A Chilling Message from Deepak Chopra

OBAMA AND PALIN EFFECT
Deepak Chopra

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin's message. In her acceptance speech
Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:
--Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
--Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.
--Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be heeded.
--Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
--Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.
--"Reform" -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

Banned Books.... What Next

Greetings my fellow book lovers. As a writer I feel it is my duty to share any and all information regarding what we love .... books. Therefore, when I received the following, I knew that it was my responsibility to pass this along. Believe or disbelieve--just dont ignore this. It is too important.
The following is what I received.
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>
> Below is a paragraph from this week's Time magazine article on Sarah Palin:
>
> "[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued
to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library
how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had
inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." The librarian, Mary
Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time
show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving "full support" to the mayor."
Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.
>
>
> Here is the list of books Palin tried to have banned:
>
> A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
> A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
> Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
> As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
> Blubber by Judy Blume
> Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
> Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
> Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
> Carrie by Stephen King
> Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
> Christine by Stephen King
> Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
> Cujo by Stephen King
> Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
> Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
> Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
> Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
> Decameron by Boccaccio
> East of Eden by John Steinbeck
> Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
> Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
> Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
> Forever by Judy Blume
> Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
> Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
> Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
> Have to Go by Robert Munsch
> Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
> How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
> Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
> I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
> Impressions edited by Jack Booth
> In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
> It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
> James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
> Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
> Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
> Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
> Lord of the Flies by William Golding
> Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
> Lysistrata by Aristophanes
> More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
> My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher
Collier
> My House by Nikki Giovanni
> My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
> Night Chills by Dean Koontz
> Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
> On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
> One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
> One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
> One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
> Ordinary People by Judith Guest
> Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
> Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
> Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
> Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
> Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
> Separate Peace by John Knowles
> Silas Marner by George Eliot
> Slaughterhouse- Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
> Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
> The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
> The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
> The Bastard by John Jakes
> The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
> The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
> The Color Purple by Alice Walker
> The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
> The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
> The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
> The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
> The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
> The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
> The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
> The Living Bible by William C. Bower
> The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
> The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
> The Pigman by Paul Zindel
> The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
> The Shining by Stephen King
> The Witches by Roald Dahl
> The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
> Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
> To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
> Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
> Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster
Editorial Staff
> Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween
Symbols by Edna Barth