Any individual monitoring the pre-primary Election 2008 chatter, can’t have missed that one of the biggest issues thus far has been Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and what it means. There are many good reasons to find Romney disturbing– like his apparent lack of an ethical center and core identity, but Mormonism is not one. There’s a double-standard in American religion against any faith that has its originS in the New World. This is not unique to Mormonism– take, for example, the case of the Nation of Islam or the Moorish Science Temple of America. In the popular and scholarly literature, both are discussed as social protest groups but ignored almost entirely as serious expressions of religious faith.
This isn’t to say that Mormonism isn’t ridiculous. Of course it is. Religions are inherently unable to withstand rational scrutiny from without. This is the real Mystery of Faith; that people are able to accept and believe ideas both supernatural (i.e., the resurrection) and social (i.e. love thy enemy, turn the other cheek) that make no logical sense. It’s no different if you’re Christian or Muslim or Scientologist. There’s an inherent hypocrisy to the debate circling around Romney– as if believing that Jesus appeared in the Americas is somehow more implausible than believing that he appeared, resurrected from the dead, to that doubtful fellow Thomas.
Because I have a weak spot for Mormonism, the Romney candidacy excites me, if only for the prospect of revisiting the origins of the religion. Over the last few decades, the Church of LDS has softened, becoming Christ-centric and moving away from its early history and its prophet, Joseph Smith. That’s too bad, but understand. Outside of Mormon circles, Smith has a terrible reputation as a charlatan and a conman.
While there’s no reason to believe that Smith was anything but sincere, I do think that he is best understood as a late practitioner of Western occultism. Prior to his discovery of the Golden Tablets, Smith had been employed as a treasure-hunter; his final method of divination was via the use of scrying stones, and indeed, it is through scrying crystals, which he called Umrim and Thummin, that he “translated” what became the Book of Mormon. When Smith was assassinated, a talisman of Jupiter was found on his body– it took decades to identify but eventually was traced to an 1801 book entitled The Magus by Francis Barrett. The Magus is kind of a catch-all primer on Western occultism– unsurprisingly, it instructs the reader on how to scry via crystals and stones.
Perhaps most fascinating is that the Book of Mormon, and its method of delivery, has a direct antecedent in the magical workings conducted during the reign of Elizabeth by Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Like Smith, Kelly and Dee employed scrying stones, some of which are still in the British Museum. They used these stones to communicate with Angels, who gave them a systematic form of religion (since dubbed Enochian magic) that was used by the Golden Dawn and now plays a role in the OTO. A central part of the story of Mormonism is Smith being lead to the Golden Tablets, like Dee, by an Angel. Nor should we overlook the instructions to Dee and Kelly of wifeswapping (which eventually ended their partnership), another direct parallel with Smith’s eventual revelation of polygamy.
The meaning of any of this is beyond me– it’s fascinating to contemplate that there is an outside chance that soon there could be a presidential candidate whose religious faith traces to time-honored and hoary occult practices. Romney’s the occultist’s choice!
UPDATE: Incidentally, this post was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
George W. Bush’s Andover old boy attitude with an Irish interviewer, and Todd C. Murray’s comment upon it, reminded me of my second favorite piece of young Bush lore: the branding.
When I first heard that Bush had defended, and in the New York Times, the branding of members of his frat, it seemed like another hilarious example of the man’s astounding ability to manipulate his public image. How could an Andover/Yalie old-boy with a Connecticut Senator (and possibly Nazi profiteer) grandfather and a former President father position himself as a Washington outsider?
Now, after Abu Ghraib and post-Guantanamo it just seems revelatory.
Here’s the original article:
Not that it needs another blog post, but Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize has shocked my lefty brain. It was hard, so hard, to have lived through the chaos of the 2000 election and its aftermath. There was a general sense of deflation not so much at Gore’s defeat as Bush’s ascendancy. It was impossible to imagine where both men would end up in the year 2007.
Gore has, at this point, assured his reputation as a master of all causes true & pure and positioned himself as a force with which to be reckoned. It’s his game to lose, which is why, presumably, he’s not foolish enough to run for President. Gore’s triumph is as surprising as the complete self-destruction and perpetual humiliation which Bush will spend the rest of his life trying to live down. Frankly, in 2000, it was hard to imagine either men achieving much acclaim or ill-repute; both seemed like mediocrities running in the vacuum of an exiting Big Dog.
