Getting a grip!

Here are some weekend reads that illustrate how seldom reality actually intrudes on our belief systems … our psychology … our mythology. You know — it’s the Disneyland thing; Tink actually WILL fly [down that wire] to the Majik Kingdom!

And I’ll issue a disclaimer — I talk to inanimate objects [trees, flowers, water.] I stand in the face of oncoming tornado’s and “speak to the wind,” I thank food for surrendering itself to my use, and I have been known to channel “others” while being dead-ass asleep, waking up confused and pissed off. I think we’re all made of stardust, that any number of us are ancient and probably originated elsewhere, and that we’ll never know how powerful we actually are until we begin to experiment with the unseen as well as the seen.

So, I’m obviously wonky in my own way and I’ll own that — in fact, I’ll celebrate it. But I won’t foist it on you, or expect you to belly up to my personal belief system. You’re entitled to your own … and so are Tom Cruise, Mitt Romney and Christocrats everywhere. Which doesn’t make any of this less strangely disturbing.

The first article here, by Steve Weber, lays a backdrop to the rest; it articulates the quicksand of fame, and very well — it also suggests that fame, of itself, has become a worrisome addiction. I always stutter and stammer when people tell me of their dreams for fame, most often turning into a cross between Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell, encouraging their creative expression while noting their obvious lacks and warts and thinking [with a cringe] what the public would make of them. Standing on a pedestal, I fear, just makes you a bigger target.

It’s an illusion, fame … it looks like something we want, until we get it. I think Britney is our poster child for all this — she never had “normal,” so she is accustomed to “living out loud,” where every twitch is documented and commented upon … and I can’t help but wonder if she might have gotten actual help with her life if we hadn’t been the witness that weighed in with both grief and delight at her every stumble. At least she didn’t add another layer of delusion to her popularity by touting a religious belief system — unless you count her early, and vapid, commentary that we should leave everything to Dubby, he knows best.

So — in the auspicious energy of a Pluto change this weekend, as the last of the dogmatic issues begin to move toward the back of the bus and the wrestling match that will prove which god is “rightest” comes to a close — here’s a little “reality therapy” in terms of how similar … and how silly*… this all is. Enjoy.

I’ve added a bonus read, as we think about the dragons that drive us, the fantasies that engage us — digby writes about Rick Perlstein’s consummate understanding of the Conservative mind … and offers a look at his new book. As she puts it … “here’s a treat to read on a cold winter’s night.”

Jude

* The 70’s were our “cult” years — we knew ‘em when we saw ‘em, members dancing around at the airport selling whatever wasn’t nailed down. We had a flurry of parents unable to contact missing children who had been “love bombed” into communal situations, with everything from the Moonies to the Children of God to the People’s Temple setting up barriers to their access [and tragically.] We had a series of rescue efforts, and a “deprogrammers” clash with no less an organization than the ACLU. Back then, there was no doubt that Scientology was one of that number; thirty years of “respectability” hasn’t changed its cult status.

Anything that seeks to control its believers to that degree meets the prereq’s … and obviously, just because it isn’t politically correct to discuss cultism these days doesn’t mean that vast portions of Mormonism and Christianity don’t meet that definition, as well.

Toxic Hollywood
Steven Weber, HuffPo
January 24, 2008

Young guy, handsome, rugged, athletic, breaks into movies, wherever he goes people know his name and face. Has genuine talent, got the world on a string, everything an actor could want. A family. A future.

And then he’s dead. Too young. Too soon. Standard story.

From early silent film star Wallace Reid to Heath Ledger, to every lionized athlete, politician, musician, actor, media phenomenon or lottery winner, all have been exposed to potentially lethal doses of a drug which was once available only to entertainers and statesmen but that has now become easily attainable to any and all who crave escape from stultifying anonymity, who would rather flame out quickly than face dull, dusty years in mundane obscurity.

It can be used alone or in a cocktail.

It can make you tipsy or knock you on your ass.

The drug is Fame.

While it is never fully acknowledged as having any ill effects, the hunger for Fame has reached epidemic levels and has replaced art, education, politics, medicine and civil service as an acceptable career objective for today’s youth. Because once under its spell, the pursuit of Fame can become an obsession on the order of chasing the dragon, making one all too willing to sacrifice anything in order to obtain its fleeting and instantly addictive high. More intoxicating than nicotine, cocaine, heroin and alcohol and virtually inseparable from Power (making it the ultimate aphrodisiac by any other name), Fame has been the elusive phantom nudging the vulnerable headlong from common sense into utter insensibility. Fame can warp the perception of the person swept up in the eye of the vortex, and its whirling force impacts even those loitering at its edges. It bends the air and light, a cracked prism through which reality is projected onto our screens and into our lives.

