Love Thine Enemies

How To Harvest an Organ, by Dick Cheney

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAIfGYAhwQA

Dumb and Dumber, 1994

I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to make a single Dick Cheney joke upon hearing that he had a heart transplant.  I made a similar promise to my 11 year old daughter when I vowed to not make tree slaughtering jokes when we went to hunt, then ultimately make a kill of a Christmas tree in December.  But as I was murdering the tree, I mean cutting it down, I found it literally impossible to not simulate what the tree would be saying (or screaming) if it indeed had vocal chords.  Sometimes for me, morally underpinned comedy trumps all else:  The sanctity of my word, people’s feelings, even a promise made to my daughter.  She cried, by the way.  Nice job Dad.  I have found that impulse control isn’t exactly a strength.

No.  The jokes that could practically write themselves are just way too easy, kind of like hitting a baseball off a tee – no fun because there is no challenge –   especially for me.  I have spent at least a full week of my life railing on Dick Cheney, as he seemed to be a horrible combination of heartless, (see I just can’t help myself…) mentally disturbed, and corrupt; with all of these qualities amplified due to his position of great power.  The fact that he always had heart trouble was the most compelling evidence for the case that he actually had a heart (damn it!).  So now here is a man who I, petty as it is, have staked a personal identity on vilifying, and he is hanging on to life in such a vulnerable way so as to take shots at him while he is down would make me … like him back when he actually had the vitality to manifest his diabolical nature.  And ‘Be Like Cheney’ is not a mantra that I would recommend to anyone.  Further, he isn’t out of the woods yet, as there is ample time for the organ to reject Dick Cheney’s body. (no hope for me… ) But I digress.  I have come here to praise Cheney, not to bury him…

Cheney is the embodiment of somebody that we should love.  Very much like 1000 pounds is the embodiment of what we should endeavor to bench press.  If we were able to forgive him, and actually have love for him, then we are well on our way to being able to love anyone.  And if there were ever an objective that would be ideal for every person to have, loving everyone seems to possess little downside.  If the consequences of our actions were the best arbiter of their appropriateness, you can’t really go wrong with love.  It is one of the very few unconditionally appropriate responses.  And so this begs the question that gets to the heart (oof!) of the matter:  can one love a Dick?

For example, is it really OK to offer love to someone who was instrumental in introducing torture as a component of our national defense?  Weren’t we supposed to be the heroes, the guys wearing white, above the fray, the moral authority?  Where does waterboarding fit into this archetype?  Love the guy that sullied the flag that so many courageously died for?  Yes.

But what about loving someone who went on canned hunts?  A man who drove his SUV into some fake woods, let his dogs out of the car where they frightened some birds that were rendered lame due to their upbringing, (making them unable to fly normally) so they move more like a plastic bag aloft in a light breeze rather than a bird with a fighting chance at getting away.  A man who then shot these birds that had no chance of escape and called it sporting?  Forget that he shot his buddy in the face, perhaps due to an ill-advised combination of alcohol, cars, and guns.  Who shoots defenseless creatures?  Dick Cheney.  And we should love him.  Not because of his pull-the-wings-off-the-butterfly pathological personality, but despite it.

It seems far fetched to love a war criminal.  And even more difficult is the fact that being a war criminal, and also being the Vice President of the United States means that our country is complicit in offering a war criminal amnesty.  Weren’t we part of the Geneva Convention?  Do as we say not as we do?  Harboring fugitives puts our country in a very difficult position globally from a diplomatic standpoint.  And what about when our soldiers are prisoners of war?  Can we expect compliance with the very treaties that we flouted thanks to a Dick?  Probably not, but we need to love him anyway.

And lastly, (only because I don’t want to spend another week lambasting this guy) what about being a war profiteer?  Let’s talk about Halliburton.  This company was hired by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1991 after the first gulf war in Iraq for various war related projects.  Cheney then leaves government and becomes Chairman of Halliburton, charged with growing a company that makes money off of war.  But after the Balkans, … Too much peace?  Dick then becomes Vice President in 2001, (so said the Supreme Court anyway), then we invade Iraq again in a war of choice and Halliburton gets many no bid contracts?  Really?  So much blood, … but oh so much market capitalization!  Do I really have to love this guy?  YES!

And not just because of the challenge, not just because it is healthier for our bodies to be vessels of love instead of hate, not just because Jesus wisely advised us to love our enemies, which means of course we aren’t supposed to have enemies.  And not just because it would make the world a better place for all of us to practice this style of next-to-impossible spiritual weight lifting.

I believe it is a reasonable proposition to forgive.  That doesn’t mean forget of course.  But to forgive puts the forgiver in a position of comfort and power, while the forgiven is in theory, just not in the picture at all because forgiving is all about the subject, not the object.  Also, it is reasonable to assume that any of us, if we had the same DNA coupled with the same environment as those we find reprehensible, would behave in the exact same way and have the exact same values.  We are all made of the same stuff, and subject to the same design limitations.  It would be very hard to speak to the mutations in Cheney’s genes, or what happened to him as a child that would have shaped him into the person he became.  I can speculate that he must have not been exposed to much love, or forgiveness, and perhaps was tortured, bullied, not breast fed, etc.  But I think it safe to posit that if I had his genes, and grew up in his environment, I might feel OK blowing lame birds out of the sky and making lots of money supporting a war machine.

Lastly, the heart has intelligence apart from the brain.  This is true.  A heart will beat on a decapitated body for a while before bleeding out.  Almost all mythology ascribes sacredness to the heart almost as a proxy to the soul.  So what if there is something to this, and Dick’s heart trouble was behind his pathological behavior?  In this hypothetical world, he deserves a second chance since he now has a second heart.  He might not be the same guy!  Somewhere out there was a person who was thoughtful and decent enough to be an organ donor.  And his heart still beats, with all it’s goodwill and positive intent inside … Dick Cheney.  So at the very least, we owe it to this guy to love Dick Cheney.  That said, I am going write on my organ donor card, ‘please do not give my organs to war criminals’.

Tim Handley

May the Odds Be Ever In Your Favor

Katniss Everdeen: “I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence.”

The Hunger Games – 2012

Now this was an unrealistic dystopian movie.

Who can imagine a future where people would actually be comfortable with their children fighting to the death?   Oh wait… That’s right – Viet Nam.  And every other war we have fought… 10-2-1  is a respectable record by a team in just about any sport, right?  But the savagery of having 23 kids die each year for government propaganda purposes as seen in The Hunger Games seems so farfetched as to be impossible.  That is unless you consider that in the said wars, many civilians are killed, and of those civilians, many are children.  Far more than 23.  And as we get older, those that are between the ages of 18-22 seem like kids.  So actually, our world is far worse in this regard, as the body bags from Afghanistan coming into our country alone make the numbers of dead in the Hunger Games … ENVIABLE.  Kids fighting kids for the pleasure of older people is the essence of war.  And all the abstract reasons we offer as to why war is justified (oil, for example), or for containing communism, or to minimize the spread of weapons of mass destruction, etc… well, these are just as silly as the reasons offered by the authorities in The Hunger Games.  Sending our young sons to die for a cause, while exemplified in the Bible and now regarded as a standard practice … shouldn’t we know better by now?  At least we are now getting our daughters closer to combat.  Let’s just see if we are as willing to put them in harm’s way.

Who can imagine a world where your mortal destiny is determined by lottery?  Well, the draft was determined by lottery.  But we don’t have that anymore … though we still have the selective service requirement for 18 year old boys, just in case we need a draft, so lets just say it is not officially off the table.  And the best charter schools, which in many cases are so far superior to neighboring underfunded public schools that to be accepted in them might mean the difference between going to college or not, determine admission by lotteries.  ‘Waiting for Superman’ made the point that the lotteries were almost a life sentence, so profound the difference between the public and charter schools.

How unrealistic is a world where there is a ruling class of people that have money to pamper their pets with expensive food and accoutrements, and adorn their bodies with fashion that are both ultra expensive and a level of  gaudy that can only be achieved through a mutated competition amongst designers, and have the money for expensive plastic surgery, technology, etc., ALL THE WHILE there are people that are struggling to eat, with many starving in large numbers?  Talk about dystopian.  No resemblance to our world, right?   What was great about this movie was, if you hadn’t read the book, you would assume that this future world was only populated by working class folks who struggled sometimes unsuccessfully to put food on the table and had no technology, presumably as a result of the apocolypse.  Only later did we find that while this was a typical pocket of people in ‘District 12’, there existed a  cosmopolitan center that had a bounty of technology, food, and frivolity, only available to the elite of the society.  Perhaps 1 percent of them.  A world where wealth was concentrated in the hands of a very few… who could imagine a place like that?!

Who could imagine a world where people would cheer the very concept of people dying in a reality TV context?  Oh yeah, I suppose there was the republican debate crowds that cheered Rick Perry presiding over a very large number of executions in his state.  Or the same crowd that cheered at the prospect of allowing an uninsured sick person to die.  Or the NFL, NASCAR, and MMA fights, just one step away from the crowds watching the gladiators… Reality TV is anything but real.  And I know from the inside, as I was on the Dating Game, one of the original reality shows.  http://bit.ly/GKWvn3 We looked like we were getting asked questions and were answering on the fly, but we got the questions minutes before the start of the show.  Reality shows are scripted, but succeed by making the audience think that they are not.  Sorry, spoiler alert, I guess.  Entertainment executives know what sells advertising and steer the content accordingly.  Martin Scorsese’s Quiz show was such a great missive about the birth of this phenomena, I couldn’t recommend it more.  We would already have people in stadiums with lions if PETA didn’t think it was cruel for the lions to have such a large dose of cholesterol.

Lastly, how farfetched is a government that manipulates public behavior through fear and intimidation, with a light strategic pinch of hope sprinkled in?  Well, I guess all we would have to do is roll tape on the occupy protests that were confronted by the authorities.  Riot police have every right to stop looting and rioting.  But wasn’t the right to assemble and petition our government sanctioned somewhere?  Like in some document like the Magna Carta or something?  A bill of goods or rights or some such thing?  There seemed to be quite a bit of force being deployed toward those that were not only non violent but … silent.

Our most potent protests today are silent protests, which should be in the playbook of all protesters.  Gathering is good, violence is bad, shouting makes you look sort of like a baby, but silent stares… boy they seem to work.  So gather and stare.  This was powerfully on display in California the day after the UC Davis pepper spraying incident.  The Chancellor of UC Davis after a speech trying to justify the way in which order was kept had to walk through a gauntlet of people … being silent and staring at her.  A similar protest happened to state legislators in Virginia over invasive procedures being forced on pregnant women.   And the Hunger Games captured this form of protest in all its power and glory beautifully.  Great movie, by the way!

If you think, as you watch the Hunger Games, that it seems farfetched, barbarian, and far removed from our world, reconsider.   The reality is our world is replete with even more savagery and oppression than is reflected in this movie.  If you can awaken to THIS reality, you can begin to be the solution.

Tim Handley