Auras R Us

by Dennis Green

Over the years, I’ve had to learn to read people. As a teacher, as a journalist doing interviews, as a businessman — it was a matter of sheer survival. Not just facial expressions and body language, but also attitudes, motives and intentions. And I had the good fortune, in the early ‘80s, to take a class from a man named Donovan, who taught yoga at Mills College in Oakland, and advanced classes out of his little cottage on 41^st Street.

Donovan taught us a few positions, stretches and such things as “The Sun Exercise,” but he also spent a lot of time teaching us how to read people, how to protect ourselves from the psychic intrusions of others, how to get rid of negative energy stored in our bodies, and even how to read people’s auras. I was 40, the only man in a class of 10, and eight of the women were Mills students seeking more advanced training.

This was long before the current yoga craze, and at a time when it was still a little exotic. But I was on a tear, intent on growing some new antennae and getting my psychic house in order. I was also, I must admit, rather charmed by the company of all those attractive young women, especially when we did “therapeutic touch.” I made the sacrifice.

I got so good at the techniques that I began seeing people’s auras everywhere I went, and one week, when I was still working at Miller Freeman, I went to a Tuesday morning meeting of the Executive Committee and got the fright of my life. As we sat around the big conference table, I saw that the CEO, the VPs and publishers, to varying degrees, all had badly muddled auras.

In yoga, the aura is believed to be an energy field that emanates from the human body about 18 inches, and more vividly around the head, creating the “halo” shown in many religious paintings and sculptures of the gods, as well as the meditating Buddha. (Also imitated, enhanced or disguised by crowns, diadems, certain hairstyles and headdresses, especially the feathered headdress common in certain tribes…)

In the most psychically healthy person, the aura is very bright gold, and the more negative energy that accumulates, the more muddled, or muddied, and blackened the aura becomes. And yes, other colors are common to these stored or vibrant energy patterns: red for anger or passion, purple when a person is feeling noble and inspired by higher values, green for envy, blue for sadness, and brown in someone who is very earthy. All very simple vibration “frequencies,” and symbols universally known.

Donovan began every class by having us lie prone, practicing relaxation yoga, and letting waves of “golden sunlight” wash over us, starting at our heads and gradually pouring down the length of our bodies. We also did this exercise when we rose in the mornings at home, and before we went to bed.

In that conference room, I saw in the auras of two of the executives so much negative energy that they were almost entirely black. Hideous. Scared the beejesus out of me, because I had to work with these people all the time. But not for long. That week, I began negotiating my departure from the firm.

Sometimes it’s good to socialize, and sometimes it’s not.

So I added “Auras” to my repertoire. And I use the technique to this day, as well as the Sun Exercise, Golden Sunlight, “Cording,” Body of Glass, Out of Body and Blowing a Rose — all the many useful exercises and visualizations Donovan taught us.

But the black or muddled aura is most common to people who like to boss other people around, who work by intimidation, by “Cording” others with their intrusive will-power. In other word, bullies. More about this subject later…

©2010 Dennis Green

The Consequences of Measure B

by Dennis Green

The small island community of Alameda is facing one of those landmark decisions around development. Should rights to develop the former Naval Air Station, taking up fully one-third of the island’s surface, be granted to Southern California-based firm SunCal, and its partner, Shaw Homes, or not? Unable to reach a negotiated agreement with the City, the developer has turned directly to the voters who will make their decision final on February 2^nd.

The terms of the initiative are highly controversial, including a provision to suspend Measure A, a current limit on new dwellings, which may be no larger than duplexes. Some say, including our mayor and two other city council members, a majority, that funding provisions are woefully inadequate and will cost the taxpayers many millions for infrastructure and services.

But regardless of the arguments pro and con, the initiative has already had consequences for the citizens of Alameda. The impact of base redevelopment is already being felt. And those consequences are not pleasant.

The divisions caused by the controversies surrounding base re-use are many, they are bitter, and they are deep. Some of these fissures were predictable, and some were not. But regardless of the outcome, these divisions won’t go away.