Bush appeared to be an idiot-savant heir apparent who was a little less racist and homophobic and classist than other men in his party and Gore was soft centre-left and incapable of campaigning. In his efforts to distance himself from any association with ideas Democratic or Clintonian, Gore was like a dog on its back, begging for the long hand of an imagined Middle America to scratch its stomach. They were, frankly, pathetic. It was inconceivable that one man would end up with a Nobel and the other would go down (at least for the next few decades) as the most unnecessary Presidential war monger in recent memory. (Shallow a defense as it is, let us remember that LBJ and Nixon inherited their idiotic conflict.)
This realization has dovetailed with my own recent thoughts about Boethius and his Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel has been hideously prostituted for television, but for centuries it had been a clever way of expressing the notion that once you’ve peaked there’s nowhere to go but down and once you’ve bottomed out you must also, inevitably, go back up. Both Gore and Bush make me think of– weirdly– Stalin. The Wheel of Fortune metaphor/image’s great flaw is that it ignores the impact of individual personality.
Which is to say, yeah, you might end up at the top of the Politburo, but how does an anonymous bureaucrat end up as an Iron Dictator who falls only upon death? How does a joke President end up destroying his reputation and the reputation of everyone who’s worked for him? And how does a guy best known for wearing too much makeup at a debate end up with a Peace Prize and the toast of the cognoscenti?
Or, to take another example of another candidate having his true nature revealed– would Gore have stood around, helplessly, as a deranged hippie was savaged by the police at one of his events?
Regardless of this election cycle’s outcome, it is safe to say that we have avoided the worst of all possible fates– the dreams of a Rudy Presidency have been dashed like the brains of Babylon’s children.
My first stint in the city coincided almost exactly with his tenure as Mayor, and like all New Yorkers from the hey-hey pre-9/11 day-days, Rudy was a constant fixture of my personal landscape– an unhinged, sociopathic and gruesomely racist bully capable of saying everything and doing anything.
Jimmy Breslin summed it up best: “A small man in search of a balcony.”
Even so, I have a tinge of sadness that Rudy went out with a whisper, begging for votes through broken microphones. I wanted his campaign to fall apart, but I didn’t want the implosion of a lazy candidate surrounding himself with inexperienced yes-men. I wanted a red faced freak out, a screaming monster of a debate answer, or R.G. pushing a pie-faced kid in the mud amidst the laughter of Bronx goons.
Who could have imagined that Nosferatu would trade in his fangs for the mannerisms of a party hack, lisping out limp answers on economic policy and disaster relief?
Not me, anyway, and it seems like a strategic mistake. Somewhere in frenzy of post-9/11 adulation, the Mayor bought into his own hype. He began to believe that people liked him. The problem with this theory is that no one likes him.
His appeal as a candidate for any office had never been that of the amiable fellow. He had always been the jerk who’d show the sissies what needed doing; not so much George Bush as George Wallace.
What might’ve been if only he had embraced his fundamental repugnance of character and turned it into a campaign virtue? This year’s contest was too crowded with bland non-entities afraid of making mistakes. The new Rudy never had a chance of gaining traction, not while he was continually forced to address his personal life and past record.
But there’s always room in the circus for a firebrand.
Of course, he still would’ve lost– but he could have gone down a Lion rather than a lamb.
(And Florida? What vampire goes to the Sunshine State?)
The open eruption of history’s wounds in the on-going-but-dying-out Obama/Reverend Wright controversy has contributed to the most fascinating, depressing and sobering period of American public debate for as long as I’ve been politically aware. For some time, my contention has been that, as individuals, Americans have grown consistently less racist while, institutionally, the country has become systematically more biased against, in particular, African-Americans.
In my opinion, the root of this is the perpetual conflation of being black with being poor. Every society has an underclass, but there is something uniquely perverse about the ability of Americans to associate the state of poverty with one racial phenotype. Though this is a legacy of slavery, the calcification began during the years and decades following the Civil War, in which a systematic abuse of African-Americans became the de facto policy of this country. Given an honest assessment in this Year of Our Lord 2008– a few days ago, I read that 50% of African-American female teenagers have some form of STD– it’s difficult to see how the political and social mechanisms have much improved, at least on an economic basis. And social mobility and justice is entirely economic.
