The NAMI Papers

 The seven blog entries below are all contributions on mental health/mental illness issues originally asked for by Indianapolis NAMI, the leading mental health advocacy organization in the U.S., which, unfortunately, is not as effective an advocate on behalf of mental health consumers as is needed.  These articles were submitted to national NAMI for publication, and were all rejected, I think because they were just too damn good for NAMI's low-middlebrow standards.  What NAMI wants, unfortunately, are breezy, facile, feel-good articles that are essentially akin to the non-professional writer contributions to the Reader's Digest, leavened with a good dose of the superficial Power of Positive Thinking "philosophy" associated with Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller.  However, as an extensively published actual writer and poet, including at the national level, I was not about to lower my standards to produce for NAMI such superficial, breezy pabulum.  Yet, my articles below definitely deserve publication, as any judicious reader will plainly see.  Hence, I have posted them on my "Politically Incorrect Leftist" blog in hopes of their finding the wider readership they deserve.     

NAMI and Parents

 

My late parents wouldn’t have been caught dead joining NAMI or attending a NAMI meeting.  Their attitude on mental health, mental illness, and seeking psychiatric help was made clear in their attitude toward me when I voluntarily sought psychiatric help—in doing so I brought shame upon the family!  My relatives had the same reaction.  My parents were clearly what psychologist Dr. Susan Forward called “toxic parents”—parents who were abusive, who were abusers.  Though my parents never physically abused me—they didn’t have to, they intimidated me by their constant screaming at me.  That is, when they weren’t ignoring me completely.  The noted Kaiser Permanente ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study of 1995 delineates this clearly:  abusive parenting can cause lifetime mental health, relationship and addiction problems for the children involved.  And there are four particular classes of parents for whom this is notably true:  parents who regularly denigrate or belittle their child; parents who themselves suffer from mental illness; parents who have serious drug or alcohol abuse problems; and parents who are jailbirds, former jailbirds, or who are engaged in illegal activity.  My parents clearly fit into the first category, and possibly into the second category.  Although I had, according to the latest psychiatric research, a 55% genetic propensity to inherit the personality disorder I suffered from, my parents’ abuse made it certain, I believe we could say, that I had a 100% chance of having psychiatric problems.  Which I did for literally decades.  As I’ve written poetically, it takes only one thing to become a natural parent: “the ability to fuck”!  Biologically, sperm meeting egg produces a child.  Period.  Even when the parents involved are utterly unfit for parenting.  As were mine.  I realize this goes against the grain of official NAMI, but, frankly, Freud was really onto something when he posited that mental illness has its origins in parental failure.  He was indeed at least half-right, and the ACE study confirms it.  NAMI needs to reform its facile view that mental illness is entirely genetic and can’t be helped, and its naïvete about toxic parents and toxic parenting.  Bad, toxic, inappropriate parenting does play a key role in gestating mental illness.  Lest we forget or ignore.   

“Stigma” is not the problem; bigotry against the “mentally ill” is!

 

“Stigma” is just the symptom, the effect of open societal and individual bigotry against those deemed “mentally ill.”  It’s just like the “stigma” of being black in the South during the period of Jim Crow segregation.  Being a black person “stigmatized” one by the color of one’s nonwhite skin, but the underlying cause of the “stigma” was the open societal bigotry against those deemed “colored,” even to “one drop of Negro blood”!  As with blacks then, we “mentally ill” are deemed “inferior” simply because of who we are; and if we seek professional treatment for our “mental illness,” the bigotry follows us, follows us with the false “Aha!”:  “See, I told you he [or she] was one of those people!”

 

I suffered this bigotry openly from my family, for whom I allegedly brought shame upon the whole family for undergoing psychiatric treatment.  I also suffered this bigotry openly here in Indianapolis, where I’ve lived since late 1979, because one person, of whom one of her friends said “She had a narrow conception of mental illness,” badmouthed me publicly for twenty-six years, and which badmouthing still haunts me to this day, despite this person now being dead for over a decade; because, as a Quaker “saint,” she was believed automatically and uncritically, but none of those who believed her ever questioned me about it!  No, instead, they just shunned me, which is what this person wanted.  To her, I was more crippled because of “mental illness” than if I had been confined to a wheelchair!  And yet—this person worked as the head nutritionist of a well-known local hospital.  And had a Master’s degree.  Yes, even the educated and supposedly intelligent can hold onto truly infantile bigotries.  One of her friends even told me, “I avoided making your acquaintance for three years because I had heard you had ‘mental problems.’”

 

So, the “stigma” of seeking psychiatric help comes from the bigotry so prevalent out there; we are literally damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.  And it’s institutionalized, and in high places.  Such as, after a horrific mass shooting a couple of years back, President Trump proclaimed publicly that guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill kill people!

 

So, my NAMI friends, focusing on “stigma” doesn’t get to the root of the problem: the open societal and individual bigotry against those deemed “mentally ill,” and our damnation whether we seek or forego seeking professional help.  It is that bigotry that must be firmly extirpated, not simply its accompanying “stigma.”

 

Indeed, the “stigma” of being labeled “mentally ill” is far greater than the “stigma” of having an STD.  After all, the “stigma” of coming down with an STD can give one bragging rights:  “Well, if you had such an active sex life as I have, where not only do I get all I can handle and then some, you’d realize that sooner or later it was inevitable that I’d catch an STD.  Just the cost of doing the business of getting all the sexual pleasure I can.  And boy can I!”

 

Then there are those mental health consumers themselves who try to fight the “stigma” of seeking truly professional help by indulging instead in all kinds of New Age nostrums and pseudo-sciences.  Such as one mental health consumer I knew who was telling all her fellow mental health consumers, “Go off your medication, and let God heal you.” (By the way, she and her husband went off their medications and did thousands of dollars’ worth of property damage; and had to be ordered by a court of law to stay on their medications!)  Though, to be honest, the ofttimes horrific side effects of psychotropic medications make going off them seem a very attractive option to those who are on them.  But these are but two more “adverse side effects” of what is a wrongheaded approach to the “stigma” of “mental illness” in the first place!

 

Then there is the problem of wrongheaded, inadequate, and often just plain malfeasant psychiatry and psychotherapy.  This, too, results in, and feeds, “stigma.”  But the answer to that “stigma” is better, more affordable, more accessible, psychiatry; which means more good alternatives, not simply consignment to often wrongheaded, inadequate and malfeasant CMHCs, especially for those who lack private incomes, rich families, or strong insurance.  Money, and its lack, also feeds “stigma.”  But again, I must emphasize, it is not “stigma” as such that is the problem; it is the underlying bigotry that fuels the “stigma.”         

