THE POTENTIAL DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF MYTHS

This is Sunday July 17th and the 23rd anniversary of my moving into my own apartment out of the Bosc house, blessedly for the last time. Carmageddon turned out to be a non event, which is good news indeed. LA west side traffic has actually been lighter. Now as of this afternoon they have reopened the 405 freeway. The major heat wave has thankfully failed to materialize though our hearts go out to the vast mid section of the country. Just now I went down to the courtyard and finally got some coffee drowning in cream and sugar and not that hot from Laura, two cups. Seid and Nicky, the Mormons, may be by tonight with ice cream. I had a nice conversation with Dr. Levy yesterday morning at the breakfast table and we resolved a few issues. Loretta was sick all yesterday and this morning at breakfast she said it was just digestive problems, but apparently nothing more serious than your garden variety bug, or at least lets hope. Relations with the staff continue good. I haven't visited Dana since he moved. Judy called me last night about that Accronis thing I can download to protect and monitor my hard drive activity. She thinks my mother consumes too much sugar, but I'm not convinced. I've had the same roommate for almost five years come the end of the month. Sometimes I think I'm more lethargic than I should be. I'm kind of in a coasting mode right now where I don't take initiative.

Unfortunately all this generally good news doesn't extend over into national politics. I am among those who believes that tea party people actually practice a "religion" of their doctrines, because nothing they say is based in reality. They are only beliefs they cling to in times of stress like a security blanket to justify not pulling their heads out of the sand. One old lady was telling John Boehner, "Don't give in to the President. Stand your ground. We have to make cuts in this growing budget". Obviously she hasn't been listening to the news. The President has already agreed to nearly four trillion in budget cuts, and several hundred billion in tax revenues. But these people say "Tax increases are a pretext to spend more money". And they say "We know how it goes. The tax hikes will come and the spending cuts never will. That's how Washington works". They identify with these corporate crooks whose tax holes we want to plug. They see these billionaire banksters as utterly pure and blameless in all of this. They talk about "ending the cycle of ever increasing tax and spend policies". Well if they've looked around they will see that so many states have slashed their budgets drastically, and California has cut its tax rates, and potential sources of income. We voted in a major corporate tax cut last November. As Dr. Phil might say, "How's that working out for you?" In reality we are in danger of, and close to, an out of control deflationary spiral of ever shrinking expenditures and "risks" followed by more cuts in government jobs causing a further loss in spending power. So the bottom line is that we have all of these destructive "memes" out there that will never be surmounted. People on the right don't "get it" that come August 2nd this country will be in a dangerous economic situation where all of their worst fears will come to pass. You wouldn't trust your five year old around fire crackers and you can't trust these republicans around such an issue as the debt ceiling they genuinely don't see the seriousness of. The interest rates will rise, the credit markets will collapse, and jobs will be lost anew. And when this happens they will blame for Obama for it come next year. These are old facts. I wonder how often it's necessary to repeat them. Were I the President I'd be making all sorts of political threats to these people that I had every intension of carrying out- - speaking to them in private. Debt ceiling rises have never before been used as a political football like this. This is the first time. These people on the right are nothing less than economic terrorists. But the President will not get on his high horse and say this. He refuses to grab the reins of moral authority which are inherent in his office. If he is a one term president, it will be by his own doing. I don't know if Baroch Hussein Obama is "The Manchurian Candidate" or whatever people on the right say. I just would rather much have an individual whom I can trust to "give it their all" to "faithfully execute the office" rather than somebody who seems just not to care a whit about anything.

