Reply #112: You might find this interesting... [View All]

[progressiveandproud]

I'm starting to read a book, Spiritual Politics: Changing the World from the Inside Out (1994), by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson, that reaffirms a gut instinct I've had about certain Republican leaders, a "very uneasy feeling," as you put it (and I hope you don't mind me using your words), "that there is an esoteric aspect to this that we're missing."

At the very least, I believe that Republican strategists like Karl Rove are in the game of using marketing techniques so insidious, that they act like subliminal messaging tapes. I'm thinking of G.W. Bush's relentless repetition of key phrases, like "liberating the Iraqi people," or "spreading freedom and democracy around the world," or "everyone loves freedom!" (As you know, this is just a small sampling!) I think it takes a lot of mental energy to resist these attractive messages, especially when the American people have heard Bush and Co. repeat them day in, day out for years. And then there's the Orwellian names that Republicans have taken to giving bills over the last four years: "Healthy Forests Initiative", "Clear Skies Act", "Patriot Act", "No Child Left Behind". You probably know a lot already about the linguist George Lakoff, but you might still want to read the following interview of him on the PBS show "NOW with Bill Moyers" because he does an excellent job of explaining why Republicans make liberal use of these deceptive "frames", as Lakoff puts it: http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2004/07/105043.shtml. (Sorry, horrible pun!)

Before I bring up Spiritual Politics, let me share some of my own direct encounters with the Republican tongue. My experiences have mostly been with the G.W. Bush dialect :); before 2000 I was still in middle-school and oblivious to most political goings-on. So I haven't seen a lot of politics; but from what I have seen, Bush uses the simplest language by far... also I tend to find him utterly unpersuasive. When he gives a speech, he's saying one disjointed catch-phrase after another, rarely bothering to explain any of them in detail. Even worse is his cocksure attitude, as if he's challenging anyone who doesn't see his line of argument as self-evident. But the point I've been moving toward is that, despite he I feel about Bush, I've caught my defenses slipping on several occassion when he was speaking: I would sort-of zone out and hear all his feel-good words like "democracy" and "freedom" wash over my mind and start to take root. And then, to my horror, I'd find myself starting to understand, maybe, why people support Bush: it's pretty hard not to get excited and emotional, maybe even patriotic, about these words. (I wonder if anyone else has had this experience while listening to Bush... or if it's just a common experience of people who are trying to resist being persuaded.) Of course all I had to do to end the delusion was remind myself that the carrier of these words was corrupt and horrible, and that was that.

Buy perhaps it's not crazy to wonder if Bush is drawing on esoteric forces. According to Spiritual Politics, many power-hungry leaders of the past, and especially Adolf Hitler, have drawn on dark esoteric forces. Personally, I think it's a definite possibility. Until I read The Prophet's Way: Touching the Power of Life (1997), by Thom Hartmann, I had never been able to make sense of the information that Hitler was fascinated by the occult. (There's a little part in Hartmann's book about Hitler's connection to the occult.) If one believes that more than human power was at work, that Hitler was drawing on a great evil force from the spirit world, then that might explain his charismatic speaking ability and the terrible magnitude of the Holocaust.

This all might sound cooky, but I don't think it would to those who believe in the existence of the spirit world. And I think it's been pretty well documented, although not necessarily in the mainstream, that the spirit world is real and can be contacted in certain ways.

Jonathan