2016

 Paul Ryan versus Martin O'Malley.

You heard it here, first.

4more

Whew!

That was a close one.  At least it felt like it.

But, given the President's coattails, squashing some of the worst ideologues, partisans,  chauvinists, and intolerants in the process, I can't help but wonder if he didn't intentionally throw that first debate just to keep the dark money invested in a losing Romney campaign instead of many other winnable Senate races.

Like Andrew Sullivan says, "meep meep".

Now, let's get back to work.

Conspiracy of Dunces

So, a few things about this year's crop of candidates.

The other night, Rachel Maddow mentioned a GOP Senate candidate who makes a point of telling his supporters that he can't pronounce names like "Sotamayor". Or "Ahmadinejad".  Or "Chu".  It's always a big laugh line for him.  To this day, Sarah Palin is OFFENDED that Kathy Couric had the nerve to ask her what newspapers she reads.

Now, there are other conservatives who at least recognize that creating the appearance of education is a good thing.  Christine O'Donnell tried to pretend she went to Princeton and Oxford. But, I can tell you for a fact that there are no mice with human brains running around the Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton.  Now, Glenn Beck is trying to create his own university, with classes on Faith, Hope, and Charity.

I think about the creationists, who've now retreated into the realm of "intelligent design", which basically breaks down like this: a lot of really complicated things happened to create the universe, and I don't understand it, but since it all works, there MUST be some intelligence behind it.

I know studying and reading and learning aren't exactly easy.  But, since when did willful ignorance become a virtue?

Why are people now PROUD to proclaim that they don't know things?  Why are people ANGRY when you suggest that they should read more?

I know I'm weird, right?  Because I'm an obsessive researcher.  I love to know, well, everything.  So I study like crazy.  But I'm not asking people to be like me.  I'm just asking people to, I don't know, learn something.

I mean, if you got on a plane, you wouldn't want the guy who is proud that he doesn't know anything about aerodynamics or flight controls or, well, flying, to actually pilot the plane, right?   I mean, no, I don't know how to fly, but I'm not insisting that the pilot be as ignorant as I am about flying just so I don't feel, what, inadaquate as we're soaring at 30,000 feet.

So why are we so ready to vote for "the guy I could have a beer with".  Christine O'Donnell says "vote for me because I'd do what you'd do".

No!  I want someone who'd do what someone who knows more about these kind of things than me.  At least it gets done right.  My pride is not so fragile that I need to see the country go down the tubes just so I can say to my congressman "I could do your job".

I remember reading Bill Bradley's book, "Times Present, Times Past", where he talked about his involvement in the US Senate with water management legislation in California, which is a stupidly complex thing involving land rights, aquaduct construction & management, and a ton of other things I know nothing about.  The end result is that clean water comes out of my tap.  I WANT someone smart about these issues in there making the decisions.

Representative government means representing my interests, not replicating my own stupidity.

Wake up, people!

But the reality is that all of these GOP/Tea Party loons are just a big distraction.  There are people who fundamentally don't believe in government who support these clowns, because the government is all that stands between them and a state of nature, which is what they really want.  There are some economically powerful people who want all of the laws to go away so that we're returned to a world where only the strong survive, because they figure they're strong and they'll win.  They want you to think that government doesn't serve a purpose, or is only worthy of clowns, charlatans, and con men.  And, frankly, I think those people are just fundamentally unAmerican, because the end result of such a world is feudalism.

A conservative I greatly respect is David Frum.  I don't agree with his philosophies or political agendas, but I admire his firm faith that government is a place where the country can be made better.  And he's commented on his blog several times that many of these so-called candidates from the GOP lately actually have no interest in running the country.  Mike Huckabee and Palin and O'Donnell are only in the race so they can get their own TV shows later on some network that pays them a lot of money.

Serving in public office is a privilege that carries a heavy responsibility.  If you believe in your principles, you should want to be the sharpest, smartest, most logically & legislatively sound public official you can be.  Frankly, I wish there were more David Frums.