Nothing about Wright’s sermons surprised me; anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with African-American religion knows that it has always been, in part, a mirror held to the failings of The Dream. When a theology is born amongst an enslaved people, please do not be surprised that this theology is less than enchanted with the status quo. There was nothing surprising about Obama’s membership in this church– nor the fact that as a middle class black man, he would not be frothing at the mouth in horror.
The truth has always been there: that dude’s a part of the black community. What I think genuinely did blindside Obama, whose entire life has been spent as liminal figure straddling multiple identities, is the extent to which African-American culture– and I mean the culture of real people, not just the folk on TV and radio– is completely ignored by the rest of the country.
At first I tried to dismiss the outrage as more Right Wing inanity, but the consistency of the response, even after The Speech, has me convinced that this is a real concern for a lot of White People. And make no mistake: such real concerns are, and always have been, motivated by racism. Not merely an institutional racism, but a personal, individual discomfort and fear. The idiotic reactions to Wright’s goofy statements have me wondering if I haven’t been wrong. Perhaps as a result of Reagan and post-Reagan (by which I mean Clinton more than Dubya) policies and demographic migrations, African-American have become more invisible, thereby lessening the opportunities for white racism by individuals.
Amidst the furore, I have been bombarded endlessly with this Stuff That White People Like blog– probably the most insubstantial, and worse yet, least funny of all Internet fads. Surely someone has commented on the timing of this site’s hitting critical mass. That the author clinched a book deal in the same week in which Obama gave The Speech can not be irrelevant; it’s almost as if the attempt at substantiative discussion forced America to expel from its bowels a meaningless and thin diversion. The site is not merely unfunny, it’s also a smoke-screen.
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I’ve never found Bloggingheads to be anything but annoying, but I think that this discussion between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury is one of the best things that I’ve ever seen on the Internet. Both men are relatively controversial African-Americans scholars, and they discuss Obama, Wright and The Speech. It’s the finest encapsulation and discussion of the consequences of this affair. You won’t find anything better.
With zero understanding of the Armenian language, and knowing very little about the current state of Armenia, I won’t hazard a guess. This is one of three fliers that started appearing about two weeks ago– the first is nearly identical, with the head at the top of the chain being hornless. The other was a Satanic collage of two heads eating each other. Recent rain destroyed all copies. I should’ve snagged it when I had the chance.
Riding dirty and running with the devil.
And you thought vampirism was soooooo ’90s.
There is no way to put a gloss on the complete and utter failure of Rudy Giuliani’s Presidential run. It ranks as the single worst campaign in modern political history, a statement born out by the numbers: $50 million dollars spent versus one (1) delegate won. This startling incongruence– combined with Rudy’s neutered and anemic performance as a candidate– seemed like the end of a great beast. America’s Mayor was sent back to New York, tail tucked between his legs, finding solace only in the plastic of his mannequin bride and left to wonder, like all living objects of universal disgust, why no one liked him. It couldn’t have happened to a worse guy.
Giuliani reminds me of Dracula in the late-period Universal horror films, the ones where Frankenstein’s Monster fights the Wolfman and Dracula and Abbott and Costello. These films are formulaic in the extreme. Each ends with Dracula dying, and each begins with the corpse falling from the coffin. The stake is dislodged from the heart. The old dessicated skeleton returns to life, growing sinew and muscle on bone and flesh on sinew.
The vampire king emerges from death for one more hissing bloodfeast.
From the first lisping giggle, I knew that Rudy’s keynote speech was his return to form. The dark lord had finished with the daylight, had cast off the veneer of respectability and aristocratic manners, and returned to his roots as a cheap thug in a bad suit, his oversized shoulder pads disguising the feminity of his frame, and was ready to sink his fangs into the first available neck.
