BAILOUTS IN THE FOG
by John Cooper
cosmicflyswatter.com
January 2, 2009
It is early on January 2, 2009. I am a little giddy over the USC Trojan’s impressive win yesterday in the Rose Bowl. I love the Trojans. But the dust has settled and it is a new year. It is time for me to get back to business, the business of my personal life and the pursuit of my hopes and dreams and my desire for the changes the entire world needs to make.
2008 was truly a year of the Cosmic Fly Swatter. All the financial fortresses that had been built and relied upon were busted up on their foundations this last year giving us all pause to reassess just what holds anything together. For me, all the explanations for the meltdown of last year are terribly inadequate.
Perhaps it is because I am not a player in the movements of capital, having none myself, and perhaps it is also because I, like most regular folks, am just a spectator on a bus driven by the aggressive movers and shakers of this world; but I am a participant like everyone else. I do have a point of view, a frame of reference uniquely the result of my Lens Pole’s structure. I hold a position in time/space that no other human has. It is a view shaped by my selection and the ordering of those filters that only my life experience could provide.
I have read and heard explanation after explanation focusing on the avarice and corruption of individuals and organizations. I have listened to the pundits and great thinkers, all specialists in their fields, offering to pinpoint the causes of all the collapses we have suffered. They will continue to speak out certain that they are right. And I am certain that from their point of view they are. But no matter how right anyone of them truly is, the best they can possibly be is only partially correct. They too hold only a relative position in time/space. This leaves those of us who are rightfully skeptical in small sinking boats drifting in a fog with only a soup can to bail the water out.
It is pretty hard to listen to anyone’s rhetoric today and take any comfort. All the yakking of politicians and business leaders right now leaves me wanting to spend my Sunday afternoon sharing a beer and a cigar with a crooked used car salesman. At least I would know where I was. There wouldn’t be any fog to complicate my own bailout.
If you are a Democrat, hope and change is your clarion call. But I am not a Democrat and I was a Republican only once when Ronald Reagan took office. I didn’t vote for President-Elect Obama. I had too much fear that he could never escape the radical leftist garden from which he sprang. To his credit he has, so far as I can tell not having spent a day in office, proved me wrong. He has assembled a cabinet, though clearly left, populated with mostly experienced and centrist sensitive individuals. America has transitioned power smoothly and intelligently and we have put the ancient wrong of slavery to rest for good. We are still a very lucky people. We are truly blessed. God bless us all and God bless President-Elect Obama.
But I will still have to figure out how to get this water out of my boat. The soup can has a hole in it, and the fog hasn’t lifted. I think I am going to need the help of all other Americans to get out of this fog. It is a fog that is lingering for reasons of which everyone will take their pick. I cannot, we cannot see clearly if we do not agree upon those things about which we all can be certain. Since most of us have little power to affect any change for good in the power structures that wash us about, perhaps the only logical choice for us is to resolve in ourselves as individuals to change for the better. Where to start?
Since we live in an age where everything is allowed and valid and spread at the speed of light we confuse the speed or momentum of all things bombarding our consciousness by misinterpreting that speed as the light itself. It is speed masquerading as light. There is very little to hold onto coming through our televisions and the Internet, and what does make it to your desktop will not help in lifting the icy fog of uncertainty that is wafting around most of us.
Agreement in principle and principles is the only common ground for real improvement in any sense. This is just common sense. If we all agree that we are free to disagree we reaffirm our way of life but only at a base level. There are overriding precepts that must be ascended to if we hope to ascend out of the mire our organizations have dragged us into. This is true no matter how unfashionable it is to say it. But what are the higher goods that we can agree upon? The ones that got us founded as a nation are no longer valid for half the country. In fact they are blamed for everything that psychology can cook up. Then they are raked over the coals by cynical writers and fashioned into vague dramas for primetime viewing. They are the target of university professors who have taken the small truth of relativism and manufactured it into a form of universal snake oil.
It is a shame that certain things that have proved to be certain over thousands of years are so unfashionable now. There are things that can provide refuge at least for the soul. There are things that are fortresses inside which the rising and dashing seas provide only the distant sounds of turmoil. I believe that if enough of us would climb the fortress towers we might just dissolve this fog we are in altogether. What are these fortress towers? How does anyone get in? These refuges are not for sale. You can’t even merit your way in. And even if you had enough money to buy Ticketmaster, the seats are not for sale.
