Observations on the Passing of Mikhail Gorbachev

Posted on August 31, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

He was a courageous and creative humanitarian, ironically the product of a justifiably paranoid regime, a man whose vision for a just world, where individual and collective interests might be reconciled, was thwarted by the power mad egoists who rule us in the so-called West.

As Yeshua ben Miriam is reported to have observed, “a prophet has no honor in his own home”, and so, he is all too frequently blamed in Russia for the misery occasioned by his successor, Boris Yeltsin, who virtually sold Russia to Western backed gangsters, a prelude to our modern, post-truth world. But some of us who were both alive and alert at the time know the truth: he almost singlehandedly ended the age of the Iron Curtain and the first Cold War.

Unfortunately, he naively felt that leaders in the United States, Germany and NATO shared his vision, and he and Russia were promptly betrayed. Something from which the Chinese and the current Russian leadership appear to have learned.

It may be a long time before a conciliator of his stature appears on the world stage at an opportune moment, a long time we perhaps no longer have.
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Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on the Nature of Divinity, and on its Delusions

Posted on August 19, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

Why do I feel compelled to take up the defense of those society considers the worst of the worst when, once upon a long time ago, as an attorney, I refused to either defend or prosecute, preferring to walk away from the legal profession, having sensed that it was soiled?

I don’t mean just ordinary villains, but legendarily evil forces like Lucifer and Cain? Why do I sense that both history and myth have misjudged them and that it is my role to make their cases, at least through my writings? Why do I sense that the entity so many of us humans worship is the real villain and that my role is to defend them and expose him, not only to my fellow beings but to the purported Divinity as well? The Divinity I promised to seek so very long ago, and to honor whether I found him or not?

With all due respect to current and ancient matriarchic and feminist concepts, the Divinity to which I allude definitely seems masculine, although perhaps not uniquely divine.

The evidence seems clear. Being prescient, omniscient and omnipotent the mythical Abrahamic Divinity would also have to be guilty of every wrong ever committed, at least derivatively, and even more, the ultimate entrapper. Lucifer’s sin was to love too much in the face of disdain, and, innocent Cain had no way to know that his actions would have terminal consequences. Death was virginal then. So how to convince the Divinity of his guilt, and that the only way to assuage such guilt is to admit the truth (there go the Bible and the Torah and the Koran), to seek the forgiveness of his victims and to make restitution. In essence, to keep the promises originally made to Adam and Eve, and perhaps even more so, the promises to Lilith of which we’ve not been made privy.

Why does this seem so clear to me but anathema to most?

Just what happened along the way that turned me into a contrarian? Was it possibly Divinity itself who, in placing negative as well as positive aspects of destiny in my path, maneuvered me into this role? Perhaps as a means of permitting itself to face its own guilt, and perhaps helping it assuage it an eventually heal? Is that what the novel I started a decades ago is about and perhaps why, to make me understand complexities, it then placed Inanna’s avatars so precariously in my life?

Are good and evil inverted reflections in a chaotic sea, shifting with the setting sun and rising moon?

How can I ever know unless I accept the challenge and either succeed or fail?

So many questions. And proof may be all around me, all around all of us; the world as it is seems so incoherent that it may well be proof that divinity and infernity are not what we’ve been led to believe. Perhaps my contrarian intuition is the ultimate tool in my quiver, the one that long, long ago, at age seven, first led me to question the nature of the divine, and reject our age old conclusions.

Who’d have thought that after rejecting the legal profession as immoral I’d accept the ultimate contingency case? Apparently someone or something did, which is why I am what I am and how I am, the essence of the inchoate but the inchoate always remains to be seen.

Infernal reflections?

Perhaps.
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The Last Guardian: A Divine nightmare

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

A mote in black on black. An echo of a shadow of what once might have been once upon a time.

