“Cancers Grow from Within” Oct. 28, 2018 Dr. Roger Ray
Yuval Noah Harari writes in “Sapiens” Homo sapiens rule the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights.
Both ancient and modern depictions of Satan tend to make the old demon look both hideous and frightening. Ancient artists, even when they depicted Jesus as looking quite European, would depict Judas as being dark, hairy, with a crooked nose and stooped shoulders.
We do the same in modern films, making the evil emperor in the original Star Wars series or Snoke in the recent series look so hideous that it makes going to the dark side, even for a nice Starbucks cappuccino seem unlikely.
Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, I don’t even know what happened to him. He was human but as the nemesis of the series, he looks like he is half serpent. And in the Marvel universe, Thanos, the killer of worlds and holder of the 5 infinity stones still couldn’t get a little plastic surgery on that chin and some hair implants.
But the truth is that the real villains in the world rarely do us the favor of looking the part of the movie or artistic painting of the villain.
About 20 years ago I wrote a grant request to the Burrell Foundation to do research into Methamphetamine addiction in our area. That is when I first got to know Paul well when Paul was directing research for Burrell. I wanted to know why people ever started using a drug that was so widely known to be highly addictive and that it led to losing your job, your spouse, your kids, and then your teeth and your health and eventually, quite possibly losing your freedom or your life.
He very helpfully walks us through what it is that makes fascism attractive. Now, if we had 10,000 people in the room and I asked for a show of hands of all of the fascists present, it is a safe bet that no one would raise their hand. Fascism isn’t a decision that you make, it is a cancer that grows from within.
Nationalism is a sense of identity that we have with members of our nation. We don’t know the 350 million people in our nation but we feel a connection to them so that when there is a disaster in another country, the news media will immediately research how many Americans were on the ship that sank, were on the Asian beech where a tsunami hit, or were killed in a earthquake in Mexico.
In war, our media reports on the numbers of Americans killed in battle and rarely mentions death tolls of anyone else, not simply because they are the enemy but because, at some visceral level, they are not quite as human as we are. I probably don’t have to remind you that when the news of the horrific murder of the Washington Post reporter, Jamal Khashoggi, reached the president, Trump’s first response was, “Well, we understand that he was not an American citizen,” almost a dismissive, “Why are you bothering me about someone who doesn’t matter?”
But within a nation, there are usually several other groups we identify with. When Trump says that he is a “nationalist” many people fear that he means a “white nationalist,” because he often doesn’t seem to include brown people in his considerations.
We here identify as Americans, some of us also identify ourselves by gender or sexual orientation, or as black, Latino, or white. In recent years we have seen our nation ferociously divided between Republicans and Democrats to the point that the parties will do things to hurt the nation if it helps their party, which used to shock us but now we expect it. We have always, though usually quietly, identified by class, sometimes by regions of the country, or what college we attended or what sports teams we loyally support.
And those subdivisions can take on a life of their own as we have seen this week as someone sent bombs to the homes of two former Democratic presidents, and three other Democratic leaders. But usually we deal with the sub divisions pretty well if not entirely comfortably. I identify as an American, and a political and religious liberal. My neighbor across the street identifies as an American, and a political and religious right-wing lunatic. We rarely speak though we have had heated correspondence. It would never occur to me to bomb his house, or vandalize his car, or even write the word “psycho” in 6 ft tall letters in his overly manicured lawn with Roundup. And even if I have thought about it, I would NEVER DO IT.
A nation of several million people is comprised of many subsets of tribal identities and we learn to get along with one another where we can and avoid contact where we cannot. Fascism, however, is that form of nationalism that tells you that you don’t have to tolerate the tribes that are not your tribe. Fascism can assert that it is the primary definition of the nation. We hear this out of certain conservative politicians who insist that ours is a Christian nation when it clearly is a nation founded on religious freedom that includes all religions and those with no religion at all.
Fascism is opposed to any tolerance of diversity. Fascism, as Yuval Harari points out, doesn’t tolerate criticism or opposition. So, when you hear Trump calling journalists who have criticized him as being the enemy of the people, or calling them “fake news” when there has never been a more fake news source than our illegitimate president. When you hear him leading chants to lock up political opponents . . . no, strike that, he has never called for locking up any male political opponents . . . just women and I’ll let you reach your own conclusions about that.
When you see Trump navigating his way into a totally reprehensible Muslim Ban, building a wall at the border with brown people to the south, and manipulating legislation to cut taxes on his tribe while cutting services to the majority, then, in all of these things, you can see the dismantling of democracy and the creeping assertion of fascism but it is never portrayed as goose stepping Nazi’s. It is rather portrayed as an attractive process of taking America back for “Americans” if you define “Americans” as rich, white, heterosexual men, with nominal connections to Christianity.
But, when Trump looks into a mirror, he doesn’t see a misogynist, racist, classist, xenophobe, with serious character defects of lying, stealing, committing treason and tax fraud, he thinks that he is looking at the most beautiful thing in the world. Most Trump supporters look at themselves in the mirror and see that the world is finally realizing how important that they are.
Trump doesn’t think that he is destroying democracy and creating a fascist state. He just thinks that he is correcting past wrongs and putting rich, old, white guys back in the driver’s seat where they have always belonged.
When I entered the ministry 40 years ago, there was a German born woman who had been a teen war bride. She told me that as the Nazi’s grew in power and went to war, she didn’t think about the holocaust, she didn’t think about innocent victims in Poland, England, or France. She said, “What I saw were young German soldiers marching in the streets and I felt proud to be German and honored to life in the time of Germany’s return to power.” Fascism looks beautiful to the tribe that is ascending. It only looks ugly to its victims.
I don’t want to go too deep into the weeds talking about information technology, but Yuval Harari says that there are two things that make fascism more likely in the 21stcentury than it has ever been before. The first is the amassing of information in the hands of too few people so that they can control the feelings and hence the votes of the majority and, in many ways, that is a matter of engineering and data management. But the other side of that coin if for all of us to learn not to be manipulated by being told that we are much more important, more beautiful, than we really are.
In the past week, the Trump administration has sought to undo progress made in the recognition of transgender, insisting that everyone always be identified by the appearance of their genitalia at birth . . . even when that, in some instances, is quite ambiguous. Well, about 5% of Americans identify as being gay or lesbian and about half of 1% identify as being transgender. So, when the majority seeks to deny the validity of a minority, you can do that and be just like my old friend Jana, who didn’t see Nazis marching in the streets, she saw proud, strong, young Germans.
The challenge for us, if I may pull the thread of my talk on empathy last week, is for us to care about and feel the plight of that fraction of a percent of Americans who are trans even if you are not trans, even if no one in your family is trans, and no one you know well is trans. Empathy allows us to anticipate and feel with a marginalized minority so that we don’t go down the path of fascism.
Look, no one who is uninsured is opposed to universal health care, right? The people who are opposed to universal health care are people who comfortably have health care. They are too easily infected with a bad case of “I’ve got mine,” so that they sincerely don’t care what happens to the uninsured and the uninsurable. What we need for those people to see is that is exactly what fascism is . . . what is good for me and my tribe is good and what that does to you and your tribe doesn’t matter.
But like that before and after photo I showed to you about meth addiction, fascism starts out looking attractive but what it turns a nation into is not so pretty.
The way we fight the ugliness of tribal fascism is not by locking more young black men in prison but by sending more young black men to college and giving them good paying jobs in meaningful careers. The way we make our neighborhoods more safe is not by getting people to buy more guns to defend their little patch of earth but by improving the standard of living of the people who might otherwise have been so disenfranchised that they might turn to crime.
We don’t need more police, we need a less criminal society. We don’t need to outlaw abortion, we just need to create an economy in which young women can afford to give birth and care for a child. We don’t need to steal more Indian Reservation land to build oil pipelines, we need to build renewable energy resources that won’t kill us with pollution.
While we are investing in military hardware with the ridiculous notion that we can use ships and planes to maintain a global economic empire, China is investing in artificial intelligence and will be poised to control world markets while our military hardware turns to rust. While we raise interest rates and college tuitions, most of western Europe and much of Central and South America is making college tuition free because they want to have a successful future, a future where the USA will be left in the dust if we don’t change.
The USA has been the most productive and inventive society in the history of the world. All of that ingenuity and passion is still here but restrained by a stupid and self-serving corporate and political administration that is trying to employ 19thcentury thinking in the 21stcentury. They have become a cancer and, somehow, they are ideologically spreading into our own community, into our own families.
We are gathered here in a week that began with news of pipe bombs being mailed to prominent citizens, former presidents, and media outlets that have had the honesty and character to be critical of our current President; and the week ended with a senseless and horrific massacre in a synagogue in Pittsburg, claiming at least 11 innocent lives.
The president and those who have so anesthetized their conscience as to be able to defend and support him, refuse to accept the obvious responsibility they have in advocating for partisan violence and division in our nation. We are engaged in a moral contest for the hearts and minds of America. The Trump administration blows the dog-whistles of racism and xenophobia and constantly tells lies intended to trick the prejudiced and simple into supporting the progress of fascism in America. It is our job to fearlessly tell the truth, and to loving try to reunite our democracy.
It is time for America to get healthy again and it sure isn’t going to come from the leadership of the cancerous administration… it has to come from you.
