not end the MAGA attack on democracy. There still the Ferealist Society, Heritage Foundation, Supreme Court and billionaires who think they can buy elections. MAGAs are embedded in local governments and state governments. Our fight for democracy will have to continue well past 2024
It is going to be a long, hard, and difficult slog to keep fighting this battle. It involves hours of hard work, and doesn’t involve violence or riots. One difficulty we seem to face as a country as the late William Greider noted, Americans only seem to make changes in response to overpowering events, like the Great Depression bringing on the New Deal. The Republicans (and a few Democrats) have been gradually bringing on the economic decline of the American middle class, and they lie about Democrats to their captive audiences to get them to believe the worst of us and to attribute to us opinions we do not support. They hope to keep their mobs (and that’s what they are) stirred up against us rather than to think critically about where our problems are really originating.
I agree Patrick, the lesson is the fight never ends. Birch Society, KKK, Neo-Nazi party, Heritage Foundation, Koch Bros., etc. and all the bad guys are always lurking, it's the extent of their following that increases or diminishes. But Trump losing and getting jailed will be like the Allies landing on the beaches in Normandy, the fight continues but the result is no longer in doubt.
Germany "reverted to mean"? The "mean" of Germany (I say this as a person of German descent) was until 1945 an autocratic, militarized state, led by Prussia. First the other states were controlled by Prussia, then Prussia "united" them (under Prussian Kaisers). While there was a liberal political movement throughout the 19th century (one of my ancestors was a member of he Congress of Frankfurt in 1848 and arrived here with a Prussian price on his head after they suppressed the Revolution of 11848), the conservatives held the majority.. Most of the Germans who migrated to America in the mid-late 19th Century were opponents of Prussia (which was ironic when that "narrow minded bigot" Woodrow Fuckwit Wilson turn on "anti-German" campaign to support World War I. However, interestingly, the sons and grandsons of those immigrants - from Eisenhower down - were the ones who smashed Nazism. But then Germany was occupied and divided until 1989.
That was what it took for the Nation of Goethe to overcome the nation of the Kaisers (and Prussia was wiped from the map in 1945 and the Prussians driven out in the years after the war).
So that's what it took to "return to the (nonexistent) Democratic mean."
My daughter, who is studying in Berlin, and I, were just discussing that democracy for Germany was the 15 years of the Weimar Republic and then in the East it did not come again until 1989. So, it is no wonder that there is less understanding of it and people are more vulnerable to Bots that encourage them to vote for the AfD. In the USA, our democracy has not been for all the entire time. Women did not get the vote until the the 1900s, and the Equal Rights Amendment still has not been passed.
David: I read (many years ago) that when the Church executed someone for witchcraft, they got the murdered person’s property. Executions went on until the law was changed and the Church could no longer collect the estate.
Reminds me of laws enabling local police to keep property and cash from anyone arrested for a drug crime (I don’t think they even had to be convicted). What a spree if local arrests that incentivized! Was that a Reagan thing? Seems like something he would do.
Your description of Germany is accurate, but also describes all of Europe in that era, except other parts of Europe had crappier universities and infrastructure, less scientific discoveries and publications, less noteworthy scholarship in the arts and sciences, less insightful philosophers. Today Germany is the cornerstone of the EU. The history of Europe for centuries is one war after another with ever shifting alliances for the sole purpose of not allowing one country to dominate all of Europe, an endlessly rapacious bunch murderous racist plunderers and that was the 'the civilized' world.
Britain’s foreign policy always has been to keep one country from dominating Europe. Farage of UKIP and Johnson of the Tories managed to pull off their goal of getting Britain out of the EU, but it will permanently stunt Britain’s economy in the end because Britain got rid of its biggest trading partner.
I hope they do, but here in the U.S. our Republicans funded with big money and an artificial majority want to lord it over the rest of us, and we can get nothing positive done.
TC, thanks for that brief history lesson. I too am of German descent -- about 1/4 -- but know little of my German ancestry (unlike my majority French-Canadian.) I do know my great great grandparents came to Connecticut I believe in the 1840s, but never knew the (possible) reason.
100Panthers, if the convicted felon loses, I doubt we will return to a less-racist/fascist state anytime soon. He has normalized such beliefs and has activated their perceived grievances for their lot in life, when as Dr. Richardson has pointed out so eloquently time and again, the real blame for their troubles lies with a slew of GOP stalwarts -- among them Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Murdoch and all the rest. The CF45 skillfully created a base of folks who probably had dark notions about race (as he does) and need someone to blame. He started it with his escalator ramble in his ugly twee building, calling out Mexicans who come to take property, jobs and lives. He made it PC among their group to reveal their previously-suppressed racism.