 

Mental Illness: It’s Not Just the Big Three

 

The Big Three being, of course, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.  There’s also, as a major category of mental illness, personality disorders, which are now viewed as far more prevalent than before.  Though psychiatrically ignored for the most part prior to 1980, where they were simply regarded as “untreatable, their recognition in DSM-III changed that.  They can also be successfully treated psychiatrically, though not by medication, which can bring significant symptomatic relief to schizophrenics, those with bipolar, or depressives.  Treatment of personality disorders requires long-term psychotherapy of a year or more, to undo the false mental narratives in the minds of the sufferers.  Fortunately, ever since the late 1980s several types of psychotherapies have been developed that successfully treat personality disorders:  though they start from different theoretical assumptions, in practice they all embrace certain similar methods and techniques of treatment.  Among them are Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Mentalization, and others, as well as hybrid approaches that draw from more than one school of therapy.  Unfortunately, these successful therapies are not generally available in CMHCS; they often require therapists in private practice, which can be a financial obstacle for many seeking treatment.

 

The individual and societal costs of untreated personality disorders are myriad and costly:  in unfilled and unfulfilling life chances and choices, in employment and schooling failures, in relationships and interpersonal interactions, and are often comorbid with other disorders notably depression.  But since successful treatment now is substantially available, it’s high time for NAMI do advocate for and demand awareness of personality disorders, and for treatment of such to be readily available and financially accessible for all who need such.  We who suffer from personality disorders have been neglected far too long; it’s time to reverse this.  And that time is now.

Wondrously Gifted

 

This article, "Wondrously Gifted," is a digest and expansion of my 2004 speech, “Wondrous Gifts: The Contributions of the Mentally Ill to Human Society,” which has been reprinted four times.  "Wondrously Gifted" was published in the Circle City Clubhouse newsletter.

 

Truth is, many great, accomplished people in history and contemporary life have suffered mental illness, addiction, or both, yet achieved anyway.  Mental illness, “mental health issues,” need not hold back such sufferers from achievement and accomplishment—history and lived life is replete with positive examples.

 

Indeed, two suffers of mental illness have been among history’s greatest geniuses:  Isaac Newton (bipolar) and Albert Einstein (severe depression).  Two other suffers of severe depression were two of history’s greatest statesmen:  Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln.  Also suffering from mental illness and addiction were the seminal painter Vincent Van Gogh (schizophrenic and suicide) and be-bop jazz pioneer Charlie Parker (bipolar and heroin addict).  Other notable sufferers were actress Patty Duke (bipolar), who also became President of the Screen Actors Guild, as well as “America’s oldest teenager,” American Bandstand host and long-time TV commentator Dick Clark.

 

Many Nobel Laureates in Literature have suffered mental illness, and wrote their masterworks while so suffering—among them, poet T.S. Eliot, and novelists Sinclair Lewis (alcoholic), Ernest Hemingway (schizophrenic, alcoholic and suicide), and William Faulkner (alcoholic). Other notable writers who suffered from mental illness and/or addiction were the father of the short story, the horror story, and the mystery/detective story, Edgar Alan Poe (depressive, alcoholic, compulsive gambler) and Jack Kerouac (alcoholic and binge drinker).  Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath also suffered from mental illness, and ultimately committed suicide—yet she wrote a classic autobiographical novel on her struggle, The Bell Jar.   Pediatrician and Harvard Medical School associate Mark Vonnegut (son of noted writer Kurt Vonnegut, who also had mental health problems) suffered from bipolar, yet wrote a brilliant account of his struggles with it, The Eden Express.  Novelist Susana Kaysen wrote a compelling account of her psychiatric hospitalization, Girl Interrupted, which was even made into a movie.

 

This writer too has a diagnosed mental illness—borderline schizo-affective personality disorder, subject to chronic depression, who also overcame a drinking problem.  Yet I am a college graduate; know a foreign language; am an extensively-published writer, journalist, poet; and stand-up comedian; in addition to holding down a steady job and being self-supporting.

 

On the other hand, neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney, architects of the disastrous U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as of policies that led to the Great Recession of 2008, have ever had their sanity questioned!  Same goes for Ronald Reagan, who, among other things, gutted federal financing for mental health treatment.  And while Donald Trump has been called “narcissistic,” no one has ever questioned his basic sanity!

 

Appropriately enough, the last word was said by a mental health consumer—a former patient at Bellvue who went on to earn a Ph.D. and return to Bellvue—to head its Department of Psychology!  He said trenchantly, “Hey, Normals!  Do you realize what a mess you’ve made of things?”

Dear Psychiatrist/Psychotherapist: Admonitions and Suggestions from a Mental Health Consumer

 

Psychotherapy and dispensing psychiatric advice are easily as much arts as they are sciences, hard science or otherwise, as recently demonstrated by new books by leading psychiatric publisher Guilford Press, which lists three recent books on how to be a better psychotherapist—which basically come down to but one suggestion: listen, really listen, to your client.  That sums it up well, psychiatrist/psychotherapist:  you are, first and foremost, not there to dispense unsolicited advice, much less bark mandatory orders, but to listen, really listen, to that troubled human being sitting across from you; that troubled human being who’s most likely have gone through life’s wringer in ways, and to an extent, you can neither fathom from your own experience, or find automatic guidance for in any standard psychiatric textbook!

 

So, first of all, listen, really listen, to your client, and put this first.  Before dispensing advice or telling the patient who’s before you what to do.  Phrase things such as suggestions and admonitions in an interrogatory way; ask, not tell, your client directly, preface your remarks with, “Have you considered that…” or “Have you thought about…,” for example. And elicit honest feedback from your client!   If your client is unsure of what you are suggesting, if the client has doubts, or thinks what you offer won’t work, and above all, if what you suggest makes your client feel uneasy or uncomfortable, you not only want, but you need, to know about it!  Enforced pseudo-certainly through engineered silence only hurts both you and your client, and detracts from, undermines, the therapy relationship.

 

Second, ask questions of your client and his/her background.  You, therapist, can’t automatically know everything you need to know about your client, not even from the most extensive psychiatric interview, but you need to find out, because as you and the client go along, ofttimes the must unanticipated, the most unexpected, will make their way to the fore.  And remember always, therapist, there is no such thing as an obvious question, or an obvious answer, so don’t ever assume there are.  What you don’t know, what you are unaware of, you are just ignorant or unaware of, period.  Further, questions to the client also show you are directly concerned about him/her, and not just play the role of an authoritative “expert” who always knows everything.  Because such, even if inadvertent, can seriously not just undermine, but also directly jeopardize, the therapy relationship.

