So long, Marianne: McSpirituality star Williamson drops out of 2020 race

As you may know, McSpirituality guru Marianne Williamson has finally dropped out of the 2020 US presidential race. She made the official announcement on her campaign web site a couple of days ago.

January 10, 2020

I ran for president to help forge another direction for our country. I wanted to discuss things I felt needed to be discussed that otherwise were not. I feel that we have done that.

I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible opportunity to share our message. With caucuses and primaries now about to begin, however, we will not be able to garner enough votes in the election to elevate our conversation any more than it is now. The primaries might be tightly contested among the top contenders, and I don’t want to get in the way of a progressive candidate winning any of them.

The extent to which Williamson was able to "elevate our conversation" is debatable; I've written quite a bit on that and related topics on this blog (see links at the end of this post). As I've noted on some of those earlier posts, Marianne made a couple of valid points on the debate stage, and the policy outlines on her campaign web site seemed well thought out. For the most part, though, the snide memes and other responses inspired by her candidacy were well-deserved.

Reporting on the news of Williamson's exit from the race, Vox's Emily Stewart led with a snark.

New Zealand’s prime minister can rest at ease that she won’t be getting a call from Marianne Williamson in January 2021 — at least not from Marianne Williamson from the White House.

Stewart's reference was to Williamson's vow at the first Democratic debate in June 2019 that her first action in office would be to call the Kiwi PM, "who said that her goal is to make New Zealand the place where it’s the best place in the world for a child to grow up. And I would tell her: ‘Girlfriend, you are so on.’ The United States of America is going to be the best place in the world for a child to grow up."

The Vox piece provided a capsule review of some of the controversies surrounding Williamson, most of which her critics have known about for years, but which gained wider attention once she hit the campaign trail.

Williamson’s record...came under scrutiny, including not only some of her weird tweets but also some of her questionable advice on weight loss and seeming suggestions that mental illness can be addressed through spirituality instead of medical treatment. (Her campaign has said that Williamson believes Western medicine should come first and she would “never tell anybody to get off their medication.”) On the campaign trail, Williamson’s comments about vaccines were also scrutinized after she called mandatory vaccines “draconian” and “Orwellian” at a campaign stop. She later walked back the comments and said that “many vaccines are important and save lives,” though she understands the skepticism around drugs “rushed to market by Big Pharma.”

But it wasn't the sheer fact of being controversial that stymied Williamson's efforts. Nathaniel Rakich, writing for FiveThirtyEight, offered a more analytical view of why her run for prez never really caught on.

Maybe one reason why Williamson didn’t fare better in the polls is that the more voters got to know her, the less they liked her. According to an average of polls conducted in May, Democrats were not very familiar with Williamson; 13 percent of them had a favorable impression of her, 10 percent had an unfavorable one and the remainder didn’t have an opinion. And even though Williamson’s favorable rating increased by 9 points after the first two debates (according to an average of polls conducted Aug. 1-25), her unfavorable rating increased more — by 16 points. This made her one of the few Democratic candidates who was more unpopular than popular among members of her own party — generally speaking, not a good place to be.

Williamson may have hoped that her New Age rhetoric (“I’m going to harness love for political purposes”) would help her appeal to the spiritual side of the Democratic Party, but it looks like it just turned voters off. As my colleague Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote in September, although “spiritual but not religious” people make up around one-third of the Democratic Party, they are not a cohesive group, do not vote as a monolith and tend to prioritize shared values and policy positions over a shared spiritual identity. They also tend to be more highly educated than the broader public, which might disabuse them of a candidate who has heterodox views on vaccines and antidepressants or who ridiculed the idea that “wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country.” Ultimately, it was harder than Williamson probably expected to get, as she once quipped, “everyone who has a yoga mat” to vote for her.

While that gives me hope for the survival of critical thinking in America, at least among the more progressive voters (yes, even some of the McSpirituality-inclined folks), Rakich concludes that most likely, the failure of Marianne Williamson's presidential campaign ultimately came down to money, or lack thereof. Marianne simply wasn't able to raise enough cash to continue appearing on the debate stage, or to continue maintaining a campaign staff, which she laid off earlier this month. Apparently even the donations of puckish republicans, who willingly gave money to Williamson's campaign because of her entertainment value, were unable to keep the love guru's boat afloat.

Williamson insists that a "politics of conscience" is still possible, and that "love will prevail." I'm not so sure, but in any case, I think I'm far from the only person whose first thought, upon hearing that Marianne has officially taken her hat back out of the ring, was, "Good riddance." I'm all for entertainment value, but given what we currently have sitting in the Oval Office, we need to clear the stage as much as possible for the serious candidates.

Related on this Whirled:

• 10 January, 2011: Snippets for a Monday afternoon (under "What's wrong with this (big) picture?") -- Marianne's weight loss book and the totally contrived marketing backstory that she cooked up with Oprah.
• 5 July 2019: So wrong, Marianne -- Musings on Williamson's first debate performance in late June, on her history as a New-Wage icon, on the new-agey "love and light" mindset, and on why Marianne is the wrong choice to go up against Trump.
• 31 July 2019: Marianne Williamson: still so wrong -- Williamson got to talk more during her second performance at the Democrats' "debate," and some of what she said made sense, but as the title of the post noted... still so wrong.
• 11 November 2019: The Williamson Institute: not quite Trump U, but still crapitalism -- Her presidential run may have been doomed from the beginning, but no worries: Williamson still managed to get some marketing mileage out of it.

The Williamson Institute: not quite Trump U, but still crapitalism

Though she is for all practical purposes currently on the sidelines of the 2020 presidential race -- or at least that's how it appears at the moment -- don't count McSpirituality guru Marianne Williamson out of the larger game. You can't keep a good New-Wage crapitalist down.

On November 5, 2019, the Rolling Stone site ran a feature by Tessa Stuart, "That Marianne Mind$et: Obeying the Law of Divine Compensation." Stuart opens with a mention of an early August 2019 email blast directed to those who had signed up for Williamson's campaign mailing list earlier in the year. The message featured a "soft-focus portrait of the presidential candidate gazing placidly at the pages of a hardcover tome beside a golden Buddha and an orchid."

That's so Marianne.

The email came from something called the Williamson Institute, and the subject was, "Summer Sale Now On!"

“For one week only, indulge in any of our on-demand courses and seminars for 45% off!” the email read. “Whether you want to invoke the romantic mysteries, create a career that matters, divinely align your body and soul, or focus on another area of your life in a miraculous way, now is the time to treat yourself. As always, we hope this offering will enrich your life and nourish your soul.” Interested parties were advised to use the code “SummerSale.” 

There was one teeny-tiny little problem, though. At the time the email was sent out, the Williamson Institute did not yet technically exist, though a note on Williamson's personal web site said that it would be launching "soon." But skilled hucksters never let the unicorn status of anything stop them from promoting that thing.

The email linked instead to Marianne.com, where for a cool $249 one might enroll in a four-part online course on “aging miraculously” or a five-parter on “miraculous relationships.” The four-part weight-loss seminar, five-parter on making money (or, rather, obeying “the law of divine compensation”), and a three-part “Aphrodite Training” were each comparative steals at $149 a piece.

