Earth Destroyed By Drunk 21 comments

16 Aug 2005 @ 07:45, by Richard Carlson Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. ---T.S. Eliot Right now, do you have a phrase that goes beyond the barrier? The writing brush comes forward and says: Daba-daba-daba-daba... ---Takuan Just still the thoughts in your mind. It is good to do this right in the midst of disturbance. ---Yuan-Wu Jean Hudon thinks it over amidst autumn scenery 1 Do I go too far with my headline? Let's take it a piece at a time. How about starting with the drunk part? Like any good ol' American boy, I know a little something about drunks. Been one myself---lots 'a times. I've been described, upon at least one occasion, by a highly spiritual person, as the drunkest man she'd ever seen. I've been flat on my back in a parking lot in Mayville, and couldn't figure out how to get up. So what's involved in stopping such behavior? And how do we know when someone's cured? There are a number of ways. Sometimes a person is confronted by his/her entire family...and carried off into a waiting car and locked up in a hospital, where maybe medication is administered. Sometimes a person surrenders and declares, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." Often this is a remark of introduction made at such 12 step groups as Alcoholics Anonymous. Other times a person goes into a church or the like and has something happen like the grace of god and rebirth. After such things as delerium tremens or other manifestations of withdrawal occur, the drunk confronts what's left of his/her life and begins a reconstruction. I have heard it said the current President of the United States once had a "drinking problem" but had it fixed up by getting reborn...as in Christian fundamentalism. I don't know if this is true, but I did notice his daughters made headlines with drunkenness during his first term. I've also heard tell there is some sort of genetic thing that gets passed along...which maybe just has to do with how the body processes sugar. I don't know a whole lot about that either. What I do know is this President plays hardball, and he employs people around him to investigate all his enemies and to construct campaigns to destroy their reputations and credibility utterly. I'd like to look a bit at the reputation of past fast times in this President. Apparently his route to sobriety was not with AA. I don't know for a fact that it wasn't, and it's none of my business. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of AA, and there are wonderful reasons for that. What I have heard is he was "saved," and his transformation is not only being advertised but administered as public policy. Let's take a look for a moment at the AA method. They have these 12 Steps toward a serene life without booze. The people of AA are anonymous but the method is not, and has been adapted by a slew of other groups. The First of these twelve is a confession of such powerlessness over alcohol that one's life is seen as utterly unmanageable. Some people cannot tolerate such a view, and head back out or elsewhere for more "research." I think probably you really have to be dragged into AA. If you have any other recourse at all, like maybe a rich father, you'll choose that route instead. But if you stay...or the court is threatening imprisonment...you hear about the Second Step. "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." Sometime during the First Step, many AA people decide there's no actual "cure" for being a drunk, and they readily call themselves drunks ever after. What there is is a fellowship of discipline for staying sober...and maybe for achieving the top step, which is a "spiritual awakening" known as Serenity. You can get that, but only if you know you'll always be a "drunk." This Second Step is about a Higher Power...which is pretty difficult for a lot a people to take. But it's even worse (and this is only the Second Step) because whatever this power is will "restore us to sanity." You mean I've been insane? Well goodness sakes, the whole fun of getting drunk is going insane. I mean, we all know we're just kidding around. When we sober up we're not crazy anymore. We remember what we did---or someone tells us...in the event we blacked out... We did what? There was a plate glass window? What's a blackout? When do we know our involvement with a drug is insane? Each person comes to his/her own terms with that question, but when those terms get laid out it usually means getting help. If I get to the point where I have to announce to some part of the world that I have a problem and I need to get help, the world needs to view us a bit differently. Maybe the people in my world are helpful and understanding or maybe they mock and push us challenged people aside and away. Inevitably the insanity confronted in AA has to do with self-destruction. I don't know if that's the case in being reborn, or sent to a clinic and set up in various jobs by Dad. But in AA that Second Step has to do with discovering I just wanted to drink until I died. I didn't care what happened to anyone else, near or far. It was just me on the way to oblivion. Maybe I'll smoke too. This attitude is called "stinking thinking" in AA. I hope this level of dependence is addressed among the evangelicals and the wealthy. Alcoholic Anonymous members learn to call it out in themselves and challenge it in others when they see it. It's tough. The process of the Second Step is merciless, but it saves some lives. Without it you remain what is called a "dry drunk." This means the stinking thinking remains intact even without the drinking. I know of at least one person who never took a drink in his life, but nevertheless was a genetic dry drunk. It's just the way he thought