Yikes - my comment was for an earlier post by 100 Panthers about the decline of MAGA after Trump loses and is convicted. Not about some of the intervening posts!
The word Mississippi always brings to mind Nina Simone and her 1964 song, Mississippi Goddamn. Here's one of several live performances from YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLcoKebBg2g
I believe we have a chance to win this election because the majority of us in this country believe in Democracy. Sure , Trump can try to revert this country back but it won't happen because we will prevail and win this election in November.
We mustn't forget voter nullification. At least one state legislature has given themselves the power to nullify a result of they don't like it. Which raises the question: if they are so sure their side is so great, why do they work so damn hard to ignore the will of the people?
Best question ever. Only those who think they are likely to lose a popular vote go to such extremes - all the while accusing the other side of doing what they are doing. Sort of like Putin and others of his ilk. Sadly, MAGAts are on board with a rigged election to get their cult leader. Not only to lead them to hell but all of us.
You took the words right out of my typing fingers. This will not be a fair election. Red states disenfranchising thousands, reducing voting methods, installing MAGAs in positions to refuse to certify a Biden victory, recruiting armed “poll watchers”…..
And the trolls, Sinclair propaganda on local stations, third party spoilers, the SCOTUS undermining voting rights… I no longer believe voting alone can or will make the difference.
As Stalin said, it matters not who votes, it matters who counts the votes. It’s not just Goebbels they have read and follow his strategies. They have mined the words of the worst.
First, don't let's malign the Middle Ages (I'm quite serious, despite all the awful downsides...).
Secondly, let's be precise, he seems to be hankering after a reintroduction of the Holy Inquisition.
In any case, it's all about social control and the power of ecclesiastical authorities -- Church, not Christ.
And I'd rather be mistaken in what I've just written, as religion imposed from above can do (and already has done) serious damage to the misrepresented and forgotten truth at the heart of Christ's religion.
Jesus got thrown under the bus when righteous power became the goal.
I agree about the Middle Ages. My niece is a professor of medieval studies and her books are fascinating. Yep the Inquisition was a bummer. Alito can’t wait.
I'm quite lost, can’t find my own comment or yours, Marge... [Can’t handle the Substack program in such a way as to conduct a cogent conversation…] Anyway, when it comes to blundering around, colliding with one belief, getting tripped by another, putting one's foot in a puddle and sinking in up to one's middle... why... the question is, “Who's sighted?”
At best, we’re like the blind man healed by Jesus who could not at first make sense of what he was seeing... trees or people?
This thing of taking beliefs for truth, taking representations for what they represent, taking ideas for concrete realities... then taking the harmless neighbor—wrong kind of face, wrong color skin, wrong politics, wrong religion (or worse, no religion...) anyway something “different”, something “not one of us...”—then, because you hate yourself, taking the neighbor you’re commanded to love “as yourself” for a horrific Hannibal Lecter demon out to murder you and store bits of you in his deep freeze... and reacting accordingly... Why, that's not just blindness... that's getting turned into a figment of DT's psychotic nightmare...!
So much fear-and-hate-filled madness, so much blindness, turning the land into a smoke-filled labyrinth of dark distorting mirrors...
*
When we look around us, we’ll do well to remember Diogenes carrying a lantern in brilliant Athenian daylight. When asked why, he answered:
I agree with you, Peter, on the idiocy of our national conversation and the difficulty of a substack conversation! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You have a lot to say.
A lot too much. Nevertheless, I'm sharing a package more...
*
“In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men [murdered there by the KKK] had been found.
‘I believe in states' rights,’ he said. ‘I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.’ ”
For people used to reciting the (basically Nicene) Creed every Sunday (without understanding most of its content or the political and social function of this text and its recital dating back to the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire) Reagan’s triple Credo will have gone down like a well-sugared happy-pill.
Yet… what is a belief? What are our beliefs? Here I’m going to veer off.
Everything we think is true or not true is… a belief.
Belief is the mind being asked to engage with a particular object… through force of habit.
Conventions about how we cope with appearances, enforce conformist doxa and ignore anomalies, even in the face of evidence.
Some insights into how the mind is kept straight and narrow are to be found in a little book published in the late 19th century: Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott.