Heck of a bargain, right? Can you say, "New-Wage sales funnel," boys and girls?

Stuart continues:

Williamson’s campaign blamed the email on a “vendor error” and, perhaps because Williamson isn’t a top-tier candidate, the use of a public campaign for private profit barely registered as news.

Or maybe it didn’t register because, at this point, it’s basically accepted that many (if not most) people who run for president are ultimately running one grift or another. Herman Cain used the email list he amassed during a failed bid for the Republican nomination in 2012 to hawk dozens of get-rich-quick schemes and dubious cures, including an erectile dysfunction drug called “TestoMax 200.” Rick Perry parlayed his aborted campaign into a turn on Dancing With the Stars. Mike Huckabee’s failed White House run transformed him into a one-man media empire, complete with a terrestrial radio time slot opposite Rush Limbaugh and a hosting gig on Fox News. (Alas, the long-promised Huckabee Post never materialized.)

Yep.

Of course no review of presidential candidate hucksterism would be complete without a mention of one candidate who actually won the presidency, and is without a doubt the biggest huckster of them all, Donald J. Trump, Scammer in Chief, whose arguably most infamous contribution to Scamworld was the totally bogus "Trump University." Trump U actually did exist, for a few years, but it wasn't a real university, and Trump, who was known for boasting that he "never settles" in a lawsuit, ultimately agreed to pay $25 million to settle three of the suits against his ersatz education endeavor.

Stuart doesn't mention Trump U in the Rolling Stone piece, but she does remind us of a few other points.

Donald Trump — despite having boasted in 2000 he could possibly be “the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it” — lost money on his run for president, but he has since turned his presidency into a four-year-long paid advertisement for his hotel chain. (He also, apparently, had a contingency plan: By election night 2016, when most everyone was predicting him losing, the candidate and his family had compiled a list of ideas to capitalize on his newfound cachet, including a budget line of Trump hotels and a TV network to rival Fox News.)

Not to mention the apparently well-founded rumors that Trump has been talking, at least casually, with Apprentice creator Mark Burnett about another future "reality" show, a "White House" edition of The Apprentice. Trump denied it, of course. But his lips were moving, so that should give you an idea of how credible his denial is. In any case, there's a very good case to be made that Trump has been running his entire presidency like a reality show. Unfortunately, as Sean Illing, the author of the Vox piece linked to in the previous sentence, noted, it's "the show we can't turn off, the car crash we can't look away from the news cycle we can't escape."

But we were discussing Marianne Williamson, right? Not that revisiting Trump's various scams and hustles is irrelevant -- not at all. After all, as some observers have noted, Trump and Williamson are in several significant ways just two sides of the same (narcissistic, celebrity-culture) coin. (Williamson has even been called a left-wing version of Trump.) And Williamson herself has famously declared on several occasions that she is the most qualified of all of the Democratic candidates to meet Trump on the battlefield that really matters: the one where the battle for the heart and soul of America is being fought (this being one of her more recent declarations).

And what about the Williamson Institute? I still can't seem to find a separate web site for the thing. There is a Facebook page, plugging a ten-part online "course" called "The New You: A Total Life Makeover," and currently Williamson's main web site leads with basically that same plug, and follows with an announcement that the Williamson Institute will be "launching soon." Of course the site contains various other links to ways you can fork over your hard-earned lucre to Williamson.

Williamson insists she is not driven by the profit motive, though. From Tessa Stuart's Rolling Stone piece again:

But ask Marianne Williamson if her campaign has a profit motive, and a beatific expression will shimmer across her face. “It’s quite the opposite,” Williamson tells me, sitting at a sun-drenched rooftop bar a few blocks from Manhattan’s Bryant Park in early fall. “I’m not doing the things right now that you do in my career to make a living — speaking fees, etc. I’m not off giving seminars. A senator running for president is still getting a Senate salary, right? This is the opposite of a lucrative thing to do.”

Williamson continues, plugging her most recently released book by name, “If you look at my Politics of Love that came out, it is not a bestseller. It is way down on Amazon.” (It was, at press time, ranked Number 25 in “Religious Studies: Church & State,” Number 74 in “Spiritual Healing,” and Number 79 in “History of Religion & Politics.”) She fixes me with a bemused look. “If I want to, I kind of know how to sell a book. It’s called a book tour.”

Condescension duly noted, Marianne. (By the way, considering the many millions of new books that are constantly being published, and zillions of older ones still actively on the market, those press-time Amazon numbers aren't really all that bad.)

Tessa Stuart writes that Williamson's campaign denies that she planned from the beginning to capitalize on the exposure she'd get from a presidential run with money-making schemes like the Williamson Institute. In fact Williamson's campaign manager, Patricia Ewing, expressed surprise that Stuart would even ask such a question, and suggested that perhaps there was a bit of sexism behind the inquiry. "Is the same question being asked of businessmen in the race?" Ewing asked, adding that no one seemed to be questioning the motives of Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang et al. when their respective businesses continued to "innovate" while they were on the campaign trail.

But the difference, Stuart points out in her article, is that neither Steyer nor Yang is launching a new business predicated on asking fans or supporters "to pay for the privilege of hearing what they have to say."

Exactly. Furthermore, there has been plenty of criticism about Donald Trump continuing to profit from his own businesses while in office. So it isn't just a matter of giving "businessmen" a pass while the poor put-upon "businesswoman" catches all of the flak. This is not to deny that sexism and double standards riddle our political landscape. They most certainly do. But this is not that.

Marianne Williamson has said that the only way we can defeat the "outrageous lies" of Trumpism is by telling "outrageous truth." She is clearly branding herself as the standard-bearer of this truth, but anyone who truly believes this is as misinformed or deluded in his or her own way as any of the MAGA-cap wearing Trump devotees who cheer at his fascist rallies. And while I am emphatically not suggesting that Williamson's fans are hate-filled bigots like so many (not all, but so many) of Trump's fans, nor am I insinuating that Williamson's crapitalism is on a scale with Trump's, or that her narcissism is even remotely as dangerous at this point as Trump's, the devotion of her base is not necessarily a harmless thing.

Lest you accuse me of Williamson-bashing, I am not categorically declaring Marianne Williamson to be devoid of truth. As I've noted here in previous posts about her -- and as was noted in this excellent August 2019 piece in The Intercept -- there is validity in some of her core messages, despite the wackadoodle new-agey veneer in which so many of them are wrapped. But it's gonna take a whole lot more than abstract declarations of moral and spiritual truths to defeat the orange blob and fix our egregiously broken system, which was broken for many years before Trump but has been immeasurably damaged even more since he's been in power. Marianne Williamson is simply not the person to accomplish this. And I am pretty sure that at some level, she knows it.

But don't cry for her, because one way or the other, with or without the "Williamson Institute," she'll be laughing -- beatifically, of course, and with a shimmering expression of thinly veiled condescension on her lovely face -- all the way to the bank.

