Our Gorbachev, The politics of disillusionment.

It was June of 2009 when I first realized that Obama was to be our Gorbachev. June 2010 when I first wrote about it. We are now living through what that means. What happens when the apparatchiks themselves no longer believe their own propaganda? If a people are lucky, and Russia was, to some extent,

Joyful Disillusionment

This last weekend was the WoodenBoat Show held at Mystic Seaport. This luckily is within an hour’s drive for me and by saving up it’s manageable to attend for the three days – with the help of a generously offered Press Pass. I’ll be writing about the experience on Boats for Difficult Times, but I

A Politics of Profound Disillusionment

Cheering “liberation” by proxy, is no more ethical than fighting wars of repression by proxy. We do a disservice in either case. In both cases we are condescending to our “lessors.” Instead we should be working on our own disillusionment while hoping that our example as it gains authenticity might “travel.”

On Reflection… part 1

David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti were right in posing that the incoherence of thought is our greatest challenge. Some thirty years later the burning question is; why has their legacy not borne fruit? What did they miss? What’s gone wrong?

Realms. How we position.

“How we position.” Seems to call for an object, “What?” before we can get into wondering about “how;” or even, who “we” are; we want to know what.

From 9/11 to 11/9…

Fifteen years between these two dates. Seventy eight years since Kristallnacht…. Landmarks on the path to disillusionment. A road we’ve not seen the end of…. A road from complacency and an unearned certainty to humility. A humility we may feel we don’t deserve. A humility that brings us no where we wanted to go.

The Politics of Nostalgia

As any hope of an actual break with business-as-usual fades into the heat and glare of a summer in which discontent does not lead to action to address its causes; but becomes nothing more than a nuisance of disaffected noise signalling on both sides of our political theater that everyone – with the strongest push

How do we integrate in the face of bad faith?

This title is not rhetorical. How do we?

Questions of Identity

Schools fail us by teaching students how to work with knowledge rather than how to deal with ignorance, not be a sucker with the unknown. Nassim Taleb This neither begins nor ends with schools. In a time when the most popular public stance is to celebrate our fears and idolize those who act on them

Violence

There is a pressure on every interaction we have. A push. Sometimes an impatience to get to a result. Sometimes a leeriness that we are being manipulated. Sometimes a form of disappointment in advance, an expectation that things will not go well. Taken together we might call the result anxiety. Meta-worry another cause to add

Stop Counting

In dreams we approach a form of knowing that we find difficult to access while awake. We tend to discount the sensation that there was “something to it.” Or, we displace our fascination within the dream in a vain attempt to narrate its dramatic particulars. As this fails to match our original wonder, as we

Where is the break with our past most apparent?

“Forever.” When I read this simple word no matter where, it gives me pause. There was a time when forever had a tangible solid ring. Today? No more. There are countless assumptions that were once seemingly reasonable, that ring hollow today. It is a symptom of the end of an era. In this situation the