The Death of Honor., Introduction

This is the first installment of a project I have been gestating, going all the way back to my college days at Penn State.  After a couple of explorative looks at other majors, i.e. pre-law, and phychology, I landed in the Philosophy department.  The reason for that was having met a remarkable professor emeritus, Ernst Hans Freund.  Dr. Freund was a birthright Quaker who had fled Germany after a brief stint in Sachsenhausen, a KV, concentration camp.  His family saw the handwrighting on the wall and knew it had to escape or perish. I had taken an intro level course from him, i.e. Philosphy of Ethics, and suddenly knew I wanted to explore the whole field of ethics in some depth.  What I also knew was that I had zero desire to make such a study into an academic pursuit laden with 'deep thinking' and theorical clouds of complex thinking.  I already knew that reading the so-called 'Dead Germans' was anathema to where I was.  I could use that crowd as a sleep aid, but they did nothing for my ability to navigate daily life in the trenches.

So, I spent the better part of the next three years writing weekly essays for the good professor and we would sit in his office and discuss them.  Kind by nature, Dr. Freund led me gently to a depth of understanding such things as 'selfishness vs. selflessness'.  What could or should be the balance between taking care of oneself and service to  others.  Many years later I spent about four years as an EMT-A, on a local rescue squad here in Maine, and that balance became a very important means of being in dire circumstances and keeping myself grounded and able to do so without being damaged by what I saw. Example: 3 a.m., driving cold rain, a smashed car and two teenagers in danger of dying before we could stabilize them and get them to a trauma center.  Things like that can eat away at your own sense of what is real and how to accept that life can be horrifyingly cruel.  One made it.

I came away from my time with Dr. Freund knowing that life is an ongoing  effort to maintain a strong and grounded connection with the challenges we all face in our lives.My intention and my hope in writing this series of essays is that I can help others to do exactly that. And, the foundation that underlies developing the ability to 'cope' is a deep sense of right and wrong.  Learning how to maintain a clear sense of right and wrong is as important as a scuba-diver knowing which was is up in zero visibility water. One needs to be able to get back to safety when everything is urging you to panic....in which case, you're toast.

My hope is that I can offer you, the reader, some ideas of how to always know which way is up.  Enter, the concept and the practice of HONOR.  I have no intention of making things any more complex than need be. My goal is to give you some 'things' that you can use as tools for navigating the dire challenges  that living in these times is foisting on each of us.  So, here goes. This is my story of how Honor came to be as a part of the human condition.

When we were hunter-gathering nomadic bands of people making a living off what we could find and what we could hunt down and kill, we lived in various caves, skin-covered huts, tents and whatever could be imporvised to keep us safe, from predators and from the elements.  I saw an example of one such hut in the Museum of Natural History in New York. Those early humans were tough and resilient.

At a point about 10,000 years ago humans realized that they could plant seeds and harvest food, instead of having to just find it or run it down. We became an agrarian society and this meant staying in one place, pretty much permanently, though droughts or other disasters might require moving at some point...which is still true today and we're seeing this happen as people are forced to abandon regions that are becoming unsustainable as the climate crisis deepens.  There is a 'diaspora' happening in which people must flee towards regions where life is still sustainable. And, of course, the people already living in these places are becoming threatened by this surge of people who have had to migrate or die.

As agrarians, we began to realize that others could descend on our settlements and plunder, rob and kill us for the food we raised. So, the nomadic warrior class morphed into the individuals who were willing to put the communityfirst and even sacrifice their own lives to defend it. This was the very first inkling of what has now become the military.  This happened all over the planet and out of it came such phenomena as the Samurai, the Knighthood, and on and on.  Each of these warrior cults (and I don't mean that in a necessarily bad way} developed their own ideas of what we now call Honor. It has been very well codified and often has a system of rigid rules and laws that a warrior member must abide by, or risk becoming an untethered outcast, a "Ronin" in Samurai culture, a leaderless danger to the established order. 

