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Damn the Enthusiasm Gap, Show Up at the Polls

Apparently some “progressives” would rather chew off their own balls (and, what’s worse, unleash brainless wacko pitbulls like Palin, Gingrich, DeMinted and that fruitcake in Nevada to chew off MY balls) than pass up an opportunity to say “I told you so.”

Here what some thinker at Salon wrote yesterday: "It would perhaps help, now, if the White House took responsibility for the ‘enthusiasm gap' itself, instead of blaming liberals for it. It might also help if they went back in time a year…and proposed some sort of massive infrastructure and jobs program, back when those things could've helped the jobs situation enough to make the forthcoming Democratic blood bath less inevitable."

A couple of points.

1) Whether it’s Obama’s fault or the writer’s, we don’t have a time machine and won’t develop one before election day.

2) All we’ve got now is election day.

3) The blood bath the writer seems to be looking forward to is “inevitable” only if people decide it’s inevitable. At this writing Real Clear Politics has 37 House seats too close to call.

4) There is a significant difference between Obama and Rand Paul.

5) In case you missed number 4: There is a significant difference between Obama and Rand Paul.

6) If the Salon writer (bloviating from the imagined security of a paying job) thinks 10 percent unemployment is bad, wait till he/she has to experience 35 percent.

People making this argument seem bent on talking themselves into the Alamo just to be able to insist (posthumously, it would be) that somebody remember them.

And they want take you and me with them.

I’m not going. I’m voting Democratic. Enthusiastically.

Don't Drink That Water, Kid, Fish Pray in It

The way I heard the W.C. Fields story was that he is on a movie set with a child actor who is trying to get a drink from an aquarium, and he says, “Don’t drink that water, kid; fish f*** in it.” Other versions have it as his excuse for drinking alcohol—“I hate water; fish f*** in it.”

In either case, there is the sense of water as a foreign medium populated by creatures doing things so removed from human manners, custom, taste and biology as to be a total gross-out. It’s as if Fields as a child had been scarred for life by walking into his mother’s bedroom and discovering her having relations with giant squid.

We all have different ways of looking at the universe and our place in it. Fields looks like a guy who never found a higher power he didn’t hate. The man is wonderfully funny, but not terribly at home in his own skin, let alone the universe.

For my purposes, I have come to believe that people might get a better sense of God if they had to swim like fish in the ocean. On land, surrounded by nothing but air and making our way under our own power across a landscape populated by seemingly distinct physical objects, it is too easy to fall into an illusion of separation—from other people, other animals, other living things—from any other objects or forces, seen or unseen.

On land, all those animate or inanimate things present to us as entities that we have to be careful not to bump into, or get irritated, or dissed, or bitten, or eaten by. On earth, even a force as obvious as gravity seems less a connecting attraction between bodies than a definition of up and down. The effect of our connection to the earth beneath us is felt by most people as a nuisance that makes the ground just one more thing that we have to avoid crashing into.

For fish in the water, the effect of their surroundings must be entirely different. Gravity makes us fall, buoyancy holds them up. We feel surrounded by emptiness, not constantly moved by the waves. We don’t feel the earth shake when someone around the next corner walks toward us, but if anything stirs in the water the ripples go on forever.

Not only does the water hold fish up in their environment, they take it into their bodies to obtain life-giving oxygen. It must feel more like living in, swimming through and breathing Jello than existing in thin air.

If you could feel your environment everywhere around you like Jello, if you had to breathe your surroundings in order to stay alive, I think you’d be more likely to come to an accurate notion of what God is. Because, as far as I’m concerned, I’m a fish and God is the water I swim in.

Is the water intentional? No, not as a human would define intentional, but the water is sustaining. Does it love the fish or even care for them? No way to know. Does it provide eternal life? No, but while the fish do die, they don’t drown.

Does the water require that the fish bow down and worship it? No, but they do have to obey its rules in order to survive, and if they separate themselves from it they die. Do the fish have to understand what the water is? No, just how it works, how to move through it, how to adjust to its flow to get where they want to go.

