Space Oddity

My senior year of high school, I had an English teacher who taped a poster for an organization called Beyond War to the lectern. Said poster was either a painting or photograph of a globe seen from outer space with a phrase something like "Imagine a World... Beyond War." Because he had a manner that inspired a mildly cult-like following, students eagerly took in this sign of a side interest of his and pestered him to tell them about the poster. He would regularly put them off, saying that One Day he'd tell us about it but not today. Finally, at the end of the year, he cracked open the vault to reveal his participation in this group that some sort of international simultaneous satellite hookup where audiences clustered in auditoriums from Sao Paulo to Moscow would look at the TVs and go "Oooooh!" all at once.

I'm quite certain I've missed the finer details (dimly recalled now; dimly understood then). But I recall the moment in that classroom that this teacher's carefully woven spell had broken. The playful, chortling teases by a teacher who probably hoped to win recruits to this goofy local cult (which I later learned was aligned with a group called Creative Initiative) - for this? Or... wait, say it again? Some paradigm-shifting adult version of LiveAid?

I recalled the woo-woo of this Beyond War hooey as I looked up one of my favorite ever pieces by Markos: a takedown of Dennis Kucinich. Granted, I had formed a dislike of Kucinich without having bothered to actually look up his record or read his positions on the issues. A greater nonentity is scarcely imaginable. But until coming across that kos post, I had no idea how malign some of Kucinich's positions truly are (or - in the case of his anti-choice past - were, before he decided to run for president).

So returning to this post reminded me this time of the Creative Initiative folks. And just because I never could figure out what this teacher was trying to subliminally inculcate in his classes doesn't mean I can't make fun of it. And draw possibly bogus parallels to other ideas I also don't understand.

So on with the fun.

Here's Kucinich describing the new cabinet department he would institute if (everyone else was kidnapped by aliens and) he were elected President: the Department of Peace (which most of us know as the State Department):

We can conceive of peace as not simply the absence of violence but the presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of human awareness, of respect, trust, and integrity. We can conceive of peace as a tool to tap the infinite capabilities of humanity to transform consciousness and conditions that impel or compel violence at a personal, group, or national level toward creating understanding, compassion, and love. We can bring forth new understandings where peace, not war, becomes inevitable. We can move from wars to end all wars to peace to end all wars. Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make nonviolence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development for economic and political justice and for violence control.

Here's an even better one, which I saved for last. An excerpt from Kucinich's keynote address at something called the "Dubrovnik Conference on the Alchemy of Peacebuilding":

Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe. Matter transcends to return to spirit. The interchangeability of matter and spirit means the starlit magic of the outermost life of our universe becomes the soul-light magic of the innermost life of our self. The energy of the stars becomes us. We become the energy of the stars. Stardust and spirit unite and we begin: One with the universe. Whole and holy. From one source, endless creative energy, bursting forth, kinetic, elemental. We, the earth, air, water and fire-source of nearly fifteen billion years of cosmic spiraling.

Instead of cluttering the debate stage, he needs a show in Vegas. Now that Siegfried? Roy? (whichever one was mauled by the tiger) is out of commission, maybe Dennis could fill in. Picture a dark stage. A single spotlight switches on above, its beam piercing the swirling vapor of the smoke machine. Suddenly a nebbishy, elfin figure appears. The crowd goes wild, wowed with his woo-woo.

[cross-posted at Vernon Lee]