Continuing conversation. . .

[with MC re: Rand Paul & Civil Rights]


Philosophically, I look at legislation (and most things) the way I look at a coat hanger: Once you bend it in one direction, you can't just bend it back in the other direction and pretend that makes it straight. It just makes it bent in two places, which to my mind, makes it twice as crooked.

The holist in me, the raw foodist in me, and the libertarian in me prefers a process of unwinding rather than winding tighter and piling imperfection on top of imperfection - with the risk of ossification at each juncture.

The thing, to be fully and finally resolved, must be *un"wound. And the more layers we put on top of the original sin, the harder and more protracted the unwinding becomes.

In the case of unjust laws, such as Jim Crow, simply pulling those laws is what makes sense to me. If the feds were to make legislation, legislation forbidding the passage of unjust (and pretty clearly unconstitutional) laws to me is better than creating new laws that compel any particular action by anybody.

This sounds simplistic, and perhaps things had gotten so far along that more was required than simply un-injusticizing the south and letting the proper equilibrium set in. Many raw foodists experience this kind of problem- they "pull" the problem by eliminating toxic foods, but their bodies are still so toxic from years (and generations) of chemical ingestion that a more proactive effort is required- intentional detoxification, in this case.

But in the process of actively intervening to accelerate the organic cleansing process (by means of herbs or enemas), one does not lose sight of the fact that the ultimate goal is to release the poison organically, not to enshrine it and build monuments to its evil. This is akin to what I had mentioned before about hewing to the ideal wherever and whenever possible while dealing with the accumulated mess of reality along the way. To get mired only in the back and forth karma of history is to create unending monstrosities that have no end - like the civil rights struggle in America, which is far from over and indeed may never be.

Your argument that slavery is also economically sound is an argument I take to heart. But at some level I must disagree. I do not, as many of my generation do, equate sweatshop labor with slavery (though I do equate cubicle work with it). And replacing slave labor with sweatshop labor - no matter how deplorable the conditions - is ultimately economically more sound since it creates, over time, a new class of consumers who will eventually feed into and invest in the global economy, thus benefiting everybody on earth.

Slavery is a dead end. It is zero-sum economics, since it deprives the economy of potential consumers and taxpayers. It needed to be enforced through violence, because it relied on inherent racism to maintain- that blacks were incapable of making reasoned choices, etc., and therefore are better to the world as chattel than as economic participants. The racism had to be institutionally maintained, otherwise it would reveal the obvious benefits to market and government by having more purchasers and taxpayers. (Incidentally, this is one of the pillars of my ongoing crusade for youth suffrage and the repeal of "child labor laws," that by ageist bigotry, we deprive ourselves of valuable economic and creative resources. There are other pillars as well, but this would be the one to win over economists.)


The deeper the problem the deeper the penetrating into underlying causes must be. Slavery has been around forever, and, as the posted bills in the East Village remind me, didn't end in 1865. It is an immortal archetype that must be dealt with as forthrightly as possible. Free markets, I think, do the best job, as they do for most things when bestial tribal prejudices are involved.

Looking at the underlying roots of racism is an important step, and it is something we refuse to do. Our PC university style "racism is just ignorance" is vacuous and insipid. (It does, however reflect the ineffectiveness of simply bending the coat hanger back to straight by creating a permanent class of anti-anti-black people rather than just "people" as they claim they are.)

Racism is rooted mostly in economic/sexual scarcity models, the remedy for which has always been greater market liberalization. Pulling ourselves out of our localized biases is the modern impulse that is most uncomfortable to animallian stasis- it is the definitive characteristic that makes us human and non-animal. Open markets offend every primitive instinct (CF: AFL/CIO) and yet their benefit to the larger family of humanity is indisputable. Isn't that the larger point for those seeking to abolish racism?

One point that is seldom made (besides the point that racism is much more virulent in non-white, non-American populations throughout the world - as I discovered being a distinct minority as a white boy at Juilliard) is that there are potentially intractable problems with black-white racism:

Firstly, the psychologically inclined would suggest that racism is merely the projection of one's tribal shadow elements onto another: We are hard working (thus suppressing our inherent laziness), *they* are lazy (thus acting out our laziness for us). In a holistic world, this happens all over the place. PIGS countries are famous for their laziness and hedonism (thus repressing their own rigor and productivity) and scoff at the anal retentiveness of their northern comcontinentiots.

Joseph Campbell makes this point well in "Hero with 1000 Faces," in an effort, perhaps, to dilute some of the idealism we moderns have towards Amerindians. They all had cultural norms and required "others" to act out the shadow or unlived life of their own culture. Gradually, through (presumably) economic union, we begin to retract some of those projections and recognize a picture of a larger human than the tribal one. Eventually, we come to be able to see our foibles with humor and learn to appreciate the complimentary aspects of other cultures (as well as their own foibles). And eventually, we learn to integrate the healthier aspects of other cultures and shed our own misguided biases. Thus we become more and more complete within ourselves. And in doing so, we become closer to being one people, thereby recognizing the truth of the religious calling that God loves us *all* (not just the industrious ones and not just the hedonistic ones, etc.) and loves all (parts) of us.

It is a beautiful thing.

In the case of white-black racism, as I was saying, this is more difficult than normal. In the dream language, the psyche expresses the deeply repressed/consciously rejected aspects of oneself literally as dark-skinned people (I have experienced this numerous times myself in dream and journeywork), and in seeing an "other" who looks exactly like our internal picture of our own evil, a rejectionary stance is almost inevitable. Psychologcailly speaking, it would only be by reintegrating our rejected parts that we could end racism, by having no more negative projections on which to hang on others. That's a tall order, but it's identical to the order to form a human family as I indicated in the previous full paragraph.

Incidentally, as proof of this psychological theory, we have only to look at black culture as the perfect antithesis to white culture: In white culture, skinniness in women is valuable, in black, fatness is valuable (both almost to a comic extent). In white culture, unassuming dress is considered appropriate, in black culture blatant ostentation is de rigeur. Violence, sexuality, and overt masculinity are intolerable. In black culture, violence is normal, as is free expression of sexuality, etc. Thugs, hos, bitches, and gangsters are all classic Venus/Mars shadow projections of the dominant (white) cultural attitudes towards these archetypes. Attitudes towards physicality vs. intellectualism are perfectly complimentary, etc. etc. That each represents the distorted shadow of the other could not be more obvious. (It has been brought to my attention, though my research is sparse, that black dreamers may see "ghosts" or shadow figures in the reverse, as white figures, but I am not so sure.)

At any rate, this natural occurrence in dreams is a monkey wrench in race relations I don't expect to hear much about. But by legislating to try to control surface behavior, we make it harder and harder for this truth to bubble up to the surface and be dealt with honestly. Command and control, to my mind, is as ill-advised culturally as it is economically, because it drives the hidden root causes of our problems farther from consciousness and deeper into the shadows, thus making them almost impossible to resolve until they explode (and nothing happens then).


So I guess I don't really think that government inaction is the point, but zenlike government "awareness" might be. Rather than reflexively "correcting" everything by rebending the legislative coat hanger, a judicious patience followed by surgical undoing is more likely to offer real solutions. Now whether politicians really want real solutions or not is another story (how many pols owe their careers to the tenuousness of Roe?). But as someone who strives for a semblance of inner and outer peace, resolution through dissolution is the only thing that really delivers and leaves the mind tranquil enough to imagine a new future for us all. And I like that. Maybe I can get it to fit on my business card. . .
D