The Holy Rosary, that favorite Marian devotion of meditations on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, has traditionally been prayed by reciting all three sets of mysteries - five Joyful, five Sorrowful, and five Glorious - all at once, for a total of 15 decades in one sitting, or a seemingly whopping 15 Our Fathers, 150 Hail Marys, and 15 Glory Be's. Needless to say, this is quite a chore: beginners and even somewhat more experienced devotees of the Rosary may typically find themselves struggling to stay awake even through just one set of five mysteries - for some, the mere thought of saying all 15 together could be a daunting prospect.
So unsurprisingly, in more recent times it has been quite customary to refer to "the Rosary" as only one of the sets of mysteries - i.e. one of the "chaplets" - to be recited depending on what day of the week it is: Joyful on Mondays and Saturdays, Sorrowful on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Glorious on Wednesdays and Sundays; the new Luminous Mysteries (or "mysteries of light") which were introduced by Pope St. John Paul II in 2002 are ascribed to Thursdays.
Ideally, however, we should still think of "the Rosary" as the 15 original mysteries as a single unit, with the five new Luminous Mysteries optionally tacked on (preferably preceding or following the Sorrowful). The reason for this is self-explanatory to anyone who's delved deeper into the devotion over a period of time, irrespective of the well-established fact that the saints throughout church history have practically universally said the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries in single succession as at least their first preference - and more typically as sheer necessity.
For starters, as one of the concluding prayers recounts, it is God's only-begotten Son Who "by His life, death, and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life"; the unmistakable emphasis here is on the three successive elements of Christ's saving work, namely that 1) He came to the world in human flesh as none other than the Eternal God incarnate; 2) that He did so in order to suffer and die in His Passion to save sinners and restore humanity's relationship with the Father; and 3) that He was rewarded for this Sacrifice by rising again into eternal glory. So there you have it - the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries of the Holy Rosary as a coherent whole sequence.
The Rosary, then, is nothing less - or more, really - than the entirety of the salvation story of our Lord Jesus Christ, seen, of course, through the lens of the person closest to Him, that is His most holy Virgin Mother. For those of us who realize - even in fits and starts - that the whole purpose of our faith is ultimately the imitation of this entire human experience of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, nothing should click more to us than the notion that, yes, we too must undergo the entire sequence of content packed into the 15 original mysteries as a coherent whole.
Such has been my own experience in the nearly eight years since I converted to Catholicism: the Rosary has accompanied me in all my most critical and intensive periods of spiritual growth or personal crisis - the two often being intermingled, as they tend to be - and I have noticed the distinct advantage of saying all 15 decades, not just five, on a daily basis or even more than once daily.
The plain fact is, every day we are called to the following succession of willful acts, which correspond to the traditional three sets of mysteries of the Rosary:
1. Invite Jesus into our hearts just as the Blessed Mother invited Him into her womb, nurture Him within our souls, and offer sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Father through that presence of Him within (Joyful Mysteries)
2. Completely immolate the life of Jesus within our souls as a (figurative) holocaust (e.g. totally consumed burnt offering, with no leftovers) such that we partake of His Passion and death (Sorrowful Mysteries)
3. Freely receive the grace of the Risen Christ, Who takes hold of and elevates our cruciform souls with Him such that even now, in the flesh, we have a foretaste of eternal life before the Father in the unity of the Spirit (Glorious Mysteries)
If there's something else that's fishily familiar here in this threefold movement, it should quite obviously be the holy Sacrifice of the Mass: it is only through the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic sacrifice and sacrament, after all, that the three-prong activity of welcoming and receiving Jesus, offering Him up to the Father, and being raised to new life in communion with Him is actualized in one fell swoop of adoration of His most precious Body and Blood.
As a related aside, consider the concluding prayer of the Angelus, which since medieval times has customarily been said at the opening of Mass (even if not noon): Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross, be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.
Life. Death. Resurrection. Again - the three elements in succession one after the other. Again - through the lens of Our Lady who personally saw it all in the flesh while her Divine Son was Himself in the flesh.
What makes the Rosary such a singularly powerful prayer, then - especially all 15 traditional mysteries said together - is that it truly is Our Lady's blessed meditative and contemplative complement to the Mass and Eucharist itself. In a very real sense, the five Joyful, five Sorrowful, and five Glorious mysteries contain within them the hidden spiritual realities of both the Eucharistic sacrifice and the Eucharistic sacrament.
So next time you find yourself at adoration, why not make an effort to say all 15 decades of the Rosary and not just the five prescribed for the day? Do this often enough, and you'll easily see why Catholics pre-Vatican II didn't even need the priest to face them during Mass: their own Rosary beads were enough to attune them to what was going on in the sanctuary and altar - on top of being the very best liturgy of the Word (i.e. the Scriptures) that one could ever come up with.
