The Revenge of the Politically Incorrect: Don Trumphalism

triumphalism: "excessive exultation over one's success or achievements (used especially in a political context)"

"an attitude or feeling of victory or superiority: as
a : the attitude that one religious creed is superior to all others
b : smug or boastful pride in the success or dominance of one's nation or ideology over others"
Merriam-Webster Dictionary

triumph:
"late 14c., "success in battle, conquest," also "spiritual victory" and "a procession celebrating victory in war," from Old French triumphe (12c., Modern French triomphe), from Latin triumphus "an achievement, a success; celebratory procession for a victorious general or admiral,"

"from Old Latin triumpus, probably via Etruscan from Greek thriambos..."
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=triumph

But beneath the Trump-halism and the Hilary-Everestism:

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico: "As you have probably noticed, as more polls include my name and show us in double digits..."

"Not only is the news media taking TO Governor Weld [former Republican governor of Massachusetts] and me more, they are now talking ABOUT us more."

"And, of course, that is precisely what we need...the media, and voters, will take note of the fact that 15 percent puts us in the presidential and vice-presidential debates this fall...Being in the debates is a game-changer."

Even though this is impressive: two former conservative/libertarian governors running in the presidential election, what can it really achieve?

Will it throw an odd curve ball?

Could it possibly throw the election, like the infamous election of 1860?

Republican Party Abraham Lincoln 39.8%

Democratic Party Stephen A. Douglas 29.5%

Southern Democratic Party John C. Breckinridge 18.1%

Constitutional Party John Bell 12.6%
--

Who will benefit from the Johnson-Weld run, Clinton or Trump?

Or will the curve be split?

In the current 4-way race, NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll:

Libertarian Party Gary Johnson 10%

Green Party Jill Stein 6%

Democratic Party Hilary Clinton 39%

Republican Party Donald Trump 38%
--

Businessman Ross Perot in 1992 earned 18.9% but that was no cigar.
--

In the divided election of 1912,

Democratic Party Woodrow Wilson 41.8%

Bull Moose Party Theodore Roosevelt 27.4%

Republican Party William Howard Taft 23.2%

Socialist Party Eugene V. Debs 6%
--

Other Third Party Runs:

1968:

American Independent Party, Former Governor George Wallace 13.5%
& General Curtis LeMay

Republican Party Richard Nixon 43.4%

Democratic Party Hubert Humphrey 42.7%
--

1924:
Progressive Party Robert M. La Follette 16.6%
--

1980:

Independent Congress John B. Anderson 6.6%
--


Could the current election get such a severe split this time around, over 100 years later?

Unlikely, but then no one thought Trumphalism was going to defeat the usual standard bearers of the Republican Party in the Primaries.




But where in all of this rhetoric, propaganda, and multi-millions spent, is there any LIGHT?

Daniel Wilcox

71 Years Later, Smoke Still Darkening the World

With the dark anniversary of the horrific bombings in Japan coming up in 6 weeks--

By Phill Courtney, Guest columnist
Redland Daily Facts

"Hiroshima, Nagasaki: lessons learned and yet to be learned"

"Seventy-one years ago this month, World War II was ended by what could be described, in objective definitions alone, as two of the most massive terrorist attacks in history: the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons..."

"...terrorism...can be defined as a way to emotionally influence an audience for the purpose of obtaining an objective."

"Terrorism is terrorism, regardless of its motivations, which can be viewed as both benevolent and malevolent depending on who’s doing the viewing."

"When looked at this way, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were classic examples. The Japanese people—and, most important, their emperor—were terrorized into surrendering; thereby obtaining what is now widely seen as a benevolent end: the additional lives that were potentially saved by avoiding an invasion of Japan."
--

"...while I’m sympathetic to those who favored their use, including several World War II veterans I’ve talked to, we might remember that there is no consensus now, nor was there even back then, as to whether or not they should have been used."

"...President Harry Truman had no doubts...never had a second thought...and maintained that he hadn’t lost a moment’s sleep over the tens of thousands of non-combatants he’d ordered incinerated, calling the bombings “the greatest thing in history.”
--

"...a couple of other presidents...Herbert Hoover said that “the use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul,”

"...Dwight Eisenhower..."the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing..."

