Blog

We’re all like Anna Karenina

Posted on by kay

 

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

That’s the famous opening line of Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. Which I just spent two days re-reading. Which I re-read every two or three years, actually. My copy is held together by postal tape now, and has highlighted passages and notes scribbled all over the margins, because something new always occurs to me while I read it.

(Confession: I adore re-reading books. You can see more deeply into characters you’ve already met in situations where you’ve already been. Plus, you can skim over passages that no longer apply — like philosophical or political issues of 1875 — without feeling guilty because you’ve already read them once.)

This trip through, what stood out was Anna’s inability to see her own faults. She could see that Karenin was half-dead, or that Vronsky was only interested in his own desires, or that her society was full of hypocrites. She could see the faults in others. But in herself? No way.

She could not accept that she, herself, ever did anything wrong. So the more “wrong” she did, by the standards of her time, the more her psyche split in two. Her charm and beauty morphed into weapons, rather than gifts.  She started refusing to answer hard questions, while looking down and away from the questioner with half-closed eyes.

“The thought of the harm caused to her husband aroused in her a feeling like repulsion, and akin to what a drowning man might feel who has shaken off another man clinging to him. That man did drown. It was an evil action, of course, but it was the sole means of escape, and better not to brood over these fearful facts.”

By the end of the book, Anna is a roaring drama queen who flies into daily rages and relies on morphine to get through the night. Then she kills herself to punish Vronsky for things he didn’t even do. She simply goes nuts.

I  know, I know. She was a young, beautiful woman living in a highly restrictive culture who married a stodgy older man when she was 18 years old. She’d probably never heard of an orgasm until she met Vronsky, much less had one. I cut her slack for all that. I have great sympathy for women whose passions were/are squelched by their cultures while their men lived/live large. Conditions like that make you crazy.

But what would’ve happened if Anna had stopped blaming and cut the drama? What if she’d simply taken the divorce when Karenin first offered it? What if she’d stopped creating untenable situations that were doomed to fail because she couldn’t bear to face her own guilt?

One of the reasons this novel is so famous is that we can all relate to Anna. We’ve all been there, at one time or another. We’ve all gotten dramatic or violent to change the course of a narrative when we should have gotten introspective. We’ve all pretended that there was absolutely nothing else we could have done, when in fact there were several other things we could have done. We’ve all spent a lot of time pointing out what others were up to, to keep from seeing what we were up to ourselves.

Denial? Blame? Substance abuse? Obsessive relationships? Self-destruction? Anna Karenina, written in 1875, is just as compelling, just as true, as ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can we face up to our past?

Posted on by kay

 

Michele L. Norris has written an excellent essay, “Germany has faced its horrible past. Can we do the same?” which appeared in the Washington Post on June 3rd. Here’s the link:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/03/slavery-us-germany-holocaust-reckoning/

 

In it, she outlines the process that Germany has gone through –and continues to go through– to face up to the horrors it perpetrated as a country in WWII. Which approaches have worked well, which approaches haven’t worked so well.

 

And then she asks an extremely timely and important question: can the USA do the same?

 

Can we face up to our history, which includes genocide and forced relocation of native populations, as well as 246 years of lawful and institutionalized slavery, followed by decades and decades of overt ‘Jim Crow’ oppression (which is staging a comeback with voter “restrictions” and police brutality)?

 

Can we accept responsibility for the bad as well as the good in our history? Can begin to move forward without blinders on? Or will we continue to try to sweep our sins under the carpet until denial, projection and blame tear us apart?

 

This is the very conversation we need to have.

 

Amnesia is not atonement.

 

Educational inequality in the US of A

Posted on by kay

 

Now that my kids are all grown up and have kids of their own, I live in a beautiful rural spot. I would have never lived in this beautiful rural spot while my kids were still at home. Back then I chose a dwelling according to its corresponding school system: the best neighborhood, with the best school system, that I could possibly afford.