In fact, as an ex-evangelical, I'd dare say that by learning and truly understanding the Rosary, a Catholic is more deeply immersed in Sacred Scripture - that is to say, in the fundamental stuff that truly counts for the salvation of one's soul - than even the most well-versed Reformed Christian can ever become. For as John so clearly reiterates the words of our Savior Himself in the Bread of Life discourse of the sixth chapter of his Gospel: Without me you can do nothing. The "me" in the "without me" being, of course, His True Body and Blood. And just what is it that makes that True Body and Blood truly true (i.e. not just a wafer as it is to your average Sunday Catholic)? Only the faith of Mary, whose fiat two millennia ago was alone found worthy to bring that Body and Blood into actual being in space and time...and whose intercession in the epoch since has alone been found effective to sustain a Real Presence of Christ in the Catholic and Apostolic Church through every possible assault of error, heresy, persecution, and even indifference.
May the Immaculate Heart of Mary - the only perfect adorer of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, being after all the very source and origin of Its Eucharistic graces - truly triumph in this turn of the third millennium. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Friday, September 8, 2017
Exorcising the demon of claptrap
It's not often that one discovers what one's demons are actually named - and yes, they do have names, as the Bible itself attests.
My particular demon seems to be named "claptrap", and the two definitions that Dictionary.com provides are as follows:
So, what to make of these in my own case?
Well, upon analysis it would appear that the two-point definition from Dictionary.com hits the mark - if both are taken together. My language tends to be pretentious but insincere or empty because it's typically merely an artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.
It is precisely because I care so much about looking good in front of others - i.e. admired for my superior knowledge and intellect - that even my accurate (or at least mostly accurate) statements carry little if any real substance.
In the first place, I tend to overly concern myself with topics - like nuclear superpower politics - which generate a good buzz and commotion, yet which ultimately matter little to the everyday life of your average Joe or Jane.
And when I do so, both the topic itself and the way I present it is for the express purpose of making myself seem to be obviously so much on top of matters which, even were it true that I were indeed on top of them (i.e. their outcome), wouldn't really be relevant in most cases anyway, either to my own life or to my audience's. The bottom line being that I puff up things for the sake of appearing important to have a grasp of them - and further beyond that puff up my grasp of them as well.
The only antidote to this is to stick to the time-honored adage: "Knowledge puffs up; love builds."
The world has always preferred knowledge to love - that is, God's unconditional love or agape - because the former is a lot flashier and showier about purporting to have the answers to the most vexing questions of human existence. On an individual level, we as creatures in God's all-knowing image are also naturally wired to have the answers right at our fingertips - it gives us a sense of power and control that we feel entitled to (or at least entitled to wholeheartedly seek) as bearers of a divine or quasi-divine imprint. Mostly though, it boils down to one thing in the end: impatience. And funnily enough, this itself is precisely what betrays just how pitifully limited we really are - no matter how hard or instinctively we try to pretend otherwise.
For it is only the unfathomable scope of eternity - the exclusive domain of God Himself which He has imparted to us in a relative and contingent manner - that can finally and ultimately disclose the full breadth and depth of Knowledge. Until that endpoint both in the history of the universe and also individually in our own lives, what we know must remain a mere minuscule shadow of what we are eventually meant to know.
This is why it is so essential in this brief earthly life to simply store what knowledge we gain from partaking of the Love that is the Most Blessed Trinity within our hearts - as the Virgin Mary so astutely did in her earthly pilgrimage with her Son. Rather than show it off or trumpet it before the world to demonstrate our own importance, it should be quietly employed to serve our neighbor and humanity at large without being uncovered to them - or even, to be honest, to ourselves (that is, once we've stored them away in the recesses of our soul, provided we attain the grace to do so even if it takes a while).
After all, for us creatures, it is revealed love that is the source of true knowledge, not the other way around. Only for God Himself are Love and Knowledge in perfect unity - for only He is God. This infinite Love that is the triune Godhead is an inexhaustible fount of treasures that we must always behold with such an awe that flushes away what little wisdom we do have of our own accord (even God-given as it may be) as an ocean wave does a few specks of sand; it is only in this genuine apprehension of God as being God alone - with no rival even worth giving a fleeting thought - that we become authentic bearers of His all-knowing image. For the creature, to know the Creator as the Creator indeed is the only final sum of all goodness, beauty, and truth.
And apart from rendering this service to our fellow man - pointing them not to the knowledge we have gained but rather to the Source of it, so that they can discover it for themselves in their own unique way - what else is there to do on this earth?
Holy Mary, Mother of God - you who alone among mortals were found worthy to receive the Divine Wisdom and Essence in its pure fullness, thus making you the bearer of Wisdom Himself - pray for us sinners, now and at the our of our death, that we may like yourself subject our indescribably minute knowledge of the Trinity to the Love that is the Trinity.
My particular demon seems to be named "claptrap", and the two definitions that Dictionary.com provides are as follows:
The Google dictionary is far more blunt:1.pretentious but insincere or empty language:His speeches seem erudite but analysis reveals them to be mere claptrap.2.any artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.
absurd or nonsensical talk or ideas.Indeed, "nonsense" or "bunk" are common synonyms.
So, what to make of these in my own case?
Well, upon analysis it would appear that the two-point definition from Dictionary.com hits the mark - if both are taken together. My language tends to be pretentious but insincere or empty because it's typically merely an artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.
It is precisely because I care so much about looking good in front of others - i.e. admired for my superior knowledge and intellect - that even my accurate (or at least mostly accurate) statements carry little if any real substance.
