Badly in Need of a Strategy

Randy Rhodes was pointing out that what this whole Occupy movement is sorely lacking is any sort of strategy. It’s silly to have demonstrators have their heads beaten in by cops only to gain the right to camp out that night in the park. That’s pointless. It’s just as much a waste of human resources as the idea of starting a war in Iraq solely because we were told that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Rosa Parks didn’t one day just decide not to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery in 1955. She had been carefully coached by the NAACP. There is a line – I don’t know if it’s in “Sunset Blvd” or “All About Eve” that goes “People think the actors make up their lines in a movie as they go along. They never stop to think that someone actually sits down and writes screenplays”. People who play chess know they need a strategy. Yet there is this delusional belief shared by such far flung people as Chuck Smith and Thom Hartman that believes that major movements just spontaneously “develop”, like flies on moldy bread. People believe we don’t need leaders because there is this “developing wave” out there and somehow after the wave really gets going then we can worry about leaders. The tea party didn’t get going without careful planning. Herman Cain, as dumb as he sounds sometimes, didn’t just fall off the turn-up truck yesterday. First of all the movement needs a reason to exist. We have that. And then we need a goal. We pretty much know what that is. Randy Rhodes suggested that a two line amendment to the US Constitution would do that. One line would be about corporations not having the rights of “persons” and the other would have to do with the public financing of campaigns. Even Christians will attribute a great amount of economic genious to the antichrist. Some have suggested that if we have leaders at all they need not be national but local. The thing is the problem is national. We have nation wide supreme court decisions that need overturning. Most of the problems – many manufactured by the tea party- - experienced by local governments- - have as their underlying cause a national malaise. Clearly our economic system is not “working”. You could liken it to as simple an example of a husband and wife in bed with an electric blanket on but somehow the controls got crossed and she had his control and he has hers, so that the higher one turns up the temperature because they feel cold, the hotter the other one feels and keeps turning the temperature down. Somehow the tea party expects the poor and unemployed to buy into arguments meant to serve multi-millionaires. One key strategy is to define the terms of debate. Sol Allinsky would tell you this. You define the enemy before he can define you. Then you present demands which are well within the ability of the other person to grant. And where the strategy part comes in is that you go outside the “comfort zone” of your opponent, but at the same time try to prevent your own people working outside their zone of comfort or unfermilarity. There is a Dylan song line that goes “and I know my song well before I start singing”. First you need a reason, and then a goal, and then strategy, and last on the list is specific tacticts. Sometimes you have to think ahead to hypothetical, not yet realized realities. It’s silly to play a chess game and to see a way you could lose, but gamble that somehow your opponent will not notice it. And of course sometimes life is a crap shoot. But even here you get the mathematical odds to work in your favor. So you need someone who preferably is not living in a half way house, and who is financially solvent, who is a good speech maker and with proven ability to persuade people. Obviously contacts in government are a major asset. You also need someone who is not a Prima Donna and is able to keep the functioning of the team as a unit in mind, and also one who does not lose sight of the goal. We don’t have any leaders like that today, and so the field is wide open. The first person who meets these qualifications and steps forward will find popularity beyond his imagination.

David Sheroda (?) was in for Hartman this morning. Chelsea Clinton has apparently been hired on by NBC as a senior reporter. To me this is a good thing because she is well liked and the closest thing we have to Kate Middleton in this country. She will lend people of the liberal perswasion a status they haven’t had up until now. People around here are confident she will do well in the post at NBC because of all the education she has had. Nonetheless there is another side to this issue, as pointed out to me this morning by three ex Beatles, Mal Evans, Stu Sutcliffe, and John Lennon. Some say that Chelsea doesn’t have a shred of background in journalism - - and how all these years she’s been such a delicate flower in need of “protection” from the press. It’s pointed out that journalism students may be tens of thousands of dollars in debts with student loans, working their buns off- - all to be preempted by someone who just waltzes in the front door of the head office and lands the most plumb job of all. I guess I take exception to Rush Limbaugh even broaching this subject because when he appears to be even a little sympathetic to the left and against nepotism and moneyed influence- - you suspect that he has a dagger in the other hand. If Rush Limbaugh were to announce that the sun rises in the east, the next morning I’d be looking to the west at dawn to see the sunrise. Of course TV news sucks royally. It’s not as if any TV station never hired a pretty bimbo (not that Chelsea is that) because of her looks. We all know it was President Clinton who abolished the fairness doctrine once and for all and all the TV stations but news as part of their “Entertainment” division. “Network” foresaw this eventuality way, way before it happened. That movie is prophetic on so many levels. This indeed should be a significant plank in the platform of the left of “changes that need to be made”.