How does a fish come to understand how the water works? By paying attention to the waves. By paying attention to what is around them.

All of us, in the water and out, are subject to unseen forces that are not understood by any man, but which connect us to everything around us, from bacteria to our fellow man to the wide universe.

For the fish, to know how the water works and flows is a given. All it has to do is pay attention. The same thing applies to us all.

If We Don't Have Great Sex, the Mexicans Will Stay Home

Using Cosmopolitan for sex therapy is like trying to learn how to drive a car by reading the owner’s manual. Cosmo seems to think it’s all about pushing the right buttons. 75 Ways to Make Him Cum Through His Nostrils, 12 Sure Fire Techniques for Finding Your G-Spot in a Dark Closet, 45 Sex Tricks of the Himalayan Mongoose—it’s as if Cosmo thinks great lovers are double-jointed, ambidextrous plumbers wielding socket wrenches with 93 attachments. Magic numbers, elaborate maneuvers, hidden secrets that everyone knows but you—in the Cosmopolitan boudoir, that’s what it’s all about.

Above all, the Holy Grail at Cosmo is GREAT SEX!!! If you aren’t having it, did you know the girl down the street is? If you aren’t having it, why not, it’s easy! If you aren’t having it, here’s how to get it. Certainly this approach has been successful for Cosmopolitan; it’s the women’s magazine with the highest single-copy circulation. It makes you suspect that maybe a lot of women out there aren’t having great sex.

Well, if you’ve continued your sex life past the age of 22, you probably have noticed that sex is complicated. If you’re a 19-year-old male with enough testosterone surging through your body to overrule whatever good sense you possess and enough money to rent someone’s service, sex is very simple. If, however, you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, and get up and be able to look a significant someone else in the eyes, and you want to have sex, then things get complicated.

Great sex every time long term with the same person must happen somewhere. It hasn’t happened to me. But somehow in America that’s the expectation. We’re all going to win the lottery, we’re going to vote once for hope and change and it will happen, we’re going to make love like pornstars.

Intellectually we all know that even pornstars (particularly pornstars) aren’t making love like pornstars, but we still buy the Cosmopolitans and deodorant and hairpieces and cosmetic surgery to make it happen. If you’re not getting great sex with your partner there could be five to 15 or 16 factors at work, none of which have anything to do with how you look or smell.

He could need Viagra, she could need a lubricant, he could be emotionally withdrawn, she could have been abused as a child, he could have been abused as a child, she could be scared of performing poorly, he could be scared of performing poorly, she could have a cold, he could have gas, they could be scared that if they perform poorly their marriage could be over, they could be scared that if they perform well their marriage will keep going, she could be worried about money, he could be worried their son on drugs, she could be worried about their daughter’s marriage, he could be mad about Obama, she could be mad about Palin, they could be mad about the oil in the Gulf, the terrorists in our midst, the Mexicans at the border, the politicians in Washington. They could be mad about not getting the GREAT SEX THAT IS PROMISED THEM IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS!!!!

OK. He and she and we should all stop and take a deep breath. Maybe great sex will happen sometime and then another sometime, but isn’t it possible that we could make do from peak to peak with some pleasantly rolling plains? Do we really need to blow each others’ heads off every single time? What if GREAT SEX is happening but we haven’t achieved GREATER SEX?

If we’re going to have sex at all, maybe it would help if we were willing to make do with good sex, OK sex, even falling asleep in each others’ arms—just once in awhile.

Mid-Term Election Rage Reaction Redaction

What’s the difference between a hobby and a hobbyhorse? I think it’s a matter of whether or not you’re able to let the thing go. A hobby is a pastime, a hobbyhorse is an obsession.

People are creatures of habit. Some habits help get us through hard times by allowing us to navigate through the turbulence on autopilot, but it is generally better to try to base behavior on realistic awareness of what is happening around us rather than programmed reactive patterns of thinking.

Unfortunately, few of us escape childhood without developing habits that, while very useful in helping us cope with the peculiar circumstances of life in the home we grow up in, often are blocks to happiness later on in life.

