#4 THE POWER OF THE WORD–Part Two: In the Beginning Was the Word, or How We got Incarcerated in an Orwellian Mandala

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

–John 1:1, King James Version

The earlier Greek translation had it as logos, which became “the Word” in English, capitalized because, I suppose, God is capitalized, and the world was God’s expression, what God had to say.  He had made quite a serious statement.

This bears some resemblance to the tantric principle of generating a mandala.  (Chogyam Trungpa compares the two somewhere, but I haven’t located the passage.) There’s a word, usually in the form of a character, maybe merely a syllable (a “seed syllable”–bija in Sanskrit), from which springs the deity and from the deity comes the mandala, which means a palace meant to re-envision the encompassing universe as a sacred realm.  Trungpa Rinpoche: “The mantric approach starts at the beginning, not even as a prayer but just as a certain cosmic sound that goes along with a certain cosmic visualization” (Orderly Chaos).  Out of formless space comes some kind of statement that sparks a particular vision of reality, whether it’s a coterie of celestial devas or tanks grinding into Ukraine.

It is, in a way, that simple.

The ground of mind may be primordially unborn, unceasing, with a nature like the sky, but what grows out of that tends to confuse the fuck out of us.  Buddhist tantra goes back to that essential flash that comes out of space, recognizes that it can go right or left, into confusion or awakening, and retrains it to come up as Buddha rather than, say, Charles Manson and the Manson family mandala.

Nevertheless, in the beginning was the Word, and for us that tends to mean discursive thought.  You don’t need much there; you might need only a syllable pulsing with some very thin impulse, but when habitual conceptual mind latches onto it and doubles down, that’s the kind of mandala you get.

Which brings us to Fox News.

I remember vividly the first time I turned it on in the mid-90s, naively thinking it regular news.  What I got was Bill O’Reilly railing against the idea of releasing Leonard Peltier, the imprisoned Native American activist, promulgating the idea that not a single shred of evidence showed him innocent, as an FBI guy stood present as his Yes man.

Well, hell, I’d just been reading about Peltier, and all kinds of evidence suggested that he hadn’t killed an FBI guy in a shooting.  It was at least arguable, and from plenty of angles, it had the appearance that the FBI railroaded him into life in prison.  But O’Reilly didn’t mention any of it.  It was black and white, an open and shut case.  He couldn’t even be bothered to try to denigrate the objections.

I was totally astonished.  Despite the emphatic conviction with which he said every word, it was like he hadn’t the slightest knowledge of what he was discussing at all.  And maybe he didn’t, and maybe he did.

Fox News comprises the first formal effort on a very big, well-funded, complex scale to wrest away the narrative and change the paradigm of how Americans see and feel about America.  There are a lot of ins and outs as to how they’ve gone about it, but I’ll try and stick to my theme here.  It is in its own way the creation of a mandala, one people come to live in and see the everyday reality they occupy accordingly.

We can understand that what Fox News (and all the organs of rightwing media, at this point) aims to do has some quasi-religious practice involved in it.  They do have some flavor of evangelical revival.  They repeat their mantras that Democrats look down on you, minorities are stealing your money, the leftwing wants to destroy the (white) American way of life, etc., etc., and fucking etc.

This is mantra, contemplation, liturgical recitation, and 24 hour a day ritual, including ecstatic trances.  Perhaps I’m giving it too much credit by putting it in this light, but in terms of observing form, they proceed by faithful, unwavering adherence.  That it’s darkness masquerading as light does nothing to dissuade millions from filing within the mandalic boundaries and living there, convinced that they’re seeing things evermore clearly.

The Founding Fathers, myopic in their way about slavery and other things, felt strongly about rational, considered debate among those who would authentically represent the citizens of the union, and premised our governance on the need for it.  We would come to make the best choices for all concerned, who would all have a voice in making them. Conserving this kind of institutional/constitutional good used to be a part of what “conservative” meant.  At this point, however, as much as they fill the air bellowing their arguments with their so-called debate, this is the very thing they do not want.  They exist to prevent rational debate, so that the other side can’t be heard even when it speaks.

But if the rightwing media has its Biblical prophet, it must be Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”

(Next time, the conclusion: Part Three–The Death of Decency)