POCKET PARADIGMS
FROM
THE WRITINGS OF SAM SMITH
Abortion
Conservatives
believe
in the sanctity of life from conception until exit from the birth
canal. Progressives believe in the sanctity of ife from birth
to death.
Action
Thought without action is the coitus interruptus of the
mind
You can't text your
way to the presidency,
you can't Facebook a revolution and you can't save the planet
with Twitter. At some point real people have to join with, talk
to, and help other real people.
Advertising
The average American
is subjected to
3,000 commercial messages a day. If you have a good day, a half
dozen people will tell you a truth worth remembering. Thus the
lies win out 500 to one.
Increasingly, our lives are being run by logos rather
than logos, symbols rather than reason.
America
The four leading causes for the decline of the American
republic were:
- Margaret Thatcher, who
provided Ronald Reagan's with brains
- The Yale Law School, which
has cursed us with everything from Clarence Thomas to Bill Clinton.
- The Harvard Business School
which taught a generation of managers that they didn't have to
know a damn thing about what they were managing
- The disco drum machine,
which inaugurated our cultural collapse
In the end, it is not the culture from which
we came but the one each of us is helping to create that will
matter. It is our common fate rather than our disparate pasts
that will ultimately describe, redeem, or destroy us.
America is not the answer; it is only a good place to look
for the answer. America has never been perfect; it's just been
a place where it was easier to fix things that were broken.
We have, it would seem, entered a postmodern
paradise where the pursuit of the moral and the decent is not
only unnecessary, it has all the status of a bad 1970s disco
band.
The fraud, the huckster,
the salesman are
not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so
strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a character
that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang
up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children,
run our government, and tell us what to think. They are the Enron
generation, filled with postmodern versions of Willy Loman: "He
don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give
you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on
a smile and a shoeshine." America once made things people
wanted, said things that needed to be said and fixed things,
including itself, that needed fixing. Now it is out there in
the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. The problem, as
Willy Loman discovered, comes "when they start not smiling
back - that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple
of spots on your hat, and you're finished."
A good way to think
about the history of our country is that it has involved repeated conflict between
the specifics of the soul and institutional abstractions -- between
people and places on the one hand and, on the other, a succession
of systems desiring to exploit, subjugate or supplant them. You
can say that one of the great characteristics of Americans has
been not merely opposition to a system of the moment but antipathy
towards unnatural systems in general -- opposition to all systems
that revoke, replace or restrain the natural rights of human
beings and the natural assets of their habitats.
We should seek a cooperative
commonwealth based
on decency before profit, liberty before sterile order, justice
before efficiency, happiness before uniformity, families before
systems, communities before corporations, and people before institutions
Today almost every principle
upon which this
country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty
we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we
are taught to follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated
with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer
considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones
of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by
corporations and of suspicion and control by government.
Those who run the country, whether in government, business
or media, seldom speak of this land anymore with feeling, affection
or understanding. They too often carry forth their affairs unburdened
by place, history or culture -- without conscience, without country,
and without any sense of the pain they have caused. America is
no longer a place to serve and to love. Because they have, in
the name of global glories, cut themselves off from their own
land, it is becoming for them increasingly a place of danger
-- a place of long, grim shadows, the sort of shadows that too
often conceal a foe.
We live in a nation
hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the
American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved
into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but
an autocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers.
A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in which
corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all
live in a Mafia neighborhood now."
o
One test of the state of an empire is whether a handful of angry young men with box
cutters can wreck your major economic and military edifices and
throw the country into total panic. One test of the state of
your culture is whether you can think of much over the past few
years to which you reacted by thinking "that's the best
[whatever] that I've seen-heard-read in a long time." Another
test is when you find yourself saying of some public figure,
"I'm sure glad such people are around at a time like this."
When you can't trust your presidents of either major party, your beloved Constitution
is in tatters, you have to submit to investigative fondling before
flying to Des Moines, your Catholic cardinals say it's okay to
bugger little boys as long as you don't do it too often and it
doesn't become "notorious," a corporation thrice declared
by Fortune Magazine to be the most innovative in the country
turns out to be a den of thieves, the accountants who are meant
to protect us from such scoundrels turn out to be co-conspirators,
our lawmakers spend most of their time finding new things to
prohibit, we feel we have to give kids drug tests to make sure
they're safe to sing in the choir, our teachers have forgotten
how to teach our children how to read, and our journalists have
forgotten how to write or to tell a lie from a fact, you've got
a problem and one that's not really Al-Queda's fault.
