vol. 3 issue 12
Greetings,
We are living in a post-America world.
As my friend, poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller says, “We probably won’t recognize the world in 2024. Who could imagine 2020? The future is unknown not known.”
We will need new stories, and new truths.
Many are frightened by this vanguard, but the truth is that the truth is fluid.
For some of us, “truth” justifies lives built on fantasy, typically one predicated on some form of spiritual better-than. For others, “truth” justifies lives built upon manipulation, such as in the currency markets or in corporate run media. And for still others, the pursuit of truth has equated with becoming a target of harm, such as journalists killed or imprisoned for uncovering despots and their evil aims.
docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind, started as a way to explore how to make sense of the rising tides of anxiety, depression, and even suicide in the US. That led to finding and exploring the correlative, if not a causative, links between these states of collective mental unrest and the parallel rise of neoconservatism, environmental destruction, and monopolization of resources by a few.
This year, we’re going deeper into the legacy of this within healthcare, including public health, medicine, and the cult of evidence-based everything which when applied judiciously produces positive public and personal health outcomes, but when manipulated — as is too often the case — amounts to nothing more than gaming a hierarchical system for profit and domination.
The truths of our past remain true
We’re exploring the truths did we once take for granted, truths about medicine and healing that a small few thought were either too powerful for the rest of us to have at hand, or were too complex for hierarchy, which demands simplicity, and so demeaned them into retreat.
It’s important to do this so, as Ethelbert also says, we do not forget the past. That includes finding and remembering the lost beautiful truths about our power to heal, not just keeping in mind the history of injury either through oppression or hierarchy.
We cannot live in the past, as that is not where the power of the future is found. But we also cannot create a future without all the tools the hierarchy forced us to leave behind in the past. And so, we must retrieve them, move forward, and ensure that the truths of our past, the collective and the personal, stay alive within us, not overwritten by others who want to steal our power by erasing our truths.
After the insurrection of January 6 and the astounding defense of it through the shattering of Originalist norms, through lies and obfuscation, as well as bizarre fantastical reinterpretations of what happened that day, why it happened, and the attempts to recast the terrifying events portending it and the events it potentially portends…docu-mental is now concerned with the preservation of the truths others seek to rewrite.
Like nearly everything else in our country, in our world, “truth” has been monetized, and so it has been branded. Brands are powerful, and so where truth is a brand, the cultification of it must follow, or else the brand collapses, and is worthless.
Yet, when truth is an angle, not a fact, it slashes the knees of history. Eventually, the angle cuts too sharp and severs the sinews of the lies that bind the truthiness to our policies and procedures, in healthcare, in everything.
Where mental health is concerned, for example, earlier this year the American Psychiatric Association released a mea culpa pretty much saying they were sorry to have created a system of diagnosis, treatment, and “knowledge” that was predicated on lies…racist and patriarchal lies about who is supposed to be considered the “norm”.
It causes us to ask: if truth is merely a brand, and the past is collapsing, whose brand should endure?
The ‘null’ state and the death cult
Approaching our third full year now of “docu-mentaling” and analyzing how the branding of truth has shaped not just our policymaking and political discussions, but also our mindsets, and thus our states of mind, be they peaceful or anxious, I have developed a calculus for determining an answer to the question of what should endure.
We are anxious, depressed, and other points in between on the continuum of mental health because we are now in a null state. The power brokers in our country, with their insistence upon controlling resources, people, and most of all the ascendency of their brand of truth, but with no vision for the future, have become little more than a death cult. They are dangerous, but will soon become irrelevant because even if they “win”, theirs is such a barren vision, there will eventually be no way to sustain it. The earth will die. They will die. We will die.
Many of us see this, and ask, perhaps even fear: What will come next? We truly do not know. Without the foundation of what we thought we knew, we must create something novel. But with what as our foundation?
Calculating the ‘new’ old truth
Therein lies my calculus: whoever has been harmed the most is usually whose truth is least explored, most ignored, and variegated with a richness the simpleton status quo is incapable of providing. The stories of what has been lost are the stories where truth and beauty were lost to violence and mendacity. The stories contain the depth we know we lack, even if after decades, scores, and centuries of having been made so bland by fitting ourselves to the straight and narrow of the consensus, we no longer possess the vocabulary to describe it.
The real truth is the one that surpasses branding, the one that is fluid, the one that is supportive, not oppressive. It doesn’t require a cult of “true believers”, be they insurrectionists or psychiatrists. It requires loving adults committed to seeing the complexity of life, not the ones who need the narrow band of belief to which all others must adhere or be conquered. That is what democracy is, but the notion of it has been usurped and co-opted by the priests of the status quo.
Let the death cult die, please, while we live on. To do that, we need all of ourselves, especially the pieces the death cult’s perditious priests insist are of no value, particularly our collective intentions to birth a new, just, beautiful and true world.
It is in these lost items, moments, thoughts, perspectives, relationships, and equations where the power of our future waits for us to plug in. Whether it is to do with our medicine, our music, our food, our beliefs, and most of all, our way of thinking and relating to the world and one another, these are what docu-mental is dedicated to re-discovering.
And once we take them back, it will be us, not the liars, who decide what truths to keep. My belief is that we will choose the truths that best serve a world of peace and harmony.