Over the millennia, Honor has morphed into some forms that are out of control and seem very radical by modern standards.  The violation of some codes of Honor is cause for not merely being cast out, but even for commiting suicide.  The concept of 'Face' and the idea that losing face is such a disgrace that one must commit sepuku, i.e. gutting oneself with a tanto (dagger) is manifest in every warrior culture in one form or another.  The 'loss' of honor due to the transgressions of another has been cause to challenge that person to a duel, often to death, by sword or pistol. It is my sense that these are perversions of the original concept of Honor, which was being willing to sacrifice one's life in order to protect and even save the rest of one's society, tribe, community, or name the type of grouping.

In order to have a military style force that can be relied on to defend the rest of the group, they had to know that this was real, and not merely a show of bravado.  The Congressional Medal of Honor is given posthumously to about 90% of its recipients.  It is awarded most famously to solders and marines who have thrown themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their nearby comrades in arms.

What we are currently experiencing in 21st century America is the death of this concept and its replacement by the idea that greed and dishonesty, and the domination of our society by  the greedy oligarchs who are not only willing to claw their way to a place of total dominance, but are unaffected by the suffering they will inflict in so doing. They want fabulous, unending affluence...but they also want to be the masters who control all the rest of us. 

We are witnessing what happens to a society when the concept of Honor is tossed aside in favor of self-permission to do WHATEVER is necessary to achieve their selfish goals.  For the so-called 'tech bros' there are no limits or any kind of restrictions on what they can do to the rest of us. 

This is a good place to pause for now. Please come  back and read the next installment when it is up.

And, on we go......to Infinity, and Beyond

OMG ! Eeeegads! Holy Sh*t!. WTF?

None of the above exclamations are even close to adequate to describe the current situation that America is facing.  We are on the precipice and about to fall into a genuine fascist dictatorship.  If you think this is a hyperbolic statement, perhaps you have been in a deep sleep-state, or maybe you have tossed your hat into the MAGA cesspool.  

Gradually, many, if not most, Americans are awakening to the fact that the Orange Idiot and his side-kick, and contemporary model of Rasputin, the Muskrat, mean to burn down the barn with the horses still inside.  They are taking a wrecking ball to the entire government under the bold-faced lie that they are 'fixing' it.  What they are really doing is converting it into a country where the 'little people' have virtually NO VOICE, and the elite (read the billionaire oligarchs) call all the shots as they loot the middleclass to swell their already obscene wealth.

I have known a number of multi-millionaires and, with one notable exception, they have all remained humgry for more and more afluence.This has been such a prominent and stark quality among them that is has caused me to ask, "Is enough ever enough?"  The answer seems to be a flat "No, never!"  One man I know is worth well north of 200 million, so, of course, he aspires to be a billionaire.  It's a sort of sick game in which your personal wealth is the primary, even the ONLY indicator of your worth as a human being.

Both Trump and Musk suffer from this odd form of mental illness.  Curiously, both of them are willing to inflict immense pain on the middle and working class in order to advance their own desires.  Not so curiously, they were both perniciously abused by their fathers as boys.  Fred Trump was, no exaggeration, a monster.  Elon Musk's father berated him for over an hour after he came home from being beaten unconscios by bullies. Hitler and Stalin...and likely every despot....were also bullied by their fathers. So, it comse as no surpise at all that they are driven to inflict pain on anybody and everybody that they can.

But, now the real question is:  how do we respond to these two bullies?  How do we prevent them from taking out their rage on us, as individuals and as a society?

I am going to offer an opiniou here that is based on my own experience in boyhood.  Three different bullies identified me as a potential target.  They were mistaken.  One of them followed me around a school 'fete' and taunted me, then finally poked me in the chest as he scolded and defamed me.  I broke my hand on the side of his face.  He fell down backwards and looked at me as if he'd just met the Devil himself.  He never spoke to me again and avoided me in the hallways of our little elite private day school.  Another such creep, cornered me under a fire-escape at the grade school I attended through the forth grade, and he started in with the same kind of dominant behavior.  I punched him in the nose and it immediately started spurting bright red blood.  Same result.

A third dirt-ball at a summer camp in New Hampshire decided that I was a likely target.  And, once again I responded with a surprise punch to his jaw.  He staggered back and looked at me with the strangest expression, a mixture of fear and awe.  Then he came toward me and extended his hand, surprisingly, to shake mine.  We didn't become friends, but he never tried to bully me again either.

The only way a bully like Trump or Musk can understand that he's not dominating his victims is if they fight back with every available means.  Based on the above instances, I have come to know this. And, we, as a people, have never been willing to be victims.  We lost the Vietnam war not because of cowardice on the part of our fighting forces, but because of politicians who lacked the moral courage to admit that we never should have been there in the first place.  There were many heros in the swamps and jungles, but their leadership in the political sphere were cowards. 

And, now our honor and our very safety is being challenged by two dirt-ball bullies...and we need to step-up and fight back with whatever mean is necessary.  If it comes to violence it will be a great tragedy, like the Civil War was.  But, the alternative is utterly and totally UNACCEPTABLE.

I still believe in the idea that is The United States of America.  We are a nation more good people than bad, by at least a margin of 60 percent to 40.  The people who form MAGA are asleep, poorly informed and some are just plain stupid.  We need to take back the country from the fools who still think The Orange Mussolini is working for them.  

Let's do it.

Do you really want to be his victim?

The Rasputin for Our Time

 To say that we're living in unprecedented times...and that they are off-the-scale weird, and getting weirder is to grossly understate what is now happening.  I won't recite the long and getting longer list of assaults that the Orange Idiot is inflicting on, not just America, but the entire planet.  You wouldn't be reading this if you were blissfully unaware that our democracy and our freedom are in deep, deep trouble.

But, in recent days, I have been thinking back to an historical figure that, while very different in some ways, is uncannily similar to a current personality who is in the news pretty much continuously:  Elon Musk.

Sure, Musk is the annointed 'Richest Person on the Planet', but he's a strange mix of qualities and one of the most dominant ones is his apparent desire and his already succeeding efforts to take over control of not just the Idiot, but America and even the planet.  His ego knows no limits and he's skilled at using his influence to manipulate and control not only the petulent orange-colored brat we currently have in the Oval, but he has cosied up to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and a list of others who apparently think he's a good friend to have.  They seem to have no recognition that Musk's plan to dominate the planet by controlling the digital sphere is well underway.  I'm not sure they even understand how that could work....but, it can.  

Yesterday a remarkable scene unfolded in the Oval Office; The Orange one was particularly resplendent in a brighter orange than even his usual shade, and he sat at the Resolute desk, looking as if he was receiving an enema with molten lead....as Elon Muskrat, in a long black coat and with his toddler son either on his shoulders or on the floor, earnestly picking boogers, held forth for about half an hour. A number of pundits noticed how glum Orange Boy appeared as the Muskrat held court.  Here was an unelected South African billionaire of all billionaires telling the assembled press corps that he was very busy demolishing numerous government agencies and essentially demolishing our government.  It was a moment for the history books without doubt.

But, here's the thing:  This will not last.  It's not going to be sustainable as the American people begin to rub the sleep out of their eyes and sit bolt-upright in bed.  "Holy Shit! What is going on here?'  will come as a rush of recognition that our rights, our very freedom, has been co-opted and then tossed in the bin.  Outrage is coming.  It will happen as the tsunami of 'Executive Orders' are recognized for what they are, i.e. illegal in many cases and designed to turn the country into a white ethno-state run by billionaires.  The people are still snoozing apparently, although there are signs aplenty that they are stirring in their sleep. The fools who believed all the bullshit and false promises are suddenly realizing that they have been had.  The various segments of our society, i.e. the farmers, the factory workers, the administrators, the bitter conservatives are all going to realize the scope of the take over...and boy oh boy, are they going to be pissed. 

What happens then is anybody's guess.  Yes, a second civil war is even possible, but short of that extreme, there will be blow-back and some of it will be full of rage.  

In Tsarist Russia, Rasputin came from the great Russian outback, and inserted himself into the Tsar's life, by winning over the attention and gaining a great deal of influence over the royal family.  The parallels to Muskrat are undeniable, despite the fact that the two personalities are quintessential opposites.  But, people in positions of power felt threatened by Rasputin, even to the extent of rumors going around that he had a humongous penis. 

The Influencers....might not work out

The upshot of Rasputin's rise to power was so threatening that in 1916, a group of aristocrats assassinated him.  And the story of how that went down even contributed to the mythos surrounding Rasputin.  Suffice it to say, he was hard to kill...but they persisted.