In the first place, I tend to overly concern myself with topics - like nuclear superpower politics - which generate a good buzz and commotion, yet which ultimately matter little to the everyday life of your average Joe or Jane.
And when I do so, both the topic itself and the way I present it is for the express purpose of making myself seem to be obviously so much on top of matters which, even were it true that I were indeed on top of them (i.e. their outcome), wouldn't really be relevant in most cases anyway, either to my own life or to my audience's. The bottom line being that I puff up things for the sake of appearing important to have a grasp of them - and further beyond that puff up my grasp of them as well.
The only antidote to this is to stick to the time-honored adage: "Knowledge puffs up; love builds."
The world has always preferred knowledge to love - that is, God's unconditional love or agape - because the former is a lot flashier and showier about purporting to have the answers to the most vexing questions of human existence. On an individual level, we as creatures in God's all-knowing image are also naturally wired to have the answers right at our fingertips - it gives us a sense of power and control that we feel entitled to (or at least entitled to wholeheartedly seek) as bearers of a divine or quasi-divine imprint. Mostly though, it boils down to one thing in the end: impatience. And funnily enough, this itself is precisely what betrays just how pitifully limited we really are - no matter how hard or instinctively we try to pretend otherwise.
For it is only the unfathomable scope of eternity - the exclusive domain of God Himself which He has imparted to us in a relative and contingent manner - that can finally and ultimately disclose the full breadth and depth of Knowledge. Until that endpoint both in the history of the universe and also individually in our own lives, what we know must remain a mere minuscule shadow of what we are eventually meant to know.
This is why it is so essential in this brief earthly life to simply store what knowledge we gain from partaking of the Love that is the Most Blessed Trinity within our hearts - as the Virgin Mary so astutely did in her earthly pilgrimage with her Son. Rather than show it off or trumpet it before the world to demonstrate our own importance, it should be quietly employed to serve our neighbor and humanity at large without being uncovered to them - or even, to be honest, to ourselves (that is, once we've stored them away in the recesses of our soul, provided we attain the grace to do so even if it takes a while).
After all, for us creatures, it is revealed love that is the source of true knowledge, not the other way around. Only for God Himself are Love and Knowledge in perfect unity - for only He is God. This infinite Love that is the triune Godhead is an inexhaustible fount of treasures that we must always behold with such an awe that flushes away what little wisdom we do have of our own accord (even God-given as it may be) as an ocean wave does a few specks of sand; it is only in this genuine apprehension of God as being God alone - with no rival even worth giving a fleeting thought - that we become authentic bearers of His all-knowing image. For the creature, to know the Creator as the Creator indeed is the only final sum of all goodness, beauty, and truth.
And apart from rendering this service to our fellow man - pointing them not to the knowledge we have gained but rather to the Source of it, so that they can discover it for themselves in their own unique way - what else is there to do on this earth?
Holy Mary, Mother of God - you who alone among mortals were found worthy to receive the Divine Wisdom and Essence in its pure fullness, thus making you the bearer of Wisdom Himself - pray for us sinners, now and at the our of our death, that we may like yourself subject our indescribably minute knowledge of the Trinity to the Love that is the Trinity.
Friday, August 4, 2017
What falling for a drug addict was like
Back to blogging for the first time since early this year, having just witnessed the half-anniversary mark of the Trump presidency and also undergoing a major personal crisis of faith, it is time to turn to my deep Eastern roots for a security and stability that is no longer available to the citizens of the West who continue to live by Western values.
I fell in love with a beautiful Mexican-Salvadorean girl, Kasandra Martinez, back in June and July. She was very much an incarnation of everything that's both seductively attractive yet ultimately completely self-destructive about the so-called "free world", i.e. the Western Hemisphere.
Fashioning herself as a "free spirit", this 24-year-old marijuana addict was in fact a total slave to her own vanity - a vanity so huge that it blinded her to even realizing its existence. In the short time I got to know this very troubled Latina - a confused bisexual on top of being a substance junkie (not just pot but also smoke, drink, and other drugs) - I saw the utterly horrible nature of addiction of any kind: the addict herself would never even admit it was a problem.
And that's the state of Western, led by American, culture nowadays: we are nothing less than a whole society of junkies - a race of stupefied idiots whose only priority in life is to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. We're so absolutely incapable of dealing with the rough storm that is life that we'd rather withdraw into a delusion of our own making that ends up cutting our bonds with the very reality of the world itself - even as it convinces us that we're making the moral and correct choice both for ourselves and for those around us.
So that's Kasandra for you, in a nutshell: a tragic beauty, fooled ultimately by nothing other than her own self-inflated ego and complete self-centeredness that, as I mentioned, is so absolute that she couldn't possibly even see it.
Now of course, because I had fallen in love with her, it was personally very difficult for me to overcome the sense of guilt that I'd passed such severe judgment on her right to her face: it was nothing less than a verbal spanking that parents and teachers traditionally have the obligation to impose on their unruly children (though sometimes rightly accompanied with the physical one as well), only tainted by my own fleshly desire for the girl. And true, behind every addict is a deep suffering and pain - quite possibly even long-buried traumas - that renders any thought of life without the object(s) of addiction literally unbearable; in this I have regretted not conveying to Kasandra a deeper understanding of the roots of her destructive behavior and why it's so hard for her to stop.