"...Admiral William D. Leahy, former chief of staff to presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Truman...“we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages...wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

Read the whole article at the RedlandDailyFacts online.

Phill Courtney is a resident of Redlands. He can be reached at pjcourtney@earthlink.net.

http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/events/20150821/hiroshima-nagasaki-lessons-learned-and-yet-to-be-learned


Work against the ocean of darkness,

Daniel Wilocx

Learning to Listen--"Listening to the Other"

from MUSALAHA, a movement and organization working toward reconciliation
in Palestine/Israel

This also speaks to what we need in the U.S. now! between various political,
religious, and philosophical enemies.

"This weekend, June 17-18, 2016 was a highlight in my work in reconciliation. More often than not, recruiting for events is very challenging, and in our anything-can-change last-minute culture, it is difficult to get people to commit to a weekend-long meeting. Why would people take their precious weekends to stare into a mirror, and perhaps see things that need to change?"

"Listening to the Other"


"The Ahlan women’s group is different...We started the weekend with a barbeque, allowing families to join us for a few hours and be involved in what we are trying to accomplish..."

"Ronza, Musalaha’s West Bank Women’s Coordinator, and a facilitator in the Ahlan group, took us through a series of ice breaker games..it was her first time to lead one of Musalaha’s joint Israeli-Palestinian groups.
--

"Later, when the husbands left, our 28 women gathered and we started a teaching on “Listening to the Other,” which covered how to listen without preconceived notions or judgments...

"...on putting our thoughts on hold and being present in order to be able to hear the person in front of us. This conversation will only happen once. Be in the moment. You don’t get do-overs in life, so make the most of it and listen."

"Rula also taught us not to listen in order to answer."

"How many times do we sit on the edge of our chairs, hoping the other person takes a break to breathe so that we can start our rebuttal?"

"Toward the end of the conference, many of the women expressed their gratitude...Some women came from a small town outside of Ramallah – a place most Israelis have never heard of, let alone visited...."

-Hedva Haymov

"We seek to accomplish through the following:

To train women in leadership and reconciliation
To multiply our women’s Israeli and/or Palestinian groups in different regions
To impact our societies through community projects
To empower women through education, community development, democracy, networking, project management, and social change
To establish women’s groups in remote regions"

Read the whole story at
https://www.musalaha.org/articles/discovering-my-culture-by-learning-about-the-others-culture/
--



In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

But the Cesspool....

Chairman Mao:
"All political power comes from the barrel of a gun."

When you are cast down by negative circumstances, even despair,
"Swing Low"*
to this true story...



The brown filth mucked up
To his shins, over a foot deep,

And buried his calloused and ulcered feet,
As he shoveled the human feces
Out of the reeking prison tank

For 60,000 lost souls where
He had been lowered by smirking guards.

But the cesspool mattered reek of all this?

At least the yellowed pus seeping
From his ankle was hidden
In the dung

But the dark brown stench
Caused an acrid backwash in his mouth.

His hands sweat with offal grime as
He slopped the feces out of his pitted world,

Punished with Red-Guarded re-education
By this fecal matter, revolting

To the norm of all learning from
Mao’s Red Book and Mao's black-teethed mouthings,

Tattooed beyond mental recovery in
The comrades’ dialectical brains.

But the cesspool mattered reek of all this?

Where the obscenities refuse to die
Where so many humans suffocate, confined

To suffering in the waste of others’ feculent ways.
This learned Chinese man, coerced








To live within the dung gate and clean
Sludge of human manure,

Created this fetid sewer into his reverent garden;
The septic tank became a place
of praise,

Ceaseless worship with every slimed shovel,
One hell-gated spiritual oasis.

Yes, the cesspool mattered reek of all this.

His fielded visions, not the Mandarin facts,
Nor the clichés of Western affluence,

But of the order of Elie Wiesel’s prayer
In the effluent night of Bergen-Belsen

Where the excrement of cultural dominance
Floods to its all-time low—ever present–

Where the obscenities refuse to die
And cadaverous worms eat tissued body parts.