You don’t have to go any further than the comments posted after online blogs to see the effects of people getting gummed up in balls of nasty emotions. What people refer to as the polarization of American politics to me seems more like watching the entire population of the country falling in slow motion down an enormous flight of stairs, tripped up by ropes they’ve wrapped around their own emotional legs.

Frighteningly large numbers of people are nursing habitual anger and resentment, self-medicating themselves with rage directed outward to escape—God, I don’t know what. Lack of love? Overpowering feelings of isolation? Fear of their own feelings of powerlessness? Fear of their neighbors? Fear of their own shadow?

Whatever the origins, the habit ain’t healthy. I say round up these people and get them all into 12 step. What’s the addiction? Are they rage-aholics? Politicaholics? Wing-nutaholics? Anxiety addicts? Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t.

In any case, I’ve become convinced that nobody is going to win the mid-term elections this fall. A USA Today poll last week found two-thirds of those surveyed describing themselves as “angry” about conditions in this country, the highest percentage in the decade the question has been asked. By nearly 2-1, they would rather vote for a candidate who has never served in Congress over one with experience.

It looks more and more certain that most people will vote no this fall, and that is bad news. If this is a nation of rage-holics, this election will play out as the fullest national expression yet of the classic reaction of angry addicts of all stripes to all of life’s setbacks—“I’ll show you, I’ll hurt me.”

This country is trapped in addictive reaction. That defines the hair-trigger defensiveness that sends people into a rage at any challenge to the way they’ve been doing things. It’s what turns couples counseling into an argument designed to prove to the therapist that the other partner is the real crazy one, rather than a search for ways to get out of such knock-down-and-drag outs when they explode in the privacy of the home, where there’s no referee around to make the final call.

Therapy—and the coming to serenity and peace that the therapist and client together should be working to achieve—has nothing to do with who gets kicked off the island, who gets fired, who’s the last man standing. Right now in America, nobody’s interested in serenity, and nobody’s playing by the rules. The therapist is nowhere to be seen. The ref has thrown up his hands in disgust and left the playing field.

We’re in the middle of a spastic, thrashing, hysterical free-for-all that will throw a lot of people out of office who may not know what we should be doing about this mess, and replace them with people who almost certainly will not know what to do.

Most people who go to the polls will be there to vote against what we’ve got. Not enough people will be there to vote for what we might have. We’ve got plenty of no votes; what we need are more people willing to vote yes.

Fear Itself: How to Make It Through the Recession

The latest numbers show unemployment in the U.S. up to 9.9 percent. Economists say it’s the result of previously discouraged jobseekers returning to the hunt inspired by news of incipient recovery poised to sweep across the country.

Meanwhile, the stock market plunges down five big stories before hopping up one, scared investors pour into the bond market, and Europe teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.

Above all, this stuff has been going on two years or so now, and a lot of people have been out of work that whole time. Credit cards are maxed out, foreclosures continue, and retirement savings are about gone in many households.

How long can we hold our breaths waiting for better times? When do the hobo jungles reappear? What do we tell the kids? How are we expected to keep from just freaking out?

It can be done. You don’t have to whistle a happy tune, imagine pennies falling from heaven, declare happy days are here again and believe that wishing will make it so.

We’re not even looking for happiness as an ultimate goal here. We’re just after a way to maintain our composure and not collapse into quivering blobs of anxiety. We just want to remain functional enough to be able to think rationally and come up with a plan that might lead us out of our personal quagmires.

And just as that state of composed functionality is what’s required to be able to change our physical circumstances, it’s also what we need to grab and hold onto any peace at all, in bad times or good.

Because, whether or not it seems like this in times of physical want, what really matters in the long run is how you’re doing inside. America came through the Great Depression physically without ever emerging spiritually. Despite Greatest Generation nostrums about money not being everything, when our fathers and grandfathers got back from the war they acted like it was all that mattered. They threw up shopping malls and suburban sprawl, turned the countryside into a parking lot, and settled back on their sofas to watch commercials interrupted occasionally by sit coms.

