What is a Real Man™?
The trademark symbol is a joke. What isn't a joke are all the unreal men running around flexing their plastic pecs.
Real Men don't hate people who don't suck up to them...
Real Men don’t hate people.
Real Men are kind, brave, honest, and open to new information.
Real Men have a conscience.
Real Men don’t get their sense of identity from a cult or tribe.
Real Men take life seriously and unseriously.
Real Men know they are going to die.
All of the above is true for any Real Person.
What do I mean by ‘real’? I’m trying to figure that out. I mean people who hold their lives in their hands with some care, with some respect for the mystery of existence. We are imperfect. Each one of us is a link in a long chain of imperfection, experiencing the challenge of living a life in a bewildering world, where the greatest bewilderment of all is ourselves.
The men and women currently wreaking havoc in the halls of power are not real men or women. I don’t know what they are. They are puffed-up fantasies of significance, hoping and praying for approval and absolution from a Big Daddy. Or maybe something else… It’s hard for me to imagine what you have to tell yourself to be a willing participant in an effort that causes direct long-lasting harm in so many directions.
Whatever stories for the mirror they use to feel justified in their actions, there is no escaping the fact that they are selling their souls for a mess of pottage.
You lie!
I read that employees of the FBI are being subjected to lie detector tests. I guess the intention is to find out if they are loyal ass-kissing suck-ups, or not. First hook them up to the device, and then, what shall we ask? How’s this…
“Are you willing to do anything, no matter how cruel, illegal and immoral in support of this administration’s ‘policies’, ‘priorities’, i.e. lawless greed and will to power?”
Maybe a lowly employee would say yes and mean no and get caught in a lie. But don’t bother trying the old polygraph test on the ringleaders of the circus. For those people, lying is akin to breathing. It’s not even lying; it’s just saying whatever you think will serve you in the moment, no matter how disconnected from empiric reality it is. How can you have a different physiological response to ‘lying’ and ‘telling the truth’ if you can’t distinguish between them?
Behaving badly
I don’t like ragging on people. What impels me at the moment is a feeling that we need to call out bad behavior for what it is. It’s not one side of a political divide, a philosophical point of view, it’s not legitimate anything. The intentions and actions we are witnessing are meant to benefit only a small group of people and everyone else can go to hell or El Salvador.
What we have here are not differences of opinion, differences of approach taking place within a cohesive structure of basic values. We have people whose stated purpose is a deception that hides their true purpose. It’s called corruption, baby.
If you are holding the reins of the government of the United States of America, an organization designed to serve the majority, and using it as a tool of self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment, while doing irreparable harm to people and systems, you suck. You are behaving badly.
A pig spray-painted gold is still a pig.
No offense, pigs.
As a representative of the human race, when I try to explain to a friendly alien how people on our planet organize themselves, it is challenging/embarrassing to admit that one of the top jobs in local and global organization, President of USA (a job that requires high intelligence, education, sense of responsibility, creativity, and moral awareness, is held by a man who, though he may be a golden calf to his followers, could not be more ill-suited to the gravity of his position.
A snake oil salesman hawking perfume, sneakers, bitcoins, watches and trading cards from upon a throne of authority, is, well, not worthy to be on that throne.
No gravity for him, just gravy. Grab, threaten, lie, cheat, steal. Grab, grab, grab. The don of this gang has always made sense as a garish fake-it-til-you-make-it businessman about town, grabbing money, grabbing pussy, grabbing as much adulation as possible.
But trying to take over the whole country (and more) is a very big grab. You need help, a lot of help. The men and women offering that help are as unreal as their boss. His followers in high places will be rats when the ship sinks, because their loyalty is based on ambition and self-preservation.
Note: I’m not saying that all the men who have had the Big Job have been selfless saints. Far from it. I’m saying that the current occupant of the White House is a next level wrongdoer.
Black and white, or a rainbow?
So much black and white thinking these days. You are with us or against us is a necessary credo for the total domination program.
The human variables that keep some people’s knickers in a twist—colors of skin, ethnicity, education, money, gender, religion, etc. have much less meaning than the real variable, which I would call maturity. I would also call it humility. I would call it a sense of wonder. I would call it an awareness of self in the context of an incomprehensible (to us) complexity of pattern and design, integrity and beauty. I would call it a variable that has delusion on one end and expansive realness on the other.
Maturity is not black and white. It is a rainbow of evolving awareness, consciousness. It is a sense of reality that comes into being through lived life.
I’m still pondering what I mean by ‘real’ and ‘realness’ in this post. I think I mean that the more we are able to connect with the matrix of life, with the medium from which we arise and to which we return, the more we feel ourselves as part of, not apart from, the whole.
Gently down the stream
This is a world of energy and motion. It obeys laws of energy and motion. This is a world of energy and emotion—dreams, fears, passions, griefs. Great damage and great suffering can be unleashed by our incompleteness, our strangeness, the almost unbearable contradiction at the heart of what we are.
What is real becomes more real; what is unreal fades. I don’t know how much more damage the current administration will do before they lose their footing on a precipice of wishful thinking; I know that they will fail and fall.
All the talk about who/what democrats are, who/what republicans are misses the point that the dynamic here is not between two opposing political parties. It is not a duality.
I could say it is a clash of energies, but that doesn’t get at what I want to express. I want to express a large slow cumulative movement of energy—think of it as a river of something with a higher viscosity than water—that naturally presses up against constructions of self-defense in its path, causing them to try to protect themselves with all the power they possess, and it is precisely this over-expenditure of force that causes their collapse. That’s what we’re seeing here and in many places in the world… a doomed over-expenditure of force.
The river of consciousness moves slowly. It gathers more to itself as it moves. It keeps moving.
Thanks. I needed that.
Yet another astute observation of the forces at work in our current world social structure.