Solitaire

Something on a personal note-I was diagnosed, several years ago, with three mental illnesses-bipolar disorder, psychosis, and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Each of them is nearly impossible to treat. I went through a series of medications before they finally settled me down on my current cocktail. Psychiatry is kinda funny; they basically guinea pig combinations of medications on you until you find something that actually works out, and they all take at least a month to kick in for some reason.

I found that, on top of the crippling effects of my disorder, I had new crippling effects from the medications. Until about a month ago, when they switched me over to welbutrin, I literally could not read more than five or ten pages without taking a rest. I went two or three years unable to concentrate enough to read, all the while being expected to work for a living.

As of now, most of my symptoms are under control; the OCD (religious scrupulosity) is gone for the most part, and the psychosis doesn't trouble me anymore either. I still get the manic/depressive mood swings, but they're tolerable. The main thing I suffer from as of now is that and the social fallout from going from a sane atheist to a druggie to a madman to well, someone with a strong spiritual side-of all my social contacts, we simply drifted apart as we lost common ground. I made the mistake of not talking with them, of letting my anger get the better of me, and now I'm mostly all alone. Sometimes I wonder if a single one of them has changed their opinion on anything in the last five years, or if they all continue to have everything figured out.

(Later I might make a post on scrupulosity, directed towards sufferers and things they can do to get it treated).

Where art comes in is simple; I think it's been the key factor in my recovery. I was literally reduced to total non-functionality, and I picked up a little kid's art kit and made an ugly watercolor picture of a tree and a sunset.

Immediately every symptom and desire I had vanished. I felt whole for the first time in years. Later i'd discover that there's at bare minimum a neurological connection between art or creative activity, prayer, and healing (I'll add meditation in here too, since I think-though i'm not sure-that it's closely related to prayer mentally). In other words, they change your brain waves, relax your system, release hormones, and get you recovered to some extent. And this is on a scientific level, so nobody can really ditch it. I've found that my delusions vanish-I feel like a normal guy-when I write fiction for extended periods of time, and the feeling of wellness persists for a long time, but it vanishes if I don't work, and the symptoms return. Finding time to work with a full-time job that leaves me sore all over is a problem, but I've found that eliminating television, movies, etc., all does the trick.

Later on I'd take a short version of the Myers-Briggs personality test and come up with "The Artist"/ISFP (Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving) and then decide that I wanted to do something with art with my life. Which is what i'm working towards whenever I've got free time. It's given me direction, something I lacked as a Political Science major (which I just did because I was very good at it).

A link for more information: http://www.artashealing.org/
A book I picked up on the topic-Art Heals by Shaun McNiff
Another book I picked up, at a doctor's recommendation-Touched with Fire, Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison

I may update the post after i've read the two books (now that I can read again).

This one's gonna be another mini-lecture. Like the one on country, nation, and state, i'm going to try to get into the mire and extract the three from one another. The reason behind this is that while I think patriotism is a good thing, it often gets confused with nationalism and chauvinism, and used to describe an attitude better described with the latter two.

Alright, the boring part. Definitions. Patriotism: devoted love, support, and defense of one's country; Love of and devotion to one's country.; love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it. Let's look at that. I'm noticing in the dictionary, the first one was actually followed by 'national loyalty', which I think is innaccurate. I think the overriding theme of patriotism is a love of one's country-and what i'm going to be getting at, is that this is more than just simplistic flag waving, ribbons on the back of cars, and "Support our troops" type slogans and jingoism. I'll come back to that, but first we need to define Chauvinism and Nationalism.