Big whooping news! Introducing Ensouled: the online journal of applied and cultural astronomy
I was so excited to see the Mars Rover Perseverance touch down on that little hot rock earlier this month, I cheered through my tears. The implications are so enormous, even the most astute of boffins at NASA can’t predict what our ability to travel millions of light years away and communicate back home with only an 11 minute delay will mean for humanity.
The recent announcement that Jeff Bezos is leaving amazon to focus on his space exploration, meanwhile, left me feeling queasy, not cheerful. When I was an antitrust reporter, I considered the depth and breadth of Bezos’ command and control empire at amazon as simply a proof of concept for his mission to the moon. So impervious to criticism was he to antitrust complaints, and so outsized his fixation on gobbling up what seems to be all of northern Virginia for its IT infrastructure, as well as the contracts to service the government’s defense and space program infrastructures, it was clear there was a game behind the game.
Just listen to what he says in this video of him unveiling his Blue Origin space vehicle.
Bezos’ stated desires to turn Earth into more or less a staging ground for whatever humans need while living in space, will be well-served by all he has learned while he helped turn this little blue orb of ours into a game ball throbbing 24/7 with industry and connection.
That we would go to space was perhaps inevitable. That Bezos and people like him should be the humans to decide our fate and policies once there should not be. It has kept me up at night more than once thinking about it.
It sets off an existential crisis to consider how we humans are expanding ourselves throughout the unknown in our current states of ignorance and stupidity. We don’t know what’s out there! We only know what we are barely able to understand NASA tells us is there, and they only know what they have asked of the universe to tell them, and with only the relatively limited funds we give them to do it.
How do we know we are asking the right questions? How do we know that what we’re learning is all there is to the equations? What stories and truths will we need to adjust the more information from out there comes back to us? To go blindly into the galaxy making the same dumb mistakes we’ve made here seems like a real waste of space.
Just because Bezos has the upper-hand on earth doesn’t mean that even if he has a vision and the means, any space authority automatically should default to him, or anyone else.
It’s either awful timing or excellent timing, depending upon one’s point of view, as to whether our national reckoning has come at the time when we are actively exploring other planets. It can be a sign of our tendency to build empires of stupidity and call it democracy, or it can be a chance to re-imagine democracy and go humbly into that abyss with an open heart and clear understanding of equality.
I prefer to think that we will address our limitations here on earth and not take them with us into space. I hope enough of us anyway, will leave behind the racism, the hierarchies, the entitlements, the persecution of “different”, leave it all in our past – so far past it becomes a strange dream.
And that is why next month marks the debut of, tada!
Ensouled: the online journal of applied and cultural astronomy.
Just like we’re doing here with docu-mental, gathering what has been forgotten on earth before we create the structures of what’s to come, Ensouled will explore the past and future of human’s relationship to the sky, to the gods, and how we’ve brought the stars down to earth and incorporated them into our civilizations past and present.
How did these beliefs and stories lead to the policies around space exploration and the sciences of our universe that we have today?
The semi-scholarly Ensouled will also examine what policies are worth taking with us when we start populating space, whenever in the future that is…probably sooner than we think.
As the name implies, Ensouled does have a distinct editorial point of view: that the Cosmos has its own intelligence, that it has a soul and we are merely an infinitesimal part of whatever its intentions are for itself, that beyond the beyond are truths we do not know exist because our thinking is too puny, but we can learn to live there in peace and harmony anyway.
Let’s all claim our place in the sky before we are assigned it. Let’s be sure to collect and examine what has been said about our human “stardom” before it is obscured.
I already have a handful of founding members. If you’d like to become one of them, please contact me by responding to this newsletter email or at whitneyfishburn at gmail dot com.
docu-mental will still scour our american terra firma while Ensouled circles the heavens.
I am so excited!!
A little extra:
Here’s an email “E-note” I received earlier this week from E. Ethelbert Miller, sent to his Beloved Community, and from where the above quote about 2024 was taken, printed with permission:
The Republican Party must decide between Trump and chemo. The media needs to ignore “the private citizen.” Anyone who believes Trump should run for president also believes in Groundhog Day and wants a one-way ticket to the past. We probably won’t recognize the world in 2024. Who could imagine 2020?
The future is unknown not known.
We know actually what type of president Trump will be. No more waiting for him to “act” presidential. We now know the past, we just must not forget it. What we are presently witnessing is the transformation of the Republican Party into a White Nationalist Party. No secret here. No secret there. If you thought a Muslim ban was unbelievable wait until you see the new signs that say “White Only” or “No Chinese allowed.”
Fascism should never become fashionable. Beware of white fists in black gloves. Learn Japanese if you get shipped to an internment camp or Spanish if you can’t climb a wall. For the rest of us - be afraid but find your spine and the courage to fight back. Everyday build. Every election vote. If you race against racism- don’t lose. Our nation is not simply “Biden” it’s time. We are struggling to keep breathing. We must take back the air and America. Work to keep the promise and find the paradise.
Patriotism without Brotherhood and Sisterhood is not love. We either build community or embrace chaos. The Beloved community is just beyond the horizon. If we have faith and not fear we can reach it. Don’t let anyone who wishes to be a Dictator stand in the way. It’s time to embrace the Whitman in our souls and sing the new spirituals.
Yes, I hear this nation singing. Help me to believe. Oh Tubman, come lead me out of darkness. - E. Ethelbert Miller
Peace,
Whitney