Another angle on this phenomenon: to animals, we ascribe stupidity and ignorance, given the infrangible limitations of animal life; yet human beings suffer from what one might term “higher stupidity”—built-in forms of misapprehension to which only we have access—we can get it right, we can get it wrong, and we have highly developed skills for justifying getting it wrong. This higher stupidity confuses appearances with realities, concepts with truth, representations with what’s represented, the extrinsic with the intrinsic, what’s secondary with what’s essential.
Only human beings have hubris, only human beings can take a misleader, a conman, for a true leader. Wolves, baboons, wild dogs cannot do this. Because of this built-in flaw which represents the other side of the coin that confers powers of mental discernment, civilized human beings’ survival skills are distinctly inferior to those of social animals...
And you don’t even need to believe in Darwinian evolution to understand this…
If I insist on the binary, at once positive and negative polarity of human intelligence—both-it-is-and-it-is-not—it is because I see this as a constant. Yet, this constant is accompanied by a secondary feature, namely, many or most modern human beings’ inability to perceive or deliberately distinguish more than one aspect of it at a time… If-it’s-not-this-it-must-be-that. If we had been a Creator deity we’d have designed birds with one wing, then wondered why they can’t fly. Frequently, we remain stuck with that one positive or negative, even in the face of overwhelming evidence… We’ve lost the ability to cope with paradox.
A failing that leaves us ill-equipped to meet with the demands of life…
Also, I can picture a new American Crusade against Muslim countries. Can’t you? Of course they wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to call it that. Or maybe they would…
True. But somehow I picture the South as the bulging beer gut of America. (I'm sorry to offend anybody -- it's just the image I get when I think of the swelling population of Southern states vs the North.
I’ll likely offend when I say that trailer trash have MAGAt sensibilities, gullible and admiring of pseudo elites. But they are useful to the ones who want votes, or ones who can intimidate voters when needed. That beer gut thing is likely true too.
I have traveled to 49 states and many foreign countries. On rare occasion I have gone to a place I truly don't wish to return to.
But when it comes to politics, the MAGAs and white Christian nationalists are drive by hate, anger, resentment and misinformation. These all breed fear.
Some of the kindest and warmest people I have met are in the deep South. They are terrified of most Democrats because of the lies they are told in church and by their politicians.
I get hung up on politics and the future of democracy when I read HCRs column and this comment section, but in reality, most Americans don't give a rip or pay attention.
As Americans, we have so much in common with most people -- unfortunately politics is incredibly divisive and it seems like people in certain parts of the country are bad.
There are a multitude of organizations and people in the South dedicated to righting wrongs from the past, they’re brilliant in mind and generous in spirit. Here are just two examples, check them out: www.eji.org/about AND www.opdla.org Montgomery, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana have set the bar high for what can be done to make the world a better place.
And, since 1971, the SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center. Based in Montgomery. Offices in Atlanta, Tallahassee, Miami, New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi.
My father was born and raised in Mississippi, and then moved to Chicago as a boy with his family. I never, ever visited Mississippi because of this story. I viewed Mississippi as a terrible place. In fact, the US South in general. My White German mother and Black American father were both very active in the Civil Rights movement, and involved me too. I marched, I fundraised, and I was for the cause of King, the integration of our society. Now I live mostly in Germany and I am always aware of the racist goings on in both countries and elsewhere because of growing up in these times in the United States. I agree that what is going on with SCOTUS, aided by Clarence Thomas, is setting the USA back into the last century if not to the Middle Ages.
Linda, 2 thoughts. First, Germany was the world leader of civilization, until Hitler and reverted to Mean afterwards. I could never understand how this could be, until MAGAs. 'It happened there (Germany), it can happen anywhere', if each generation fails to meet the democratic challenge of its day. Similar thoughts, experience? Second, if if if Trump loses, it will be the beginning of the end of our generation's brush with Facism. After an election loss, all the pending cases against the Orange Clown will catch up to him, he will be convicted. The sordid details will sicken much of America and that POS will spend much of the remainder of his life in jail. If Trump is elected, then our generation will have been the first generation since 1776 to have dropped the torch of freedom, with unimaginable consequences.
A Biden win in 2024 will not end the MAGA attack on democracy. There still the Ferealist Society, Heritage Foundation, Supreme Court and billionaires who think they can buy elections. MAGAs are embedded in local governments and state governments. Our fight for democracy will have to continue well past 2024
The fight for freedom has to continue forever. Evil will rise up snatch freedom away at every opportunity.
