Bill Maher in Albuquerque

Saw Bill Maher tonight here in bee-u-tiful Albuquerque. Wonderful night, crisp, golden leaves blowing around just enough to make you put on the wool coat. I love Bill Maher. He's damn funny and smart and he'll say anything he feels and he's just about always right (especially when he talks about the baser human instincts). Spot-on with his commentary about the "gay marriage" issue and the GOP's willingness to exploit any bigotry for the purpose of winning votes and maintaining power. A few tried-and-true lines ("I'm the only one who lost his job because of 9/11") and lots of good, new material.

In his spiel, however, Bill Maher also embodies one aspect of the current Left which I consider to lack "class". You know what I mean when I use the word "class." You have to let go of your political correctness to get me here, but in certain regards, Bill Maher lacks class. And the particular aspect of him that rises to the level of hurting the Left, I think, is his disdain for religion.

Now I'm not suggesting that Bill Maher is personally hurting the Left. On the contrary, the crowd tonight left excited and heartened and with positive energy swirling around their boots. But if you observe Mahr's attitude toward religion, you can get the gist of what alienated a lot of people from our dear Democratic party this past election. Yes, the Bush Team used a lot of dirty tricks, but they didn't make wine out of water. They were devious and greedy and in an effort to maintain power, they very professionally exploited powerful unconscious forces that grip the country.

The complaint isn't as simple as the fact that Maher disrespects religion. There's nothing at all wrong with that. After all, it's America, church and state, he's entitled to his opinion. Amen. What is disconcerting and alienating is his lack of sophistication with regard to religion and religious imagery. The vast majority of the time, Maher exudes maturity and a sort of carnal wisdom. But when he talks about religion, he sounds like a smart 14-year-old punk talking shit to impress a favorite teacher or the pom-pom girls. And it's that smart-ass 14 year-old masculine energy that insults a large portion of our population.

A large portion that is actually larger than the 56 million that voted for Bush. The fact is, as a nation, we share common values that we hold sacred. Now, if you start drilling down into them, any sense of unity fragments. But if you just leave it at that high level, the notion of sacred common values, and turn off the analytical part of your brain and for a moment let go of the negative feelings you might have now because of the election, you will feel something in the center of your chest that says, yes, sacred common values. That's a very powerful thing.

There are two archetypal ways that people experience this feeling. One way is strictly through feeling. The other is strictly through rationality. In reality, there is a spectrum between these extremes with most people falling somewhere in between. In our current system, there is a very distinct split between the people who perceive reality via feeling (in the body) and those who perceive it through rationality (in the mind). The "liberals" are in the mind and the "conservatives" are in the body.

For the conservative, the resonance they feel with the phrase "sacred common values" is so powerful that it overcomes their mind's attempt to analyze what those words really mean. For the liberal, the feeling (which is, in fact, the exact same feeling) doesn't stand a chance and is quickly muted by the mind's rational attempt to deconstruct and define it as something empirical and verifiable.

The Bush team has been masterful at recognizing these differences and, through very aggressive marketing, playing them against each other. It's brilliant because they understand that in the current psychic condition of the nation, the feeling (body) aspect will always win out. The nation is emotionally damaged and no one is doing anything to heal it. When a body is in fear, its instincts take over. This is as true of nations as it's true of horses and birds. And so the undecided voter, the one who is rational enough to recognize the facts but who's brain is no match for the resonance with the sacred common values that keep us strong, that will (if anything can) save this nation and make it great once again.

People who are experiencing the world mostly through their body aspect relate very strongly with poetic language, with metaphor and theme. The more radical of these people, the fundamentalist Christians, actually experience the world in what "rational" people would describe as a metaphorical reality. For this reason, they can see direct meaning in the words of the bible and "rationally" accept what they read as "real," "truth".

People on the Left, people like, well, Bill Mahr, look at this way of experiencing the world with contempt. For them, such a world view is primitive and despicable. And the people on the Right feel that contempt and are told it can be attributed to "liberals." Those farthest to the Right feel it the most, but in times of terror, when the instincts run the show, the contempt can be felt much further down the spectrum.

So I contend that intellectualism (along with political correctness) has neutered the Left and the Democratic Party, gelded it into a perpetual smart-ass 14 year-old boy. The Bush Team has ruthlessly taken advantage of the situation to build a self-stoking fire, a perpetual motion machine whose ultimate product will be disastrous beyond the scope of their vision.

The only way out is to heal the nation. This isn't the work of boys and girls, but of men and women. It requires an effort at achieving a healthy relationship between the body and the mind and as anyone who has ever been in a relationship (and paid attention) will agree, relationships work best when both parties are making an effort, both are putting aside their stern belief that they are correct and accepting the thought they the other person could be correct too. And what is required for this step to occur? Respect. Sophistication. Class.

So you go, Bill Maher. I really, really love your work.

And for the rest of us on the Left, it's up to us to start the healing. To try showing some respect (not capitulation), to accept that in a very real sense, people all see the world differently. It's unfair for us on the Left to criticize Bush for his failure to dismiss any way of seeing the world other than his own, and then us doing exactly the same thing to a very large population within our own country.

If there was an International border between the red states and the blue, would we in the blue states be open-minded and respectful of their worldview the way we wish Bush would be of other countries and cultures? Or would we view them as simple and savage and in desperate need of civilizing and democratization? Maybe we'd look at them and see an uptight and oppressive people and say that they hate us for our freedom...

The way to return the national psyche to balance is by each of us on the Left surrendering a bit of our rational control and allowing ourselves to feel our resonance with America a bit more distinctly. In doing so, our rationality will organically flow to those otherwise currently empowered more distinctly by the Right. We might feel respect for them and get them to feel respect for us and maybe we make a country that produces real leaders and great poets and kindness toward one another.

Bill Maher will be Bill Maher so we don't have to.