To begin with, the developer is cynically aware of the past naiveté of Alameda voters, who have in recent memory supported several ballot measures which proved costly, even disastrous mistakes. The most obvious is the conversion of the local electric utility company, municipally-owned, into a “telecom” company that attempted to compete in the cable TV and high-speed internet business. That enterprise lost some $90 million and still faces several lawsuits by investors in the bonds who believe they were swindled.

These blithe spirits have also passed several tax increases, in the form of parcel taxes and increases on real estate transfer fees, of questionable merit, which have crippled businesses and especially maritime and real estate firms. So the developer knows, and we all know, that Alameda voters cannot be counted on to make the most intelligent decisions.

Supporting Measure B are many of the usual suspects, people inclined by ideology to support development for its own sake, or “affordable housing,” or who are so altruistic they want another ten thousand people or so to have the opportunity to live here. They are joined by a new demographic, affluent young families, refugees from Berkeley and San Francisco who couldn’t afford to buy homes in those communities but can make the nut here. Yuppies.

So Alameda is not the Navy Town, the working class town it was when I moved here in 1988. I was raised a sawmill kid, with those same working class values, and immediately felt right at home here. But that has changed.

The Yuppies call anyone opposed to rampant development “NIMBYs” and we accuse them of being ignorant of the history of this island, and what it was like before Utah Construction filled in the marshlands and the Bayshore, building tract houses and a shopping center where there was once a San Francisco bay front. The debate has gotten vituperative.

Moreover, without Measure A, there would be a forest of high-rise condos in Harbor Bay, and many more ugly, Los Angeles-style stucco apartment buildings all over the island, as there are along South Shore Drive. And if Measure A is suspended at Alameda Point, no one can guarantee that it won’t be challenged by property owners all over town.

But it doesn’t really matter anymore whether Measure B passes or not. The damage has already been done. Thousands of newcomers have expressed their profound disdain for the history of Alameda, the concerns of preservationists, and for the tastes and feelings of their neighbors. In their blogs, and in their ballot arguments, they have shown a snarky disregard for the “old timers” never known here before.

With all that, the community spirit once enjoyed by this island community has vanished, along with the neighborly, working class values that once prevailed. More Yuppies? OMG! Not in my backyard!

©2010 Dennis Green

Another Modest Proposal

by Dennis Green

Now that the Republicans have 41 seats in the Senate, out of 100, they should definitely try to impeach President Obama. He is not a leader. He is weak. He is certainly not a Ronald Reagan, let alone a George W. Bush.

So, if Newt Gingrich and his “Contract on America” gang could impeach Bill Clinton for having oral sex in the Oval Office, conservatives such as John McCain and Joe Lieberman should be able to impeach Obama for having sex upstairs, instead of achieving health care reform.

I know, I know, the Democrats say that if healthcare fails, those 38 million Americans without coverage will never vote Republican again. But who can count on them, anyway?

No, I would advise Republicans, just keep on voting “No!” on everything, except impeachment. Just because Obama hasn’t had a 9/11 on his watch — yet! — it could still happen, and Republicans have to hope that it does. What else could get him to invade Yemen?

Obama, after all, has retained a high personal approval rating only by deferring to Congress, and letting them look like fools. So the American people would rather hate a woman, like Nancy Pelosi…so what?

And the gender wars are still working for the GOP! Why else, in Massachusetts, would a man known primarily as a truck driver, whip a woman’s ass big time! What does she drive? Huh? Huh? A Toyota Prius? A minivan? I ask you.

And this is just the beginning of a populist revolt against that Socialist, that Knee-Grow, who hasn’t dipped a teabag in the First Lady’s cup — ever! We have a vision, and it comes straight from Massachusetts…witch trials! Burn ‘em all at the stake!

Who really cares about health care? It’s all about jobs! jobs! jobs! And mobs! mobs! mobs! Who is left on Obama’s side? Rahm Emmanuel? That guy was Bill Clinton’s political advisor, and look how that turned out! And he’s just one of many D.C. political hacks recycled by Obama.