Prepped by McCain’s handlers, Rudy was without armor or sword. His one rhetorical device stripped away for the first time in almost seven years, America’s Mayor had to pretend that it was a 9/10 world; he had to tap into to his previous self, the earlier incarnation. Presented with a unique challenge– “Don’t Mention September 11th”– Rudy drew from his Inner Well of Hidden Strength and discovered anew that it was as it had been: a cesspool, a rotting festering sinkhole buried deep and clogged with a lifetime of malice and hatred.
I’m not sure at what point– maybe when America’s Mayor openly laughed at the idea of public service, or maybe when he characterized Obama’s life-story, pejoratively, as something that could happen Only in America– but somewhere in that despicable rant, I understood. I realized. I got it.
As a serious candidate for National Office, Rudy had burned himself out, yes, but now he has a new niche. He has become the mean-spirited little monster that the Republicans will bring out every two-to-four years. Whenever a nasty speech needs making, whenever an enemy requires besmirching. He will be there, snorting and laughing at his own jokes. He is a hack and a hatchet-man, the one who will do what the others will not. He is the in-house vandal, a dog that attacks on command and then returns, its mouth covered in blood, to lap at its master’s hand, longing only for approval.
But don’t fool yourself: his masters still hate him. Everyone hates him. Other than a brief blip in which American society went crazy enough that it finally– at last– was operating on Rudy’s wavelength of constant paranoia and aggression, this has been the defining factor of his career. He was voted into office not for likability or personal charm. He was elected as Mayor for a simple reason: he had promised to brutalize criminals. He knows that he is on the fringe of the party– that he is a creature viewed with suspicion, that old women from Nebraska cross themselves and hide cloves of garlic under their skirts whenever he enters a room– but he has no other options. No one else will accept him. This knowledge makes him dangerous, more eager to perform, to make sure that the knife unerringly passes under the ribs.
The small man will never get his balcony, but he is allowed to borrow podiums, and it is from these that he demonstrates his vacuity. There was a time, and I remember it, when Rudy seemed as if he might be a political figure with Ideas. You could disagree with those Ideas and you could be disturbed by the ancillary damage that accompanied them, but you never felt that you were watching a charade or a put-on.
There was a time, however distant, when he seemed his own man. His brief ascendancy has changed him. He got a taste of the real, pure stuff and wanted more. Painfully aware of his personal limitations, the only way Rudy could imagine himself scoring the mainline was to become yet another unsuccessful political void. Mitt Romney without the charm. Huckabee without the brains. John McCain without the competence. A sucking pull of desperation, doing whatever is necessary to Win. There is no value or long-held position that he will not reverse. Nothing is beyond compromise. Guns, God, abortion, gays, Jews, whatever. Even New York itself will be betrayed on command. If we woke up tomorrow & the nation had placed a value on lawlessness rather than order, Rudy would be first in line to refute his time as the Ball Buster. Reduction in crime rates would be blamed on subordinates, on underlings– America’s Mayor would recast himself as the man who had favored chaos but was held back by career politicians and the bureaucrats.
Yet there is a solace: the week is over. It is time for Republicans to stake the heart and hide the body. America’s Mayor will pass to his undying death, waiting in stasis for the next call of his masters. He will return, as he always returns, with his cheeks purpled by makeup and tufts of grey hair framing a face that he stole from Max Schreck. Watch his tongue, see how he licks his lips.
It is not a question of if, but of when.
Some monsters never die.
(obligatory pre-election chatter. sorry. can’t be helped.)
Mail to my old pal, Harvey, who claims he is voting McCain and asked for ten reasons why he should go Obama:
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From: Jarett Kobek
To: His Pal Harvey
Date: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 3:38 PM
Subject: obama vs mccain ten reasons you stupid bastard
(IN NO ORDER OF IMPORTANCE)
#10. mccain is jacked up crazy. this statement in no way dishonors his service. dude was a jerk before he went into pow camp and came out a jerk with ptsd. search your feelings. you know it to be true.
#9. obama is an exceptionally effective communicator– lawyer, college professor– and we often forget that the roots of democracy are in the public advocacy of athens. there is a direct link between good government and effective communication.
#8. obama has a very specific kind of african-american cool; not in the sense of cool as a popularity contest, but cool like cool jazz. charlie parker, john coltrane kind of cool. this is why he never freaks out. totally useful.
#7. palin.
