EXCLUSIVE!!!
Before I begin this post, let me just point out that this is truly an EXCLUSIVE!!! No other ‘blog out there will have this exact combination of words, express it the way I express it, deal with this particular issue in my way than Horsepoup. Horsepoup was first! First on the scene, first to report, first with this coverage, these images, etc. In fact, even if someone were to copy this Word document from my hard drive and post it before me, I’m still posting it for the first time right here on Horsepoup at this exact moment, exclusively.
Nevermind that I’ve told you more about me being exclusive than I have about anything else... or that I really don’t have anything to report at all other than my usual ramblings that we’ve all heard before by others so eloquent they actually get paid to write it or say it in syndicated columns or network news stations, I’ve got the exclusive on this one! Horsepoup was the first. Horsepoup brought it to you. Horsepoup has the exclusive. Oh, and did I mention that Horsepoup was first?
Doesn’t that annoy the shit out of you?
I try to watch the news every now and again just to keep The Daily Show honest. I read the Akron Beacon Journal quite a bit, The Plain Dealer occasionally, USA Today and the WSJ a little less frequently, but at least once a month, and I check out a variety of magazines pretty regularly too just to try to keep up with and make my own sense of the world around me, but exclusivity rarely helps in that effort. It’s never something I look for. In fact, if the stations I watch, the locals and the cable giants, spent more time coming up with useful news and less telling me how exclusive their report is, I might watch more of them as well. I don’t give a rat’s ass about exclusivity, what I care about is news I can use. I’m guessing I’m not the only one out there who thinks this.
It’s no wonder more people get their news from The Daily Show. (and I purposely did NOT use quotes around “news” because their approach is no more comical than the others.
OK, now that we’ve established Horsepoup’s EXCLUSIVE coverage let’s move on to what we’re covering exclusively:
Human Nature.
Specifically the balance that must exist in human nature that Republicans like to pretend doesn’t until one of their own gets caught displaying it.
About 6 months ago I began reading a book by Thomas Moore called THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL. I suppose you’d call it a self-help book, but it’s more like a philosophy book. It examines the importance of mourning or “dark nights” to the development of a person. I’ve been carrying it in my briefcase for 6 months not because it isn’t interesting to read, but because, to me, it’s just not a page-turner kind of book. I’ve heard of people who read it in one or two sittings and couldn’t put it down, but it’s just not that kind of book to me. Instead, I read a section or two at a time and let it sink in a little. If not, I find it a bit repetitive because it deals in such broad strokes that it all comes back to the same ideas. This, however; doesn’t make it any less meaningful. That’s why I’m still carrying it around. Books that don’t strike me don’t last that long in my possession, but this one has.
Lately what’s struck me about it is what it, like most philosophy, has to say about the way the Bush administration and the Republicans who attach themselves to it conduct themselves – namely, in a short-sighted, superficial, anti-human manner.
Before I explain that, let me point out that another reason I’ve enjoyed reading the book this long is because of its worldly approach to its topic. It incorporates elements of Christian faith in all shapes and styles, other faiths, Zen Buddhism, atheism, agnosticism, philosophers from all over the world and various time periods... you get the idea. It doesn’t tell you that any one of these sources is right or wrong, but simply that each offers amazingly similar and similarly helpful advice when it comes to the importance and methods of dealing with the darker moments in every human’s life. I like that approach because it doesn’t rely on any sort of EXCLUSIVITY. There are no contradictory moments due to strict adherence to any one source of knowledge or rules for living. Instead, it asks you to recognize what you’re going through, how it’s affecting you, how you can be better on the other end of it and, most importantly, to know that what you’re experiencing is every bit as much a part of your life as the good times are.
It is that sort of balance that, I suppose, fascinates me the most. The concept of yin and yan has always held water for me. Usually it manifests itself in something much more inane, like my love of weather... all weather, not just warm, sunny days, but all four seasons in Northern Ohio, or summer rains and hot summer days. I always thought it was strange that people act like those sunny days are the norm and thunderstorms are some kind of aberration or punishment from the gods. Weather is weather. It takes all kinds!
Similarly with bees or mosquitoes. As a kid I wondered about the possibility of simply doing away with these annoying creatures. Why couldn’t we just spray the world and kill them off. I suppose it was around third grade or so that I learned about ecosystems and the role that each part plays. No bees, no honey. No mosquitoes, no bass fishing or bird watching... you know. (I’m not a biologist, but I’m a student of life with a grasp of the basic concept.)
So this idea of balance as it applies to humans is all the more fascinating to me. The fact that humans are a balance of black and white, good and evil, happy and sad has just always made perfect sense to me. The notion that a fever is the body’s way of dealing with an infection is simply amazing.
What DARK NIGHT points out is that, these days, we’re a little too quick to reach for the ibuprofen or acetaminophen or whatever fever reducing medication Madison Avenue has convinced us is the safest, healthiest choice. That fever, to a degree beyond what most of us are comfortable with these days, is the body’s way of handling a problem it has recognized long before the conscious mind came in to mess with what is really a pretty well-balanced system. We do the same with therapy and counseling these days, trying to “fix” sadness or mourning rather than letting it run its course, learning and gaining what we can from it and thus benefiting from the experience. We don’t allow ourselves to become fully human.
