SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.

Thursday 1 February 2018

All rise & applaud! How Trump’s State of the Union was reminiscent of Soviet-style conformity

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013. robertvbridge@yahoo.com

Published time: 31 Jan, 2018 16:39

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All rise & applaud! How Trump’s State of the Union was reminiscent of Soviet-style conformity

Trump supporters interrupted last night’s State of the Union address on 115 occasions with resounding applause, despite much criticism of the president within his own party. Does such conformity speak well of a democracy?

At 5 o’clock on Wednesday morning, with Moscow slowly digging itself out of an overnight snowstorm, I decided to do something I haven’t done in many years: watch a live broadcast of the State of the Union address, starring one of the most divisive presidents in US history, Donald J. Trump.

Having lived overseas for two decades, it is always instructive to catch the occasional American pageant – from the Super Bowl to the Academy Awards – in an effort to gain some valuable insight into the real ‘state of the union’ that no teleprompted words from a president could adequately convey. What I did not expect to take away from Trump’s 80-minute political theater, however, was a heavy dose of culture shock and awe.

Not even the mighty Trump could mitigate the oppressive, rigid conformity of the entire affair. The spectacle of watching the Republicans punctuate Trump’s speech with standing ovations and applause brought to mind a scene from a Soviet-era Politburo meeting where the attendees seem locked in a feverish contest to see who can applaud the longest.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provided some insight into this phenomenon in a passage from ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ detailing a communist rally: “For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly…”

Silly indeed.

According to the mainstream media’s applause-o-meter, Trump’s first SOTU generated exactly 115 rounds of hand-clapping, which came close to breaking the modern record (Bill Clinton holds the record as having most applause interruptions, 128, during his 90-minute 2000 speech).

I would imagine that even the fiercely conformist North Koreans would be hard-pressed to match that level of exuberance. And it will certainly pain many members of the media to admit that Barack Obama was interrupted an average of 90 times, while George W. Bush only attracted 80 rounds of applause during his addresses.

In order to put this bizarre clapping craze into its proper perspective, consider that Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy – respectable leaders in their own right – averaged just 30 to 40 applause breaks, which comes out to be less than half the number recent American leaders have had.

While watching this display of hand-clapping insanity, I had to ask myself: Is such behavior more conducive to a group of groveling sheep as opposed to that of independent, strong-minded individuals? An authoritarian state as opposed to a healthy democracy? Here's a thought experiment: What do you suppose would happen to the career of any Republican who failed to join along in the ardent applause for Great Leader? Ostracism from the self-righteous ranks? And the same could be asked of any Democrat who may have ventured a muted golf clap or two for the Republican leader.

Tellingly, one of the only moments of unity between the Democrats and Republicans arose when Trump spoke about defeating Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), thus proving the maxim that nothing can unite this nation more than an external enemy.

“Last year, I… pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the Earth,” Trump said. “One year later, I am proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated very close to 100 percent of the territory just recently held by these killers in Iraq and in Syria and in other locations as well.”

Needless to say, that comment raised some eyebrows, and not least of all in Russia, which contributed a significant amount of military prowess in routing IS.

It deserves mentioning that the only time the Democrats found Trump to be presidential material was when he bombed a Syrian airport. That speaks volumes about where we’d be today had establishment darling Hillary ‘We came, we saw, he died’ Clinton been elected. But I digress.

Thankfully, some much-needed comic relief was provided during the speech, mostly from watching the stony faces on the other side of the hall – in this particular case, the Democrats – as Trump proudly rattled off last year’s achievements.

The scowls from the Democrats went a paler shade of white when the Republican populist dared to draw attention to record-low black unemployment rates, for example, and those people who refused to stand and honor the flag during the singing of the national anthem, and how he was determined to resolve the country’s immigration problem.

Another moment that underscored the deep divisiveness between the two parties came when Congressman Luis Gutierrez stormed out of the chamber towards the end of the speech as Republicans started chanting “USA, USA.”

The icing on the cake came later, however, when Gutierrez snubbed the president’s speech by saying: “Whoever translated it for him from Russian did a good job.”

This unfortunate comment is a reflection of a lengthy media campaign that continues to peddle the news – without providing a shred of evidence – that Trump somehow colluded with the Russians to emerge victorious in last year’s election. Once again, many Americans are conforming to an unsubstantiated idea that has been foisted upon them without rhyme or reason. Few are brave enough to challenge this fake news blitz, since doing so would risk career.

Meanwhile, the left-leaning media is already complaining that Trump only mentioned Russia once in his speech (while the bad guys at Islamic State got a disproportionate six mentions).

“Around the world, we face rogue regimes, terrorist groups, and rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, our economy and our values,” Trump said.

Apparently that criticism of Russia fell short of Democratic expectations, especially considering that Barack Obama regularly placed Russia into the same category with Islamic State.

So as the bright lights dimmed on yet another State of the Union Address, a thought came to mind: Why are there only two parties year after year expressing their increasingly conformist beliefs in the halls of power? Why the mindless, ritualistic applause for two short-sighted groups, that are engaged in an endless game of back-and-forth regarding America’s future?

This shockingly high level of conformity, I believe, is symptomatic of America’s two-party political system, which dramatically reduces the options available for everyday Americans when forced to consider political topics of great import. Yet poll after poll shows Americans want and need a third political brand to choose from.

What was conspicuously missing from Trump’s State of the Union Address was not rapturous applause and standing ovations. What was missing was a third voice in a third section of the Capitol to lend some credence to this Soviet-style political show.

@Robert_Bridge

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Why Is the Bible So Badly Written?

The obvious answer is that the Bible was not actually dictated by a deity.

By Valerie Tarico / AlterNet

Photo Credit: Marcel Mooij / Shutterstock

Millions of evangelicals and other Christian fundamentalists believe that the Bible was dictated by God to men who acted essentially as human transcriptionists. If that were the case, one would have to conclude that God is a terrible writer. Many passages in the Bible would get kicked back by any competent editor or writing professor, kicked back with a lot of red ink—often more red than black.

Mixed messages, repetition, bad fact-checking, awkward constructions, inconsistent voice, weak character development, boring tangents, contradictions, passages where nobody can tell what the heck the writer meant to convey. This doesn’t sound like a book that was dictated by a deity.

A well-written book should be clear and concise, with all factual statements accurate and characters neither two-dimensional nor plagued with multiple personality disorder—unless they actually are. A book written by a god should be some of the best writing ever produced. It should beat Shakespeare on enduring relevance, Stephen Hawking on scientific accuracy, Pablo Neruda on poetry, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on ethical coherence, and Maya Angelou on sheer lucid beauty—just to name a few.

Why does the Bible so fail to meet this mark? One obvious answer, of course, is that neither the Bible nor any derivative work like the Quran or Book of Mormon was actually dictated by the Christian god or other celestial messengers. We humans may yearn for advice that is “god-breathed,” but in reality, our sacred texts were written by fallible human beings, who try as they might, fell short of perfection in the ways we all do.

But why is the Bible so badly written? Falling short of perfection is one thing, but the Bible has been the subject of literally thousands of follow-on books by people who were genuinely trying to figure out what it means. Despite best efforts, their conclusions don’t converge, which is one reason Christianity has fragmented into over 40,000 denominations and non-denominations.

Here are just a few of the reasons for this tangled web of disagreements and the generally terrible quality of much biblical writing (with some notable exceptions) by literary standards.

Too Many Cooks

Far from being a single unified whole, the Bible is actually a collection of texts or text fragments from many authors. We don’t know the number of writers precisely, and—despite the ancient traditions that assigned authorship to famous people such as Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—we don’t know who most of them were. We do know that the men who inscribed the biblical texts had widely different language skills, cultural and technological surroundings, worldviews and supernatural beliefs, along with varying objectives.

Scholars estimate that the earliest of the Bible’s writers lived and wrote about 800 years before the Christian era, and the most recent lived and wrote around 100 CE. They ranged from tribal nomads to subjects of the Roman Empire. To make matters more complicated, some of them borrowed fragments of even earlier stories and songs that had been handed down via oral tradition from Sumerian cultures and religions. For example, flood myths that predate the Noah story can be found across Mesopotamia, with a boat-building hero named Gilgamesh or Ziusudra or Atrahasis.

Bible writers adapted earlier stories and laws to their own cultural and religious context, but they couldn’t always reconcile differences among handed-down texts, and often may not have known that alternative versions existed. Later, variants got bundled together. This is why the Bible contains two different creation myths, three sets of Ten Commandments, and four contradictory versions of the Easter story.