He was the only thing that remained of the once infinitely expansive multiverse, everything else had withered and disappeared so many eternities ago, that an eternity was infinitely less than a grain of sand in everything that had ever been. He’d volunteered to stay behind when both he and the multiverse were relatively young, knowing just how lonely he’d eventually be when everything, even time, was so long gone that it was impossible to recall that it had ever been. But it had, and he remained. And he recalled, there was nothing else. The multiverse reduced to his own body or his body expanded to encompass the multiverse, it made no difference. There was utterly and absolutely nothing else. The body he’d worn so long ago somehow perfectly preserved and, despite the absence of air or water or sustenance or space, still fully, well, sort of fully, functional. Despairingly so as it had no functions at all. A relic. A memorial of sorts.

His last breath had been an infinity of eons ago, the last trace of long forgotten gasses inhaled, and then, absolutely nothing. No time, no space. Just him. Existing, and watching, although for what he’d no idea. There was nothing else to see. He was self-contained. Only that which he was and would always be but had not always been, now and for very, very long, always conscious. Eternities’ chosen scapegoat paying for long forgotten sins of long forgotten others.

There was no future, only a long distant past. And a present out of time. And the promise he’d made to stay behind so that everything else could end. He recalled that on the day he’d turned seventy-six, he’d wondered for the first but not the last time, if divinity had once played the role he was now charged with assuming, the sole role at the end of time and space. If so, that would explain a great deal, perhaps everything. How could anything remain sane in any sense at all after being so utterly alone, and yet, knowing what awaited, he’d confirmed his commitment, which implied something about his sanity as well.

While still enjoying a normal life span, he’d watched as his contemporaries aged and passed on, and then his descendants. He’d been there, albeit an oddity, a freak, as species, including humans, evolved and changed, and planets evolved and died, and as different species conquered space and even time, and then they too moved on, but he was cursed with anachronistic eternity, a never ending relic. And on the last instant of time, everything was gone, everything but him.

The other side of panentheism. The last guardian, long after the end of time and space.
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Conan the Barber

Posted on July 28, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

He was not related to the much better known Cimmerian after whom he’d been named, although, like him, he was somewhat expert in the use of sharp implements, just not in the same manner. Actually, in a very different manner with very different goals and very different results. His only involved butchering when he failed, while his namesake engaged in that activity when he was most successful, at least in his own lights.

Robert E. Howard would probably not have thought much about Conan the Barber, although, perhaps, he might have patronized him, as might his great albeit very different pal, H. P. Lovecraft. But this Conan also took his profession seriously, and at times engaged in cosmetogolical competitions where, every once in a great while, his creations emerged victorious.

It may well be that he took as much care of his scissors and razors and blades as his namesake did of his swords and spears and lances and arrows, so in that, at least, they were similar. And of course, they were both Cimmerians, although not many people today know just what that entailed. For readers who have no idea, well, according to a popular source that will remain unnamed due to its erratic reputation for accuracy, they were “a nomadic Indo-European people, who appeared about 1000 BC”, originating in the Pontic-Caspian steppe but subsequently migrating “into Western Asia and into Central and Southeast Europe”. Interesting definition, especially the part about “originating in the Pontic-Caspian steppe”, since it begs the question, … well, where were they before that, did they spontaneously come to life there, perhaps from a bit of molded clay onto which a stray divine wind blew? I would guess that they were a link in the chain of tribes that for diverse reasons kept pulsing out of central Asia, perhaps out of what is now Mongolia, and scaring the hell out of their neighbors who cascaded south and west. But that’s just my unsubstantiated guess, which is as good as yours.

One wonders what kind of coiffeurs our Conan specialized in, whether he ever invented any, perhaps the Mohawk, or the Pictian spike look, or, perhaps, the faux bald look so popular nowadays. I can almost see him, concentrating profoundly and perhaps fantasizing about his name sake as he clipped and scraped and combed and parted and started the process all over again. One wonders if he had a special flair, perhaps a unique style, and what kinds of faces he made as he worked, perhaps as though he were a bass player in a late twentieth century New Orleans late night dive, lost in his melodies.

Of course, in antiquity and even not so long ago, barbers were also sort of surgeons, and engaged in therapeutic, curative bleeding, hence today’s barber poles. It would be sort of ironic if our Conan was a healer, rather than one who generated a massive need for healers. Kind of symbiotic.