 

Remember always, psychiatrist/psychotherapist, your first duty in therapy or dispensing psychiatric advice is to help the client help him/herself, not transform the client into an obliging robot.  You are a guide, not an automatic “expert” who knows all the answers.  Realize also, psychiatry is forever evolving, new knowledge and techniques of practice are always coming along, so it is important to not only be abreast of these, but to communicate to your client that you, too, are a fellow human being also searching for answers, not some automatically infallible guru.  For even the best of us can make mistakes, mistakes that seriously rouse anger and doubt about efficacy in the minds of the clients.  Such as the psychiatrist who asked me in all sincere honesty, “What did you do to make your parents abuse you?”  (Emphases as they were originally in the psychiatrist’s phrasing.)  The “correct” answer is, of course, “Nothing.”  (I did not answer his question this way, though I felt it.)  I can no more cause someone, even a parent, to abuse me any more than, as a woman supposedly having too much to drink or wearing too short a skirt, cause a man to rape me!  Same way with my most recent therapist, who alleged I was not “subtle” enough in understanding my father who called me “sissy” and “n****r-lover” repeatedly at the top of his lungs when I was a child and adolescent!  These two examples show conclusively that, even if inadvertently, the failure to make good word choices can unravel therapy relations!  For, in both these cases, things were never, ever, the same between me and the therapist.

 

That all sums it up.  These are things I’ve wanted to convey for a long time as a mental health consumer to my “professional healers,” and these are things I think are absolutely vital to a good, constructive therapy relationship.  Summarizing, they are three in number, and are an absolutely needed and vital three:  Listen, Ask Questions, Elicit Feedback.  Remember, your client is an autonomous human being, not just an empty vessel for you to pour into whatever you wish.  For therapy to work, it must be an exchange between two people.  Yes, psychiatrist/psychotherapist, you are “first among the two equals here;” but you are neither a god nor and infallible guru, and your expertise needs always to be tempered with a sense of humility, and awareness of just how fallible you really are. Remember, psychiatrist/psychotherapist, you also make mistakes.

Causes of Mental Illness: Don’t Overlook Adverse Social Environment!

 

It’s now commonplace for psychiatry to credit adverse social environment as a cause of mental illness, even as it slights the social environment in favor of genetic causes, or else concentrates on medication to eliminate or alleviate the outward symptoms of such.  For example, in relation to the mental illness I have, personality disorder, the state-of-the-art research handbook on such, 2014’s Handbook of Personality Disorders, Second Edition (Livesley and Larstone, Eds., Guilford Press), states broadly that personality disorders are 45% genetic, and that hopes for effective medicinal treatment are under research; which implicitly notes that the majority of its roots, 55%, is attributable to social, especially parental, social environment.  This makes a lot of sense, especially since personality disorders are most amenable to long-term cognitive behavioral and other related therapies such as dialectical behavioral, mentalization, hybrid, and other therapies (though these various therapies have differing theoretical premises, they are all similar in the specific therapeutic approaches and techniques utilized).  The Amish and other psychological/psychiatric studies have also demonstrated the importance of social environment in the attenuation or enhancement of basic pathological propensities.  No, adverse social, especially parental, environment must also be considered just as important in causing mental illness as genetics, and that psychotherapy is as needed as is medication (with the proviso that medication is not recommended for personality disorders except to treat chronic outward symptomatic mental illnesses, since personality disorders are often comorbid with depression, substance abuse, and other maladaptive behaviors).  In fact, the last part of the Handbook, Section VII, “Empirically Based Treatments,” is given over entirely to effective therapies in treatment of personality disorders, and how best to utilize them.

 

The role of adverse social environment is especially brought home when we consider the cases of two contemporary notorious individuals.  Serial killer Ted Bundy, for instance, was left orphaned by the death of his parents and was raised by his grandfather, who horrendously abused him.  Bundy was an outwardly charming individual who not only worked in a “Good Samaritan” job, as phone responder to 911 emergencies, but also used his charm to disarm the women in distress he encountered, and then rape and murder them. 

 

Former President Donald Trump was (and is) frequently, publicly, regarded by mental health authorities as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder (however, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton regarded him as “solipsistic,” i.e., sensing no one but himself in interactions with others), and was certainly noted as often publicly unhinged, especially after his defeat in the 2020 election, where he continually blamed his defeat (and in fact, still does) on non-existent “voter fraud.”  But an article on Trump in Politico Magazine by Michael Kruse on December 20, 2020, “Is Trump Cracking Under the Weight of Losing?” contained this telling paragraph on his childhood and parental rearing:

 

Trump is who and how he is first and foremost because of his parents. His  unwell mother couldn’t and didn’t give him the attention he wanted and needed, while his domineering father gave him attention but a wrong and warping kind—instilling in him a grim, zero-sum worldview with the dictate that the only option was to be “a winner.” Ever since, he responded so relentlessly to these harsh particulars of his loveless upbringing—the insatiable appetite for publicity, the crass, constant self-aggrandizement—that he became the president of the United States and arguably the most famous person alive. But from the time he was a boy, the way Trump has coped with the void he’s felt ultimately has been less a solution than a spotlight—it’s what’s made his most fundamental problem most manifest.

 

Don’t these two personality sketches encapsulate much about the importance of a good, nurturing home social environment?  Even over and above genetics, possibly?

 

This is also borne out in the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study based on questionnaires given to 17,000 patients of the Kaiser Permanente health insurance/medical provider organization in California—which found out that childhood trauma could result in lifelong mental health, relationship, and addiction problems.  Specifically, a pamphlet I picked up free at my medical clinic’s office, “Understanding Adverse Childhood Experiences” (Prevent Child Abuse Publications, 2009), lists four types of parents who, beyond physically or sexually abusing their children, can harm them through other ways:  by swearing at, belittling or insulting their children; being a parent or parents who are mentally ill themselves; abusing alcohol or using illegal drugs; or being a parent who went to prison or engages in illegal activity.  In my particular case both of my parents were of this first type, and may have been of the second type as well—but tellingly, while they accused me of bringing shame upon the family by seeking psychiatric help, they themselves would never, ever, consider it as appropriate for them!  And though they never physically or sexually harmed me, their constant, unhinged screaming at me in 15-minutes-at-a-time raging tirades cowed and intimidated me, especially since their volatility was entirely unpredictable.  But as I’ve written before, it takes only one thing to become a “natural” parent—the ability to fuck!  Even when no other qualification is evident.  So it was for me as a result of such parents, later compounded by the also-negative social environment of abusive Catholic small-town schools and deliberate physical bullying and social ostracism of my classmates, further abetted by inept and malfeasant psychiatric treatment at university clinics and CMHCs, which don’t know what to do with a patient if they can’t drug or otherwise minimally “manage” him/her.