 

What that says about the Unites States is appalling. It means that we all participate, every day, without thinking about it, in an educational system designed to reward those who are already well off while punishing those who are not. By basing public school funding on local property tax revenues, the United States overtly and covertly perpetuates inequality in education. A child whose parents can afford to live in a good neighborhood in a big city can get a good education in public school. A child whose parents can’t afford to live in a good neighborhood in a big city is on their own.

 

Yesterday afternoon I waited where my gravel road joins the paved road while local kids piled off the school bus. The little kids looked pretty much like little kids everywhere look. Excited to be alive. The older kids, the middle schoolers, looked pretty down in the dumps. I thought about that as I drove to a doctor’s appointment.

 

What if you’re one of those middle schoolers getting off the bus yesterday whose parents are–and will probably always be–achingly, grindingly poor?

 

And what if your only ticket out of a similar life of poverty was the public school system in a rural county in the United States of America?

 

 

Democrats Need Harder Shells and Sharper Claws

Posted on by kay

 

I’m lucky enough to have a wise old friend to call whenever I need a long rambling think about what it means to be human. During and after the Trump era, we’ve needed a lot of time on the phone.

 

In the 1970s, when my friend and I first met, we were both hard-working young mothers. It was still possible to live well on $800 a month back then, and we did. We ate natural foods, wore Birkenstocks, rather sporadically tried out new forms of meditation and yoga, and endlessly discussed the best way to deal with each phase our children went through. We volunteered in schools, were important forces in our neighborhoods, juggled home life and careers. Idealistic and optimistic, we believed that the world was changing for the better, and would keep changing for the better, while the musicians we listened to assured us that love was all we needed. That war was a bad thing. That peace was possible. That all we had to do was imagine a better world.

 

Fast forward to 2021. Instead of living in the 70s, we are 70, and it’s obvious that love is not all we need.

 

In 2000, when a Republican-majority Supreme Court gave the election to Bush before all the votes had been counted, my friend and I both thought we were going to die. The process took weeks, with the final count going back and forth and back and forth between candidates, and by the end of that time we were both physically ill. Disappointed and outraged enough to be physically ill. How in the world could an undemocratic power grab like that happen in the United States of America?

 

Fast forward to 2021, with Donald Trump flat out saying he’ll do whatever it takes to stay in power as he urges his followers to violence, while those who hope to benefit politically or economically (Fox News) from his fan base spread scandalous, traitorous lies about the election results.

 

What is going on here? Whatever happened to peace, love, and civil rights? Whatever happened to democracy?

 

For one thing, a failure of imagination. But not a failure to imagine good things happening, ala John Lennon. A failure to imagine how many truly frightening varieties of human nature there are.

 

In any given population, 4% — or 1 in every 25 people — will qualify clinically as sociopathic if tested. (i.e., devoid of compassion for others, scornful of the rules, driven only by power.) Then add in borderline personalities and narcissists and all the other destructive psychological tendencies in the human dictionary, and what you’ll end up with is the realization that there are real kooks out there, folks. Lots of them. And real kooks are often charismatic enough to sway others to their cause.

 

Real kooks do not listen to John Lennon or CSNY. They are not swayed by beautiful lyrics or concern for others. Real kooks are only out for themselves and will happily break any law they can get away with breaking. While the rest of us form an orderly line to do the right thing, real kooks cut in front.

 

My friend and I are both glad the era of ‘peace and love and hope’ is over. We’re tired of feeling disappointed and disillusioned to the brink of madness. We’re both ready to move on to the era of ‘examining the cold hard facts.’ And one cold hard fact is: human beings are much closer to animals than they are to angels.

 

What, exactly, is the difference between Donald Trump and a bull elk during mating season? They each have elaborate head gear. They each bellow and strut and butt competitors out of the way. They each want sole control of the babes and the territory no matter what. The only real difference is that no one will ever call Donald Trump majestic.

 

And who, having ever been around a blue jay, could doubt that self-promotion is one of the calling cards of creation on this planet? What could possibly be more bent on world domination than the common dandelion?

