Twilight Time

November 21st, 2009  |   

 Heavenly shades of night are falling, it’s twilight time.
                                                                          The Platters

I’ve just witnessed a brilliant twilight. To the east the sky was already black, over-head it had turned gray, while in the west the sun kissed the day goodbye by splashing orange and red across the horizon.

Twilight time is a mysterious time when the world is shrouded in gray, hovering between darkness and light. Figuratively speaking, twilight has been depicted as a time when good and evil vie for attention — a period or state of obscurity, ambiguity, or gradual decline. The twilight zone lends itself to weird and strange happenings.

In 1959 Rod Serling created an American television series called The Twilight Zone. It was weird and strange as it combined science fiction, suspense and horror with unexpected twists and turns. The twilight zone was a bizarre place.

Watching the morning news, it does seem like I am living in the twilight zone.
•People, mostly young girls, are lining up in droves to see the movie “New Moon,” the second edition in the Twilight book series. It’s about a handsome, romantic vampire who shuns the job description of a vampire. Necking for him has nothing to do with sucking blood. Vampire books and movies are hot items today. As if we didn’t have enough blood-sucking bankers, Wall Street CEO’s, and lobbyists. 

• It’s reported that a pig caught Swine Flu from a person. But the disease de jour is now Palinitis. It has infected everyone, including the media. Huge lemming-like crowds are storming bookstores to get a glimpse of Sarah Palin and buy her book. One woman interviewed shows all the signs of Palinitis. Like a deer staring at headlights, clutching a copy of Going Rogue to her breast, she says she’s going home, climb into bed with an electric blanket, and devour the book. My God, does a vial of Sarah’s blood come with every copy sold?

• If that weren’t enough, there’s talk about the end of the world coming in 2012. It has something to do with the Mayan calendar. Thinking about the possibility of Sarah Palin being elected president in 2012, maybe there’s some truth to this doomsday scenario. Maybe the end will come not with a bang but a “you betcha.”

This issue of Notes is full of twilight thoughts—thoughts offered as the sun manages a final hurrah of daytime summer-like heat, while the nighttime fall chill anticipates a cold and dark winter on the way. 
 

The Noxious Virus Called Positive Thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my favorite truth-telling authors. I haven’t read her new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, but I sure am enjoying the reviews of the book.

Hanna Rosin, reviewing the book in The New York Times, says she has waited her whole life for a book like this — a book that comes down hard on what she calls “a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name of positive thinking.”
Rosin goes on to write that “America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relationship to genuine hope or happiness.”

Readers who know me up-close-and-personal know that I am a positive person. I enjoy laughter, smile frequently, and look for the best in the worst situations. But I understand what Ehrenreich is getting at in this book. She’s out to unmask the proverbial smiley face that so often hides and smothers the truth — the truth that there is nothing wrong with feeling that something’s wrong.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s take on the oppressiveness of positive thinking comes from her own experience with breast cancer. She’s bound to alienate some who wear what she calls “sappy pink ribbons,” and support groups where “the appropriate attitude” is “upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive,” where the word “victim” is taboo. She has little appreciation for Lance Armstrong’s comment that “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” or survivors who described the disease as “your connection to the divine.”

Ehrenreich believes the positive thinking movement was a 19th-century response to a dour Calvinism that has now turned equally oppressive. Furthermore, churches that preach the “prosperity gospel” — the belief that a positive faith will make you rich—contradict what Jesus was all about. “Where is Christianity in all of this? Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, ‘if a man sues you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also?’”

Rest assured that I’m not going to trash my t-shirt that says LIFE IS GOOD above a smiling person eating an ice cream cone. And I’m not suggesting you throw away your smiley buttons or stop posting an occasional smiley face on your e-mails. All I ask is that you recognize that a smile can hide more than it reveals, and what it hides may be important information. Acknowledge that so-called negative thoughts and feelings, when allowed out, often spark positive change in a world fed up with hypocrisy and desperate for truth.

(Of note: Check out Hannah Rosin’s interesting and informative article about the “prosperity gospel” in the December issue of Atlantic magazine. It’s entitled “Did Christianity Cause the Crash? How Preachers Are Spreading A Gospel Of Debt.”)