Fame does not occur in the animal kingdom, although the famous often exhibit variations of atavistic animal behavior. The media’s fixation with celebrity reflects a sick cycle of cannibalism; the young, ripe celebrity is flattered and fattened for his or her inevitable downfall and ritual slaughter.

Heath Ledger’s body is wrapped in a black bag, strapped to a gurney and wheeled out under a hailstorm of flashbulbs and a clash of jostling elbows and mourned by the very people who regularly dine on such a meal. Witness the cruelty surrounding the predictable, Hindenbergesque combustion of Anna Nicole. Her life had death written all over it the second she struck a pose and the cameras were aimed at her, waiting for the inevitable.

As each celebrity preens and pouts on red carpets suggesting a regal path to immortality, and each smitten consumer seeks to emulate their hollowed-out heroes, the mad truth is that the public is buying into the illusion and scrapping the reality. Fame is now an end justifying any means necessary. Because if the public is gonna use and the companies pushing the glittering hallucinogens are way too profitable to be in any way responsible, then celebrities should have mandatory labels delineating their nutrition and possible side effects, how they should be handled and what the minimum age should be for their consumption. And before taking on the burden of celebrity themselves, the young, the talented, the handsome, the beautiful and the just plain ambitious should know whether it’s better to burn out than to fade away. ++

Are you Tom Cruise crazy?
Yes, the tiny megastar proves he’s all kinds of nuts in a bizarre video. But how about you?
Mark Morford, SF Gate
Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Here is something you can do.

Set up that nifty little Flip Video camera you got for Christmas just over there next to your couch. Now, plop yourself down in front of it and have a friend sit just off to the side and then both of you slam about nine shots of vodka followed by nine more of extra-strong espresso and then hit the “Record” button as she begins to question you about your deepest beliefs on How the World Really Works, and you answer them employing only tense, cryptic bursts of pseudo-lingo that make sense only to you and the houseplants, all while making sure you suddenly burst out laughing as maniacally as possible at random intervals and never ever blink. Won’t
that be fun?

And then you can compare. You can go back to your computer and re-watch the now-famous Tom Cruise Scientology video currently winging across the planet like a wacky Ebola virus, and contrast it with your swell little video and go: See? See that? No matter how hard I try, no matter how weird I think I am and no matter how heavily my therapist sighs every time I bring up my love of Shania Twain and banana sandwiches and “Battlestar Galactica” collectibles, I am not nearly as insane as Tom Cruise. Life is going to be OK.

Ah yes, the Tom Cruise Scientology indoctrination video. Surely by now you’ve seen this little hunk of pop culture manna? Surely, at least, someone you know has watched the video and has described it to you in amazed, slightly disturbed tones and you’ve maybe responded by shrugging and saying: No no no, it couldn’t be that weird … could it?

It could. It is something to see. It has already enjoyed more than 2 million views so far and Anderson Cooper even filed a swell little CNN report about it and it’s still moving fast, this nine-minute slab of crazy that features this very intense, grinning, bizarre movie star talking in barely comprehensible half-sentences and perky Scientology lingo about “SPs” and “the tech” and “KSW” and “half-acks” and all manner of cool culty jargon that, if you close your eyes and blur your imagination just right, sounds remarkably like a high school speed freak talking up Dungeons & Dragons to his kid brother.

Except this particular clip has apparently been edited by an epileptic teenager. It is scored with the “Mission: Impossible” theme song (to which Cruise doubtlessly owns the rights) and it has laughable zoom-in graphics pulled from somewhere deep in 1994 and it is bookended with some of the most bloviated, hammy voiceover work this side of a “Saturday Night Live” parody. All told, it is, as the universal verdict goes, “unintentionally hilarious.”

Unintentional, because it’s supposed to be serious. It is supposed to make Scientology look intense and cool and badass and righteous and Cruise is clearly meant to appear as some sort of idealized L. Ron Hubbard-drunk demigod, a true hero and visionary (he’s an OT VII, after all, the highest rank you can achieve in his “church” without going off to battle evil warlord Xenu yourself), who has apparently single-handedly brought Scientology to over 1 billion people worldwide and who can lift boulders with his penis and bend spoons with his mind and whip up a delightful marinara in his sleep.