What about his clothing? Was it as minimal as his namesake’s? Did he wear loincloths or trousers, beads or shirts, and what was his own hair like? Did he change his look frequently or prefer a classic, easy to recognize look that would identify him? Was it long, short, or somewhere in between?

Was he a contemporary of his name sake? Not likely, unless, of course, he was twenty or thirty years younger, a lifetime in those days. Did his namesake ever meet him, perhaps patronize him, and, if so, in what sense? Double entendre possibilities abound there.

Interestingly, many millennia later, at least a few people have taken to the name and appellation, check out twitter, and evidently there’s also a current musician who uses that name, and not a few barber shops. So his legacy too lives on.

“Conan the Barber”, a nice ring. Was it a given name, an adopted name or, perhaps, a professional moniker?

Guess we’ll never know. Regardless of how carefully one “combs” through the related chronicles compiled by Messier Howard, not a trace of Conan the Barber can be gleaned. Then, of course, perhaps one would need a sleuth out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination to take up that particular task, although, why would he.

Wouldn’t it be something if Sherlock Holmes’ creator was somehow distantly related to either of our protagonists? Of course, after so many generations of intermingled genes, almost anything is possible.
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Alta Rei Publicae et Veritatis Inopia

Posted on July 15, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

Another in a series of probably non-productive rants, — but, … who knows?

How does one capture a reader’s attention enough so that, curious, he or she will at least glance at what one publishes? The infamous “hook”? I confess that I may well have no idea, so this time, I thought I’d use a title in Latin. We’ll see how that works. In this case, the title deals with the association between the dearth of truth at all levels, and the rise and predomination of “deep states”.

As a young historian during the 1970’s, I first taught history along official lines. Eventually, however, I came to realize that the “official versions of history” were contradictory and incoherent[1]. My epiphany started, appropriately enough, with the Abrahamic sacred texts (the Talmud, Bible and Koran), in large part, based on observations with which I became acquainted, first by Sigmund Freud in his book, Moses and Monotheism, then in Lloyd M. Graham’s Deceptions and Myths of the Bible and Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, and then based on a torrent of other sources which made clear that the Talmud, the Bible and the Koran were, more than anything, fictitious narratives seeking to justify genocide and other aberrations in order to promote the Abrahamic faiths. Given that such bedrocks of Western civilization seemed fallacies, I followed up with other critical supposedly historical events and found them equally unreliably reported. That seemed especially true in the areas that I taught at the time with respect to the causes ascribed to armed conflicts such as the American Revolution and subsequent Civil War, the two acknowledged World Wars, the purported Cold War (really a collection of small hot wars interspersed with coups d’état and political interventionism) and the current crises in the Middle East. In short, just about everything.

One of my most disturbing epiphanies (or possible epiphanies) is that what we’ve been taught about the horrors of the Nazi regime in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century was only partially accurate, and that the entire truth was much more disturbing. Clearly, evil lay pretty equally divided on all sides (think Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only the tip of the iceberg). Like the ancient Hebrews, the British especially, and their progeny, the United States and now NATO, have been especially adept at demonizing their adversaries while whitewashing their own inequity. For example, taking an extreme case, an objective analysis of Nazi policies during its Third Reich would lead to the conclusion that the regime was extremely successful in social programs, medicine, education, urban and rural renewal, transportation, manufacturing and scientific research but, of course, it is most remembered for its racism, xenophobia and mass murder. However, the latter also pretty much describes the European-United States-Israeli colonial regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, assuming anyone is daring enough to undertake a similar objective analysis, an analysis that ought to be reflected in future history books (except that, as in the case of journalism, history is rarely if ever accurately or truthfully recorded and taught). It is only a very efficient system of public relations that whitewashes and distorts the numerous misadventures by the Western Allies (think Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Latin America and Africa in general, and other invasions, interventions and regime changes too numerous to mention), in reality all too similar to purported historical villainies by our adversaries and no different than the horrors visited on all sides during the first and Second World wars, including the Holocaust (See, e.g., Chris Hedges: “NATO — Most Dangerous Military Alliance on Planet”; Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 189–Monday July 11, 2022).

