Dickheadedness


"We have made a generous offer, a very generous offer." That's what Tony Snow says, over and over, at the press conference.
"Tony" means having a stylish, aristocratic presence. Snow means ... well, it's slang for cocaine, and it's often used to accentuate the purity of white, as in, Snow White. So I guess Tony Snow could mean a stylish white guy who's better looking than his mom, and who may or may not snort coke.

When you're dealing with the Godfather, any offer that isn't your nuts on a serving dish is a generous offer. But screw that. Politics is just an excuse, a pretense to be doing something when I'm avoiding looking down into the chasm I am walking across. For me it's that satisfaction of identity when identity begins to slip away. I know when I see the face of one of the senators, or representatives, if (s)he is a corporate hireling or somebody with a sincere interest in the entire country. And if I make a mistake on the face I sure don't on the voice.

I know more about somebody from their voice than from almost any other identifying characteristic. That's because I worked with my speaking voice as a biofeedback mechanism to get to know my own heart, and even with as much work as I've done with myself, I'm still a dickhead more often than I want to admit. What I have learned to do when I hear my dickhead voice is just stop the show. "I'm sorry, but I am defending real estate I do not want to defend."

It's surprising how easy it is to do that once I can get past the idea of surrendering, or losing something. All I lose is my dickhead identity. But what if that is the only identity that seems, well, really stable? You begin to grasp the existential dilemma of relinquishing power. For a man, or a woman, the masculine identity is formed by the real estate he or she defends. Earlier, I was listening to Sam Johnson, from Texas, and he was asking the other house members if they'd asked their constituents, "Do you want to lose in Iraq?"

Of course they would say, "No, we don't want to lose in Iraq. We don't want to lose anything, any where, any time. We want to be winners. We don't want to be losers."

Unfortunately, we can't win in Iraq because we are not at war with Iraq. All we can do is occupy the country, which will continue to fuel an insurgency, just as an occupation in our own country would fuel an insurgency. We went in to depose a dictator as a favor to the Iraqis. We did that. And in the meantime we failed to provide security, disbanded the Army, purged the Ba'ath party of power, and began a process of privatizing all of the state apparatus, so the wealth could be moved from the people to international corporations. So I guess "winning in Iraq" is about the same as winning a game of Monopoly. When the Borg Queen has sucked out the wealth "we" will have won.

Some of us had a different idea of what it would mean to "win in Iraq." If we just had to go in there and depose Hussein because he was going to stop using dollars and convert to euros, then as soon as he and his sons were captured or killed we should have immediately left the country, offering our technical and material support to Iraqi companies to establish a base of entrepreneurial enterprise. There was absolutely no reason for us to alienate the Ba'ath party and the Sunni tribe. There was no reason for us to "do" anything except begin to build a foundation on which democracy might gain a foothold. That foundation was Iraqi, not Halliburton or any of the other big companies that were lined up like hogs at the trough.

We lost the war as soon as we had the poor judgement to maintain a military presence past our victory. The speed of the invasion was impressive and if we'd withdrawn back to Kuwait, and moved to diplomatic relations with the leader who emerged from the fray, it is unlikely he would would have forgotten how quickly he could be deposed if there were not some changes in the diplomatic and economic strategy.

Perhaps Taha Yassin Ramadan would have been our man in Bagdad. He was a cunning, amoral and brutal man, which suggests he would have worked well with the current administration.

There, you see? It's impossible to write about politics without being cruel or vapid. I don't want to defend that real estate. Only a dickhead would want Ramadan in charge. Hmmm .... You know what I'm thinking, don't you? I have to stop. My ancestors originally fled from England to the colonies because they were on the wrong side of a political insurrection. It must be passed along as a genetic tendency, and a revolting one at that.

So why am I wallowing around in the pig shit of politics anyway? It's because it's so easy to do. When I was traveling, the poorer the country, the more likely it would be that all the men would be at the cafe talking politics while the women harvested the olives and made the bread. There is probably a causal connection between arguing politics and poverty. It's like smoking; you get into the habit of it, even though you know it leaves an offensive odor in your hair and clothing and stains your fingers.

What isn't so easy to do is decide what else to write about. I began publishing excerpts from Ash Fork as I worked on it, but that doesn't allow me the space to rework the ideas and put together a finished product. It locks it in as soon as it's published. So I need to come up with something else, completely different from Ash Fork, so that I can work on it separately now.

What I am leaning toward is a series on hypnosis and bodyworking. I've read a lot of books about hypnosis, including the collected papers of Milton Erickson. I've read a lot about the history of hypnosis, the various techniques and how they are used, etc. I've looked at hypnotists' strategies for quitting smoking and losing weight and so forth.

What I haven't seen, really, is much discussion about the difference between hypnosis as a profession, in which you package it as a product and sell it in the marketplace, and the broader implications of incorporating the knowledge of hypnosis into your life. One of my favorite comic strips is Dilbert, and when I read "The Dilbert Principle," I loved Scott Adams' relating that he became acquainted with hypnosis as a way to understand why people operate in trance state.

At least that will give me something other than politics to focus on when I'm trying to write a blog and at the same time work off line with the Ash Fork manuscript. But I honestly haven't settled on what to write about while working on Ash Fork. I could write about sex I suppose. The readership sure jumps up when I do ...

Posted: Thu - March 22, 2007 at 06:55 PM