It is, in a way, a seminal piece of film. It finally removes all doubt that one of the wealthiest and most successful celebrities of this generation is, indisputably, many, many fries short of a Happy Meal. It’s as if you crossed Mitt Romney with Mike Huckabee and rolled it in the hot goo of Ted Haggard and packed it all into the body of a junior-weight high school wrestling champ, with exactly the same level of verbal articulation. Which is to say, a log. A very, very intense log.

Perhaps this is the true joy of watching celebrity derailments and breakdowns and cult addictions. We like to think that would never be us. We like to think, “You know, if I was world famous and had a billion dollars and still had pretty good hair and a killer smile and at least used to be the hottest hunk of malehood on the planet, I sure as hell wouldn’t hitch my spiritual cart to the crazy train of a deeply deranged pill-popping sci-fi hack writer who invented a nutball cult religion on a bar bet. Wait, would I?”

Perhaps you are still not sure. Perhaps you think it’s still not fair to make fun of Tom Cruise this way, no matter how clearly bats— crazy he so obviously is. After all, he’s done some passable movies. He’s a decent enough guy. I sort of liked him in “The Firm” and, um, “Legend.” Cut him some slack, maybe?

Maybe. After all, everyone needs their little cult, right? Everyone needs their tribe and their myths and their psychological attachments and is it Tom’s fault that his intellectual and spiritual development apparently got stuck somewhere between “Star Trek” and the episode where Gilligan gets hit on the head with a coconut and his mouth turns into a radio? No, it is not.

What’s more, it’s not like this video is all that unusual. Surely there are Mormon indoctrination videos equally as deranged. Surely there are creepy installations playing right now over at the Creation Museum in Kentucky that will make your brain implode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that half of Americans actually believe that humans really did fly on the backs of pterodactyls. Hell, I’m sure Opus Dei has some sort of S&M fetish dungeon where they take new recruits and staple their eyelids open and make them watch “The Da Vinci Code” on infinite repeat until they swear to worship an angry misogynistic God forevermore, just to make it stop. And hell, the evangelicals in the hugely disturbing 2006 documentary “Jesus Camp” make Tom’s Scientologists look like a bunch of geeky Boy Scouts on crack.

So then, maybe we all owe Tom Cruise a big debt of gratitude? After all, it is only through videos such as this that we can gain perspective on our own lives. It is only though ogling such phenomena over and over and maybe only after someone turns this clip into a drinking game (”Every time Tom squirms awkwardly in his chair and can’t finish a sentence, drink!”), that we can finally eliminate all doubt as to our own mental stability and say, “Yes indeed, I may be a bit crazy, but I ain’t no Tom Cruise crazy.”

Or, as Tom would say, “I’ve canceled that in my area.” Yes, Tom. You most certainly have. ++

I’m a Man of Faith, You’re a Crackpot
Michael Smerconish, HuffPo
January 24, 2008

The world’s gone mad.

A major Hollywood star appears devoid of all common sense when it comes to matters of religion, and the same malady is on display in the life of a leading presidential contender.

First, there’s Tom Cruise. According to the just-out unauthorized biography of Cruise by Andrew Morton, one of filmdom’s biggest stars is now an enlightened leader of the sect whose members believe that deceased founder L. Ron Hubbard will soon re-emerge. Hubbard died in 1986, but Morton writes that Scientologists have detailed preparations for his return that include maintaining apartments around the world complete with some of his personal property.

Morton reports that the motto of the Church of Scientology is “We Come Back,” and claims that Hubbard was expected to return 20 years after his death.

Which is why when Tom Cruise’s wife, Katie Holmes, became pregnant, “True believers were convinced that Tom’s spawn would be the reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard,” Morton writes.

Scientology issued a statement calling the book a “bigoted, defamatory assault.” But, of course, these are the same people who believe that 75 million years ago an intergalactic warlord injected millions of alien souls into earth’s atmosphere, that those aliens, called Thetans, continue attaching to human bodies today, and that these Thetans harbor the “false ideas” of organized religion and are the root of all the world’s problems.

At least Tom Cruise is just a celluloid leader, and not, say, the chief executive of the free world.

