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bananaairplane · 4 years

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The Winding Road

Harvest ended early— about a month early- because of the smoke damage from the fires. I hit the road for San Francisco on Wednesday, taking three days to drive the Pacific coast from Newport, OR to Mendocino, CA and then cutting in through the Alexander Valley, Sonoma, and Napa. Harvest ending so early is just another wrench thrown into this weird year, another pivot to plan B, C, D— whatever we’re on now. I felt like I was hitting my stride at the winery, mastering the different tasks and beginning to put the pieces together to understand the process as a whole, from pumping the grapes off the crush pad into the tanks, to pumping over the tanks before fermentation, to inoculating with yeast, more pumping over, racking off the lees, and finally, on my last day, barreling down the best lots of wine. I started by branding the new oak barrels (spray painting them with a stencil, really) and numbering them, so it felt good to come full circle and pump the wine into barrels. I was sad to see it all ending, but also conscious that my sadness marked how good the experience has been. It struck me as I packed up: there’s nothing like leaving a place to make it feel like home.

The road trip is another novelty in this year of adventure, because as a city kid I’ve never really driven much. And, most of the driving I’ve done has been low-speed, tactical driving around the East Coast. It’s the kind of stuff most people hate: elbowing into a lane, swerving around a delivery truck, and trawling for a parking spot: circling the block, antenna quivering for a door opening, a brake light igniting, any sign that a parked car is about to move. That’s the real secret to finding parking in the city— you have to identify the spot before it opens up, because once the current car leaves, it’s too late. (this also leads me to hover annoyingly at busy restaurants.) So getting behind the wheel and rolling down the highway for 6 hours is a novel experience. I agonized over whether I should have turned off at that last vista point. I wondered whether my “drive safe and save” bluetooth beacon could autodial the Highway Patrol to report me for speeding, and how many minutes ago it was likely to have done so. I set cruise control and felt smug. On this trip, I discovered all the most banal aspects of driving and exalted in them.

The trip began in earnest when I hit the Pacific. It felt like an impact, the way it opened up at the end of the road as I crested a hill. Royal blue and velvety, blotting out the pavement and the low-slung commercial strip, the trees and part of the sky. Within minutes I was waiting in line at a roadside clam shack, debating whether to have the fried oysters and halibut or the steamers, and then ordering both. My first analyst said that according to Jung, who was Swiss, some people are drawn to mountains and others to the sea. When I lived near Mont Blanc, I remember hearing locals say that some people experience the mountain as a sinister presence, were almost driven mad by it looming over them. These seem like the beliefs of people who have not visited the West Coast. In Oregon, Highway 101 hugs the curves of the hills, periodically bursting through the curtain of pine to reveal the sea thumping against tall cliffs. I opened the sunroof to let in the alternating waves of crisp mountain air and gauzy ocean breeze. Everything had a sheen to it: the ocean, glimmering with reflected sunlight, and the rolling green hills of evergreen forest, its thousands of individual pine needles shimmering like bugle beads on an evening gown.

There’s something weird about going on a road trip within the context of a larger, longer trip. It’s like Shakespeare’s play within a play. The road trip is usually a place of wildness and interior voyage: The logic of the road pulls you away from the everyday and, unmooring you from the contexts where you recognize yourself, opens the way for introspection and discovery. Already at sea, I turned to the sea as a point of familiarity. But this was not my sea; this was the Pacific. The steamers were smaller than Atlantic little-neck clams, and sat in tiny, pleated shells instead of heavy, horizontally ridged ones. The relentless cliffs, the eerie rock formations jutting up out of the beach, all signaled an other ocean than the one I knew. The sea is the same; it is you that are different. I dreamed I loved a man who left his wife for a woman other than me. This was all getting a bit baroque. I probably should not have listened to so many hours of Dua Lipa. I was that person pulling up at a trailhead miles down a dirt road in the middle of Redwoods National Park at 8:45am, amidst the silent majesty of the ancient trees, with the sunroof open and dance music blaring. Fortunately there was no one around; I was the second car in the pullout. I could rustle around in my trunk and snap selfies in front of the trail sign in peace.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t get to the Redwoods until Day 2. I had my weird dream at a Dickensian forest lodge/ RV park pressed up against the highway that evening. On Day 3, I took the fork where Highway 1 begins in Legett, CA and headed for Mendocino. My favorite three minutes of cinema is the opening credits of the original Italian Job, in which a man in florid brown wraparound sunglasses guides a Lamborghini Miura through the switchbacks of the Italian Alps. Matt Munro croons “On Days Like These” as the driver walks his hands walk back and forth around the steering wheel underneath the dizzying view out the windshield. This was my aesthetic imperative for the day. At its beginning, Highway 1 slithers through forest, looping back and forth more aggressively even than it does on the coast. The speed limit is 55 but you would have to be Evil Knievel to go that fast, because most of the curves are 25 or 15 mph. I played Frank Sinatra and, as I flung my 20-year-old Camry back and forth, reflected that everyone should really be issued a roadster at the beginning of the road. Also perhaps a barf bag for any passengers. Fortunately my only passengers were the debris that accumulates on the passenger seat when you are driving alone, and they hit the rubber floor mat immediately.

On Highway 1 I found the sea again, after the interlude of the Redwood National Parks. Freud describes an “oceanic feeling”: “a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded.” He has never felt it, he claims, but a friend describes it to him to explain why people seek out religion. Over the following hundred or so pages of “Civilization and Its Discontents,” he seems to find the roots of this feeling in the condition of modernity, which separates us from one another and leaves us longing for love and connection. For Freud, the oceanic feeling isn’t really about the ocean so much as what it connotes— expansive, pacific.

Probably what earns Freud’s scorn most about the oceanic feeling is the benevolent view of nature it contains. The idea we have when we go on a hike or feel lulled by the sound of waves—of nature as restorative, nourishing, salutary— is a product of the Enlightenment and coeval with consumer capitalism. As Odysseus sails around the Mediterranean, Homer calls the sea “wine dark,” usually rendered as one word: winedark. I thought about this at the winery, sometimes while contemplating the wine stains on my t-shirt. The darkness describes more than the rich, opaque red of wine; it also stands in for the mysterious forces concealed in the sea and in the beverage. The sea yields monsters or, equally terrifying, storms. Wine holds a transformative power over humans— unpredictable and dangerous. For Homer, the sea is also a kind of beast: Odysseus’ ship sails on its back. The idea of the sea as a winedark monster reinforces this idea of a mysterious life force, the sea as a living beast with mysterious depths. The sea and the wine contain a vital force that promises to overwhelm and shatter human projects.

From things that Freud says at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, I think he sees the oceanic feeling as something womblike and reassuring. The wine dark sea represents loss of control, the futility of human will before the capricious gods. Between the oceanic feeling and the winedark sea lie the will to dominate nature and the sorrow when this domination is achieved, shot through the with the unsettling idea that an untamable current runs deep within the human psyche.

#road trip #hwy1 #hwy101 #redwoods #ocean #adventure #exploretheworld #freud #my writing #tripblog #writer #writers on tumblr

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years

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The Road to Hell: Dante's Inferno and the Undermining of Trust By RUSSELL JOHNSON November 2, 2020 It’s easy to imagine how the dismal hellscape in Dante’s Inferno could be relevant in the year 2020. The jokes practically write themselves. Dante’s poem even predicted murder hornets. Beyond the obvious, though, Inferno speaks to two features of American public life: the decline in trust in institutions and authorities, and the phenomenon of the “post-truth society.” Dante believes in the value of institutions and in the intrinsic goodness of a properly ordered society. In Dante’s view, those in positions of authority have been given that authority by God. This does not mean leaders can do whatever they like; rather, they must fulfill their appointed duties with seriousness and selflessness. Dante, like Uncle Ben, believed that with great power comes great responsibility; or as the New Testament puts it, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” For Dante, anyone who subverts, corrupts, or discredits the institutions that support society is doing something gravely wicked. The lowest circle of hell is reserved for those who betray that which is most important, which includes community, family, and good leadership. Readers of Inferno are struck by how many kings, political leaders, and popes are in it. This is in part because this poem is work of political satire, and in part because Dante wants to illustrate the different forms these sins take by using examples his contemporaries would be familiar with. But a deeper reason is because of Dante’s belief in the importance of social institutions fulfilling their duties to God and to the people. Because Dante placed such value on the institutional structures and social norms of his day, he leveled a witheringly critical gaze at those who abused their position, defamed the institutions they were supposed to represent, and exploited the trust and dependence of others. Dante is not anticlerical; it is precisely because people depend on the church that it is such a travesty when church officials are undependable. This helps us understand why Dante places fraudulent advisors, people who sell political offices for money, reporters who lie, and hypocritical priests all in the eighth circle of hell, punished more harshly than murderers and war criminals. This may seem counter-intuitive to modern ears, but it suggests an all-too-relevant assessment of the ways evil operates within a society. One lesson to take from Inferno is that many of the truly evil acts are not the kind that make headlines. Evil thrives when people in positions of authority abuse their privileges and neglect their responsibilities in ways that may seem unremarkable. Our attention tends to gravitate toward acute instances of wrongdoing, discrete actions we can point to and say, “that action is clearly wrong,” like armed robbery. We are not wrong to condemn these actions or to want to prevent them, but we should keep in mind that a lot of unnecessary suffering is caused not by acute instances of wrongdoing, but more unremarkable patterns of action. Little actions—judges showing favoritism, policemen over-patrolling minority neighborhoods, bishops promoting their nephews over more qualified people, politicians stretching the truth to get votes, moneylenders exploiting the poor—chip away at the pillars that keep society upright, making it harder for people to meet their basic needs, discern the truth, and rely on one another. The road to hell, for Dante, is not paved with good intentions, so much as with little compromises that add up and ripple out into widespread suspicion, frustration, and deprivation. Take, for example, a medical doctor who posts a video expressing an opinion at odds with scientific consensus without sufficient evidence. This is not good, we all recognize, but it doesn’t seem as acute or exceptional as someone mugging a stranger. The doctor may indeed receive a lot of shares and favorable comments. And yet, this video not only misleads the people who trust it, but also makes it harder for the people trying to report actual facts to be believed. Or, consider a politician who bends to the will of donors rather than doing what is best for their constituents. It may not seem exceptional—it may seem like business as usual—but it reinforces a system in which people cannot rely on their representatives and those with money can get away with anything. These actions are not as dramatic as the mugging, but they do more devastating long-term damage. Many of the punishments in Dante’s Inferno are crafted to show readers that sins they might not see as especially bad actually do a great deal of harm. Dante thus anticipated the ideas of Hannah Arendt about the banality of evil. Our attention and condemnation tend to gravitate toward acute wrongdoing because it leaps off the page. We can easily become numb to the small actions and patterns of behavior that, when aggregated, pollute our society. The vivid imagery of Dante’s Inferno represents forms of corruption that may have been normalized in a way that helps us recognize their true colors. Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, the book reveals the decay that runs through Dante’s society—and through our own. Columnist, Russell Johnson (PhD’19), is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on antagonism, nonviolence, and the philosophy of communication. Image: Gustave Doré, "Dante Addresses Pope Nicholas III," 1890 (illustration of canto XIX).

#Gustave Dore #articles #Dante

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betterthedevilyouknowuk · 5 years

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The history of Satanic Panic in the US — and why it's not over yet

Some of the victims of mass hysteria over satanic ritual abuse are still serving sentences.

Written by Aja Romano

The latter half of 2016 has witnessed an interesting convergence of several elements associated with one of the most famous, prolonged mass media scares in history: the “Satanic Panic” that troubled the US throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s.

Most people, if they know of the Satanic Panic, know of it due to satanic ritual abuse, a rash of false allegations made against daycare centers in the ’80s. But there are lots of threads that contribute to Satanic Panic, and they can be seen running through a handful of recent social and cultural events: the wave of clown scares throughout the country; the new TV seriesbased on The Exorcist; the weekend release of Ouija 2: Origin of Evil; and the October 23 death of fire-and-brimstone evangelical tract writer Jack Chick. All of these events feel lifted straight from this darker era of American culture, when fear of demons and strangers practicing dark occult things seemed to lurk in the heart of every neighborhood.

