Prof. Howard Zinn’s May, 2009 article in The Progressive speaks directly to the mentality now being adopted by Obama’s supporters, the one drilled into us from earliest childhood in the form of myths of our patriarchal cult of kinetic power.

Excerpted from Changing Obama’s Military Mindset
By Howard Zinn
May, 2009
The Progressive

In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise—and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.

Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, “It’s not just that we have to get out of Iraq.” He said “get out of Iraq,” and we mustn’t forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq—not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.

But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: “It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq.”

What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?

It’s the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers—that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.

It’s the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we’ve been at bringing democracy all over the world.

Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.

[...]

My heart sank when Obama said that. [Emphasis added.]

Watch this The Daily Show with Jon Stewart segment on Dick Cheney’s AEI speech (transcript here).

According to Cheney, "There is no middle ground." His is an absolutely dualistic cosmos, in which the following conflations have occurred:

good v. evil = growth v. decay = self v. other = us v. them.

There will be no peace in Cheney’s world. Sadly, Obama shares many of these misconceptions about being human.

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The fear that powers our insane militarism, is symptomatic of what ails us. We’re at perpetual war with the other side of our own borders.

In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the first thoughts of a self-aware consciousness are explored. When consciousness first thought, "I am," it next thought, "I fear what I am not."

The mystical response goes like this: since the cosmos is a pouring forth, from out of itself back into itself, there is no ‘I,’ neither the first person singular pronoun nor the numeral; the cosmos is fundamentally kenotic, self-emptying, not exclusively kinetic. We are not apart from, nor other than, our own source.

And yet here in the West. in the absolute dualism of sectarian and secular monotheists alike, we have enshrined an absolute division between our selves and our source at the center of our conception of being in the world.

This is the progenitor of every self/other division, from pejorative stereotypes to porous border walls. Note that the self/other divide is necessarily a semi-permeable membrane. Thus, the root cause of human suffering is this: we cellf-imprison our selves in cellves of our own mistaken making. That’s right, astute ones: our misconceptions turn us into cosmic pinheads.

For example, when we look up into the night sky, we’ve been taught mistakenly to implode our own psyches into quantum singularities of egocentric pain.

This mythology falsely places fear at the center of being human. Here’s a simple illustration to demonstrate this primeval principle.

What is this?

___________________

Is that an absolute boundary? Or a segment arising in a field? Are we many things, or one?

In fundamentalist absolute monotheism, and that goes for absolute market fundamentalists, too, there can be only One. Your access to the Promised Land, therefore, rests entirely on your relationship to the proper authority. We take one position in a field (The Terrorists are coming! Regulation is evil! Obama always means well! or what have you), and define it as the center of the universe, judging others by their relative stances.

The opposite mythology rests on experiencing the insight that I and the Other are One; the goal is to experience identity with divinity. In the former, aggressive competition in defense of the illusion of the separately existing ego, is the central idol, making it ultimately self-defeating; in the latter, empathic compassion clearly is the proper motive for all human action, making progressive humanism only natural.