Related on this Whirled:

• 10 January, 2011: Snippets for a Monday afternoon (under "What's wrong with this (big) picture?") -- Marianne's weight loss book and the totally contrived marketing backstory that she cooked up with Oprah.
• 5 July 2019: So wrong, Marianne -- Musings on Williamson's first debate performance in late June, on her history as a New-Wage icon, on the new-agey "love and light" mindset, and on why Marianne is the wrong choice to go up against Trump.
• 31 July 2019: Marianne Williamson: still so wrong -- Williamson got to talk more during her second performance at the Democrats' "debate," and some of what she said made sense, but as the title of the post noted... still so wrong.

Marianne Williamson: still so wrong

Note: This post has been amended; see text in blue.
~ CC, August 1, 2019

Among reporters and pundits and people whose mouths are agape over the sh-t show that American politix has become, the consensus seems to be that McSpirituality/New-Wage guru Marianne Williamson, whose presidential run I lambasted earlier this month, did better than expected on last night's Democratic primary "debates." (I still can't seem to bring myself to use the word "debates" without quotation marks, given the insane number of candidates and the arbitrary formats for these gabfests. Even so, I think that my current favorite, Senator Elizabeth Warren, shone as the true star.)

I will concede that Williamson's performance during last night's lineup was stronger than her previous effort, mostly because the CNN mods called on her more. That performance arguably gave her presidential shampaign some momentum, leading some watchers and would-be influencers to declare her the unironic breakout star of last night's round (as opposed to being the ironic breakout star in the first round). And as with that previous round, her appearance led to a flurry of Googling; per GoogleTrends, she was the most-searched of the ten candidates during the debate in 49 of 50 states. (Montana was the lone exception; one wag suggested that it was because Montana Governor Steve Bullock was the number-one search in his own home state).

On stage, Williamson did seem to offer a couple of firm-ish policy ideas, controversial as some of them might be (e.g., her thoughts on reparations for descendants of African slaves), though invariably she would circle back to more abstract McSpirituality babble that sometimes didn't sound so different from fundamentalist hypoChristian talk about the devil -- such as when she warned of a "dark psychic force" in America. Despite this, or in some cases because of it, more than one of her utterances prompted some pretty loud and boisterous cheers from the live audience.

Not to mention the cheers on the Interwebs, as Williamson's online fans solidified her standing as the "orb queen" of the 2020 campaign. In the Washington Post, Avi Selk wrote:

In the few minutes she got to speak, Williamson did not disappoint the online fan club of professed occultists, liberal peaceniks and ironic memeophiles who have gathered around the 67-year-old New Age guru’s metaphysical campaign for the White House...

...Williamson has harnessed something from the body politic, whether love is the best term for it. Obsession might better describe her online community of devotees. Informally known as the “orb gang,” they celebrate Williamson’s mystical utterances with various levels of irony and earnestness — and a passion some of her rival Democrats might envy.

One person organizing what has been called "an occult task force" said that a group of 13 "chaos magicians," witches, and energy workers have been performing synchronized "gestures" to help their favorite candidate get airtime during the debates and throughout the race. Chaos magick, as Selk explains, is "a postmodern occult belief system that dates to the 1970s and bears similarities to the 'Course in Miracles' that Williamson preaches, insofar as both treat reality as a malleable thing that can be manipulated with ritualized thoughts."

Yup, sounds familiar. And Williamson does have quite the (religious) cult following, as evidenced by the fact that there are actually Marianne votive candles on the market. But let's put things in perspective. As Selk notes:

Magical thinking is not wholly alien to American politics. In “Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump,” the Blondie-bassist-turned-author Gary Lachman chronicles how a handful of Internet jokesters coalesced in 2015 to make ironic memes about Donald Trump somehow winning the presidency.

Yes, and as we've discussed previously on this blog, Trump has at least a small share of New-Wage/McSpirituality supporters, as well as wackadoodle fringe conspiranoid followers, who engage in their own kind of magical thinking.

But let's not forget "Christian" magical thinking, of which the very vocal majority of the magical thinkers working on behalf of Donald John Trump are practitioners. They're out there. Way out there. And Trump is busily pandering to them and sometimes even pretending to be one of them.

So Marianne Williamson is not alone in attracting a cult following of magical thinkers and random irrational folk. There's definitely a cult of Trump -- and even though I don't believe in fighting cults with cults (which Marianne and her army of airy-fairies appear to be trying to do), so far it appears that the Trump cult is the more dangerous and destructive force, because it is by and large a cult of hate, and it is the one now in power.

All of which raises a few disturbing questions about what would happen if it really were to come down to Trump versus Williamson -- with the irrational, hateful MAGAnoids and the fiercely self-righteous prayer warriors/theocraps/Christian Sharia law proponents on one side, and the irrational, love-and-light-infused "chaos magicians" and new-age ninnies on the other. First, where does that leave the rest of the citizens of the republic -- those of us who are clinging to what is left of our sanity and critical faculties, and who want to elect a qualified president (like Elizabeth Warren, for instance) who will try to deal with real-world problems in a realistic and practical way that will be inclusionary rather than exclusionary?

Secondly, might such a rivalry set a horrid precedent regarding Church/State separation? Even though I've previously said (and still think) that I find Williamson's brand of McSpirituality, and her willingness to thread it throughout her political rhetoric, to be marginally less offensive and concerning than the "Christian" theocrap-ic efforts to take over American politix, I am still a firm believer in secular politics.

And finally, would a Trump v Williamson ballot ultimately result in Trump's re-election? I'm afraid we already know the answer to that question. 

 * * * * *

Vox's Emily Stewart conceded that notwithstanding the new-agey babble, several of Williamson's statements last night made a lot of sense. Wrote Stewart:

One of her biggest moments was when she took aim at her fellow candidates on the issue of money in politics. “For politicians, including my fellow candidates who themselves have taken tens of thousands and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars from these same corporate donors, to think that they now have the moral authority to say, ‘We’re going to take them on,’ I don’t think the Democratic Party should be surprised that so many Americans believe ‘yadda, yadda, yadda,’” she said, to applause.

Point taken. But if I may interject another plug, Elizabeth Warren is one of those who famously hasn't taken money from corrupt corporate donors either. Just saying.

Williamson also had some profound words last night about race and inequality, and unless you're totally in denial, you really can't argue with statements such as the one she made about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the role that systemic racism has played in that horror. She said:

This is part of the dark underbelly of American society -- the racism, the bigotry...We need to say it like it is. It’s bigger than Flint. It’s all over this country. It’s particularly people of color. It’s particularly people who do not have the money to fight back, and if the Democrats don’t start saying it, then why would those people feel they’re there for us? And if those people don’t feel it, they won’t vote for us and Donald Trump will win.

Yet Williamson seemed to be veering dangerously close to Trump I-alone-can-fix-it territory when she declared, in her closing statement:

...I want a politics that speaks to the heart. Because the only way to fight — you keep talking about how we’re going to fight Donald Trump. You can’t fight dog whistles. You have to override. And the only way you can override them is with new voices, voices of energy that only come from the fact that America has been willing to live up to our own mistakes, atone for our own mistakes, make amends for our own mistakes, love each other, love our democracy, love future generations. Something emotional and psychological that will not be emerging from anything on this. It will emerge from something I’m the one who is qualified to bring forth.