That role is being sought by a man who adheres to a religion founded in 1830 by a farmboy named Joseph Smith. Smith told his followers that he had been visited by Jesus and charged — at age 14 — with restoring the purity of the church. One of his religion’s primary texts, the Book of Mormon, was drawn from gold plates buried in the ground. Today, participants wear special undergarments to remind them of the tenets of their faith, and refrain from drinking anything with caffeine in it.

No wonder some Americans are reluctant to support Mitt Romney for president. A Gallup poll conducted in the days after Romney delivered his “Faith in America” speech found that 17 percent of voters said they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon presidential candidate. That’s the same result Gallup got when asking a similar question about Romney’s father, Michigan Gov. George Romney, when he was running for president.

No doubt these people are largely Christians (like me) and Jews.

We’re clearly aided by an ability to spot a whopper when we hear one, a skill obviously lacking in Scientologists and Mormons. Maybe it’s our grounding in the Old and New Testament that enables us to easily size up the preposterous nature of the customs that guys like Cruise and Romney follow.

I’m thinking we have certain street smarts emanating from our belief in the Good Book that’s given us the ability to filter out obviously bogus beliefs.

After all, we know that the earth was created in seven days, and that the son of its creator was born to a virgin mother. Indeed, a star over Bethlehem led three wise men to the scene of Jesus’ birth, and, 30 years later, he walked on the water of the Sea of Galilee.

If only the Mormons and Scientologists would take the time to read those stories — and with them learn about the great flood that Noah survived by building an ark and loading two of each animal onboard, or the drowning of Pharaoh’s army after Moses parted the Red Sea — they’d surely come to their senses over the obviously fictitious lore surrounding L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith.

Heck, say what you will in this time of war with radical Islam, but not even Muslims would fall for the trappings of faith that Cruise and Romney have.

Islam, too, is founded on the sound perspective of the Koran, including the idea of 72 virgins standing ready in heaven to greet those who’ve achieved martyrdom.

Truly, one man’s faith is another man’s bunkum. ++

Peace is Not Only War…
JurrasicPork, WelcomeToPottersville
Monday, January 21, 2008

…it’s going to bring on the Rapture. At least, that’s according to Rapture Ready.com’s eagle-eyed news hounds.

As proof that the End Times are near, they link to this story that contains this ominous message of Armageddon:

The Arab world, by the Arab peace initiative, has crossed the Rubicon from hostility towards Israel to peace with Israel and has extended the hand of peace to Israel, and we await the Israelis picking up our hand and joining us in what inevitably will be beneficial for Israel and for the Arab world.

The extension of this horrid olive branch between two ancient enemies was announced by none other than Prince Turki Al Faisal, a former ambassador to both the UK and the United States. Now, if that doesn’t convince you that that’s proof positive the flesh-melting, “Oh, fucking shit!!!” nuclear holocaust is imminent, here’s the money shot:

“One can imagine not just economic, political and diplomatic relations between Arabs and Israelis but also issues of education, scientific research, combating mutual threats to the inhabitants of this vast geographic area…”

You hear that? “Combating”! Head for the fucking hills! Because everyone knows that it’s always lightest before midnight. Or, er…

Well, maybe this ought to convince you that the End Times are at hand, to which our Rapture fans also link:

It seems like this is just too uncanny that these are all ‘coincidences’. On January 8, 2008 the day that President Bush left the USA for Israel in order to lay the framework for the establishment of a Palestinian State and the division of Jerusalem for its capital, a freak ‘January’ tornado swept through a city in Bush’s own country. The place hit was
‘Jerusalem’, Arkansas. Coincidence?

One church was totally destroyed in the tornado’s path. The name of it was “Mt. Zion” Community Church. Coincidence?

One man was killed in the tornado. He was a ‘Pope’ County resident. His name, was Billy Carter.

There you have it. A guy with the same name as the creator of Billy Beer gets killed in a random tornado. Jesus swoops down and picks up all fundies, the rest of us walk around as unemployed zombies, end of story.

Yet, despite the fact that their inscrutable Rapture index currently stands at 163 (the highest it’s been since 9/11/01, when it hit 182), that doesn’t stop them from asking for donations.