 

But it should be emphasized, as it is in the child-abuse-recovery manual, “Survivor to Thriver” (The Morris Center, 1995), that when  it is this kind of abuse and this kind of parent, when it is, as said in law, “a consistent pattern,” when it is the norm, and  not just the rare, occasional freaking out of a parent who’s having a bad day, that the problems stemming from child abuse  fully arise.  No, it is the “consistent pattern” of the abuse, as it was for me with my parents constantly screaming at me, and the teachers in the Catholic schools I attended not caring at all that I was bullied and socially ostracized.  This prevalent abuse is rightly called by “Survivor to Thriver” “self-indulgence” on the part of parental and other authority figures—and is something to be extirpated, not apologized for; and certainly not to be glossed over or overlooked! 

 

But eventually I was able to grow out of all this to a substantial extent, much considerably due to a very able psychotherapist I had at one particular CMHC, who stuck doggedly yet compassionately with me for over a decade.  In our parting session, he said to me, “Congratulations.  By rights [i.e., by statistical probabilities] you should’ve been institutionalized, incarcerated, a hopeless alcoholic or drug addict, a suicide, or otherwise prematurely dead, but you turned out to be None of the Above.”

 

And yet—since my recovery didn’t come until quite late in my life, I feel (properly, I consider) having been fundamentally robbed by my parents, by my adverse parental and school-system social environments.  Which is why, for the children’s sake, it’s better to deal with parental dysfunctions early in the child’s life, and not let the effects fester throughout childhood, only to be appropriately dealt with when the child has grown to be an adult—with so much vital life and growing lost, in important ways, forever, even with later recovery.  Which may not be, may never be, full recovery.

 

 

NAMI and “Spirituality”: an ex-Catholic Atheist’s Perspective

 

A while back, the NAMI Indiana newsletter summarized a Huffington Post article that claimed, based on a sample of 87 respondents, mostly Catholic and Buddhist, that a sense of “spirituality” was integral to mental health, and upheld that position itself.  Needless to say, and self-evident to anyone with a statistics background (which I, as holder of a university degree in economics definitely have), such a small sample size is grotesquely too tiny to have any statistical validity at all; and that the sample was skewed toward Catholic and Buddhist respondents undermines the statistical necessity that the sample taken must be random, which obviously in this case it is not—so such a conclusion has no legitimacy whatsoever.  Also, the recent and current events of Catholic priest-pedophilia and Catholic priests and bishops using Catholic nuns and convents as harems and sources of sex slaves, along with the Catholic bishops’ and cardinals’ deliberate cover-up of decades of priest-pedophilia, and coupled with the ethnic cleansing of non-Buddhists carried out under the aegis of Buddhist monks in Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, and Sri Lanka, denies any moral authority whatsoever for either Catholicism or Buddhism to claim any “moral high ground” when it comes to “spirituality,” the alleged necessity of “spirituality” to mental health, or the tenets of  morality!

 

Psychiatrist Eli Chesen, in his book Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health (New York: Collier Books, 1972), very admirably points out the perils and deleterious effects of too great an attachment to religion and “spirituality.”  But he still upholds, in my mind, a psychologism, a simple “belief in belief,” with his notion that religion can do some good by teaching appropriate moral values.  However, drawing on my experience as both a Catholic child and adolescent and later atheist adult, I think that appropriate moral values flow more readily from secular humanism than they do from any religion, no matter how “enlightened;” and that “enlightened" religions are such precisely because they’ve been positively influenced by—secular humanism!  (Secular, of course, does not mean atheist; it simply means indifference to religious claims.  Humanism means, of course, human-centered.)  My direct experience with the Catholicism I was born and raised in, and which was inculcated in my through twelve years of Catholic schooling, has taught me that the values religions promulgate and teach are often quite arbitrary and selective—and I’ve seen the same thing in those raised in other religious traditions.  As a key example, within Catholicism, and within Christianity in general, it’s specifically noted that Jesus himself admonished his followers that this commandment was “like unto” the first, of loving God with one’s whole mind, body, and soul, and every bit as important—loving one’s neighbor “as thyself.”  Yet, “Hate thy neighbor” is quite common within Christianity, especially when one’s neighbor is different:  of a different creed, or different sexual orientation, or of a different race or ethnicity, or a “nerd,” or otherwise deemed an undesirable person.  Indeed, I, myself, suffered as a Catholic child and adolescent from my Catholic classmates’ bullying and social ostracism because I was “different”—too physically weak and non-athletic, too “nerdy,” too much given to reading!  Same with my Catholic parents—too much not a “chip off the old block,” too “nonconforming,” too much into intellectual pursuits, not athletic or interested in sports enough.  These were enough to make my Catholic childhood and adolescence, especially from the ages 10 through 18, a living hell!  Also, racism was widespread among my white Catholic classmates, as was disdain for the Civil Rights Movement among both my Catholic classmates and my Catholic parents—a disdain I did not share, and was thus punished for and screamed at for rejecting!  Further, what “values” that were taught us in the Catholic schools were arbitrary, selective, very conforming to right-wing viewpoints, were rigidly upheld, and above all, were quite different and distinct from any notion of “Love thy neighbor as thyself;” which, as I recall, was never taught us in the Catholic schools I attended from 1953 through 1965!  Instead, we were taught a simplistic, totalizing anticommunism, a disdain for Protestants and all other non-Catholics, hostility toward Jews as Christ-killers who had really shady ethics (something Catholicism did not change until the early 1960s at Vatican II!), and above all, once we reached adolescence, the absolute necessity of constantly policing our genitals and romantic/sexual attachments, lest we fall into perdition! Along with absolute obedience and unquestioning allegiance to Catholic authorities and Catholic moral, “spiritual,” and even temporal, authority.  The Church was first, all else was strictly secondary.  Those were the Catholic “values” I was raised on, the Catholic values my classmates and I were specifically taught.  No mention ever of “love thy neighbor.”

 

So it seems to me that when NAMI embraces “spirituality” as necessary for mental health, it’s really saying that, for some reason, simply a belief in some sort of otherworldly, anthropomorphic but supra-human, benign father figure is somehow beneficial to mental health.  Yet NAMI does not answer how such a father figure could be benign and yet punish transgressors with eternal punishment in hell, which is taught specifically by Christianity (at least historically for about the last 2,000 years) and Islam, and certainly implied in some forms of Judaism; while Hinduism posits an equivalent cycle of endless reincarnations into undesirable animals for such transgressors!  All at the hands of an allegedly benign God or gods who somehow love us humans, but whose sense of justice requires very severe, even unending, punishment.  Not exactly consistent with Logic 101, to say the very least!  NAMI’s adherence to such is thus certainly naïve, if not outright false.  In fact, as I state at the bottom of this essay, it’s directly contradictory to the positive peace and humane morality I’ve found as a mental health consumer who’s specifically an—ex-Catholic atheist without an ounce of “spirituality”!