Why Kucinich WIll Never Be President

Or, Frankly, Ron Paul, or Tom Tancredo, or Carol Mosley Braun or any number of politicians who are, regardless of what you think of their politics, at some base level, qualified.

It's the same reason why someone as manifestly unqualified as Sarah Palin is still considered a legitimate national figure. Or why John Edwards or even the President himself, Barack Obama, was considered a legit contender after less than a single term at the national level in the senate.

I'm reminded of the very last episode of "The Practice", where Alan Shore was finalizing his relationship with Crane, Poole, & Schmidt, ultimately leading to 5 years of Emmy glory on "Boston Legal". As Shore introduced his assistant/paramour Tara to his new boss Denny Crane, Crane said to her in typical Denny fashion: "We only hire pretty people here. Are you a pretty girl, soldier?"

It's the same reason, apparently, that Kennedy beat Nixon, or why Reagan beat Mondale, or why Clinton beat Dole.

The camera loves them.

And when the cameras love them, the press love them.

More specifically, the advertisers love them.

Yes, there is substance to many of the debates, and, yes, I do truly believe that Obama is far and away the best person for the job. But if he looked like Al Sharpton, he'd never stand a chance.

The modern presidential election has bore more than a passing resemblance to American Idol for quite some time, but it's all behind the scenes, in media focus groups who decide who can best get the American public to keep tuning into 24/7 cable news outlets to drive advertising dollars to support the revenue streams of those networks.

And let's be honest, do you REALLY want to see Dennis Kucinich on your TV every night for 4 years?

I'm just sayin'.

Born in the USA

I have, on occasion, been known to indulge in conspiracy theories.

For instance, there's a part of me that still believes that John Kerry struck some kind of deal born of Skull & Bones to basically throw the 2004 election for George Bush. After all, he fought like a hellcat to destroy Howard Dean, robocalls & all, but declined from using similar tactics against the 43rd president.

So, yes, I do buy into some conspiracy theories. But I find the recent Birther phenomenon so amusing for two reasons:

1. for it to be true, you have to assume the complicity of The State of Hawaii, at least two major Hawaiian newspapers, the Federal Election Commission, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and basically the entire Republican political apparatus. And that various elements had been upholding this conspiracy for nearly 50 years (that, or they went back and planted false evidence in the record, 1984-style). To which, I would respond, why? If Sarah Palin had some serious doubt about Obama's citizenship, do you think she would have waited a second to use that in a campaign speech? She was damn near calling the man a terrorist because he'd been in some guy's house. Which gets to the larger issue of most conspiracy theories, namely the presumption that all of the important famous people are out to punk the rest of the world so they can.... do what, exactly? "Control us"? I mean, really, if all of these players were interested in fabricating Obama's birth, wouldn't they have come up with a better cover story.

2. To borrow a line from Rush Limbaugh, the Birther movement is totally about race. The guy who's credited with originally trying to discredit Obama's nationality is a dude who once ran for congress on the promise that he would "exterminate Jew Power in America". The woman who shouted down that congressman in his town hall meeting about the birther stuff ended her tirade with "I want my country back!", because, of course, this can't really be America if a Black man is now president. Lou Dobbs teased the notion that Obama might even be an illegal immigrant. The fact is, these people are looking for anything that would just undo the last election, because that election proves that the majority of America thinks they're a bunch of crackpots.

Barack Obama is an American.

And he's your President.

Suck it up.

Seven Days Later

Barack Hussein Obama II will be the 44th President of the United States of America.

Honestly, I don't even know where to begin.

Moments after the networks called the election on Obama's behalf, my friend called me and said, simply "this proves that Love Beats Fear."

A few days later, another friend called and said this:

"Yo, man. I had this dream last Tuesday night, where this whack dude was the President, and he was fuckin' everything up. So we had an election, and there was another old whack dude running against a black dude.

And you know what? The black dude won.

Crazy shit, right?

So, I was just callin' to ask, did you have the same dream?"