It is going to be a long, hard, and difficult slog to keep fighting this battle. It involves hours of hard work, and doesn’t involve violence or riots. One difficulty we seem to face as a country as the late William Greider noted, Americans only seem to make changes in response to overpowering events, like the Great Depression bringing on the New Deal. The Republicans (and a few Democrats) have been gradually bringing on the economic decline of the American middle class, and they lie about Democrats to their captive audiences to get them to believe the worst of us and to attribute to us opinions we do not support. They hope to keep their mobs (and that’s what they are) stirred up against us rather than to think critically about where our problems are really originating.
.
I agree Patrick, the lesson is the fight never ends. Birch Society, KKK, Neo-Nazi party, Heritage Foundation, Koch Bros., etc. and all the bad guys are always lurking, it's the extent of their following that increases or diminishes. But Trump losing and getting jailed will be like the Allies landing on the beaches in Normandy, the fight continues but the result is no longer in doubt.
Yes-well said. Our problems will take many years to sort out if we can ever live up to our ideals.
Germany "reverted to mean"? The "mean" of Germany (I say this as a person of German descent) was until 1945 an autocratic, militarized state, led by Prussia. First the other states were controlled by Prussia, then Prussia "united" them (under Prussian Kaisers). While there was a liberal political movement throughout the 19th century (one of my ancestors was a member of he Congress of Frankfurt in 1848 and arrived here with a Prussian price on his head after they suppressed the Revolution of 11848), the conservatives held the majority.. Most of the Germans who migrated to America in the mid-late 19th Century were opponents of Prussia (which was ironic when that "narrow minded bigot" Woodrow Fuckwit Wilson turn on "anti-German" campaign to support World War I. However, interestingly, the sons and grandsons of those immigrants - from Eisenhower down - were the ones who smashed Nazism. But then Germany was occupied and divided until 1989.
That was what it took for the Nation of Goethe to overcome the nation of the Kaisers (and Prussia was wiped from the map in 1945 and the Prussians driven out in the years after the war).
So that's what it took to "return to the (nonexistent) Democratic mean."
My daughter, who is studying in Berlin, and I, were just discussing that democracy for Germany was the 15 years of the Weimar Republic and then in the East it did not come again until 1989. So, it is no wonder that there is less understanding of it and people are more vulnerable to Bots that encourage them to vote for the AfD. In the USA, our democracy has not been for all the entire time. Women did not get the vote until the the 1900s, and the Equal Rights Amendment still has not been passed.
Not to mention a collective racial subconscious and the desire of the super menschen to acquire Jewish property.
David: I read (many years ago) that when the Church executed someone for witchcraft, they got the murdered person’s property. Executions went on until the law was changed and the Church could no longer collect the estate.
Reminds me of laws enabling local police to keep property and cash from anyone arrested for a drug crime (I don’t think they even had to be convicted). What a spree if local arrests that incentivized! Was that a Reagan thing? Seems like something he would do.
I understand the feeling. I felt that way when Obama was elected and my father did not live long enough to see it.
Your description of Germany is accurate, but also describes all of Europe in that era, except other parts of Europe had crappier universities and infrastructure, less scientific discoveries and publications, less noteworthy scholarship in the arts and sciences, less insightful philosophers. Today Germany is the cornerstone of the EU. The history of Europe for centuries is one war after another with ever shifting alliances for the sole purpose of not allowing one country to dominate all of Europe, an endlessly rapacious bunch murderous racist plunderers and that was the 'the civilized' world.
Britain’s foreign policy always has been to keep one country from dominating Europe. Farage of UKIP and Johnson of the Tories managed to pull off their goal of getting Britain out of the EU, but it will permanently stunt Britain’s economy in the end because Britain got rid of its biggest trading partner.
Just today, Sir Keir Starmer, the likely next prime minister, admitted his growth plan ‘doomed’ without access to EU markets.
Starmer is correct, but I doubt the Tories will cooperate.
If Labor gets a supermajority, as some predict (and others dread), it won't much matter what the Tories want.
I hope they do, but here in the U.S. our Republicans funded with big money and an artificial majority want to lord it over the rest of us, and we can get nothing positive done.
That's the irony. Republicans in the US are actually a minority but Big Money allows them to cast an outsized shadow over America politics.
TC, thanks for that brief history lesson. I too am of German descent -- about 1/4 -- but know little of my German ancestry (unlike my majority French-Canadian.) I do know my great great grandparents came to Connecticut I believe in the 1840s, but never knew the (possible) reason.