Empires and cultures are not permanent and while thinking about the
possibility that ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise
it is far less so than enduring the dangerous frustrations and
failures involved in having one's contrary myth constantly butt
up against reality like a boozer who insists he is not drunk
attempting to drive home. Instead of defending the non-existent
we could turn our energies instead towards devising a new and
saner existence.
The drug Soma, obstacle
golf, Feelie movies and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy were used in
Huxley's Brave New World to placate the masses. These have been
supplanted by a enormous variety of political tranquilizers ranging
from actual drugs to distractions such as video games and even
substitute elections such as American Idol and Survivor. Never
have Americans in their off-work hours had so many ways to avoid
what is really going on. Never have so many Americans been deactivated
in imagination, creativity and energy by drugs prescribed by
medicine rather than by taking those of their own choice.
Those who would preserve the better America and recreate from its damaged remains
are not naive fools; they are the new founders of a time and
place still to come. Nor are they fantasizing. Any place, any
community, any gathering can become what Hakim Bey called a temporary
autonomous zone, an oasis of freedom, decency and hope, in which
a new culture can take sprout. Name it, enjoy it, use it. It's
the best we have at the moment.
Anthropology
Let's go to a time and
place so distant
that no one knows when or where it was, a time and place whose
importance is as infinite as its obscurity. The moment we are
seeking is the one during which a single individual, or a small
group of individuals, did something so unusual that it helped
free their ilk forever from the shackles of the environment and
genetics -- grabbing destiny from the tree of nature and making
it human. . . On the first day of my freshman anthropology class,
the professor drew an invisible evolutionary time line on the
wall of the lecture hall. As we twisted in our seats the eras,
periods, and epochs of musical name and mystical significance
boldly circumscribed the room. Finally we came back to where
the professor stood and when there was nearly no place further
to go, he announced that this was the beginnings of us. We were
only inches from the first fire maker.
I didn't know it then, but I had joined not so much a
discipline as a rebellion. Under the guise of studying the often
rigid rules, customs, and traditions of different human communities,
anthropology was actually opening a benign Pandora's box of choice,
laying before the world its own wondrous variety, opportunity,
and concomitant pain and joy. It was not a popular rebellion.
Only one or two of my courses had more than 20 students. Years
later, academics and media would discover something they called
multiculturalism or diversity. They would speak of it in ponderous
tones and as their discovery, and they would describe it as a
problem and demand that we do something about it. Too few would
notice that what we were talking about as a problem was really
a gift and an opportunity and a potential source of our own happiness
and freedom.
While the range of choices,
values, and constraints
among cultures is stunning in its variety, it is impossible to
find a functioning society in which choices have not been made.
Similarly, though individuals may reject society and even design
their own micro-cultures, they are no less dependent on their
decisions, whether conscious or not. To not make them is to drift
aimlessly and lifelessly, pushed this way or that by others quite
anxious and ready to make choices for you
Our own culture, for
all its wonders and faults, represents but a tiny fraction of the choices humans
have collectively made over time and space. These choices, distant
as they may be, beckon us towards possibilities lying dormant
within ourselves. They also mock the self-assurance with which
we run our little corner of the world. Secondly, the nature of
culture is drastically changing from being something in which
the individual is indoctrinated and absorbed, towards something
the individual must preserve, restore or recreate in order to
avoid the destruction of all culture save that of the corporate
market and the political systems that support it. Finally, the
strategies by which this can be accomplished depend on no small
part on the imagination, passion, obstinacy, and creativity of
ordinary people who refuse their consumptive assignments in the
global marketplace, who develop autonomous alternatives, and
who laugh when they are supposed to be saluting. The business
of constructing culture is no longer an inherited and precisely
defined task but a radical act demonstrating to others that they
are not alone and to ourselves that we are still human.
Part of what had attracted me to anthropology
in the first place was a search for a society that would find
my personal traits and rituals acceptable enough for membership.