My own personal analogy is that it's the difference between standing in a room in the dark for eight years, and suddenly someone switches on the lights. Nothing physically in the room has changed. But the light banishes the shadows. It makes the gems in the room shine. It illuminates the paths forward. Where once there was nothing but fear and uncertainty, we can now, all see the possibilities.

Now, let's take them.

U.S.A.

Tina Fay as Sarah Palin was great, BUT....

...what I'm really waiting for is for Saturday Night Live to bring back Jon Lovitz so he can do John McCain as Tommy Flanagan, Pathological Liar.

"Yeah, when I said the economy was strong, I was talking about the biceps on the workers. Yeah, that's the ticket."

Living in a Post-Rational World

So, before all of you liberals, progressives, and Democrats start doing the electoral victory dance because the failing economy has turned the tide presumably in Obama's favor, let me make one observation:

Although most people don't want to admit it, the vast majority of the electorate does not cast a vote for a specific policy or issue, even when they say they do. They're not voting for the issue, but for their emotional response to the issue.

They're not voting FOR a pro-life platform - they're voting because aligning themselves with the pro-life platform makes them FEEL better about their relationship with God.

They're not voting FOR environmental platform - they're voting because aligning with conservationism makes them FEEL like responsible stewards of the planet.

They're not voting FOR gun control - they're voting because the idea of gun control makes them FEEL safer.

As I mentioned earlier, Republicans figured this out a long time ago and decided to just cut out the middle man: they don't even really bother to run on issues anymore. Their campaigns are almost like reality TV shows, with characters cast in the roles as candidates to elicit specific emotional responses.

"The Maverick"

"The Hockey Mom"

"The Guy You'd Like To Have A Beer With"

Bill Clinton got it. He was "The Man From A Place Called 'Hope'".

Obama gets it, too. Just look at the early speeches.

The point is, if you're pinning your hopes for the election on convincing people with a rational argument about taxes and incentives and plans and such, I've got news for you: the average American is not listening.

They're feeling.

And if you want to win, you'd better start feeling and sharing and eliciting those feelings right along with them.

The Place Where Dreams Are Born

Let me wax poetic for a moment.

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about the use of both negative and positive manifestation through the manipulation of collective emotional energy in the election process. I titled it "Before Sunrise", to hearken back to my Election '04 postmortem, "The Sun WILL Rise" (with a little nod to Richard Linklater), but also because so many of us seemed to be in a dark, scary place during this part of the election cycle, and, as they say, it's always darkest before the dawn.

But what else happens in the dark before the dawn?

We dream.

One of my dreams as I wrote that blog was that there would be a place where people could share their dreams and hopes and aspirations for the future of this country and the world, and where that collective, beautiful, joyous energy could coalesce into powerful, inspired action.

So, imagine my shock when a friend pointed me to this brand new blog:

Change. Hope. Dream.

Yes, a new blog, inspired by MY blog, that does exactly what I was hoping for.

Talk about a manifestation!

Dreams do become real.

So, GO THERE. Share your dreams. Share the blog. Help us all conjure the real magic that will transform the world around us.

Before Sunrise

I love logic.

That comes from my training and natural inclinations towards math, science, and the rational process. I like to know how and why things work.

I have also always been a creature of faith.

Perhaps it's the rural roots of my family and our own brushes with the esoteric and unseen.

And I don't consider these to be mutually exclusive.

One of my all-time favorite books is "Fire In The Mind" by George Johnson. In it, he examines a pair of seemingly mutually exclusive systems of thought in Santa Fe, New Mexico - the nuclear physics labs in Los Alamos and the traditional religions of the local Native American tribes - and shows that, in many ways, they have much more in common than the average person would think. After all, whether it's a sky god or an electron, they both use a series of instruments and tools to predict the behavior of things we cannot experience directly with our 5 senses, but which they both assume have a direct impact on your everyday life.

So, let's start with a somewhat lazy logical argument:

I'm an enormous believer in Arthur C. Clarke's so-called Third Law of Prediction:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

And by "technology", I'm pretty much in agreement with Wikipedia's initial definition that it is "a broad concept that deals with a species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment."