 

Then there are those expressions of religion, of “spirituality,” that are mental illnesses themselves.  As in people who believe they are God, or Jesus, or some saint, or have been given a specific divine mission to carry out by God, even if it is to harm others; not to mention people who believe, are convinced, that God is directly talking to them!  There are also mental health consumers, among them people I’ve known personally, of a New Age “spiritual” bent, who advise other mental health consumers, “Go off your psychotropic medication and let God heal you!”  Indeed, there are many mental health consumers, and even some prominent “mental health professionals” (author Seth Farber, for example, comes to mind, as do those associated with the group MindFreedom) for whom the quintessence of mental health “recovery” is—going off one’s psychotropic medication!  Even just quitting it, cold turkey!  Further, many mental health consumers, both recovering and non-so-recovering, are drawn to evangelical, even fundamentalist, Christian sects and denominations that teach that mental illness, poverty, homelessness, and other adversities in life are God’s punishment for “sin,” and which demand, or at least strongly pressure, their adherents to tithe, i.e., give 10% of their income to the church, even when they have only a poverty-level income.  These, too, all these above, are also “spirituality.”

 

Chesen’s book cited above relates a very moving case history (pp. 75-76)  of someone fatally blinded, led to desperation, by his religion, his “spirituality”: a struggling married Catholic computer programmer with eleven children when he and his wife had wanted only four, but both of whom followed the Church and didn’t use birth control, and who committed suicide when it was apparent he could not support such a large family on his and his wife’s already-stretched-to-the-limit income; after which his wife went on welfare and gave the two youngest children up to foster homes![1]  (Yes, I know, that invidious, “nasty” question pops up, at least to this atheist:  Just where was God when all this was happening?)

 

When I was a Catholic child, I used to pray to God to protect me from those tormenting me, not realizing, in my naivete, that I was asking God to protect me from—his professed followers!  For indeed, as I attended four different Catholic grade and high schools with different student bodies, had professed Catholic parents and Catholic relatives on my mother’s side, and professed Protestant relatives on my father’s side, and have of course known or been acquainted with Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim religious believers in adulthood, I’ve specifically known, or acquainted with, over 500-700 professed Christians or students at Catholic schools in my lifetime; of these, I can say that only 60 of these were what I would consider morally admirable.  Or, only about 8-11% of the whole.  Moreover, of the rest, overwhelmingly they were cruel, insensitive, malicious, or slighting of me personally, and not uncommonly sanctimonious, self-righteous, and in complete denial they were doing anything harmful or hurtful to me, even when they were, and I called them on it!  I had only one-two friends at a time throughout my grade- and high-school years, and didn’t develop any real friendships until I was of college age and older—and with precious few exceptions, those who did befriend me were all  “immoral” atheists who really saw merit in me and actually practiced “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” even as Christians maintained that people were atheists only because they wanted to sin, and rationalize their sin away!  (But then, to Christians overwhelmingly, “sin” has solely to do with how one uses one’s genitalia, and has no relation whatsoever, except in a very abstract, formal, sense, to “love thy neighbor.”)  So, yes, I do have “problems” with cruel, insensitive, sanctimonious, self-righteous, and morally blind religious believers!  Among whom are many such who are absolute bigots toward those they deem “mentally ill”!  But I have no problems whatsoever with humane and humanistic religious believers of any stripe, among whom are some close friends of mine and very admirable, moral people, long-time fighters for social and individual justice—but who, I’ve found, are preciously few and far between among religious believers generally!  So, I content and devote myself to trying to live a conscientious life that is morally upright and admirable, living my life without God or gods, not as one still ruefully “worshipping” a malignant anti-God!  Such is now my positive life as an ex-Catholic atheist who has found full peace and contentment in a life lived without “spirituality,” someone who finds a deep “awe at the universe” more in the magnificent photographs taken by the Hubble telescope than in any notions taken from theology, no matter how allegedly “sublime” they’re portrayed to be.

 

               

---

[1] Catholics, of course, are forbidden by the Catholic Church itself from using any form of “artificial birth control” (condoms, the Pill, diaphragms, IUDs, etc.) and must rely for family planning only on the rhythm method (often sarcastically referred to as “Vatican roulette”!), or else, abstinence from sexual intercourse entirely, to prevent pregnancy.  However, since the Church sees the purpose of sexuality as solely for reproduction, Catholics may not engage primarily in sexual activities (cunnilingus, fellatio, manual sex) that thwart reproduction, although Catholic married couples (sexual activity outside of marriage is strictly forbidden by the Church; that includes masturbation) may use such in foreplay only.  Such is determined by the Catholic Church authorities themselves, from the Pope on down, all of whom are (at least theoretically) celibate males who have been ordained as Catholic priests! (And only males can be ordained as Catholic priests.)  Nuns, by Catholic canon law, are subordinate within the Church to male priests (only from whose ranks may come valid Catholic bishops, Cardinals, and Popes); and lay Catholics are specifically designated as powerless, as their purpose in the Church is only to obey Church authorities.  Such is the reality of the Catholic Church that I, myself, was specifically taught and directly experienced, along with the duty of all Catholics, lay and clergy alike, to uphold these unquestioningly.  Although many Catholics do not hold such rigid views on sexuality, they are deemed illegitimate and “sinning” when they do so.  So, to remain good Catholics, they must not make such views public.  If they do express such views publicly they are deemed as “causing scandal” to the Church, and can be excommunicated.    

The “Woke” Discover Racism

 And in doing so, immediately disregard any and all issues of social class, or classism, in favor o “identity politics” racial essentialism, and deride any and all serious attempts to inject socio-economic class into the discussion of race and racism as nothing but “class reductionism.”  As if merely being black, or Latinx, or another person of color, no matter what one’s class standing, wealth (or lack of it), influence (or lack of it) or power (or lack of it) automatically made one a “spokesperson” for the whole of the community on issues of race, racism, power, influence, wealth, or any and all else.  Thus, a black college professor at an elite university, or a grad student, is automatically an expert on how the black poor and working-class experience race, racism, and all other matters sundry to these.  For there is no class difference in the communities of color, all are essentially in the same boat because of allegedly “lived experiences,” don’t you see?  And when people such as retired black professor and socialist activist Adolph Reed, Jr. try to point out the non-truth of this, and note pointedly that “racial solidarity” has often been but a get-out-the-vote ploy to win support among masses of ordinary working and poor people for an essentially middle-class, professional-managerial political and social agenda, they are vilified in no uncertain terms as—worse than an avowed Uncle Tom!

