SARAH PALIN WANTS TO BAN BOOKS LIKE THE NAZIS DID: DON’T VOTE FOR HER

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I regret to say that recent reports of Sarah Palin have changed my mind about her.

Originally, I was inclined to like her. If moms don’t cut other moms slack, no one will. We mothers are the first ones blamed for everything, for every rotten decision a son or daughter makes, every wrong turn, every misery and failure and short-coming, every lousy card that fate deals a kid. This is part of the distortion of modern talk psychotherapy, of course, as it has osmosed into the zeitgeist. So when I first heard and read about Palin, I thought the best of her.
But subsequent reportage has changed my opinion. What changed my mind is the report that Sarah Palin espouses book banning and censorship. The New York Times printed that Palin brought up the idea of banning books at a town meeting. “The librarian (of Wasilla, Palin’s town), Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to ‘resist all efforts at censorship,’ Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after office.” The Times goes on to say that Emmons was reinstated when residents made a strong show of support. 
But the damage was done. And there are few acts of greater civil sabotage than the attempted mind-control of citizens by banning books. People are defined by their actions, and Sarah Palin’s acts show her to be a repressive, vindictive politician, a fascist of the first order who is intent on curtailing free thought. Anyone who votes for her can expect to see jackboots, an empowered Gestapo, and concentration camps in short order: that’s the natural evolution from that first, powerfully evil act of banning books.
All tyrannies ban books and espouse censorship. Books release ideas into the collective consciousness, and ideas are the great liberators of the human spirit. Ideas cause change, freedom, and human dignity. To oppose those dreaded eventualities, all repressive regimes strive mightily to control ideas. Banning books to control ideas is an effective way to control constituents, to turn citizens into subjects and slaves. Fraulein Fuhrer Palin is rightly afraid of books and ideas… but in the US, she should not, must not, can not be allowed to, fear a free citizenry.

I LIKE SARAH PALIN BUT WILL STILL VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA

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John McCain is a smart man. In choosing a woman who’s had several children, he’s chosen someone who understands about working through exhaustion, is creative and resourceful, can multi-task and think on her feet, profoundly grasps the simultaneous need for both boundaries and flexibility, can negotiate between raging, demanding people, and has a big heart that’s been beaten up by life. Those are the irreplaceable gifts of motherhood, which is the single most demanding, least gratifying 24/7/365 state of being. 

 According to the NY Times, of which I am skeptical because I know reporters, and in my idiosyncratic opinion they are smart but difficult people who are pissed because they don’t make more money and who cherish pretensions to more meticulous integrity than they actually practice, Palin rose in Alaska by “impressing voters more with gumption, warmth and charm than an established record in government.” I really like gumption, warmth and charm. It’s first rate stuff.
And I am in favor of lower taxes and economic stimuli for small businesses. My husband Sabin Howard runs a sculpture business as a business, and he provides employment for models, foundries, mold-makers, finishers, packers & shippers, so he is an integral part of a capitalist economy  and should be rewarded with tax breaks and incentives. As an author, I am an entrepreneur, gambling on a good product: the books I write. The Democratic party isn’t going to help me out with this.So let’s call the Democratic party for what it is: the great punisher of rich people, small businesses, and entrepreneurs. Ayn Rand would have something to say about this, and she wouldn’t be all wrong. 
BUT. Despite the great appeal of Sarah Palin, and of McCain himself, I will never vote Republican. It is unfortunate but true that the Republican party has been hijacked by the Christian right, who do not have the country’s best interests in mind. Sadly, fundamentalist Christians are no more enlightened than fundamentalist Muslims, and are equally prone to the misguided opinion that anyone who worships the divine differently than they do, is damned. Bigotry. The necessary end to an insistence on purity is terrorism. And the people who vote AGAINST abortion will never understand, because it is never spelled out to them, that they are also voting against a better standard of living provided by education. Republicans do not support education.
So I like Sarah Palin, but I will still vote for Obama.
Love’s Hidden Symmetry: Hellinger’s Work (part 1)
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Love’s Hidden Symmetry: Hellinger’s Work (part 1)

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Of late I am reading Bert Hellinger’s book LOVE’S HIDDEN SYMMETRY: What makes love work in relationships (Zeig, Tucker & Co, Phoenix, Arizona: 1998). This book is amazing. I read it with a sense of wonder and delight, a feeling that at last there’s psychological work that deals honestly and practically with the deepest issues of the heart.