and did things and related to people. His father died drunk before his eyes. He made it through successfully...outwardly...by sheer determination and will power, by white-knuckling it. 2 Whether the President admitted he was a drunk or a sinner, there must have been a time when he found himself on his hands and knees searching for his own honesty...if the rebirth was real. Both churches and twelve step groups have open meetings where you hear the testimonies of people who have tried, and probably still are working to turn their lives around. These stories are among the most moving you'll ever hear. They are so emotionally gripping because inevitably the confessor has discovered he or she had been living a life of lies. While still in childhood every person decides whether or not to use lying. It takes practice. By the time a guy's in his teens, he may have been confronted by Mom in the dead of night about how many beers he's had. If he gets away with his answer of "a couple," when in fact it was 8, he may be encouraged to go on to the next level. The easiest way to lie is to convince yourself that, in some way, what you're saying is true. This is risky. Naturally if you come really to believe the lie, you're setting up a mounting burden of pathology. But to some people it's worth it. There may be a higher cause you're serving. Maybe you're a spy. Perhaps you are sworn to secrecy in some club or social society. There's a password or a look to exchange, and then you know you're OK to relax and just be honest---if you still can, and if such a bearing is valued. Outsiders don't know these secrets and so they don't matter as much as the members. The danger of course is the whole group may be set up on a false premise, and may be some kind of cult. And you become brainwashed. If you're comfortable and successful you may not mind being brainwashed. It can be cool. The hierarchy does the thinking, and you just do what you're told. You chant the mantras and do the dance and enjoy the feast. A life in a tribe like this can be fine, and I believe most of us maintain some aspect of this behavior. But you always have to watch out for the loner, or for that part of yourself that just wants to get away from it all sometimes. Just wants to disappear...or go off to another secret life somewhere else. Like drink, the lie can become more important than anything else. Intimacy is a problem because it's so hard to keep all the stories straight. Ultimately one forgets what's a lie and what isn't...and if there's misery in the situation, it must be time to move on. To the next society, the next lover, the next church. Lying depends on what you can get away with and how comfortable you are with it. Some people can stand up in front of the whole world, tell a lie, and watch bemused to see who's believing it. Actors have to learn to do this...and certainly to hide the bemusement, and some get into personal crises over this trick. There are those who say United States presidents, and especially this one, can do it. Alas, many in this republic have decided all politicians lie all the time, and have given up on the representative process. In AA and other groups of reform, finding an inner voice of honesty is the hardest work, but also the most rewarding part. It has to be in order to replace the contentment in deceiving others. The reason it's so hard is the battle with denial. It's possible to throw yourself into the arms of a Higher Power without doing that battle, but AA's don't recommend it. You can weep in front of a priest or a sponsor about what a mess your life has become, and you can leave that old life and those ways behind. But you still carry with you that thinking problem. AA's sometimes say, "It's not so much a drinking problem as it is a thinking problem." 3 Denying goes hand in glove with lying. Mom says, "You had more than a couple beers," and you lie, "No Mom, that's all I had, honest!" Does she believe it or let you get away with it or just avoid further conflict? Maybe she just lets you stagger off to bed to sleep it off, and she'll try to raise you correctly again tomorrow. But what I may learn is there are ways I can be so that people won't know and can't tell who I really am, or find out the bad and lazy things I'm doing. Eventually I may get to the point when someone suggests I have a problem, my defenses will be so impenetrable that I won't hear any amount of convincing. I'll dispute all the facts. I won't even consider the possibility. Consistency won't matter either. Nothing can shake me. Beware the leader who corroborates the lies and denial of others. A whole nation may need restoration to sanity. And the worst part of such a figure is he disdains the foolishness of his followers, and will leave them behind in the first spaceship outta here. If these musings strike a chord of recognition in you regarding George W. Bush, I'm glad and relieved. I've tried to take him apart in this article precisely because we liberals don't like this approach. We want to discuss issues, not personal failings and scandal. But the issues thing isn't working, and probably hasn't for nearly half a century. We have a leadership in this society that asserts it makes its own reality and the only measure of its merit is whether it succeeds...and whether the leadership still is on top by hook or by crook. I presume the "crook" here is the shepherd's tool rather than criminal activity. But what is the view now of crime? Is it really what people say? "Just don't get caught." All of this has been inspired by 2 publishings I saw during the past week. The first came to me on Friday from Jean Hudon, a Quebec City native, whose mailing list sends out something nearly every day. His www.earthrainbownetwork.com/ is concerned with global events from a spiritual perspective. This particular message carried an email from Peter Phillips who is Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored, a website that features news stories felt to be ignored by mainstream media. The email introduces yet another study by yet another statistician of the recent major elections in this country. Let me say I am aware that both political parties have histories of crooked manipulations of our free elections, but what concerns me more is when the people shrug off such chicanery as inevitable or not worth doing anything about. Dr. Phillips' message is posted at Jean Hudon's website [link] but allow me to quote it entirely~~~ Date: 11 Aug 2005 From: Peter Phillips peter.phillips@sonoma.edu Subject: Election Fraud Continues in the US Election Fraud Continues in the US New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004 By Peter Phillips In the fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news after September 11, 2001. New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election. The facts are as follows: In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters. More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another statistical impossibility. Dennis Loo writes, "A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes where past voting patterns held." There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for the US corporate media. Black Box Voting ([link]) reported on March 9, 2005 that voting machines used by over 30 million voters were easily hacked by relatively unsophisticated programs and audits of the computers would not show the changes. It is very possible that a small team of hackers could have manipulated the 2004 and earlier elections in various locations throughout the United States. Irregularities in the vote counts certainly indicate that something beyond chance occurrences has been happening in recent elections. That a special interest group might try to cheat on an election in the United States is nothing new. Historians tell us how local political machines from both major parties have in the past used methods of double counting, ballot box stuffing, poll taxes and registration manipulation to affect elections. In the computer age, however, election fraud can occur externally without local precinct administrators having any awareness of the manipulations - and the fraud can be extensive enough to change the outcome of an entire national election. There is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in 2004 and earlier elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are complaining about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both parties accept the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither party wants to further undermine public confidence in the American "democratic" process (over 80 millions eligible voters refused to vote in 2004). Instead we will likely see the quiet passing of legislation that will correct the most blatant problems. Future elections in the US will continue as an equal opportunity for both parties to maintain a national democratic charade in which money counts more than truth. Dennis Loo's report "No Paper Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election," can be viewed at [link] -- Peter Phillips Ph.D. Sociology Department/Project Censored Sonoma State University 1801 East Cotati Ave. Rohnert Park, CA 94928 707-664-2588 [link] Dr. Loo's study is only the latest to inform the world that George Bush is not actually the President of the United States, nor has he been ever. I find this possibility so disturbing that I cannot imagine how the nation can "stay the course" day after day in such possible illegitimacy. Is such fraud too huge for the average mind to grapple with? What are the stakes and how important are they? That brings me to the second message, which I saw the day before. It is an article from www.guardian.co.uk/ with the title "(Global) Warming Hits 'Tipping Point." Ian Sample, science correspondent Thursday August 11, 2005 Guardian A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today. Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures. The discovery was made by Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford University and is reported in New Scientist today. The researchers found that what was until recently a barren expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years. Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards. The remainder of the article is here [link] and koravya has even more on this at his Log [link] Let us be reminded that George Bush has scorned those who warn about global warming, only flipping over to acknowledgement recently after reframing the problem as climate change. I notice no difference in White House policy however. I remember an installment of Scientific American Frontiers earlier in the year on PBS. It was called "Hot Planet - Cold Comfort" and took Alan Alda up to Alaska to witness similar changes in the Arctic climate. Now here's a guy that everybody likes and believes, even when he's playing a debauched senator for Scorsese or TV. Alan appeared as skeptical about all this warming stuff as the next guy, until his guide across the frozen tundra handed him a long pole just in case he sunk up to his waist---which he promptly did. [link] Are we sunk so deep in fraud, lies and denial that the nation, indeed the species and the planet, are in terminal danger? I am prepared for the mockery that comes when someone asks such a question these days. However, I would welcome a huge forum on these matters. That would be a Reality Show I could get into!

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