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Will the Shadow Win Again
Sarah Palin is the reverse of
Barack Obama
By Deepak Chopra
Sometimes politics has the
uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even
when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly
illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah
Palin had on the Republican convention in
Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes
former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely
choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in
the complex affairs of governing. Her state of
Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which
reduces the job of governor to the scale of running
one-tenth of New York City . By comparison, Rudy
Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's
pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but
her real appeal goes deeper.
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She is the reverse of
Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his
idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst
impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that
part of the psyche that hides out of sight,
countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with
qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear,
revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of
"the other." For millions of Americans, Obama
triggers those feelings, but they don't want to
express them. He is calling for us to reach for our
higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden
reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly
clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact
that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor
widely in use before his arrival on the scene.)
I recognize that
psychological analysis of politics is usually not
welcome by the public, but I believe such a
perspective can be helpful here to understand
Palin's message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin
sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate
their resistance to change and a higher vision.
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Look at what she stands
for:
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—Small town
values—a denial of America 's global
role, a return to petty, small-minded
parochialism.
—Ignorance of
world affairs—a repudiation of the need
to repair America 's image abroad.
—Family
values—a code for walling out anybody
who makes a claim for social justice.
Such strangers, being outside the
family, don't need to be heeded.
—Rigid stands
on guns and abortion—a scornful
repudiation that these issues can be
negotiated with those who disagree.
—Patriotism—the usual fallback in a
failed war.
—"Reform"—an
italicized term, since in addition to
cleaning out corruption and excessive
spending, one also throws out anyone who
doesn't fit your ideology. |
Palin reinforces the
overall message of the reactionary right, which has
been in play since 1980, that social justice is
liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants,
being different from "us" pure American types, can
be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort
and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right
marches under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack,"
and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is."
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The irony, of course, is
that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the
same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her
resume, while blithely reversing forty years of
feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there
are millions of women who stand on the side of
conservatism, however obviously they are voting
against their own good. The Republicans have won
multiple national elections by raising shadow issues
based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and
narrow-mindedness.
Obama's call for higher
ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The
shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just
conservatives possess a shadow—we all do. So what
comes next is a contest between the two forces of
progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or
has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can
predict.
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The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she
brought this conflict to light, which makes the
upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect
another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking
horse for the reactionary forces that have brought
us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to
see what we are getting, without disguise.
4 September 2008
Emancipate yourselves from
mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our
minds.—Bob Marley
Deepak
Chopra has
written more than 40 books. They range broadly
across spiritual and health topics; including
bestsellers on aging, the "Seven Spiritual Laws of
Success," the existence of God, arguments for the
afterlife and world peace. He has also written
novels and edited collections of spiritual poetry
from India and Persia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepak_Chopra
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into the
novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 9 September
2008
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