MindSpinner

An Anglo-Saxon poet singer was called a scop (pronounced shop). The word means “shaper.” It is the best word in all the world to look to in order to unfold the significance of storytelling. The poet storyteller was a shaper of stories - that’s simple enough. But stories are not merely stories, and this is what we must grasp: our stories shape our perceptions of reality, our notions of our own identity and that of others, and by extension our choices. We don’t just tell our stories; we live them – nations rise and fall by them, and in the end, so may a world. So this business of storytelling, of shaping the “realities” we choose to affirm and to act upon, turns out to be a matter of fundamental importance, indeed, of individual and collective destinies.

I’m currently reading Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (just got started, actually). There’s some fascinating science about how our brains function during meditative or religious experience here, and, for me, a useful overview of how our brains create a mind. The second portion of the book delves into speculation that disappoints scientific purists, but I’m happy for the science and interested in the speculation, too, as long as I keep sorted out where one ends and the other begins.

In the opening pages of the book, the authors explain their understanding of what our brains are up to:

The goal of every living brain, no matter what its level of neurological sophistication, from the tiny knots of nerve cells that govern insect behavior on up to the intricate complexity of the human neocortex, has been to enhance the organism’s chances of survival by reacting to raw sensory data and translating it into a negotiable rendition of a world. (15)

Our “negotiable rendition” of our world is made up of the stories we concoct about why things are as they are, about who we are, about who they are, what our purpose is, and what our relationship is with our world, with others, and with the universe itself, whether we envision that universe as a creation or a happening. Our stories only work if they optimize our chances of survival, and they don’t work if they drive us closer to extinction.

In my own head, I’ve been working for years to uproot the stories I might tell myself - or that others might tell me that would work to cripple or diminish me in some way, and I strive to replace them instead with stories that continuously open my life into possibility and allow me to breathe and to live authentically. I won’t say I do not sometimes feel defeated; there are difficult battles I must quietly wage day in and day out, without certain hope. But I will not dwell in defeat. I will pick myself up every time and confront each day with a story that opens into possibility, however limited that possibility may seem, even if it’s just the peace I glean pulling weeds in the garden. If I had not done this over years, I might be curled up into a little ball by now. A principle seems to be emerging: if I embrace possibility in and out of my days, then possibility regards my pluck and embraces me back, sometimes all out of measure. This is good to know and comes to constitute a kind of faith.

All this said, my interest in our renditions of reality as shaping forces in our destinies extends far beyond the personal, to the national and the global, and that’s really where I’m headed with this thread, except that right this minute I have to finish packing the car and drive a long way instead for a family visit at which head and heart should be totally present, so there’s going to be a few days’ hiatus between point A and point B.

Best wishes for warmth, light, and love in the closing days of 2005.

My daughter and I made Christmas cookies yesterday, for the first time in a number of years. It’s a little different now.

There is still the licking the batter from the spoon or just plain snatching some of it to eat out of hand. We’d forgotten just how good that old-fashioned sugar cookie dough is.

There is still plunking the cookie cutter right down into the middle of the rolled out dough without any plan for efficient positioning. There is still that voice in my head reminding me, “Perfection doesn’t matter. Shut up. Just a gentle suggestion now and then….” There is still a big mess and a decorator who has satisfied her desire to decorate after a half dozen cookies have been smeared with icing. We leave half the cookies plain. I like the plain ones, too.

But some things are different, now that she’s fifteen. At first, she wanted to make all men, using the gingerbread boy cookie cutter. “What about angels? Or bells?” I asked.

“We don’t need angels,” she pronounced. “Those are girls,” she said, noting the shape of the angel cookie cutter, with its spreading robe. “We need men.” She made a lot of men. She made her current heartthrob, the boy who lives across the river and plays drums in a band. For a minute there he was anatomically correct. Oh boy. His hair was green. She made a man for me and insisted that I eat that cookie in particular. Finally, bored with men, she diversified. “Let’s make dinosaurs.” We actually have dinosaur cookie cutters. So for Christmas we have the odd T Rex and Triceratops, but somehow we never got around to Santa. Not sexy enough. I finished using up the dough with blessedly simple shapes that are easy to get on and off the pan.