Like, I suspect, many real anthropologists, I was a subculture
of one looking for my lost tribe. I began this search for the
lost tribe of Sams at an unusually early age thanks to the fact
that my school - Germantown Friends in Philadelphia -was one
of only two high schools in the country that offered a course
in anthropology. And in ninth grade. At this precise moment of
teenage alienation and confusion, the school offered the reverse
of a Pandora's box, for when opened, anthropology freed not evil
but hope and possibility, leaving locked safely inside the myth
of the single, homogeneous cultural answer. In the middle of
the stolid, segregated, monolithic 1950s, Howard Platt showed
us a new way to look at the world. And what a wonderful world
it was. Not the stultifying world of our parents, not the monochromatic
world of our neighborhood, not the boring world of 9th grade,
but a world of fantastic options, a world in which people got
to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in
an extraordinary variety of ways. Mr. Platt did not exorcise
racism, and he did not teach ethnic harmony, cultural sensitivity,
the regulation of diversity, or the morality of non-prejudiced
behavior. He didn't need to. He taught something far more important.
Mr . Platt opened a world of variety, not for us to fear but
to learn about, appreciate and enjoy. It was not a problem, but
a gift.
My relationship with the fire maker, and with the creator of the stone ax, the inventor
of the spear thrower, and the first potter, would never cease
to be both humbling and glorious. Humbling because our true evolutionary
insignificance daily mocks our pretensions. Yet also glorious
because without the endless random reiteration of individual
creation, choice, and imagination, we might still be shivering
in the dark instead of reading a book with our feet up and wondering
whether there's another beer in the fridge. We are nothing and
everything, inexplicably and inseparably bundled together.
Art
Art is the serendipity that occurs when imagination meets
discipline and skill. Every work of art is a challenge to the
status quo because it proposes to replace a part of it.
Asperger
politics
Key to the Asperger
style of politics
and media is the constant repetition of thought patterns and
the imperviousness of the practitioners' thinking to outside
fact or argument. The technical name for this is perseveration
which has been defined as "the persistent repetition of
a response after cessation of the causative stimuli; for example,
the repetition of a correct answer to one question as the answer
to succeeding questions," an almost perfect description
of what regularly occurs on your average Sunday talk show. A
less technical but even more generally apt definition is "continuation
of something usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired
point." Silently, without argument or recognition, the logic
of our nation has drastically changed - from "show me"
to "tell me," from experience to propaganda, from the
empirical to the virtual, and from debate and discussion to addictive
perseveration.
Balancing
rights
Politicians and the
media have taken
to talking about "rights and responsibilities," as
though free speech and free religion and not having cops raiding
your house without a warrant were privileges we citizens only
get when we're well-behaved. When politicians or journalists
say that a constitutional right must be balanced by something
else, they are really talking about reducing or eliminating that
right. In fact, the rights listed in the Constitution are not
bargaining chips, but permanent guarantees. Your constitutional
rights, to borrow a phrase from the Declaration of Independence,
are "unalienable."
Baseball
Baseball is among the
most democratic of sports. Each
player is given great freedom and specific turf to guard, but
this individuality only works when all the members of a team
cooperate. Baseball, Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, is unique
in that the game is not restricted by either time or space --
games theoretically can go on forever as can an out-of-the-park
homer. He also notes that while in other sports you might hear
fan suggestions that the ref be fired, it is baseball in which
the crowds cry, 'Kill the umpire!' Thus the game, like America
itself, celebrates not only a deep distrust of authority and
a lack of limits, but also cooperation, individuality, and community.
Beat
generation
We tend to think of the
1950s as a time of unmitigated conformity, but in many ways the
decade of the 60s was merely the mass movement of ideas that
took root in the 50s.
It is instructive during
a time in which even alienated progressives outfit themselves
with mission and vision statements and speak the bureaucratic
argot of their oppressors to revisit that under-missioned, under-visioned
culture of what Norman Mailer called the "psychic outlaw"
and "the rebel cell in our social body." What Ned Plotsky
termed, "the draft dodgers of commercial civilization."
Unlike today's activists they lacked a plan; unlike those of
the 60s they lacked anything to plan for; what substituted for
utopia and organization was the freedom to think, to speak, to
move at will in a culture that thought it had adequately taken
care of all such matters.
To a far great degree than
rebellions that followed, the beat culture created its message
by being rather than doing, rejection rather than confrontation,
sensibility rather than strategy, journeys instead of movements,
words and music instead of acts, and informal communities rather
than formal institutions.