So I say…let’s impeach him! If it was good enough for a good Orange County Quaker like Dick Nixon, it’s good enough for a half-breed Baptist from Nigeria like Barrack Hussein Obama. And the work won’t be finished there. Once we’ve installed Joe Biden as our new President, we can begin voting all the other incumbents out of office. Including that new guy in Massachusetts…

Why, a year from now, there could be 41 Democrats in the Senate and a white man in the White House, as its name implies the residence is intended. We can take back America now.

And as for all those dead bodies in Haiti..? Just imagine how many White Castle mini-burgers you could make!

©2010 Dean Swift

Greed Is Good!

by Dennis Green

Oliver Stone is making a sequel to Wall Street, with Michael Douglas, and it promises to be as insightful as the original. But in the meantime, I have my own Michael Douglas stories.

He was a theater arts major at UCSB about the same time I was a student there, and I saw him in several campus productions, including a fine rendition of Waiting for Godot. His father was often in the audience, and we pretended to ignore him.

Michael kept a big house in Montecito after his burgeoning success in Hollywood, appearing in The Streets of San Francisco, and later a number of major movies made there. Montecito is just south of Santa Barbara and a little over an hour, by car, north of L.A. A big enclave of old mansions and estates, it’s also home to Westmont Baptist College, where I taught Shakespeare, Survey of American Lit and Creative Writing in 1972.

Visiting friends in Santa Barbara one year, long after I’d moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I went to a festival at the old Catholic Mission. Sidewalk artists were inscribing some wonderful chalk art paintings on the broad pavements in front of the Mission, and the public had been invited to view these works, some of them completed, some still in progress.

So I was there, with the Clouses and my wife Stefanie, lingering over one particularly fine work of art, when a woman bumped into me, and then began rubbing up against me in a quite familiar fashion. A svelte, trim blonde all in tight-fitting black leather, the pants, the boots, the jacket, the works. And I looked her in the eye and said, “Nice day, isn’t it?”

And suddenly, I realized that there was a man with her, also dressed in fashionable black leather, and it was Michael Douglas! I had, many years before, interviewed him when he was named “Alumnus of the Year” by the UCSB Alumni Association, where I had worked as editor of the newsmagazine mailed to some 68,000 alumni.

And he was pissed. He took the woman by the arm and pulled her away from the sidewalk art display. I saw them a few minutes later, standing in the parking area, Michael berating her with anger in his expression, shaking his fist at her. And I had another realization: she was his wife!

This was the same wife whom, I was told many years later, by old friend Alsie Ellington, trying to return to the States from Santiago, Chili, where he’d been living with his third wife, a dancer who had left him to live with her first boyfriend…(Boy, do these plots ever thicken as we age..!)…the same Mrs. Douglas who made Alsie feel unwelcome when he had visited Michael at his estate in Montecito, after Michael had invited him there for dinner shortly after making Wall Street.

Michael Douglas is married these days to Katherine Zeta-Jones, who is currently starring in a revival of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music with Angela Lansbury on Broadway, which Diane hopes to see in March. And I’m really looking forward to seeing the new sequel to Wall Street. It should be a humdinger, for now we all know just how good greed is.

©2010 Dennis Green

Knee! Grow!

by Dennis Green

Call it “the other N-word”! And there was Stephen Colbert, leading his audience in a chant, one half shouting, “KNEE!” and the other half chiming in, “GROW!” “KNEE-GROW! KNEE-GROW!”

And there was Morgan Freeman, standing just off-stage but on-camera, and Colbert urges him, “C’mon, Morgan! Knee! Grow!” And Morgan gives them all a deadly killer stare.

Surely one of those classic moments in television history.

But now “Negro” has joined the lexicon of verboten words and phrases, along with “bitch,” “Kike,” “redneck,” “honky,” “queer,” “Roundeyes,” “Gook,” “Girlie-Man,” “Custer Died For Your Sins,” “Out of Vietnam NOW!” and “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.”

Political correctness rules the day.