Some myths are more dangerous than others. There have been medical myths like "leeches are good for you" or "a really fat baby is a sign of health" or "high blood pressure means absolutely nothing" or "There is nothing wrong with being homosexual". Oh wait a minute, everybody still believes that last one. Some are cultural myths like the Escamo creation myth or Hindu creation myths like a turtle riding on the back of an elephant or some such thing. The tales of the Greek or Norse gods are very elaborate with a whole saga of moral lapses. The Jews believe in a man called Moses who led them out of bondage in Egypt to roam in the Sinai wilderness for forty years, without a shred of historical evidence to back them up. But this, too, is a relatively harmless myth. Contrast this with the Christian myths. "Our Lord was murdered and it's all the Jew's fault; they did it". Or how about "I have Good News; you are going to Hell unless you "give your life to Jesus" and just remember God will hold on to you as long as you hold in to him but if you "lose your grip" even for a moment, it could be the Wrong moment, and you could find yourself "Damned for all time". Or, "avoiding all sex is a way to get closer to God", or "If Jesus comes back next year, none of these conflicts will matter", or "We'll understand everything in the great bye and bye" or "Not all Truth is true, but only those things which give glory to God" or "Being submissive is what the Bible instructs Blacks to do to please their White masters. God ordained slavery". Suddenly now we have myths that interfere with the cource of everyday life. These false "memes" work on the soul and carode and erode it of moral fibre over time. Why embrace a religion whose overlying implication is "by hating my brother, I am showing piety to my God". I think we've had quite enough "Us and Them" religions over the course of time. Just because the Moslems do it doesn't mean we have to descend to their level. But there is nothing either in Islam or Judaism or most other religion that approaches the destructive power of Christianity. John Lennon didn't take the news of Bob Dylan's being Born Again - - at all well. The thing is he had the gonads to express what a lot of us were thinking but couldn't quite put into words, or else we were sleep-walking at the time, and psychically didn't catch the implications of one of the great Prophets suddenly having his "message" utterly eviscerated.

So now we come to my own personal myths. Some would say "You're always saying you talk to everybody after death". That just isn't so. Name one family member, even a distant relative that I've claimed to have talked to or seen after death. Name one person, and there are so many, who have died in this place that I claimed to have seen or talked to after death. I have never said it of Jerry Stewart, or John Sneed or Ronald Diggins, who were in my same "graduating class" in high school. The first died in the fall of 1965. and the other two died in a car on March 5th 1967. You think you're the expert. Start retteling off names of people that I've talked to after they died. As for some of this astral-projection stuff, I myself am ready to admit the dubious nature of that, and have been "weeding things out" of my repituire. So people like John Lennon and Burt Lombard are being scaled way back. As for some myths, they do serve a function. Like "why was I so lethargic from the spring of 1968 on through about January of 1971?" It could be I was possessed by a demon of laziness or something. But more likely the whole "taken-over-by-a-lazy-person" phenominon (if you don't know the background on this, just forget I said it) is explained by a little blue pill. I don't mean viagara, neither am I referring to LSD, I'm talking about Stelezine. I don't remember when I started taking Stelizine or when I stopped. I know I was on it in 1968 and I think other subsequent doctors prescribed it. Whatever I was on, I wasn't any more in 1971. Sometimes myths do serve a function. They teach lessons that are beneficial for the overall culture. They give a people a sense of unity and comon purpose. Of course some will call me a hypocrite. They will say that a damn religion and embrace it in an unguarded moment the next when I appear "to come crawling back to it". There is actually no inconsistency here. I said religion was like a drug, "the opiate of the people". And you have to be vigilent with an addictive drug because if you aren't careful you can be snared back into its use. Such has happened with me from time to time. Actually a lot of ding-bat thoughts I've had over the years were spawned in one way or another by trying to make sense of Christianity. As you know James Dobson has a book out called "When God doesn't make sense" to which I would add, "- - then Get Him a Therapist". A better book title would be "Getting God to Make Sense" or perhaps "Rehabilitating God so that he can again go out in Public". Some of us want to "Rehabilitate" our myths to kind of lean them up and make them fitter by injecting more factual material into them. In the same say corporations will suffer much the more of suddenly "Everybody has to give up their tax loopholes" - - in the same way Christianity will suffer much more than I, were both of us suddenly compeled to immediately shed any belief we had that couldn't be concretely proved beyond a reasonable doubt. (Selah)