Yet in the end, for every single one of us, we are what we are - "how" we got to be what we are is of little practical relevance in terms of actually changing what we are into something better, both for ourselves and those we love.
I may have suffered greatly at the hands of a neurotic and eventually schizophrenic mother who basically left home for the madhouse when I was 8, and this may have been the origin of my 14-year addiction to masturbation; but when the time came to own that particular grave habitual sin and cut with its destructive effects on my real life (especially how it reduced women and girls to sexual objects to be manipulated for me), that could never have been in the least an excuse to go somewhat easier or slower on myself.
I still love Kasandra, in fact. Perhaps I saw much of myself in her, notwithstanding the big age gap (12 years older); there was something more than just the physical attraction, but in the spiritual dimension I sensed a special kindred independence of character bordering on eccentric arrogance that I've grudgingly come to acknowledge is my personal hallmark, and a longing there in her for discovering what is true amidst a life and a world of such confusion. She wouldn't have been responsive to the point of being so open and vulnerable with me about her problems if she hadn't herself sensed I could be of some genuine help in her life - and no matter how much an addict might act or say otherwise, deep down they simply can't ultimately deny that their addiction is a source of tremendous suffering that they'd rather do away with. It's just that the pain of deliberately denying oneself one's longstanding source of consolation - the only coping mechanism against going crazy outright - is just too much at first.
So Kasandra, if you're out there somewhere, I'll say again unequivocally that I love you; more deeply and purely now than ever. You will probably be in my prayers for a good while; if only my prayers and penances could actually help it, you'll eventually be clean no matter how long and tortuous a process that is. That is the hope of my life, if even a secret and hidden one. In your healing and renewal as a woman bearing the image of God in its full truth and beauty, I hope and long for the broader restoration of an entire world - the West - in the opening decades of this third millennium.
I fell in love with a beautiful Mexican-Salvadorean girl, Kasandra Martinez, back in June and July. She was very much an incarnation of everything that's both seductively attractive yet ultimately completely self-destructive about the so-called "free world", i.e. the Western Hemisphere.
Fashioning herself as a "free spirit", this 24-year-old marijuana addict was in fact a total slave to her own vanity - a vanity so huge that it blinded her to even realizing its existence. In the short time I got to know this very troubled Latina - a confused bisexual on top of being a substance junkie (not just pot but also smoke, drink, and other drugs) - I saw the utterly horrible nature of addiction of any kind: the addict herself would never even admit it was a problem.
And that's the state of Western, led by American, culture nowadays: we are nothing less than a whole society of junkies - a race of stupefied idiots whose only priority in life is to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. We're so absolutely incapable of dealing with the rough storm that is life that we'd rather withdraw into a delusion of our own making that ends up cutting our bonds with the very reality of the world itself - even as it convinces us that we're making the moral and correct choice both for ourselves and for those around us.
So that's Kasandra for you, in a nutshell: a tragic beauty, fooled ultimately by nothing other than her own self-inflated ego and complete self-centeredness that, as I mentioned, is so absolute that she couldn't possibly even see it.
Now of course, because I had fallen in love with her, it was personally very difficult for me to overcome the sense of guilt that I'd passed such severe judgment on her right to her face: it was nothing less than a verbal spanking that parents and teachers traditionally have the obligation to impose on their unruly children (though sometimes rightly accompanied with the physical one as well), only tainted by my own fleshly desire for the girl. And true, behind every addict is a deep suffering and pain - quite possibly even long-buried traumas - that renders any thought of life without the object(s) of addiction literally unbearable; in this I have regretted not conveying to Kasandra a deeper understanding of the roots of her destructive behavior and why it's so hard for her to stop.
Yet in the end, for every single one of us, we are what we are - "how" we got to be what we are is of little practical relevance in terms of actually changing what we are into something better, both for ourselves and those we love.
I may have suffered greatly at the hands of a neurotic and eventually schizophrenic mother who basically left home for the madhouse when I was 8, and this may have been the origin of my 14-year addiction to masturbation; but when the time came to own that particular grave habitual sin and cut with its destructive effects on my real life (especially how it reduced women and girls to sexual objects to be manipulated for me), that could never have been in the least an excuse to go somewhat easier or slower on myself.
I still love Kasandra, in fact. Perhaps I saw much of myself in her, notwithstanding the big age gap (12 years older); there was something more than just the physical attraction, but in the spiritual dimension I sensed a special kindred independence of character bordering on eccentric arrogance that I've grudgingly come to acknowledge is my personal hallmark, and a longing there in her for discovering what is true amidst a life and a world of such confusion. She wouldn't have been responsive to the point of being so open and vulnerable with me about her problems if she hadn't herself sensed I could be of some genuine help in her life - and no matter how much an addict might act or say otherwise, deep down they simply can't ultimately deny that their addiction is a source of tremendous suffering that they'd rather do away with. It's just that the pain of deliberately denying oneself one's longstanding source of consolation - the only coping mechanism against going crazy outright - is just too much at first.