There was a brief, failed rebellion in the 60s against the materialist, conformist spiritual swamp we had fallen into, followed by five decades of miserable reaction.

Now this second great economic crisis may be giving us a second opportunity for regeneration. I doubt that a lot of people will seize the moment with the gusto they should, but maybe you, sitting there reading this, can do something really good for yourself, and for the people around you who have to deal with yourself.

Rather than losing yourself in anxiety, panic, and every-man-for-himselfism, concentrate on what you can do next.

Don’t freak out over some imagined final disaster falling upon you and your loved ones next week, or next month, or five years from now; focus instead on what you can do right now. The next step is not only the most important one you can take to start changing things, it’s also the only thing you can do right now. The next step is all you’ve got.

Delay taking it and you just increase the odds of future calamity.

The fear comes from all the things that you can’t do anything about, because they lie in the future and you’re here right now. Let the future go. At this moment you can do nothing about it.

Believe in a power that is there to take on the fear when you decide to let it go. Then let it go. Then take the next step.

The Secret of Happiness ($9.95, with a money-back guarantee)

I’ve been looking for a job since the beginning of April. I’m a freelance writer, and while 2008 and 2009 went well enough, the recession caught up with my clients and me at the turn of the year, and since that time, work has been spotty at best.I just got a promising freelance project this week, but I continue to look for full-time work. There’s only so much money left in my family’s savings to pay the bills.

It doesn’t faze me. I’m doing fine, one day at a time, because I’ve figured out the secret to human happiness.

It’s all in our heads.

I guess you’ve heard this before. But when was the last time you actually managed to go into your brain and put it into practice? Self-improvers tend to wade inside themselves with a potato masher, bent on personally squishing all the bad stuff out of their grey matter and forcing the remains through a sieve to filter out the nuggets of serenity, joy, and peace that might be hidden there.

Such was my approach for a good 40 years. I thrashed around my insides with blunt instruments, determined to beat my misery into submission. The whole spastic effort just left me gummed up in a ball of misery.

Generally, this will be the result, no matter what your misery of choice. You might be a habitual self-kicker, or a bigot, or a punitive martinet, or a workaholic, or self-absorbed, or a lazy good-for-nothing, or an angry, violent, lying, son of a bitch. You may hate your misery with a purple passion, but be unable to overcome it no matter how you struggle and strive. People become so wrapped up in their hatred of the problem that it becomes impossible do deal with the problem itself.

I only began to make progress against my self-hatred when I figured out the effective limits of my jurisdiction. Some parts of the universe—specifically including those areas where decisions are made on my worth to humankind, the value of my contribution to the greater good, my moral batting average, my ultimate eternal destination, the sorting out of my pluses versus my minuses, the final judgment of my goodness or badness—all that stuff is simply outside my bailiwick.

What I control are my actions in this moment. I can make the next step down the walkway and see what happens. If it gets me toward my destination, I try another. If it causes pain to me or others, I stop and reevaluate. If the pain might result in a better outcome, I might keep moving in that direction, with all due caution.

At the end of the day I can check where I am, and who I am, and if I’ve lost ground or caused pain I can change direction and make amends the next day.

What I cannot do ever is assume that I’m in charge of the final judgment on myself. The small, moment-by-moment calls are up to me. The big ones I let go to someone else. And that leaves me at peace.

Democrats: Pass Health Care Reform or Go Home

Huge majorities of Democrats in both houses of Congress have now voted for comprehensive health care reform. Whatever the public thinks about health care reform, most Democrats have gone on record in favor of it.

Given that very uncomfortable fact, what can they do about it politically?

What would George W. Bush do? This is the guy who started as a political mediocrity, won a contested election in the Supreme Court, invaded the wrong country in retaliation for 9-11, experienced the steepest crash in the approval polls in half a century, and still did a full eight-year term as president.

Did he do it by saying he was sorry? Ever? No, he did by sheer brass. For Bush being president meant not having to have a majority, or doing anything right, or subscribing to evolution, or global warming, or Copernican astronomy, for that matter, and it never had slightest thing to do with saying you’re sorry.

