Thursday, October 15, 2015

Learning Again To Walk the Middle Path

I have been wanting to get back to offering a few posts from time to time, but I never seem to get around to it.  One of the issues has been the fact that my home computer went kaput and I'm typically too busy with radio duties to use the production computer down here at the station.  More than anything else, I suppose, it's just lazy inertia.

So, I'm not promising anything.  You may start seeing some infrequent posts...or you may not.  It all depends on where the flow of life takes me.

~

Recently, I was diagnosed with diabetes.  It's one of the best things to happen to me in a long time!  I know that sounds like an odd statement, but it reminded of the importance of walking the middle path.

Control of diabetes is about moderation: Eating the right things in appropriate quantities and limiting the amount of items with little nutritive value.  

In a manner of a week or two, I got my blood glucose levels well under control.  In fact, I've done such a good job of it -- one of the few times when being OCD has proven beneficial -- that I was taken off of my initial diabetic medication in less than 2 months after diagnosis.

On top of that, I've lost nearly 35 pounds over the past 5 months.  I now sit at around 170 on a 6'1" frame.  I haven't been this light since my 20s.  My BMI looks very good!

All in all, what many would view as a bad turn of events has, for me, been the exact opposite.  I'm feeling much better than I have for years.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Scott Bradley Follows in Zhuangzi's Footsteps

Our dear friend Scott Bradley -- the modern day alter ego of Zhuangzi -- has done two momentous things lately.  First, he's published a book: All Is Well in the Great Mess: An Adaptation of the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi with Reflections!    Secondly, because I have become a derelict blogger, he has launched his own blog on -- yes, you guessed it -- Zhuangzi.

I always knew he had, at least, a book or two in 'em.

Monday, June 8, 2015

Big Business: Capitalism & Religion

Here's a great article posted on AlterNet.

By Kevin Kruse / AlterNet
June 1, 2015

During the Great Depression, big business needed rebranding. Blamed for the crash, belittled in the press, and beset by the New Deal’s regulatory state, corporate leaders decided they had to improve their image, and soon. “The public does not understand industry,” an executive complained, “because industry itself has made no effort to tell its story; to show the people of this country that our high living standards have risen almost altogether from the civilization which industrial activity has set up.”

Accordingly, corporate leaders launched a public relations campaign for capitalism itself. In 1934, the National Association of Manufacturers hired its first public relations director in its four decades of existence, expanding its annual budget in that field from just $36,000 to nearly $800,000 three years later, a sum that represented half of its total budget. NAM marketed the miracles of “free enterprise” with a wide array of advertisements, direct mail, films, radio programs, a speakers’ bureau, and a press service that provided prefabricated editorials and news stories for 7500 newspapers. Ultimately, though, the organization’s efforts at self-promotion were generally dismissed as precisely that.

While old business lobbies like NAM couldn’t sell capitalism effectively, neither could new ones created especially for the cause. The American Liberty League, founded in 1934, originally seemed business’s best bet. It received lavish financial support from corporate leaders, notably at Du Pont and General Motors, but ultimately their prominence in the group crippled its effectiveness. Jim Farley, then head of the Democratic Party, famously joked that it ought to be called the “American Cellophane League” because “first, it’s a Du Pont product and second, you can see right through it.”

As the 1930s came to a close, corporate leaders looked over the returns on their investment and realized the millions spent had not swayed public opinion in the slightest. The image of big business still needed repackaging. In a 1939 address to the US Chamber of Commerce, H.W. Prentis of the Armstrong Cork Company proposed the way forward. “Economic facts are important, but they will never check the virus of collectivism,” he warned; “the only antidote is a revival of American patriotism and religious faith.” Prentis’ speech thrilled the Chamber and boardrooms across America. Soon propelled to NAM’s presidency, he continued to tell corporate leaders to get religion. His 1940 presidential address, promoted heavily in the Wall Street Journal and broadcast live on both ABC and CBS radio, promised that business’s salvation lay in “a strengthening of the spiritual concept that underlies our American way of life.”

Accordingly, corporate America began marketing a new fusion of faith, freedom and free enterprise. These values had been conflated before, of course, but in the early 1940s they manifested in a decidedly new form. Previously, when Americans thought about the relationship between religion, politics and business, they gave little thought to the role of the national state, largely because it was so small it gave little thought to any of them. But now that the federal government had grown so significantly, corporate leaders sought to convince Americans that the New Deal threatened not only the economic freedoms of business leaders, but the religious and political freedoms of ordinary citizens as well. They worked tirelessly throughout the 1940s and 1950s to advance a new ideology that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.”

Initially, businessmen outsourced this campaign to an unlikely set of champions: ministers. Though this decision seemed unorthodox, the logic was laid out clearly in private. “Recent polls indicate that America’s clergymen are a powerful influence in determining the thinking and acting of the people in the economic realm,” noted one organizer, and so business leaders should “enlist large numbers of clergymen” to “act as minutemen, carrying the message upon all proper occasions throughout their several communities.”

Over the second half of the 1940s, corporate leaders lavishly funded new organizations of ministers who would make their case for them. Some of these groups secured donations from a broad array of businessmen. Reverend James W. Fifield’s Spiritual Mobilization, for instance, amassed millions in corporate and personal checks from leaders at companies such as General Motors, Chrysler, US Steel, Republic Steel, International Harvester, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Sun Oil, Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Colgate-Palmolive-Peet and countless more. Others leaned heavily on the generosity of a single patron. The Christian Freedom Foundation, created by Reverend Norman Vincent Peale and then led by layman Howard Kershner, was sustained almost single-handedly by Sun Oil President J. Howard Pew. The Pew family’s contributions to the organization averaged more than $300,000 a year for twenty-five years.

With this generous funding, ministers in these organizations spread the arguments of Christian libertarianism. “I hold,” Reverend Fifield asserted, “that the blessings of capitalism come from God. A system that provides so much for the common good and happiness must flourish under the favor of the Almighty.” But concern for the “common good” was uncommon in their arguments, which tended instead to emphasize the values of individualism. In their telling, Christianity and capitalism were indistinguishable on this issue: both systems rested on the fundamental belief that an individual would rise or fall on his or her own merit alone. Just as the saintly ascended to Heaven and sinners fell to Hell, the worthy rose to riches while the wretched were resigned to the poorhouse...

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

This Bird Has Flown

Monday, January 12, typically would have been a good day for my dad. That night the Oregon Ducks played The Ohio State Buckeyes for the NCAA Football National Championship. But my dad didn't see the game and we didn't get a chance to discuss it the next day.

At about 9:30 am -- after a brief illness -- my dad died. He was 81. He had been battling several health issues, but his death was still a bit of a shock.

To date, I haven't had a good cry. Sure, I've gotten a bit misty-eyed a time or two, but I haven't broken down. The main reason why is that it was a good death. He didn't suffer long and he died in his sleep. For my money, that's the best way to go.

I haven't gone as far as banging a drum like Zhuangzi (at the death of his wife), but I have taken some solace from that story.

Life and death. 

It's the ebb and flow of the existence we know.