So Kasandra, if you're out there somewhere, I'll say again unequivocally that I love you; more deeply and purely now than ever. You will probably be in my prayers for a good while; if only my prayers and penances could actually help it, you'll eventually be clean no matter how long and tortuous a process that is. That is the hope of my life, if even a secret and hidden one. In your healing and renewal as a woman bearing the image of God in its full truth and beauty, I hope and long for the broader restoration of an entire world - the West - in the opening decades of this third millennium.
Friday, December 30, 2016
2016's parting lesson: Elites aren't the problem - elitism is
I argued when 2016 began that this would be the year that democracy either triumphs or collapses. Now as 2016 draws to a close, it's time to hazard an initial verdict: democracy has indeed triumphed, but in such a way that betrays both its promise and its peril as opposing faces of the same coin.
We have witnessed over the course of this past year just how difficult the democratic experiment of governance really is, as the fundamental reason for this inherent difficulty has finally been laid shockingly bare: human beings can have very strong differences with each other.
We now live in an openly acknowledged "post-truth" world, where the very facts of life themselves are no longer universally agreed upon. Some would argue that this situation is hardly new: it's always been the case that opposing values, worldviews, and belief systems tend to produce contrasting understandings of particular events or circumstances which impact the common human family. What 2016 has demonstrated, however, is that objectively observed or reported facts are so superseded by the subjective interpretations that establish their context for any particular individual in question, that even the most irrefutable factual contradictions of one's preferred narrative can become so irrelevant as to be practically no better than blatant falsehoods.
In this toxic environment of self-polarization and self-isolation into echo chambers or "safe spaces", it's easy to see why one side is winning and the other is losing - badly. The global right-wing populist insurgency is toppling the international liberal establishment because it enjoys a massive asymmetry of intimate knowledge and understanding: it knows the ways and goals of the Establishment far more than the Establishment reciprocally knows and understands the ways and goals of the surging rebellion against it - even at this relatively mature stage of the gathering coup.
Both ends of the political spectrum live in massive bubbles, but it's now obvious whose bubble has been bigger and more artificially inflated for a longer time - because its bursting has been so dramatically and traumatically disconcerting for those who've sheltered in it so habitually that they didn't even recognize it.
As the year ticks down, the revolt of 2016 can now be seen as having been an uprising not so much against "the elites" as a socioeconomic class, but as one of rejection and repudiation of elitism as a philosophical lens for understanding societal reality.
The respective euphoria and angst over Donald Trump's election among his supporters and opponents says it all: while the latter are appalled that an individual with no conventional or "mainstream" qualifications for the post he ran for somehow managed to win it, the former are cheering precisely this overthrow of a perceived rigid caste of merit.
Those that have since decried Trump's betrayal of his common-man campaign through his appointment of a veritable clique of plutocrats to run his incoming administration miss the point: Trump loyalists never really had much beef with the wealthy and well-connected for being wealthy and well-connected; their hostility was always reserved instead for the perceived alien values and interests that have come to be associated with those privileges - whether real or imagined.
As a whole, both progressives and the cosmopolitan "mainstream" still haven't fully grasped the deep socio-cultural character of Trumpism, with the economic factor mostly a secondary and subsidiary element: the "elites" that this movement purports to throw out aren't measured by the size of their pocketbooks, but by the size of their intellectual and ideological egos. Billionaire Exxon-Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson is thus a "man of the people" as a provider of well-paying blue-collar jobs to ordinary working folk; yet (probable) millionaire bleeding-heart pundit David Remnick of The New Yorker is a haughty, condescending snob who's completely out of touch with "real Americans", who actually still exert their bodies for a living.
That's not to say that socioeconomic redistributionism of some sort isn't the core of Trump's mission - providing measurable criteria that he'll be judged by over his coming four-year term. But the way that this crazy 2016 has turned out to be - with conservative and liberal "experts" alike having their proverbial ivory tower windows smashed and eggs tossed in their faces - the only survivable way forward for anyone still taking their cues from a badly discredited, bi-coastal globalist, socio-cultural elite is to start looking for the forest beyond the trees.
Elites aren't the problem - elitism is. Rather than fixate on individual figures and their statements or actions, one must look to the ideas and ideologies driving them - and quite possibly find that precisely because they're actually quite open and even a tad progressive, after all, the means to achieve such ends could look anything but conventionally enlightened.
In this toxic environment of self-polarization and self-isolation into echo chambers or "safe spaces", it's easy to see why one side is winning and the other is losing - badly. The global right-wing populist insurgency is toppling the international liberal establishment because it enjoys a massive asymmetry of intimate knowledge and understanding: it knows the ways and goals of the Establishment far more than the Establishment reciprocally knows and understands the ways and goals of the surging rebellion against it - even at this relatively mature stage of the gathering coup.
Both ends of the political spectrum live in massive bubbles, but it's now obvious whose bubble has been bigger and more artificially inflated for a longer time - because its bursting has been so dramatically and traumatically disconcerting for those who've sheltered in it so habitually that they didn't even recognize it.
As the year ticks down, the revolt of 2016 can now be seen as having been an uprising not so much against "the elites" as a socioeconomic class, but as one of rejection and repudiation of elitism as a philosophical lens for understanding societal reality.