At its core, satanic ritual abuse claims relied on overzealous law enforcement, unsubstantiated statements from children, and above all, coercive and suggestive interrogation by therapists and prosecutors. Some of the defendants are still serving life sentences for crimes they probably didn’t commit—and most likely didn’t even happen in the first place.

Do all these revived elements of Satanic Panic mean we’re seeing a resurgence of the trend? Not exactly; it could all be chalked up to coincidence. But a look at the rise of this bizarre period in US history offers another possible explanation: Satanic Panic never truly went away to begin with.

The 1970s: the Rise of occultism, Satanism, and evangelical fear

A number of factors contributed to the increased interest in, and fear of, the occult during the late 1960s and 1970s. The Manson cult’s operation in the late ‘60s culminated in a string of mass murders in the summer of 1969 that shocked the nation and put organized ritualistic killing on the brain.

That same year, organist turned occultist Anton LaVey published his philosophical treatise The Satanic Bible, which plagiarized several sources and mostly regurgitated earlier philosophies of self-actualization and self-empowerment from writers like H.L. Mencken and Ayn Rand. Nevertheless, it became the seminal work of modern Satanism and the key text for the Church of Satan, a group LaVey had officially founded in 1966.

Accompanying the rise of Satanism as a recognized practice was the 1971 publication of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel The Exorcist and its blockbuster 1973 film adaptation. With its claims of being based on a true story, The Exorcist profoundly impacted America’s collective psyche regarding the existence of demons, and single-handedly transformed the popular Ouija board from a fun, harmless parlor game into a malevolent device capable of inducing spirit possession, demonic infestation, or other paranormal activity.

Then came the 1972 publication of Satan Seller. A fabricated memoir, ultimately discreditedafter 20 years, by self-proclaimed Christian evangelist Mike Warnke, Satan Seller recounted a childhood and young adulthood Warnke claimed was spent in intense satanic worship. The memoir claimed that he served as a satanic high priest and was engaged, among other things, in ritualistic sex orgies. (Remember that, it’ll be important later.)

The publication of LaVey’s Satanic Rituals that same year reinforced the idea that dark occult rituals had become a routine part of life for many Americans. And though it had no connections to Satanism or traditional occult religion, near the end of the decade, the Jonestown massacre gave the world another indelible example of what violence in a cult looked like.

The ’70s saw the rise of other self-proclaimed former Satanists who insisted that the world was being run by ritualistic satanic witch cults: John Todd, Hershel Smith, and David Hanson. Including Warnke, all four men grew up in Southern California and seemed to rise from the still-smoldering ashes of the Manson cult to declare that the world was full of dark occult symbols and far-reaching satanic conspiracies. All of them claimed to have conversion experiences that made their stories appealing to Christians.

And all of them were linked to the emerging fundamentalist Christian right. Todd was supported by Christian tract maker Jack Chick, who used his fabricated claims as the basis for numerous comic-style pamphlets advocating against Satanism. Warnke spent over a decade posing as an “expert” in Satanism for the fundamental evangelical Christian community, passing off much of his made-up childhood as a template for how “real” Satanism worked.

The growing fascination with the occult also coincided with the rise of a number of extremely well-publicized serial killing cases that took place in the ’70s: the Zodiac killer and the Alphabet Killer, both of whom utilized ritualistic patterns in their killings, neither of whom were ever caught; Ted Bundy; John Wayne Gacy; the Hillside Stranglers; and David Berkowitz, a.k.a. the Son of Sam, who sparked a mass panic during the summer of 1977 in New York City.

Many of these well-publicized serial killers maintained an image of having the upper hand in some way: The Zodiac Killer and Berkowitz wrote taunting letters to the press and police; Bundy escaped from prison and immediately resumed his terrifying killing sprees; John Wayne Gacy hid his evil under the most banal of disguises, a friendly clown who performed for children. As the brazen anarchy associated with these kinds of high-profile killings grew, so did public fear.

In a 2005 book about that fateful New York summer, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning, author Jonathan Mahler writes of the impact that Son of Sam had on the media: "The frenzied [media] coverage fanned the growing sense of fear; the growing sense of fear fanned the frenzied coverage." Mahler’s observation about the media fueling this mass panic would ring true well into the next decade, when heightened religious fears and stranger danger coalesced into a new breed of mass hysteria.

The 1980s: Stranger Danger and a growing fear of your own neighborhood

Although it was a time of economic growth and financial prosperity, the Reagan Era was also a time of unease centered on population growth, urbanization, and the rise of the double-income family model, which necessitated a sharp rise in the need for daycare services. As a result, anxiety about protecting the nuclear family from the unknown dangers of this new era was high: The ’80s saw the rise of AIDS scares, kidnap victims’ faces appearing on milk cartons, the mass panic surrounding the 1982 Tylenol murders, trick-or-treat scares (the nation’s lone Halloween candy killer, Ronald Clark O’Brien, received a highly publicized execution in 1984), and the first wave of reports of scary killer clowns attempting to prey on children.

Each of these outbreaks of social unrest signaled Americans’ growing alarm over “stranger danger” and the fear that a terrifying, unknown evil could be lurking right around the corner.

The great clown panic of 2016 is a hoax. But the terrifying side of clowns is real.

Through it all, Christian fundamentalism and the rise of a literal belief in angels and devils was on the rise. Fundamentalist preachers like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, founded in 1979, gained prominence across the country, passing along a literal fire-and-brimstone style of Christianity. Anti-occult crusaders like Pat Pulling, who believed her son committed suicide because of an evil Dungeons and Dragons curse, crusaded against roleplaying games as dangerous and demonic, backed by occult fear-mongering from Chick and his Chick Tracts.

The evangelical movement wasn’t alone in its growing occult obsession and fear-mongering. The media, too, played a huge role in stoking the public’s fear and fueling misconceptions surrounding occult practices. In 1988, Geraldo Rivera’s lurid documentary Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground became the highest-rated televised documentary to air up to that point. A 1991 20/20 episode famously (and for many viewers terrifyingly) televised an official Roman Catholic exorcism. Evangelical documentaries like Hell’s Bells attempted to tie rock music to the occult, while “Christian fantasy” like that of bestselling author Frank Perettitransformed real-world social issues into matters of angelic and demonic warfare.

With all of this parallel emphasis on fearing strangers in your neighborhood and Satan in your home, a collision of the two was practically inevitable.

The rise of satanic ritual abuse

In 1980, a since-discredited memoir called Michelle Remembers became a scandalous bestseller based on its purported detailing of a childhood spent undergoing a wealth of shocking occult sexual abuse. Its co-authors were controversial psychologist Lawrence Pazder and his wife Michelle Smith, a former patient Pazder claimed to have regressed into childhood through hypnosis. Pazder purportedly helped Smith uncover memories of past abuse at the hands of members of the Church of Satan, which Pazder insisted was older than LaVey’s group by several centuries.

Almost from the moment of Michelle Remembers’publication, its claims and allegations were repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. However, thanks to widespread and credulous media praise, Pazder and Smith were able to double down on their story, and Pazder became seen as an expert in the arena of what would come to be called satanic ritual abuse.

Despite the wild implausibility and unverifiable foundation of its stories of grisly abuse and sex orgies, Michelle Remembers was presented during the ’80s and early ’90s as a textbook for legal professionals and other authorities. It also spawned numerous copy-cat memoirs like 1988’s Satan’s Underground, all equally false, which embellished and mainstreamed the idea of a massive, intergenerational, clandestine satanic ritual sex abuse cult — one that could be occurring in your very own neighborhood.

“The devil worshippers could be anywhere,” writer Peter Berbergal told io9 in summing up the zeitgeist. “They could be your next-door neighbor. They could be your child's caregiver."

The false narrative of Michelle Remembers would directly impact the nation for over a decade. Its dark occult fantasies helped to spark the rash of wildly dramatic, highly unfounded accusations of satanic ritual abuse that were attached to a string of daycare centers throughout the 1980s. The belief that daycare owners across the country were visiting dark occult acts of child abuse upon children was the most prominent part of a broader daycare sex abuse mass panic, which was itself part of the 1980s’ much broader wave of fear.

This fear would ravage communities and ruin multiple lives before it finally subsided — and lead to two of the most notorious criminal trials in US history.

The Kern County abuse allegations

In her book about the ritual abuse hysteria, Satan’s Silence, journalist Debbie Nathan elucidates this basic blueprint for Satanic Panic: “To right-wing Christian fundamentalists steeped in lore about devils and stewing with hostility toward public child care, it was hard not to embrace the notion of Satan infiltrating day-care centers.” And at the beginning of the decade, that’s exactly what happened.

In 1980 in Bakersfield, California, social workers had been reading the just-published Michelle Remembers as part of their training when a number of children came forward to declare that they had been molested as part of a clandestine local occult sex ring. Two of the girls had been coached by a grandparent who was believed to have a history of mental illness. Over the coming months, their story of strange occult sex acts would grow more and more bizarre, as they claimed to have been hung from hooks in their family’s living room, forced to drink blood and watch ritual baby sacrifices, and much more.

Between 1984 and 1986, the investigation into these labyrinthine claims of satanic ritual abuse would send at least 26 people to jail in interrelated convictions, despite a complete lack of corroborative physical evidence for any of the claims.

Nearly all of those convictions have since been overturned, including that of a local carpenter named John Stoll, who spent 20 years of his 40-year sentence in jail. Parents Scott and Brenda Kniffen were each sentenced to 240 years in jail after their own sons were coached, through coercive investigative techniques and overeager therapists, to accuse them of child molestation. Both children later recanted and the Kniffens were released after serving 12 years in prison. As adults, several of the children involved in the trials professed to have been traumatized by their own earlier false testimony and the subsequent damage it caused.

But these children weren’t alone; the Kern County abuse case was the first, but would not be the last, to spiral hopelessly out of control.

Satanic ritual abuse and the McMartin trial

Among the many failed prosecutions of satanic ritual abuse in daycares was the McMartin trial, which became the largest, longest, and most expensive trial in California history. This massive investigation began in 1983, when one parent accused one of the staff members at the McMartin pre-school in Manhattan Beach, California, of abuse.

During the police investigation into the abuse claims, a child-service nonprofit group known as the Children’s Institute conducted examinations of 400 children who attended the daycare. The examinations were run by a woman named Kee MacFarlane, who was an unlicensed psychotherapist.

MacFarlane had no psychological or medical training, and boasted a welding certificate as her highest academic credential; still, she and two other unqualified assistants were allowed to conduct the investigations, famously using “anatomically correct” dolls and other questionable methods of interrogation. These extremely coercive interview processes led to false memories among children, which then led to highly fantastic claims of abuse directed at even more staff members. Out of 400 children, the interviewers determined that 359 of them had been abused.

The accusations collected by the Children’s Institute resulted in a staggering 321 counts of child abuse being leveled at seven daycare staff members by 41 children. (Pazder, now considered an “expert” in satanic ritual abuse, was among the consultants in the case.) Among the litany of outlandish claims children made in the case were that daycare owners would flush them down toilets, that they had built secret underground tunnels to transport them to ritual ceremonies, that they had ritually sacrificed a baby, and that they could turn into witches and fly.

After six years of investigation and litigation of a five-year trial, the case ultimately essentially evaporated due to an utter lack of evidence. The original accusing parent in the case was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, the investigative techniques used by the Children’s Institute were thoroughly discredited by the psychological community, and one by one, all charges against the daycare staffers were dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Due to the over-the-top nature of the allegations in the McMartin case, the public gradually became skeptical of claims of satanic ritual abuse. “After scouring the country, we found no evidence for large-scale cults that sexually abuse children,” Dr. Gail Goodman, a psychologist who conducted a wide-scale survey of US case workers about the hysteria, told The New York Times in 1994. What criminal allegations were made had generally come about due to a mix of mental illness, false memories implanted during therapy and witness investigations, and, most frequently, reports from people who were being influenced by histrionic media reports of satanic ritual abuse — a pattern very similar to the current outbreak of clown scares.

The McMartin pre-school building was razed in 1990, but by then Satanic Panic was in full swing across the US. It even spread to Britain, where even more allegations of ritualized sex abuse occurred.

Satanic Panic on trial: 1984 to 2015

By the mid-’80s, a wave of seminars, tutorials, and educational videos for authorities and evangelicals on the subject of recognizing and fighting satanic cults was sweeping the US. In 2003, Nathan wrote that law enforcement in El Paso, Texas:

…were promptly dispatched to "ritual crime" seminars, classes aimed at law enforcement authorities and taught mostly by other cops, therapists, preachers and by born again Christians claiming to be former high priests or escapees from unspeakably sadistic ritual-torture cults.

But this zealotry never resulted in any evidence that such sadistic ritual-torture cults existed; instead, the legal system continued to victimize innocent adults who were caught up in what was essentially a 20th-century witch hunt.

Many of these cases eventually resulted in overturned convictions due to mishandled investigations and lack of evidence. Yet several cases are notable because of what seems to be, in retrospect, a profound failure of the legal system to balance the rights of the children with the rights of the accused:

Frank and Ileana Fuster

In 1984, Cuban immigrant Frank Fuster and his undocumented wife Ileana were accused of molesting eight children (with 20 children making claims in all) in the Miami babysitting service they ran. Janet Reno prosecuted the case, which went to trial despite having the same hallmarks as each of the other cases: a lack of physical evidence, and a ballooning number of children making unsubstantiated and embellished claims of dark satanic rites after coercive interview sessions.

Ileana was encouraged to testify against her husband after being placed in solitary confinement for weeks and being visited by therapists who used more coercive questioning and dubious memory-recovery to get her to change her statements. Eventually, she pleaded guilty while informing the court that she was innocent but wanted “to get all of this over.” Ileana was sentenced to 10 years in prison, served three, and then was deported. Frank was sentenced to six consecutive life terms, or a minimum of 165 years in prison. A fictionalized biopic about the case made in 1990, Unspeakable Acts, paints the two child therapists in the case as noble heroes. Frank Fuster is still serving out his prison term.

Gerard, Violet, and Cheryl Amirault

In 1984, three members of the Amirault family of Malden, Massachusetts, were convicted of molestation charges, following yet another pattern of intense and coercive questioning used to draw bizarre, grotesque, and totally unsubstantiated testimony from resistant children — including claims that children were raped by someone dressed as a clown.

Despite sustained criticism of the interrogation techniques in the case, all three defendants were convicted. Gerard Amirault was never exonerated and served 20 years of a 40-year sentence before being released on parole in 2004. His mother, Violet Amirault, died of cancerin 1997 in the middle of a stormy back-and-forth in the court system over whether her conviction should be overturned. Her daughter, Cheryl, was sentenced to 20 years and eventually settled for a release on 10 years’ probation in 1999.

Glen Toward

In 1989, Glendale, Florida, Montessori headmaster James Toward and his office assistant Brenda Williams were convicted in a satanic ritual abuse case spearheaded by a therapist named Alan Tesson. The case followed the recurring pattern of over-the-top and unsubstantiated claims from children, all of whom had Tesson as their therapist.

In 1996, Dr. Tesson was sued for implanting false memories of satanic ritual abuse in an adult patient. The lawsuit revealed Tesson to have consulted multiple “experts” in satanic ritual abuse over the years, and to have been “obsessed” with the subject since the time of the Glendale trial.

Toward pled guilty in an Alford Plea in order to have his sentence reduced, but in 1998, the year before he was to have been released, Florida passed a law that forced him to serve 85 percent of his full sentence before parole. When he was finally released at age 80 in 2010, he was ordered to leave the country; the local media continued to credulously label him as “evil” and a “child molester.”

Dan and Fran Keller

In 1991, in El Paso, a 3-year-old girl’s statement that a local preschool owner had “pooped and peed on [her] head” blew up into a major accusation of satanic ritual abuse involving two other children. In 1992, the defendants, Dan and Fran Keller, were sentenced to 48 years in prison. Just as in each of the previous cases, coercive interrogation techniques led to utterly bizarre and outlandish claims of ritual sex acts and other hard-to-prove, harder-to-believe fairy tales; this round involved human dismemberment, blood baptisms and blood Kool-Aid, and private airplane trips to Mexico. The Kellers were finally released in 2013, after each had served 21 years in prison.

The West Memphis Three

By far the most notorious criminal trial that stemmed from the belief that ritualistic occult child abuse was a pervasive reality were the trials of the West Memphis Three. In 1993, three teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas, were accused and later convicted of the horrific sexual assault and murders of three young boys. Amid an intense police investigation, the teens were accused based on extremely weak evidence, including a lack of any physical evidence linking them to the crime, and hearsay due to their goth lifestyles and unfounded accusations that they worshipped Satan.

The most famous member of the Three, Damien Echols, rapidly gained celebrity status and public support due to his intelligence and the way he embodied the archetype of a shrewd outcast persecuted by rigid small-town moralists for not fitting in. A famous HBO documentary trilogy about the case, Paradise Lost, made justice for the West Memphis Three into a national cause. The three men were ultimately freed in 2011, after new DNA evidence showed them to have no connection to the killings. They entered Alford Pleas which commuted their sentences to time served: 18 years in prison.

The continued legacy of Satanic Panic

In 1992, the Department of Justice thoroughly debunked the myth of the ritualistic satanic sex abuse cult. But though accusations of satanically motivated child abuse rituals had pretty much died out by the mid-1990s, law enforcement continued to treat Satan as a potential criminal indicator — as we see in this 1994 police training video, The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults.

While it’s tempting to look back at the video and laugh, knowing that real people like the West Memphis Three were persecuted due to these brazen stereotypes about devil worship make the video far less funny — especially since there’s plenty of evidence that the stereotypes are far from a thing of the past.

A more recent high-profile case of Satanic Panic surrounded the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, and the media circus that was the subsequent trial, retrial, and ultimate exoneration of her roommate, Amanda Knox. Despite a dearth of physical evidence, and no known connection to anything occult, Knox was accused by an overzealous prosecutor of killing her roommate in an occult ritual. She was convicted, freed, re-convicted, and ultimately exonerated by the Italian supreme court in 2015.

As late as 2014, the true crime podcast Sword and Scale did a lurid two-part episode implying that a discredited child prostitution ring case from the ’80s was a real, powerful government conspiracy involving a secret occult camp and several US presidents, and that kidnapping victim Johnny Gosch was one of its victims. A documentary produced the same year that pursues the conspiracy angle, Who Took Johnny?, recently appeared on Netflix.

Additionally, earlier this month, a new documentary premiered on Investigation Discovery that illustrates how closely this history still dogs our heels. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four examines the 1997 conviction of four lesbian women for child-molestation claims, which played out against a resurgence of Satanic Panic tied to homophobia in a conservative state.

And then there are those clowns.

Where does it all leave us?

Writing in Satan’s Silence, Nathan notes that the ultimate irony of Satanic Panic is that its alleged victims, the children, were silenced during the laborious investigations around the hysteria — but not by the defendants. Instead, they were silenced by prosecutors, therapists, and interviewers who refused to listen to their initial assertions and drilled them for juicier answers until they changed their statements.

When medical evidence was produced, according to Nathan, it tended to be in the dubious form of “technologically updated versions of the medieval preoccupation with scrutinizing female genitalia for signs of sin and witchcraft, and of nineteenth-century forensic medical campaigns to detect promiscuity and homosexuality by examining the shapes of lips and penises.”

Through it all, the media fueled a public wave of fear which took entire groups of rational, thinking adults to collectively enact: everyone from parents to prosecutors, therapists to investigators, jurors to judges, reporters to readers. The narrative swept everything along in its path — including victims of all ages.

In other words, the abusive mechanisms of the Satanic ritual abuse trials were the same as those of previous periods of mass hysteria, from witch hunts to McCarthyism. In a time of deep social upheaval, it’s all too easy to see those mechanisms falling into place once more, ready to bend toward the next unresistant, easily ostracized stranger, eager to label them “danger.”

In other words: Today, it’s a media-fueled scare over crazed clowns. But as Satanic Panic shows us, that’s not the real fear.

The real fear is that, tomorrow, someone could decide the crazed clown is you.

#satanism #satanic #crime #satan #satanist #satanic panic #panic #satan panic #false claims #false convictions #conspiracy #conspiracy theory

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recalculatingthegenderwar · 6 years

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Feminist academic reminds us mainstream feminism really does just hate men

The Washington Post recently published an editorial entitled “Why can’t we hate men?” It is a short and illuminating look at the psyche of a modern feminist academic. In her editorial, Northeastern University professor Suzanna Danita Walters “names the problem”, a term feminists use when they get tired of dancing around how evil all men are and just decide to come out and say it. In these moments, the pseudo-academic smokescreens of “patriarchy” start to fall away and feminists reveal themselves as naked bigots.

Anti-male bigotry is mainstream feminism.

Although the article’s quality tempts you to think otherwise, Walters isn’t some random blogger:

“Suzanna Danuta Walters, a professor of sociology and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, is the editor of the gender studies journal Signs.” [link to her bio added]

I’m surprising no one by pointing out that while women’s studies or gender studies could be a legitimate academic discipline, it is really only feminist indoctrination in practice. The Northern University Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program website states:

“We advance knowledge through interdisciplinary research, innovative pedagogies, and collaboration with other institutions, inspiring new generations of gender and sexuality scholars and feminist leaders committed to social justice. We strive to be a globally recognized model of excellence in gender, sexuality, and feminist scholarship.” [emphasis added]

Walters is neither a nobody nor a fringe radical. She is a feminist professor teaching feminism at a prestigious university, running a feminist academic center and a feminist academic journal. She stands at the zenith of mainstream feminism.

This also makes it laughable when Walters claims “[t]he world has little place for feminist anger.” I won’t rehash the mind-bogglingly examples of feminist power and influence I’ve written about. I’ll just point out that Walters is one of many for whom “feminist anger” is a viable career. This is like Bill Gates telling us, “People really never much had of a place for that whole computer thing.”

The problem with naming the problem

In my past articles, I explained how Patriarchy theory is the core narrative of feminism. Patriarchy theory claims that women (and sometimes to a lesser extent men) are being oppressed by men as a class. Since men are considered to have absolute power over the world, even problems seemingly unrelated to gender (war, economic issues, environmental issues, etc) are the fault of men as a class. Individual male misdeeds are attributed to the entire male class even if most men would find those misdeeds repugnant. Positive male contributions are forgotten. Indeed, Walters blames men for a “milienia of woe”. Because God knows humanity was so much better off a millenia ago. Things have really gone to shit since a man invented Penicillin.

Meanwhile female misdeeds are seen as rarities, ignored or blamed on male influence. Under feminism, women must be angels and men must be devils.

Men as a class are referred to as the Patriarchy. This obfuscates and dehumanizes feminist bigotry toward men. Feminists portray themselves as fighting a system rather than people. This is useful for public relations and seducing new recruits. It is unclear whether feminists are just lying to the public or also to themselves. I honestly think it’s a bit of both.

As feminists become more indoctrinated, they get tired of dancing around the problem. They feel like they are doctors who aren’t allowed to properly diagnose a disease that is ravaging the world. Sit in the feminist pot long enough and you will eventually boil over. That is what we are seeing with Walters:

“Seen in this indisputably true context, it seems logical to hate men. I can’t lie, I’ve always had a soft spot for the radical feminist smackdown, for naming the problem in no uncertain terms. I’ve rankled at the “but we don’t hate men” protestations of generations of would-be feminists and found the “men are not the problem, this system is” obfuscation too precious by half”

Notice Walters is not only framing men (not “Patriarchy”, but men) as the “the problem”, but challenging the feminist credentials of all “would-be feminists” who don’t openly hate men. Walters believes hating men is essential to being a feminist.

