Lying Again, Again

I did a blog post on April 10, 2012 called “We are Lyin’: Are we Dyin’?”.   This is an update of that 2012 post.

In 1978, Sissela Bok published a book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life.  On page 19 of the Vintage paperback sitting on my desk, Ms. Bok invites us to:

“Imagine a society, no matter how ideal in other respects, where word and gesture could never be counted upon.”

I do believe that, in politics at least, we are there. In 2016, politicians have become brazen about lying—saying things they know are lies, knowing that people will know that they are lies, and knowing that people won’t care because they expect to be lied to. So as long as the lies reflect what people want to believe, the lying politician will win votes. It is happening today. When caught in a lie, they lie about having lied, win more votes, and are praised for “telling it like it is”.

In fact, in 2016 not a small number of people are asking politicians to lie to us. The larger the lie,  the more we support them. Evidence, the 2016 GOP primaries.

We have actually codified the legitimacy of lying. Evidence:  (1) As a result of U.S. vs. Alvarez, I may lie with impunity about my war record (sic); (2) This week, an Ohio law that prohibited false statements about a candidate for office bit the dust. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit stuck it down, using the Supreme Court’s money-is-free-speech decision to support their decision.

And we just elected a man whose lies are documented, blatant, and loved by his followers. He in turn has chosen an expert in propaganda as his chief advisor.

Lies are now legally considered a part of self-expression, politicians who lie to us cannot be held legally accountable for those lies, and we the people beg them to tell us bigger and more bodacious lies.

Bok says, again on page 19, “Deceit and violence—these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings,” and “society could scarcely function without some degree of truthfulness in speech and action.”

And I again wonder if anyone is grieving for our loss.

Guns again

Another senseless killing involving guns, which have now become religious symbols in the U.S. This killing was "inspired" by another favorite U.S. religion: racism.

So here I go again, re-publishing this same old piece I wrote several years ago.

On hot Saturday afternoons in Kentucky, in the 50s, my sister Betty Zane would give me fifty cents to take my niece Karen Lee by the hand and go “uptown” to the Lido Theatre. Karen and I would watch a few commercials, a cartoon or two, an episode of a serial, like Flash Gordon, and at least one movie—sometimes it was a double feature. Usually the movies were westerns with flashy guns figuring prominently. I lusted after pearl handled toy six shooters.

I remember how I felt when we walked out of the cool, dark theater into the heat and glare of a late afternoon. Surreal and high. In the two or three hours inside, I had become Flash Gordon, Whip Wilson, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry or whoever the hero happened to be. Being the older uncle (I was maybe 9), I kept these feelings to myself as Karen and I walked home. When I got home, though, I’d head for the woods with my imagination for a horse and fingers for guns and kill the bad guys or Indians with the appropriate gun sounds and death sounds coming out of my mouth. I was transported into another reality, and I enjoyed it a lot.

As I got older, I enjoyed driving nails from as far away as possible with my daddy’s .22.

The only part of the Army’s basic training that I enjoyed was the rifle range. The M-16 was light weight and accurate and fun to fire. I was good at it. I have a medal to prove it.

Guns, real and imagined, have been a part of my experience all my life. I currently own several real ones; fewer imaginary ones as time passes.

In 1992, my son was a precocious 16-year-old student in a small (300 student) private college tucked away in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Christmas was approaching. One of his fellow students bought an assault rifle and ammunition and killed a professor and a student and wounded others. Luck (or God or fate or Karma or….) intervened on my family’s part and he was not physically injured. We still deal with it psychologically.

Every time there is a new tragedy involving a school or mall or street corner, or whatever, it gets dragged out again.  The incidences are increasing. Blame is placed at everyone, except for one major U.S. group, who manages to shape public policy, using fear and money.

As I sit in Colorado on a cold December day, I wonder why:

1.     We pledge allegiance to the flag “and to the Republic for which it stands,” BUT

2.     We believe that our founders believed that the elected “government” of this Republic might someday take our guns away and subjugate us

3.     We, therefore, believe we have the right to own as many guns of whatever kind as we want—not the smart bombs, drone planes, tanks, and dirty weapons owned by our “government”, but GUNS—with which to protect ourselves from the smart bombs, drones, tanks, and dirty weapons our government might throw at us in order to subjugate us

4.     Our elected representatives (those same government people who might come after us one day) pledge allegiance to The National Rifle Association to act on our behalf against the government that we fear is going to enslave us—themselves

5.     The NRA (the largest lobbying group in the country) collects boatloads of money from us, which they use to support those representatives (the people who might subjugate us) in their continued reelections.

I admit I’m not all that smart, but I wonder where the logic and reason went. "Guns don't kill, people do." "God (via the first amendment brought down from the mountain) gave me the right to bear arms." 

Think about that. I wonder if people would worship the same mantra if it read:

1. Atomic bombs don't kill, people do
2. I have the God-given right to bear arms
3. By all definitions, the A-bomb is "arms"
4. Therefore I have the God-given right to my own bomb

I find myself feeling that same sense of the surreal I felt leaving the Lido Theater all those years ago. Without the high.

I make no judgment about my friends who continue to hunt, shoot for sport, collect, and love guns. God bless you.

But I do hold some ill will toward the NRA (not the rank and file, but the “NRA government” that controls the organization). I also hold ill will toward cowardly politicians who support the NRA government over that of the U.S, and pass laws that fly in the face of reason, humanity, and love of country, in the name of guns.

I wonder if these people think I’m calling them ignorant and un-American.

I sure hope so.

Search for Decoder Rings

In the mid-1950s I was very active in the Methodist Church in my hometown in Kentucky. It was the hub of my social life and provided some grounding for me as I tried to figure out who and what I was.