The respective euphoria and angst over Donald Trump's election among his supporters and opponents says it all: while the latter are appalled that an individual with no conventional or "mainstream" qualifications for the post he ran for somehow managed to win it, the former are cheering precisely this overthrow of a perceived rigid caste of merit.
Those that have since decried Trump's betrayal of his common-man campaign through his appointment of a veritable clique of plutocrats to run his incoming administration miss the point: Trump loyalists never really had much beef with the wealthy and well-connected for being wealthy and well-connected; their hostility was always reserved instead for the perceived alien values and interests that have come to be associated with those privileges - whether real or imagined.
As a whole, both progressives and the cosmopolitan "mainstream" still haven't fully grasped the deep socio-cultural character of Trumpism, with the economic factor mostly a secondary and subsidiary element: the "elites" that this movement purports to throw out aren't measured by the size of their pocketbooks, but by the size of their intellectual and ideological egos. Billionaire Exxon-Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson is thus a "man of the people" as a provider of well-paying blue-collar jobs to ordinary working folk; yet (probable) millionaire bleeding-heart pundit David Remnick of The New Yorker is a haughty, condescending snob who's completely out of touch with "real Americans", who actually still exert their bodies for a living.
That's not to say that socioeconomic redistributionism of some sort isn't the core of Trump's mission - providing measurable criteria that he'll be judged by over his coming four-year term. But the way that this crazy 2016 has turned out to be - with conservative and liberal "experts" alike having their proverbial ivory tower windows smashed and eggs tossed in their faces - the only survivable way forward for anyone still taking their cues from a badly discredited, bi-coastal globalist, socio-cultural elite is to start looking for the forest beyond the trees.
Elites aren't the problem - elitism is. Rather than fixate on individual figures and their statements or actions, one must look to the ideas and ideologies driving them - and quite possibly find that precisely because they're actually quite open and even a tad progressive, after all, the means to achieve such ends could look anything but conventionally enlightened.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Obama seals positive legacy embracing Trump's rise: Donald take note
Yesterday, for the first time ever, Barack Obama formally met face-to-face with the leader of a counterinsurgency that has placed his legacy squarely in its cross-hairs for much of its stunning ascension to the doorstep of power.
The way the nation's first black president treated the arch-peddler of the not-so-subtly racist "birther" conspiracy theory against him is far more indicative of the likely trajectory of the monumental White House transition between now and January 20 than whatever the partisan punditry of either side has had to say in their celebratory or grieving commentary since the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Above all, it was an expression of a mature humility which goes a long way to explaining Mr. Obama's persistently high approval ratings - something which a popularity-conscious Donald Trump was sure to take note of.
Trump was impressed enough by Obama's affable professionalism to even call him "a very good man" - not quite what you'd expect of someone who's spent months and months excoriating the president as essentially the worst America's ever had (though the two polar opposite assessments aren't necessarily mutually exclusive).
Beneath all the bluff and bluster, in fact, there's good reason for Obama to believe that the better aspects of his eight-year administration won't be reversed - not so much because it'd be too difficult even for a united GOP government to do so, but because Trump of all people has no desire to swim against the tide of history.
Obama has now accepted - if merely by necessity - that his opposition to Trump and Trumpism on behalf of Hillary was, in his own words, "on the wrong side of history." Or better yet, that history itself hasn't "ended" - i.e. its final course hasn't been irrevocably fixed for one last time - as it supposedly did back in 1989. He's doubtless reassessing both his own legacy and also the broader context of where the world stands as a whole, and it must comfort him to remember that even the unstoppable long-term currents guiding the human community's common destiny don't obviate any twist or turn along the way: such detours are simply part of the journey, because they expose and thereby release underappreciated tensions or contradictions that block the way to eventual Nirvana.
His ultimate decision to stay out of the Syrian civil war was a reflection of this fundamental judgment. On this particular issue, which is widely branded as his single greatest foreign policy failure, it's interesting to note that his dovish stance actually falls short of Trump's - even if you cynically note that the latter's perception of the whole issue is colored by an apparent infatuation with Vladimir Putin.
As he takes the reins of power, The Donald may yet find that a number of Obama's "failures" were actually primarily failures of messaging and spin (ironic for an administration that has been lambasted by its opponents as running a propaganda mill in cahoots with the liberal mainstream media). In the end, however much better (or worse) he actually fares than his predecessor in tackling the republic's most vexing problems - not to mention the most pressing crises in the world at large - Trump can at least take one cue from the community organizer whose social re-engineering agenda he's ambitiously attempting to replace with a massive reconstruction project: even if you don't get your way, you can still be a gracious loser without having to overcompensate with even bigger "wins", if even primarily for your image and your own ego. Potentially very valuable insight for someone who's gaudily steamrolled over obstacles his whole life, seizing even the most mind-blowing setbacks as occasions for bragging.
The way the nation's first black president treated the arch-peddler of the not-so-subtly racist "birther" conspiracy theory against him is far more indicative of the likely trajectory of the monumental White House transition between now and January 20 than whatever the partisan punditry of either side has had to say in their celebratory or grieving commentary since the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Above all, it was an expression of a mature humility which goes a long way to explaining Mr. Obama's persistently high approval ratings - something which a popularity-conscious Donald Trump was sure to take note of.