100Panthers, if the convicted felon loses, I doubt we will return to a less-racist/fascist state anytime soon. He has normalized such beliefs and has activated their perceived grievances for their lot in life, when as Dr. Richardson has pointed out so eloquently time and again, the real blame for their troubles lies with a slew of GOP stalwarts -- among them Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Murdoch and all the rest. The CF45 skillfully created a base of folks who probably had dark notions about race (as he does) and need someone to blame. He started it with his escalator ramble in his ugly twee building, calling out Mexicans who come to take property, jobs and lives. He made it PC among their group to reveal their previously-suppressed racism.
Worded so simply and truthfully, 100 Panthers
That’s my dream, too. May it be so!
Yikes - my comment was for an earlier post by 100 Panthers about the decline of MAGA after Trump loses and is convicted. Not about some of the intervening posts!
Do you think Trump and his minions will create chaos home and abroad if he loses?!
The word Mississippi always brings to mind Nina Simone and her 1964 song, Mississippi Goddamn. Here's one of several live performances from YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLcoKebBg2g
Yes me too! And I mean every damn word of it!
Wow, what a powerful song. Thank you!
I believe we have a chance to win this election because the majority of us in this country believe in Democracy. Sure , Trump can try to revert this country back but it won't happen because we will prevail and win this election in November.
Don’t discount the lying, cheating, election manipulation, voter suppression and outright intimidation. If only votes mattered.
We mustn't forget voter nullification. At least one state legislature has given themselves the power to nullify a result of they don't like it. Which raises the question: if they are so sure their side is so great, why do they work so damn hard to ignore the will of the people?
Best question ever. Only those who think they are likely to lose a popular vote go to such extremes - all the while accusing the other side of doing what they are doing. Sort of like Putin and others of his ilk. Sadly, MAGAts are on board with a rigged election to get their cult leader. Not only to lead them to hell but all of us.
You took the words right out of my typing fingers. This will not be a fair election. Red states disenfranchising thousands, reducing voting methods, installing MAGAs in positions to refuse to certify a Biden victory, recruiting armed “poll watchers”…..
And the trolls, Sinclair propaganda on local stations, third party spoilers, the SCOTUS undermining voting rights… I no longer believe voting alone can or will make the difference.
As Stalin said, it matters not who votes, it matters who counts the votes. It’s not just Goebbels they have read and follow his strategies. They have mined the words of the worst.
I hope you're right
"If not before..."
Long, long before.
Still, still a land of primitive savagery.
Armed with machine guns, blessed by demented jurists.
Alito aspires to the middle ages
Jeri,
First, don't let's malign the Middle Ages (I'm quite serious, despite all the awful downsides...).
Secondly, let's be precise, he seems to be hankering after a reintroduction of the Holy Inquisition.
In any case, it's all about social control and the power of ecclesiastical authorities -- Church, not Christ.
And I'd rather be mistaken in what I've just written, as religion imposed from above can do (and already has done) serious damage to the misrepresented and forgotten truth at the heart of Christ's religion.
Jesus got thrown under the bus when righteous power became the goal.
I agree about the Middle Ages. My niece is a professor of medieval studies and her books are fascinating. Yep the Inquisition was a bummer. Alito can’t wait.
We’ll be back to “an eye for an eye” and everyone will be blind. That’s what the oligarchs and theocrats dream of!
I'm quite lost, can’t find my own comment or yours, Marge... [Can’t handle the Substack program in such a way as to conduct a cogent conversation…] Anyway, when it comes to blundering around, colliding with one belief, getting tripped by another, putting one's foot in a puddle and sinking in up to one's middle... why... the question is, “Who's sighted?”
At best, we’re like the blind man healed by Jesus who could not at first make sense of what he was seeing... trees or people?
This thing of taking beliefs for truth, taking representations for what they represent, taking ideas for concrete realities... then taking the harmless neighbor—wrong kind of face, wrong color skin, wrong politics, wrong religion (or worse, no religion...) anyway something “different”, something “not one of us...”—then, because you hate yourself, taking the neighbor you’re commanded to love “as yourself” for a horrific Hannibal Lecter demon out to murder you and store bits of you in his deep freeze... and reacting accordingly... Why, that's not just blindness... that's getting turned into a figment of DT's psychotic nightmare...!
So much fear-and-hate-filled madness, so much blindness, turning the land into a smoke-filled labyrinth of dark distorting mirrors...