Now, if that's true, than the logic student in me would also posit a corollary - that anything that appears to be magic is simply the usage and knowledge of a series of tools and crafts that the observer does not fully understand.

In short, magic is simply a science you haven't figured out yet.

Which is why I'm a big fan of John Dee.

For those of you who don't know, Dee was, officially, the queen's surgeon, as in Queen Elizabeth I of England, way back in the 16th century. Not only was Dee a scientist and a mathematician of the first order, he was also a specialist in mysticism and the occult. So, not only did the queen turn to Dee for his scientific acumen, but she relied on him to interpret her dreams, to check the path and influence of the stars, etc. Because, of course, back in those days, if you were a scholar, you studied everything and treated it all with equal weight based on the actual results, without having a bias to one system of thought over another (e.g. rational science over mysticism).

But, you'll notice, individuals in positions of power almost always have someone next to them, just behind the scenes, who is doing.... something that the average layman doesn't quite understand.

Every King Arthur has a Merlin behind him to "work the roots", as they used to say back in "the country", to help him stay in power.

Now, I'm sure some of you have read this and said "wow, Day really hides his insanity quite well. I had no idea he was such a madman."

And that's OK, because I needed to put what I'm about to say in some context first.

I want to talk about Karl Rove.

I know what you're thinking.

And, yes, you're 100% right - I AM saying that Rove is to Bush as Merlin is to King Arthur or Gandalf is to Aragorn and so on and so on.

And it didn't fully click for me until today. Here's why.

Right after the 2004 Presidential election, I wrote a post called "The Sun WILL Rise", in which I said the reason why Bush won was because he was, literally, The Candidate of Fear (tm). The entire electorate had bought into the fear paradigm - Republicans were afraid of what might happen to them if Bush lost, and Democrats were afraid of what might happen if Bush won. But the fact of the matter was that everyone's attention and emotional energy was all focused on Bush. Our collective national fear put him in office.

So, as I wrote in a 2006 blog called "The California Democratic Party Sucks", I was no longer going to vote out of fear ever again, even if the absence of my vote for Phil Angelides meant that Arnold would get re-elected governor. I was only going to vote FOR what I believed in, not AGAINST anything.

And, yes, Arnold was re-elected, but, if you look at his record since then, for all intents and purposes, he may as well have been a blue-dog Democrat for the last two years.

Now, consider what's happened this year - there had been a tremendous amount of positive energy flowing in Barack Obama's direction. He figured out that it wasn't enough to have good policies. You also had to inspire people and activate their hearts. Luckily, he also has the skills to do that. The Democrats were on their way to a landslide victory.

Until McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Oh, wait - let me clarify that.

Until Karl Rove and his surrogates who are now running McCain's campaign forced him to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

And, while everyone on the left and in the media is screaming "but she's completely unqualified!!! She's a right-wing ideologue!!! She has a history of misuse of power!!!", they've all completely missed the point.

The Rovians made McCain pick her BECAUSE she's unqualified. BECAUSE she's an ideologue. BECAUSE she has a history of misusing power.

They picked her because she terrifies us.

Sarah Palin is The New Candidate of Fear (tm).

And now, instead of all this talk about hope and the future, we get Democrats and Obama supporters running around with their hair literally on fire over the possibility of President Palin.

I mean, people who've been completely silent over the course of this entire campaign have suddenly been bombarding me with crazed e-mails, sounding like Randy Quaid in "Independence Day":

"We've got to stop them!!!!!!"

The entire focus of the campaign is now on her - those who love her, and those who're afraid of her. And, at the moment, our collective national fear is putting her in office.

The manipulation of the emotional state of a group of people as large as a voting electorate is a science that Rove has employed for decades to adjust and control the political landscape to his liking. A science that the average person simply doesn't understand.

It's magic.

So, for those of you who support Barack Obama like I do, here's the plan - remember how you felt when you saw this?


Don't be misled by the news or the opposition: Our candidate gets it. He knows the power of the collective American spirit is what has propelled him this far and is what can bring him to victory.

So, from now until Election Day, stop forwarding all of those e-mails about how crazy Sarah Palin is.

Instead, tell me stories about the America you dream about.

The President and leadership you hope for.

The Future you believe in.

Write about your own faith in tomorrow, and forward THAT email to everybody in your address book. Re-ignite your belief in the horizon and pass those on to everyone you know.

There's a reason why this is Obama's logo:


To paraphrase Harvey Dent, it's always darkest before the dawn, but keep dreaming about the warmth of the sun on your face, and I promise you, THE DAWN IS COMING.

And remember to vote FOR Obama.

What You Got To Say NOW?

Watching that Obama acceptance speech tonight, I kept thinking back to the end of "8 Mile", with Eminem in the final MC battle against his nemesis, Papa Doc, the head of the so-called "Leaders of the Free World" clique.

Now, for those of you who've never seen an MC Battle before, it's basically a competitive performance where two rappers are given a fixed period of time in a hip-hop club to mock each other with rhyming lyrics they make up on the spot, i.e. freestyle. The crowd decides which one dissed the other the hardest, and awards him the victory.

By this point in the film, Eminem, who lived in a trailer park with his broke down mom (Kim Basinger) had just gotten his ass kicked by the entire Free World crew in a team beatdown, after one of them had had sex with his new girlfriend. And his own crew were so lame that one of them had even shot himself in the foot trying to be tough.

But watch how it all plays out. It's profane, but, man, is it worth it.


 After that total tongue lashing, where Eminem basically threw every attack he knew was coming right back in Papa Doc's face, he as completely speechless and was booed off stage. Eminem wins.

I'm saying all of that to say, what could John McCain and the Republicans possibly say next week in response to Obama tonight that could have any weight or value?

Obama just asked McCain and the Rovians "Is THAT the best you've got?"

The balls in your court, boys.

YES WE CAN

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to tell you who to vote for. But don't just take my word for it.



Wouldn't it be just poetic for Obama to become the first African-American presidential nominee of a major American political party during Black History Month?

THIS is The Moment

If you look to your left and see the nifty new Archives feature here on Macroscope, the statistics are very telling. I generated more posts in 2003 than in all of the other six years of this blog's existence, combined.

2003 was a heavy year.

I turned 30 that August.

And, on the day of my birthday, I had to attend a funeral.

One of my co-workers, a very nice young Mormon fellow, had recently left his job to go back to law school. About a week after we'd given him a fond send off, he was celebrating with his family, including his parents, brothers, his wife and two young children, during a cookout. At one point, my friend's father was playing with my friend's little two year old son in the front yard, and he took his eyes off the child for a moment.... which was all that was needed for the little boy to run over to the next door neighbor's pool that had always fascinated him.

He fell in and drowned.

2 years old.

And the funeral was the day of my birthday.

I remember my girlfriend & I driving deep out into Ventura County early that morning. She's an artist and she'd made a painting of the two of us and her young daughter as a birthday gift. After being together for nearly a year, I believe we broke up roughly a month after this drive.

It was a beautiful day and the area surrounding the church was full of orange groves and farm land. I remember stepping inside the viewing room for the wake.

To this day, I can think of nothing more abominable than a tiny casket.

Inside, he just looked like he was napping.

By the time I got home, my mother had called to wish me a happy birthday. She was on the road coming back from Georgia at the time. A young man from my family's church back in Baltimore was a Marine paratrooper and he was being court-martialed because he and two other marines had been caught tampering with the parachute lines for their unit. They claimed it was meant to bring attention to some unknown ill on the base, but, really does it really even matter? However, the other two had somehow managed to cop a plea, so he, at 19 years old, was left holding the bag and facing the full righteous fury of the United States Marine Corps. He was being sentenced that day in Georgia, so a group from our church took a bus down from Baltimore to act as character witnesses in hopes of inspiring some leniency in his sentence.

Mom told me that, after they all made their impassioned pleas, the judge sentenced him to 20 years in Ft. Levenworth, KS.

As opposed to life in prison.

In this same phone call, Mom told me that one of her old co-workers who'd been a longtime family friend and had even done my taxes on some occasions had just died after a long illness. She also told me that one of the elder statesmen of our church, himself a Marine who was praying for the young man's freedom, had died.

2003 was the first year I had official representation as a tv writer. After several meetings, I apparently came within a hair's breath of getting hired to write for a major NBC drama. But was not. So, I, as an Ivy League graduate, formerly a highly paid IT consultant, now holding a Master of Fine Arts degree, would continue to subsist for another year as a glorified secretary in a non-profit. Excuse me, as a TEMPORARY glorified secretary in a non-profit.

At various points throughout the year, I'd had both my telephone and my electricity disconnected because I hadn't paid my bills. It's moments like then that you think, "Maybe that payment protection plan on my credit card wasn't such a crazy idea."

I turned 30 that year.

To paraphrase Max Cady, 2003 was the year I learned about loss.

Loss of loved ones. Loss of the dream of a family of my own. Loss of opportunities. Loss of pride.

I wrote a lot that year.

But if you look at Macroscope, circa 2003, you won't find any of these stories there.

Instead, you'll find page after page after page about what's wrong with the world outside. Dozens of invectives against George Bush and the invasion of Iraq and intolerance and Rwanda and water politics and CSA sympathizers, with some pop culture & comic references sprinkled in between.

And, of course, LOTS of posts about Howard Dean.

And, if I may psychoanalyze myself from 5 years ago, Dean was going to be the one to make it all right in my life again. And he was going to do it by making Them pay. We were going to take Our Country back. We were going to steal our dreams back. And kick the asses of all the people who'd taken our dreams away in the first place.

I mean how else can you explain this?



I think I was dying inside, and Dean helped me live again by being an avatar for all of rage that was building inside.

Sometimes, I think anger is a necessary tool. You can't go from abject despair to rapturous joy overnight. There are steps. Sometimes, you need a righteous fury just to muster the energy to pick yourself up again.

I loved Dean for America and everything that it stood for. But, like with all things, if you continue to grow, eventually, you'll outgrow them.

Case in point, sometime in the summer of 2004, I was conducting yet another e-mail debate, this time, over legalizing gay marriage, when my brother, staunch, pro-defense Republican that he is, waded into the thick of my progressive, liberal friends to defend the church's official position on the subject. And, of course, it was just ON. But one guy, who'd I'd campaigned with extensively for Dean, took it too far. While everyone else was saying that my brother's position was rediculous, THIS guy started saying that my brother was stupid and that people like him are the reason why this country is in the mess that it is and that he hoped that my brother didn't have children so that they wouldn't grow up to be as stupid as he was and...

You get the idea.

I was livid.

I was out of work, sitting at home at my computer in my underwear, and I was livid.

How DARE he attack my family like that?!?!

I basically told my brother "I got this", and then spent an hour composing a blistering response.

I was using Hotmail at the time. And it wouldn't let me send that e-mail. I'd exceeded the maximum number of e-mails I could send in a day and would have to wait.

I'm suddenly reminded of an episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to buy a gun and is told that he can't take it home right away because of the 5 day waiting period. His response?

"Five DAYS?!?! But I'm angry RIGHT NOW!!!"

At this point, I had a new girlfriend, and I called her to rant. And, of course, she would have none of it. Moreover, she pointed out to me that this was, in fact, my fault. After all, I'd spent the better part of a year sowing bile, venom, and anger to this little virtual community. The guy in question hadn't said anything worse than I had over the year, it's just that this time it was about someone I cared about instead of some abstract evil OTHER out there.

You reap what you sow.

And that was really the moment that I realized that, if I wanted a different world, I had to start making different choices.

I had to BE different.

I realized that, ultimately, as easy and viscerally satisfying it may be in the short term, fighting just really didn't feel good at all. And it simply wasn't constructive. I stopped arguing with my brother about politics. In fact, I stopped arguing about politics, period. Because, in the end, it was never about America. It was always about me.