Trump was impressed enough by Obama's affable professionalism to even call him "a very good man" - not quite what you'd expect of someone who's spent months and months excoriating the president as essentially the worst America's ever had (though the two polar opposite assessments aren't necessarily mutually exclusive).
Beneath all the bluff and bluster, in fact, there's good reason for Obama to believe that the better aspects of his eight-year administration won't be reversed - not so much because it'd be too difficult even for a united GOP government to do so, but because Trump of all people has no desire to swim against the tide of history.
Obama has now accepted - if merely by necessity - that his opposition to Trump and Trumpism on behalf of Hillary was, in his own words, "on the wrong side of history." Or better yet, that history itself hasn't "ended" - i.e. its final course hasn't been irrevocably fixed for one last time - as it supposedly did back in 1989. He's doubtless reassessing both his own legacy and also the broader context of where the world stands as a whole, and it must comfort him to remember that even the unstoppable long-term currents guiding the human community's common destiny don't obviate any twist or turn along the way: such detours are simply part of the journey, because they expose and thereby release underappreciated tensions or contradictions that block the way to eventual Nirvana.
His ultimate decision to stay out of the Syrian civil war was a reflection of this fundamental judgment. On this particular issue, which is widely branded as his single greatest foreign policy failure, it's interesting to note that his dovish stance actually falls short of Trump's - even if you cynically note that the latter's perception of the whole issue is colored by an apparent infatuation with Vladimir Putin.
As he takes the reins of power, The Donald may yet find that a number of Obama's "failures" were actually primarily failures of messaging and spin (ironic for an administration that has been lambasted by its opponents as running a propaganda mill in cahoots with the liberal mainstream media). In the end, however much better (or worse) he actually fares than his predecessor in tackling the republic's most vexing problems - not to mention the most pressing crises in the world at large - Trump can at least take one cue from the community organizer whose social re-engineering agenda he's ambitiously attempting to replace with a massive reconstruction project: even if you don't get your way, you can still be a gracious loser without having to overcompensate with even bigger "wins", if even primarily for your image and your own ego. Potentially very valuable insight for someone who's gaudily steamrolled over obstacles his whole life, seizing even the most mind-blowing setbacks as occasions for bragging.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
It's really so simple: Obama failed to deliver, period
In its most unadulterated and undiluted essence, the Trump tidal wave was fundamentally an uprising against the prevailing ideological and policy hegemony of the post-Cold War era. And you sure didn't have to be a Republican or conservative (let alone a Trump supporter) to notice that something was afoot.
Let's just focus on Barack Obama - the hope and change candidate of eight years ago who has long since become a proxy for "the way things have become" with "the establishment" - as a bellwether for that establishment's continuity and stability, as against the swelling anti-establishment revolt which culminated in last night's historic upset.
It didn't matter, in the end, that the outgoing first black president still enjoyed 50-plus approval ratings for virtually the entire homestretch of the campaign; of far more consequence was the fact - undeniable in hindsight - that his whole agenda had already been effectively frozen dead in its tracks by the onset of the Trump campaign in mid-2015. He downplayed this by trying to keep such fiascos as Syria out of the news as much as possible, and it saved his job polls, but apparently ultimately at the cost of cementing a widespread perception among those voters looking for decisive leadership from whichever party or candidate that he'd simply checked out of a presidency he just couldn't handle anymore.
Consider that just since Trump launched his raucous run for the White House last June 16 by essentially labeling Mexicans rapists and gang-bangers, Obama has suffered the following setbacks:
1. His signature amnesty for undocumented immigrants was blocked by an uncompliant court
2. His late push for the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal was stalled by a gridlocked Congress
3. His pick for Antonin Scalia's replacement as Supreme Court Justice - a moderate specifically tailored to suit enough Republican Senators - was unceremoniously stonewalled
4. His policy of replacing brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a transitional authority that would end that country's catastrophic five-year civil war - and usher in a liberal democracy that would buffer it against ISIS and Al Qaeda - has been systematically eviscerated by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
5. His signature domestic achievement - the Affordable Care Act - has fallen so far short of its original promises that his administration has quite conspicuously shelved the very term "Obamacare" from its public discourse
There are other failures and reverses Obama has suffered beside these, and some date back well before Trump bombastically stole the whole show less than 18 months ago. But in the world of politics, such a string of defeats finally comes back to bite you at the end of the day - no matter how much you manage the surface perception that you're still effective as a popularly mandated leader.
Politics is ultimately not about popularity - it's about the actual exercise and execution of power. Obama has failed to deliver, period. Long before Trump blew away the extension of Obama's legacy, the brash reality TV trash-talker had already emasculated the Oval Office - by simply capitalizing on the incumbent's existing longstanding weaknesses and inflexibilities.
What we have now is regime change - in Washington, of all places. But in fact Obama had lost much of the country long before November 8, 2016 - he'd already been a rump like Assad in Syria (in the American context of course) for a while.
If you blame it on his enemies, you miss the whole point: a US president, no less than other leaders and statesmen the world over, is primarily evaluated on the actual efficacy of his rule; on that, he's underwhelmed and so has finally been overwhelmed by his antithesis.