So donate generously because you never know: Jesus not only saves but he also has a Paypal account up in heaven. ++

Bonus Read

Da Man
digby, Hullabaloo
Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Hey, here’s a treat to read on a cold winter’s night: a profile of our brilliant pal Rick Perlstein in The Chicago Reader:

In Before the Storm, the 2001 history that made his reputation, Rick Perlstein put his readers inside the skin of a pimply college freshman cast adrift on a sprawling concrete campus in the 1960s. “Wearied from his first soul-crushing run-in with Big Bureaucracy,” the imagined student is buying his required texts in the campus bookstore when he happens on a slim book with big type. He flips it open and “standing, reads fourteen short pages inviting him to join an idealistic struggle to defend the individual against the encroachments of the mass.”

And the kid is hooked. “Freedom, autonomy, authenticity: he has rarely read a writer who speaks so clearly to the things he worries about, who was so cavalier about authority, so idealistic.”

This mesmerizing book isn’t by Che Guevara or Abbie Hoffman. It’s Barry Goldwater’s ghostwritten The Conscience of a Conservative.

The story Perlstein began to tell in Before the Storm, and will continue telling in May with its sequel, Nixonland, isn’t what you might expect. It’s not the story of how hippies and radicals turned America upside down, because they didn’t. Perlstein is telling the story of the other major grassroots movement of the 1960s, the one that grew up and elected 20 years’ worth of presidents. Holden Caulfield, meet George W. Bush.

Do read the whole thing because Rick is the most astute observer of the right wing I’ve ever come across. As you all know, Rick invited me to write on his blog The Big Con a few months back at Campaign For America’s Future, and it’s been great fun. He talks about the blog in the interview:

“My fantasy for the blog,” he says, “was that readers would send posts to Aunt Millie—that it would be a way to get people talking. But people aren’t forwarding them to conservative relatives and friends. They aren’t talking to them.” Perlstein, on the other hand, is. “I have a group of four very different conservatives I’ve been e-mailing back and forth [as a group] since 2003. I can’t imagine living my life, intellectually and politically, without keeping these lines of communication open to people I disagree with.”

And he doesn’t just disagree with them; he appreciates that “people genuinely believe that good order has to be protected from people with scary values.” By his reckoning even Watergate, the ultimate dirty trick, sprang from a genuine fear that if George McGovern were elected president it would spell disaster for the country. No doubt Perlstein would’ve thought the same thing of Nixon’s reelection that year, if he’d been 30 and not 3, but he can still recognize himself in the ideological mirror. He says, “If I were an academic, I’d be talking about ‘incommensurate apocalypses.’”

The point is, if you can’t feel what they feel, then you can’t take them seriously as political opponents. You see only the flimsy intellectual foundations and miss the motivating power of strategically harnessed resentment. From Adlai Stevenson to John Kerry, high-minded liberals have acted as if they were blind to the root feelings that feed the followers of politicians like Nixon and Bush. Instead, they alternate between expecting a fair fight on the issues (and getting swiftboated instead) and imagining that once people realize what a bad person Nixon or Bush is, the people will turn against him.

Conservatism isn’t just a temporary delusion or a wacky distraction. In Perlstein’s view, it’s a deep-seated expression of human nature. He recalls the Gilbert and Sullivan song from Iolanthe about two kinds of babies:

“I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.”

His point:

“We’re not going to eliminate them. The best we can do is to win our 51 percent. What’s fascinating is that we share this country together.”

He’s right about this. Conservatism is not an aberration. It is a facet of human nature and a permanent fixture in American life. At the moment they have a successful political movement that first grew out of a genuine grassroots uprising and was soon funded by the aristocrats (who are always conservatives) to help them protect their interests.

We will not eliminate conservatism or even transcend it. But we might be able to win a governing majority for a while and do some good. This back and forth and give and take, between the polarities of our American philosophy — freedom and equality, opportunity and security, tradition and progress— is America. We are, as a people, both conservative and
liberal.

The conservative movement is adept at advancing its agenda from the minority and keeping the movement alive when they are out of power. But they have a problem:

Perlstein and other bloggers have been making the case that conservatism is a failure—not because of incompetence or cronyism but because it is not and cannot be a governing philosophy.

Progressivism, on the other hand, is a governing philosophy. The key for us is to create a movement that pushes its political party to govern in both principled and effective fashion when it holds power and knows how to advance its agenda when it’s out. It can be done. And progress most certainly can be made, in spite of conservatives’ best efforts to thwart it.

Read the whole interview. His book is coming out soon and it’s going to knock your socks off. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment January 25th, 2008