*
When we look around us, we’ll do well to remember Diogenes carrying a lantern in brilliant Athenian daylight. When asked why, he answered:
“I'm looking for a man...”
I agree with you, Peter, on the idiocy of our national conversation and the difficulty of a substack conversation! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You have a lot to say.
A lot too much. Nevertheless, I'm sharing a package more...
*
“In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men [murdered there by the KKK] had been found.
‘I believe in states' rights,’ he said. ‘I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.’ ”
For people used to reciting the (basically Nicene) Creed every Sunday (without understanding most of its content or the political and social function of this text and its recital dating back to the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire) Reagan’s triple Credo will have gone down like a well-sugared happy-pill.
Yet… what is a belief? What are our beliefs? Here I’m going to veer off.
Everything we think is true or not true is… a belief.
Belief is the mind being asked to engage with a particular object… through force of habit.
Conventions about how we cope with appearances, enforce conformist doxa and ignore anomalies, even in the face of evidence.
Some insights into how the mind is kept straight and narrow are to be found in a little book published in the late 19th century: Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott.
[cfr. https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Abbott/paper.pdf and https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Abbott/]
Another angle on this phenomenon: to animals, we ascribe stupidity and ignorance, given the infrangible limitations of animal life; yet human beings suffer from what one might term “higher stupidity”—built-in forms of misapprehension to which only we have access—we can get it right, we can get it wrong, and we have highly developed skills for justifying getting it wrong. This higher stupidity confuses appearances with realities, concepts with truth, representations with what’s represented, the extrinsic with the intrinsic, what’s secondary with what’s essential.
Only human beings have hubris, only human beings can take a misleader, a conman, for a true leader. Wolves, baboons, wild dogs cannot do this. Because of this built-in flaw which represents the other side of the coin that confers powers of mental discernment, civilized human beings’ survival skills are distinctly inferior to those of social animals...
And you don’t even need to believe in Darwinian evolution to understand this…
If I insist on the binary, at once positive and negative polarity of human intelligence—both-it-is-and-it-is-not—it is because I see this as a constant. Yet, this constant is accompanied by a secondary feature, namely, many or most modern human beings’ inability to perceive or deliberately distinguish more than one aspect of it at a time… If-it’s-not-this-it-must-be-that. If we had been a Creator deity we’d have designed birds with one wing, then wondered why they can’t fly. Frequently, we remain stuck with that one positive or negative, even in the face of overwhelming evidence… We’ve lost the ability to cope with paradox.
A failing that leaves us ill-equipped to meet with the demands of life…
Also, I can picture a new American Crusade against Muslim countries. Can’t you? Of course they wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to call it that. Or maybe they would…
As in Every state, there are the pluses and minuses. Today, the preponderance of minuses are in the South. But hate has legs, beware everywhere.
I find that there is a concurrent majority within the South that is probably more liberal than most of the North. Think Jimmy Carter.
My home town in Pennsyltucky is more reactionary than most places in the South.
Pockets galore, I have lived it.
True. But somehow I picture the South as the bulging beer gut of America. (I'm sorry to offend anybody -- it's just the image I get when I think of the swelling population of Southern states vs the North.
I’ll likely offend when I say that trailer trash have MAGAt sensibilities, gullible and admiring of pseudo elites. But they are useful to the ones who want votes, or ones who can intimidate voters when needed. That beer gut thing is likely true too.
Terrie-
I have traveled to 49 states and many foreign countries. On rare occasion I have gone to a place I truly don't wish to return to.
But when it comes to politics, the MAGAs and white Christian nationalists are drive by hate, anger, resentment and misinformation. These all breed fear.
Some of the kindest and warmest people I have met are in the deep South. They are terrified of most Democrats because of the lies they are told in church and by their politicians.
I get hung up on politics and the future of democracy when I read HCRs column and this comment section, but in reality, most Americans don't give a rip or pay attention.
As Americans, we have so much in common with most people -- unfortunately politics is incredibly divisive and it seems like people in certain parts of the country are bad.
There are a multitude of organizations and people in the South dedicated to righting wrongs from the past, they’re brilliant in mind and generous in spirit. Here are just two examples, check them out: www.eji.org/about AND www.opdla.org Montgomery, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana have set the bar high for what can be done to make the world a better place.
And, since 1971, the SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center. Based in Montgomery. Offices in Atlanta, Tallahassee, Miami, New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi.