To a T

Warning: Here comes the nuclear blow up of a mind hit this week by a tsunami of inane human news.

It's become impossible to see any difference these days between the Taliban and the Tea Party, so the wonder is why we're so expensively trying to eradicate one while so extensively placating the other. Both are radical terrorist groups so terrified that time goes by, they advocate an extremist turn back the clock hold on tight conservatism. Both are so hysterical about losing their seeming individual specialness in the trend toward interracial, interactive interconnectedness, they are desperate to have the world their way or go away. They are control freaks so frightened by freedoms, they're hellbent on establishing a Medieval theocracy, a dictatorship where everything is permanently cut and dried. Mike Huckabee, a former preacher and current politician--same thing these days--was arguing forcefully this week with Jon Stewart that he has no problem relying on a discredited ideologue historian because we have to do everything we can to prove America was meant to be a Christian nation. Read his lips: I'm the one with the truth and you're out.

The Tea Party and Taliban are so scared of losing control--read that: self control, they won't take No for an answer: no more fouling the climate, no more infallible Shariah laws, no more coal or oil. And no other people allowed to exist in the universe, just them. The rest of us are flies on their food for thought who must be shooed away before we poison it. That makes them chillingly cavalier about killing, and knee jerk ready for violence. That gives them a sense of macho in charge here, of cleaning up and ordering the universe to fit their view of it. Ah, the world served to me just as I ordered it! And they want to push women back into the darkness of silent servitude, because sexuality--something more likely to control you than you it-- seems to scare this hell out of them. After all it involves others and otherness devils these people. Those this uncomfortable in their own skin keep itching for a fight, their way to vanquish otherness.

You also have to wonder why all the anguished talk about schoolyard bullies and the epidemic of social networking bullies, but none about those holding up the cue cards for these kids. Not one word about the Tea Party bullying here, the Taliban there, the corporate CEO's and Rovian Republican leaders in Washington, the military in Tahir Square and all the Arab strongmen trying to stop sandstorms in their desert. So many people now so profoundly believe in that old football philosophy "winning isn't the only thing, it's everything," that bullying has become the 21st Century's M O. The fear of being wrong, second guessed or second best is now so intense, being indisputably right has become the obsession of the Right. What's Left is whatever.

Bang bang, you're dead and now I don't have to deal with you is the way fundamentalists historically react to doubt, a natural corollary of otherness: if them, what about me? Fundamentalists are certainty zealots deathly allergic to doubt the way some are to peanuts. We don't need radical Islam to show us the horror of this hysteria. We've been there, done that before with Nazism and fascism and the Catholic totalitarianism of the Inquisition, the French reign of terror. Burn books, burn people: the poet Heine pointed out they are the same thing. It's so much easier to blame the other guy for your distress, to change the furnishings instead of yourself.

A Buddhist realizes thoughts flow through our mind like huge schools of fish out in the sea and we tend to hook onto one as though it's really there and matters terribly. Most of us eventually let it flow on and catch a new idea but not the Taliban or Tea Party. The Taliban and the Tea Party have hooked on to one stale thought and are holding for dear life as though that's all there ever should be. They are not just attached to an idea, you might say, an idea that is actually something ephemeral and insubstantial and always floating away. They are cemented into it like it's a coffin. They're so embedded they can't get out. I was listening to a Tea Party spokeswoman interviewed on CNN and no matter what was asked, she shouted the same memorized answer. And she sneered viciously at both host Anderson Cooper and the Democratic spokesmen for not "getting it" when they continued to probe. Over and over with increasing shrillness, she parroted the same lines. I thought her mind had been botoxed. She seemed as brainwashed as crazed cult members in Guyana or Waco. It is so sad. So many minds so dark and airless. So much suffering to the rest of us caused by so much suffering they don't want to see.

Impermanence is the nature of all existence, the Buddha said. No wonder the movement most opposed to the Tea Party is called Move On.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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