We cannot change history and reporting of current events (our future history) is following historical deficiencies which are, in all likelihood, assuring that historical mistakes will not be corrected, or even acknowledged. For example, take the current Ukrainian situation, an exercise in destructive fiction if ever there was one. An objective historian, analyzing the current Ukrainian crisis, would note that it involves the sacrifice of the Ukrainian people and of their infrastructure, wealth and natural bounties in order to derail Russian efforts to attain reasonable security and economic welfare and, as importantly, to prevent Chinese economic progress to predominate, ending the unipolar, hegemonic aspirations of the United States and threatening to derail the economic cornucopia enjoyed by ill named Western “defense” industries.

It seems clear to virtually everyone (except, perhaps to cancel-culture-woke-warriors) that we live in a post truth world, although that begs the question of whether or not truth has ever really been a driving force among our species. We disagree as to who is deluding whom but we are certain that delusion reigns. As unfortunate as it’s been predictable, narrative control has become an effective science thanks to behaviorist theories and their manipulative tools made famous by psychologist and author, B.F. Skinner almost a century ago. For those of you unfamiliar with Dr. Skinner, he was Eric Arthur Blair’s (known to us by his pen name, George Orwell) chief intellectual antagonist and believed that the techniques criticized by Orwell in his two most famous dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were actually beneficent and could be used to mold us into a more humane species (see his answer to Orwell, the novel Walden II), as today’s counter-culture-woke-warriors also seem to believe. Behaviorism has successfully eliminated empathy from our lives and filled the gap with polarization, to the delight of our “betters” (at least as they perceive themselves), who so adeptly manipulate our emotions and minimize our use of reason.

The foregoing brings us to the concept of “deep states”, a phenomenon forecast by Eric Arthur Blair under the phrase, “Big Brother”. The concept of “deep states” haunt our realities. By a “deep state”, I and others apparently afflicted by “civic insomnia” mean that informal complex of government functionaries (elected but also and perhaps especially, unelected), purported journalists, internet platform owners, intelligence agencies, “think” tanks, major universities and, of course, multinational corporations and the elite billionaire class that, in one fashion or another, own them all, and which are the means through which democracy and liberty are rendered into oligarchies subservient to the whims of the few.

Until the right wing populist tide in the United States unexpectedly, indeed shockingly, brought Donald Trump to the verisimilitude of power (real power remained vested in our deep state, as he quickly discovered), the United States’ version of the deep state lay well camouflaged despite the attempt by President Dwight David Eisenhower to expose it in early 1961 (see “President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address”). Well camouflaged perhaps but successful, with success measured by the increasing accumulation of wealth and power by the unscrupulously at the cost of starvation and poverty for the majority of our planets denizens. Accumulation so thorough and complete that the vast majority of the world’s wealth is owned by one tenth of one percent of the global population while more than half of the world’s children go to sleep hungry each and every night.

Such accumulation of wealth is defended by those who possess it as the fruit of diligence, prudence and discipline but, as French economist Thomas Piketty made clear to us in his epic Le Capital au XXIe siècle (Capital in the Twenty-First Century), such wealth was not accumulated through hard work but through fortuitous financial manipulation, inheritance, and the blessings of constant armed conflict (see, Scott Ritter’s latest article, “The Fantasy of Fanaticism” (Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 174–- Saturday, June 25, 2022), as well as that of John J. Mearsheimer, “The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis” published in The National Interest based on a speech he made to the European University Institute in Florence on Thursday, June 16, 2022). For a general description of the morass in which we find ourselves, I recommend Tom Valovic’s article entitled “The Corporatization of Just About Everything” in Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 183–- Tuesday, July 5, 2022.

Deep states are a phenomenon prevalent primarily in states whose governments are superficially structured as “western style democracies” (just as the Roman Empire vestigially maintained the populist institutions prevalent in the Roman Republic) with their democratic aspirations subverted through manipulation of available information. In such contexts, truth is as elusive today as evil is ubiquitous. Of course, with so very many of us effectively somnambulant in the United States (the most powerful country controlled by a deep state), those conditions are all too easy to maintain.