Now, that's a steaming heap of abject McSpirituality narcissism if I ever smelt it. On the other hand, it could be argued that Herr Twitler's "politics" speaks to the heart -- the dark heart, that is. Which sort of gives credence to the declaration by some that Williamson is in a sense a "progressive" version of Trump. See all that stuff about cults, above.

And actually she may not even be all that "progressive," and certainly not a "leftist," according to at least one observer. Just ahead of part 1 of the second round of Dem "debates," Noah Berlatzky posted a critical piece about Williamson on NBC News' Think site, exploring an angle of the New-Agey "love and light" passive-aggressiveness and hypocrisy that I touched on in my previous post about Williamson's candidacy. Granted, Berlatzky went deeper into the issue than I did in my post, writing that Williamson's "supposedly empowering rhetoric masks a mean-spirited individualism." He explained:

Williamson, like conservative thinkers, often blames material problems on personal failures. Her ideology may sound airy and inoffensive, but it is ultimately one of neoliberal victim shaming. And it would lead to harmful policies if she were, by some miracle, to be elected to public office.

Over the 13 years that this Whirled has been spinning, I've written several times about the general theme of New-Age guilt myself, that is, about the New-Age "you create your own reality" mindset, which later evolved into the Law of Attraction dogma popularized by the atrocious New-Wage moviemercial The Secret. These seemingly empowering concepts have all too often been flipped, becoming just another excuse to blame people for their own misfortunes. Everyone from Secret creator Rhonda Byrne to Abraham-Hicks to Joe Vitale has jumped on that blame train. Marianne Williamson wasn't part of The Secret franchise, but much of her work is rooted in that same faux-empowerment mentality.

I do have a couple of minor quibbles with Berlatzky's piece. My husband Ron Kaye pointed out, and I agree with him, that Berlatzky's description of Williamson's current rhetoric as "hippie" is inaccurate. Historically the hippies were more benign than the calculating, crapitalistic manipulator that Williamson has become over the decades.

And I am not quite as sure as Berlatzky seems to be that the blame-the-vic/mean-spirited individualist mindset would translate directly to harmful policies in the unlikely event of a Williamson presidency, at least if the policy outlines on her Marianne 2020 web site are any indication. (Aside from various unscientific declarations on vaccines (on which she seems to have walked back a bit) and clinical depression and AIDS, she doesn't seem to be a complete enemy of science, at least where climate science is concerned. So in that regard she comes out ahead of the Trumpsters and that whole gang of GOP climate-crisis deniers. But then again, Trump et al. have set the science bar pretty low, so consider this faint praise.)

And where various other social and economic issues are concerned, ya never know. If she is like most of her fellow leaders in what my pal and blogging colleague Chris Locke of Mystic Bourgeoisie fame calls the "Spiritual Industrial Complex," a Williamson presidency would end up being as much of a disaster for the poor and struggling as the Trump reign is turning out to be. It would just have different slogans and music and caps.

This could all be moot, of course. After all, it's doubtful that Williamson's stage performances will really gain her much traction. Perhaps debate coach Todd Graham, whose piece on the CNN site I linked to earlier in this post (here it is again), and who gave Williamson a grade of D-minus for last night's performance, said it best:

The problem with Williamson in this debate is that for every legitimate criticism of our government she gave -- and there were several -- she lacked follow-up solutions. She derided the "political insider game and wonkiness and intellectual argument," without offering a clear picture of her practical alternative. And her closing statement was something about emotional and psychological gobbledygook that finished with a crescendo like she was singing the big finale of a Broadway musical.

Precisely.

And if you don't mind me citing myself, let's review the reasons that despite her claims in her closing statement about being uniquely qualified to beat Trump, Marianne Williamson is not the one to do it. Besides Trump himself, there are...

...[Trump's] base, too: a firewall of irrational, tenacious MAGA soldiers who stick with their leader through thick and thicker, through dumb and dumber. Included among these supporters are viciously hateful MRAs (men's rights activists) who fancy themselves "alpha males" and spend their social media lives raging against women, feminism, "SJWs" ("social justice warriors"), and all manner of "snowflakes."... Then there are the theocrats who still think new-age spirituality is the work of the devil. And of course there are the random racists, xenophobes, and garden-variety ignoranti who won't even consider anyone but Trump, because they see him as their only hope to save America from a host of real and imaginary (mostly imaginary) threats. The hatriarchy truly has Trump's back. And beyond Trump's base, there is a wide field of powerful Republicans who are bent on remaking America in their own image and that of their wealthy donors. That's a lot for one faux-accented, love-spouting guru to tackle, even if she is a bad-ass Jewish Texan.

However solid some of her ideas may be, Williamson's public persona and general flakiness, not to mention her utter lack of qualifications for the most powerful position in the world, overshadow all of those good ideas.

It's entirely possible that despite the spike from last night's gig, Marianne's momentum is slowing down, and that she won't be able to qualify for the September "debates" in her former hometown and mine, Houston. Regardless, she would be doing us all a favor if she would drop out of the race sooner rather than later. She can still continue to entertain us from the sidelines.

  Related on this Whirled:

• 5 July 2019: So wrong, Marianne -- Musings on Williamson's first debate performance in late June, on her history as a New-Wage icon, on the new-agey "love and light" mindset, and on why Marianne is the wrong choice to go up against Trump.
• 10 January, 2011: Snippets for a Monday afternoon (under "What's wrong with this (big) picture?") -- Marianne's weight loss book and the totally contrived marketing backstory that she cooked up with Oprah.

Off this Whirled but on a related planet:

• 12 August 2008: Brilliant, Gorgeous, Talented and Fabulous -- The above-mentioned Chris Locke at the Mystic B blog writes snarkily and cleverly about Marianne, A Course in Miracles (the source for her original cash cow), and more.

* * * * *

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So wrong, Marianne

Step out of the race now, my little darlin'
We've heard your lofty talk before
Your words of love won't cure the loathing
Your thoughts on peace can't win the war

You're so wrong, Marianne
To win, we need a plan, which
You don't have, so just go back to writing books again

~ With apologies to the late, great Leonard Cohen


When McSpirituality/New-Wage guru Marianne Williamson made her appearance in part 2 of the first Democratic pageant last month -- I can't seem to bring myself to seriously call those two nights of sound bites, posturing and constant interruptions "debates" -- she reportedly won the Google search war for the evening, as herds of the curious and perplexed stampeded to their favorite search engine to find out more about her, or in many cases to find out just who the hell she is. No doubt her ascent to fame in the 1990s predated the birth of many of the searchers, and she hasn't exactly been front-page news in recent years.