Forgery and Counter-Forgery

Best-selling Bible scholar Bart Ehrman has written a whole book about forgery in the New Testament, texts written under the names of famous men to make the writings more credible. This practice was so common among early Christians that nearly half of the books of the New Testament make false authorship claims, while others were assigned famous names after the fact. When books claiming to be written by one person were actually written by several, each seeking to elevate his own point of view, we shouldn’t be surprised if the writing styles clash or they espouse contradictory attitudes.

Histories, Poetries, None-of-These

Christians may treat the Bible as a unified book of divine guidance, but in reality it is a mix of different genres: ancient myths, songs of worship, rule books, poetry, propaganda, gospels (yes, this was a common literary genre), coded political commentary, and mysticism, to name just a few. Translators and church leaders down through the centuries haven’t always known which of these they were reading. Modern comedians sometimes make a living by deliberately garbling genres—for example, by taking statements literally when they are meant figuratively—or distorting things someone else has written or said. Whether they realize it or not, biblical literalists in the pulpit sometimes make a living doing the same thing.

Lost in Translation

The books of the Bible were originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, though not in the modern versions of these languages. (Think of trying to read Chaucer’s Middle English.) When Roman Catholic Christianity ascended, church leaders embraced the Hebrew Bible and translated it into then-modern Latin, calling it the Old Testament. They also translated texts from early Jesus-worshipers and voted on which to include in their canon of scripture. These became the New Testament. Ironically, some New Testament writers themselves had already quoted bad translations of Old Testament scriptures. These multi-layered imperfect translations inspired key doctrines of the Christian faith, the most famous being the Virgin Birth.

Most English versions of the Bible have been translated directly from the earliest available manuscripts, but translators have their own biases, some of which were shaped by those early Latin translations and some of which are shaped by more recent theological considerations or cultural trends. After American Protestants pivoted away from supporting abortion in the 1980s, some publishers actually retranslated a troublesome Bible verse that treated the death of a fetus differently from the death of a person. The meaning of the Bible passage changed.

But even when scholars scrupulously try to avoid biases, an enormous amount of information is simply lost in translation. One challenge is that the meanings of a story, or even a single word, depend on what preceded it in the culture at large or a specific conversation, or both.

Imagine that a teenage boy has asked his mom for a specific amount of money for a special night out, and Mom says, “You can have $50.” She is communicating something very different if the kid asked for $20 (Mom is saying splurge a bit) versus if the kid had asked for $100 (Mom is saying rein yourself in).

As the mom opens her wallet, the son scrolls through restaurant options on Yelp and exclaims, “Sick!” Mom blinks, then mentally translates into the slang of her own generation which, her son’s perceptions aside, doesn’t come close to translating across 2,000 years of history.

Inside Baseball

A lot changes in 2,000 years. As we read the Bible through modern eyes, it helps to remember that we’re getting a glimpse, however imperfectly translated, of the urgent concerns of our Iron Age ancestors. Back then, writing anything was tremendously labor intensive, so we know that information that may seem irrelevant now (because it is) was of acute importance to the men who first carved those words into clay, or inked them on animal skins or papyrus.

Long lists of begats in the Gospels; greetings to this person and that in the Pauline epistles; instructions on how to sacrifice a dove in Leviticus or purify a virgin war captive in Numbers; "chosen people" genealogies; prohibitions against eating creatures that don’t exist; pages of threats against enemies of Israel; coded rants against the Roman Empire....

As a modern person reading the Bible, one can’t help but think about how the pages might have been better filled. Could none of this have been pared away? Couldn’t the writers have made room instead for a few short sentences that might have changed history: Wash your hands after you poop. Don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t want to. Witchcraft isn’t real. Slavery is forbidden. We are all God’s chosen people.

Answer: No, they couldn’t have fit these in, even without the begats. Of course there was physical space on papyrus and parchment. But the minds of the writers were fully occupied with other concerns. In their world, who begat who mattered (!) while challenging prevailing Iron Age views of illness or women and children or slaves was simply inconceivable.

It’s Not About You

The Gospel According to Matthew (not actually authored by Matthew) was written for an audience of Jews. The author was a recruiter for the ancient equivalent of Jews for Jesus. That is why, in the Matthew account, the Last Supper is timed as a Passover meal. By contrast, the Gospel According to John was written to persuade pagan Roman prospects, so the author timed the events differently. This is just one of many explicit contradictions between the four Gospel accounts of Jesus’s death and resurrection.

