This is an unsettling time in our country and it doesn’t help that the news is freely spun from no truth.  The sensationalist spin and full-frontal dishonesty on offer has most of the audience dizzy in mimicry and mental paralysis where thinking and asking questions just cease to be possible.  If this doesn’t ring a bell, it may be an indication that you’re either:  a) over-medicated or b) one of the bank bailout recipients. 

Scanning  news sites, sources, and blogs as I do to find out what people are talking and writing about is a genuinely befuddling exercise.  Yes, there are thinking people out there responding to real news, yet mostly on display is an absence of the stubborn inquiring mind that everyday reporters used to bring to their work.  This is what each of us needs to do if we are to salvage democracy.  We need to ask questions, speak out about obvious discrepancies in the stories we are told, and immediately embrace the motto, It Doesn’t Go Without Saying.

The ongoing “Dont Ask. Don’t Tell” debate  is a perfect example.  If, like myself, you are not a fan of the current wars American leaders have created and lied us into supporting,  then it doesn’t go without saying that the latest propoganda on “gay rights” is absurd.

I do not consider the overturned discrimination that will allow gays to risk their lives in dubious wars a step forward for gay rights.  Yes, the initial prejudice that bans gays from openly serving in the military is a disgrace and the law needs to be changed.  But is that really a step forward for gay rights in the way it is being advertised? If the Jews in pre-concentration camp Germany, who were forbidden to work, were  then allowed to scrub the sewers, would this have been an improved status or condition for Jewish people?

The very fact that gay people who are willing to die for America are deemed undesirable enough to be rejected by the military is sad evidence of the disease of hatred and fear.  Let’s not buy into the notion that giving gays permission to  die in American war is a vote of equality or friendliness.  That news spin is a big, bright red herring  obscuring the black and white world of prejudice that remains.

“Nice people do not make interesting characters.  They only make good ex-spouses”.

Isabel Allende’s 2007 speech calling on passion and an end to violence against women includes this aside, where  she references being “nice” as the antithesis of passion.

“Nice” is a  primal direction, delivered mostly to little girls who dare to preview wild, passionate spirits.  It is the teaching that to express independence  means you are “bad” or ”not nice”.   Disconnection from the truth of the self often begins early in life.

Watch out for these insidious  imbeds or outside personality directives that disconnect us from being whole and living passionately.

If I were to choose one central theme of what is dangerous about our lives today, it would be what I call our “culture of disconnection”.   Being and staying alive used to require eye to eye, mano a mano, moments.  Or at least the conscious understanding that other people exist!

Facing one another wasn’t always comfortable or seemlessly fabulous, but there we were sometimes, “socially anxious” with no pharmaceutical pills on hand.

If we don’t ”face” or consciously acknowledge the other, do other people actually exist for us?  This question nails the essence of where I live, the Los Angeles experience.  The daily road warrior driving where arrival is a miracle, given that people just can’t be bothered with other cars existing until he or she crashes into one.  But let me not digress.  

When other people fail to exist for us where we live,  how then do we grasp that people in other parts of the world exist?  Wars are much easier to wage when people are unseen and “enemized”.

I do acknowledge that technological “connection” is the delight of a majority for whom it is connection.  I just want to say, “Not so fast“.  Let’s look at what we’ve lost and found.  Let’s look at social results.

The brightest minds of the future will zero in on what I believe is a fundamental unhooking of human connection.  They will understand that many people were relieved to disconnect.  Thanks to email, twitter, facebook, and all virtual “connectivity” sites, words like “friend” (as in, how many thousands of “friends” on facebook do you have?)  have been emptied of meaning and tossed into the fog of chat.  

Even more alarming, this time is marked by the socially sanctioned ability to behave with extreme hostility, rudeness, even anonymity, providing unprecedented opportunity to strike out against others.

It seems like the “news” is all about reporting nasty feuds between celebrities  and giving them a public forum to spit at each other.  It’s an angry time with much that needs to be said.  I’m just getting started.

I personally believe that this is a culture of disconnection because the culture normalizes and encourages  the very worst in us to be exercised, hailed, and celebrated.  How disconnected is that?

Basic truth:  in order to answer a question, and thus be empowered with knowledge, rather than stunned into silent  fear, you actually have to ask a question. 

