Again today, the photograph above has nothing at all to do with my journal writing... except perhaps for the images of Margaret, Tilly and Smokey resting in the middle of the afternoon reminding me that peace on earth is a possibility.
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Rain on the skylight above my bed woke me last night, but it was worry about what we are becoming as a nation that kept me awake... thinking about the extreme, right-wing contingent of the Republican Party’s determination to destroy the presidency of Barack Obama. These are not the honest patriots that I know most of my Republican friends to be. They are not the Republicans who believe in the principles of American democracy. Both of our major parties have within them a few unprincipled people who are willing to plot and carry out high crimes in order to gain power. Ambition moves most people toward the accomplishment of good for society as well as for themselves. A psychopathology occurs in a few, however, who are willing to drop their concern for society in order to gain power for themselves. Adolph Hitler was undoubtedly a psychopath. Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein are classic examples of people who could “smile and smile” and be villains . They were so good at convincing people around them that their ambition was normal that few noticed they were psychopathic and dangerous. To be successful at the kind of killing they did, they wrapped themselves in cloaks of patriotism; and they ultimately destroyed themselves and wrecked their society.

Governments by their very nature are managed by ambitious people. All the people who move to Washington as senators, representatives, cabinet members, supreme court judges are people of importance and leaders in the states from which they come. They were ambitious and successful in some other place before their election or appointment to a post in the nation’s capital. They don’t leave personal ambition behind when they relocate to a place within the capital beltway. Washington is fertile ground for ambition.

Everybody who passed through eleventh and twelfth grades in an American high school will have “studied” Macbeth. Most people who read the play in twelfth grade likely also saw a Hollywood movie version, or they have seen the play acted on the stage. “The Play’s the thing,” that catches us when it’s performed well, catches us by grabbing hold of whatever thread of ambition is in us and shows us what unchecked ambition can do to a person, especially to a person who is already in a position of power but who wants more, who wants ultimate power. In the story, a lesser lord in Scotland, Macbeth, dreams of being more noble... his longing to be king lies not far below the surface. The play is about human evil that grows from ambition for power to obsession with gaining power regardless of consequences. Macbeth himself is actually not the central character. The play is really about what ambition does to his wife. Lady Macbeth’s ambition for her husband and for herself leads her slowly but surely into a web of dreams and plots so powerful that she renounces her humanity (remember her taunt to her husband when he seems unable to go on with the project to kill the king, “I have given suck, and know how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this.”). Pretty strong stuff! The cost for giving up one’s humanity is always too great to bear, and in the end Lady Macbeth and her husband are destroyed. What was evidently a strong marriage disintegrates. He becomes a murderer who loses control of his own destiny, and she is transformed into an unnatural desexualized evil spirit. Some argue that the point of the play is that she does not escape her humanity, that she cannot personally manage the dehumanized self she has become... as evidenced by her insanity and suicide.

And Macbeth: His is the story of a nobleman whose life disintegrates after he becomes a murderer, a tragic story of a successful man whose ambition turns him into a monster. After he kills King Duncan, he laments, “We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it. She’ll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice remains in danger of her former tooth. But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep in the affliction of these terrible dreams that shake us nightly. “

In the middle of last night it was that speech, “We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it,” that came to my mind. I began to worry about our President, for his physical safety and for his emotional well-being. His political enemies are powerful people who have vowed to get him out of the White House. It would be naive to expect ideologues in the Republican Party to celebrate the Obama White House and to welcome a second term for his administration. I am deeply troubled, however, by the determination of leaders of the party to obstruct absolutely every project that comes out of the Executive Branch. I expect the likes of Rush Limbaugh to say Republicans must not allow the administration to succeed, that the party must actively promote its failure. I like to think he is not representative of the GOP. I expect intelligent, honorable Republicans in government to understand the critical importance of a strong two-party system to a strong American democracy. I expect Republicans and Democrats to understand and acknowledge the importance of cooperation and compromise in government.

The martyr phenomenon is a psychopathic reality. In a nation of three-hundred-million citizens, there are a few people out there whose twisted sense of what is right won’t be satisfied by listening day after day to Limbaugh. Without the approval or general knowledge of good people within the Republican Party, there are unscrupulous but bright strategists busy devising media campaigns to undermine and discredit the work of the Obama Administration. Those strategists have no qualms about making up stories that have little relevance to facts. They will continue to funnel a steady stream of
outrageous assumptions and predictions to media hungry for sensational stories. Although damaging to our government, assumptions can be proven to be false, and predictions can be invalidated; but deliberately inventing and publishing outrageous false stories inspires and enflames anarchists. What worries me most is that it is nearly impossible to identify and track the activities of all pathological anarchists and their little groups of determined followers who would like to kill and scotch what they consider to be the snake.