THE WORLD IS EXPLODING

Some readers of this blog are mistaking my purpose, which is multiple anyway.  I’m exploring to find the forces that make our human lives -- among many other living and geological forces -- something unique and powerful (dangerous) enough to change the world.  Readers are using the same strategy they have learned as a defense against apocalyptic times: reducing everything to sentimentality suitable for grouping and marketing, like cowboy and combat movies, or middle-class sit coms, or crime as a neurosis needing therapy, or religion as a club, or sports as a replacement for education.

This link below is to a program interview by Bill Boyers and a chapter that can be read from a book called “SHADOW NETWORK: MEDIA, MONEY, AND THE SECRET HUB OF THE RADICAL RIGHT”  by Anne Nelson.

Here’s the link to the interview:

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/expert-details-the-shadow-network-behind-the-powerful-and-incredibly-secretive-movement-behind-the-radical-right-for-the-past-40-years/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5736

Here’s a link to a chapter of the book, the best account of one way the world has changed that I’ve found so far.

https://d1uu3oy1fdfoio.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ch3-to-Moyers.pdf

Moyers, a former Presbyterian minister, has always taken an Enlightenment view of the country.  Nelson introduces an East versus West dynamic that I could feel in the art of the American West.  The Manhattan/Boston hegemony just flew over most of the continent while they simply refused to consider indigenous people except as wild stories for kids and old men.  My stroke of genius for Bob Scriver was linking the two worlds through the National Sculpture Society and the National Academy of Design.

Moyers terms the Radical Right juggarnaut  “the pastors and the plutocrats,” an economy of ideas on the one hand that supports and feeds off of an economy of big money on the other.  What it enables is a Trump/Epstein-level of corruption and international mafia, partly by preventing attention to such hustles.

This is very much helped by the taboo on ever talking about the subjects of religion or money, because they cause too much fighting during Thanksgiving dinners.  The taboo has been veiled by the less political taboos about sex and birth.  In fact, this book and most discussion entirely ignore the incredible paradigm shift that science has given us by today.  People sentimentalize it in the same way I noted at the beginning of this piece.  They see technology and regret the loss of wonders of the natural world as the only messages.

I’m after these forces, trying to understand them in my life, in Bob Scriver’s life, in the lives on this rez and in this small town — not to sentimentalize them but to uncover the much more universal principles of survival.  The U of Chicago Divinity School, whether or not they intended it, gave me a method that far exceeded “religion” as such, even redefining the term to include the cosmos.