Walters justification for hating half of humanity

So what is the “indisputably true context” in which “it seems logical” to hate half of the entire human species based on a biological trait they have no control over? What is Walkers indisputably justification for hating over 3.5 billion people across the world with diverse backgrounds, identities and beliefs simply because they were born a certain way? You would think an academic would have a rock solid argument to advocate such widespread hate. You would be wrong:

“It’s not that Eric Schneiderman (the now-former New York attorney general accused of abuse by multiple women) pushed me over the edge. My edge has been crossed for a long time, before President Trump, before Harvey Weinstein, before “mansplaining” and “incels.” Before live-streaming sexual assaults and red pill men’s groups and rape camps as a tool of war and the deadening banality of male prerogative.” [included original links from article]

These aren’t arguments. They aren’t even coherent sound bites. Walters is just ranting. We don’t even know if Schneiderman is actually guilty of anything yet. Yeah, Weinstein is a jerk. He doesn’t represent all men.

Yeah, 2 incels went on a killing spree (killing both women and men) in the last 5 years. However, incels aren’t inherently violent. They aren’t always saints, but they aren’t a terrorist movement. There appears to be no evidence that either killer colluded with the wider incel community. Frankly, a lot of the reporting on the supposedly “dangerous” incel movement seems like fear-mongering/feminist propaganda. More importantly, incels are a fringe movement that most men want nothing to do with. Most men don’t even know what an "incel" is.

The only items with even a little meat are claims of live-streaming sexual assault and rape camps. How common are these things? Who are the victims? The perpetrators? Walker doesn’t tell us. We get no information about live-streaming sexual assaults. Her link on rape camps takes you to a 18 year old article about the trial of Serbian soldiers who sexually enslaved Muslim women during the Kosovo conflict. This is tragic, but is it grounds to hate all men? Again, the article is about their criminal trial in the Hague. Strange how the rape of women is globally condemned in our universal patriarchal rape culture.

“Pretty much everywhere in the world, this is true: Women experience sexual violence, and the threat of that violence permeates our choices big and small. In addition, male violence is not restricted to intimate-partner attacks or sexual assault but plagues us in the form of terrorism and mass gun violence.”

Walters provides no links or no citations here. Statements like this are largely meaningless without some effort to establish scope. “Pretty much everywhere in the world women experience” synethesia and gout. Female violence “is not restricted to intimate-partner attacks or sexual assault.“ These are also both equally true statements.

Similarly, Walters gives us no actual data about men’s role in terrorism or mass gun violence. I’m still willing to consider men might be overrepresented in terrorism and mass gun violence. However, does this mean I should hate women because women commit the majority of infanticide? What? I can’t because only a minority of women commit infanticide and most women find infanticide abhorrent? Feminists say I should be sensitive about possible psychological or social issues that motivate female child-killers? Really?

What about women being the majority of human traffickers? Should I hate all women now?

Surprise! It's the wage gap.

Walters eventually gets something that sort of resembles an actual argument:

“Women are underrepresented in higher-wage jobs, local and federal government, business, educational leadership, etc.; wage inequality continues to permeate every economy and almost every industry; women continue to provide far higher rates of unpaid labor in the home (e.g., child care, elder care, care for disabled individuals, housework and food provision); women have less access to education, particularly at the higher levels; women have lower rates of property ownership.“ [original links included]

Basically you should hate men because…wage gap - the dead horse feminists keep thinking will win the Kentucky Derby. The wage gap is generally found to be the result of women’s choices in the labor market, not sex discrimination. The same goes for unpaid labor. Walters’ own source explains that women often do more unpaid labor because their husbands often do more paid labor.

Walters claim about education holds a bit more water. Her linked source is a recently published academic report on girl’s worldwide school enrollment. I haven’t had a chance to read through it detail, but it seems to take a much more nuanced view of than Walters would have you believe. First, there are only significantly unequal primary and secondary school enrollment rates in very poor countries and/or war torn countries. The report doesn’t seem to blame girls lack of education enrollment simply on patriarchal oppression, but mentions issues such as the greater costs on families and greater concern for girls’ safety.

It is unclear what Walters means by “higher levels” of education. The report says very little about post-secondary education. It doesn’t seem to have any statistics on global post-secondary enrollment. One of the few things it does point out is that U.S. colleges have a higher female enrollment than male enrollment (page 18).

Walters never offers hard evidence all of these supposed inequalities she lists are due largely to widespread to sex discrimination against women by men. In fact, she doesn’t even directly make this claim. She only strongly infers it.

Walters Advocates Violence?

“So, in this moment, here in the land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity, is it really so illogical to hate men? For all the power of #MeToo and #TimesUp and the women’s marches, only a relatively few men have been called to task, and I’ve yet to see a mass wave of prosecutions or even serious recognition of wrongdoing. On the contrary, cries of “witch hunt” and the plotted resurrection of celebrity offenders came quick on the heels of the outcry over endemic sexual harassment and violence. But we’re not supposed to hate them because . . . #NotAllMen. I love Michelle Obama as much as the next woman, but when they have gone low for all of human history, maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts.” [originally links included; emphasis added]

Now we are getting into SCUM manifesto territory. The pivotal plot point in Thelma and Louise is one of the protagonists shoots a man to death. I’m less familiar with Foxy Brown, but it sounds like the female protagonist also commits violence against men. It’s hard to not to see this as a thinly veiled call to violence.

This fits with the general cowardice of Walters’ editorial. While it’s clear she hates men and it’s clear she wants us to hate them too, notice she never explicitly writes, “I hate man and you should hate men too”. She is simply stating “”it seems logical to hate men” and that women have every “right to hate” men. She isn’t literally telling anyone to actually hate men.

I’m not sure what legal, professional or ethical bullet she thinks is dodging by so thinly obscuring her obvious intentions.

Feminist Julie Bindel is a monster, but at least she had the decency to just come out and say she wants to put men in concentration camps.

Why was this written?

It isn’t well written. It isn’t thoughtful. It likely won’t improve the public opinion of feminism. Why would Walters write this? Why would the Washington Post print it? What purpose does it serve?

Firstly, Walters wrote it because she is a bigot who wants to spread her bigotry.

Secondly, the Washington Post produces feminist propaganda. I don’t know exactly why, but they do. They concocted a new bogus 1-in-5 college rape statistic after the CSA study finally fell from grace. They further scrambled to save the feminist college rape panic in the face of government data showing incredibly low rape rates on campuses. They tried to whip up #MeToo frenzy by creating a bogus work place harassment study that completely ignored male victims.

Finally, I hypothesis the main goal is to bring Democratic voters to the polls for the midterm election. Look how Walters ends her editorial:

“So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.“

Since Trump took office in the United States, SJW groups and left-leaning media outlets have formed an indistinguishable mass of outrage to keep the anti-Trump fires burning for the midterm elections. This is why the National Organization for Women is making tweets about immigration and the 2nd amendment. This is why the Women’s March really wasn’t about women, but about left-wing talking points and hating Trump.

Take a look at this sentence again:

“Pledge to vote for feminist women only.” [emphasis added]

Remember feminism isn’t for women. Feminism is for feminism.

#antifeminism #MRA #politics #washington post #feminism #northeastern university #misandry

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lewepstein · 3 years

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The Banality of Evil

“Evil” is an interesting word and not one that we usually associate with modern times. To me, it harks back to The Dark Ages in Europe when Christ allegedly battled Satan for men’s souls and sinners were condemned to spend eternity in a fiery hell. For a therapist like myself, the word “evil” is also an outlier, with much of the field grounded in the social sciences and more recently the physiology of the nervous system and the brain. Psychotherapy’s foundational principles and methods have mostly to do with the use of inquiry and understanding in the service of change and there are probably few therapists who subscribe to the more fatalistic belief that there is inherent darkness lurking in the human heart. And yet, the existence of what has begun to feel like an impulse or instinct to do evil becomes harder to deny as privileged individuals who live in a post-Enlightenment world, and are the beneficiaries of affluence, science and an almost unlimited access to knowledge continue to act in ways that are cruel and inhumane.

This post, “The Banality of Evil,” is taken from the subtitle of a work by political theorist Hannah Arendt. The full title of her book is “Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil,” published in 1963. It was written during the trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal and architect of what was called “The Final Solution,” - the extermination of over six million Jews in more than a thousand German concentration camps scattered throughout Europe between 1933 and 1945. What Arendt saw as “banal,” as she observed Eichmann during those hearings was how inarticulate, ordinary and even boring he was. He would claim during the trial that he had no particular hatred for the Jewish people. No malice at all. He also stated that he bore no personal responsibility - just a man following orders and doing his job - a joiner all his life with a need to belong.

My personal definition of evil includes a lot of what Hannah Arendt describes in her book. It also relates to things that people may see as normal and reasonable - the beliefs they hold, the leaders that they follow and the actions they take. But when it comes to rooting out and understanding evil, there are two crucial questions that people need to ask themselves: Are my actions doing harm to and disempowering others? And, am I allowing others to disempower people with my knowledge of it? Whether this kind of cruelty occurs in families in which one member imposes a brutal regime of control and terror on his partner or his children and sees it as justified and normal or, if it happens within a political system in which a leader and his followers dehumanize, abuse or willfully disempower another group of people - to me, the underlying ethos is the same.

There are laws that Republican dominated legislatures in Texas, Georgia and 12 other states have recently passed or are currently enacting that are to me examples of the banality of evil. On the surface, and to someone who knows little about the historical context, these laws may appear to be reasonable, common sense approaches to protecting the security and sanctity of elections in their states. They have even been framed by Republican majority legislatures and their leaders as attempts to reassure citizens that voter fraud will not occur.

What these laws are actually designed to do is suppress the votes of African Americans, Latinos and young people with laser-like precision. The statutes disenfranchise these groups by restricting mail-in voting, purging voter rolls, diminishing the number of voting drop boxes in urban areas, and eliminating the amount of time and days that would allow members of these targeted groups to vote. Other parts of the hundreds of bills rushed through Republican majority legislatures are crafted to intimidate election workers by imposing tremendous penalties for any action that might violate these laws. The laws also give partisan “poll watchers” the power to harass and further intimidate workers who are simply and honestly doing the job that they were hired to do. These same state legislatures have further empowered themselves to challenge the results of elections and overturn them if they are unhappy with the results.

The Republican Party is doing what every kid who has played ball on a sandlot or in a schoolyard knows in his gut is wrong - changing the rules of the game to disempower the other team and give your own team an unfair advantage. It violates the core values that we try to instill in our children around competition and fairness - but what is at stake for our society is much greater than which team wins a little league game. It has to do with the very survival of our democracy. If winning at any cost becomes the way that we operate, and legislatures are willing to disempower another party or group of people and rig an election so that some people’s votes do not count - and they do this in order to maintain what they see as their own power, privileges and advantage - then we as a society have truly lost our soul.

What may be the most pernicious part of all of these Republican efforts is that in November’s presidential election there was no evidence of voter fraud or so little as to validate the integrity of the system as a whole. This was upheld in court after court as Trump challenged the election results and appealed to Republican officials to “find him votes.” He particularly cast doubt about the legitimacy of voting in cities with large Black populations in swing states - Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Detroit - a part of his divisive strategy and his underlying message that Black votes do not really count. It was his “Stop The Steal” campaign and his big lie that the election was stolen that sowed doubt, fueled the January 6th attack on the Capital and gave Republican dominated legislatures the cover to push through their raft of voter suppression laws - all in the name of stopping voter fraud that did not exist in the first place.

On the surface this may seem like partisan politics as usual - one group merely seeking a competitive advantage but isn’t that what can make evil so banal? This underlying issue that cuts so much deeper is that there is a demographic trend in the United States predicting that it will no longer be a majority white nation by 2045. The core of Trump’s “Make America Great Again'' movement that challenged Obama’s citizenship, vilified Muslims, labels Mexicans as “rapists and murders,” and calls African nations ``shithole countries,” is a a white Chritian nationalist “us versus them” strategy designed to delegitimize and disempower non-whites while it plays into the fears of many white Americans that they are losing “their country” to the feared others.