 

Human beings are just one small part of an unimaginably old and incredibly complicated evolutionary process, and judging by the mess we’ve made, very possibly a dead end. A slight mistake in the never ending process of creation, on a little blue planet with a unique but fragile atmosphere whirling in a spiral galaxy among millions and millions of other galaxies. Smarter than the elk or the dandelion, but still too greedy, bull-headed and selfish to share power or resources, hence most likely doomed to extinction. But if you get a chance to watch stars and planets cross the sky on a dark, clear night, it may occur to you that such an outcome would be perfectly OK. It’s a pretty big universe. We won’t be missed.

 

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be appalled at Trump and the whole Republican party in the here and now. Certainly we should be! We should be doing all we can to make our country more just and fair, all we can to make this world a better place, all we can to remedy the evil we’ve caused… all we can to make ourselves better people. But it’s become clear that the extent of my disillusionment during and after the Bush/Gore debacle — and many, many times since —  is directly proportional to my naive belief that people are basically good and that love will prevail.

 

Get over it, girl! It just ain’t so. (And it never has been so. Any perusal of any period in human history will make that perfectly clear. The Tudors and the Borgias poisoned or beheaded people who got in their way.)

 

I’m saying that ‘hoping everyone will play nice and that things will turn out for the best’ merely leads to outrage and disappointment in good people while it allows the brutes to take over.

 

The Republican Party does not have a majority. It hasn’t had a majority in decades. So why are Republicans still in power? By continuing to embrace the outdated electoral college, by gerrymandering, by filibustering, by voter suppression, by lying shamelessly about their opponents, by lying shamelessly about whatever just happened, by turning what ought to be personal decisions (whether or not you have children; whom you can marry) into divisive political issues. The Republican minority is still in power because the rest of us have failed to keep it in check.

 

So my friend and I have decided that we don’t need any more hope, thank you very much. Nor peace, nor love, nor anything touchy-feely, pie-in-the-sky, airy-fairy, or PC… None of that, thanks.

 

What we really need is a hard look at human beings as they actually are, and laws about governmental standards and election procedures with real teeth in them.

 

Harder shells and sharper claws.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never write a book about anything important

Posted on by kay

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/03/29/qanon-new-age-spirituality/?itid=hp_magazine

     Because as the above article shows, ignoramuses can and will turn your words inside out and totally distort whatever you said in the book. The better you said it, the better their arguments will be.
     Poor Robert Bly.
     Humanity has reached the dismal state where great masses of it will believe anything. Incapable of thinking for themselves, and too ignorant to adequately process complex ideas, this group invariably misunderstands complex ideas. These folks can think of themselves, and how special they are, but that’s as far as their thinking can take them.
     The problems highlighted in the article above are exactly what I ran into while a member of the Oregon Friends of Jung. Meeting monthly –obstensibly to discuss the ideas of one of the most original minds humanity ever produced, one of the ‘big three’ fathers of modern psychology– did they actually do that? Did they want to delve into difficult and troubling concepts like the human shadow? Of course not!  Accept for the hard-hitting James Hollis and Karl Marlantes (whom I scheduled once, with great difficulty), they wanted to hire lecturers on astrology and other such ‘make you feel good’ navel-gazing diversions. While board members, my husband and I dutifully sat through countless lectures so muddled they were meaningless. Jung would have crapped his pants in frustration.
     If one slithered by right now, I could bite the head off a rattler.
     Because the author of this article is right. There is a connection between “New Age” concepts and QAnon.
     That connection is rampant narcissistic ignorance incapable of processing complex ideas.

This blog post is not politically correct

Posted on by kay

 

I just got off the phone with my step-son, who had just tried to conduct a conversation with his birth mother, a borderline personality. He was justifiably upset.