To give timeless eternal thanks
Despite the ordures of such polluted nights,

To live in hope while shoveling feces
Or your neighbors’ poisoned ashes

Surrounded and feet deep
In the filth;

Yes, the cesspool mattered reek of all this.

The answer that seems so reeking
Pollyannaish if it weren’t Existential–

A lighted match of faith in that bottomless pit
Of long history’s shit of evil acts,

The complete excrement of mystery;
Then the man ‘crosses’ the tank,

Finally wholly empty,
To be lifted up by a psalm

Of compost and fertilizer
Winging up in the Spirit of Ultimate Truth.

Swing low...

Sweet savored pool of fragrant myrrh
And frankincense.



-Daniel Wilcox

"Swing low..." Negro spiritual

*Factual background from a news article
by Dan Wooding, British journalist,
and Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang
and Jon Haliday
--

First published in
different form in
Liturgical Credo,
then in the poetry
collection, selah river


In the Light which defies the "Ocean of Darkness,"*

Daniel Wilcox


*George Fox

Don't Miss This Must-Read Article!

Get disturbed and urged to think deeply across current theological, political, and cultural divides.

Read this bridge article promoting "progressive Quakerism"!

FAQS FOR FRIENDS– PART #9: JESUS & THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE

by Chuck Fager

http://afriendlyletter.com/faqs-friends-part-9-last-part/#more-6038

"...What’s Jesus Got to Do With the Golden Gate Bridge?"

"...one of the most agreeable years of my life was spent in San Francisco, from mid-1976 to mid-1977. Never mind that I was poor, even officially homeless for part of the time, because life was good. I had steady work as a reporter..."

"...a Progressive Quaker perspective, is inextricably tied up with my memories of one of San Francisco’s signal glories, the Golden Gate Bridge.

"Suppose the Golden Gate Bridge connected, not Marin County and San Francisco, but earth and heaven..."

"This idea is not as silly as it sounds. At the old Lake Street Friends meetinghouse...a large window opened on a view of the bridge. On numerous First Day mornings during that year I sat and contemplated the scene."

"Often enough the great arched span was caressed and then obscured by rolling sweeps of fog, and it was easy to imagine that the far end came down in some dimension much stranger than Marin County."

"Thus, solid as the bridge looked, and was, not everyone who set foot on it made it to the promised land at the other end. There was no guarantee: to get across, one had first to find the bridge, then walk or drive straight, stay in lane, and keep going."

"And it was not long thereafter when it came to me that the bridge could serve as a parable of the work of Christ, as understood by early Quakers, and Progressive Christian Quakers today."

With this powerful metaphor and vivid image,
so begins a very deep, insightful, and inclusive article by Chuck Fager
on the matters of reality, identity, purpose, ethics, religion, and philosophy.

I tend to be skeptical of "progressive"-labeled writing
(for a host of reasons, but that's not the 'angles'here).

And I don't much care for long hyphenated words for Quakers,
or anyone else for that matter.
But given the extreme divides and contradictions within Quakerism
(and most worldviews for that matter), it is probably necessary as shorthand.

Don't miss this article.

See if it is, indeed, one of those deep moments of witnessing in meeting.



In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Do You Have a One Trek Mind? The Trouble with Trumples? Boldly Go Where No...

Are you Lost in Space?

Electoral Space: the final frontier.

These are the voyages of the U.S. Starship Enterprise.

Its four-year mission:

to explore strange new ways,
to seek out new political life and new uncivilization,
to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Welcome to The Twilight Zone in The Outer Limits, Will Rogers!

Oh-Be-the-Won! Captain 'Kurt.'

You are our last hope, Yodi!







In the Lighthearted,

Daniel Wilcox

Part #2: Review of Meetings by Chuck Fager

from Amazon's website:
"Chuck Fager’s transition from a conservative Catholic, pro-military youth to an active peace witness and a lengthy period of “spiritual formation” among progressive Quakers...a special religious coming of age in the mid-1970s...in a continuing time of tumult and change."