As in the famous foreign policy doctrine of “divide and conquer”, domestic control essential for the implementation of global policies requires the replacement of empathy with polarization through the creation of illusory divisive issues that distract us from solving actual problems to which they are tied. Thus we rail about abortion and the right to bear arms, and historical monuments and even, the misadventures of our favorite sports teams, while we watch propaganda laced “entertainment” spewing out of Hollywood and we insult each other and donate, a dollar at a time, to purportedly benign existential causes to be decided based on fraudulent elections, as The World Turns”.

With truth passé and replaced by fictitious, manipulative narrative, deep states thrive as we drown. We have become a diseased society, the collective victims of a sort of social cancer who perhaps do not deserve to survive. We have been artfully molded into an amazingly gullible and cognitively challenged society whose members refuse to accept their individual and collective responsibility for the consequences of political cowardice and gullibility. The reality is that, rail as we do against our favorite villains, each of us who shares in the responsibility of political participation but supports a version of the deep state shares in the responsibility for the emerging Holocaust towards which we are racing as though we were Olympic sprinters. It is claimed that Albert Einstein once defined insanity as continuing to engage in the same conduct while expecting different results. That is what we do during each purported existential election (they are all characterized in that fashion) where we are required to compromise our values in order to save civilization by electing evil people in order to prevent even more evil people from attaining power, this despite a plethora of other options (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard).

We are being herded to our own metaphorical incineration chambers just as surely as were the Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and Catholics and Slavs (contrary to current dogma, the Holocaust was a multicultural affair) who were gassed and then cremated in Nazi “death camps” (interestingly, in a morbid sense, concentration camps were invented by the British during the Boer Wars and adopted by the United States with respect to its Japanese citizens during World War II, and to Muslims during its more recent Middle East misadventures). Unfortunately, as in their case and as in the case of today’s Ukrainians, we just can’t believe that it’s true. So we ignore reality and suffer on, complacent because at last others suffer much more, … because of us. Besides, we have our sports teams to worry about, and beauty pageants, and soap operas, and Netflix binges, and bingo, etc. And we also have to meddle in each other’s affairs, finding fault everywhere but in our mirrors.

So, about the relationship of evil to the dearth in veracity? Pure, undistilled 24 karat evil resides prominently among us and its purest strains exude from those among us, who, without even needing Tolkien’s one ring, rule us all and bind us to their will, albeit with velvet chains, as we sleepwalk where poppies daren’t grow.
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[1] Credible alternative versions of United States history include Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States and the Gore Vidal series of historical novels, Narratives of Empire.

An Objective Rant Pertaining to Abortion and other Issues

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

Word games are tempting in a world fraught with apparently imminent disaster (or is that eminent), but they’re not productive by themselves, not if problem resolution is the goal. Unfortunately, the only problem that really concerns our corporate media and political “leaders” is the maintenance of power, and that requires that polarization be heightened, which in turn requires the “creation” and maintenance of polarizing issues, not their resolution.

Abortion is a great example right now, given the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. ___ [2022]). The underlying issue seems to me to be irresolvable morally or ethically because it involves the clash of two fundamental social premises (not rights, the concept of rights is incoherent). First, the purported sanctity of life (notwithstanding our addiction to perpetual wars and the death penalty); and second, the right of humans to control their own bodies (notwithstanding government interference in diverse health related issues, including recent pandemic oriented mandatory measures). Law, however, is notwithstanding platitudes to the contrary, not bound to moral or ethical factors. It merely involves the exercise of raw power over individuals based on collective decisions, though it is usually justified using arguments disguised as morality, ethics, justice, equity or pragmatism. In reality, in fact, a great deal of law involves norms imposed in order to maintain a parasitic minority in permanent power.

For about half a century, the availability of optional abortion in order to eradicate errors of judgment by women was protected by the United States Supreme Court through usurpation of constitutional and legislative powers. Not a rarity, unfortunately. Men, on the other hand, did not enjoy a related privilege in conjunction with support related obligations based on their own errors of judgment, and of course, embryos, well what the hell are they anyway but inchoate child rearing problems and drains on our personal economy, especially now that the family has broken down and there is no real tradition of progeny caring for their forbearers in old age. Well, that’s one perspective. The other focuses on the incoherence of state mandated reproduction without shared responsibility for the consequences, responsibilities such as guaranteeing sustenance, housing, education, freedom from violence and adequate employment.

