I’ve been seeing all sorts of postings on Facebook and elsewhere, pointing to Jan 20th as “The start of a Golden Era”, “the day when eggs are 99c a dozen and gas $2 a gallon,” “the day the world will stop laughing at the US”, “a new dawn”, etc.etc. All this really smacks of an apocalyptic cult, like those doomsday cults that say the world is going to end on a certain day.
If ever there were proof that Trump’s supporters were members of a cult, this is it. In fact, like Jesus, Trump is coming again, a ‘Second Coming’. I turned to the famous poem of W.B. Yeats: “The Second Coming”. Here are some excerpts:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Really nails it! And who might that ‘rough beast’ be? I notice that he is even walking with a slouch these days.
I like the Bible’s depiction of the Second Coming: “..like a thief in the night.” Got that right! How about “..like a felon in the night”?
I’m always intrigued by these doomsday cults, because when D-Day arrives and the world doesn’t end, they keep going about their business as though there had been no D-Day. It’s clear that when on Jan. 20th, egg and gas prices don’t drop, it will have no impact on the cultists, who will then focus on theirnext D-Day, and believe just as strongly as ever in the Second Coming of their Messiah.
I’m getting bombarded with Facebook posts showing billboards with pro-Trump messages, usually referring to some Golden Age starting on Jan. 20. There are several Facebook pages posting these, but one main one is Next Chapter. Go look for yourselves.
There are two very strange features common to most of these billboards.
First, the photos appear to have been taken outside the U.S. The brand name at the bottom of the billboard seems to be some squiggly language — hard to read because it’s so small, but it looks a bit like Thai. Background shop signs and license plates are also written in these squiggles. It doesn’t look like Cyrilic, which would be my first guess as a Russian hack or bot. The people in the pictures are Caucasians, and one photo has an Eastern-European-looking streetcar.
The second feature is the ubiquitous grammar or spelling mistake. Maybe a misspelled word, like ‘Donold’, or grammar, like ‘is need to’, or even a duplicated or missing word, like ‘like like’. It’s so common, I must conclude that it’s planned and intentional.
Now why would someone intentionally make all those mistakes in English? It’s really a mystery to me, but here are two hypotheses:
A. The bots want to convince the audience that these signs aren’t machine-produced. A machine wouldn’t make all those silly mistakes, would it? Ironically, however, it’s precisely those mistakes that tip you off that a machine IS producing them.
B. The bots are tapping into America’s anti-intellectualism. People who get their English right are suspected as being ‘woke’, so these mistakes attempt to show that the messages are coming from uneducated hillbillies, who, as we all know, possess a knowledge superior to that of those pointy-headed ‘experts’.
Any hints as to where these are coming from? One common Facebook page is Next Chapter, which posts dozens of these billboards. No clue as to where Next Chapter comes from, nor is there any information on the ‘About’ section of the FB page. That in itself is rather suspicious.
Not all the messages are pro-Trump. In the past, Russian interference has aimed at sowing discord rather than supporting one particular party. So a sprinkling of anti-Trump signs confirms in my own mind that this is Russian meddling.
Cambodia is a thoroughly Buddhist country. I just took my son to school, which is open on Christmas day, as are government offices and most businesses. And yet, I exchanged “Merry Christmas” with the teachers. In front of the school were a Xmas tree, Santas, snowmen, etc. This happens all over Cambodia.
No one was offended or threatened by “Merry Christmas.” I haven’t heard anyone say “Happy Holidays.” No problem! Christmas, as a secular season, is celebrated around the world. I would not hesitate to say “Merry Christmas” to Buddhists, Moslems, or Jews. The politically correct avoidance of using the word “Christmas” in America appears ridiculous to me and to most Cambodians.
In the same vein, I do not hesitate to write ‘Xmas’. I feel sometimes that Christians might feel offended by my use of the X. But really now! It was the early Christians themselves who invented the X.
In summary, I can confidently wish all Cambodians, and people of all faiths around the world, a
Hamas allowed Israel to destroy Gaza in order to precipitate a wider war. They failed.