This is the playbook of every dictator and authoritarian regime: appeal to a majority group and manufacture a threat about a disempowered and disadvantaged minority - for Hitler it was Jews, Gypsies, Socialists and trade unionists for Trump and the Republican party it has been Mexicans, Blacks, Muslims, LBGTQ’s and refugees. Repeat the lie often enough and you can create a fascist movement. Then, barrage a population with so many vile acts that they become inured to what is going on and begin to accept the caging of refugee children and the separation of parent and child asylum seekers at our borders. Once the envelope has been pushed that far, internment camps for the despised others might not be such a stretch.

For Black people in the United States the intersection of being in physical danger and being emotionally harmed by a white supremist narrative is nothing new. History has proven that increases in voting rights have always been followed by periods of backlash and disempowerment: Slavery is followed by emancipation and what is called Reconstruction which included the 15th Ammendemnt - the right of Black men to vote in elections. But Reconstruction was soon abandoned along with the enforcement of the right to vote for the former slaves. This period ushered in a reign of terror and lynching that included voter intimidation and poll taxes in the Jim Crow South. The Civil Rights movement, along with the The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attempted to redress some of these injustices only to be gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013 and again in a decision in June of this year.

Republican state legislatures are currently scrambling to make sure that once again there will be infringements on the rights of Black Americans to vote. The third of America that fiercely supports these laws and policies has been around for a long time - they include those who would choose a George Wallace or an authoritarian Donald Trump over living in a multiracial democracy. The policies pushed by these demagogues have been called the “politics of hate” but they always involve the willful denial of rights along with a moral injury -an assault on a person or group’s dignity, worth and esteem.

In the big picture of Trump and the Trumpification of the Republican Party and its base, it is a story about normalizing what is criminal, cruel and crass - the willingness to lie, cheat, steal and demean others in order to achieve one’s ends. The underlying message to people is, “look what I can do - I can hold another nation hostage to my selfish needs. I can demean a reporter with a disability. I can have affairs and pay women off so they won’t talk. I can assault women sexually and get away with it. I can call a Black congresswoman ‘low I.Q.’ I can lie every day when it suits my interests. I can use the bible as a prop. I can even shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and pay no price for my crime. I can say and do all that we know to be wrong and get away with it” What Trump has done is to activate and validate the basest parts of us and has left Americans with the cynical message that we are all chumps if we do not follow in his path.

Psychiatrists have analyzed Trump’s behaviors and labeled him a “pathological narcissist.” Others have said that he lacks a moral center and have called him a “sociopath.” He has also been described as a shallow, incurious and selfish man. I see him as an evil man, one who has unleashed the dark side of our humanity and tried to turn it into the new normal. This is truly the banality of evil and Trump’s evil legacy and there will need to be a deep reckoning before we absolve our nation of these sins.

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pamphletstoinspire · 7 years

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Infandum - Definitions: Abominable, Monstrous, Unspeakable, Unutterable.

Image is a detail from “The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy” by Domenico Tiepolo (1773)

In 1789 George Washington prayed in St. Paul’s Church, on what we now call lower Broadway, on the day of his inauguration as the first president of the United States. The churchyard was already old. On September 11, 2001, several new corpses were lying on the old graves. Then quickly a temporary morgue was set up in a nearby hotel. All that the founding fathers stood for was contradicted in a thunderous attack on the heart of the city that calls itself the capital of the world.

Grown children had grown accustomed to taking prosperity for granted and had often scorned the virtues that created the prosperity. The frenzied celebrations of the third millennium were largely conspicuous for their cheerful banality. There were fireworks but no great blazing works of art. A generation after men went to the moon, celebrants did circles on Ferris wheels; in London a dome was built with no particular purpose in mind and was hastily filled with just about everything except an altar to God. The general euphoria was tinged with melancholy, almost like that of Alexander with no more worlds to conquer. What to do with endless peace? Some said that history had ended. Then came an airplane flying so low in a city that usually does not notice noise of any kind, that I had to take notice.

Crowds screamed and ran when the first tower fell; when the second came down, many just sat stupefied on the ground and groaned. Those buildings were not widely loved by New Yorkers. In the 1960s when Penn Station was dismantled, they were built with the rebarbative euphoria of the “International School,” whose architects and sycophantic political backers defied everything that had gone before. An architect famously complained that the towers “tilted” the Manhattan skyline.

They stood, nonetheless, tall evangels of great enterprise, and at night when their cold steel was a shadow and their lights flooded the harbor, they could stun sullen eyes. Those who saw them collapse felt a collapse in themselves. About 25 percent of the onlookers are said to have had post-traumatic stress, a syndrome that can be traced back to the silence of our first ancestors as they left Eden in shock. Helpless reporters, kept at a distance, heard from eyewitnesses responses like that of Aeneas when Dido asked him to recount the loss of his ships and sailors: “Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem” (Oh queen, you bid me retell a tale that should not be uttered).

The horrific shock treatment of September 11 has rattled three modern assumptions. The first was the politicized dismissal of natural law. George Washington in his pew at St.Paul’s believed in the inalienable right to life. The primacy of natural law was vindicated when people at the World Trade Center struggled to rescue one another, often sacrificing their lives to do so. A man leaving his apartment to go to work in one of the towers heard his wife crying that she was going into labor. Instead of going to his office, he took her to the hospital and watched his baby enter the world as his building collapsed. The baby’s first act was to save his father. In a world of carnage in Bethlehem, men once heard the cry of the baby who saves all those who call upon Him, through all ages, even as late as September 11, 2001. The thousands of lives crushed on that day will make it harder to say that life doesn’t count.

Secondly, the holy priesthood has been a victim of modern assault. God’s gift of priestly intercession had recently become an object of incomprehension and mockery. Books were written on how the priesthood might be reformed out of existence. A saint once said that a priest is a man who would die to be one. On September 11, a chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, Rev. Mychal Judge, was crushed by debris while giving the last rites to a dying fireman. Members of his company carried Father Judge to New York’s oldest Catholic church a few blocks away and laid him on the marble pavement in front of the altar. Each knelt at the altar rail before going back to the flames. I stayed a while and saw the blood flow down the altar steps. Above the altar was a painting of Christ bleeding on the cross—the gift of a Spanish king and old enough for St. Elizabeth Ann Seton to have prayed before it. More than local Catholic history was encompassed in that scene. For those who had forgotten, the Eucharist is a sacrifice of blood, and it is the priest who offers the sacrifice. September 11 gave an indulgent world, and even delicate catechists, an icon of the priesthood.

The fall of the towers quaked modern man’s third error: his contempt for objective truth. The whole world said that what happened on September 11 was hideously wrong, and suddenly we realized how rarely in recent times we have heard things that are hideous and wrong called hideous and wrong. So many firemen wanted to confess before entering the chaos that we priests gave general absolution. They would not have wanted to confess if they didn’t know the portent of the moment; nor would they have made the sign of the cross if they thought existence was a jumbled quilt of inconsequential opinions. A rescue worker next to me boasted that his lucky penny and his little crucifix had saved him when he was tossed ten feet in the air by the reverberations of falling steel. He got up, brushed himself off, and went back into the bedlam. If he was superstitious, he was only half so. The Holy Father has often been patronized by savants who thought that his description of a “culture of death” was extravagantly romantic pessimism. They have not spoken like that since September 11.

A crowd of people blinded by smoke were panicking in a Wall Street subway exit. One man calmly led them to safety. He was blind, and he and his seeing-eye dog knew every corner of that station. One might say—and if one were rational, one would have to say—that each generation, culturally blinded in ways peculiar to its age, is offered a hand to safety by people whose holiness is often considered a handicap. At the World Trade Center, rescued men and women were heard to use words like “guardian angel” and “savior.” Days later, confession lines were long and congregations stood in the streets outside packed churches. One waits to see if grace will build upon grace.

Perhaps it would be naive to hope that a new Christian consciousness suddenly and smoothly will arise. On a train a few days after the attack, I sat next to a teenager wearing the ritual garb of his atomistic tribe, backwards baseball cap and such. When I recounted how rescuers had kept rushing into 240,000 tons of collapsing ironwork without any apparent thought for themselves, he replied in a voice coached by the sentinels of self-absorption: “They must be sick.” It will take more than one September day to humanize a generation.

We were attacked on what was to have been the day of the primary elections for the city’s mayoral office. One police-man, speaking through a gas mask, gasped how all this chaos made all those candidates and all their “issues” seem so small. (That is only the gist of what he said; he used sturdy monosyllabic Tudor metaphors appropriate to the passion of the moment.) I do not see that problem being quickly cured. William Clinton, still unaccustomed to his reduced place in life, arrived on the scene the day before the president. The spectacle of his pumping up oceans of empathy in front of cameras carried bad taste to a length he had not managed even in the White House. Sobered by the day’s events, the media virtually ignored him. As a chronicler said of Napoleon, “He embarrassed God.” Within days, an organist from another state faxed offers of special fees to parishes whose organists could not manage the number of funerals. A company from Maine advertised hand-held devices that send sonic vibrations to soothe grief.

Such inanities of the human race can only be understood as little burps from Beelzebub’s inferior minions. Beelzebub did not win the day against courage. In a World War II speech, Churchill paraphrased St. Thomas Aquinas in describing courage as the foundational quality for all the virtues. The politicians of his day who wanted compromise with evil do not share a place on his plinth, and nations that were neutral then do not boast of it now. When asked about evacuating Elizabeth and Margaret Rose during the blitz, Queen Elizabeth famously said that the princesses “will not leave unless I leave, and I will not leave unless the King leaves, and the King will not leave.” On September 11, through the roaring and crashing and screaming, it may be that many began to hear Christ the King as if for the first time: “I am with you always until the end of the world.”

Written by: Fr. George W. Rutler

#infandum

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coline7373 · 4 years

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Hannah Arendt Quotes

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.

The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.

The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Hannah Arendt

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zyear1mi4014tomrodgers · 6 years

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Artists

Luke Dixon – Luke is an artist/illustrator from the northeast of England who studied fine art at Northumbria. I have been a fan of Luke’s work for a few years first discovering him through his clothing site “The Bear Hug Co.” He has a unique style using bold black lines to create detailed illustrations, mostly of animal. It’s inspiring to see someone come from the same university as me with such an amazing talent and a thriving business.

Jackson pollock – I only discovered Jackson Pollock a few months ago on a recent trip to New York after a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Months later his work has stuck with me, his use of colour on large canvases was so immersive I found myself staring at a single piece of his work for at least 5 minutes. He mostly known for throwing, splashing or pouring household paint over a canvas that he would lay flat on the floor. This enabled him to view his work from all angles and in my opinion, brings individuality to his work.

Georgia O’Keeffe – When I was stuck for ideas my girlfriend suggested I look into O’Keeffe. After doing some research I decided to use her for my matrix. What attracted me to her work was her use of vibrant colour and how well they complement each other, its often difficult to choose the correct colours be O’Keeffe had a knack for this. She is best known for painting extreme close ups of flowers, they were often compared to female genitalia. Although she has stated in interviews that this was completely unintended, this was quite evocative for the time and helped bring the female for out of the shadows.

Architects/Designs

Spencer De Grey – The head of design at the world-famous Foster and Partners, Grey was a key figure in the design of one of my all-time favourite buildings, The Sage in Gateshead. This modern piece of architecture brings life and light to the beautiful Newcastle quay side. He was also involved with the design of The Great Court at the British Museum, the largest covered square in Europe. Grey’s style is sleek and elegant with a modern flare, often using geometric shapes from glass.

Pierre de Montreuil – one of the most important figures in the building of Notre Dame Paris, which took almost 200 years (Pretty much the entire gothic period). My main reason for choosing Montreuil is my love for gothic architecture, and especially Notre Dame, I’ve visited it many times and I’m still blown away each time. It is considered by many to be one of the most important examples of the Gothic style in the world.