I’ve undergone a lot of psychotherapy, most of which I now view with suspicion. It isn’t that I didn’t get a lot out of the work. It isn’t that I don’t see how useful a compassionate witness can be. I grew from my nearly 18 years in therapy, and I have many times taken solace from, and given it as, a caring and non-judgmental presence.

However, there are some serious flaws with the way most contemporary therapy is practiced. To begin with, every shrink I know as a person, not professionally, is completely daft. Why do people become therapists? They want to fix themselves. Let me say, every shrink I know in a secular way needs all the help they can get. I look at these people while we’re socializing and think, Wow. People pay you to muck around in their psyche?

I don’t exempt myself. I was a healer for many years because I wanted to heal my self. That wasn’t the only reason, of course. Just as it isn’t the only reason people become therapists, psychiatrists, etc. They also have compassion. They mean well.

And they want to earn a living. They have a stake in their clients/patients staying crazy, not healing, in order to continue to earn a living. I am a big fan of people making a living, but I wonder about the conflict of interest here. Which leads me to one of the other distortions in modern psychotherapy, which is: it takes too damn long. That benefits the therapist but not the client.

The last few years I was in therapy, my therapist did a lot of the energy therapies with me: EFT, TAT, EMDR. I hear good things about neuro-linguistic programming, too. These techniques work well. They’re quick and elegant, and they cut through the bs like the sword cutting the gordian knot. More and more, it seems to me that all that talk therapy, regurgitating the same stuff about your mom and dad, serves mostly to re-wound people. Say it once, twice if it was a life-changing trauma, then move on–otherwise there’s a very good chance of falling into what Caroline Myss calls ‘woundology.’

Then too there seem to be plenty of people using talk therapy as an expensive and elaborate narcissistic crutch. They go to session as a means for rationalizing the most absolutely atrocious behavior. I’ve seen that a lot: “I have to talk to my therapist,” says someone, before behaving in a way that is criminally unkind.

Kindness matters a lot. Niceness not at all.

So, with these criticisms about psychotherapy, I turn to Hellinger’s family constellation work. I don’t agree with everything he writes. I’m probably never going to agree 100% with anything, including myself, because I use the tools of critical analysis at my disposal. That is, I discriminate: I separate the wheat from the chaff. The highest octave of this ability is discernment, something that modern psychotherapy, in its overly convoluted quest for a blithe blankness masking itself as neutrality, seems to be trying to eradicate from the contemporary mind. I also form opinions. Some are wrong, some are right, and most are strongly held. This is where I’ll quote Dante: “The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” And we live in a time of great moral crisis.

In my opinion, Hellinger’s work is some of the most real and authentic work I’ve ever come across. This is a long post, so I’ll continue with why I like Hellinger in another post.

Madeleine McCann and the Shame of Portugal

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I have followed this case with sick feelings of horror, sadness, disbelief, and, frequently, disgust. Disgust at the criminal antics of the Portuguese police, who were obviously lying about the McCanns, leaking confidential information while hampering the McCann’s search for their daughter, launching a smear campaign to discredit the McCanns, and distorting evidence. 

The shameful tomfoolery of the Portuguese police was evident even before the 30,000 page dossier was released. Now it’s out there for the world to see: the Portuguese police lied to the McCanns about DNA evidence in an attempt to extort a confession from them, sequestered an e-fit of two suspicious men despite the world’s interest in the case, and withheld possible leads. Not to mention that they made the McCanns suspects with absolutely NO EVIDENCE, and counter to an official forensic report saying that the DNA evidence was inconclusive.