The clear solution to our problems lies in the clarity of our philosophy. This is a bit difficult today since all philosophies have been given equal status in eyes of those who control the dissemination of media. So as not to offend, the purveyors of popular culture have adopted a multiculturalism of philosophy. This may seem to be a good thing since their intent is to promote tolerance, but they have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. There are certain fundamental precepts that are quite requisite to our way of life. To banish them from the marketplace of ideas and from the classrooms is to lead all of us into the vagueness that has produced our recent system collapses.
We are always at risk of being made suckers in a capitalist society, but there should be no reason for us to be made suckers en masse. Our current malaise is in my view the result of two decades of denying certain time-tested precepts and embracing what I call Cultus Cheerleadicus. Positive thinking is a good thing. Tony Robbins will tell you that if you look up and smile you will feel better. He is right; but for how long? Another area of partial truth blown out of proportion to reality is intent. Dr Wayne Dyer was selling intent as the cure all for everything for a while. And though good intentions are perhaps prerequisite to happiness they cannot produce a perfect outcome. There is an old saying that the road to hell is paved with them. The last time I saw Dyer he had abandoned intentions as the prime ingredient in his snake oil sales, and was barefoot in black pajamas hawking the Dao. Reality is pretty big and singling out one aspect of truth as a remedy takes us further from understanding it. We are then more susceptible to Suckerdom.
The Ten Commandments used to be the standard. It worked pretty well in forming the greatest civilization developed by man. But where they came from is a source of great irritation to any card-carrying relativist. Besides this there is the problem of all the “other stuff” that comes along with accepting them as useful. But make no mistake, if we cannot agree on these ten things we have little chance to agree on anything and even a lesser chance to protect ourselves from the cheap snake oil that we all have been drinking for the last few decades.
It is true that some of the ten cause discomfort to many; the first three refer to man’s proper respect for God himself. This is a problem for atheists and people who want to define God as some thing other than the one who spoke to the Jews first. But you cannot tell me that hearing thou shalt not murder, or steal, or tell lies about your neighbor, or sleep with someone else’s spouse is not a useful thing.
If you are anti-religious any argument you can cook up against these warnings sounds pretty hollow. You’d be better off, we’d all be better off by allowing these things to be taught to the young and to be displayed in the halls of justice. Maybe you would feel better if above their display it read; “Some don’t think there is any such thing as God, but if there is, this is what he says.” Would that make you happy? Isn’t it just possible that tomorrow’s potential corporate thief might remember these words at the last moment and restrain himself? The promptings of his own conscience might just get through and uncover the lie that he has been telling himself that “It’s not really stealing.”
A psychologist and I were having a conversation about this and he protested the fourth commandment: to honor your father and your mother. “What if your father was a rapist or a murderer and your mother was a prostitute, what kind of honor could you provide?” he asked. I had to pause to gather my thoughts before I answered.
“If you were to restrain yourself from speaking ill of them, and refuse to use psychology to play victim, and do well in your own life, have you not honored them and God at the same time?”
There is truly nothing bad about following the Ten Commandments unless you are looking for an excuse. There are perhaps many other things with which a person can guide his or her life to navigate the dazzling dangers of the Information Age, but there are none that are more clearly to the point and on point. Wisdom cries out in the street while we play violent and lascivious video games.
We Americans are still a very lucky people, and we are a can-do people. The only way out of the fog surrounding our sinking little boats is to climb back up on the time tested towers of wisdom. All of us then will be more capable of recognizing snake oil from a distance.
Perhaps then the next time some silk-suited jackass hawks you with a
get rich quick,
you can’t lose,
think positive,
get on the bus or get left behind,
everyone’s doing it,
don’t be an old-fashioned ass,
the sky’s the limit,
it’s all relative man,
buy the training CD now for $49.95,
learn the “Secrets,”
it’s a new “investment vehicle,”
real estate never goes down,
come-on...
You will hand him a map of the best parks in town in which to fly a kite.
Even the snake oil salesman whether he is on Wall Street or in Washington will benefit in the long run. We will lift the fog for them also. They may not have as much fun playing with other people’s money, they may have to get an honest job, but we will save our way of life simply by a little common sense restraint.
The Cosmic Fly Swatter is ever hovering. If we clear the air of the philosophical fog we are in, we might see it coming in advance. We might get a jump on bailing ourselves out.