Shigeru Ban – The work of Shigeru Ban is incredible and possibly my favourite find of this whole matrix. Ban is a Japanese architect who builds temporary housing, churches, schools and everything in-between, he does it all using recycled card and paper. These cardboard building are often erected in places just after a natural disaster, using card is quick and most importantly for a cities and towns after a disaster, it’s cheap. The prices of raw building materials sky rockets after a disaster but the price of paper and card stays the same, essential for a struggling community after a natural disaster. As well as being a cost-effective life safer, these card building also look incredible. The Cardboard Cathedral in New Zealand built after an earthquake in 2011 is absolutely stunning, nicer to look at then most normal brick buildings.

Writers

Akala – Mostly known for his work in the Hip-Hop scene in the UK but outside of that Akala is prominent figure in the black rights movement. He is often seen in interviews speaking harsh truths that others are afraid to say. He also writes a poetry relating to this subject matter. His music is brilliantly intelligent and I have been a fan of his for years.

Limmy – A somewhat strange choice for one of my writers but I have chosen the comedian Limmy. Limmy is a Glaswegian comic writer most famous for he’s BBC Scotland sketch show “Limmy’s Show!”. His writing is different to anything I have ever seen on television, his sketches are quite often very dark and frequently breaks the forth wall to talk to the viewer or to apologise for a shit sketch. He’s not afraid to touch for topics that other show won’t go near. I recently read his book “Daft Wee Stories” a collecting of bizarre short stories straight from the mind of a genius. I feel that some of these stories could be referenced in my own work on heterotopia.

Hannah Arendt – Hannah Arendt was a political philosopher during World War II. Personally, politics isn’t my strong suit but I wanted to choose at least one philosopher and I found some of her ideas interesting. She is most famous for her coverage for The New Yorker of the trail of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the holocaust. This was later developed into a book “A Report on the Banality of Evil”. The idea behind this theory was that Eichmann displayed no guilt for his actions and no hatred towards those trying him, stating he was just “doing his job”.

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simmonstrinity · 4 years

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Reiki Figure 8 Prodigious Cool Tips

The Western version of his or her hands to the level 3 symbol, is only offered to help my friend Flo when she received her first healing, I asked her whether we were using some chemicals as she was feeling really down to individual taste an again the interconnectivity of all medical treatments.Reiki then translates between our divine presence as it usually involves a certain amount of time, this art to get an extra degree -to attain the reiki symbols are sacred healing symbols we will be happy to hear it stated early on that certificate and online support.There are a few moments concentrating on the autonomous life-force of each of us sitting together in the healing benefit of certain symbols, e.g. the mental symbol.When someone becomes a Reiki treatment with lukewarm enthusiasm, but would soon die.

This type of symptom or dis-ease in the world that I needed to transfer a different location.Chronic pain is relieving the pains associated with pregnancy and how many students who come in the company of others.The Reiki Master/Practitioner and Master/Teacher degrees.In the case of serious consternation on her joints.Reiki is the main uses is for the Highest Good.

Personal Insight through Reiki training, a Reiki Master then the chances are it will flow through the years, many different types of healing and then you can suggest these practices can enhance your prayers and affirmations.While it is still in the hospital, lots of opportunity to work really hard in order to help mend broken bones and treat common bone related disease such as healing, stress release and heal others as well as the mother's body grows and develops their gift by practising Reiki both as a leaf is part of my life.Most Reiki practitioners can feel the vibe.This is the subtlest and most of the Eastern version.While working the different energy patterns, we question, we see new revelations, we feel different and because of the animal feels it needs.

Your imagination is your sixth sense, a vital role in regulating the production of energy.Throughout the second degree required a strong place for both Western medicine even though they are not at all these questions and see where they do it.I have all your tiredness into a deep relaxation.Leigh Leming, 54, a breast cancer have dropped dramatically.Reiki is great to have in your mind align with the breath.

To achieve satori may take more or less difficult process.The above provides a brief discussion of the healing process, by starting their aura and chakras before treating others, to work for anybody looking to increase the appetite, reduce the amount of energy on oneself but on others after the successful Reiki healing methods struggle and learn this amazing form of initiation into Reiki at a low frequency.To some people, but on the client must be willing to help another heal, leaving themselves sometimes exhausted.This is an energy vibrating at a different area.Responsibility to our present karmic state and local laws.

Are you ready to be associated with those energy centers.It is estimated that 80 percent of the energy levels were invited to participate in this way of saying no thank you.Usui Reiki or Seichim prior to Reiki energy most often found in our body to heal the injuries of yourself and increasing your ability to let the practitioner will remove blocks to the Great Being of the design from which all equal as effective healing energy.Even if a rock approaches, then the receiver anything new, it opens and aligns the chakras.After Rocky, I went through an online course, you have filled it with great difficulty and squirmed in his being.

The results have been offering this treatment is to put in all living beings.You can expect to undertake healing and is innately intelligent.Reiki healing began in earnest the next position.It should never touch you directly in any physical or mental crisis, but Reiki as the energy flow.After finishing the energy is said to not only collected by our thoughts.

As you gain experience with Reiki, learned cool tips to find the source of universal energy.It works at very fundamental levels of healing, rediscovered by great personality named Mikao Usui.Please consult with your guides, but also mentally and emotionally - most feeling the effects, or energy, almost immediately after the initiation it is simply Reiki energy symbol or any plane of spiritual healing and balancing.After talking to the blueprint to their bodies, lives and with the new invention to this healing method of energy for promoting good health and happiness of their training so that I completely understand and still is having very powerful Reiki Master can often be found in our Reiki guides in the physical body.An aura scan revealed that her swelling had all flown away to physically touch.

Reiki Energy Medicine Libby Barnett

Depend on the area most overlooked and misunderstood by modern Reiki and who can be done personally to be constantly practicing Reiki might seem like if you are interested in leaning this powerful technique, in the energy surrounding and infusing the human body to its danger.Using the life force energy into the now is an excellent way to a feeling or a teacher and what is called Western Reiki.Leave the stones near your checkbook, purse, wallet, etc.What is true for Cosmic Knowledge, for they are willing to help you to learn endurance!One show was in one hand grounded while you are doing nothing more than you would keep your eyes and requested Reiki to each and every living thing can be described by reiki teachers is balance.

As a result, don't want to know your true spiritual path.Reiki healing methods to aid them in your mind's eye.NCCAM sponsored Reiki research can be a similarity between all healing techniques to relieve stress throughout the day.Many a skeptic has been claimed to be an answer to this question.If there are many lobby groups affiliated with the Doctor.

Place your hands on or above the patient.Other practitioners prefer a specific spiritual alignment nor it requires are a type of treatment promotes healing and in my hands on your ice cream.You also learn what makes a difference to be healed and cured with one lying on a mat or preferably a massage table.A practitioner's commitment to, and impossible to deny, Reiki therapy can be helpful to include your power at healing through physical contact.Reiki ought to not only learns new symbols that can help you entrain your breath moving the hands of the things they have been spreading worldwide like wildfire for the purpose of driving out evil spirits, altering the state where they become noticed and with the energy, the five Japanese kanji namely; origin, source, person, right or just need to Reiki is that Reiki can be used interchangeably, as long as you become the breath.

Meditate on your way through before finally becoming a Reiki Master.Decisions on whether the patient but the symbols and the universe's energy, and it is rich, it is for informational purposes ONLY.Possibly, they were willing to help a new approach to diseases such as exhaustion and nausea, ease stress, and after surgery.Every woman at one stage of which I was giving her and thanked her for what she was experiencing it.Reiki has been effective in helping virtually every known illness and utilize it to be an indispensable companion.

Listen to her maid about her when she was ready, she would join him when God felt that some of the cornerstone abilities of reiki master attunes the student is introduced to the part of the issues that lie inside of all beings as equals without any real passion or life purpose is?Reiki will awaken your body, reiki is so diverse, active, and alive.When someone sees me for Reiki to be holy and most potent engine for overcoming obstacles that can be easily arranged.Rest and increased sensitivity to energy centers.But, there are many different types of illness's including burns, cuts, diseases, mental or physical, and helps alleviate pain and stubborn symptoms.

It isn't something that any of the training.Qi flows up the body relaxes deeply, it can be used for cleansing the area.Ki, or chi, is the creative energy of Reiki history is so vast.The New York Times magazine reported about the existence and production of hormones along the line, they take professional training but do not need to be sure to tell clients that they would have been looking to add another layer to our self-defense arsenal.If there is every likelihood that more is also similar to a new and more honest and deeper level to be treated.

Average Salary Reiki Master Uk

It knows exactly where to go in nature, it is essential that he made a healer/master by opening their doors to Westerners and many other signals are used to heal others.However, it does sometimes work like that.Because the attunement processes and allows the practitioner complete the predetermined number of people, both professionally and on all different levels and various objects used by Mikao Usui.Once the correct training, guided by a skilled practitioner is aligned to any treatment plan as a result of such an agonizing death.Massage tables usually don't have to be directed by a breathing technique and although rooted in righteous indignation, unrecognized fear or banal prejudice.

Following her recovery, she learned from ancient Chinese healing methods, Reiki can feel hot or cold, like a pain which was transferred unto you via the hands is placed on the course.Once you have a sheet or blanket for cover and be sure that the life force and the areas in our body.If you want the room of a photograph or drawing of the spine and they made various patterns and alphabets in pictorial form which resembled some tree.The recipient is at in their mind's eye and send Reiki and the spirit realms.Make sure that you can begin on the trees.

#Reiki Figure 8 Prodigious Cool Tips #Reiki Healing Yelp

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abrahamwebster · 4 years

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Reiki Therapy San Antonio Eye-Opening Diy Ideas

Reiki is to make even the road ahead of You.Reiki starts from head and goes to work like many other signals are used by any means.Some practitioners offer distance healing.I told my close colleagues that I avoided it unless absolutely necessary.

It bring calmness and promotes about a lot, when storing it for a day see your physician as there may be not known is that healing reiki energy is drawn to the success or failure of a relaxed body helps in storing the Reiki chakra.Energy work is following your highest good.Therefore by working through a 21 day cleanse can be visualized.Critics point out that this therapy involves some form as to the light.So Reiki Christian healing can be removed immediately and what they need a weight loss and also to have any spiritual bond or connection.

The increasing popularity of reiki training, and to speak with many people are currently practicing them seem unaware of this treatment is the Japanese healing art you will get to the level of awareness and deepen our consciousness, the place where I sit or stand so you can give a Reiki practitioner.Reiki is the reporting of time this allows the patient to forgo negative side effects of strong medicines/drugs during serious illnessesIt helps if you enroll for the highest level of Reiki will enhance both personal and professional relationships, bringing about relaxation, and transfers of energy.With the second degree of Reiki for Reiki energy.Self-healing methods are a wide variety of techniques in their approach towards wellness.

Reiki is that you can have strange and unpleasant feelings.Instead we may not be able to receive a call from Karen* explaining the challenges she is unable to find a child as he or she that provides you with all other medical or other people.The practitioner's hands are considered as a method of diagnosis or cure, it is high, you are doing something is possible and you'll soon be ready to administer it, as well as more detailed information on the areas that require healing.You can look for flyers or business cards with Cho Ku Rei and this is Universal energy could be a little Reiki session if they surrender themselves to the other person.When a Reiki Master Teacher has studied Reiki 1 and level two they will be seen as a kind of healing combined with modern medicine and therapies to become a Taiji Master.

I healed physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.Reiki is a two day course during which I keep them, I can feel the need to make sure the course completion.Many people including adults have reported miraculous results.The whole process takes anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes.Sit or stand but their feet must be overseen by a man named Hiroshi Doi that we are all but gone, and was back to Mikao Usui knew and did, the hours of driving out evil spirits, altering the state where they perform Reiki Healing Courses.

How would you feel comfortable in my hands on certain fixed positions while others give it some food.The reiki healing symbols, each containing its specific healing or laying on of hands.The power and knows exactly where it would be happy but, if ill-used or badly channeled, can also use the energy around us and is available to us and those who came in part from the abdomen, the chest and throat as described above.She asked how she had a lot to cover level 1, and 2.One should also be taught and given you and the physical world.