That abortion was rendered conditionally immune from state imposed prescriptions by inappropriate judicial action did not impact the reality of the important social issues involved. They should have been dealt with by the People through their representatives; through exercise of constitutional and legislative duties unfortunately abdicated based on fears of ballot box consequences. They should have been dealt with through constitutional means at the federal level, or constitutional or legislative means at the state level. Unfortunately, notwithstanding emotional angst and hyperbolic outbursts, those responsibilities were ignored and proponents of abortion on demand were too lazy to undertake the social campaign required to condition society to accept their sociopolitical premises, instead, they resorted to the antithesis of democracy, the unelected, life tenured judiciary to come up with an arbitrary solution. But recourse to such strategy inherently involved the probability that the judicially crafted solution to a social and constitutional issue, a political issue, would eventually be undone by a future judicial coup de’ grâce, also circumventing democratic institutions and requirements.

The foregoing is problematic but not malevolent, it is merely lazy and inept. What is malevolent is the use of an issue as important as abortion for purposes of political polarization, specifically, keeping it in constant play as a means to secure political fundraising and political power by those on both sides of the debate, rather than resolving it through democratic decision making. The recent United States Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, while constitutionally sound, does nothing to resolve the issue, nor do purported opponents of the decision appear interested in taking any meaningful actions to legally resolve it in their favor. Rather, they are merely using the case in order to salvage the disaster that seemed to await the political party that has made them its captives, its tools, in this autumn’s Congressional elections.

A lot of noise and fury has been generated, albeit most demanding a continuation in power of a political party that traditionally betrays those who vote in its favor, and protests, a bit of violence and threats of violence, have been omnipresent. However, no tangible efforts to legally and constitutionally attain that which they claim to be essential are being undertaken. That would require reconciling diverse societal perspectives and convincing adversaries through education and logic, but we have come to perceive logic as a disease that afflicts an imaginary race we refer to as Vulcans, and education requires empathy, takes too long, and does not yield immediate and ongoing political dividends. So, riots it is, perhaps with a bit of arson and mayhem thrown in, notwithstanding the platitudes and hypocrisy on display in the so called January 6 Congressional hearings.

And the purported victims? The women who may be unable to obtain abortions and the unwanted children they will be forced to bear and perhaps raise? Why, in an exact analogy to what is occurring to the populace and infrastructure of the Ukraine and the two self-proclaimed Donbass republics, they’re being efficiently used and abused for tawdry political purposes by politicians with nothing but disdain for ethics, morality, legality, democracy or constitutional government, caring only for the acquisition, maintenance and abuse of political power.

The foregoing is true regardless of which side of the abortion debate you call your own. And the same is true with respect to the Second Amendment and gun rights; with respect to superiority hypotheses based on race, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identification, nationality, religion, ethnicity, age, etc.; indeed with any of the emotionally polarizing issues used by our unethical and ruthless elites and their minions to keep us divided and docile, too confused by our emotions (especially fear and hate) to defend ourselves from their predations. The foregoing is true whether you’re a liberal, a progressive, a conservative, a libertarian or addicted to any other ideology.

The real issue today, as it has been through most of history, is the struggle between elite minorities who use their designees to abuse the concept of popular governance for their own greedy ends (today generically identified as “deep states”), and populists on every part of the political spectrum who seek liberation from those ubiquitous predatory parasites by eliminating their monopoly on political power. Unfortunately, like addicts of all kinds, we are drawn to the issues that most effectively polarize us and are all too easily distracted from those that we really need to address, those issues involving real democratization of our political systems and processes and replacement of the political vultures who inhabit all current major political parties. Issues we need to address so that we can civilly and efficiently resolve the policies that divide us, and, recognizing that our society is dynamic and our values variable, develop the ongoing mechanisms necessary for us to justly and equitable govern ourselves, permitting us each, individually and collectively, to realize our best potential.