"The result is both a compelling story of our time, and the narrative of a unique personal quest for meaning, transcendence, and a useful life."

Yes, no, and maybe not.

I've finished the book. Chuck does deliver some intriguing stories from his life as he promised. Kudos for that.

And at times, stories of his intellectual quest do come through clearly. His account of professor Milton Mayer of the University of Chicago is powerful and moving.

Furthermore, Chuck's recounting of those radical days of the late 60's and early 70's, and his involvement, will bring back many memories of that best of times, worst of times.

But overall this book appears to be at first-read weaker than some of his other books. Unlike those, this one seems fragmentary, more of a starting outline. There are key stories like wall pegs; now hang deep personal reflections on them.

Yes, the book has up appealing and shocking stories, but Chuck doesn't show how they relate to his interior life, doesn't put them in the context of his personal life, and doesn't reflect on them in relationship to his spiritual belief and life.

The reader feels unconnected and is filled with many questions unanswered.

For instance, there is the fascinating story of his discovering a missal like the ones of his childhood.

But after the very detailed nuanced narrative of how he comes across the book at the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store, he just leaves the aged ritual book stuck on a shelf in a plastic bag.

We don't know how he felt and thought about religious ritual, and Catholic ritual especially, about how filled with superstition it seems, about it relationship to Church history, about cannon law, about hell and purgatory in relationship to himself and all humans.

This is so unlike his recent posts on the same sexuality controversy in North Carolina Yearly Meeting, where even in those brief blog posts, Chuck ferrets out the motives, reasonings, etc. of the not-so Friendly leaders in that tribulation, that ocean of darkness.

Here's another particular example of a disconnected story from Chuck's book:
Suddenly, half way through his autobiography, we learn that his wife, Tish, has a severe drinking problem, and he moves out. Then he speaks of his own "sin."

Wait a minute!

We readers didn't even know he had met a girl, gotten married, had a kid, developed relationship problems, etc.

We have no idea about his views of sexuality.

Or his coming of age as a teen guy in the late 1950's.

Or how his wife developed her alcoholism, and why they couldn't work this out.

Meetings is a short autobiography so Chuck didn't have time or space to go into great detail, but a short 2-page lead-in on his youth and girls, his views on sexuality, and his life relating to women was very necessary.

And we get only a very brief glimpse of his relationship with his mother. And we learn nothing of his relationships with his siblings. We don't know about his views, his ethical and spiritual wrestlings.

All of those aspects are very important in understanding the sudden split, of his moving out to a friend's.

And how did he meet Tish, and their marriage?
Was it a Roman Catholic wedding?
Was she a practicing Catholic?
What were their views on birth control?

And most importantly: What are his reflections of how his spiritual and religious experience relates to his sexuality and marriage?

Then there is a girlfriend, called Sylvia. Again, we have no idea who, why, when or how this relates to his religious life.

Even more importantly, he fails to reflect on all of this and other unexplained vague statements about "sin."

And he mentions having sex after his wife and him split? Does he mean he engaged in fornication?

Does he go to confession? Or not? Why or why not?

At another point in the book, Chuck states that his class ring, "the red and gold band" is much more important than his wedding rings!!

He wrote that the ring took on "much more important" meanings.

Again, as a reader, I am left confused.

We readers don't need lots of private details, but we do need to understand--to feel and experience and think what he did.

I don't expect an autobiographical writer to completely bare his soul or his very private life, but without some details, some description, and extensive inner reflection, the reader is left confused and unmoved.

If Chuck does a revision--
I did about 7 on one of my book after its first edition--
he needs to keep in mind the old very truism of writing:
Show, don't tell.

And in a religious autobiography, REFLECT on your motives, your inner directions, your shadow, and how all parts of your life relate to the spiritual.

And Chuck needs to remember that in many cases, he didn't even tell.

He's right, "any religion that's worth it is built around stories."

And he ought to have added, any religion that's worth it reflects on its stories.

Shows potential.

Evaluation: C-