This is the nature of politics right now. Superhuman cosmic obstinacy is how the Republican Party manages to veto laws with 41 votes out of 100. They hold their breath till they turn purple, and pass out, and die if necessary, but live or die they get what they want.

Do people like Evan Bayh think he’s going to hold off these sharks by apologizing for his vote on health care? By begging the voters of Indiana to forgive him for going astray? No way. He’s already checked into the Alamo and the Republicans aren’t about to let him out.

The Democrats can go down simpering like weenies in November. They can stand by their convictions and pass health care reform and possibly still lose. But it’s guaranteed that the only way they can escape the Alamo they now occupy is to stick to their guns and fight their way out.

Haiti and Limbaugh

When will I hear a Republican repudiation of Rush Limbaugh? As I watch the news about people continuing to die in Port-au-Prince tonight for lack of medical supplies, I reflect that Rush Limbaugh is telling people to not contribute to White House-run efforts to save lives. He says we cannot trust the Obama administration to exhibit common decency. A classic case of projection, I suppose. For people like Limbaugh, the disaster in Haiti is not a real event, but rather more grist for their sick ideological mill.

There is a special place in hell waiting for this man, and most of us have known that for a long time.

But my question is, when am I going to hear a Republican voice telling this evil, evil man to shut up and go away?

Cheney Accepts the Nobel Prize for Natural Selection (But Obama Should Have Won It)

Two of the most powerful Americans in recent history just delivered pronouncements on war and peace that not only addressed the topic at hand, but revealed a lot about their outlooks on life, religion, and survival of the fittest.

Dick Cheney and Barack Obama are popularly portrayed by the liberals as embodying the choice between fear and hope, and by conservatives as embodying the choice between strength and weakness.

Personally, I think the conservative juxtaposition is a lot more skewed than the liberal, but both oversimplify the differences between the two men’s positions. If you can read Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize as simply his latest elaboration on the theme of “Yes, we can,” then I suspect you haven’t yet come down from the high of November 2008.

If you read Cheney’s latest blasting of Obama’s response to Muslim extremism as nothing but the crazed, discredited bleatings of a foreign-policy dinosaur, I think you underestimate the degree to which his viewpoint can be supported by rational calculation.

Sure, Cheney is a wacko coot, but the method behind his madness was summed up in the 17^th century by the rationalist French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “Pascal’s wager,” as it’s called, famously decreed that given that we can’t be sure about the existence of God, the rational bet is to believe. If He doesn’t exist and we believe, then we’ve just wasted a lifetime of boring Sunday mornings in church; if He does exist and we bet he doesn’t, we burn for eternity in hell.

Cheney believes in the hell to pay at the hands of terrorists not taken seriously. If, in the process of avoiding that hell, we end up torturing a few innocent people or attacking countries that don’t harbor terrorists after all, then so be it. Better to be paranoid with blood on our hands than to be toast.

Cheney stands foursquare with our ancestor cavemen who judged that unexplained rustling in the bushes at midnight to be a wolf, rather than the ones who dismissed it as the wind. In those instances in which it really was a wolf, the paranoid cavemen survived to pass on their genes to millions of God-fearing, wolf-fearing, gay-fearing, French-fearing red-state voters.

Obama’s rather chilly defense of war in his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize was hardly the testament to wishful thinking that Cheney sees in the administration’s foreign policy, but it was genuinely hopeful in its insistence that mankind possesses the rationality required to figure out the difference between the wind in the bushes and the wolves, and devise rational, practical responses to the wolves.

Obama said in that speech, “I face the world as it is, and I cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of men and the limits of reason . . . So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.”

Given the coexistence of these truths, Obama laid out “practical steps”—fostering agreements among nations, supporting human rights, promoting international economic development—he said could lead to an “evolution” of human institutions toward peace. He borrowed the idea and the word from John F. Kennedy, but, as he used it, it could have come directly from the mouth of Darwin.