These are not the actions of a professional police force. These are the actions of officially empowered thugs and buffoons. In my opinion, the Portuguese police are no better than the Gestapo–but a lot less intelligent.
My question is: were the Portuguese police in on the crime? Is that why they deliberately sabotaged the McCanns’ search and tortured the McCanns by making them suspects? 
Is there a party or parties among the Portuguese police who know exactly what happened to little Madeleine, and has profited by it? 
Besides former PJ Inspector Mr. Amaral, who beat a ‘confession’ out of a mother whose daughter disappeared some years ago, but who wasn’t able to do that with Kate McCann because of public scrutiny. Naturally, his fists not coming into play, Mr. Amaral’s usefulness was limited. He couldn’t take time out from his boozy two hour lunches to actually investigate the disappearance. So he was sacked. It was a belated attempt for Portugal to look concerned about the case. But don’t worry about Amaral; he used his free time to write a contemptuous, and contemptible, work of fiction about the case. He’s made money off the McCanns’ suffering. The question is, who else on the Portuguese police force besides Mr. Amaral took in some cash?
A dear friend from the north of Europe says, “South of the Alps they’re all corrupt.” That’s a generalization, but maybe she’s on to something. 
Last November at a party, I encountered a beautiful, intelligent, accomplished Portuguese woman who launched into a vicious attack against the McCanns when I inquired about her opinion of the case. “They’re all swingers,” she insisted. “They would drink twenty bottles of wine at dinner.” I wonder what she would say now that SKY News reports that “receipt from the ‘Tapas nine’s’ meal on the evening show that there was only two bottles of wine drunk between them.”
Or would a misguided sense of patriotism lead her to deny the only evidence there seems to be: that the Portuguese Police, with its clumsy, inept and vicious handling of the investigation, has thoroughly shamed Portugal?
I will not travel to Portugal, nor do I buy Portuguese products. I would certainly recommend strongly that no one with children younger than, say, 15, travel to Portugal. Portugal is not a safe place for children. If anything happens to your child, the Portuguese police will blame you and try to extract a ‘confession’ any way possible: through physical abuse, psychological torment, or whatever other means at their disposal.
In the meantime, I will continue to pray for little Madeleine McCann, that she be found alive and well, that she be returned to her parents.

The Screwing of the Artist, part 1

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This is a vast subject, so oceanic in scale that I can only imagine that “The Screwing of the Artist” series would extend to at least part 2,843,613.

In fact, I almost don’t know where to begin: the way some sleazy literary agents nickel-and-dime their authors; the way publishing houses refuse to support mid-list authors with pr, placement, and distribution; the cultural mindset that artists should be poor; the way art galleries are, largely, owned and run by dishonest and disrespectful douchebags who take 50% and more from the artists’ sales and do nothing to deserve that except pay rent on a storefront; the way American education from K to 12 fails to educate either budding artists or the budding public in what good art is; or, and yes, I blame the artist too: the way so many artists refuse to grow up and take on adult fiscal responsibility and effect a change in the system. Note to Peter Pan painters and writers everywhere: if you bend over, you will take it up the butt.
The most recent way we’ve all been reamed, individually as artists and collectively as a public: the $25,000,000 sale of that piece of doo-doo Jeff Koons “Balloon Flower (Magenta).”
Note to everyone: Jeff Koons sucks as an artist, and “Balloon Flower (Magenta)” is bad art.
 
Actually, it’s atrocious art. It’s ugly. It’s meaningless. Worse, it’s just silly. When a piece like this sells for that kind of money, the only thing it serves is to make us a laughing-stock in history. In 100 years, art historians and critics will call this the Dark Ages of art, and we will all be cringing with humiliation in our graves.
And, naturally, Christie’s and Jeff Koons are laughing all the way to the bank at the idiocy of anyone who would buy such a piece of crap, and at the gullible media for freely promoting it, and at a public moronic enough to believe that a big number means important art. They’re washing off their fists after wriggling them in our bottoms–yes, NY Times, they’ve fisted you, too–and smirking at the hoax they’ve perpetrated on a stupid, indiscriminate public.
To the public: go to museums and read books and talk to working artists to find out what good art is. Watch Sister Wendy on dvd. Just don’t talk to art critics and art history professors, because, largely, their media are words, overly abstruse theories, and self-importance. The “Blah blah blah” about art doesn’t matter .0001 percent as much as the visceral impact of beauty on the soul. That occupies a space that is mostly inarticulate.
So when you see some silly objet of modern art and you say, “My kid could do better than this,” believe it: you’re right. The emperor has no clothes.

Franklin and Winston

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My oldest daughter is going to Amherst. The waitlist cracked like an amphora to allow in some light, and she was admitted a few weeks ago to the class of 2012. It was her first choice college so we are all very excited for her.

And yesterday, true to its reputation as one of the finest intellectual institutions in the country, the office of the Dean of Students sent her the summer reading: Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston. I told her how exciting it was and lucky she was, and she rolled her eyes at me. This kid has worked hard for the past 6 years, and she’d rather have the summer free of homework, with space to enjoy her job as a camp counselor for 9 year olds and all her parties with her friends.
But she is lucky, luckier than she knows at almost 18 years old. I know from the perspective of midlife what she can not: that she is at the start of a grand adventure. That she will learn and question and explore and discover, over the next four years, in ways that she never will again. Not just in books, either. Franklin and Winston indeed.