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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: American psyche

Noah’s Ark, Judges & Lessons Not Learned

03 Tuesday May 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Religion

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9/11. Celebration, American Patriotism, American psyche, Book of Revelations, Christianity, Climate Change, Culture of Imperialism, Global Warming, Hyper-Patriotism, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Judges, Noah's Ark, Osama bin Laden, Patriotism, Politics of Religion


Celebration of Osama bin Laden's death outside of White House, May 1-2, 2011. http://cfnews13.com

One of the really cool things about having lived an eclectic life — whether by choice or parentage — is that I often see things around me very differently from most people. It may make me goofy or an oddball, but it also makes me the thinker that I am.

Even on matters of belief, I find myself at odds with most Christians. It’s made it hard for me to find a church that I’m comfortable with for more than a few services. Today’s American Christians, Protestant, Catholic, Evangelical or otherwise are for the most part a bunch of hypocritical and self-absorbed — but hardly self-reflective — imperialists who use scripture and religious traditions at every turn to thwart equality and peace. We lack the wisdom necessary for real faith, and knowledge necessary for real understanding.

In the case of global warming and climate change, this deliberate ignorance has bothered me for years. The fact that so many have been willing to ignore droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes in favor of “drill, baby, drill” has been a point of disgust. Add to it the belief for many that these are the signs and wonders of the book of Revelations is somewhere between absolutely stupid and arrogance unlike few

Johan's Ark, a half-sized replica of Noah's Ark, in the port of Schagen, The Netherlands, September 3, 2006. Ceinturion (via Wikipedia), in public domain via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license versions 2.5, 2.0, and 1.0.

other than God has ever seen. Even theologians have trouble interpreting the many contradictory messages of Revelations. Yet most of us prefer this explanation to the scientific proof that our burning of oil, coal, forests and vegetation over the past 250 years has done damage to the global climate.

Fewer who claim to be Christian use the Bible as a way to understand what’s happening beyond fire, brimstone and thunderbolts, making these folks no different from Norse or Greek pagans scared of Thor or Zeus’ wrath. Take Genesis and the story of Noah. It’s ultimately a story of great faith and climate change. Noah had the unique wisdom — some would say revelation — that a great flood would eventually arrive, and dutifully prepared for it while everyone else refused to believe and conducted business as usual. Eight millennia later, with enough scientific evidence to convince a doubting Thomas of climate change, and denial and debating Revelations is all that most of us do.

Or take the historic announcement Sunday night. After nine years, seven months and twenty days, the architect of 9/11 — not to mention the embassy bombings in ’98, attacks in Indonesia, the UK, Spain, and other parts of the world — Osama bin Laden, was killed by US special forces in Pakistan. As conflicted as I can be about many things, I wasn’t conflicted about US forces capturing or killing him. Not because I’m a bloodthirsty person, and not because I believe in the cause of invading other countries to capture leaders of a global terrorist organization. But because a billionaire global terrorist leader is a danger to us all.

So relief, a little bit of vindication, even, is what I felt, followed by the thought that this helps Obama and completely invalidates Bush’s preemptive war and occupation doctrine for both Afghanistan and Iraq. Not to mention thousands of dead and $4 trillion spent. Then followed by dread, because of the idiotic giddiness and hyper-patriotic vitriol spewed Sunday night and all day Monday by my fellow Christians. I’m not arguing that some folks shouldn’t have been a bit happy, felt some relief, and shouldn’t have been in tears. It’s been a long decade of intolerance, ignorance and insecurity that’s followed 9/11. But “USA! USA! USA!”? We took out one man. Al Qaeda still exists, along with a whole bunch of other homegrown and foreign terrorists, many unaccounted for.

Many of my fellow Christians would deny a peaceful afterlife to bin Laden’s spirit because of the evil that he did while here on Earth, playing the role of judge, jury and executioner. Not entirely unlike the judges in the Old Testament, providing law in a leaderless land of lawlessness. I’m hardly suggesting that we should all forgive and forget, even though that’s what we should ideally do. I doubt, though, that expressing glee equivalent to the Pharisees after the Romans crucified Jesus is high on the Christian playbook list.

All of this also leaves me sad. Because it shows that there’s no way on what’s left of God’s green Earth that most of us American Christians can repair the damage we’ve done to ourselves, our country, and the rest of the world. We won’t admit that jobs and gas for our cars today are more important than the environmental, economic and geopolitical future of our children. That the underlying conditions that led to the rise of Osama bin Laden — US political and economic imperialism all over the rest of the world — haven’t changed enough to prevent the rise of another in his place. We might as well keep doing what we’re doing. Chanting patriotic slogans while waiting on the side of a road, bags packed, waiting for Jesus’ return. While the world around us burns.

Driving as a Metaphor

26 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture

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American psyche, Driving, Narcissism, neurosis, psychosis


I’ve spent the last few months talking about our individual and collective narcissism in this country, about Whites and Blacks and people of color and women and academics who all demonstrate our national psychosis. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that nothing illustrates our American narcissism more than what takes place on our roads and highways, in our parking lots and intersections, more than what we do as drivers and pedestrians. We are petty, nervous, angry, unyielding, selfish, oblivious and unthinking assholes when it comes to what we do to get from point A to points B and beyond every single day.

