Women's Legacy Project

Our Lives Change The World

cultural incorporation

Zeal Gone Too Far

A TO Z, A to Z 2023

When I started the A to Z this year I switched my topic from a focused topic to a the far-ranging exploration of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that zip around in my head as something more than a fleeting thought.

I think it is most appropriate to wrap up this a to z writing challenge by looking at a fascination or interest, something for which we feel a zeal, and how a love of something can take over a person and become an evil obsession. How does this happen? What institutions encourage this? Is this transformation that comes from within a person naturally, or one that invades a person from the outside?

As a student of human culture I am intrigued by popular culture and how small group ideas incorporate into the broader culture. My master’s thesis was in this topical area. I looked at how medical institutions incorporated alternative birthing practices into medical birthing centers and delivery suites. My thesis looked at how a behavior, such as home birth, that threatens an established practice can be dissembled and parts of the practice can diffuse the felt need for the subculture practice by placing the most visible parts of the alternative behaviors into the institutional practices. Benefit need not be gained, but it should be believed.

Decades later, I believe I was right. Maternal mortality in the U.S. has risen dramatical from the time I researched and wrote my thesis.

Planned Parenthood Federation. 2019.

The Centers for Disease Control reported 0.41 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions between 2013–18 and that the maternal mortality rate was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020.

The Centers for Disease Control reported 0.41 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions between 2013–18 and that the maternal mortality rate was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020.

Beliefs about life and death are of course fueled by zeal. But Zealotry does not belong here. No one wins through a zealot’s stance. The Zealots of the bible were violent revolutionaries who fought against Roman occupation. Roman governors and army returned and killed the zealots.

So much for zealotry being a strategy for success.

The transformation of passion into intolerance can be invisible to those internal to the process. This relates to self-awareness. Milton Bennett, Ph.D. in a self-published document, later included in E. Dunbar’s edited volume, Indoctrinated to Hate, posits that the conditions for suppression of self-reflexive consciousness are easily manipulated by leader who demand uncritical acquiescence to authority. Any person who has ever taken an Introduction to Psychology course in college knows about how Stanley Milgram’s experiment in the 1950s showed how people can become hateful, punishing beings in a short time span.

It is impossible to argue with any form of “true believers.” Blind obedience is just that. Logic does not enter into the creation of their reality.

All we can do as individuals is support civil governance that excludes forcing belief onto individuals. We can also look for people we know who are zealous and offer them unconditional love so as to counter any other calls to indoctrination they may be experiencing.

HOW, Exactly, Arizona Elections Are Being Stolen

Election 2012, technique, Tucson

Crappola. I want to be a regular old empty nest blogger and non-political writer, but I am cursed with awareness of events and the power that single voices can have. So instead of writing about Pinterest posts that serve as #ff or Follow Friends or Follow Fridays or Friend Feed or whatever the heck it stands for, I am writing about the theft of elections in Arizona and how they are being accomplished in at least one county, Pima County. Pima County, the county in which I happen to reside, is supposed to be a bastion of liberal sense in a sea of Christian/Mormon and Wingnut Libertarian Wack-a-doodlery.

I've posted this clip with a simple introductory sentence on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ to attempt to get the word out for the original Election Integrity folks, Audit AZ, not to be confused with Rovian election “integrity” folks who usurped the phrase and applied it to their thugs who were challenging voters throughout the U.S., possibly as a decoy to distract from the real way provisional ballots were planned to be created.

Rove and his smarmy cadre of Machevelian actors steal from the best. The old confuse a cat routine of distraction coupled with boredom works. It is a variation of the desensitization experienced when someone cries wolf so often that real information is lost. No one pays attention to Arizona because of the Right wing wacko reputation of the state. What better place to test out manipulation and theft tactics than a place no one takes seriously anyway? This reputation exists in spite of the huge Latino and First Peoples populations, the fact that Raul Grijalva, the Congressional Progressive Caucus leader, and massive bipartisan cooperative recall efforts, such as the one that recently removed the, now former, President of the Arizona Senate, Russell Pearce. A rather large progressive community in Arizona is far less credible than it should be by the caricature that has taken hold in the mind of most people in the U.S.

I wrote a Master's Thesis in Anthropology about cultural incorporation of the elements most threatening to the status quo by the larger “governing” cultural system so as to maintain its primacy. I believe that some of the left's most effective protests against the Rovian machinations of the Bush II's administration were absorbed, probably consciously, but possibly unconsciously, by the Kochian Right that continued the Bush assault on democracy after the Bush administration. I see potential for the early borrowing and reframing of progressives memes that the Right shaped into the Tea Party that began in the likes of progressive and cooperative street theater such as that done by CODEpink and Yellow Cake groups.

I witnessed early Tea Party-esque protest memes put together at a Convergence Center for the Phoenix Presidential Debate 2004. This was when I was helping put together an Arizona presense for CODEPINK in 2004 was the model for the Right Wing's Tea Party theme. We progressive to downright leftist groups (all the way from early players in what was becoming the Progressive Democrats of America, to environmental groups, Nadar supporters, anarchists of several stripes, and the general dissatisfied voice of youth) chanted, “We're Joe Six Pack and we've come to take our Country back,” while a “let them eat cake” Cake Street Puppet danced by the dangerous fretful and antsy hooves of Phoenix P.D. cavalry, when we were caught between the Darth Vader armor clad and shield weilding Phoenix Arizona Storm Troopers and the aforementioned calvary.

Many folks here in Arizona have been attempting to out the massive manipulation of elections as well as the testing of public sentiment manipulations and desensitization tactics for years. I understand that no one wants to believe this. It is extremely disturbing. But it is happening, and once again I have to say, “I'm reserving my right to tell you, 'I told you so!' when, down the line, this becomes widely known and accepted.”