From the beginning of the war, Hamas had no chance of defeating Israel. Their only hope was to resist Israel as long as possible. Indeed, their network of tunnels and supply of missiles made it possible to hold out indefinitely, even if above-ground Gaza is reduced to a depopulated wasteland.
I have argued that the over-arching objective of Hamas was to anger surrounding anti-Israel countries into finally eliminating Israel. Using hospitals as military bases was a strategy designed to enrage the world over Israel’s killing of civilians. Hamas was willing to invite Israel to destroy Gaza, along with over 40,000 people, in order to precipitate Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, and others, to gang up on Israel.
For a while, it looked as though this strategy was working. Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel, as did Hezbollah. It looked as though an all-out war was inevitable, much to the delight of Hamas.
But then Israel more or less destroyed Hezbollah with its remote-controlled cell-phone bombs and its targeted assassination of Hezbollah leaders. At the same time, Iran showed itself to be a paper tiger when its hundreds of missiles were intercepted and had no effect.
The last straw was the fall of Assad in Syria, followed by Israeli bombing of strategic targets in Syria. Syria was no longer a threat, and Russia was no longer a front-line player, as Putin withdrew resources from Syria in order to fortify his Ukraine actions.
So now, Hamas has nothing to show for its more-than-one-year war with Israel, other than piles of rubble, thousands of dead and civilian casualties, and an economy on the verge of starvation. It is time for Hamas to negotiate. In fact, they had better reach a deal right now, while the Biden administration is at least outwardly sympathetic to the civilian devastation. When Trump becomes President, he will no doubt embolden Israel to pursue their destruction of Gaza to total ruin and genocide.
One possible counter-scenario is that Trump would like to claim credit for ending the war. Details are being worked out now, so that when Trump enters office in January, the deal will be ready to sign, and Trump will portray himself as the great peace-maker. Of course, the month-long delay until the Trump reign will cause a few more thousands of civilian deaths and more destruction and starvation.
Sure, we all know what integrity is: honesty, sincerity, morally upright, etc. Merriam-Webster defines it as:
firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : incorruptibility.
But somehow, I feel there’s more to it than that. This essay is the sort of exercise that Plato engaged in: taking concepts as real things, which he called ‘the forms’, and exploring the various aspects to see what they really mean.
Let’s start with the Latin root ‘integr-’, meaning entire or whole. A person with integrity is somehow a ‘whole’ or complete person. As Shakespeare commented, an integral person is ‘to thine own self true’, and it follows, ‘not false to any man’.
Freud’s theory of id-ego-superego is out of fashion these days, but it’s a nice model to gauge things by. If your id is out of control, you are a slave to your base desires, and you are not an integral person. On the other hand, if your superego is out of control, you are a slave to your moral precepts. That’s not really integrity, either.
Aldous Huxley wrote a fine book called Grey Eminence, in which he examines the personality of François Leclerc du Tremblay, a French monk who lived around 1600. He was absolutely devout and morally pure, spending hours every day in prayer and completely incorruptible — the very epitome of integrity. However, his strict moral values included the torture and massacre of thousands of heretics, as God directed him in his prayers. Is that really integrity?
Excessive emphasis on the superego plays a large role in the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment. As Prince Siddhartha, he led a lavish life of luxury (id-dominated). He then escaped that princely life, became a monk, and led a morally pure, ascetic life, almost starving himself to death (superego-dominated). Finally, he adopted his ‘Middle Way’ of balancing the id and the superego, that is, being able to engage in and to appreciate life without renouncing it entirely, and without becoming a slave to his desires (id).
Starving Buddha
What Freud and Buddhism have in common is an emphasis on balance — balance between the id and superego in Freud’s case, and balance between attachment and renunciation in the Buddha’s case. Even though the superego and renunciation can both satisfy the Merriam-Webster definition of integrity, I would argue that neither of these extremes constitutes integrity, as the fanatically extreme person, although honest, morally pure, and incorruptible, is not a whole person.
In order to be a whole person, one must combine the seemingly opposite extremes of id and superego into a unified and consistent whole, managed by the rational ego. Add this quality to Merriam-Webster and you get my personal definition of integrity.