So, it's of course fanciful to say that we have our own Rasputin in the form of Elon Musk, but, at some point people are going to wake-up to what his agenda is and they will respond to the existential threat that he brings.  His ego dwarfs that of the Idiot, who is a simpleton by comparison. The fact that he has more money than God just adds to his veneer of superiority and his willingness to exercise power in ways that harms others is clear at this point. 

Trust me: his time in the spotlight will come to an end.  Perhaps not an abrupt one if he's luckier than Raaputin....but, it WILL end.

Now is NOT the Time to Close Your Eyes...

 I am back. I had to take a break after the November calamity.  I have struggled and battled with myself, until I am blue in the face, trying to understand how this happened.  I, of course, understood all along that the MAGA host of idiots would vote for him regardless of all his obvious shortcomings and rotten propensities.  If brains were dynamite, they couldn't blow their noses off.  There have been countless articles written trying to understand this mis-placed, yet fierce, loyalty. And, yet, it's not something new that we've never seen before. 

In fact, it's as old as civilization itself, the most glaring and disasterous example is that of Hitler and the Third Reich.  I once interviewed an elderly man who had been a Luftwaffe fighter pilot and survived the war.  He told me that 70% of Germans were '...go alongs to get alongs', that another 15% resisted, even if on a very subdued level, and the remaining 15% were rabid Nazis....the MAGA of their time, who would end up following Der Fuhrer into the flames of the Gotterdamerung, i.e. the Twilight of the Gods.  After only 12 years, the 'Thousand Year Reich' was  nothing but a pile of rubble and Germans were starving, many of them even raped to death.

So....here we are, with a re-run of a leader who aspires to mimic dictators, especially Putin, Xi, Orban and any others wbo have managed to gain a strangle-hold on their people. The Idiot loves the idea that Putin's resisters, rivals--if you can even call them that--are flying out of eleventh story windows, having the wings come off their airplanes in mid-flight, dropping dead with a nerve agent in their bloodstream, etc. etc. Nobody who has been listening and reading about what he intends to do as soon as his hand is off that Bible....which should burst into flames when he touches it...should be surprised. Time and again, people have written that we should believe him when he says what his plans are.  And, despite his slimy denial that he knew 'nothing' about Plan 2025, we found out that not only was he in on the idea of it, but that he was intimately involved in shaping it. 

Oh, he's got plans for you.....

If you somehow missed it:  Plan 2025 is a 900 page plan to destroy our democracy and push the country toward becoming a white autocracy.....for many it should be a 'CHRISTIAN' white dominated society where people of color, LBGTQ+, Muslims, Jews, and anybodyy who isn't ready to prostrate themselves before the Throne of the Oligarchs......are on the outs.  I.e., they will remain subjugated to the white masters of society.

As you're reading this, you may be wondering if it is an exaggeration. I can tell you that it is--if anything--UNDERSTATED.   

And, now we have the richest man on the planet--who it turns out is as much of an asshole as his Orange bossom-buddy.  Musk is a man who figured out how to manipulate the money machine and scoop up billions and billions of bucks.  His current net-worth is estimated at around 450 billion.  It's truly mind-boggling, eh.  But, the bad news is that he doesn't have the conscience or conscienousness, to accomplish anything but further plundering of the world around him.  He's as nuts as the Idiot, he is just a whole lot smarter, read 'more wiley'.   The idiot only THINKS he's the smartest asshole on the planet..which is just another one of the lies he tells himself and us.  When he finds out that Musk is riding him like a rented mule....it's going to get wild.

So....what, if anything, are we to do in the face of this rapidly unfolding diaster?  Well, I can tell you that the ONE THING we should not and cannot do is to become passive.  "What can I do?  I'm just one person among so many millons.  But, here's something for you to consider:  if you just give up and become a passive non-member of this society.............you will be exactly like the 70% of Germans who just wanted it to all go away, who wanted to hunker down and pretend it wasn't happening.  And, only a few years later, there they were, sitting on a pile of bricks that used to be their home. True.

This is a time for getting busy doing everything and anything one can do to connect with fellow Americans who also see the danger in front of us.  Join the ACLU, or any local group that is determined to kick up a fuss over the seriously painful plans and actions that these anti-democratic bastards want to inflict on the rest of us.

Just DO IT!!!!