The contradictions in the Gospel stories—and many other parts of the Bible—are not there because the writers were confused. Quite the opposite. Each writer knew his own goals and audience, and adapted hand-me-down stories or texts to fit, sometimes changing the meaning in the process. The folks who are confused are those who treat the book as if they were the audience, as if each verse was a timeless and perfect message sent to them by God. Their yearning for a set of clean answers to life’s messy questions has created a mess.

The Pig Collection

My friend Sandra had a collection of decorative pigs that started out small. As family and friends learned about it, the collection grew to the point that it began taking over the house. Birthdays, Christmas, vacations, thrift stores...when people saw a pig, they thought of Sandra. Some of the pigs were delightful; others, not so much. Finally, the move to a new house opened an opportunity to do some culling.

The texts of the Bible are a bit of a pig collection. Like Sandra’s pigs, they reflect a wide variety of styles, raw material and artistic vision. From creation stories to Easter stories to the book of Revelation, old collectibles got handed down and inspired new, and folks who gathered this type of material bundled them together into a single collection.

A good culling might do a lot to improve things. Imagine a version of the Bible containing only that which has enduring beauty or usefulness. Unfortunately, the collection in the Bible has been bound together for so long that Christian authorities (with a few exceptions) don’t trust themselves to unbind it. Maybe the thought of deciding what goes and stays feels overwhelming or even dangerous. Or maybe, deep down, Bible-believing evangelicals and other fundamentalists suspect that if they started culling, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left. So, they keep it all, in the process binding themselves to the worldview and very human imperfections of our Iron Age ancestors.

And that’s what makes the Good Book so very bad.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington, and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at valerietarico.com.

https://www.alternet.org/belief/why-bible-so-badly-written

India slips 10 ranks to 42 on democracy index

UK watchdog blames rise of rightists, conservative religious ideologies, violence against minorities

New Delhi, January 31

India has slipped to 42nd place on an annual Global Democracy Index amid “rise of conservative religious ideologies” and increase in vigilantism and violence against minorities as well as other dissenting voices.

While Norway has again topped the list, followed by Iceland and Sweden, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), India has moved down from 32nd place last year and remains classified among “flawed democracies”.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The index ranks 165 independent states and two territories on the basis of five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation and political culture. The list has been divided into four broad categories—full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime and authoritarian regime.

The US (ranked 21), Japan, Italy, France, Israel, Singapore and Hong Kong have also been named among “flawed democracies”. The EIU is the research and analysis division of the UK-based media behemoth ‘The Economist Group’. Created in 1946, the EIU describes itself as having over 70 years of experience “in helping businesses, financial firms and governments to understand how the world is changing and how that creates opportunities to be seized and risks to be managed”.

Top-ranked Norway has been given an overall score of 9.87 with perfect-ten scores for electoral process and pluralism; political participation and political culture. Only top-19 countries have been classified as “full democracies”.

India’s overall score has fallen to 7.23 points, even as it scored well on electoral process and pluralism (9.17). It has not managed to score so well on other four parameters—political culture, functioning of government, political participation and civil liberties.

This year’s report which also measured the state of media freedom around the world noted that in India, media is “partially free”.

Moreover, journalists are at risk from government, military and non-state actors and radical groups, and the threat of violence has a chilling effect on media coverage.

“India has also become a more dangerous place for journalists, especially Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir. The authorities there have restricted freedom of the press, closed down several newspapers and heavily controlled mobile internet services. Several journalists were murdered in India in 2017, as in the previous year,” it noted.

In the 2017 Democracy Index, the average global score fell from 5.52 in 2016 to 5.48 (on a scale of 0 to 10). Some 89 countries experienced a decline in their total score compared with 2016. 27 recorded an improvement. The other 51 countries stagnated, as their scores remained unchanged compared with 2016.

Almost one-half (49.3 per cent) of the world’s population lives in a democracy of some sort, although only 4.5 per cent reside in a “full democracy”, down from 8.9 per cent in 2015 as a result of the US being demoted from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” in 2016.

Around one-third of the world’s population lives under authoritarian rule, with a large share being in China, EIU noted. — PTI

http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/india-slips-10-ranks-to-42-on-democracy-index/536921.html

SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.

Thursday 1 February 2018

All rise & applaud! How Trump’s State of the Union was reminiscent of Soviet-style conformity

Why Is the Bible So Badly Written?

India slips 10 ranks to 42 on democracy index

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