 

But socio-economic class is real, and so is societal stratification because of it.  People of color are not all “essentially in the same boat” anymore than white people are.  It is indeed as the Preamble to the Constitution of the radical union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) put it, “The working class [i.e., those who work for the rich and powerful, whose labor turns the wheels of, and makes the goods and services that arise from, capital and the means of production] and the employing class [i.e., the rich and powerful, the owners of capital and the means of production]  have nothing in common.”  Except to be bound together in continual struggle against each other, no matter how individuals within both such groupings may subjectively feel otherwise.

 

This lack of commonality was vividly brought home a few years ago on an iconic video that appeared on the Internet, where a Latina woman employee of McDonald’s confronted the African American CEO of McDonald’s at the stockholders meeting, and vociferously agitated for a $15 an hour Living Wage for herself and her fellow employees, and the African American CEO had her arrested and thrown out of the meeting by the police!  A very clear case of socio-economic class trumping any form of racial essence, may I point out!  An African American CEO of a corporation such as McDonald’s no more has the desire to pay the employees a Living Wage any more than a white CEO has!  It is simply—not—in their class interest, no matter what “identity” as a person of color might “indicate.”  In today’s largely integrated equal-opportunity, workplaces, it’s not uncommon to have managers, supervisors, bosses over one, who are black, or Latin, or women, or intersectional:  Yet how many ordinary employees in such workplaces can specifically say they benefit because their manager, supervisor, boss, is a “fellow” person of color, or a “fellow” member of one’s gender, and thus is not a—boss—in the usual sense?  To ask the question is to answer it; and the answer is, overwhelmingly, “It makes no difference!”  Why?  Because of the social position of the boss, an alienating power over the worker, not at all because of the accident of race or gender.  An insight which is but an updated understanding in this age of “identity” of that which was noted long ago not only by Karl Marx, but those first who tried to organize their fellow workers into trade unions!  Which explains why the “ideal” spokesperson for the race or gender as a whole (most of whom, overwhelmingly, are ordinary blue- and white-collar workers) is simply not some lawyer, or politician, or grad student, or whatever, who is not of the ordinary working class him (or her) self!  Something at the heart, by the way, of what Adolph reed, Jr., says, or his son Touré Reed says, or other alleged “class reductionists” say!  Yes, class does matter, and it infuses the whole of social structure.  The Haves differ greatly from the Have-Nots, even if the Haves and the Have-Nots are of the same race, or gender, or share a common intersectionality!  The Ruler is simply “not essentially” the same as—the Ruled!

 

The only good fallout (but it’s only a paltry one) from this obsession of the “woke” over racism to the detriment, dismissal, of class has been to broaden somewhat our understanding of class in notably the U.S., but throughout the capitalist world, to include gender and racial components in the working-class’s composition.  We of the left no longer have as much the conception of the “working class” as predominantly comprised of white males.  We of the left are now more consciously aware of the role racial minorities, marginalized groups generally, and sexual divisions play in the working class’s composition.  But this seeming “slight” of women and minorities in the working class was only implicit, an oversight, rather than a conscious manifestation.  Simple truth is, the vast majority of minorities and women in the workforce are ordinary blue-collar and white-collar workers forced to sell their labor power (in Marxist terms) in order to make a living (or somewhat alternatively, their education and skill sets to qualify for selling certain more advanced forms of labor power to the employers).  Overwhelmingly, they are not, decidedly not, of the professional-managerial class, nor are they business owners or business executives; nor, even if they own some stock, are they major stockholders.  They are as “ordinary” a part of the working class are supposedly “privileged” white workers, and thus share a class commonality with them—something leftists have pointed out all the ways back to the days of the Communist Manifesto, even if racism among whites has obscured this commonality ofttimes—to the detriment of the working class as a whole, black, brown, yellow, red and white, male and female, gay and straight alike!   Racism and sexism is thus not a “white privilege” that benefits white male workers to the detriment of non-white, non-male workers, it is but a form of false consciousness (to invoke an “archaic” term our left has wrongly forgotten) that works to undermine white and male labor as well as colored and female labor.  It is an injury to all.  Period.

 

Further, if racism were still as ubiquitous as the “woke” maintain, then the whole of the Civil Rights Movement has been—in vain!  However, 2021 is not 1962, important progress and gains in equality have been achieved, and, as Bernie Sanders has emphasized, while much still needs to be done, much has already been accomplished.  No, we are not an equal society yet; but we are far less unequal than we used to be.  Progress has been made.  And prominence for blacks and Latinos, for example, is no longer confined to athletes and entertainers.  In fact, so much progress has been made that hidebound white supremacists in political office and on the Supreme Court now work assiduously to roll back these gains in equality achieved!

 

But this is something the “woke” don’t seem to see.  Nor do professional anti-racists such as Robin DiAngelo of Ibrahim X. Kendi.  But it bears emphasizing once again:  this is not 1962, this is 2021, and much has positively changed!  And denying that it has is only an ostrich-with-head-in-the-sand outlook.  Worse.  The “woke,” completely lacking a positive program to combat this supposedly ubiquitous racism that’s all around us, can only retreat into a pursuit of secular sainthood and shaming, calling out “racism” everywhere, even it can be ascribed to mere inadvertence, and developing a form of what can only be called a Manichean Christianity filled with sin, but offering no forgiveness.  Thus does the strident call for “racial wokeness” only increase resentment, undermine self-reflection and changing of attitudes, and inhibit the very anti-racism the “woke” demand.  Truly it is counterproductive to create enemies where there are none—but that is precisely what today’s “woke” seem to be aiming for.  And, sadly, succeeding, at least partially.  To the detriment of all of us, black, white, brown, yellow, and red; male and female; gay and straight alike.  An effective “divide and conquer” approach that’s the envy of many an anti-union employer faced with a working-class unity against him!  (Or her.)           