Few people know anything about Turkmenistan, and far fewer have actually gone there. But its former capital of Merv was once the hub of the universe: a major stop on the Silk Road, a center for science and culture (home of Omar Khayyam), and in the ninth century, the capital of the Caliphate of the entire Muslim world. By the 13th century, Merv was reputed to be the largest city in the world, with a population of half a million.
I visited Merv several years ago. It was deserted and desolate — no tourists, no souvenir shops or restaurants, nothing. It reminded me a lot of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, especially the last line:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Also located in the country of Turkmenistan is its current capital city, Ashgabat. For years, the country’s post-Soviet dictator, one Saparmurat Niyazov, who labeled himself Turkmenbashi (= ‘leader of the Turkmen’), ruled as one of the most ruthless and self-agrandizing dictators in modern history, and built golden monuments to himself. He required all people to possess and to read his biography; there is even a large statue in Ashgabat of just that book. The modern city is really beautiful: a gleaming white marble city where the glory of Turkmenbashi is manifest everywhere.
Turkmenbashi
Yes, Turkmenbashi is a lot like the old Ozymandias, whose most famous quotation could equally well be that of Turkmenbashi:
My name is Turkmenbashi, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Will the white marble city of Ashgabat eventually return to the ‘lone and level sands’, just as Merv did nearly 1000 years ago? Will the golden statues of Turkmenbashi lie in pieces in a lonely desert?
History repeats itself again and again, as egotistical tyrants continue to build huge monuments to themselves, only to be forgotten by history.
I’m reaching that age when one’s body starts to fall apart. It could happen any day — that first stroke, that first cancer diagnosis. I can’t pretend that it’s not going to happen. I’m so blessed that it hasn’t happened yet.
As a result, I am savoring every moment of happiness. My family is a source of infinite joy in each moment. I want to squeeze the last drop of happiness out of the present.
But when that first death knell sounds, I will be ready. My goal will be the happiness of my family and others, and I will do whatever it takes for them. I’m not talking the big things; rather, it’s the small hugs, smiles, favors, etc. that count.
Even in my dying breath, I can still smile and say “I love you”, to bring that little bit of happiness into someone’s life.
As you know, I live in Cambodia, a thoroughly Buddhist country. Most of my life I have adhered to the Buddhist philosophy of detachment, of avoiding need and dependence, the causes of suffering. But you know, the Buddha abandoned his wife and baby son. I wouldn’t do that, nor would most Cambodians, who dearly love their families. On the contrary, my recent philosophy, and that of most Cambodians, is that of the old Barbara Streisand song: “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”
The future Buddha sneaks away from his wife and baby son: “The Great Escape”
I loved my daughter, who died of cancer at the age of 7. My feeling today is that “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” To have lived a life without love is not to have lived at all.
So today, on my birthday, as I contemplate my demise, I am still happy in the moment, and I can continue to make my loved ones happy. It will be worth the effort.
For most of the history of mankind, and in many countries today, the leader has usually led a luxurious life of debauchery and corruption, oblivious to the needs of his people. Yes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But for millennia, the People accepted that system as inevitable, so they accepted the status quo and even loved their king.
My many years of schooling purported to teach me that there was some kind of positive arrow of history, pointing in the direction of the betterment of mankind. Those courses in philosophy showed, first, a concern for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, as John Stuart Mill argued. Then, in the Age of Enlightenment, people were seen to have rights. In order to achieve these goals, education was deemed necessary, in order to form an enlightened populace and electorate. The United States was the beacon on the hill, shining democracy into the world, and declaring that “All men are created equal.” Even in the 20th century, the rights of women and minorities were enshrined in all sorts of laws, and improvements were made.
I was brought up to see this progress. Democracy, equality, and human rights have been almost my religion, as I believed so fervently in these principles. Having been nurtured in the same educational system and American culture, I believed that other Americans had this same belief in Democracy, in Progress towards more equal rights and opportunities.
Well, now I have been proven wrong. Americans have now voted to turn their backs on Democracy and Human Rights. That is my great disillusionment from the recent election, where bigotry, discrimination, denial of rights, and deification of the supreme leader have now taken center stage.