But many others -- me, for instance -- have known about her for years and years, and I daresay that many of us knew most if not all of what National Review recently declared to be "Twenty Things You Probably Didn't Know about Marianne Williamson." Being a former long-time resident of Houston myself, I knew, for instance, that she is a native Houstonian, and furthermore I know very well that she used to make quite a big deal of being a Texan, making her current strange-sounding accent, which some have described as "mid-Atlantic," seem all the more like an affectation.

More importantly, many of us think that her presidential campaign is a colossal waste of our time, though probably not of hers; after all, look at all the renewed attention this once fading star is now getting as a result.

Williamson didn't speak much compared to some of her co-stars on the Democrats' stage, and in fact didn't speak at all for nearly the first half hour. But what she did communicate drew a lot of attention, particularly her apparent disdain for plans.

I tell you one thing, it’s really nice if we have all these plans, but if you think we beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing [sic] coming. Because he didn’t win by saying he had a plan. He won by simply saying, “Make America Great Again.”

She did follow that up immediately with a valid if abstract point about America having a "sickness care system" rather than a health care system, and a slightly more concrete point about some of the possible roots of chronic illness. And later on, after the performance, she clarified that she has nothing against plans but believes crafting plans is the province of the president's Cabinet.

But it was Williamson's closing statement that arguably got the most jeers across the Interwebz:

I’m sorry we haven’t talked more tonight about how we’re going to beat Donald Trump. I have an idea about Donald Trump: Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk. He’s not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans. He’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what the man has done. This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he has harnessed fear for political purposes.

So, Mr. President — if you’re listening — I want you to hear me please: You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. So I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field, and sir, love will win.

Williamson sounds a tad arrogant when she insinuates that she is the only one who has any idea about the damage that Trump has done, not just to American ideals but, as she says, to the American psyche. In truth plenty of people, inside and outside of politics, have been speaking to those very issues nonstop for years. And as for the "love will win" rallying cry... well, for a brief time during the 2016 campaign, as it was becoming ever more apparent that Trump was emboldening and empowering the hatriarchy in ways that hadn't been seen in decades, the Clinton campaign tried #LoveTrumpsHate. That didn't work out so well.

The past as prologue
Perhaps you know Williamson's back story, but in case you don't, and you don't feel like following all of the links I'm providing, here's a capsule review.

After years of being an adventurous, free-spirited dilettante whose colorfully dysfunctional past is currently being portrayed in the media as wild, crazy, exotic, and even "controversial" -- but really wasn't all that unusual for many who were born during the first half of the postwar American baby boom -- Williamson shot to New-Wage guru stardom in 1992 with the publication of her first book, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles." (The Amazon link is for the 1996 reissue/update, but the book was originally published in '92).

The original A Course in Miracles, as you may know, was a ponderous three-volume work by a woman named Helen Schucman (1909-1981), who claimed that Jesus Christ Himself dictated the words to her between 1965 and 1972. Marianne Williamson's book was a much more marketable distillation of ACIM -- and her own attractiveness and charisma certainly didn't hurt -- and her career took off like wildfire. Numerous books and other info-products followed over the years, and Williamson became a McSpirituality minister to the stars -- even officiating at one of the late Liz Taylor's multiple weddings -- and, of course, she became an Oprah pal.

I lampooned Williamson back in the early daze of her stardom, originally creating this fake ad for "A Correspondence Course in Miracles" in 1992 and including it a few years later in my self-published BLP (book-like product), Cosmic Relief: Honoring and Celebrating the Global Paradigm Shaft, which is apparently a very, very rare book, though I still seem to have a few copies lying around the garage, and if you ask me very nicely, I will sell you a copy for much less than the $1,071.50 or even $425.00 currently listed on Amazon.

As her star rose, Williamson caught a lot of flak about a lot of things, including her temper and her seeming fondness for using colorful language. In a long-ago essay (posted on my currently inactive Cosmic Relief web site) about Houston being "Spaced City," due to the city being a breeding ground for numerous New-Wage/McSpirituality/selfish-help luminaries, I swatted at Williamson in passing, describing her as having a sweet face but a foul mouth, and making a reference to "A Curse in Miracles." On a more serious note, Williamson was also accused of mis-managing some of her charitable organizations, essentially using them to promote her various shticks. Some of those early-days criticisms are detailed in this 1992 Entertainment Weekly piece. And Mother Jones published a more than slightly mocking profile in 1997.

Like many New-Wage gurus, some of whom I've also written about on this blog, Williamson had a tendency to throw the criticism right back at the critics, strongly insinuating that they were the ones with the problems, not her. But she was not above invoking her Texas background as a partial explanation for some of the problems people had with her, nor of using her Jewish heritage as a rationale, and indeed on more than one occasion she used her "Jewish Texan" creds to explain why she was such a bad-ass. I don't have any specific links to the latter point; I am just going by long-term memory.

In more recent years Williamson was no longer front-page news -- or maybe I had just grown bored with her so she slipped off of my radar -- but she kept producing whatever it is she produces, and in late 2010 she came out with a weight-loss book that her pal Oprah enthusiastically endorsed in what was clearly a very contrived promotional scheme. Natch, I had to write about that.

Back to the future
In many ways Williamson was and is a personification of the passive-aggressive reality that so often lies beneath the thin veneer of the SNAG (sensitive new age guy/gal) "love and light" mindset. That sometimes disturbing inconsistency, so often seen in New-Wage "leaders," is another topic I've covered on this blog, and as a matter of fact I'll be writing about it again very soon regarding a hypocritical and profoundly narcissistic New-Wage guru/scoundrel I've written about many times before.

But back to Marianne. While it's true that women who assert themselves in any way -- in business or in politics or in their personal lives -- have always been more harshly judged than men (a phenomenon that holds true even today), the new-age love-and-light hypocrisy is a separate issue from that. Following Williamson's stage performance as a Democratic presidential candidate, my friend Barbara G, who lives on the West Coast and is about as astute an observer of the cultural milieu as I've seen, wrote about Williamson on a Facebook thread, saying, "She is so phony with her hostile, aggressive 'love'. She drones on & on with her prepackaged pseudo wisdom and spirituality. My skin crawls when I hear and/or see her obnoxious demeanor. YUK!" She added, "Something off about her. She talks love but emanates something opposite." I concur.

That said, I don't see anything bizarre or terribly offensive in Williamson's rhetoric about "leading with love," nor in her implicit and explicit messaging that so many of America's problems are rooted in a deep spiritual malaise. While it may have seemed laughable to many when she preached it from the stage at the Democrats' show, consider the fact that Williamson is, after all, a long-time proponent of a McSpirituality "religion" of sorts. So her message is hardly surprising, and to tell the truth I don't find it nearly as objectionable as the right-wing theocrats' booming declarations that America's problems are mostly rooted in a Jesus deficiency or in Americans forgetting that the US is a "Christian nation."