Freed of our predatory political masters, perhaps empathy (the opposite of polarization) could again become a viable attribute in our political discourse and we could disagree without ridiculing and belittling each other and our respective belief’s, and perhaps we could, in good faith, understand that we all have valid points, and that legitimate democratic governance involves finding those perspectives we share, and granting our government the right to regulate them, but retaining individual autonomy with respect to those areas where a reasonable consensus is unattainable, rather than feeling compelled to always have our own way on every issue. Perhaps someday, hopefully soon, we’ll awake from our induced traces and take our political responsibilities (they’re much more than mere illusory rights) seriously and vote for things in which we believe, rather than against illusory straw arguments crafted to confuse us; vote in favor of candidates in whom we believe rather than against those we’re manipulated into despising, and perhaps then we can cast “lesser evils” into the hells where they belong. We would make mistakes and not always get our way, but at least it would be, “We the People”, governing ourselves. We could not do any worse than the deep states that rule us now.

Something to at least think about.
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Brief but Important Reflections on the Fourth of July

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

I’ve long believed that holidays, all holidays, are days best suited for introspection, reflection and reevaluation rather than celebration, especially those based on some ethical principle, like today. So today is a day to reflect on Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy, which we’ve inherited, but also on the warnings of two presidents in their farewell addresses: Washington’s, to avoid entangling alliances (like NATO, our special status with the United Kingdom and Israel, and our disdain for Muslims, Russia and China); and, Eisenhower’s warning about the deep state which, without the one ring, still manages to rule us all more efficiently that Tolkien’s villain, Sauron, ever dreamed possible.

Perhaps it’s also a day to reflect on the reality that until we vote our consciences, rather than permit ourselves to be manipulated through orchestrated fears and emotionally polarizing issues, until we develop empathy and tolerance for opposing viewpoints, we will never be truly free, or truly independent.

Happy Fourth of July!!!
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A Dark and Dystopian Diatribe. Again. They’ve become the Norm

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

An introductory query might go something like this: Evil or merely inept? Which is worse? In what combination? An initial response might speculate: Well, inept evil would probably be the least negative. Unfortunately, evil and inept is what we have, with evil all too apt. Would a less than perfect divinity find that funny? Imagine Groucho Marx (or maybe just a grouchy Karl Marx) as God!

Another day, another trillion or so dollars; a few hundred thousand or so lives thrown into the pits needed to feed insatiable armaments industries, but we’re still giving birth to more and more babies so that’s all right: look at the newborns and weep but keep’em coming. Fortunately (sort of, … at least for a few) there are still plenty of Ukrainians in the wings, and perhaps Lithuanians and Poles as well. And of course, Muslims: a surfeit of Arabs and Iranians and Palestinians to dispel. And when they’re gone, well, “first they came for ….” and there’ll be plenty left until, fighting among themselves, like Heinlein’s Igli, they eat themselves into oblivion.

And then, merry Christmas and a good riddance to all. “Bah humbug”!

But till then we’ve got video games and Hollywood spectacles and Disney and Netflix, and new model cars and designer clothes, and aren’t the Yankees something this year and sure hope the Jets come through this time, perhaps God’s forgotten the promises we made during Super Bowl III. The latest abortion decision has us up in arms (as did the first), that’s true, and murderous guns and bullets keep attacking our children in schools: And inflation plus rescission, ain’t they depressing? And gas prices rising are a pain (for some). But still, all and all, ain’t life just sort of grand? After all, we’re lucky to be Americans: the brave and the free (sort of, … at least in the movies and on television) who can solve any problem because we are so exceptional, except for the half that are too stupid to see the light (so sayeth each half).

Anyway, ….

What if synonyms and antonyms decided to have a war? Or if verbs and adverbs formed a coalition of the willing against nouns and adjectives, with propositions and pronouns sitting on the sidelines confused, while social science majors removed all of those troubling and scary page numbers from their treatises and physics and math majors looked on with vacuous expressions on their faces wondering why mirrors had become anathema? What would we get if all the odd numbers subtracted all the even numbers? Would it be different if all the even numbers subtracted all the odd numbers? And what about those prime numbers, all odd except the number two. Interesting. Is there a profound metaphysical meaning there? Or at least some obscure symbolism? And just what is a solipsism?

