Hi Keith,
You make a good point about social cohesion. Here in the US and in
Oklahoma when I was young, it was built around these four legs.
1. Secular Culture (As I defined it in yesterday's "another way")
2. Religious Culture
3. Political Party
4. Education
I wrote the following post to a family list that I have and yet as I re-read
it, it seemed relevant to this so I am including it. It is more provincial
then I usually allow my posts on this list since that mentions local
politics but it does show the mentality that helped us to co-exist this far
with a wide difference between groups. There was always some connection
in one of the above. Up until the Vietnam war there was also the military
draft but that is gone. The religious culture was the wild card since the
Evangelicals on the reservation basically were intolerant of anyone else.
But our connections were so strong making music and art in the secular and
academic setting that we didn't push that too much. Also the White
religion didn't reach too deep into Indian cultural attitudes about respect,
which helped. Today, there is a zero sum game going on in the Evangelicals
as well as the "neo-liberal" wing of American politics. We are literally
in a cultural war declared by the right wing of American religion and
politics. If you don't give them the right to proselytize your children,
they throw a tizzy-fit. If on the other hand, you deliver tit for tat
back to their own children they think that is unfair and they use terms like
cult, heathen, pagan and even satanic against you. (Satan is one of their
Gods not ours.)
Since most of the world's spiritual paths are not messianic or evangelical
but are transferred by blood and community, talking to their children is
really a betrayal of our own principles, so the model that I use is Elijah's
when he was trying to get the Baal priests to light that fire with prayer.
I just talk to them from their own principles and urge them to follow every
single one, especially the ones that are inconvenient for them and that
represent the great compromise with capitalism in the 19th century.
London:
I wondered thro' the charter'd street,
Where the charter'd Thames doth flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
(William Blake)
Keith, do you still have those wonderful singing clubs in the UK?
English culture has wonderful things. That is why those of us who
have been oppressed by Anglophillic abuses are so willing to forgive.
Just like the second and third generation Jews encountering the
German Lied, the great symphonies and the Ring. Like the Anglo-
philes, Hitler created an alternate history that removed the Jews
from the creation of those things. But they are not blind. They can
see and feel the touch of their ancestors within the songs of Strauss
and the Music Dramas of Richard Wagner. Wagner may have been
a racist fruitcake but artistry solves problems within a time/space
cultural context and the Jews were a part of the abstract musical answers
that he discovered. Strauss was more sophisticated and when
Hitler tried to use him he simply resigned. How about teaching
the new immigrants the glories of England while integrating their own
cultural lessons into the contemporary canon? That has its roots in
the old European Craft Guilds along with the sacredness of students. Every
craftsman had to leave his apprenticeship and journey around Europe
picking up new ideas and mastering his trade. He then returned to
his home as a Master to share what he had learned and keep the
locals up with the rest of the world. Not a bad model, don't you think?
Note to the family list:
Hello everyone.
My father was a Democrat, as was my mother. Their fathers and mothers were
also Democrats, and as my dad said to me before he died:
"I was given my party by my father and that is good enough for me. If the
party is wrong then change it and fight to change it from within. We are
the party of the people, the little guy, we believe that everyone owes the
country for their opportunities and we don't forget that when we were in
college we were given scholarships and stipends by the state schools
supported by the government. If we hadn't had that we couldn't have gone
to school and our lives and our children's lives would have been much
different. We must never forget that we too were recipients of "welfare"
even though it wasn't called that at the time."
That was from a speech that he made to the Washington County Democrats
as he retold it to me. Today the Republicans are foaming at the mouth
because they see the "theft" of Marc Rich from their coffers to be
treasonous. Of course they were the big supporters of the pardon before
Clinton. They should, however, understand that Democrats are not afraid of
money, we just think its purpose is to accomplish something rather than
praying to the god of mammon materialism that says that profit is the reason
for building rather than great works that help people and develop our
children. Those who find the basis of life in profit are suspicious of
any kind of charitable giving as Rich has done all over the world. He's
not an angel. He is, like the US from the founding of the Republic to the
present, an arms dealer on a world class level. America makes him a
criminal for acting like America. America should put a muzzle on the
American corporations that sell the guns to dictators all over the world
before they yell at others. Profit is King and declared so in Fortune
Magazine. Not quality, excellence or human growth, profit! Some say
that they need money before they can pursue excellence, growth or even
quality but the artists of America have given America a good name in the
cultural world, defeated the Soviet Union in the Cultural Cold War, and
created the Arts capital of the world all on next to no money and a lot of
misery, starving and broken homes. So don't take credit when all you do is
hoard your funds for your potential offspring.
That is why the current Bush so resembles the past Bush/ Reagan/ Nixon in
the pursuit of quality. Most of them, like Rice and Greenspan are failed
artists anyway. They didn't have the courage or the discipline to develop
their passion. They simply blamed God for their inability to succeed.
(Like it was about talent rather than will.) Well the Florida election was
about fraud and theft and in the history of the world that is more grievous
a sin than taking a concubine which is historically allowed in the Judeo
Christian tradition as long as you maintain your family and satisfy your
wife. Don't blame me, its in the book and the law. Look it up if you
don't believe me. While you're there look up usury and the food laws as
well. Today the Passover police in Israel fined a restaurant owner for
serving a hamburger on an unleavened bun.
Well, the Florida results just keep pouring in. The question is,of course,
does the end justify the means? If the answer is yes then the next
question is: what is it about sex that makes it so much more inherently
evil in such a system than a betrayal of an election? Or the burglary of
the opposition's office? Or the murder of Mayan Indians in a distant
country? Such incredible self hate and hate of natural functions is
beyond my ability to understand. Did not the Creator invent sex?
Today the African Americans in Cincinnati drew a line in the street. No
longer are they protected by the CIA needing to support them in order to
counter Soviet cultural attacks on America in African countries. (The CIA
even bragged that they got the great African American Soprano Leontyne Price
in the Metropolitan Opera because the Soviets were pointing out that even
great artists were segregated in America.) Little did George Wallace
understand that it was the American Cultural Cold War against the Communists
that fought his segregationist policies down to the wire and made black
religion
so powerful in a society that created private white church schools once they
were
integrated. That behind every religious civil rights worker was an
American
spy helping them because America's dirty policies could end up losing the
cold
war if they weren't cleaned up. God knows it wasn't the natural goodness
of
the American people or their committment to righteousness no matter how much
it
hurt. It was competition pure and simple. Americans must surely be
the most externally motivated people on the planet. We seem to have almost
no inner life.
The government has become the scapegoat for this immoral action and is in
danger of being destroyed. The banality of it is that this is the typical
path of almost all of the historical Western democracies from the past to
the present. That is why they end up in tyrannies. They create a hero to
purify the "evil government" that represents their own inner bankruptcy and
he becomes Caesar.
(Freshman Poli-Sci 101 Univ. of Tulsa, John Conklin professor 1959)
Grade for America C-
But what now? There is no more Soviet Union to keep us on the straight
and narrow. George Bush worried openly about whether the American flyers
in China had Bibles but in the American prisons, Indian people's sacred
pipes
are broken and burned and sacred ceremonies are dis-allowed. The
recidivism rate amongst American Indians who have been allowed to return to
their sacred ways is very low. Certainly comparable to the return rate of
other people who found a return to their religions in the prison system.
Only the Indian people have had their ceremonials stopped. Meanwhile
outside the prison walls, theft and de facto segregation is alive and well,
in Florida. REH