The idea was that rational, step-by-step improvements in the exercise of international relations could be successful, and by succeeding could be replicated, replacing the paranoid lashing out at every stirring in the bushes that Cheney champions and that failed so miserably in the Awful Aughties.

Because, despite the urge toward global paranoia that persists in the American populace, it really did fail us badly under Bush and Cheney. People around the world came to hate Americans. We were behaving like the Germans in World War II, killing indiscriminately in the hopes of shocking and awing our enemies into submission. It didn’t work. It bred disgust among our friends and increased resistance among our enemies. It lost Republicans the last election.

Obama doesn’t say we have no enemies. He doesn’t tell us to surrender to them. He advocates the use of force against them. But he suggests that it is possible not only to do so in a measured, controlled, discriminating way, but to simultaneously work effectively to promote peaceful solutions to conflict and problems that can eventually become part of an evolution toward peace.

And in doing so, he advocates the replacement of fear with hope.

Pass Healthcare Reform So the Republicans Can Repeal It

It’s not often that I get the urge to give advice to the loyal opposition. For one thing, they are so obnoxiously disloyal, not merely as a matter of conviction, or even emotional gut revulsion at policies they dislike, but strictly from a coldly calculated tactical decision to derail the smooth workings of the government for their own political gain.

They’ve decided to gum up the national works and blame it on the Democrats.

They propose no alternatives to Democratic initiatives: their alternative is NO. Whatever it is, as Groucho Marx sang in the movie Horsefeathers, they’re against it.

On health care reform the tactic has come dangerously close to working. The longer the apparently interminable debate has dragged on, the lower support for reform drops in the polls. The present system is in trouble, it has to be changed now or the country will suffer, and the Republicans have decided to let the country suffer in order to see the Democrats fail.

Why offer help to people who are this creepy, and who seem to be getting what they want by being creepy?

I don’t know. They come up with such interestingly perverse reactions to reality that I have an almost irresistible urge to sign up as their life coach. I think, “These people really need help, but exactly how could anybody go about helping them?” It would be like trying to push someone’s buttons whose buttons are hooked up to an inner circuitry designed by Rube Goldberg.

For example, at the same time that they’re doing their calculating Richard Nixon machinations to get what they want no matter what the consequences, they retain a blissfully childlike belief in ideological notions that threaten all the fruit of their cold calculations. It’s a weird combination of ruthless effectiveness and bumbling naivete.

It leads them to repeatedly oppose any government action, based solely on the all-American fear of having the government do anything, even when it’s pretty clear, to even a slightly objective observer, that the government action is going to end up being wildly popular.

What political mileage does the Republican Party possibly get out of wanting to privatize Social Security, for example? None, nada. Will they ever drop this notion that most people realized was stupid somewhere around 1943? No, never, because to do so would be to deny the fairy tale of inevitable government fallibility.

So, yes, the Republicans are smart to oppose healthcare reform, and oppose it to the hilt. People are scared of hospitals, they don’t want to die, they don’t like the present system, but they’re even more nervous about any changes that involve the government. The longer you draw out the process of change, as the Republicans are doing, the less likely it is that change will happen, and the more likely people will be to blame the Democrats for not achieving the change they need and want and fear all at once. Perfect tactic for where we’re at right now.

But what do you do if healthcare reform passes? There’s a bunch of really smart Republican politicians, including Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, who say that if reform passes this month, the party should back repeal in November.

Who knows? In the fall of 2010, before reform is really in place, that might well work. But if healthcare reform is still in effect in 2016, the Republicans might as well back the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill, Medicare, Social Security as well. There’s a whole bunch of good ideas initially opposed by Republicans that the wisest among them have eventually embraced. That’s how a black man became head of the Republican National Committee.

If healthcare reform passes and people actually have enough experience of it by the fall to actually like it, the Republicans would be nuts to run on repeal. Party principles are useful to guide a political movement, rally the faithful, and even attract the undecided. It’s important to have an idea of where you want to go.

But the Buddhists have a principle for personal enlightenment that I think can also be valuable for mass political movements, particularly ones as dysfunctional as the Republican Party: don’t believe everything you think.