Personally I would like to get the whole Federal Government out of the food business. So we really need a school lunch program run out of Washington? Who cares whether some beaurocrat considers Pizza as a vegetable? Frankly it’s not worth expending the time it takes to argue about it. As far as I’m concerned Mc Donald’s can put anything they want in their Happy meals- - barring of course things like alcohol. I am tired of the Federal government trying to micro-manage how corporations choose to run and market their business. OK if you’ve got a dirty sign right next to a school or something where kids pass by every day- - that’s community standards. You can regulate that. But I think Romney and some of these other republicans have a major point in discussing the mountains of federal regulations on each and every aspect of how a business is run.

I would like to discuss a few loosely flung items in this final paragraph. I believe one should choose his words carefully both in written and in oral discourse. For instance nothing is more frustrating than asking where a certain business is and you’re told ‘Oh, it’s not far from here. It’s at Ball and Katella”. The only problem is that Ball and Katella are parrellel streets. Cops use this discernment when “vetting” a story a witness might tell to the cops about what he knows about the crime. You’re looking for the nonsensical red flags. People misuse words. For instance there is intimate, meaning close to another, and apparently the same spelling of intimate meaning to allude or hint at verbally, and then there is imminent, meaning- - - here and now, immediate, and not being able to escape it. In my theology God is imminent, but he is not intimate. People ask where human rights come from. My view is by way of analogy- - just as a scientists looks at Life on earth and cares less where it came from but that it Exists- - so we don’t really know where human rights come FROM. They are a part of karmic law. They are things that are deduced to exist. They are Self Evident in the same way a scientists sees life on earth as Self Evident. As such it may be investigated and learned from and even reverenced - - and in the case of Life one is by inference reverencing God, from whom it came. As such there is a deducable stewardship man has over the Planet that is referenced in the 2^nd chapter of Genisis, which is to “tend and to keep it”. But to me there is no inherent link between Nature and Karma. The problem is that I would argue that “Morality is made for Man and not man made for morality”. A Christian would argue the opposite and therein lies the problem. He seems to think that man himself is not the best arbiter of his own morality, but Jefferson says that this truth is Self Evident. Some people like myself wonder whether two different souls can occupy the same body at different times. At times I have wondered when told of these “radical transformations” of a person- - whether it might be so. In psychology they have a thing called disassociation, where a person doesn’t want to face certain aspects of his nature, so he describes these now distasteful acts as acts done by Another. Upon psychological probing, I suspect, one could detect an underlying thread or “purpose” in these seeming shifts of personality masks. But in the case of John Lennon it’s interesting why he would choose to write a lot of songs from the point of view of an emotionally immature teenage boy, who is insecure and possessive and all of that, when he himself was in his twenties and married with a son. So I guess you have to go around looking for some thirteen year old spirit that might have possessed Lennon’s both to write and sing these songs. Sometimes tracing down musical style or “geshtaldt” isn’t the most key thing since the ‘sixties were such a time of rapidly evolving musical trends. I guess I wonder whether the real John Lennon would write a song about an affair he’d had or another song about how he used to beat his wife. Many would say the Real John Lennon doesn’t like to discuss his real feelings but hide them in multi layered metaphor. Of course there is a word for people who let their “feelings” dictate excuses as to why they act irresponsibly both on the job and with their friends and associates. It’s called being a Flake. You observe this a lot with Christians.