Veterans Day—Comes And Goes

Veteran’s Day has come and gone and a confession is in order. I have a hard time with this holiday because the flags, parades, music, and speeches hide more than they reveal. I watched the parade for a few minutes then went home to spend the day honoring veterans by revisiting Jonathan Shay’s powerful book, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Shay is a psychiatrist with a long history of having counseled veterans with Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and those who counsel veterans.

Writing about the social process which veterans encounter when they return from war, Shay tells the story of a veteran back from Vietnam. After a meal with his family, someone asks him what the war was like. “And I started to tell them, and I told them,” he says. “And do you know within five minutes the room was empty. They were all gone, except my wife. After that I didn’t tell anybody I had been in Vietnam.”

Paul Fussell, an expert on war, says there’s plenty of rich language available to describe war (blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, hoax, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum), but the problem is “less one of language than of gentility and optimism…The real reason (that soldiers fall silent) is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news they have to report.”

Truth-telling comes hard for veterans who have been exposed to combat. It’s that requirement for a smile and positive good news that Barbara Ehrenreich has written about. Hanna Rosin recalls that when she was a child with a neutral look on her face some folks would say “What’s the matter, honey? Smile!” It was to her “as if visible cheerfulness was some kind of requirement for citizenship.”

What Shay, a counselor to so many veterans, says is this: “The painful paradox is that fighting for one’s country can render one unfit to be its citizen.” The rage that veterans bring home from war, for a variety of reasons, often leaves them disabled and unable to engage family, friends and the community which sent them off to war.

When it comes to war, any one of the many we have fought, there is always a lie lurking beneath the pomp and pageantry of the Veterans Day. A fictitious romanticism manages to smother the ugly reality of war. Watch some of the old war movies which attempt to shape the immorality of war into some sort of moral story. Tim O’Brien tells it like it is in his novel The Things They Carried.

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth, if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.”

Those are words from an infantry foot soldier and Vietnam veteran.

Solace And Closure

The word solace is defined as “comfort or consolation in a time of distress or sadness.

A recent newspaper headline reads: Wounded Soldiers Return to Iraq, Seeking Solace. The article talks about a new military program that takes wounded Iraq War veterans back to Iraq “to exorcise demons” and “reassure them that their losses have been worth it.”  The solace searched for has to do with “psychological closure” even though there is no medical assurance that wounded veterans are healed by going back to a conflict zone.

Folks throw the word closure around with reckless abandon but you rarely hear the somewhat antiquated word solace. In my case, I bump into this word when I preside at the Table at the Holy Communion Service. Over bread and wine I pray “deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength.”

It’s strange how when you run into a word, it keeps running into you. The word solace popped up again in a magazine article pertaining to someone’s grief. Grieving over the death of a loved one, the writer Edmund Wilson wrote, “Why should I have solace when he hasn’t breath.” There was no such thing as closure for Wilson when it came to grief.

Self-proclaimed experts like Dr. Phil make house calls via a television set. They speak of closure as an answer to grief, but I don’t buy it. To paraphrase Wilson, why should I have solace when people around the world are sick-unto-death, refugees, starving, and dying in war? What room is there for such cloying comfort when others are condemned to implacable suffering?

In church we pray for the peace of God which is beyond all human understanding. We don’t ask for happiness, prosperity, or even success, even though there may be nothing wrong with any of that. The peace we hope and long for is somehow rooted in the peace Jesus experienced as a suffering servant—one who shared other people’s suffering, guilt and death. It is a peace found in conflict, not in flight from conflict. It’s not found in transcendent flight from the world. Instead, it comes only when human beings are immersed in and share, for better or for worse, the messy struggle of everyday living. Strength for solidarity with those who struggle is really all I can ask for, don’t you think?
    

The Counselor Who Went Berserk At Fort Hood

Jonathan Shay’s observations about veterans are profound and troubling. Veterans suffering from PTSD describe the horrible things they saw themselves and other troops doing in combat—killing children, raping women, burning villages. “War changes you…strips you of all your beliefs, your religion, takes your dignity away, you become an animal.”