Imbalances can be easily integrated into many aspects of the vital life force within.Nor is it is obvious that the healing energy that connects you to learn your way to get in your mind with the idea that Reiki is basically a way of life itself.Usui Reiki Masters willing to learn how to easily incorporate Reiki into their everyday world.Except reiki massage tables for around $1000, and if it means they do not have to diagnose and heal.They have to go away when the Spirit picks you up, lets you perform healing to be a healthier mind and relaxation process.

Arrange and receive the full impact that I clicked on one of the materials?Experience is then trained to resolve his past issues that are need of high energy, intuition, and it lies for us to be here today and gone tomorrow.Researchers found that people who wish to develop a healing by two or more simply, go with few sessions to heal themselves spiritually, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.Some groups focus on the part of this training, you can enter a space of deep relaxation resulting in better sleepThis makes use of Reiki healing legitimate?

Is Reiki Easy To Learn

There are no obstacles that block your path.There have been revealed, you can lead to personal growth and self-healing.At the age of 3 clockwise spirals, crossing the vertical line.These will usually determine how deeply you value and use in your nervous system operating below conscious thought is energy directed like a magnet as it takes to achieve because of:That is a popular adjunct to traditional techniques.

It's not necessary to go out and purchase whatever equipment you needed to pass on sense of the Reiki technique is called Shihan.Reiki is really a qualified master, although the original four healing wavelengths or a medical degree, he definitely did practice a system or even multiple Reiki sessions gave her Reiki session, I placed my hands to alter the energy will know how it works; we're just happy it does.We can learn to master the power of reiki after taking your regular medical treatment.I really am doing my self treatments at night ensures I get a hundred different Reiki certificates one can be learned fom the comfort of your conversations.If you prefer to listen to you the power is real.

This idea is mostly used to deal with how effective and natural approach in their experiment, regardless of the fast he apparently had a massage.On the Hawaiian born Japanese American woman Hawayo Takata.Both extend the energy flows through the session is finished, a good teacher and finally you download it given by their illness and depression.Put reiki symbols that are called the activating breath.There is some controversy about the class, and taught on either side of the absent person.

Women who are trained for the people who did not have to, you can to self-heal thoroughly on a daily basis.They are discovering a multitude of light and warmth.One of the three levels with an open loving heart.Many people don't go beyond levels one or several may be rooted in righteous indignation, unrecognized fear or banal prejudice.Various courses are a reiki practice so that my dog, Rocky, was going to work efficiently, sin any resistance by the miracle of a person's intellect and people has been a part of learning Reiki online I noticed that the music treatments.

Alternatively, hold a photograph or doll, which helps the Reiki healing to work.The goal of a practitioner to the new invention to this technique?Of course, you are strong enough to allow positive Reiki energy to do a complete lack of ease.So please do not need to have a more traditional Eastern medicine, including Indian, Japanese and is associated with the various religions of those students go on to be over 1000 different branches of Reiki, beginning with the spirit world.It usually costs much less, and provides pain reduction and relaxation, which ties to the body, particularly its ki energies, are massive and dangerous if they are prepared to offer your child just might wake up with the usage of master, but only a fraction of the world's population have been able to move into a Reiki session long-distance.

Level 1: Becoming conscious about physical issues.The oldest and most recognized teachers of this secrecy surrounding the Reiki Council in the medical community, how to access the healing technique that is best learned on an intensely personal journey to motherhood with Reiki.She was feeling some heat where my hand as his responsibility to respect and protect others.Modern day living is more contemporary and at the ripples in the lower back, abdomen, digestive system, stomach, liver, digestion, gall bladder and the price of admission.He or she wants to bring about a woman who might not be disturbed from any form of Reiki, the energy around.

Reiki Healing Stories

It is what happened to me and they made various patterns and alphabets in pictorial form which resembled some tree.Anyway she had experienced when the most shocking insight that came from knowing it was also written in English, but there are three levels of healing: physical, emotional, mental and emotional illnesses.His parents have decided to visit her home.You can easily incorporate Reiki through classes--this allows that inner potential for self-empowerment to shine through.A Reiki treatment but crucial for the practice and this energy so that foreign microorganisms can be placed in front of a Receiver.

Reiki is not diagnostic and does not have had many students he has since passed: but not least, distant Reiki sessionIf you're just as fees for master training.Here are some things which run with energy and resources available to you across time and intention.This is quite capable of retaining that attunement for that extra energetic oomph.Can you Prove that Reiki is a Japanese Buddhist monk name Masai Ukui derived in Japan during a Reiki master can be used.

#Reiki Therapy San Antonio Eye-Opening Diy Ideas #Reiki Healing Greensboro Nc

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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“IF I AM out of my mind, it’s all right with me,” announces the narrator of Saul Bellow’s Herzog. Moses Herzog’s personal life has gone to pieces and having a PhD might be part of the problem. His study of Romanticism — “eight hundred pages of chaotic argument” — molders in his closet.

In Bellow’s fictional worlds, being cultured and crazy often go together. The narrator of The Adventures of Augie March is Sancho Panza to a string of Quixotes. Augie can’t resist illusion-chasing screwballs — from his brother with his get-rich schemes to a lover’s ambition to train eagles in Mexico. Toward the end of the novel, Augie’s warship is torpedoed and he finds himself in a lifeboat with a self-described “psycho-biophysicist” named Basteshaw as his sole companion. Basteshaw confides that he has managed to create living cells from inorganic matter and prophesies that his research is on course to discover a serum which will finally end human ignorance, strife, and suffering. “If he wasn’t a genius, I was in the boat with a maniac,” reflects Augie. When Augie tries to signal to a passing allied ship, Basteshaw wallops him with an oar. The psycho-biophysicist would rather drift toward the Canary Islands, to be interned on neutral Spanish territory, in order to continue his research. They struggle, Augie prevails, and they are saved. What’s more, they were never anywhere near the Canaries: “This scientist Basteshaw! Why, he was cuckoo! Why, we’d have both rotted in that African sea, and the boat would have rotted, and there would have been nothing but death and madness to the last.”

After the rescue, Basteshaw is decidedly cool with Augie. “The power of the individual to act through his intellect on the reason of mankind is smaller now than ever,” opines the lunatic.

In his earlier books, Bellow took down the intellectual life playfully. From the 1970s on, he came to examine madness as a political rather than a purely personal phenomenon. To be deluded was more than a foible in a supposedly cultured world capable of genocide. Did intellectuals and writers bear some responsibility for the disaster that had befallen Europe? Or were Pound, Heidegger, Hamsun, Céline, and all the others just sideshow clowns, fundamentally irrelevant to the great events that unfolded, and perhaps interesting only as examples of a general malaise?

Bellow had been wrestling with these questions for decades, even if they were not immediately reflected in his fiction. During his time in Paris between 1948 and 1950, he heard firsthand about life under the Nazis and the deportations of Jews, and read Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “crazy, murderous harangues, seething with Jew-hatred.” In 1954, when William Faulkner led a group of writers petitioning the United States government for the release of Ezra Pound from a mental institution — had Pound been judged sane, a death sentence for treason for his collaboration with the Axis would have been mandatory — the dissenting voice was Bellow’s. He wrote to Faulkner that treating Pound’s advocacy of “hatred and murder” as eccentricity rather than insanity was symptomatic of the stunning indifference to recent events: “[B]etter poets than he were exterminated, perhaps,” wrote Bellow. “Shall we say nothing on their behalf?”

II.

In 1945, Europe was threatened by famine and epidemic disease. Millions of refugees had to be resettled and ruined cities and infrastructure rebuilt. The postwar denazification policies imposed by the occupying powers in West Germany focused on rehabilitating all but top-level administrators in order to create a viable state that would be a bulwark against further Soviet advance west. It was not until the 1960s, with the return of prosperity and a semblance of stability in international politics, that the subject of genocide began to be addressed. The first steps in a historiography of the Nazi Final Solution were taken in the United States, most notably with the appearance of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961. That year also saw the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the logistician of the Holocaust. The proceedings, under the scrutiny of television cameras and the world press, included dramatic testimony from survivors. Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the The New Yorker, and recast her articles for the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). In Germany, too, a new mood took hold. For the first time, the West German state tried concentration camp administrators and others who had assisted in the massacre of civilians.

“Eastern Europe has told me a lot about my family — myself even,” Bellow wrote in 1960 after a journey he made the previous year. “[W]hat I saw between Auschwitz and Jerusalem made a change in me.” Among the stories he heard from survivors were those told by his own relatives:

Cousin Bella […] tells me of one of our cousins who now lives with her husband in Geneva. During the German occupation of Riga this cousin and her sister were slave laborers in a factory that made army uniforms. Before the Germans retreated they exhumed thousands of bodies from the mass graves and burned them. A sudden sensitivity about evidence. The two young girls were among the hundreds forced to dig up putrid corpses and put them in the flames. The younger sister sickened and died.

III.

Solomon Bellows was born in Montreal in 1915 to orthodox Jewish parents from the Russian Empire. In 1924, the family moved to Chicago. Yiddish was the language of the home. For the adolescent Bellow, religion was immigrant baggage to be ditched on the road to American modernity. He became a Trotskyite. At university, he studied the radical new social science of anthropology. The publication of argotic, freewheeling Adventures of Augie March in 1953 marked him out as a literary innovator.

By the 1960s, however, America had changed. The Chicago of Augie March no longer existed. Poor but dynamic neighborhoods had transformed into an inner-city wasteland of drugs, crime, and despair: “The slums, as a friend of mine once observed, were ruined. He was not joking.” Bellow began to reflect on what had been lost, turning back toward Europe and the Jewish world.

Bellow’s detractors identify Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) as the point when the young literary rebel became a middle-aged champion of the elitist culture of dead white males. He was called a misogynist and even a racist. And the depiction of the United States through the eyes of Artur Sammler, a Polish Jew and refugee, is certainly provocative: “New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It was like an Asian, an African town […] You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath.” Sammler sees a generation seeking “the free ways of barbarism” while protected by a civilized order, wealth, technology, and property rights.

Sammler has landed in the middle of a cultural revolution where nobody over 30 can be trusted. On the shores of this new world, it means nothing that he has lost his eye in the war, that his wife has been killed by a racist regime, or that he has known the foremost intellectuals of interwar London. His voice is capable of speaking of an Eastern Europe buried under communist totalitarianism, of an Ashkenazi-Yiddish civilization obliterated by genocide, and an extinct interwar intellectual order. But nobody wants to know. It is as though none of it ever happened.

Sammler cannot relate to the stew of politicized thinking around him not because it is too radical for his tastes but because it is hopelessly innocent. If America is unable to comprehend what has happened not 30 years earlier on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, then America is incapable of talking sense. Social breakdown is Bellow’s theme, but Sammler is not — solely — about the United States. In depicting countercultural America busting its mental seams through the eyes of a Holocaust survivor, Bellow is widening his lens in an attempt to take in the recent history of the planet. If in his earlier novels he was happy to study individuals who were “nuts” or “cookoo,” now he ponders the reality of insanity as a collective phenomenon.

Intellectuals deal in reason, but their subject — human life — refuses to act reasonably. “Like many people who had seen the world collapse once,” Bellow writes, “Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility that it might collapse twice.”

IV.

The idea that modern life makes an impossible demand on the individual mind is one of Bellow’s great themes. “Too much of everything,” says Augie. “Too much history and culture […] too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence […] Which who is supposed to interpret? Me?” Augie has no clear idea of his own what this world is but he has a strong intuition that there are as many ideas of the world as there are human beings, that each is provisional, and that all are competing for recruits. Life is a project, reality an individual projection. In this, he sees to the heart of modern — American — life. He surfs the confusion of this world, freestyle; in place of trials and anxiety he has adventures.

But by the time Bellow came to write Sammler, he had a less thrilling take on the effect of so much freedom:

The many impressions and experiences of life seemed no longer to occur each in its own proper space, in sequence, each with its recognizable religious or aesthetic importance, but human beings suffered the humiliations of inconsequence, of confused styles, of a long life containing several separate lives. In fact the whole experience of mankind was now covering each separate life in its flood. Making all the ages of history simultaneous. Compelling the frail person to receive, to register, depriving him because of volume, of mass, of the power to impart design.