Where do questions come from?

Curiosity.  The desire to know and understand.

Why are people not asking basic questions in America today?

I don’t believe that curiosity is dead.    Rather, the media screaming  terror and the high-pitched propaganda of corporate agendas have managed to nationally numb even some of our creative minds.   

To borrow a phrase from the 1960’s– spoken, perhaps, through a  pot-smoking haze –today is an excellent time to ”drop out” from the constant blast of lies.  It’s time to ”turn on ” the volume of our own intelligence.

When the personal question reappears, there may be a second American Revolution.  It can’t happen soon enough.

Memo to Kim Cattrell: 

I know you are appearing on a British talk show tonight.  I know you are speaking in a (well-publicized) English accent, that is purported to be your own.   I imagine you want to broadcast, LOUD AND CLEAR, that you are an actress, playing the role of Samantha Jones on Sex and the City.  In other words, you are an actress, not an actual American person whose name is Samantha Jones.  Okay.  I got it.

The demands of the acting career for women are insane.  I know.  The cultural demands on women are insane.  With   lauded exceptions,  my personal favorite being Meryl Streep,  actresses sign the invisible contract,  should they be lucky enough to land it,  to remain strictly inside the confines of one identifiable character. That character is Samantha Jones.  Yes, I know you’re rehearsing a Noel Coward play in London.  But remember: you are a famous American female character.  America comes first! 

More emphatically, you created America’s real hope in delivering Samanth Jones; strong, successful, sexual.  You are the trailblazer giving women permission to express aggressive, uninhibited sexuality, which men have forever claimed as their natural born right, on and off the screen. 

And here’s the kicker, Kim: your Samantha is over 50!  You have turned both ageism and sexism for women characters–and for all women–on its head.  We got you, babe, and we’re not letting you go. 

Here’s the thing.  You were way too good in that role.  It’s too late.  It’s too late to have a British accent.  Don’t traumatize your audience.

In making Samantha Jones, you have made yourself responsible for the psychological well-being of,  probably,  a generational mob of women. 

Don’t fuck us up.

There are brilliant and not-so-brilliant political pundits, and it is thrilling when sharp, knowledgeable political experts speak and educate us publicly.  That’s not me.  I’m a communications analyst; a word girl.  What are they really saying? is my gig.

The substance of last night’s State of the Union address glazed me over.  I like to think I know a piece of substance when I hear one.  I didn’t hear it last night.  Optimistically,  I leave  hard-core political interpretations to true experts, and eagerly await discovering the existing substance I  missed. 

What I am hearing reminds me of George W. Bush’s unending vocabulary tactic;  the use of his favorite word, “patriotic”, to manipulate the American people, post-9/11. 

Remember what I am calling the strategic and “social blackmailing” use of the word, “patriotic”?  As in, “You are either with us or against us”, and “If you question the tactics and military activities in Iraq”, well, you are simply not “with us”.  You are downright “unpatriotic”.  This was effective enough to muzzle the entire country from telling their truth in response to post-9/11 administration misdeeds.

Obama’s emphasis, in last night’s speech, on cautioning us from becoming “cynical”, uses this word in an eerily similar and strident context.

Here’s the question:  Is it “cynicism” to register the falsehoods in Obama’s words in light of his disconnected actions?  Cynisim must not be mistaken for being awake and speaking out.  Let us not confuse cynicism with active disagreement and the courage to respond to national events and powerful political choices that are just wrong.

There is a place for balanced “cynicism” if we are to survive.  By “balanced cynicism”, I mean nothing more than the acknowledgement, and yes, acceptance, of all potential truth, both “good” and ”bad”, without which we are blinded and unprepared to meet and respond to life as it exists.  

Let’s not agree that “cynicism” is a dirty word.

Once again, it is a case of The Vanishing News.  

This time, the media has managed to shift American focus from a monumental Supreme Court ruling,  replacing our, yes, crisis, with a catastrophe in another country.  All eyes are on Haiti, and what a boon for the powers that be to fill the air with hypnotic Haiti Extreme video. Yes, Haiti is a true disaster.  But here’s what happened to us:

 January 21, 2010, New York Times:  ” A bitterly divided Supreme Court on January 21, 2010, rules that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.”

Scan the media and op-ed pages of even, yes, the above-mentioned newspaper, and what do you see today? 