#6. health care. obama’s plan is weak but I suspect that with huge democractic wins in the congress, an obama presidency will push through a radical health care initiative. this will serve as a smokescreen to distract us from the fact that we are never, ever leaving iraq. it’s time that america joined the civilized world. this may upset you re: taxes, but sorry, the one thing you should your national government should do is protect you from disaster and foreign invasion. a/k/a keep you safe. health care is a big part of this and the lack of universal coverage is a huge, massive problem for US competitiveness in the global market.
#5. foreign policy. mccain’s is a 20th century vision of the cold war world– look at everything he talked about in the debates. nicuragua, panama, russia. these problems were solved poorly 30 years ago. That the war on terror is a disaster is due precisely to rumsfeld and cheney being 20th century cold warriors who could not understand a new enemy. the only way that the MAJOR ISSUES, including israel (which you know I support those jews like no other) will ever be solved is via an entirely new set of faces. cold warriors, with their skewed realpolitik, must go. asap.
#4. likelihood of full examination of bush era war crimes increases inordinately. seriously, cheney + co f’d us in the a with massive illegal tortures. abu ghraib only scratches the surface. mccain’s cowardice re: the base ensures he will be unable to facilitate appropriate reviews of the previous administration.
#3. afghanistan. this could fall under #5, but fuck off, it’s important. obama seems to understand the need for afghanistan to succeed as an independent state and also seems interested in killing bin laden. A refreshing change.
#2. obama is smart. I know that it’s a time honored american tradition to pull down our betters and be suspicious of any natural ability not connected to sports, but whatever. dude is smart and a writer. When was the last time we had a real writer in the white house? Teddy Roosevelt? (Kennedy’s shit was mad ghost written.)
#1. leaving aside the pedantic and goofy questions of whether or not obama is BLACK ENOUGH, his wife is straight up descended from slaves and his babies got that blood in their bodies. I can not think of anything better for America than to have to see and live with a normal, beautiful black family in the white house for eight years. if nothing else, this will go incredibly far towards the normalizaton of race relations. it’s almost impossible to express its full impact. I saw michelle holding hands with dude’s lily white uncle during Kerry’s speech at the convention and the most shocking thing was not that it was happening but that it was so totally, utterly normal. welcome to the 21st century.
okay. vote obama, jerk.
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BONUS FOR CALI CALI: Vote no on Prop 8. Duh.
But don’t do it solely because of hoity-toit arguments about equality or any of the scare-mongering associated with the hideously inept anti-8 campaigns. Arguments about fairness have merit, but opponents of 8 have been hella squeamish and thus operating on the same wave length as the dirrrty west Mormon-funded pro-8 ads. No one is stating a basic truth: gay marriages, individually and socially, are hugely positive and should be celebrated.
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(last politics post pre-election. promise.)
I was going to run three dense, separate posts of analysis on this election & its aftermath, entitled “WHO LOST: OLD WHITE FOLKS,” “WHO LOST: THE GAYS,” “WHO WON: EVERYBODY ELSE” but then, like a long-time friend of the blog, I heard the Voyce of the Lord, and He spaketh unto me: “No.”
So instead I’ll say this: fuck you, California, fuck you to the idiots running the anti-Prop 8 campaign, unable to grasp basic truths of American politics, and fuck you to all the big-toothed Dirrrty West Mormons who funded the pro campaign. And fuck you to Barack Obama for his political calculus, giving as much as he could to remain a Good Democrat without alienating the rest of the country, a phenomenon marked by his refusal to support gay marriage or speak out forcefully against Prop-8, and the voicing of his tepid support for civil unions in as few syllables as possible and only when prompted. And fuck you to the Clintons, the DLC, Al Gore, John Kerry and every other limp-dicked Democrat of the last sixteen years. You were the worst of all.
NOW. If there is one thing which my life has taught me, it is this: the smallest minority in America has got to be the children of single mother households who were sired by secular Muslim immigrants. The only other person with that convoluted parental history whom I even know of, let alone know, is our boy Barack Hussein Obama. So I’ve given his ascent an enormous amount of thought and have not, really, been able to suss it out as much as I’d like– but one can’t help lose the feeling that this background either produces the god damned President of the United States or, well, me.
Anyway: fuck yes.