Blame
HOW TO AVOID
BLAMING THE WRONG THING
1. Count the bodies. If
something bad is happening there should be evidence of it. Besides,
counting the bodies helps to order priorities.
2. Get facts before you
get scared. Just because a politician or a journalist says there's
a threat doesn't mean there actually is one.
3. Just because it's on
TV doesn't mean it happening to you or your neighborhood. Just
because it's at the top of the news doesn't mean it should be
at the top of your mind.
4. Fight issues not people.
Your gun-loving, anti-abortion neighbor may also oppose plans
to store nuclear waste nearby. Find out. After all, most of us
are right only part of the time.
5. Don't try to crush those
with whom you disagree; convert them.
6.Before "they"
can do you any real harm, "they" probably need money
and power. If "they" don't have it, you are probably
worrying about the wrong "they."
Budgets
At times, it seems that there are no governments
anymore, only budget offices. As the numerologists rose in power,
programs increasingly became transformed into line items. Numbers
began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced to figures and
policy became a matter of where one placed the decimal point.
Bush
administration
While Condoleeza Rice's
intent is that
of an imperialist, her manner is that of an prissy third grade
teacher apparently unaware that not only are most whom she scolds
not in the third grade, they're not even in her school district.
George III, failed to
prevent the creation
of the American republic, which lasted over two hundred years
until a dysfunctional despot, George II, destroyed it.
Business
While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship"
and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude
is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully
constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance.
We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time
and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a
testament to our fear and lack of trust.
Campaigns
2008
Richard Cheney says the
election of Kerry-Edwards might lead to a major terrorist attack.
Could be. We don't really know. What we do know is that the election
of Bush-Cheney certainly did.
George Bush is consistent,
but consistently wrong. John Kerry is inconsistent, which means
he is occasionally right.
This would be a good year
to follow the Mae West dictum: whenever faced with a choice between
two evils, always pick the one you haven't tried before.
Don't think of this election
as a choice between candidates but between battlefields. Would
you rather spend the next four years fighting Republicans or
Democrats?
Campaign
contributions
Today, every politician
in Washington takes
bribes, from the president on down. Only please call them campaign
contributions.
Most assume that to bribe
someone you have to commit a crime. Not so. Dictionary definitions
of 'bribe' include both criminal and merely distasteful acts.
For centuries ordinary
people knew exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary
found it described in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly,
by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes
bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt
the conduct" of someone.
In more modern times, the
Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other
thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government
official. Simple and wise.
But that was before the
lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning
of bribery. And so we came to a time during the Clinton administration
when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting
the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because
of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew
exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was
only illegal if the briber was dumb enough to give you a receipt.
The media has gone along
with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary
in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," "the
appearance of a conflict of interest," or "campaign
contribution."
Yet, according to various
dictionaries, campaign contributions fall comfortably within
the definition of bribes. And hardly anyone in Washington talks
about it.
Capitalism
.Behind the public drama of the S&L
solution is the most egregious example to date of no-fault
capitalism and lemon socialism. The former is the remarkable
principle that - notwithstanding all the fawning over the ""free
market economy"" - our largest business institutions
are philosophically, fiscally and criminally exempt from the
ultimate consequences of laisse faire. The latter is the equally
inconsistent principle that to maintain the free market the government
is responsible for anything out of which private enterprise can't
make a profit. It may not, however, help support this magnificent
non sequitur through activities that might actually provide income
for the government, No, the rules of the game are that a major
industry is allowed to make whatever mistakes it wishes in pursuit
of the holy grail of free enterprise, the costs of which to be
fully borne by the taxpayer,
Sometimes I stand in
an airport bookstore
and try to figure why God decided to reveal all of life's mysteries
in such a place. Why didn't God make philosophers and theologians
and poets as all knowing as MBAs?
Center
If you ask important
people in politics,
think tanks or the media where they stand politically, many will
say "in the center." A lot of these folks like the
center because it makes them sound reasonable and moderate. It
also allows them to call other people extremists or gadflies
or wishful thinkers for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom
of the moment. Some members of the American elite have made whole
careers of being measured and cautious. They like to write somber
columns asking pompous questions like "Can the Center Hold?"
What they really mean is: can they hold on to their power? But
even if you do find the center, it's not necessarily the best
place to be. My navigation instructor at Coast Guard Officer
Candidate School explained it well: "If you take a navigational
fix and it places you on one side of a rock and then you take
another fix and it places you on the other side of the rock --
don't split the difference." Unfortunately, it's a rule
not often followed in American politics.
Even the KKK, so
often cited as an example of the sort of threat the contemporary
right poses, was powerful primarily because it was at the center,
holding political and judicial and law enforcement office as
well as hiding beneath its robes. In some towns, lynching parties
were even announced in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both
the Colorado governor and mayor of Denver were members of the
Klan, the latter well enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport
named after him.
Change
From the American revolution to the underground railroad, to
the organizing of labor, to the drive for universal suffrage,
to the civil rights, women's, peace and environmental movements,
every significant political and social change in this country
has been propelled by large numbers of highly autonomous small
groups linked not by a bureaucracy or a master organization but
by the mutuality of their thought, their faith and their determination.
There is no reason it can not happen again.
Whatever the source,
it now takes longer,
requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability
to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our
rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship"
and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude
is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully
constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance.
We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time
and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a
testament to our fear and lack of trust.
The reporter risking
status by telling the truth,
the government official risking employment by exposing the wrong,
the civic leader refusing to go with the flow -- these are all
essential catalysts of change. A transformation in the order
of things is not the product of immaculate conception; rather
it is the end of something that starts with the willingness of
just a few people to do something differently. There must then
come a critical second wave of others stepping out of character
long enough to help something happen -- such as the white Mississippian
who spoke out for civil rights, the housewife who read Betty
Friedan and became a feminist, the parents of a gay son angered
by the prejudice surrounding him. But for such dynamics to work
there must be space for non-conformity and places for new ideas
and the chance to be left alone by those who would manipulate,
commodify, or destroy our every thought.
Even when you can't
change things you
can change your attitude towards them. For example, we tend to
think of the 1950s as a time of unmitigated conformity, but in
many ways the decade of the 60s was merely the mass movement
of ideas that took root in the 50s. Because in beat culture,
jazz, and the civil rights movement there had already been a
stunning critique of, and rebellion against, the American establishment.
Choice
Contemporary America
actively opposes choice.
Choice is repressed by a government that increasingly interferes
in its citizens' personal lives; choice is manipulated by advertising
and public relations; choice is distorted by mass media and the
politicians it creates; it is limited by the growing homogeneity
of commercial and cultural life, it is ignored by schools that
prefer teaching driver ed to analytical skills, and it is suppressed
by a cornucopia of illegal and legal drugs that allow one to
avoid the pain and hard work of decisions -- seductive relief
from what Sartre called the "vertigo of possibility."
We easily observe and
deplore the absence of choice when we see it in its adolescent form -- such
as in the gang -- but we are less perceptive when it happens
to us, especially when it occurs incrementally and in a climate
that permits the evocation of what we once were to conceal what
we are truly becoming.
Cities
We have in recent decades been so intent on making our cities
neat and orderly that we have forgotten that the major contribution
of the city is its explosive and random potential. Our goal has
been physical order and fiscal benefits; the results have been
social disorder and huge deficits. A thriving urban ecology should
not just be about clean air and trees; but also about communities
and economic survival, justice, decent education, security, happiness,
the joy of chance, variety, and opportunity.
Cities often fail us
but it is their
enduring service to both shelter and venture that makes even
the grimmest among them continuing magnets. Even as those who
have used them well and long for their own purposes flee to the
quiet, comfort, and safety of another place, the artist, the
drug dealer cashing in his chips for a legal business, the ambitious
new immigrant, the young college grad, the entrepreneur, move
in and begin the urban story again. Free from the predetermined
human and physical geography of a rural or small town community,
we have a chance to design our own environment. In the end, the
city, becomes not just a place but, as Brown University's Arnold
Weinstein has suggested, "work being done."
We now comprehend
the hazards of blithely pouring DDT over crops, slashing through
treelands, or fouling the air. But we still act as thought we
can, without penalty, wipe out neighborhoods, force mass migrations,
rip out favorite meeting places for people, or tear down centers
of communications, culture and commerce that are as important
to a community as a marsh is to a flyway
One of the reasons liberals
don't do better
is because they use phrases like "urban sprawl" to
describe the places where about half of America lives, most by
some degree of choice. While there is nothing wrong with trying
to encourage denser, less traffic dependent communities, it doesn't
help to bad mouth all contrary communities while doing it. What
is happening now is the suburban equivalent of the 1960s when
liberals and urban planners disparaged inner city communities
by calling them ghettos. Like Toronto planner Terry Fowler, one
can speak of the importance of replacing mobility with access
or of the advantages, with high fuel costs, of having more of
what we need closer to where we live. People will respond to
practical solutions far better than to vague goals disrespectful
of their communities. The key point should not be to reach some
abstract goal but to improve the life of communities affected
by decades of poor urban planning. Many of these communities
are already attractive places to live but suffer from transportation,
shopping and energy inefficiencies. The key is to plan for the
people who live there and not for the soulless desires of master
plans. The next time you're tempted to use the word, just remember:
it ain't sprawl, it's somebody's home.
Good urban economics would be the economics of small
business, of self-generating economies, of cooperatives and of
neighborhood-owned companies. It would be the economics of recycling
money within the city, of making things other cities need, and
of giving every resident a fair chance to make a buck.
The key to the economic
revival of the older city
is the development of these self-generating economies. The self-generating
economy has a long history in America. Many of the country's
early communities were largely self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency,
however, disappeared with the concentration of industry and land
ownership. In cities, one can easily find self--generating economies
although we seldom recognize them as such. The explosion of the
legal profession, for example, reflects in no small part the
ability of lawyers to create jobs for each other. The yuppie
phenomenon can be seen as a self-generating economy: yuppies
creating artificial needs for other yuppies and with some selling
and others buying items that fulfill these needs. The importance
of such economies tends to be disregarded because they don't
have the visible form of a single corporation or factory.
The more we step into a paradigm of
urban ecology, the more we find
ourselves drifting closer to other things -- our work, our food,
our environment, and our neighbors. Our sense of order no longer
relies -- in the tradition of American city planners from L'Enfant
to Robert Moses -- upon outward symmetry, illusions of order,
and grandeur. Rather it seeks inner integration and grace. Our
concept of the city steps away from the cold rigidity of the
blueprint and comes closer to the joyful exuberance of a Richard
Scarry drawing. We stop worrying about the sleek exterior of
the car and concern ourselves with the less aesthetic but more
essential engine.
For each of us there is a public and
a private city. Some live primarily
in former and typically describe the city with concrete numbers
-- so many of some problem per 100,000 -- and abstract phrases
such as "we need a public-private partnership." Many,
many more, though, know the city as a collection of specific
stories and people. It is not just understanding that gets lost
in this gap. Urban policy seeks to improve a city's numbers rather
than the specificity of individual lives. The result is that
many plans still -- although more covertly than in the days of
"urban removal" -- implicitly assume that part of the
solution is a better class of people moving to the place being
planned. We do not yet require human impact statements that might
reveal a plan's true cost in higher rents, ethnic and economic
change, effect on existing social structure and institutions,
or access to places that matter.
The problem with urban
planners is two
fold. First, they work for the wrong people, the government,
rather than for the citizens. As local governments have become
more corrupt and more beholden to the interests of a small number
of developers and other businesses, urban planning has inevitably
come to reflect these perverse priorities. Second, urban planners
believe in sweeping physical solutions to social problems. The
idea, Richard Sennett has written, goes back to the 1860s design
for Paris by Baron Haussmann. Haussmann, Sennett suggests, bequeathed
us the notion that we could alter social patterns by changing
the physical landscape. This approach was not about urban amenities
such as park benches and gas lighting or technological improvements
such as indoor plumbing but about what G. K. Chesterton called
the huge modern heresy of "altering the human soul to fit
its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the
human soul."
Modern planning was in part spurred by the desire
of the elites to recover their cities from the immigrant politicians
and riff raff who had seized urban America in the late 19th and
early 20th century. Much of what was described as "reform,"
was in fact just a transfer of power - including the power to
corrupt - back to the elites.The same thing would happen again
folloowing the migration of blacks to the cities in the last
half of the 20th century. It was not urban development for the
masses but urban recovery for the elites.