Let's just focus on Barack Obama - the hope and change candidate of eight years ago who has long since become a proxy for "the way things have become" with "the establishment" - as a bellwether for that establishment's continuity and stability, as against the swelling anti-establishment revolt which culminated in last night's historic upset.
It didn't matter, in the end, that the outgoing first black president still enjoyed 50-plus approval ratings for virtually the entire homestretch of the campaign; of far more consequence was the fact - undeniable in hindsight - that his whole agenda had already been effectively frozen dead in its tracks by the onset of the Trump campaign in mid-2015. He downplayed this by trying to keep such fiascos as Syria out of the news as much as possible, and it saved his job polls, but apparently ultimately at the cost of cementing a widespread perception among those voters looking for decisive leadership from whichever party or candidate that he'd simply checked out of a presidency he just couldn't handle anymore.
Consider that just since Trump launched his raucous run for the White House last June 16 by essentially labeling Mexicans rapists and gang-bangers, Obama has suffered the following setbacks:
1. His signature amnesty for undocumented immigrants was blocked by an uncompliant court
2. His late push for the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal was stalled by a gridlocked Congress
3. His pick for Antonin Scalia's replacement as Supreme Court Justice - a moderate specifically tailored to suit enough Republican Senators - was unceremoniously stonewalled
4. His policy of replacing brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a transitional authority that would end that country's catastrophic five-year civil war - and usher in a liberal democracy that would buffer it against ISIS and Al Qaeda - has been systematically eviscerated by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
5. His signature domestic achievement - the Affordable Care Act - has fallen so far short of its original promises that his administration has quite conspicuously shelved the very term "Obamacare" from its public discourse
There are other failures and reverses Obama has suffered beside these, and some date back well before Trump bombastically stole the whole show less than 18 months ago. But in the world of politics, such a string of defeats finally comes back to bite you at the end of the day - no matter how much you manage the surface perception that you're still effective as a popularly mandated leader.
Politics is ultimately not about popularity - it's about the actual exercise and execution of power. Obama has failed to deliver, period. Long before Trump blew away the extension of Obama's legacy, the brash reality TV trash-talker had already emasculated the Oval Office - by simply capitalizing on the incumbent's existing longstanding weaknesses and inflexibilities.
What we have now is regime change - in Washington, of all places. But in fact Obama had lost much of the country long before November 8, 2016 - he'd already been a rump like Assad in Syria (in the American context of course) for a while.
If you blame it on his enemies, you miss the whole point: a US president, no less than other leaders and statesmen the world over, is primarily evaluated on the actual efficacy of his rule; on that, he's underwhelmed and so has finally been overwhelmed by his antithesis.
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Downed by a big Weiner? If this is politics 2016, who needs reality TV?
Even the most outlandish political satire would have a tough time rivaling the surreal developments now unfolding in the final week of the presidential race.
Who could have thought that the long-running Anthony Weiner freak show would not only keep going on and on with one lurid exposé after another for months and years on end, but that it would finally have actual fallout in the realm of power and influence?
And to think that this is all because of a 15-year-old girl he allegedly sexted last winter, knowing it was a stomp on legal thin ice? If this is American politics in 2016, who still needs reality TV?
You gotta feel for Hillary and her now disgraced aide, Weiner's ex Huma Abedin: perhaps their hubbies' private-part escapades have finally caught up with them.
Granted, there's almost certainly still no evidence of malicious wrongdoing here, and criminal prosecution remains a stretch. But the negligence of what now looks to be a deliberate habit of intentionally forwarding sensitive emails to a political ally's unsecured account reeks to high heaven. If this were anyone else, you're talking a ban from any significant public service position for a probationary period plausibly at least five years - never mind the White House and nuclear football come January 20.
So has Hillary been shot by a big fat Weiner, so close to her lifelong prize? Having survived Bill's shenanigans with women for so long, how brutal a twist of fate it would be to suffer such a late-minute meltdown on account of a far more appropriately named philanderer who just so happened to be far too close to you to not spray your own name with his juicy dissipations.
Who could have thought that the long-running Anthony Weiner freak show would not only keep going on and on with one lurid exposé after another for months and years on end, but that it would finally have actual fallout in the realm of power and influence?
And to think that this is all because of a 15-year-old girl he allegedly sexted last winter, knowing it was a stomp on legal thin ice? If this is American politics in 2016, who still needs reality TV?
You gotta feel for Hillary and her now disgraced aide, Weiner's ex Huma Abedin: perhaps their hubbies' private-part escapades have finally caught up with them.
Granted, there's almost certainly still no evidence of malicious wrongdoing here, and criminal prosecution remains a stretch. But the negligence of what now looks to be a deliberate habit of intentionally forwarding sensitive emails to a political ally's unsecured account reeks to high heaven. If this were anyone else, you're talking a ban from any significant public service position for a probationary period plausibly at least five years - never mind the White House and nuclear football come January 20.
So has Hillary been shot by a big fat Weiner, so close to her lifelong prize? Having survived Bill's shenanigans with women for so long, how brutal a twist of fate it would be to suffer such a late-minute meltdown on account of a far more appropriately named philanderer who just so happened to be far too close to you to not spray your own name with his juicy dissipations.
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