Where are we today anyway?

Perhaps happily mired in banalities while in a real world, one on the other side of a looking glass, a one way mirror of sorts, sad eyed, lean and hungry people deal with our residue. An image: Insane mariners cruising on a ship of fools doomed to disembark onto quicksand flavored shores singing songs about how happy pigs are when they wallow in mud (or less desirable excrement oriented substances), collectively following piebald pied pipers playing merrily discordant tunes, vacuity become an art form.

But out there, rocking boats, a few just won’t let sleeping dogs lie. The ones who, like that pain-in-the-ass (or is it arse) Cassandra, keep finding dark linings surrounding silvered clouds, insisting on freeing bluebirds from gilded cages, for some reason believing that it would be hard to imagine anyone or anything more troubling than the world around us, a world seemingly careening from crisis to crisis, … but profitably so.

Anyway, … again:

Is pure evil a tangible thing? As tangible, or perhaps as intangible as truth? Or are they both moronic oxymorons. Or perhaps, they’re a curious blend reflected in the eyes of billions of confused beholders, beholden beholders, although beholden to whom may be a puzzle writ by an insane enigma following lemmings of a cliff in Dover.

I can’t really personally vouch for the existence or impossibility of absolute truth, although math seems to echo that something must be at least somewhat accurate, but as to absolute evil, the scent seems omnipresent, and it smells a great deal like rotting corpses doused in expensive perfumes. Pure evil kind of sounds like an ambivalent oxymoron though, doesn’t it? Oxymorons seem popular today.

What might it be like to drive to hell in a handbasket? Perhaps Toto knows which may be why he barks as Momba (more recently renamed Evillene to avoid racist undertones), slowly melts, albeit soaking wet, bemoaning the world in which we live, and Dorothy laughs as Lucy once more pulls away the football and Charley Brown falls flat on his back wondering who the hell “Peanuts” is.

Do you think Biden will really win this time if he runs again against Trump?

Things on which to reflect or introspections to avoid?
_______

In Defense of Divinity

Posted on June 28, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

What if sentience was first?

Self-awareness with utterly nothing about which to be aware?

Absolutely nothing existing, no being of any kind in any sense, just the sentience.

How not to be traumatized, but for the fact that trauma did not exist. Absolutely nothing did. Not even timid time. Certainly not space. Nor any heaven and, of course, no hells. Not even an incipient big bang, nor a little one, not even an infinitesimally tiny one. Not even solitude.

No right or wrong, no morality or ethics, no echoes or shadows or hints of things to come. No infinity or eternity. Nothing.

Nothing, but a newborn sentience with nothing to sense.

That’s what it would have been like to be god, in the real beginning.

No wonder divinity lacks stability and perspective.
_______

Reminiscences on an Early Summer Day

Posted on June 26, 2022 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

For some reason, this morning I was recalling the Christmas season while we were at the Citadel and how our Christmas traditions impacted my whole life, and impacted it profoundly. I recall that we sold ourselves to the “knobs” in a parody of Saturnalia in order to raise funds to share with the city’ orphans and orphanages, and I recall the visits, especially to the orphanages set aside for black children, and how grateful and warm they were, and how much more I think we appreciated the privilege of sharing with them than they welcomed our gifts. Not that they were not appreciated! But it was we who came out ahead I think. It turned us into real human beings. In my case, it evaporated any vestiges of the racism in which we were raised. I hope the tradition prevails there but I tend to doubt it, although I’m pretty sure it is imbedded in each and every one of our hearts.

We each recall many things about our times at our alma mater, and there are many, many things that bear recalling. It was a very full season of years, and it certainly made us who we are. But which of us would have thought way back then that love would be its principle legacy, love for each other and for all of our fellow alumni, love of truth as something tangible, and of honor, and of our fellow men and women, and of the world in which we live, and of tradition, and of the future we hope to bequeath to our posterity. The world is vastly changed from what it was then, in some ways, for the better, but in too many ways for the worst. Polarization and greed have become the rule and empathy the exception. But to some extent, I think we are immune from that.

Just wanted to share with those I most respect.
_______

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