When there were cookies to be had, my son emerged from his room to devour a few. Christmas came in the kitchen.

Have a cookie. If it’s Christmas you celebrate, Merry Christmas! In any case, I wish you all things good.

I am fascinated by how conservative leaders keep the religious right stirred up about some issue or another that captures the imaginations of the faithful, thereby completely distracting them from the substantive issues of the day and ensuring their undying loyalty to the Republican Party no matter what that party is actually up to. This year, it seems, the tempest in the teapot is the “War on Christmas.”

Maureen Dowd invited her conservative brother Kevin to write her column for today, and the War on Christmas is what he chose to write about. Not the war in Iraq, not spying on Americans, not the frightening expansion of the powers of the presidency, not power that seems to tell anything but forthright truth, not the plight of New Orleans, not global warming, not the workings of the mind of Samuel Alito, not the deepening plight of the poor, not the health care crisis, but the placement of nativity scenes and the wording of holiday greetings. If I had one shot to speak my mind to the readership of the NYTimes, or at least those of us who finally coughed up $50 to read Times Select content, this just would not be my topic. Even on December 24. Kevin begins,

Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. Maybe it was the extended absence from the stern Franciscan nuns at Nativity grade school. But more likely it was the decorations, the songs, the movies like “A Christmas Carol” and “Miracle on 34th Street,” that filled people with an unbridled joy and an unusual generosity of spirit. Christmas has generally been celebrated as both a secular and religious holiday in this country. Recently, the P.C. police have decided that the word Christ carries an unbearable religious aura, so they are working hard to strike the word entirely for the more generic Holiday. The battle for the soul of Christmas has heated up.

Battle for the soul of Christmas? Has not the soul of Christmas been conflicted for a long, long time - indeed since the inception of the holiday? And does “Happy Holidays” actually constitute a blow (as opposed, say, to rampant commercialism)?

The day after Christmas my children and I traverse several state lines to visit my family. Our only Democrat, besides me, was my father, and my father is dead. My mother is a Republican now disappointed in George W. Bush. (I told her she would be, but the erstwhile president of her college debate team wasn’t really hearing me at the time.) My brother is conservative, but we don’t talk politics much. My uncle is concerned for the state of my immortal soul because I’m a Democrat and therefore a babykiller. I will be interested to hear what the topics of conversation are this year, whether the issues that concern me deeply are on the map at all.

The crux of the matter is that, if we are to move this country forward, we’re going to have to find enough common ground to have sensible conversations about far-reaching issues beyond the matter of whether we say “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas.” (I’m partial to “Peace on Earth,” myself.)

In the blue of winter morning,
above the tops of trees,
the moon shone still.
An airplane climbed aspiring
just beneath, then
banked to chalk a trail
arcing partway round
her three quarters’ face.

***
This we know

In our beginning is our end - it will come.
But between our beginning and our end
is all the gift that life can be.

***

People who actually keep up saw this article in Salon two days ago, when I was correcting yearbook pages:

Bush’s impeachable offense
Yes, the president committed a federal crime by wiretapping Americans, say constitutional scholars, former intelligence officers and politicians. What’s missing is the political will to impeach him.

The Bush administration has mounted a frontal attack on values many Americans hold dear and demonstrates little evidence that it is capable of grappling with reality or governing with competence. Now we learn that Bush has been systematically side-stepping the Constitution that ensures the integrity of our democracy and the rights of our people. Indeed, here at last, is an identifiably impeachable offense which is only a part of a larger pattern of behavior - an abuse of power executed through a measure of secrecy and, always, it seems, a measure of deception.

One of the books I care very much to read with students is Orwell’s Animal Farm. I feel as if that little parable is being played out before us right now. Every time my students and I encounter that little book, we talk about the importance of education, of keeping vigilant watch over government, of speaking out before it is really too late when we see abuses of power. I do not believe America can stand by and hand over power blindly to the executive branch without unbecoming what she has been and was meant to be. She’ll be selling her soul. We’ll be selling her soul. Handing over the farm to the pigs.

Though, thankfully, there are courageous exceptions, the will the average politician musters to act bravely derives primarily from the will of the people. My will. Your will. This is not a time for acquiescence. Not a time for silence. Whether we impeach this president or otherwise emphatically contain his penchant for exercising power unilaterally and in ways we cannot approve, we cannot let his abuses go unchallenged.