It took me a while to get to this point. I’m a late-blooming driver. I didn’t get my license until a month after my twenty-second birthday, during the morning of a minor snowstorm that had left six inches of snow on the ground at the testing center on Washington Blvd. in Pittsburgh. After that, I drove sporadically, renting a Ford Escort in Yonkers to get to a conference at Lincoln University in the hinterlands of southeastern Pennsylvania in May ’92. House-sitting for professors with car access in August ’92. Renting a car in July ’95 and April ’96 to go places. Borrowing my eventual mother-in-law’s car for errands and job interviews in July ’97, November ’97, November ’99 and November ’01. And more rentals of cars and a moving truck in May, June, July and August ’03, and July ’04. We didn’t buy our Honda Element until the end of September ’04, our first car, and definitely my first car. I was almost thirty-five years old.

But I’ve learned a lot in the past six years and 50,000 miles of driving. I’ve learned that there are only two kinds of narcissistic drivers: neurotic ones and psychotic ones. The neurotic ones tend to drive as if they’re about to be ambushed by an armed gang with a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher driving in front, behind and beside them. They often drive five or ten miles below the speed limit, slow down for no reason, and make sure that everyone behind them become neurotic for fear of bumping into them. Neurotic drivers describe about thirty percent of the narcissistic people I encounter on the road.

Why narcissistic? Because — and I can attest to this feeling during my on-and-off again driving experiences between ’92 and ’04 — they’re driving scared, as if out of the 220 million people on the road, someone’s out to get them. That we as drivers have no margin for error, even though people may be beeping on us to speed up, jumping in front of us because of the five-car-long gap in front of us. These drivers drive as if it were an early Sunday morning in rural Georgia, and they were on their way to Macon for some Krispy Kremes before heading to church. Mind you, it’s usually the height of rush hour when this occurs.

But psychotic drivers are even more narcissistic. While neurotic drivers do what they do out of a combination of a need for self-preservation and their belief that the way they drive is the only way anyone should drive, psychotic drivers tend not to care much at all. They run stop signs and red lights, cut you off from making a turn, drive past you when you’re already ten miles over the speed limit themselves, honking and giving you the finger all the while. They don’t use turn signals to let you know they’re turning or changing lanes. They refuse to turn their lights on at night, even when you’ve given them the signal that their lights are off. They will brush the clothes of any pedestrian in a crosswalk, because no matter what, they have the right-of-way. They make u-turns that turn into three- and five-point turns in the middle of traffic, with no hint of an apology of any kind. They act as if other drivers are clairvoyant, and get angry if you don’t know what their next unpredictable move is.

These are the same people we work with, or used to go to school with, every day of the week. They go to church, temple, mosque and synagogue, attend PTA meetings, see plays and go to music concerts and sporting events. They go to the gas stations and supermarkets and strip malls. They are unpredictable people, the kind that are constantly on the phone or texting while they drive, as if bluetooth earpieces and headsets and hands-free technology haven’t been invented yet. They are us, the seventy percent of us out on the roads these days.

In many respects, driving with the psychotic is like being in high school for me all over again. In my case, of course, Mount Vernon High School might as well have been four years of time between gen pop and my neurotic grade-obsessed, cool-obsessed classmates. But I digress, again. I remember being in line at the cafeteria for lunch on about a hundred occasions with guys constantly trying to cut in because they didn’t want to wait. When I’d say, “No!,” often loudly, I’d get called “m____f____” and the f-word. It’s the same thing in rush hour traffic. All of sudden, some dumb butt comes up beside you, practically sticking the front end of his or her car in the way to get into my lane. I usually refuse, especially if they didn’t have their turn signal on or look as if they really are psychotic. That refusal usually draws a middle finger and some cuss words, racial epithets and other idiotic statements. Just like high school.

Even in parking lots or other areas where drivers have to stop, pull to the side or at least slow down, you see the high school stuff. The other day, at a Metro Rail station parking and pickup area near Silver Spring, a guy in a white Isuzu SUV stopped in the driving lane to wait for his girl, I guess, to walk out of the tunnel, walk through half the parking area, and put her bag in the back of the car. The skinny stick-of a-woman then took her time buckling her seat belt before they slowly got out of our way so that we could pick up our loved ones. I’ve seen people block my car for no reason, or worse still, people get out of their car to talk and snack on the hood of my car, I guess because it was too clean for them.

Pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists aren’t immune from this psychotic, narcissistic behavior. All attempt to have their cake and eat it too. While the law protects pedestrians in crosswalks, it doesn’t mean you can cross the street whenever you feel like it. If the light is green, don’t cross the street. If the crosswalk signal is orange or red and not blinking, and the light directly in front of you is about to turn red, that’s a pretty good sign that the traffic you’re about to cross into is about to start moving, right? And if you are jaywalking, walking the slow version equivalent of crossing patterns in football, you may want to, say, hurry it up by walking faster or running, instead of acting as if my insurance will cover your hospital bill.

Bicyclists and motorcyclists, when on the road, act as if we should watch out for them as they weave in and out of traffic, run stop signs and stop lights, and ride two and three across a lane. A bicycle weighs at most thirty pounds. A motorcycle, maybe 800. A car weighs anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 pounds. It might be a good idea to make a note of this when you flip a psychotic driver the bird when you’ve cut them off from making a turn.

I think that there should be a change in law, one that requires a person to have an education at least the equivalent of two years of college, and at least 500 hours of training as a driver, before they can obtain a driver’s license. And, that license should cost at least $600 (as much as two iPods), and really, between $1,000 and $1,500, renewable every ten years after a brief test. That would take most of the high-school-esque, narcissistic and psychotic drivers on the road today off of it, possibly including me (because I didn’t have 500 hours of driving to my credit before ’04). Given the stress that comes with driving, though, I would welcome the break.

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