Starting with nationalism, I think we can get to the root of some confusion. The term is usually associated with the situation in Europe prior to and during the first and second world wars. Essentially you had a bunch of independent states, some of them empires or with imperial ambitions, jockeying to be at the top of the game and rule the world-a sort of group egoism was at play, where the prevalent notion was that you take care of you and yours at whatever cost, no matter how moral or immoral. It led to two of the most devastating conflicts in history. Going back to the cultural definition of nation, we also see that nationalism can be the aspiration for national independence (as in the American Revolution, when you had two seperate cultural entities waging it out), which to me can be a good thing. But more often, the notion is-i'm using the American Heritage dictionary here-"Devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation.
The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals." It's group egoism, egoism being an ethical theory treating self-interest as the foundation of morality. At, I will point this out, everyone else's expense.

Now that nationalism's been covered, we'll get to chauvinism. From wikipedia, here's a good root definition: "blind and unquestioned zealous devotion to one's country [or other group of reference]". It comes from a semi-mythological bonapartist (a loyalist to Napoleon, even after he went into exile) named Chauvin, who was legendary for, ah...the above. Despite being wounded and crippled.

Why is knowing the difference between the three at all important? Because in America, I think in power, we have a bunch of nationalists ruling the scene, and in the general population, we've got them using chauvinistic propaganda, both of which are detrimental to patriotism and the good of the country we live in. Depending on your thoughts, i'm going to go into more depth on what I think patriotism really is, and a bit about love of country and love of society.

All I'm hoping, right now, is that some gears and cogs are turning in your head, and you're thinking about the three terms now as independent of one another (and probably thinking about the new, almost dead word 'chauvinism'). Largely because I think this is a key to understanding some of the greater trends going on in the nation at the moment.

More: http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_patriotism.html

"Creativity likes constraints and specifics." - Bert Dodson

What I want to do is summarize the current political situation in America. Exactly where i'm supposed to start is beyond me, so I'll go with the gestalt as I see it.

Capitalism is dying the way communism did. The environment is trashed. Resources are being depleted rapidly, and we need a new type of economy that keeps all of the above in mind. Meanwhile, we're seeing increasingly petty squabbles over cultural issues-abortion, gay rights, gun rights-which replaced the economy for decades in terms of significance to voters-until recently, with the stock market showing off bipolar tendencies and the price of oil dramatically increasing. Terrorism, for its part, is being used as the ultimate distraction to domestic woes, with incredible success (it's always been a threat-my take on it is that it's being dealt with very, very poorly by incompetents, who're also taking advantage of the attacks). At the same time, a lot of issues are being totally sidelined and ignored, and mainstream media has yet to even pick up on them, such as the slow but steady slouching towards a police state and the corporate/government lines blurring to obscurity. The situation calls for some pretty radical activism and political involvement if we don't want to see ourselves stumbling blindly into a new dark age. There's more, and I can't think of it right now.

In the good news, we did have the party of dirty tricks thrown out of office just recently. So there is hope.

The above is a pretty big series of big assertions with no evidence provided (yet). I'm aware of this. I won't get to any of that in this post, but it'll come up later, as well as some of my theories as to why this is happening, what can be done, and what i'll be doing to (hopefully) help with this blog.

But back on topic-direction. Politically, anyway, this blog is going to include essays and my attempts to simplify and bring clarity to numerous issues. I'm going to discuss concepts like nationalism, patriotism, and chauvinism-their differences, particularly, and the dramatic misuse of them in contemporary talk-rebellion and conformity, to name another-basically, I'll attempt to get rid of some of the confusion that would lead people to, say, read two paragraphs above, scream their heads off about America haters without bothering to consider that the writer in question mind actually care about his country and dislike where it's headed. If you are screaming, I can recommend some breathing exercises. Bear with me for a while. On top of all that, I'm going to make an effort to same something NEW in my posts, as opposed to repetition of things already being said. This is easier said than done.

Anyway, i've been out of the essay game (been writing fiction steadily instead for about a year now) and the gears in my head are grinding together and making a lot of noise, so i'll stop and suggest anyone who wants a very accurate analysis of the current situation go to the Archdruid Report in my links to the right. If you think the idea of an archdruid is silly, I invite you to go over there and get your intellect smacked to the ground. Believe me. At least humor me. And the good Mr. Greer.