Deepak Chopra Goes Deep:
"Obama and the Palin Effect"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The Republicans' success is based on their ability to activate not
just the base, but the basest of the base."
-- Swami Beyondananda
Every now and then, I find a piece of writing that is so incisive
and pertinent to the moment that I am moved to quote it in its
entirety. A few days ago, I saw this article by Deepak Chopra that
brilliantly expresses the political choices we face now, and
explains why Sarah Palin has been so successful thus far in
"activating the base."
Here is his article called "Obama and the Palin Effect:"
Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national
psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly
illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the
Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she
outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice,
given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of
governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents,
which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth
of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering
international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her
forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.
She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding
his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In
psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides
out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with
qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence,
selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of
Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to
express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves,
and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind.
(Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of
the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely
in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that
psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the
public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to
understand Palin's message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent
a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to
change and a higher vision.
Look at what she stands for:
• Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return
to petty, small-minded parochialism.
• Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to
repair America's image abroad.
• Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a
claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family,
don't need to be heeded.
• Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that
these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
• Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.
• "Reform" -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning
out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone
who doesn't fit your ideology.
Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which
has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical,
that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure
American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much
effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches
under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change?
Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin
is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to
apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of
feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of
women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they
are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple
national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear,
rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.
Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a
vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just
conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a
contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the
shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one
can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought
this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It
would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was
a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to
the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are
getting, without disguise.
More about Deepak at
http://intent.com
www.deepakchopra.com
web: http://www.wakeuplaughing.com
What's Wrong With The Federal Reserve?
yBy John Devore
The "Federal Reserve Banking System" is neither federal nor rese J
The "Federal Reserve Banking System" is neither federal nor reserve. The system was a replacement for the foreign (Rothschild) owned banking system thrown out of this country by Andrew Jackson, right after he was elected president. The FRB was reestablished by permission of the US congress in 1913. Twenty years later the congress, because of the enormous transfers of title to the gold and silver belonging to the American People to the FRB in redemption of the Notes issued to the US Government upon payment of interest, was forced to declare the Bankruptcy of the United States Government. That document is called House Joint Resolution 192 enacted on 5 June 1933.
There is a question of conspiracy because the US Congress has never answered the question of WHY did they borrow Notes from the Federal Reserve at interest when they at all times had the power to issue notes of their own based upon their own treasury without any interest? In essence the Congress simply gave the contents of Fort Knox to the FRB. Why? Good Question. A better Question is why are they continuing to deal with the very institution that bankrupted this country?
What's wrong with the Federal Reserve?
It is not "Federal", that is, it does not belong to this country. In fact if you read their balance sheets, you will find that the owners of the Federal Reserve believe they own the United States.
It is not "Reserve", that is, it does not do its business as it pretends to. A Fractional Reserve Bank is supposed to keep a specified fraction of its deposits on hand to satisfy demands for redemption of its outstanding notes. The Federal Reserve was for some time regulated by the congress and required to show the reserve within specified limits enacted by congress. Eventually that regulation was ignored and now the FRB does all or most of its business electronically and maintains no actual reserve at all.
A Note is a written instrument that acts as evidence of a debt. All real debts must be "Paid" in real value equivalent to the original value. In the case of the FRB you need only examine the face and back of the "Notes" they issue to see that the so called Note is not a note at all, as prescribed by law. The law specifies that a Note must include an unconditional Promise to Pay a certain specified amount at a certain time or upon demand, and may include interest. You can examine the Federal Reserve Notes of every denomination with your naked eye, with a magnifying glass, or with an electron microscope, but you will find NO Promise to pay anything ever. According to Law, the fact that the instrument is entitled as a Note without the required attributes of a Note, and because it is knowingly used to induce someone to exchange something of real and intrinsic value, the Federal Reserve Note is a FRAUD.
Of course this opens the question as to whether the US congres
s has knowingly induced the American People to accept the Fraud co
mmitted by the Federal Reserve Banking System. There are more than a few pages buried in the hundreds of volumes of the Congressional Record that clearly establish that the US Congress was well aware of the situation with the Federal Reserve, The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations Organization, the Internal Revenue Service and a half dozen other arms or fronts for the Rothschild banking system.
The question is perhaps not so much, what is wrong with the Federal Reserve, that is an obvious matter of record. The question perhaps should be, "What is wrong with us, US, for letting the Federal Reserve system control our country for so long?"
THE BAILOUT
Biden: Political Survivor
Palin: Rise To Fame
CAMILLE PAGLIA
Pow! Wham...The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars." (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in "The Phantom Menace.") This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.
That day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.
As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me -- and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).
Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.
Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.
One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil). Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones -- nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they're sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along -- poor dears!
It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.
And in the snow belt of upstate New York, for example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"
Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
Here's another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto's Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:Abigail Becker Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830
A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.
Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today's pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.
But what of Palin's pro-life stand? Creationism taught in schools? Book banning? Gay conversions? The Iraq war as God's plan? Zionism as a prelude to the apocalypse? We'll see how these big issues shake out. Right now, I don't believe much of what I read or hear about Palin in the media. To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.
The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.
The issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.
But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.
On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?
What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion.
The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.
If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society's acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life. If McCain wins the White House and then drops dead, a President Palin would have the power to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, but she could not control their rulings.
It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.
But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.
Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.
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" George Washington's brother, Lawrence, was the Uncle of Our Country. "
GEORGE CARLIN
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