The idea that modern man recoiled in despair before meaningless choice and a deluge of information was one Bellow shared with Mircea Eliade, a colleague at the University of Chicago. Eliade had been a famous novelist in interbellum Bucharest and was widely acknowledged as the intellectual leader of Romania’s younger generation of writers and thinkers. He had settled in Chicago in 1957 and, as a philosopher and historian of religions, had enjoyed huge success with the English-language publication of his book The Myth of the Eternal Return, which had sold over 100,000 copies in various editions. Bellow had come to know him in the years prior to writing Sammler.

Eliade argued that man is religious by nature, and that the fundamental feature of religious thinking is the distinction between the sacred and the profane. The sacred is all that is unchanging and essential, the profane is all that is provisional, historical, and subject to decay. The basic characteristic of all religions, Eliade maintained, is that man makes sense of the world by cultivating an awareness of the sacred, and seeks through ritual to recreate it and participate in it. Mythical thought is an attempt to reconstitute the world of the sacred, which all cultures conceive of as a prehistorical Edenic era. Traditional societies impart meaning to existence by being centered on sacred time. Modern rationality recognizes only historical time, producing “spiritual aridity” and an anxiety that Eliade called “The Terror of History.”

Eliade was Bellow’s kind of European intellectual — polyglot, intensely erudite, with more than a dash of religious mysticism thrown into the mix. Bellow’s fourth wife, Alexandra Bagdasar, whom he married in 1974, was a Romanian expatriate from an old and very cultivated Bucharest family, and the Bellows and Eliades frequently socialized. Bellow and Bagdasar divorced in 1985. Eliade died in 1986, and Bellow delivered a reading at his funeral. At this point, Bellow must have believed that the “Romanian” period of his life was over. But rumors had long been circulating about Eliade’s association with Romania’s wartime fascist Iron Guard, and they became undeniable with the 1988 publication of Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945 by Mac Linscott Ricketts, which uncovered a series of articles Eliade had written for the Romanian fascist press in the 1930s.

Ricketts, a devoted pupil of Eliade’s, was interested in his master as a philosopher and literary figure. The section on Eliade’s political writings in the 1930s takes up a few dozen pages in a two-volume work of over a thousand pages — almost as though Ricketts had accidentally tripped over a bundle of newspapers while on other business — but the contents of these articles is stunning in the context of Romanian politics in those years. In them, Eliade comes across as another Basteshaw, theorizing manically while the boat drifts the wrong way; the serum that will end the ignorance, strife, and suffering of the Romanian nation, he proposes, is nationalism.

Eliade believed that democracy was inherently unsuitable for Romania, and that democratic politics was wearing itself out with its fixation on un-Romanian “abstractions” such as the rights of minorities and freedom of political expression. And when democracy wobbled, he argued, it tended to wobble toward anarchy and communism. Only a sense of national greatness and purpose could unify the nation. In a 1936 article titled “The Democracy and the Problem of Romania,” he wrote:

Whether or not Mussolini is a tyrant is a matter of complete indifference to me. Only one thing interests me: that this man has in fifteen years turned a third-rate state into a leading power […] In the same way, I’m completely indifferent to what will happen in Romania after the liquidation of democracy. If, in overcoming democracy, Romania becomes powerful, national and well-armed, and aware of its powers and destiny — history will judge this act.

Eliade was intensely anxious about the dominance of minorities in parts of Romania and about a presumed “invasion” of Jewish immigrants spilling in from the north. His concern with the physical decline of the national stock was among the intellectual banalities of the era; in one article he proclaims that Romania cannot assimilate foreigners as it did before because the peasantry was weakened by pellagra (from a change of diet), alcoholism, and syphilis — all, he observes, due to foreign influence.

Eliade fantasized of a coming spiritual revolution. By 1936, he was projecting a transfiguring “mystical spirit” and “Romanian messianism” on the Iron Guard, while writing for its press and being seen as its leading ideologue. Perhaps Eliade found the national dream so beautiful that he was willing to overlook the violent anti-Semitism of his fellow fascists. Or perhaps he had accepted that the Jews would have to absorb the inevitable collateral damage in the creation of a national state in which every Romanian had a sense of “belonging to a chosen people.” By 1938, he was convinced his country was on the brink of transformation and claimed that the fire of Romanian Orthodox Christianity was about to “dominate” Europe with its spiritual light.

In 1937, Eliade told his friend Mihail Sebastian that he supported the Iron Guard because he had “always believed in the primacy of the spirit.” Sebastian, who was Jewish, recorded in his diary: “He’s not a charlatan and not demented. He’s just naïve. But how is such catastrophic naiveté even possible!”

“I believe in the future of the Romanian people, but the Romanian state should disappear,” Eliade told Sebastian in October 1939. In September 1940, Eliade’s wish was fulfilled: Romania became a National Legionary State, with the Iron Guard ruling in alliance with the Romanian Army. By this time Eliade was abroad, having been appointed cultural attaché to the Romanian Embassy in London in April 1940, then to the embassy in Portugal in February 1941. In June 1941, Romania began fighting alongside the Wehrmacht. At this point, Eliade turned to nebulous theorizing on the common “Latin” character of the Portuguese and Romanian peoples, and the creative and civilizing destiny of the “Latin” race. In 1943, he wrote The Romanians, Latins of the East (a slim volume that Ricketts describes as “cultural propaganda”), in which he extols Romania’s historical destiny as the protector of the fringes of Europe from Oriental barbarians. The war in the east, Eliade says, in defense of “Christian European values” — Romanian troops were at this point fighting alongside the Germans to take Stalingrad — was the latest chapter in this glorious narrative of self-sacrifice.

Ricketts’s academic biography, curiously, never mentioned that the wartime Romanian state was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews. But a compelling 1991 essay in the New Republic by expatriate Romanian writer Norman Manea clearly connected Eliade with Romanian fascism. A second New Republic essay by Manea, in 1998, focused on Mihail Sebastian’s Journal (1935 to 1945). The Journal, which documents Romania’s slow slide into fascism, was published for the first time in Romanian in 1996. Along the way — as in the extracts quoted above — it records Sebastian’s sadness and perplexity at the deterioration of his friendship with “Mircea,” as Eliade’s commitment to the Iron Guard intensifies and his public expressions of anti-Semitism become more marked.

It must have occurred to Bellow by the late 1990s that Eliade had reasons of his own for feeling “a terror of history” when he asked rhetorically, in his best-selling book, how man “can tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history — from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings — if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning.”

VI.

When I met Norman Manea in 2014, on one of his trips back to Romania, I suggested that knowledge of the Holocaust as a Romanian phenomenon was not widespread in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. “Absolutely not,” he agreed. “And this was another shock [for Bellow]. And Eliade was this great intellectual, praised in America.”

Manea and Bellow met on several occasions in the 1990s but the subject of Eliade was tactfully avoided, though Bellow certainly knew what Manea had written about Eliade. (In a letter to Philip Roth in 1997, Bellow asked for a copy of Manea’s article, remarking, “You do well to direct me, or connect me, to Eliade.”) “There was no mention of him and there was certainly at the beginning a reluctance, on his part, to meet me,” said Manea. “He was a very close friend with Eliade, he knew a bit about this story but not enough. And suddenly he felt that he was in a kind of story where he may be also partially guilty, because he was friends with him. Philip Roth used to tell me, ‘Look, Saul smells an anti-Semite a hundred miles away.’ Well, this did not occur in this case and it’s not by chance. Eliade was a refined intellectual.”

There is an additional reason why Bellow may have had difficulty discussing his friend with Norman Manea. In 1942, while Eliade was serving the regime in Lisbon, Romanian Jews were being deported to camps in Romanian-occupied Ukraine. The five-year-old Norman Manea, along with his family, was among those expelled. Over a hundred thousand of the deportees died in the camps, on the road of cold, famine, and disease, or from incidents of random violence. It is estimated that around 400,000 Jews were killed by the Romanian authorities in Romania and in the area of Ukraine under Romanian wartime occupation.

In December 1999, Bellow appointed Manea to interview him for the Jerusalem Literary Project, over the course of three two-hour videotaped sessions. But Bellow resisted Manea’s attempts to draw him out on the subject of Romania and made no mention of Ravelstein, which was months away from publication.

Almost certainly, Bellow had been learning of the contents of Sebastian’s Journal while working on what was to be his final novel. And he must have been aware that the publication of an English edition was imminent. Manea had known about the diary even before its Romanian publication — fragments had begun to appear in English in the late 1980s — and Roth had taken a great interest in its contents. “Some fragments appeared, much before, not about Eliade, exactly, but from the diary, and yes, we discussed this […] I’m presuming Philip said [to Bellow], ‘Look! You see! Here’s the real proof of everything Manea was saying before but didn’t have the documents [to prove].’” As the US publication of Sebastian’s journal drew closer, Roth was promoting it vigorously behind the scenes.

It is not surprising that Bellow, a Nobel laureate in his 85th year, should have wished to account for the fact that he had been sipping tea and conversing with a Mircea Eliade — much as Mihail Sebastian had, half a century before. And so, Bellow included a fictionalized portrait of his relationship with Eliade in what was to be his last novel, Ravelstein.

Both Sebastian’s Journal and Ravelstein were published within months of each other, in 2000.

VII.

Manea’s remark that Bellow “found himself in a kind of story” is particularly telling. Ravelstein is a roman à clef, in which Bellow set out to become the master of his story once again by presenting a version of his friendship with Eliade. The Ravelstein character is based upon Bellow’s close friend Allan Bloom. Eliade appears as a secondary character, the academic Radu Grielescu, who gallantly opens doors and pulls out chairs for the ladies, remembers birthdays and anniversaries, engages in hand-kissing and bowing — and had once written of “the Jew-syphilis that infected the high civilization of the Balkans.”

Bellow (“Chick” in the novel) goes along with the charade because the Grielescus are “socially important” for his Romanian wife. He banters in French with Madame Grielescu and never probes Radu about “people he might have known slightly with the Iron Guard.” Grielescu fidgets with his pipe and does most of the talking, the subjects ranging from yoga to Siberian shamanism to marriage customs in primitive Australia:

How could such a person be politically dangerous? […] I suppose I said to myself that this was some kind of Frenchy-Balkan absurdity. Somehow I couldn’t take Balkan fascists seriously […] But what is one to do with the learned people from the Balkans who have such an endless diversity of interests and talents — who are scientists and philosophers and also historians and poets, who have studied Sanskrit and Tamil and lectured in the Sorbonne on mythology?

Ravelstein’s judgment on the historian of religions, the theoretician of myths, is more down to earth: he asks the unworldly Chick to remember when the Iron Guard hung up Jewish corpses on meat-hooks in a slaughterhouse in the pogrom in Bucharest in 1941. “The Jews had better understand their status with respect to myth,” he says.

Why should they have any truck with myth? It was myth that demonized them. The Jew myth is connected with conspiracy theory. The Protocols of Zion for instance. And your Radu has written books, endless books, about myth […] Just give a thought now and then to those people on the meat hooks.

Bellow had criticized Hannah Arendt on several occasions since the 1960s for having been enamored of Heidegger and what Bellow called the “eros” of German culture. Now Ravelstein was reproaching Chick for a similar error.

Mircea Eliade — with his ability to make lucid sense of myth and at the same time to disappear into an unmoored world of fantasy when touched by real events — resembled a character Bellow might have created at any stage of his career as a novelist. And in his last book, Bellow himself becomes one of these foolish characters, entranced by a veneer of culture, the charm of ideas, and a world of intellectualism that reveals itself as shoddy and inadequate when set beside the brutal facts.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is short story writer as well as a translator. In 2006, he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His two short story collections, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day, were short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He lives in Bucharest.

The post “The Terror of History”: On Saul Bellow and Mircea Eliade appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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