Killing someone requires that you see the person as the enemy, an animal. The enemy must be dehumanized, converted into “Japs”, “gooks,” “towel heads.” They must be depicted as ugly, dirty, smelly, lacking emotions, godless. If in fact Muslim fighters are portrayed as “terrorists” and “Soldiers of Allah,” Christian soldiers could very well see killing them as justified, even heroic — David killing Goliath. One soldier put it in these words: “You couldn’t kill them (the enemy) if you thought he was just like you.” But I would ask what does that view of a human being do to someone brought up as a Christian and taught to look for the image of God in friends and strangers, and even enemies?

We must accept the fact that American troops who suffer from PTSD and other forms of mental illness are capable of violence when they return home—violence even upon themselves. One hundred and thirty three soldiers have killed themselves this year alone. And how about counselors—the men and women who counsel war weary military men and women along with veterans? Which brings me to Major Nidal Hassan—the man who perpetrated the Fort Hood massacre.

Hassan did a horrible thing and will have to be held accountable for his actions. But the claptrap I hear from the Fox in our media henhouse, and others looking for a bloody human sacrifice that will atone for the lost lives at Fort Hood, reeks of Islamophobia and racism. It hides behind words like “terrorist” and “liberal politically correctness.”

Before buying the rope and erecting a gallows, perhaps we should pay attention to counselor Shay’s words about the suffocating despair that takes place in the therapeutic relationship between counselors and the survivors of severe trauma. “Despair is communicable,” says Shay. “It communicates itself to mental health professionals, families, employers, co-workers, social service workers, and administrators.” That observation is substantiated by a recent penetrating New York Times article that emphasizes the overload on military counselors and the crippling stress they are under.

My take on Hassan, from a distance, is that he may well have been emotionally and mentally unstable for a long time. His mental instability, fed by his rage over the wrongness of this war and the pain and carnage it had caused, and then his orders to be sent to Afghanistan, caused him to go berserk. His violence, in a strange way, actual mirrors the violence perpetrated by us in Afghanistan and by some veterans back home. How can that be? Because this war is wrong and, like all wars, it is blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, hoax, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and suffering that cries out for the strength to put an end to the carnage.

Obama: A One Term President?

This time last year I was still celebrating the presidential election. I had no illusions about the change that Barack Obama promised and have said all along that he would be subject to the same principalities and powers that all presidents must face — demonic by nature and systemic in our culture and institutions throughout our nation.

Attempts to deal with the economic crisis and changes to the health care system are two of the places where we have seen greed and self-serving interests raise their ugly heads. And now President Obama faces what may be his most difficult test — the war in Afghanistan. It has Shakespearean tragedy written all over it. To be in Afghanistan with more troops or not to be there with more troops, that is the question.

What the American public still has not really understood is that the economic morass we are in is directly connected to our profligate military spending. While people bemoan a health care package costing $849 billion while cutting $1 trillion over a decade in projected health costs, they fail to acknowledge that we have spent about a trillion dollars on the Iraq War. And now we are on the brink of sending more troops to Afghanistan with the price tag of $1 million a year per soldier. The overall military budget could jump to $734 billion — 10 percent more than the $667 billion under the Bush administration.

In the Leonard Bernstein “Mass,” a street band and chorus do a rollicking riff on the Gloria: Half of the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election. Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction. And they call it glorious living. Prophetic words from maestro Bernstein. Folks are already polling Obama’s popularity and the wing nuts on the right are ready to torpedo him as a failure if he doesn’t send troops overseas. They can’t wait for the next election.

Garry Wills, in the November 5 New Your Review of Books, still has high hopes for Obama’s promise to “change the way Washington works” and would like to see him enter a second term. “But I would rather see him a one term president,” says Wills, “than have him pass on another unwinnable war to the person who follows him.”

I like that, and I like his conclusion: “It is unlikely that we will soon have another president with the moral and rhetorical force to take us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be sustained without shame and defeat. If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?”

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