Did someone mention ‘divine right’? We now have ‘The Chosen One’ at the helm. His followers claim that everything he says and does is inspired by God, and therefore true and correct, despite fact-checkers from the Washington Post finding some 30,573 lies since he first took office in 2017. All fake news, I guess. I have avoided the word ‘criminal’, because a ‘Chosen One’ cannot commit a crime, especially since his own hand-picked Supreme Court has decreed that he is above the law.
Americans have decided that they want a supreme leader in the old style: corrupt, debauched, caring only for himself, seeking vengeance on anyone who opposes him, above the law, but projecting strength and manhood.
Is America’s grand experiment with Democracy at an end? Has it been shown to be ineffective, now that the People have rejected it?
One issue from the election that stands out in my mind is that of tariffs. Trump was able to completely misconstrue the notion of tariffs by saying, “I’ll put a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods. Think of how much money they will have to pay us.” The American electorate shouted “Yes! Yes! Let the Chinese pay us billions of dollars in tariffs.” If Trump or the American population had even a modicum of economic education, they would immediately see that tariffs are paid by the importer, not the Chinese, and the importer passes the 60% on to the customer. This amounts to a 60% tax, which will cause inflation for the already hard-pressed Americans. But they cannot or will not see this.
My point is that a lack of economic and civic education allows the demagogue to bamboozle the people, as in the H.L. Mencken quote at the top of this page. This is exactly the argument against Democracy put forth by Plato and Aristotle, over 2000 years ago. That is where America has failed; it has allowed its education system to deteriorate to the point where the population has become like sheep, vulnerable to cruel manipulation by despots. We have reached 1984, where Big Brother can say that something is black, when it is clearly white, and be believed.
This is why I am so disillusioned with the election. I have devoted my entire life to education, and it pains me so much to see the current anti-intellectualism and downright hatred of education in society, leaving the population susceptible to this demagoguery.
It looks as though we are going back, not just to the past century, but to the sybaritic despots of millennia ago.
Trump’s closing argument was made in Madison Square Garden, directed to a mostly male audience. It was vulgar; it was angry; it was politically incorrect. On CNN, David Axelrod claimed that Trump was closing his campaign poorly, that he should be focusing on the economy and solid issues.
I disagree. Trump’s closing message has been hate, hate, hate. This is exactly what appeals to that white, male audience, and will stir them up to go out and vote their hatred. Those guys feel that their manhood has been stolen from them. Their (often female) bosses, and probably their own wives, are constantly harping that they are lazy slobs who can’t do anything right. The message is, “what kind of man are you?” Those belittled males are finding their revenge through Trump.
Trump speaks their language, especially when he keeps calling Harris epithets like ‘dumb as a rock’, or ‘mentally deficient.’ He is the dirty old man that many men can identify with. Back in 2016, when the “Grab ‘em by the p***y” remark came out, many pundits opined that that would be the end of Trump’s chances. I claim the opposite: such ‘locker-room talk’ was exactly what American males wanted to hear, and may have even WON Trump the election. That may be what is happening this time, or at least, that’s what Trump is hoping for.
Just picture those rioters from Jan. 6. All decked out in some kind of Halloween costumes, pretending they are real tough guys. I almost want to laugh, but they are pathetic. A comment on TV by prostitutes sticks in my mind: they say that those bad-ass characters turn out to be their most pathetic clients. Listening to Trump not only makes them feel like real men, but also makes it sound that abuse of women, political violence, and racial discrimination are quite all right.
Contrast this with Kamala Harris. Axelrod and others are praising her for her disciplined closing arguments, for ‘staying on message.’ I watched her Town Hall on CNN, which some pundits described as a ‘home run’. I didn’t view it that way. To me, she came across as oh-so-politically correct. She had a ready and scripted answer (or rather, non-answer) to every anticipated question. She performed well, but I felt that there was no ’there’ there. Did she really mean any of it?
She lays out her plans, complete with numbers and statistics, about the economy, etc. How is it that most Americans claim that they don’t know her, that she hasn’t defined her policies? It’s that those plans go right over most people’s heads, because she is not really passionate about them (with the possible exception of the abortion issue), and people can see through her empty promises.
