Flim Flam Man

(fr. True Fashionista Now!)

I have here in my pocket -
and thank heaven you can't see them -
lewd, dirty, obscene, and I'm ashamed to say this:
French postcards.
They were sold to me in front of your
own innocent high school
by a man with a black beard... a foreigner
--Elmer Gantry (1960)

Alice: One can't believe impossible things
Queen: When I was younger,
I always did it for half an hour a day.
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as
six impossible things before breakfast
--Alice in Wonderland,
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
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Two incompatible headlines from yesterday's news:

"Obama's Task: Maintaining Support for U.S. War"

"Fed Holds Interest Rate as U.S. Recovery Limps"

It seems mauvaise foi to argue for two contradictory things; it can't be both. Yet Mr. Obama continues to tout the resilient (not so) U.S. economy.

In keeping with our lead-in quotation, a third might be the headlines for Michelle Obama's current South African trip while the raging waters are soon to breach the dikes in North Dakota, a very uncool place for a new jet-setter like Shelly O. (North Dakota Residents Flee as Historic Flood Waters Rise):

"Michelle Obama, Daughters Make Splash in South Africa"

She's unlikely to make a splash when the poor folks in Minot are inundated; the First Lady always manages to be on a junket when our nation faces a crisis. At least she was not shown frolicking poolside as during her trip a few months ago to South America. That would have been tres unchic considering the floundering state of the nation she would pretend to represent.

{Note: Ashwin Madia, Iraq war vet and interim Chair of VoteVets.org wrote a solid piece in HuffPo yesterday on the President's speech -- Time for Troops to Come Home. Madia accuses Obama of violating President Lincoln's dictum: "You can't please all of the people all of the time" by fronting a mish-mashed war policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.}

Bad Faith

You either got faith or you got unbelief
and there ain't no neutral ground
--Precious Angel, Bob Dylan

We sing about beauty and we sing about truth
At ten thousand dollars a show
--On the Cover of the Rolling Stone,
Dr. Hook

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men
--The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

Do or do not -- there is no try
--Yoda, Star Wars
_______________

Friend Publius recently commented that recently demobbed General Stanley McChrystal, he of Rolling Stone infamy, may have unconsciously wished to be relieved of command.

So: What if McChrystal DID unconsciously engineer his dismissal due to the stress and internal confusion caused by executing an immoral, illegal and pointless war? What if his conscience is in revolt?

What if General Petraeus passed out while testifying in congressional hearings fainted because his conscious mind is rebelling against his subconscious knowledge that he is a hollow man laden with meaningless medals that signify naught. What if his mind just shut down from the psychic overload of the reality versus the lies?

What if the famous West Point Honor Code crept into his brain and overwhelmed his imposed and constructed beliefs? There is a place where reality (truth) and lies intersect, and this place is psychosis.

What if the U.S. currently resides in a state of national psychosis? What are the current wars if not a manifestation of collective psychosis -- wars which defy rational thought and will never achieve anything of merit?

What if logic and clarity of thought are no longer a leadership requisite? What if our leaders and their re-election reflect nothing so much as our ignorance and mass hysteria? What if we have approached an episode of national schizophrenia, sometimes defined as stimulus overload?

When is too much? We are on a treadmill of input, trying to filter out the extraneous or downright lies, but the feed never stops. News programs assault us with pugnacious opinionators, while dissonant feeds scroll across the bottom of the page. It is like some horrific dystopian world in which words are our SOMA.

When the psyche is overloaded, the organism enters a state of struggle for definition. It rarely heals without a period of rest and/or intervention. It does not look like the media onslaught will abate anytime soon.

As a nation, we are a bunch of re-actors. We vote to the swing of the pendulum, in anger and without much deliberation. Logic and orderliness of thought does not seem to be the order of the day. We prefer the antipodes, but cannot decide which reflects our best national interests.

The U.S. is a nation in opposition to itself and its national values, or what we thought were our core values. The decisions of our Supreme Court reflect this ambivalence. Engineers of state torture -- Bybee, Yoo and Addington -- were recently cleared of charges because they believed in the righteousness of their decisions. And so passioneering takes the torch from disinterested rationale.

What if we are so morally bankrupt that we have actually adopted a Warrior Code, and war has become our national identity?

We are acting from Sartre's mauvaise foi (bad faith). For the world's freest nation, saying "You made us do this" is poor form. "You won't you let me (be a democratic nation; honor our civil rights, etc. . . .)" -- is the cry of spoiled child. We do or we don't, we are or we aren't.

Perhaps the Generals know this, and their innards are staging an externally-witnessed revolt.

--Jim & Lisa

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