The lens from which we view this urgent ruling is now five days old and not just out-of-focus, but gone. 

The success of the media’s BLUR campaign has given many commentators, writers, and bloggers their latest, largest, (and weirdly, easiest), spinning opportunity.  The matter of the ruling was overblown, they say,  in its initially-perceived significance, and really, not such a big deal.  

Let’s hit the public hard and rerun the Haiti footage and freak people out of their minds with visuals.  Don’t forget to warn those who live in earthquake-vulnerable locations that this will happen to them.  Give ‘em a generous dollop of terror on their late-night local news.  Sweet dreams!

The real life-changing American news shows up, when you can catch it, for an instant.  It then deliberately is lifted and shredded, inevitably to fade away in the chaos and confusion of media double-speak.  

Then there are those who just don’t care.  Indeed, even television shows like the esteemed, The View, as well as on most nightly current “event” talk shows, the story does not exist. 

The hosts are simply too enthralled with the whereabouts of Tiger Woods.  WHERE IS HE?   Hosts ask a new panel of  location experts each night.  And the demands of gossiping about Conan and Jay apparently never end,  especially if one is fascinated by the study of colleagues being handed harsh judgement and bad news. 

Was it just me, or did I see a rather intelligent Joe Klein rolling his eyes as one host determinedly turned back to the Tiger topic and asked his opinion.  The talented Joy Behar literally introduces nonsense panel “discussions” with the question, “Does anyone even care?”  She exhibits her charming mock-outrage as she introduces this wasting of time, as if to say, “What a ridiculous subject, but enough thinking about that.  This is mine and I choose to go there.”   Oyyyy, Joy, why do you care enough to use all your precious airtime on stupid, empty subjects?   A big disappointment for those of us who are fans and will always root for her.

Now there I go.  Talking talk shows rather than staying on topic with what truly matters.  See how easy it is to be entertained by distraction?  See how we all want to step away from the intensity of important matters, even as they disappear from our view?

Here’s the lesson for today:   Let us stay awake and alert for all  momentary sparks of real news that will genuinely affect  our lives.   Our live do matter, and the moment is now.  As Janis Joplin once warned,  “Get It While You Can”.

Obama’s presidency is a study in American public relations as it relates to race relations.  The real “hope” in Obama was that we had finally arrived at realizing Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream in electing a president with stellar qualities who happens to have black skin.  Was this not evidence that long-held American racist beliefs were a thing of the past?  Sadly, no.

As I study the social/political landscape, racist hypocrisy is everywhere to be found under the vulnerable veil of political correctness. What we learn from the Gates episode is that racism is still alive and well.  The cover-up, however, is glossier today, making it harder to recognize the presence of the same old bigotry.

Would the Gates episode even make a news splash if he had been a white man?  I don’t think so.  Therein lies the tricky-to-identify, yet recurring spotlight on race, showing that racism is far from over.  Obama, himself, quickly read the situation as a racial-profiling episode, stating that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly”.  He then backpedaled, complimenting all parties involved.  He obviously wants to broadcast–for his own reasons–that racism doesn’t exist.  Alas, having a “Beer Summit” doesn’t erase our nation’s racist reality.

Harry Reid’s lapse in PC vocabulary reminds us that just below the politically staged surface, all the unfinished business of hatred and bigotry rest unattended.

Here’s the truth:  even the world-wide ubiquitous presence of our black American President posing as a symbol of the end of American Racism turns out to be a lesson in appearances.  It fails to mask the racist hatred that is real and alive.  It is the subject Americans must identify and work to truly “change”, not just to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but in order for humanity to survive.

“WE ARE AT WAR WITH al-QAEDA”  is the concrete message, underlined every day in the media, whether from the mouth of the President or others. 

Let’s replace “al-QAEDA” with the word, “HATRED”. 

WE ARE AT WAR WITH  HATRED.  We want to kill our enemy, “HATRED”. 

We certainly would not put out HATRED in our fight to get rid of  HATRED.

That would be stupid.

When you find yourself unable to think a clear thought.

When you are anxious about seemingly nothing and everything.

These are the symptoms of our times. 

Do nothing.  Breathe.  Identify how scary it feels for everyone, no matter how others seem to you.

Everyone is in this time together.