In addition to lampooning her in Cosmic Relief, I have, as indicated above, taken a few potshots at Williamson on this blog over the years, as has my friend and blogging colleague Chris Locke at the dormant but still germane and well-worth-reading MysticBourgeoisie blog. I'll say again as I've said before that I met Williamson in person once at a book signing/reading that I attended with a star-struck friend. The event was to promote her recently released work, A Woman's Worth, and if you're interested, I do have a signed first edition of that book, which I will gladly sell you for only a few hundred dollars. Anyway she seemed genuinely nice during our brief exchange, though this doesn't invalidate the points about the faux-love-and-light syndrome I mentioned above. Williamson is also clearly intelligent, writes lovely and poetic, if rambling, prose, and has lofty ideals and a strong sense of social justice.

But she is -- to put it mildly -- not a credible presidential candidate, any more than her g.f. Oprah is. Granted, Williamson actually did manage to make a couple of valid points during her performance at the Democratic gathering in June, even if most of those points were so abstract as to be useless. And she made one highly pertinent comment that, unfortunately, was immediately drowned out: she mentioned the historic role that US foreign policy in Latin America has played in the current immigration crisis. Williamson was spot-on when she said that none of the other candidates had mentioned this core problem during the entire evening's performance. In fairness, it's hard to dig deeply on any issue when you're restricted to 90-second or less sound bites, and when folks are constantly hollering over you, which is why these "debate" formats are such a joke. Even so, someone should have at least mentioned the US' foreign-policy baggage, and Williamson did. I have to give credit where it is due.

But none of the above means that Marianne Williamson is a viable candidate for the presidency. She might have a place in an agency such as Health and Human Services, due to her long history of advocacy and activism, or perhaps in the Environmental Protection Agency, assuming that any of these agencies survive the Trump disaster. But president? Please, girlfriend.

Joke's on us?
Hilarity aside, Williamson isn't being completely dismissed across the board. Even though she is widely considered a joke candidate, there seem to be two schools of thought regarding even this matter. Some think she's nothing but a joke. Humorists have been having a field day mocking her; Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon did a fair imitation on Seth Meyers' show, and comedian Trae Crowder took to Twitter to recap Williamson's platform "as I understand it":

Healthcare plan: lol plans are stupid
Biggest issue: Holler at New Zealand
Ultimate takeaway: See y'all in the Love field
#KookyAunt2020 #DemDebate2

The second school of thought is that Williamson may be a joke, but, as Arwa Mahdawi reminded us in a July 2 opinion piece in The Guardian, we might still be wise to take her seriously; after all, Trump's victory in 2016 taught us that a joke can win an election. A writer on The New Republic web site, Alex Pareene, suggests that Williamson is a possible Democratic version of Trump, being "a proper outsider, with a great deal of TV experience giving her both name recognition and some degree of respect among the 'base' despite the 'establishment' not taking her seriously." Yet of course she is also Trump's opposite, Pareene hastens to add, being "not just female but powerfully and unabashedly feminine, aiming her message not at the raging car dealer dad but the anxious Wellness Mom."

Maybe so, but we don't need another TV star in the White House, no matter how opposite she may be to Trump in all of the ways that matter.

Williamson herself seems to have been a good sport about the laughter at her expense, noting, according to the Guardian article I linked to above, that America could use a good laugh. (She did, however, get a bit huffy about being left out of a Vogue profile of female candidates, which perhaps indicates that the "good-sport" facade can only cover up so much.) And notwithstanding Trae Crowder's snarky tweet, Williamson does have some solid progressive ideas that are not mired in abstraction and flowery new-age language, at least as outlined on her campaign web site. Her words on those pages don't sound nearly as flaky as the Marianne we saw on stage in Florida. Again, that ludicrous "debate" format left little opportunity for thoughtful remarks, much less elucidation, on any issue; with such a large pool of candidates, everyone would have been better served had the show been stretched out over four nights instead of two. But it was what it was. Time to move on.

In any event, however much or how little of a joke you may think Marianne Williamson is, the joke may be on all of us. As of now it appears that she has reached the requisite donation and polling thresholds to make it to the second crop of debates at the end of this month, apparently thanks in no small part to donations from Republicans, who reportedly want to keep her in future debates for her entertainment value. This is both funny and scary.

These Republican donors fully understand that Marianne Williamson is in over her head, and no doubt they are chuckling at her wacko pronouncements, and patting themselves on the back for their efforts in the service of sabotaging the Democrats, even as they're clicking the "Donate" buttons or writing out their checks. But I should point out that these are most likely some of the same folks who supported the profoundly stupid-sounding Sarah Palin or even bonkers Jeezus freak Michelle Bachmann back when those women were in the running for national office, and who now wholeheartedly support the ignorant, lying, gaffe-prone poser who currently occupies the Oval Office, and who has said more than his share of just plain stupid things. Clearly these GOP hyper-partisans don't even raise an eyebrow over a candidate or even a president saying unintentionally hilarious or completely wackadoodle things, nor do they object to that person's core unfitness for office, as long as he or she is on their side. But I do mind, and I have no problem with calling out Williamson even if I agree with her on some matters.
 
Williamson (unlike Palin and Bachmann) is smart, and she seems to have a pretty good idea about what is going on, so I find it hard to believe that she thinks she truly has a chance to win. Call me a pessimist or a cynic, but it seems clear to me that the toxic combination of Trump's cult of personality and GOP dogma and obstructionism have brought American politics far beyond a simple battlefield where love meets hate, and love wins out. Williamson and some of her supporters may truly believe that her metaphorical placing of a flower in the barrel of a rifle will go straight to the core and fix what's wrong with the republic, and she might even be able to best Trump in the unlikely event that she would participate in a one-on-one debate with him -- assuming, of course, a format where candidates were quizzed intelligently on issues and allowed time to give substantive answers -- but Trump isn't the only problem.

There's his base, too: a firewall of irrational, tenacious MAGA soldiers who stick with their leader through thick and thicker, through dumb and dumber. Included among these supporters are viciously hateful MRAs (men's rights activists) who fancy themselves "alpha males" and spend their social media lives raging against women, feminism, "SJWs" ("social justice warriors"), and all manner of "snowflakes." (I've most recently discussed them on my previous blog post, in the context of the way some of them have been defending motivational stuporstar Tony Robbins against #MeToo allegations; see section under the sub-head, "Alphabitching and other reactions.") Then there are the theocrats who still think new-age spirituality is the work of the devil. And of course there are the random racists, xenophobes, and garden-variety ignoranti who won't even consider anyone but Trump, because they see him as their only hope to save America from a host of real and imaginary (mostly imaginary) threats. The hatriarchy truly has Trump's back. And beyond Trump's base, there is a wide field of powerful Republicans who are bent on remaking America in their own image and that of their wealthy donors. That's a lot for one faux-accented, love-spouting guru to tackle, even if she is a bad-ass Jewish Texan.

However solid some of her ideas may be, Williamson's public persona and general flakiness, not to mention her utter lack of qualifications for the most powerful position in the world, overshadow all of those good ideas. I hope she doesn't let her ego get the better of her, and that she has the good sense to step out of the race soon, perhaps donating all of that Republican money either to another, more credible candidate (like Elizabeth Warren, for instance, who actually does have credible plans as well as a solid understanding of who Trump and the GOP power structure are and the damage they are doing), or to any number of worthwhile causes that Williamson holds so dear. We can't afford another four years of what we have now, and Williamson's candidacy is counter-productive to the urgent mission to #DumpTrump.