I’m French and Irish, but hardly anybody sings, “Froggie went a’courtin’ and he did ride, uh-huh!” when I walk by, and I haven’t been accused of being a member of the IRA for at least a dozen years. But I’m well aware that about a hundred years ago, the Irish, the Germans, Poles, and Italians were at the bottom of the ethnic pile on.

And yes, I know some older black people in Oakland who are much more comfortable with the term “Negro” than they are with “African-American,” or even “black.” Yesterday, the airwaves were filled with self-anointed spokespeople for the culture honored along with Martin Luther King, Jr.

And what I didn’t hear was what those of us who have worked in the black community, in Oakland politics, in the inner city institutions such as hospitals and clinics know for a fact: everybody’s a racist in his or her most private moments. In Oakland, for at least the past ten years, the struggle for power between blacks and Hispanics, (or is it “Latinos” this week?), has been…vigorous.

I worked on Jerry Brown’s first campaign for Mayor of Oakland, and I was well-aware that his chances were greatly enhanced by the fact that the previous administration, that of Elihu Harris, had been so dysfunctional that the grip on politics there by the black community leaders — especially the ministers — was weakened. And Jerry brought the first economic development to Oakland it had seen in many years.

Oakland City Council member and Hispanic powerhouse Ignacio de la Fuentes, who would have, in the ordinary course of things, followed Jerry’s second term as Mayor, was nudged aside by the return of long-time Congressman Ron Dellums. His Mayoral reign has been a disaster, rife with corruption, cronyism, absentee governing, a huge deficit, and a surge in crime.

So there is no magic solution to the ills of the black inner city. Economic development downtown does not guarantee prosperity in the neighborhoods. But neither does merely electing black politicians with connections in Washington, D.C. Having a dream doesn’t mean it can’t turn into a nightmare.

©2010 Dennis Green

How Implacable Nature Is

by Dennis Green

Nature has often been romanticized, often worshipped, even personified, but I don’t think we really comprehend it at all. It wasn’t glorified in New England by Emerson and Thoreau until it had been largely “tamed,” when the average citizen of that part of the country could live indoors and not worry that the next storm would tear the roof off.

In more savage times, Nature was feared and worshipped, even placated by various kinds of sacrifice, including human beings. In ancient Egypt, the gods were so feared that the incense used by the priests in worship rituals was a valuable trade commodity.

During the modern age, nature has been regarded, by the French Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, for example, as “the benign indifference of the universe,” which takes no particular interest in the fate or future of mankind. By others, such as 20^th Century Evangelical Christian preachers Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts, America is God’s Chosen Land, unless it must be smited mightily by such disasters as Katrina or 9/11, for its sins.

Likewise, the Very Right Reverend Roberts commented recently that Haiti was struck by an earthquake because of its “pact with the Devil” in the 19^th Century to get out from under French colonial rule. By that I assume he meant its embrace of Voodoo, (“Voudou”), a combination of French Catholicism and West African beliefs. I suspect he’s never heard of plate tectonics.

In 1989, I flew in a private helicopter over the collapsed Cypress Freeway, brought down by the Las Prietas earthquake, and saw these lumps between the sandwiched concrete slabs, with smoke coming from some of the big lumps. They were cars! With people trapped inside them. And I don’t believe for a moment that all the 50 or so people who died on the Cypress that day had been singled out by God for their sins.

No, we inhabit a planet that is still in the very unstable stages of geologic development, one besieged by seismic and volcanic activity, by uplift and erosion, by storms and climate change. And as much as we may disturb its ecology — with strip mining, clear-cut logging, damning its rivers, wasting its prairies and polluting its atmosphere — it is ultimately beyond our control.

People who have sailed its seas in small boats know this all too well, that nature is utterly implacable, that during a storm at sea, there is no escape, nowhere to go. “You can go below, and many have died that way,” sailors say. Scientists who study its magnetic poles, and who know that they may shift, and what the consequences will be if they do, also know how vulnerable we are, no matter how much we think we are masters of our fate!

So if we don’t temper our hubris somewhat, Nature will do it for us. If not with an earthquake, or a tsunami or a hurricane, with our own mortality. For many of us, long before the Boneyard, come the aches and pains, the failures of certain vital organs, the bypass and the transplants and the procedures. Or just the feeling of running down.

No amount of incense, so far as I can tell, and I’ve burned my share, can fend off our “fate.” Nevertheless, we persist in doing what we can, what we think will make a difference. Stem cell research? Cloning? The miracles of modern medical technology? The glory of God’s grace? Whatever.

For whatever we do, Nature will have her way with us, and even the weatherman doesn’t have a clue what’s coming next. So hang on.

©2010 Dennis Green

Malignant Narcissists

by Dennis Green

If humility is not your bag, there may still be hope for you. A comparison between Judaism, Christianity and Islam — concerning the nature and the claims made on behalf of Jeshua of Nazareth — can be revealing. And reassuring.

Islam says that Jeshua, (aka “Jesus” in Romanized texts), was a great Prophet in the same line of prophets as Abraham, Ishmael, Moses and Mohammed, but that he was not the son of Allah, and that Allah is a lone and solitary deity, transcendent and numinous and beyond human comprehension or portrayal. Not a person in any sense at all.

Some Jews say that Jesus was a great teacher, but that he was definitely not the Messiah promised by the Prophets, or else his coming would have brought universal peace and justice to mankind. They also say that Isaac, not Ishmael, was the son Yahweh commanded Abraham to sacrifice, and that the tribe of Israel is descended from Isaac, that Ishmael and his usurper mother Hagar were, correctly, banished by Abraham to wander in the desert alone and afraid.

Both the believer in Islam and the Jew would also say that Jeshua was contrived by Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee, as the Son of God, and the Messiah, and that the New Testament was purged of most of its Jewish names and “Romanized” by Saul, who changed his name to Paul, in order to make Christianity more acceptable to the Romans, if not during his lifetime, then eventually, as it was.

Many devout Jews and Muslims also say that early Church fathers rejected many of the true gospels in favor of those that perpetrated their view of New Testament doctrine and dogma, such as the Gospels of Mary Magdalene, Judas, Thomas and others. They also say that if Jeshua/Jesus were without sin, he would not have asked his cousin John to baptize him, to cleanse him of his sinful nature as a fully human male.

And it is true that several early conferences of bishops, such as the Nicene Council, decided which texts were authentic and which were not, and put their imprimatur on some and not on others. These are very crucial contradictions, so what are we to believe?

If Jesus was not the son of God, and never claimed to be, then the bishops, and perhaps even the gospel writers, are prevaricating. If he was not the son of God, but claimed to be, then he is the one prevaricating. And if he falsely claimed divinity, then he was a malignant narcissist, and a liar of the first rank, and nothing else he says can be trusted.

And if Jesus was the son of God as Paul says he was, and whom Paul and the gospel writing disciples say he claimed to be, then believing Jews and Muslims are so mistaken that they cannot be taken seriously, let alone saved. And that’s what orthodox Christianity says they are — damned all to Hell, as infidels.

Feel better now?

Humility may be a virtue, but the historic Jesus is portrayed, even by orthodox Christian doctrine, as having none. He repeatedly makes fun of his disciples for being “of little faith,” and presents himself as possessing a wisdom and a vision none of them can quite appreciate, let alone duplicate. He claims succession from the line of Abraham, Moses and all the inspired prophets, and constantly admonishes his disciples for being dense.

He displays spectacular and miraculous abilities, converting water to wine, raising the dead, multiplying the loaves and fishes, and coming back to life after crucifixion and burial. He contradicts most sacred Judaic beliefs and practices, including prayer in public places, money-changing in the Temple, and he replaces the Ten Commandments with only two. “But I say unto you…”

Moreover, in a culture that places a high value on material success and careful planning and foresight, even scheming, he says, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and “It is more difficult for a rich man to get into Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”

So much for respect for one’s elders and their traditions. Jeshua/ Jesus was many things, but none of the three Abrahamic traditions presents him as having the virtue of humility. So go ahead, indulge your inner narcissist! It’s okay.

©2010 Dennis Green