And a funny thing happened once I started focusing on myself and getting right inside. My life actually started getting better. I got a real, permanent job. I got to travel. I lost weight. I got a house. I nearly sold my movie. Twice.

As a Dean supporter, I used to make fun of the Kucinich people, especially as their candidate spoke of replacing the DoD with a "Department of Peace". But, now I see, that, if peace is what you truly want, you have to make peace your intention.

And, more specifically, as I said after Dean's collapse in a post called, ironically enough, "Electibility":

America is, for lack of a better term, a symphony.

It is the blueprint for a song that calls upon the very best from every single instrument in the orchestra. And the President is the conductor. A conductor cannot take the elements of the piece meant for the brass section and give them to the strings simply because he likes the way the strings sound. On the other hand, the conductor can't take from the strings and give to the winds because he thinks the strings are too arrogant and full of themselves. And he certainly can't make the symphony work by catering to the natural divisions between the various sections.

The conductor's goal should be rousing, fulfilling, beautiful harmony.

Which means the President of the United States of America has to represent the entire country. Not just the red states or, my personal favorites, the blue states. Every section has a role to contribute to the endeavor, and the President's job is to led the way by which ALL sections contribute and are provided for. He must be the President for the workers, the poor, the underclass, but he must also be the President for the business community and the wealthy, those who provide the opportunities for the others.

Which brings me to the events of the last week in Iowa.

There was a time when my hopes for Barack Obama waivered, and I was leaning more towards John Edwards. But, again, I had an epiphany.

I get those a lot now.

I realized that Edwards had transformed himself into a more disciplined and effective version of Howard Dean. He was the new servant of red meat for the progressive faithful.

Even more scary, if you compare their speeches and take out the '90's nostalgia, Edwards sounds an awful lot like Hillary Clinton. While Edwards is talking about fighting and taking on the powerful corporate interests, Hilary is saying that she's the only one who knows how to fight the right wing machine.

They're both there to fight The Bogeyman. Just like John Kerry in '04 and Al Gore in 2000. They're all spoiling for a fight. For them, it's not about peace and prosperity, it's about victory on the battlefield.

Just like the Republicans. I was struck by last night's GOP debate, where they all talked about this giant existential battle for the soul of the planet against islamofascism, but not a single one of them gave any time to discussing how do the practical things like, I don't know, securing the loose nukes laying around the old Soviet republics that could actually make the islamofascists so dangerous. To them, Al Qaeda and the PLO and Black September and the Ayatollah Khomeini are all faces of the same monster, like Sauron in Middle Earth.

Bogeymen.

But, as I said in my Christmas post about Freddie Krueger, Bogeymen are only as powerful as you make them.

In the end, you can't stop war by waging war on war.

Which is why I love what Obama's doing. He is operating on a totally different, and, dare I say, higher level than anyone else in this race. He is conducting his campaign and trying to lead the nation in the tradition of RFK, and MLK, and even Gandhi.

He understands the power of peace and reconciliation. He is the only person who is actually running to be President of the UNITED States of America.

Oddly enough, the night of the caucuses, they interviewed Howard Dean on MSNBC. And he really didn't look well. He looked sickly. And old.

I still love Dean, but his moment has past.




My mom was a staunch Hillary supporter until I gave her Obama's two books. Now, she thinks, given the improbability of Obama's very existence (Kenyan father, Kansas mother, schooled in Indonesia, raised in Hawaii, on to Harvard law, etc.) that he must be a divine gift.

Over Christmas dinner, she asked my brother who he's supporting, and, even though he's a Republican who voted for George W. Bush TWICE, he said that, if he gets the nomination, he's voting for Obama.

THIS is the America I want. And, as any student of manifestation and divine energy will tell you, before you decide to fight like Edwards or get to work like Hillary, it all starts with choosing and cultivating the right dream.

Dreams reshape the world.

I read recently that one of the beliefs about the ancient Mayan calendar is that, when it ends in 2012, the world as we know it will come to an end.

A moment of profound loss.

But you need that loss to get to the next world, the so-called "Noosphere", a state of transhuman consciousness for the entire planet.

I know. More about that later.

In 2003, I needed those losses to be who I am right now. You have to let go of the old to embrace the new.

I think Obama is the vanguard of a transformation. Of this country and, potentially, the world.

And all I can say is, "Bring it on!"

".....the sun WILL rise...."

So, I know many of you are still where I was last night.

Sad. Hurt. Stunned. Disappointed.

But that was last night.

Here are the facts.

America WANTS Bush.
By a margin of nearly 4 million votes.

Why?

Because EVERYBODY is scared.

The whole electorate. The entire country is scared out of their minds, losing sleep, grinding their teeth, pulling out their hair, about something.

Half of them are terrified of Bin Laden and homosexuals. And the other half are scared of evangelical Christians, the Patriot Act, the deficit, and, quite frankly, Bush himself.

Fear was on the ballot, and it won in a landslide.

Now, we can all have fear for 4 more years. The people who voted for Bush get to be afraid of terrorists and gays for 4 more years because Bush will continue to play to those issues. And the people who voted against Bush (because, let's be honest, very few of them were actually voting FOR Kerry), get to be afraid of Bush for 4 more years.

This is the world we chose.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

We voted for fear because it's comfortable and familiar. But there are other choices.

So, I'd like to suggest that we all deal with our own fear. Whatever it is. Fear of Bin Laden. Fear of homos. Fear of financial ruin. Fear of Bush. Fear of evangelicals.

Because the more you fear something, the more of it you'll get. The more you choose fear, the more you'll get fear. So, choose something else.

For instance, choose faith. Choose to believe IN something, instead of being afraid OF something. I read recently that fear is perfect faith in evil. Choose, instead, to believe in what you love.

Instead of fearing Bin Laden, have faith in America.

Instead of fearing gay marriage, have faith in the strength and
sanctity of your own marriage, no matter what challenges come your
way.

Instead of fear of bankruptcy, have faith in opportunity and your own ability to
prosper, to be wealthy and abundant. (As we Christians SHOULD say "see
the birds in the sky. They do not sew nor reap, yet your Heavenly
Father provides for them").

Instead of fearing Bush, have faith that this is the signal of the
beginning of a progressive era, just like 1964 was the beginning of
the conservative era (remember, Johnson beat Goldwater in a landslide,
and then Nixon routed the Democrats 4 years later. Nixon destroyed
McGovern, and was then run out of office). This election laid a
foundation.

Stop being afraid.

Start having faith.

Faith in who you are. Faith in what you believe. Faith in the world you choose. Faith in the world you want.

And then share your faith with your neighbors, who are clearly wetting their pants right now, whether they voted for Kerry or Bush (after all, the Bush people voted for him primarily out of fear of Al Qaeda & some mythic gay wedding press gang).

We on the progressive side need to stop defining ourselves in opposition.

The absence of a negative is NOT a positive.

We need to define the world we want, at every level, and then proclaim it. To the heavens.

Of course, the conservative response to that will be "Damon, you're dreaming".

And my response will be "Of course I am. That's why I wake up smiling.

A better question is 'Why aren't you?'

Because clearly this bed-wetting thing can't feel too good."

:-)

Everybody should listen to some Roy Ayers today, namely his track
"Shining Symbol":

"It's not the end.
It's the beginning......"


Note: after a long hiatus, there's going to be a different kind of
Macroscope, in line with what I'm talking about. Stay tuned....

[Update - 11/4/04]: Incidentally, the book I referred to above, that talks about faith as the opposite of fear, can be found here:


This book was simply life-changing. I can't recommend it strongly enough. And I would be remiss if I did not give my sweetheart, Ms. Heather Gillespie, the credit for bringing it to my attention.

And, while I'm at it, if you want to get the Roy Ayers track I mentioned, it's on the soundtrack for the Pam Grier film, Coffy, both of which can also be found here: