Love, Light, and Lies: Getting in Touch with Your Anti-American Spirituality

by Charles Winecoff

Here’s a creepy thought: Dennis Kucinich and I have something in common.  We’ve both seen a UFO.  I saw mine in New York City in 1989, hovering over a crowded avenue on a warm spring night, as big, bright and still as the full moon.  I wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t alone (there were hundreds of other gawkers).  After giving us all a good look, the object glided across town, towards the East River, and disappeared behind some skyscrapers.  I’ll never forget it.  The end.

The point: I’m a believer.  Psychics are in my family too.  But that doesn’t prevent me from having a built in bullshit detector – one that’s been working overtime.

Sometime last fall, I began hearing fickle ex-Hillary supporters wax ecstatic about the “paradigm shift” we were all going to experience if Barack Obama came down from heaven and moved into the White House.  I wasn’t exactly sure what a “paradigm shift” was (clearly I was supposed to know).  But this strange talk reminded me of Michael Tolkin’s apocalyptic movie, “The Rapture” (1991), in which ordinary office drones whisper at the water cooler about “the pearl” (their code word for the second coming).

I later ran across a YouTube clip of Hollywood’s favorite New Age nut, Shirley MacLaine, telling Larry King that we were all suffering from “paradigm blindness.”  Assuming she didn’t mean the talent agency, King asked her what “paradigm” was.  “Paradigm meaning a whole shift in consciousness,” MacLaine explained.  Sort of.

Flash forward to summer 2008: just as Americans are beginning to experience a shift in their ability to watch any more Presidential debates, San Francisco columnist Mark Morford hails Obama a “Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being… who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet… help us evolve.”

This sent me on an inner journey – wondering if people really believe this kind of mumbo-jumbo when it comes to crass US politics.  Have the daily niceties of Oprah rotted our brains that much?  Or is there something else, possibly less benign, behind such trendy prophecies?

In places like Beverly Hills and Santa Fe, pampered prophets pull out the spiritual card at the first sign of any unmonitored human emotion – usually anger, which they themselves invariably stuff and cover with sinister calm.  Express anything less than total satisfaction with the latest Presidential flip-flop on national defense, Michelle Obama’s arms, or that (suspiciously Marxist) five-year cyber-pledge to visualize world peace - and you’ll get this typical, flat response:

“I’m concerned about you.  Have you read Eckhart Tolle?”

You mean the guy who alleviates liberal guilt by perpetuating the multicultural myth that the white man (me) is inherently cruel and that Western industrialization is the cancer of the planet?  Yes I have - and once was enough.  But thanks for caring.

Such compassion.  Yet the same enlightened believers who rage against “Catholic guilt” (and sympathize with Muslim rage), who claim that Evangelical Christians hold Washington in their grip, and scream that Mormons keep gays oppressed, are the first to use their own smug, metaphysical superiority as a psychological shiv to bring non-believers, apostates - and anyone not registered as a Democrat - to their knees.

Call it New Age jihad.  Since 9/11, the religion of anti-Americanism has been winning hearts, minds, and souls faster than the much-dreaded Christianity or the celebrity cult of Scientology – and it’s keeping neck-in-neck with that poor, misunderstood underdog called Islam.  But at least the New Age movement is capitalistic.  In fact, it’s ruthlessly profit-driven – a booming cottage industry that thrives on Anglo-guilt as it shamelessly trivializes the indigenous (i.e. Native American) beliefs it pretends to venerate.

In other words, nondenominational self-loathing has become an urban guilty pleasure.  Or, as Marianne Williamson put it, “The search for God is a lifestyle decision.”

Nothing new there.  The seeds for this blissful bonanza were planted well before the turn of the century, when clever spiritual mediums conjured up “Noble Savages” at their seance tables like clockwork.  A hundred years later, in the 1980s, the multi-culti fetishizing of American Indian culture filled an imagined void for wealthy baby boomers on a desperate quest to bring primitive meaning to their luxurious, white-collar lives.  Lucky for them, a vast array of self-flagellating spiritual products was already available, to atone for genocide they could only dream of.

Catholic mass may be frowned upon – but do it in a circle, in the dirt, with feathers on your head, and suddenly it’s full of mystical truth.  Walmart may be capitalism at its most obscene - but Kokopelli waste baskets, Sun Dances taught on tennis courts, ”sweat lodges” held on cruise ships, and swingers parties advertised as “traditional Cherokee ceremonies” - those are ”sacred.”

Redskin mania opened the floodgates for a modern tribe of predatory “plastic medicine people” - cultural pirates like Mary Summer Rain, country singer Jamie Samms, and bestselling author Lynn Andrews (a.k.a. the “Beverly Hills Shaman”) – who claimed to have studied under authentic Indian witch doctors.

But don’t blame all the plundering on ugly Americans like Ward Churchill.  Even classy, British-born psychic Rosemary Altea roped in a trusty Native American spirit guide named “Grey Eagle.”  Oprah knew a zeitgeist when she saw one – and gave Altea’s debut book, The Eagle and the Rose, a big push onto The New York Times bestseller list.

(Note: Haven’t the sham shamans read any grade school textbooks lately?  Muslims were in North America long before Indians.  Just asking.)

Call me cynical – even the Southwestern American Indian Movement eventually got fed up.  At a 2003 Leadership Conference in the Navajo Nation, AIM issued a statement condemning anyone profiting from Native American spirituality – calling its crass commercialization an ”insult and disrespect for the wisdom of the Ancients.”  The National Congress of American Indians also announced “a declaration of war against ‘wannabees,’ hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers, and self-styled New Age shamans.”  (I guess war is the answer – for sage, non-white elders.)

Of course, many New Agers believe money is just spiritual energy anyway, that buys them an edge.  And like all good totalitarians, they don’t care as much about actual people as they do the idea of people.  So while healers like ’80s AIDS guru Louise Hay trumpet that ”We are each 100% responsible for all of our experiences” - drumming it home that only happy feelings yield happy results - New Age preachers themselves generally leave the positive thinking to the little people.

Celebrity guru Marianne Williamson followed in Hay’s footsteps, becoming the personal spiritual adviser to a parade of politicians and show biz personalities including Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Anthony Perkins.  As Williamson admitted in her 1992 book A Return to Love, ”I spent years as an angry left-winger before I realized that an angry generation can’t bring peace.”  But like many on the Left, she was just paying lip service to centrism; Williamson continued to perpetuate racism and liberal self-contempt in order to sell books to her well-to-do, guilt-ridden sheep.

“It’s as though Hitler was a tumor,” Williamson wrote two years later in Illuminata: A Return to Prayer, “and we hoped that with the end of World War II we had gotten out all the cancer.  But we didn’t and it’s spreading now…” The root of the problem?  No, not Hitler’s Middle Eastern Nazi spin-off – why, our own down-home bigotry, of course!

According to Williamson, “Racism pervades the entire country…. In America today, racial disharmony increases with every generation…  Where people are not free to disagree, there can be no democracy, since that is what democracy is.“  (Tell me about it.)

Having sufficiently demoralized her readers, Williamson moves in for the kill, offering up a series of masochistic supplications: Amends to the African-American (”Please forgive me and please forgive this country… On behalf of my nation, I deeply apologize.  If I could rewrite history I would…”); Amends to the Native American (same deal), and the all-encompassing A Prayer for America (”May this nation be forgiven for its transgressions, against the African-American, the Native American, the nation of Vietnam, our men and women who should not have suffered or died there, and any and all others”).

Williamson makes big claims for her presumptuousness: ”This is the zeitgeist of our times,” she declares, ”a turning inward of the Western mind.”  How true – especially now, in the face of rising Islamofascism, when so many Americans insist on keeping their heads in the sand (and their eyes on Adam Lambert).  Perhaps Williamson really does have the gift of divination, because 9/11 certainly caused a spike in the New Age crusade against Bush and America.

The destruction of the WTC and the Pentagon – the ultimate symbols of capitalism and US military might - sent the touchy-feelies into holier-than-thou, preemptive overdrive.  Hollywood Buddhist Richard Gere immediately urged everyone to empathize with ”the terrorists who are creating such horrible future lives for themselves because of the negativity of this karma.  It’s all of our jobs to keep our minds as expansive as possible.”

And guru Shirley MacLaine offered this national security policy: “Melt their weapons, melt their hearts, melt their anger with love.”

Meanwhile, by 2003, as the Enlightened elite of Hollywood, the Upper East Side, and the Castro (no pun intended) congratulated themselves for protesting against the toppling of mass murderer Saddam Hussein – whose existence Madeline Albright had once called ”the greatest security threat we face” - Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Dalai Lama, was more circumspect.  He told The New York Times that it was “too early to tell” if the war in Iraq was misguided, and that “only history will tell.”

“Terrorism is the worst kind of violence,” he added, “so we have to check it, we have to take countermeasures.”  Translation: playing nice doesn’t work.

The Dalai Lama’s common sense barely made a media blip.  But three years later, Rhonda Byrne’s derivative The Secret exploded onto the bestseller lists.  Based on the fabled “law of attraction,” The Secret gave believers (and slackers) the a-okay to crawl back under the covers, assume the fetal position, and change the world by assuming blame for all its tragedies.

As Byrne herself explained, when ”massive numbers of people are killed…. there is no one to blame…. In a large-scale tragedy, like 9/11… we see that the law of attraction responds to people being at the wrong place at the wrong time because their dominant thoughts were on the same frequency of such events… if their dominant thoughts and feelings were in alignment with the energy of fear, separation, powerlessness and having no control over outside circumstances, then that is what they attracted.”

MacLaine echoed a similar concept In her 1987 memoir, It’s All in the Playing. Pondering the fiery accidental death of her daughter’s acting coach, MacLaine wondered, “Why did she choose to die that way?”  But as author Karen Kelly points out in The Secret of The Secret, “Saying that disasters happen as a result of a population’s negative thinking falls into religious fundamentalist territory.”

According to Byrne, there’s an upside to this solipsistic slop: “The Holocaust spanned some six years, and over that time the energy of the fear escalated, intensified, and spread, reaching many more people.  Humanity learned a lot through the Holocaust, and as a race we went from separation and closer to the concept of unity.”  Then what accounts for the recent international craze for the Muslim Brotherhood?

But the proselytizers themselves don’t practice the passivity they preach; they work – hard – to make their dreams come true, usually behind the scenes (where nobody can see them sweat).  For example, by 2005, Marianne Williamson had already joined forces with Dennis Kucinich’s Peace Alliance – and was actively promoting bill H.R. 808 to create a “U.S. Department of Peace and Non-Violence” that would ”establish a Peace Academy, patterned after the military academies, where students would learn peaceful conflict resolution skills.”

Then, in September 2007, she rushed to the defense of gay-killer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after his controversial appearance at Columbia University.  ”Maybe he is that bad,” she opined in The Huffington Post.  “But it doesn’t feel that way to me…” I wonder how it felt to the thousands of young gay men he executed in Iran.  “When he said he wanted to go to Ground Zero and pay his respects, I think we should have let him.  He didn’t perpetrate the horrors of 9/11, any more than Saddam Hussein did!”  (She forgot to mention he’s got the cutest chest hair!)

In November 2008, the unlucky guests at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai had no time to empathize with their jihadist captors – they were too busy trying not to be beaten, shot, or mutilated alive.  Again, the actual Dalai Lama understood this.  “It is difficult to deal with terrorism through non-violence,” he reiterated, shortly after the Taj atrocities.  ”They [terrorists] are very brilliant and educated… but… their minds are closed.”

(He also said, “I love President George W. Bush.”)

His insights got next to no press.  The media was too busy giving airtime to famous capitalists.  On Larry King Live, millionaire entrepreneur Deepak Chopra asserted that the Mumbai attack was entirely the fault of US foreign polices and the holy trinity of ”humiliation,” “poverty,” and “lack of education” (see quote above).

A few months later, after the election of the Lightworker-in-Chief, Marianne Williamson also blamed the industrialized nations: “If the women of the western world insisted over the past forty or fifty years that all the babies had to be fed before anything else was done, 9/11 would not have occurred.”

But perhaps no one embodies the we-stink spiritual agenda better than that grand dame of New Age propaganda, Shirley MacLaine.  As early as her 1983 book, Out on a Limb, MacLaine justified her own multicultural cowardice with a sweeping moral relativism: “The world seemed to be moving into an era of Holy Conflict, what with the violent rise of Islamic pride in the Arab world, of self-righteous Christian fundamentalism among the so-called moral majority in America, and of militant Zionism in Israel… Perhaps the physical plane of existence was not the only plane of existence…. real reality was much more.”

In other words, unable to take a stand – on anything – MacLaine, like Rhonda Byrnes, opted to wish away the physical world, including other people, in favor of a purely subjective and narcissistic dream world: “I created everything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, tasted; everything I loved, hated, revered… I created everything I knew.”

Unlike most people, the movie queen could afford to live in luxurious isolation.  But in December 1993, when MacLaine tried to create her own private utopia on Atalaya Mountain in Santa Fe, New Mexico, local environmentalists revolted.  In a pow-wow with City Councilor Ouida MacGregor and an American Indian named Two Moons – to discuss whether the mountain should be developed at all (MacLaine claimed she’d bought her land to protect it) or preserved for the Pueblo nation - the actress reportedly told McGregor, “You don’t understand – I have to be on top.”

Even former Interior Secretary under JFK, Stewart L. Udall, entered the fray.  A Santa Fe resident and ally of MacLaine’s during George McGovern’s 1972 Presidential race - a campaign the star has mentioned in every interview she’s ever given, ever since - Udall accused her of maneuvering to be “Queen of the Mountain,” another “pampered rich” in search of a “trophy home.”  MacLaine finally backed down, grousing that she was tired of being a ”punching bag” for “fanatical environmental fundamentalists.”

“My whole reason for being in that part of the world was to have some unobtrusive, invisible peace and quiet,” she said. “I wanted to meld into the peace and quiet of New Mexico.”  Instead, MacLaine melded into the 7,357-acre ranch she already owned in Northern New Mexico.  Of course, blending into the scenery is the last thing New Age “activists” actually want to do.

Promoting her latest book, Sage-ing While Age-ing, on PBS with Tavis Smiley in 2007, MacLaine tried to pass off her snobbery as enlightenment.  When Smiley asked her why she thought many Americans didn’t travel beyond U.S. borders (news to me), she responded, “Oh, I thought you meant they were forbidden to travel.”  Did MacLaine think he was talking about Cuba?

She continued, “We’re a little xenophobic.  We think everyone who’s not us is strange.  Maybe that comes with being an island psychology.  I don’t know.”  (Awfully big island, n’est-ce pas?)  “Thank goodness I traveled because my orientation is more open than most Americans…. When you go within and you find that divine within and you find that color within and you find the sound vibration within and you’ve found the chakra system within… you have more of a peace.  Then you start living a parallel reality to the world that is in such fear.”

Contemplating your navel in parallel reality, however, doesn’t preclude Republican bashing in the here and now, on national TV.  “Imagine the fun I’m having with watching George Bush [laughter],” MacLaine told Smiley.  “I mean, this is a comedy show.”

When Smiley asked her if she thought Bush was “a curious guy,” MacLaine dropped all pretense of love and light.  Instead, with a big smile, she went for the whole nation’s jugular: ”I don’t know what’s wrong with him.  Oh, my God, the poor guy.  But you know what?   We deserve it…. He has so destroyed the nobility of our spirit and our country that we have to look at the fact that he is ours…. What are we doing with a President like that… ?”

Similarly, “Today” host Matt Lauer asked the otherworldly authoress if there was anything she feared.  MacLaine replied, with sour sagacity, “Mad men who say they’re at the head of democracies scare me.”  This is the same liberated woman who, decades earlier, had extolled the sexless suppression of life in Mao’s China and vacationed with torturer Fidel Castro (as MacLaine notes in Sage-ing, “when I returned to New York, my Cuban maid unpacked my bags, saw pictures of me with Fidel, and promptly quit!”).

In truth, MacLaine’s outlook is decidedly pessimistic.  As she told another interviewer, the future is “going to be horrible.  It’s going to be worse than it is now.”  Guess she doesn’t read her competition; according to The Secret, negativity can be hazardous to your health.

And what about the children?!

Shirley doesn’t care – she’s got her private bomb shelter in “parallel reality”: “I won’t experience a nuclear thing because I’m not afraid of it.  I don’t want it.”  Do Rhonda Byrnes, Marianne Williamson and Shirley MacLaine really believe they can wish away the “nuclear thing” with positive vibes?  Or are they just holding out for the final holocaust – in the hope that then, at long last, the rest of the world will really, really like us?

The fact is: celebrity salespeople who hawk the dawning of the New Age of Aquarius aren’t serene, non-judgmental Lightworkers; they’re conflicted, knee-jerk nihilists who have too much money – and for whom “spirituality” is just another colon-cleansing weapon of mass delusion to undercut individual power, advance multicultural defeat, and help them feel better about themselves.  Same card-carrying crap, different day.  Zen masters?  Try passive-aggressive thugs.

Do I believe in life after death?  Yes.  Do I believe we can visualize peace?  No.  If there’s one thing we can learn from our purposeful enemies, the jihadists, it’s that spiritual people can be warriors too.  So when New Age wannabees tell you that violence is a one-way street, that we need to lay down our imperialist ammo and “learn to listen,” just remember the wise words of Mahatma Ghandi:

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”


Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | | Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted May 27th 2009 at 5:02 am in Celebrity News, Featured Story, Politics, Religion | No Comments