In college in 1962, the Wesley Foundation, also affiliated with Methodist Church, became the hub of my social life. The grounding shifted. I started reading at Tillich and Kierkegaard and Bonheoffer and their ilk as a result of my involvement with the Wesley Foundation. I say “read at” because I was not equipped to read and understand these guys, but it seemed they had important things to say so I kept plugging away at them. I also got tuned into Hoffer as well as the beginnings of liberation theology and social justice.

Meanwhile, in my Freshman English classes I started reading at Transcendentalists and Existentialists, and going to movies that I did not understand. I did understand that they held messages that, if I could decode them, would be important.

I also spent some time in college reading at the Bible (not in Aramaic or Hebrew of course—I did not have the languages), knowing there were messages there as well, if I could decode them.

Several of my friends, the ones who weren’t majoring in philosophy or accounting, were looking into Divinity School, so I learned about Vanderbilt, The University of Chicago, and the crown jewel of the genre, as determined by the elite of Western Kentucky State College, Yale.

Since college I have read at other philosophers, the Qur’an (not in Aramaic of course), Zen, Taoism, and such, looking for codes, or at least decoder rings, while fantasizing about spending a year studying things mystical at Chicago, in Kyoto, cruising the Greek Islands, and, most importantly, spending time at Yale.

As the years passed, religion gave up on me. I maintained a belief in a metaphysical power, but its manifestation in temporal organizations created by humans ran counter to my understanding of that power.  In plain English, I fell out of love with the religions created by preachers, priests, and theologians.

I became a management professor in the early 1980s, put aside fantasies of studying the metaphysical through the lenses of the temporal,  and focused my attention on management literature, some of which purported to contain wisdom and answers. The good news was that this literature was easy to read and understand. The bad news is that is was easy to read and understand, and contained no decoder rings.

Last week I spent two days at Yale University’s Divinity School, attending a conference on “Practical Wisdom” as it relates to the application of things spiritual to the practice of management. In attendance were international CEOs and business school faculty and administrators representing fundamentalist Christians, Catholics (including Jesuits and Benedictines), Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and a couple of Humanists. I served on a panel discussing the notion of “timeless leadership”.

The conference did not last a year, and only involved Yale, not Kyoto, Chicago, or Vanderbilt. But it was Yale.

The really important thing is that this two-day experience tied an earlier me (the searcher of the 1960s) to a more recent me (the management-professor-turned-cynic of the 21^st Century) in some satisfying ways.

There are people over the world, not just theologians and philosophers, but business people and professors as well, who continue to look for decoder rings, to search for meaning in the world into which we have been thrown. This encourages me because I believe that search forms the essence of being human.

In September I will mark 69 years on this earth, this time around at any rate. I wonder how many people live to see pieces of their earliest fantasies, especially those we have discarded, realized in their old age as a part of a pattern. I am worried that most do not. I am giddy about the fact that this kid from Kentucky did.

Sensuality and Weather

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In the late 1950s I sang in the Methodist church choir.  Wednesday night was choir practice night, a night when Tobby Burklow, Edd Hust, Edna Earl Vilines, and others would get together to practice songs for Sunday’s service. I was the youngest singer, and under the tutelage of Tobby Burklow learned to sing church tenor. This was my social life on Wednesday nights.

Choir practice never lasted more than an hour and a half.  But what frequently happened afterward became much more important, and memorable to me over time. The night that greeted me on these nights was inviting and demanded my attention. I remember these winter nights being cold and dark, the air thick with humidity, driving rain and sleet.

In those days my winter coats were never a match for the winters they faced, a result of my lack of money to buy good heavy coats, and my teenage need to look better than I thought cheap weather-efficient coats offered. I also owned one pair of shoes, bought for looks rather than service.

So generally I was not prepared to exchange the warmth of the softly-lit church for the darkness and damp that awaited me.

Rather than being put off by the weather, however, I remember embracing it, being in no hurry to walk home. The rain and sleet caressed my face, dripped off my nose, crept up my pant legs,  and soaked my feet. Shivers greeted my body and joined with the tenor line to “Holy, holy, holy” (number one song in the old Methodist Hymnal) rolling around in my mind.

At my house, when it got dark, my daddy went to bed. When my daddy went to bed, everyone in the house went to bed as well. In the winter, darkness came as early as 5:00. So, when I got home on those cold Wednesday nights my momma and daddy were asleep, the coal stove banked for the night hours earlier, the un-insulated three room house wrapped up on the outside with a coating of ice.

I remember opening the front door as quietly as possible, the task made easier by the fact that we never locked the door. One did not make noise in my house. If Big John were awakened, I was in trouble.

Dripping and shivering, still enjoying the feeling, I would quietly make my way through the living room to the kitchen, where I slept.

We didn’t use sheets when I was growing up. I slept between heavy blankets. My bed sat against a window. I would quietly open the window just an inch or so and slip between the blankets. The sound of the rain outside, but at my fingertips, complemented the experience of my shivers warming the bed, and consequently me, as I lay in my dry warm nest.

This was pure innocent sensuality. And it has shaped me considerably over the years.

I own several pairs of good shoes now and my winter coats are well made for the weather in which I find myself. My house is warm and comfortable. I sleep in a bedroom.

But when it is cold and rainy and dark, as it was one night last week, I will grab a drink and a blanket and go sit on my deck and feel the damp cold creep into my consciousness, welcome the shivers, feel the water drip off my nose, and wallow in my now not-so-innocent sensuality. Occasionally, the tenor line from that first song in the Methodist Hymnal will join me.

I wonder at the early sensual experiences that shape our lives.