Harris’ supporters point at Trump, and say, quite rightly, that he has no plans or policies at all, other than vague and impossible ideas like rounding up millions of illegals and shipping them out, or putting high tariffs on imports. He is lambasted for stating that he has a ‘concept’ for a healthcare reform of Obamacare. He contradicts himself daily, so that if we just take his words verbatim, we have no idea what he is talking about.
But of course we do know exactly what he is talking about on all these issues, whether he actually states it or not, or even says the opposite (e.g. denying Project 2025, claiming that he will ‘protect women’, etc. ). This is because his hatred of immigrants, non-whites, women, LGBTQs, et al., is so palpable in every word he speaks, even when he is ‘weaving.’ Sending the military on vengeance missions against his ‘enemies within’ list strikes an emotional chord with the male hatred for the system that has so demeaned them and beaten them down.
For Trump’s supporters, resonance with his hateful messages produces a visceral response, untouched by rational arguments or facts. That’s why he may just win on Tuesday.
Noah’s Ark — the more you think about it, the more you realize how impossible it is.
Do religious scriptures have any meaning at all? More and more, I come to see the answer as negative.
Let’s start with the Bible, which is chock full of contradictions. Perhaps the most important one is also perhaps the most important moment in the whole Christian narrative: the empty tomb on Easter Sunday. The Gospels have very different versions of which woman or women were at the tomb, what they saw or didn’t see, and what they did or didn’t do afterwards. This is supposed to be the ‘word of God.’ Would God lie, or contradict Himself?
To most Christians, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether the Old Testament says ‘an eye for an eye’, while the New Testament says to ‘turn the other cheek.’ Did Jesus come as a peacemaker, or ‘with a sword’? Who cares?
I find it comical that 200 years ago the Bible was used to justify, according to Americans, slavery, racism, and denying women’s rights, but now, 200 years later, slavery, racism, and denying women’s rights, have now miraculously become bad, according to the very same Bible. You don’t hear much about the ‘curse of Ham’ anymore. I remember, from my youth, Ephesians 5:24: “wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” I’m not hearing that much these days.
The Bible is just a symbol; what it actually says is of little importance. You can justify anything you want with the various contradictory passages in the Bible.
I’m not singling out Christianity for its hypocrisy. Take Islam, where the Quran is written in Arabic. In most countries, the Arabic language is sacred and may not be translated, so most Muslims memorize verses and prayers in Arabic without the slightest idea what they are mouthing. In Africa, I saw young boys learning to recite the entire Quran, without knowing the meaning of one word they were chanting. The Quran is sacred, but most Muslims don’t know what’s in it and can’t even read it.
In fact, much of Islamic doctrine comes not from the Quran, but from the Hadith — sayings attributed by a wide variety of sources to have come from the Prophet Mohammed or his entourage. Just as in Christianity, the Hadith contains many contradictions, and Islam has various schools of thought and interpretations about which verses are more authentic or more important than others.
Here in Buddhist Cambodia, where I live, most people can’t even name the holy scriptures (the Tripitaka — bet you didn’t know that), much less quote from them. People follow the teachings of the monks, and of their family upbringing, oblivious to what the scriptures say.
Just as in other religions, Buddhism has various versions, interpretations, and contradictions among the Tripitaka. Cambodian Theravada Buddhism recognizes the Pali Canon, which differs from other branches of Buddhism.
So why do we have holy scriptures, anyway? Well, for one thing, they symbolize the ancient continuity of the religion. Simply the very existence of the Bible — whatever it says — shows that Christianity has been around for a long time. It gives Christians a sense of rootedness. Same goes for the Quran and the Tripitaka. They give the religious community a pivotal point of unity, even though the (some 45,000) Christian sects interpret the Bible in different ways, or emphasize different points of it.
Those 45,000 Christian sects, which all agree to accept the Bible as holy scripture, but which have 45,000 different interpretations of it, are to me the most convincing evidence that the Bible is an important focal point for Christianity, but that it doesn’t really matter what the Bible actually says.