Note: I have added links and clarifications to this post since it was first published on July 5.
~ CC, July 6, 2019

Addendum, July 23, 2019: Last week, Tarpley Hitt at the Daily Beast reported on Marianne Williamson's return to what she described as her "soul base" in Los Angeles. Said Marianne to her appreciative audience at the Saban Theatre, "There has always been a sense for me that I was seen and heard in Los Angeles, because I think like so many people here think. You don't actually think you're wacky when you're here. You just think like everyone else." (Not a good selling point for a nationwide candidacy, but whatever.) Yet despite her rapport with that audience, some folks clearly wanted her to talk about concrete issues.

For a homecoming—one which could strengthen her standing among California primary voters—the event was largely untethered to Los Angeles, a city currently bogged down by disasters, from record-setting earthquakes and looming wildfires, to one of the worst housing crises in the country. Just last month, Los Angeles County Homeless Services Authority announced the results of an annual homelessness count, which showed that the number of people experiencing homelessness in the county had grown by 12 percent since 2018, to a staggering population of 58,936. Housing is one of the most pressing issues in California—and no shortage of attendees expected Williamson to talk about it...

...At one point, as Williamson waxed Goopish, someone in the back yelled: “Talk about homelessness!” She didn’t.

The choice left more than one fan disappointed. “Marianne says, ‘If you see a hungry child, feed that child,’” said Jess Torres, a formerly-undocumented organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Human Trafficking and a longtime Williamson supporter. “But I can tell you that 100 people passed a hungry person on their way here, and nobody fed them. I’m looking for a candidate who’s willing to point that shit out.” 

And in another Daily Beast article published on July 7, Sam Brodey wrote about how Marianne Williamson squandered $2 million when she unsuccessfully ran for Congress "in one of California's most New Age-y districts" a few years ago. It's a cautionary tale for those who still might be considering supporting her presidential campaign. For the rest of us, it comes as no surprise whatsoever.

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Snippets for a Monday afternoon

Happy New(ish) Year! It's past time for me to get back to my Whirled; no more excuses. While I'm putting the finishing touch on several longer posts, and churning out content elsewhere for pay, here are a few snippets.

What's wrong with this (big) picture?
New-Wage guru-ette Marianne Williamson, who first rose to fame in the early 1990s by popularizing A Course in Miracles with her book, A Return to Love, has been an Oprah fave for years. Marianne's stock-in-trade is flowery, poetic writing that is often lovely to read but has a tendency to be kind of rambling, while offering very little in the way of practical advice. (Kind of like this blog, come to think of it, except for the flowery and poetic writing and the being-lovely-to-read bit.) I met Marianne years ago at a book signing in Houston, and because in my brief conversation with her she exuded what seemed to me to be genuine kindness, I still tend to give her, perhaps against all reason, a little more of a pass than I do other New-Wage superstars. But her latest opus... jeez.

The story goes that Marianne was standing near Oprah one day when the latter was chatting about dieting. As most of us know, Oprah has experienced dramatic weight losses and re-gains – repeatedly – over the past couple of decades. According to the story Marianne tells, she said to Oprah, "If you could have done it by yourself, you would have done it by now."

Oprah asked Marianne to 'splain, and Marianne said she would reply by email. Subsequently she sent Oprah several letters detailing how Oprah or anyone else should ask God for help to move forward from food addiction or compulsive overeating, and the accompanying emotional baggage. At some point – we're not told exactly when – Oprah suggested that Marianne turn those emails into...hold on to your hats, Dear Ones, because this is really unprecedented...a book. And the result is A Course in Weight Loss, published in November 2010 by, appropriately enough, the New-Wage fiddle-faddle factory Hay House.

The title of the book is, of course, a blatant marketing ploy, and if you're at all familiar with the history of A Course in Miracles (aka ACIM), you'll also immediately notice that the cover of A Course in Weight Loss is vaguely reminiscent of the design of the classic ACIM book covers, consisting of simple text with a border and solid-color background. If you're not familiar with ACIM, suffice to say that it is a New-Wage study course with an impeccable spiritual pedigree, having originally been channeled by an atheistic Jewish woman, Helen Schucman, Ph.D., straight from Jesus H. Christ Himself. The success story of ACIM and Marianne herself are neatly encapsulated in this informative graphic. (Click for enlargement. And yes, I know I've shared this pic before. Sorry about the redundancy.)

Marianne's newest book is all about retraining your consciousness and healing your separation from Gawd, which, she explains, is the true cause of your portliness, anorexia, binging and purging, or what have you. "People report that just from reading this book they're losing weight," says Marianne, according to the Houston Chronicle article I linked to in the second paragraph of this snippet. Oprah herself listed A Course in Weight Loss as one of her "favorite things" of 2010.

The elephant in the room, if you'll pardon the metaphor, is actually a thundering herd of elephants. One hardly knows where to begin. There are several problems, apart from the glaringly obvious fact that Marianne herself has apparently never had a weight problem remotely on the scale (no pun intended) of Oprah's. "Well, gee, Cosmic Connie, that could just be because Marianne takes her own advice," you might say. If you believe that... um, you know those sayings about oceanfront property in Arizona, or bridges for sale?
So let's examine some of the elephants.

First of all, that story of the origins of the book seems...well... a tad contrived. Oprah has long been in tune with all of the trends and ideas of the conspicuously enlightened set, embracing everything and everyone from Eckhart Tolle to, most infamously, The Secret. She has supposedly been in touch, almost ostentatiously at times, with her spiritual side for years. She has known Marianne Williamson for years as well. How could anything that Marianne says or writes possibly be so novel to her that she would even ask what Marianne meant by that remark during their conversation about dieting? Or was Oprah just making polite conversation? Or did the conversation actually occur as related? Something about that story doesn't quite ring true to me.

Secondly, the use of spirituality (whether of the New-Wage, Eastern, or Bible-thumping Christian variety) to aid in weight loss is hardly a revolutionary concept. If the blending of spiritual or religious concepts with weight issues is supposed to be a unique selling point for the book, the author and the promoters are kind of behind the times.

Third, Oprah is lavishly wealthy, and besides having her finger on the pulse of cutting-edge spiritual and pop-psychology concepts, she has easy access to all of the world's very best fitness trainers, dietary experts, and methods of medical intervention that she could possibly ever desire in order to achieve permanent weight loss, if such a goal were even possible for her. And indeed, she has had personal trainers and chefs and Lord knows who and what else to aid her in her struggle for years; contrary to the implication in Marianne's remark to her, it doesn't appear that Oprah has been attempting to to do it on her own for a very long time. 

Fourth, just look at Oprah. While I think she's lovely at any weight, I have a strong feeling that being even remotely trim is going to be a lifelong struggle for her no matter what she reads or how she tinkers with her relationship to Spirit. I'm not making fun of or trivializing her weight struggle or anyone else's. I'm just making observations.