Fondly Remembering the Solidarity Books Collective

 

They were known fondly, but also, sadly, hostilely, as “The Kids.”  They, the Solidarity Books Collective, were comprised, when they formed in 2001, as a group of feisty young anarchists ranging in age from 17 to 25.  Some were Indianapolis homegrown, some had come from out-of-state to take jobs here.  Their great ambition was to form a nonsectarian left bookstore in Indianapolis, which they did—Solidarity Books, on Indy’s South Side.  And from the beginning, they were regarded hostilely by the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” who comprised what passed for a left here in the justly named IndiaNOPLACE.  As I was alienated from these “churchgoing progressives” already, I was naturally drawn to the Collective by the very hostility it generated.  My first exposure to the Collective came when I overheard Harry Van Der Linden, a pacifist philosophy professor at Indianapolis’s Butler University and then President of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, the political home of the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” indignantly complaining to the two leading “churchgoing progressives,” Ron and Jane Haldeman, how the Solidarity Books Collective had the temerity to ask Van Der Linden’s son, a teenager same as others in the Collective, to give $70 toward making the bookstore a reality.  A whole $70!  (But that’s typical of cheapskate Indianapolis—I had encountered it many a time as a writer here, people telling me, “I love what you’re doing!  Where’s my free copy?” with the emphasis on “free,” as though everything just grew on trees!)  Right then and there, I just knew I had to check out the Solidarity Books Collective.  I wasn’t in the least disappointed when I did, met them, and from the beginning regarded them as a fine bunch of young radicals of whom more were needed in IndiaNOPLACE.

 

They formed their bookstore, Solidarity Books, and kept it alive even after having to relocate it, then having to relocate it again, changing the store’s name to Paper Matches, and worked long and hard to keep it alive, despite its being deliberately boycotted by the “respectable progressives” due to the young Collective’s open espousal of anarchism, and its frequent non-pacifist rhetoric, even though the Collective’s members themselves were all de facto nonviolent and highly democratic, welcoming, and inclusive.  Certainly at first.   Further, they took Solidarity Books’ non-sectarianism seriously by stocking its shelves with a wide range of offerings for sale.  (Later, frustrated and beleaguered by the “respectables’” slighting of its efforts, the Collective became more specifically, more hegemonically, anarchist, and stocked the bookstore’s new titles exclusively with offerings from anarchist AK Press.)  Frustration, and with it, sectarianism, had set in, as the Collective grew beleaguered and chagrined by the deliberate sabotage of what they were trying to do by the “respectables,” and by 2005 they’d all left, in anger, frustration, bitterness and resentment.  Meanwhile, what remained of the left in Indianapolis only grew older and more hidebound, and lost all attraction it had once had among Indianapolis’s young.  Yes, a fatality engineered by the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” who just couldn’t stomach anyone not calling himself (or herself) a Christian, a “spiritual person,” or religious.  (The members of the Solidarity Books Collective, same as I, were overwhelmingly atheists.)  Or possessing boldness, which the Solidarity Books Collective had.  But they were gone by 2005, killed off by “churchgoing respectability,” a “left” form of it that differed only from the right-wing version of it by whom they considered “fellow respectables.”  Their “respectables” were Democrats, as opposed to the others’ Republicans.  But that was the only major difference.  Rather than embrace the Quaker principle of “Speaking truth to power,” I’d suggested to the Solidarity Books Collective, which heartily agreed with me, the “respectables’” approach was, instead, “Begging ‘Pretty please’ from power,” which, I really believe, sums up the whole of the “political approach” of Indianapolis’s “respectable churchgoing progressives”—a group not nearly so much pacifist with a “c” as they were passive-ists with an “i-v-e,” when they weren’t being outwardly passive-aggressive!

 

Needless to say, Indianapolis, one of the Top Ten cities in the U.S. by population size, thus lost its chance to have what nearly every large city has, a prominent left bookstore.  Now it has no independent bookstores, only national chains, and the chief source of left books in Indianapolis is ordering them online.  All because Indianapolis, through its “respectable churchgoing progressive” denizens, insisted on being moored down by “respectability” first and foremost, thus ensuring that Indianapolis would resemble, and remain resembling, despite its growth and gentrification, a city more out of a Sinclair Lewis novel than anything else.

 

Which is a prime reason why Indianapolis has not, nor ever has really had, any kind of serious left movement, let alone any left movement of any notable size.  But it’s always had “respectability” of a shabby middle-class sort.  A “respectability” borne of—not being anything of consequence!    

New Poetic Contribution on the Billionaires' Space Race

 

WHAT FUCKWAD!

(reflecting realities as of July 20, 2021)

by

George Fish

 

I read the news the other day,

oh boy!  British billionaire

Richard Branson took off for

space in his own self-financed

rocket ship excursion.

Now he’s followed by

another billionaire (or rather,

it’s multi-billionaire), Jeff

Bezos, richest man in the

world, again in his own self-

financed rocket ship.   Soon

to come after that, obviously,

will be Elon Musk.   And so,

here we are, a space rivalry

among billionaires!  Reminiscent

of the old Robert Heinlein

science fiction series about the

multimillionaire who

funded moon travel and

colonization.  (Prices were much

lower when Heinlein wrote, so

millionaires could do what it

now takes billionaires to do.) 

In fact, Elon Musk proposes to

do just that, with indentured

servants (to pay off the loans

he advances to them)

colonizing Mars.  Talk about

the ultimate grotesquery in

Thorstein Veblen-style

“conspicuous consumption”! 

Multibillionaires with way too much

money and time on their hands,

not to mention egos, having a

high school rivalry on who

can make it big in space most

successfully!  Meanwhile, we ordinary

working people, still reeling from

the ravages of the COVID-19

pandemic, are still worrying about

making ends meet.  Is this ridiculous,

or what?  Or is this just capitalism

showing how absurd a social and

economic system it really is?

Anarchism vs. Anarchy

 

 

This is a follow-up blog to my last blog on Bret Weinstein and the anarchistic nihilism of the violence and looting in his home city of Portland, Oregon.  I want to elaborate more on the distinctions between anarchistic nihilism and political and philosophical anarchism, or, in other words, the crucial difference between anarchism and anarchy.  Not that I’m particularly sympathetic to either political or philosophical anarchism.  As socialist Hal Draper has pointed out, under anarchism it would be like the Wild West, for there would be no intervening body such as a state to protect the weak and defenseless from the bullying strong.  For to have such would be to restrain the “freedom” of the bully!  Also, I read an account of how anarchism would supposedly work in practice, through a series of interlocking autonomous local communes—where the communes themselves, and their mechanisms of cooperation among themselves would clearly resemble—state mechanisms!  Thus, to me, the state is a tautology:  it exists out of necessity, it has needed functions to fulfill, it is there because needed regulation and management, even repression of evil and malevolence, are called for under human social arrangements; even purely local ones, as there simply is no automatic “invisible hand” to spontaneously regulate, neither in the market, nor in other vital social functions.  When both Marx and Bakunin wrote, in the 19^th Century, one calling for the gradual “withering away of the state,” i.e., gradual anarchism, while the latter wished to abolish the state immediately, the modern welfare state was not only not in existence, it was even unheard of.  It didn’t come about until the 1890s, after the deaths of both Marx and Bakunin, and near the death of Engels (who died in 1895).  In the 1890s, that wily conservative Otto von Bismarck, as leader of a united Germany, passed the Anti-Socialist Laws, which forbade the German Social-Democratic Party from propagandizing the socialist cause, while, simultaneously, providing for workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance—thus appeasing the working class.  Prior to that, the state was neoliberal, if not openly repressive, and carried out no welfare measures.  So, it was thus impossible for either a Marx or a Bakunin, or their followers, to envision a different kind of state, and the states when then existed were hostile not only to the working class, but to ordinary citizens as a whole; and viewed its function as a state in purely negative terms—to restrain in the name of “freedom,” and to control from the top-down.