 

My own mother was a borderline personality. So is the ex-wife of one of my son-in-laws. That’s three really toxic people, in this one little circle of extended family. (And not related to one another by birth.) Three people who do not listen to others, swing wildly from clinging to attacking, cannot be depended upon, lie without even realizing it, and simply don’t care what the facts are. Three different people, in this one extended family, who are incapable of using reason to make decisions; they live only to defend whatever crazy thing they just said or did, and wreck havoc wherever they go.

 

The question in my mind today is, does this ratio hold true in the larger population? We already know that about 1 in every 25 people are sociopathic. Then how many are borderline personalities? How many are narcissists? Just how many people in any given population are mentally and emotionally incapable of registering facts, even when those facts are biting them in the ass?

 

No wonder it’s so hard to practice democracy.

 

And, could these ratios explain what’s happening to the Republican party? Has it been gradually absorbing all those who are too mentally unbalanced to care about what happens to other people? Has it become the Party of Brain-Wiring Misfires?

 

Told you this post would be politically incorrect.

 

 

It sucks, but I’m afraid Gandalf was absolutely right.

Posted on by kay

 

“Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.”

–spoken by Gandalf to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I, “said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black. The Enemy is fast becoming very strong. His plans are far from ripe, I think, but they are ripening. We shall be hard put to it.”

 

 

 

Democracy? Not really. It’s actually a minoritocracy.

Posted on by kay

 

Minoritocracy (my nor a tok rah see):  where a minority rules over a majority by cronyism and repression.

 

If you haven’t already done so, watch “All In: The Fight for Democracy,” on Amazon now.

 

Brian Kemp should be in prison, not governor of Georgia. And so should all those who helped him purge more than a million voters from Georgia’s rolls before the election.

 

We need laws with real, severe, and undeniable consequences for anyone who tries to limit the right to vote.

Election fraud, indeed.

Posted on by kay

 

Here’s a problem for practicing democracy:

 

a multi-million dollar Trump donor is running the US Post Office these days. And –surprise!– his methods are causing delays and backlogs of undelivered mail that will complicate our upcoming election results.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/postal-service-backlog-sparks-worries-that-ballot-delivery-could-be-delayed-in-november/2020/07/30/cb19f1f4-d1d0-11ea-8d32-1ebf4e9d8e0d_story.html

“To Walk Invisible”

Posted on by kay

 

 

Spurred by the PBS film “To Walk Invisible,” about the Bronte sisters, I got Jane Eyre down the other day. When I first opened it I thought, Am I going to be able to read this?  The language is so elaborate and melodramatic, the feelings expressed so over the top by today’s standards… And then I remembered the film, ‘saw’ the lives those women led and realized, Well hell yeah, it was another world! Why would they sound like us? 

 
        1845 was 175 years ago. Oregon was not even a state. Whereas today we can pleasure ourselves, receive pleasure from others, dance freely and wildly to music, write, publish, cuss, be rude, dress however we want, play sports, run for office, talented and educated women in Victorian England had no such emotional outlets. They had to express their feelings in words, not deeds.
        There’s a scene in the film where Charlotte is sitting in front of a window, rain falling outside, pen and paper before her. The director dwells for about a minute on her face, and you can see the resolution form — she needs a better book, she’s been told they’ll publish her if she writes a better book than her last one (they think she’s a man named Currer Bell), she needs the money to survive — then she dips her pen into a pot of ink and writes, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” The first line of Jane Eyre.
        Damn. I had to pause the film for a minute there. We’re not talking about having a word processor where you can cut and paste til you puke. We’re talking about having the foresight and intellect –the sheer genius– to write down exactly what you want to express, the way you want to express it, in the right order, every time your pen hits the paper. Damn.  
        So I dropped out of 2020 and fell into 1845 for several days. Into Charlotte Bronte’s world. Made myself slow down and hear the music in her language, feel the passion in her soul. Pulled all-day-wreck-your-eyes-and-your-back reading sessions with Jane Eyre.
        And now I’m gonna give Emily her due.
        Now I’m gonna start on Wuthering Heights.