I’ve excerpted a big chunk of the Salon article below, just to make it ready reading:

“The American public has to understand that a crime has been committed, a serious crime,” Chris Pyle, a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College and an expert on government surveillance of civilians, tells Salon. “Looking at this controversy objectively, you inevitably end up with a question of impeachment,” says Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law.

On Dec. 18, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, released a 250-page report detailing Bush’s misconduct and, on his Web site, called for the creation of a select committee to investigate “those offenses which appear to rise to the level of impeachment.” Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., said in a radio interview that he would support trying Bush. “If there is a move to impeach the president, I will sign that bill of impeachment,” he said.

Assessing the controversy, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter wrote on Dec. 19, “This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.”

It was bracing to see impeachment mentioned as a possibility in the mainstream media. But experts say it’s not unreasonable. According to Turley, there’s little question Bush committed a federal crime by violating the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The act authorizes a secret court to issue warrants to eavesdrop on potential suspects, or anyone even remotely connected to them, inside the United States. The bar to obtain a FISA warrant is low; more than 15,000 have been granted, with only four requests denied since 1979. In emergency situations, the government can even apply for FISA warrants retroactively. Nevertheless, Bush chose not to comply with FISA’s minimal requirements.

“The fact is, the federal law is perfectly clear,” Turley says. “At the heart of this operation was a federal crime. The president has already conceded that he personally ordered that crime and renewed that order at least 30 times. This would clearly satisfy the standard of high crimes and misdemeanors for the purpose of an impeachment.”

Turley is no Democratic partisan; he testified to Congress in favor of Bill Clinton’s impeachment. “Many of my Republican friends joined in that hearing and insisted that this was a matter of defending the rule of law, and had nothing to do with political antagonism,” he says. “I’m surprised that many of those same voices are silent. The crime in this case was a knowing and premeditated act. This operation violated not just the federal statute but the United States Constitution. For Republicans to suggest that this is not a legitimate question of federal crimes makes a mockery of their position during the Clinton period. For Republicans, this is the ultimate test of principle.”

Of course, that may be exactly the problem. While noted experts — including a few Republicans — are saying Bush should be impeached, few think he will be. It’s not clear that the political will exists to hold the president to account. “We have finally reached the constitutional Rubicon,” Turley says. “If Congress cannot stand firm against the open violation of federal law by the president, then we have truly become an autocracy.”

Similar fears are voiced by Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. Fein is very much a member of the right. He once published a column arguing that “President George W. Bush should pack the United States Supreme Court with philosophical clones of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and defeated nominee Robert H. Bork.”

Suddenly, though, Fein is talking about Bush as a threat to America. “President Bush presents a clear and present danger to the rule of law,” he wrote in the right-wing Washington Times on Dec. 20. “He cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses. Congress should swiftly enact a code that would require Mr. Bush to obtain legislative consent for every counterterrorism measure that would materially impair individual freedoms.”

What alarms Fein is not only that Bush has broken laws but also that he has repeatedly shown contempt for the separation of powers. Fein wants to see congressional hearings that would explore whether Bush accepts any constitutional limitation on his own authority.

“The most important thing to me, in terms of thinking about the issue of impeachment, is to recognize that the Constitution does place a value on continuity,” Fein says. “We don’t want to have a situation where you make a single error, and you’re exposed to an impeachment proceeding.”

Fein says Congress should probe Bush on whether he plans to keep “skating the edge” of federal law by trying to concentrate power in the executive branch. “That’s the key. It’s that probing that’s essential to knowing whether we’re dealing with somebody who’s really a dangerous guy. If he maintains this disregard or contempt for the coordinate branches of government, it’s that conception of an omnipotent presidency that makes the occupant a dangerous person. We just can’t sacrifice our liberties for ourselves and our posterity by permitting someone who thinks the state is him, and nobody else, to continue in office.”

In fact, though, that may be exactly what America is permitting Bush to do. “Politically, I see no possibility that impeachment will succeed,” says Jonathan Entin, a professor of political science and law at Case Western Reserve University.