 

As a socialist I engaged in an anarchist-socialist dialogue through two book reviews for the hard-copy socialist journal New Politics of two books from anarchist publisher AK Press:  the first, from 2010, of Noam Chomsky’s Chomsky on Anarchism, Chomsky, Anarchism, and Socialism - New Politics, the second from 2013, of the anthology The Accumulation of Freedom,  Anarchist Economics and the Socialist-Anarchist Dialogue - New Politics.  The Chomsky review is especially relevant here, for Chomsky, a self-professed anarchist, is often derided by other anarchists as a “reformist.”  For example, while he believes, rightly, that all authority should be questioned, interrogated, he concludes that not all authority is bad; indeed, some is necessary and beneficial.  Similarly, Chomsky holds that a major problem besetting the Third World is too little government, state power and intervention—that too much authority and power there is in private hands, is controlled by neoliberalism in the service of neoliberal capitalist interests against the needs and wishes of the people.  On these, we socialists and political and philosophical anarchists can agree.

What we can’t agree on is the nihilism engendered by anarchist acting out; it’s descent into mere anarchy, not political anarchism in any meaningful or constructive sense.  While I can certainly positively hold with anarchists on the need for individual autonomy, even against the “popular masses,” and the generally beneficial achievement of such anarchism in the arts, where the freewheeling artist creates compelling freewheeling art, beyond that, as a socialist, there’s little in anarchism I can accept; and when it comes to anarchy, there’s nothing I can accept.  As a prime example of both, consider the Sex Pistols’ song, “Anarchy in the U.K.”  I certainly can embrace the opening words of brazen statement in the song, “I am the anti-Christ/I am an anarchist,” but cannot accept, embrace, the later statement in the song, “I want to destroy.”  For the act of revolution, of successful social transformation, is constructive more than it is destructive.  As an example, when we destroy the rotting, decrepit shed on the weed-strewn lawn, we must also construct not only a new edifice on the property, but also cleanse it of its weed-infested, unsightly nature, or else our work will become as naught.  Social change that lasts is constructive, not merely destructive of the old order; and, as Bret Weinstein pointed out, the destruction in rampant anarchy presently going on in Portland, Oregon, is not revolution of a positive sense, but negative, nihilistic anarchy which is only destructive, and alienating of the very people we need to reach.

 

      

A Righteous and Just Excoriation of “Woke Left” Anarchistic Nihilism

 

Bret Weinstein, the egregiously, horribly, railroaded former professor of biology at Evergreen State College, and a Bernie Sanders supporter, who spoke out against an action of de facto segregation promulgated by “woke” black student activists at Evergreen, has just spoken out on the British Unherd (https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-anarchists-captured-portland)  against the “woke” chaos now being perpetrated in his newly-adopted home city of Portland, Oregon, where he and his wife Heather, also ostracized from Evergreen, now reside—and criticizes the “woke” from a standpoint that can only be described as concerned, social-democratic left, not neoliberal right.

While he calls those promulgating violence, looting and harassment of ordinary citizens in Portland as “anarchists,” he’s not necessarily implying that they are political or philosophical anarchists; merely nihilists of the “woke left” who’ve latched onto the slogans promulgated by Black Lives Matter and concerns over the still-prevalent racism in US society to garner sympathy and support for what he calls only the ceding “by voices of reason on the Left to extremists who deliberately conflate a demand for racial justice with a desire to burn civilisation [British spelling, as Unherd is British—GF] to the ground” and ruefully, ironically, cries out, “Welcome to Portland; the progressive dream that has turned into a nightmare.” 

Weinstein is scathing throughout in his denunciation of these new nihilists:  he pointedly notes of this “movement’s” origins, “suddenly last summer, with the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the Presidential election, Portland came unmoored,” calls these activists, “a small but violent mob of misanthropes” perpetrating a “current wave of terror, and, due to the deliberate inaction against these mobs of “woke” by both Portland’s Mayor and police force, alleges directly, “anarchists have gained a strange kind of control over the city in their fight against Nazis and white supremacists they appear to have conjured in a quest to give their anger meaning.”  (However, Weinstein pointedly notes that, in progressive Portland, these supposedly everywhere hordes of Nazis and white supremacists are, in the famous words of Mark Twain commenting on his supposed death as published in a newspaper’s obituary, “greatly exaggerated.”)

But we of the “voices of reason on the Left” have dealt with this kind of pernicious nonsense before, famously in the case of Weatherman in the late 1960s, early 1970s, a group that, despite its florid adoption of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist rhetoric, were really, just as are the “woke” of Portland, “neo-anarchist terrorists” who only gave grist to the right-wing mill all too eager to silence those “voices of reason on the Left,” and who, under both Nixon and Reagan, succeeded masterfully, and shifted the country not to the left, but to the right (especially in Reagan’s case, to the far right, as this Great Communicator ran successfully for President twice on being against the New Left, and as a bulwark of safety against anarchy, terror, and Weatherman’s random bombings).  Thus, are there enemies of the Left clearly on the supposed left:  the “propaganda of the deed” denizens, the ultraleftists who have no idea of what is actually and actually not feasible, and the Blanquist small coteries of cadres who, by military-minded conspiracy, bring about “socialism by insurrectionary coup.”  [Blanquism is named after Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), a French revolutionary socialist who called for socialism to be achieved by small, armed groups leading insurrections.  The similarities between the “woke” of today and Blanqui’s small cadres provoking revolutionary violence are obvious—GF] Much the same happened to the Weinsteins at Evergreen State; but it no more ushered in the Olympia, Washington Commune [Olympia is the home of Evergreen State—GF] than it has the Portland Commune.  All it has done is cause fear among small business owners whether their businesses will be trashed by looting, as has happened to so many other Portland businesses; and ushered in anger among ordinary working people, who are awakened from sleep by chanting mobs demanding, “Wake up, motherfuckers, wake up!”  Thus, do ill-conceived tactics, and a general sense of nihilism masquerading as activism directly undermine the cause of the left, not enhance it—and make meaningful and extensive social change that much more difficult to achieve and attain.