Could it be that Oprah was just trying to help out a gal pal whose star is kind of fading, by suggesting a quick and easy money op? Ya think? 

In any case, Marianne is now making the rounds to promote and sign her new book. She'll be in my neck of the woods this coming Thursday, giving a lecture on what seems to me the painfully self-explanatory "The Lure of the Miraculous." Don't look for me there. I'll be staying home experiencing the miracle of The Big Bang Theory and $#! My Dad Says.

A Course in Methane Miracles: who's gonna step up to take credit? 
One of the biggest disaster stories of 2010 was the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last April. It was bad news to be sure, but as it turns out, it wasn't all awful. Texas A&M oceanographer John Kessler and fellow researchers recently published a study concluding that hordes of hungry bacteria have gobbled up nearly all of the estimated 200,000 tons of methane the spill released into the Gulf of Mexico. And the microbes performed this feat faster than anyone had previously predicted, without creating the expected oxygen-deprived "dead zone" in the ocean. Not everyone is convinced that the bacteria alone were responsible for the fact that the methane is all but gone, but some journos are calling it "the methane miracle." 

Now I'm wondering who is going to be the first in the New-Wage community to step up and claim to have provided the power behind that miracle.
Will it be Phoenix, aka the Spirit Diva, aka Judy Marks, the gal who not only communicates with hurricanes but who also led not one, not two, not three, but twenty-three meditations on the Gulf oil spill?

Will it be Mr. Fire and his sidekick, Pat, who last year announced a "clearing" audio to clean up the mess, featuring Pat's music and Joe's weird vocalizations, which they claimed had awesome powers to tune listeners into the collective unconscious, thus enabling them to impact the oil spill and anything else perceived as being bad?

Or will it be members of that cultish sex-and-money (dis)organization, Access Consciousness (née Access Energy Transformation), who are experts in "Molecular Demanifestation" and "Demolecular Manifestation," and who are going to attempt to demonstrate their expertise by going out on a boat and demanifesting a giant glob of plastic in the ocean? Perhaps a group of Accessories will step forward with the claim that they've been practicing their skills on the methane from the BP oil spill, in preparation for their big ocean voyage (on which they will embark once they have taken care of basic details, such as manifesting a boat).

Or will it be some other New-Wage entrepreneur claiming that it was his or her frauduct or metaphysical superpowers that cleared it all away? Guys and gals, there's a huge money op here. What are y'all waiting for?

Accessories on the loose: monkeys and typewriters

Speaking of Access, in an Access post I wrote last year, I mentioned that a former Access insider shared some of the hooks that Access founder Gary Douglas and his right-hand boy, Dain Heer, have used to sucker participants into continued participation. Among these hooks, my correspondent wrote, were the "clearing statements."

Gary originally and then Gary & Dain together would come up with what they said were new more powerful clearing statements - all the time. So if you missed classes or workshops, you didn't get the 'clearings' from these new and great clearing statements, and you didn't have them to process yourself with or process your clients (if you had any). While I was participating I observed many accessories try to make a 'go' of doing Access facilitation to create income. Most could not and no facilitator was raking in the money like Dain.

The other day someone forwarded an email to me that had been sent out by an Access facilitator who claims to be a relationship expert. This is a person who, among other things, teaches people how to stay married and happy, and also coaches women on how to find happiness and fulfillment as The Other Woman. (In Access, any type of sexual arrangement is apparently okay as long as it is satisfying to the Accessory.) During a recent "relationships bootcamp" call, the facilitator shared a new Access clearing statement:

What secret agenda for the creation of confinement, definement, and avoidance of choice and question pressurizing you utterly into stillpoint through sex copulation and relationship do you have that maintains and entrains what you cannot change choose and institute as life and living that is bigger than the reality of others?
Right and wrong, good and bad, all 9, POD, POC, shorts, boys and beyonds.

When I shared that clearing statement with my guy Ron, he said, "That kinda nails down the thing about monkeys and typewriters, doesn't it?"

Au contraire, Ronald! Far from being the result of random pecking, the clearing statement is in fact deeply meaningful. I'm willing to bet that the first paragraph can be easily understood after taking a few Access classes, downing a few Very Special Brownies, or consuming a large amount of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. Anything that severely compromises cognitive function should do the trick. (If you're wondering what "stillpoint" means, however, you'll have to listen to the bootcamp call to find out.) 

The second paragraph is actually the classic original Access clearing statement, according to the former Accessory I mentioned at the beginning of this snippet. In use for many years now, it's a sort of shorthand, with each word having many meanings, according to the Ex-cessory. An early Access web page stated, "This phrase unlocks and erases all the programs, agreements and judgments which keep you stuck throughout all time and space." It's a phrase that is generally used after a "process question" to clear all of the energies – good and bad, right and wrong. Some of the things that are cleared include...

...implanted and explanted stuff, perpetually and/or eternally regenerating and all of the relays, spheres, uns, atomic, subatomic, pre-atomic structures, confluences throughout all time, space, dimensions and realities, ad infinitum.

All of these things were taught in Access One, at least at the time my correspondent was involved. I think they're taught in Scientology too, come to think of it.

But what do those weird things like "POD," "POC," "all nine," "shorts," "boys," etc. mean?

According to information on an Access web site...

POC is short for "point of creation." This means you are asking the energy to go to the point of creation (the moment where you first began functioning as though whatever thought, feeling or emotion was actually yours) and uncreate and destroy it, so that you can now function as the infinite being you truly are.POD is short for "point of destruction," where you started destroying yourself by functioning from those thoughts, feelings or emotions that were not yours.

My Ex-cessory correspondent 'splained the rest to me:

• All nine refers to the "nine layers of garbage" that Accessories are taught to eliminate. Each of these layers has a power of its own.
• Shorts stands for "the meaning, the meaningless, the punishments, the rewards, the layers, the non layers, the meaningless glop and the glop." Hey, makes sense to me!
• Boys refers to "the 22 nucleated spheres," which Accessories refer to as "the boys in the hood." These are issues that tend to repeat themselves no matter how often we work on them. Clear as a bell, eh? Although I would think that "boys" should be spelled "boyz" for cultural consistency.
• Beyonds are "the usual feelings and sensations that stop you dead."

Now it all makes sense, doesn't it? I bet this is some of the stuff that Gary Douglas got from his old pal Raz, or Rasputin, as most of us know him.
The former Accessory tells me that Gary always used to say it didn't matter what order the words were said when repeating the clearing phrase. In that respect, the Access clearing statement is like the Four Magic Phrases of Ho'oponoponoponoponoponoponoponopono. Cool, huh?

When I shared Ron's comment with the correspondent who had forwarded the info about the "relationships bootcamp" and the latest Access "clearing statement," that person replied, "Honestly, he's so judgmental." "Judgmental" is kind of a dirty word in Access and, indeed, in much of New-Wage culture.
"But I'm not being judgmental," Ron protested. "I was merely pointing out some scientifical data."

Indeed. Besides, Ron and I both happen to like monkeys. We just think they should be kept away from typewriters, keyboards and phones.

That's it for now; more to come soon.

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