The internet is full of pundits and our Televisions are stuffed with experts 24 hours a day. We are treated to opinions and analysis until we begin to think of ourselves as experts. We don't need anymore experts or pundits in America. We need poets. The Iraq war has no more justification. What we are doing there can never be defended. The hell we have put upon the Iraqi people is the work of the rapacious soul of America.
Robert Bly calls it the work of the negative Father.
Something called the "negative father" or the "poisonous father" -- the one who curses the children. For example, let me read you something from the Journal of Psychohistory, and by "psychohistory" they mean damage
caused by brutality to children, from the beginning of history until now. Listen to this:
In the first Gulf War all eleven of Iraq's major power stations were destroyed, along with substations. Iraq's eight multipurpose dams were hit repeatedly and seriously damaged. Four hundred seven waterpumping stations were destroyed; eleven municipal water and sewage facilities were hit by bombs. Bombs hit twenty-eight community hospitals and
fifty-two community health centers. Six hundred
seventy-six schools were damaged and thirty-eight
totally destroyed.
And so on, and so on. All that happened in the first war. The journal article goes on to say that "the Pentagon did in fact admit it massively targeted civilian structures to `demoralize
the population.'" So one of the energies at work right now is the insane, obsessed father who tries to damage the children. In other words, we took Iraq and bombed it back into childhood. ...That's what happens when you get rid of the electricity and sewage systems and hospitals: you reduce an
adult country to a child country. That's the negative father who kills his children. And because Bush Senior wasn't doing it to kids on our block, he got away with it. And now we get his son, who doesn't think that the child was punished enough. Saddam Hussein doesn't have nuclear
weapons. But Bush says, "Never mind! You did have them. I know you did. Now get over here. I'm going to give you a whipping." That's what I think is going on in Iraq. That's why it's so
desperate and insane. The negative father is coming forward almost nakedly and beating a country that's already on its knees. Why do you think it's so sad right now in the United States?
The men and women lack spirit, and they're all depressed.
In this mad world where we are confronted with so many problems it is easy to become bitter and angry. We spite our political opponents for their ignorance and lash out at the pundits for spewing deceit and vitriol back at us.
It is easy to believe that we are coming to the end-times, even if one has never read Revelations. Whether you are worried about anti-depressants, vaccines, Global Warming, the food supply, your job, homelessness, pedophiles, crime, terrorists, imperialists, neo-cons, liberals, Socialists, conservatives, fascists, tyrants, elitists, School-killings or any other major problems your worries can be justified with any number of facts you manage to dig up in the never-ending quest for information.
This is madness and we are all mad. No rational mind can comprehend the madness, and rationalizing your worries is the worst madness of all.
It's already too late. Take joy in your madness.
Robert Bly advises:
the only thing we can do is recognize that it's mad, and reach inside ourselves and bring out our own genuine madness in the form of art, and then teach our children to do the same. We can bring our madness out to meet the world's madness! Can we diminish the world's madness? No way! But every individual or family can bring up some madness of their own by learning the arts. Learn to paint a picture or write a poem.