So yeah, human mental states can be pretty well-balanced also, when we let them. Humans have dark thoughts and light thoughts. Left alone, we all hear the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. I won’t go so far as to suggest that all of us listen to the right one, but I will agree with the book in suggesting that we’d all be a lot healthier, mentally and physically, we'd make better decisions if we let the amazing machine that is the human body, run its course a little longer than we do before intervening.
So what does this have to do with Republicans? Well, nothing, exclusively, but as long as the righteous right continues to tell everyone that they know what’s better for us, and, in the course of doing so, creates some unbalanced ideal that completely contradicts human nature, then they continue to ignore the most basic ideas about what it means to be human. The result is that any positive outcome based on their “perfect human” philosophy is so artificial, so impossible for humans to maintain that it is, at best, extremely short-lived and, at worst, a provocation of the dark side such efforts seek to repress, virtually guaranteeing that that dark side will eventually return to the surface, probably in a manner much more disturbing than if said righteousness were simply accepted as HALF the balance in the first place.
Case in point: Mark Foley. Look, I don’t know what he was thinking or what he actually did, but when his party puts themselves above everyone else by pretending that human desire doesn’t exist, anyone who shows any outward sign of that desire has to fall hard. I’m not going to say that I approve of his instant messages or pretend that even if those messages were the sum-total of the whole situation that that’s ok, but pretending that such desires are not part of human nature is simply lying and contradictory to what we all know about ourselves. It’s begging for some big outpouring, some catastrophic event in which that balance is finally struck. Because that balance WILL be struck. The human machine, nature, biology WILL run its course. The problem is, when you establish a platform that pretends this balance of human nature is NOT part of human nature, then when said nature shows itself, you prove yourself to be a fraud.
Another case in point: Bill Clinton. Look, I’m not going to say that cheating on your wife and then lying about it to the public is ok, but what he did, like what Mark Foley did, is something we’ve all experienced. Using either of them as cathartic elements, sacrifices to purge our own guilt isn’t fair to them or helpful to us.
Caution – liberal rant inserted here: nevermind that Clinton and Lewinsky were consenting adults whose acts took place in the privacy of the most secure office in the world and, as such, their acts were nobody’s business but Bill, Hillary, and Monica’s. And don’t even start with that crap about how “if I had sex in my office, I’d be fired,” cuz you know it’s not true and you know someone who has done it. If you really believe the bigwigs in corporate American have never had sex in their offices, and you really believe that whether they did or not is any of you're business, then you’re not reading this anyway.
The much more important point is that what Clinton and Foley were truly guilty of is something we’re all guilty of: being human. What’s more, the tendency for these desires to manifest themselves in a way that will get you caught is actually pretty common among people whose desire and motivation propel them to the top – athletes, politicians, CEOs, power players on all sides of all aisles are prone to acts like this. Those of us who settle for less power, prestige and pay seem to be less likely to act on these desires... our balance is of a different nature, but the same elements are there even if the proportions are different.
This doesn’t mean their behavior is excusable – don’t confuse what I’m saying with some stereotypically “liberal” idea, but rather that the impetus for their behavior is something we all share. This is the concept the righteous right pretends doesn’t exist. So when one of their own “falls victim” to these facts of life, there’s no way to explain it away. It’s inconsistent with their professed beliefs. That humans have these “flaws” doesn’t fit into the picture of the world they paint. Therein lies the danger, the contradiction, the problem with such beliefs.
If Jesus had to die for our sins, then we are sinners, all motivated, to lesser or greater degrees by the same balance or lack thereof. If you’re going to claim to live by Jesus’s teachings, then you have to admit we ALL need him and you can’t claim that Clinton or Foley are truly exceptions to the rule. Their balance may have been a little more skewed than most of ours, but they are, in more ways than not, just like the rest of us.
So instead of pretending that Foley or Clinton is the devil, that all Muslims are terrorists, that terrorism isn’t a natural result of this balance of nature, that “evil” will ever be wiped out... or that terrorism will ever be wiped out... or that terrorism is some “thing....” some enemy that can be identified and defeated, we’d all be a lot better off if we’d admit that we all have some issues.
We’d be a lot farther down the road to encouraging a peaceful balance if our issues weren’t exacerbated by conditions like those the people in Iraq are facing right now or if the people of North Korea weren’t having their balance affected by the poverty and oppression they face. The people among us who are having the most difficulty maintaining their balance are being pushed to the edge by the actions of the Bush administration in their effort to promote this lie and in their blindness to this balance of human nature that we all must accept.
The balance of human nature is a law like gravity. It works whether you believe in it or not. Mess with it... step off a building or a cliff, and your beliefs won’t help you. Messing with it for too long, refusing to believe it, is like hitting that hornet’s nest with a broomstick – you might get away with a couple of swats and you might convince people, who because of their circumstances, are ready to be convinced, that hitting it is the right thing to do since you didn’t actually get stung yet, but thousands of people have been stung, fatally, as a result of that ill-advised action. Hundreds of thousands have been stung non-fatally. For them, that ill-advised action, that sting, has dangerously affected the balance of their human nature. The imbalance is making itself known already. It will continue to do so, in ways fewer and fewer of us will be willing to accept and ways that are harder and harder to ignore, until it restores itself.
We can be part of restoring the balance, taking into account the needs of all who fall under its influence, or we can refuse to acknowledge it in favor of the short-term interests of a few. But the balance will be restored.
Remember, you heard it here first – this has been a Horsepoup exclusive!