Citizen
The question of whether we should give up our
citizenship in favor of customerhood or being a taxpayer has
never made it to the ballot. It doesn't have to. Like much political
change these days, the idea has grown more by osmosis than by
choice, the product of a "shared vision" among the
elite, dutifully disseminated by a media that has lost much of
its capacity for skepticism.
Clinton, Bill
One of
the worst indictments of the Clintons is that they helped create
a nation that is so pessimistic it believes a Clinton is the
best it can do...- Sam Smith
If this was a just world, Bill Clinton would resign, Al From and the New
Democrats would settle a product liability suit for selling defective
politics by taking a vow of perpetual silence, the entire Democratic
congressional leadership would be arrested for loitering on federal
property, and every journalist who told us how wonderful life
would be under Clinton would commit themselves to at least 1000
hours of community service. - 1994
Cool
In the 1950s before cool and hip became
another form of corporate cooptation, they were symbolized by
an indifference to, rather than an obsession with, style.
Communications
IF YOU CHALLENGE the contemporary
"communicator," you are likely to find the argument
transformed from whatever you thought you were talking about
to something quite different -- generally more abstract and grandiose.
For example if you are opposed to the communicator's proposed
policy on trade you may be accused of being against "change"
or "fearful of new ideas" and so forth. There is an
hyperbolic quality to this language that shatters one's normal
sense of meaning. Simple competence is dubbed "a world-class
operation," common efficiency is called "Total Quality
Management," a conversation becomes "incredibly transforming,"
and a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals
is called a "Renaissance" weekend.
"A breakdown in communications,"
if you listen carefully to the eleven o'clock news, is the source
of all human problems viz: "Police officials blamed the
accidental shooting of three orphans in a drug bust on 7th Street
on a breakdown in communications." -
Community
The native American
was forced westward
by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that
had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents
escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether
seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter
Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief
in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we
find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu
Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom
and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but
also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure
and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives
little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a
self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background
of other things, other places, and other people.
Our own experiences with
community may in large part represent something from which we
have fled -- a fouled-up family, a stifling neighborhood, an
oppressive religion -- rather than that which we seek. We may
have declared, either consciously or unconsciously, never to
go through that again. And so we look for maximum freedom and
decline to make the trade-offs -- except, of course, when we
are working, commuting, or buying those things that are supposed
to make us free. In the end, ironically, we may find ourselves
having mostly freed ourselves from voluntary associations.
Those relationships, appointments, and activities required by
our status, employment, or to pay for our totems of liberation,
are not impeded at all by our declaration of independence; rather
they sit there happily munching away at what we, with an increasing
sense of nostalgia, call our "free" time.
Communities are easiest
to build in times of stress
or out of painful need. Impressive self-sufficient communities
were constructed in New York's Harlem and Washington's Shaw in
response to racial exclusion. Similarly, to many veterans, few
communities can compete with the bonds created under fire. Yet
wistful as such memories may be, few would really attempt to
recover them by reviving segregation or going back to war.
Communities do things
that individuals can't and things that institutions won't. From the friend who drives you
home when you have had too much to drink, to farmers rebuilding
a neighbor's barn after a tornado, people draw strength from
others that is unavailable in isolation. And in the process,
they become themselves.
Throughout history, community order has largely grown
out of the cooperation and effectiveness of individuals, schools,
families, and the strength of local institutions. The police
have been there not to maintain order, or even to define it,
but to assist and protect the community and to intervene in those
rare cases the normal community systems can't handle. One should
not expect the fire department to come over and cook your dinner
safely or light the logs in your fireplace; nor should one expect
the police to replace the normal functions of individuals, families,
and community institutions. Yet that is precisely what we have
done.
The drive for family
and community remains
so strong that some of the young have created a surrogate for
what has disappeared. They call it a gang.
Consequences
Consequences can't be wholly unintentional once
you've imagined them. Successfully deny or ignore them and you'll
die happy. Open your eyes and you become irrevocably responsible,
with all the pain, doubt, and fear that goes with it.
Conspiracy
The
term 'conspiracy theory' was invented by elite media and politicians
to denigrate questions or critical presumptions about events
about which important facts remain unrevealed.
The
intelligent response to such events is to remain agnostic, skeptical,
and curious. Theories may be suggested - just as they are every
day about less complex and more open matters on news broadcasts
and op ed pages - but such theories should not stray too far
from available evidence.
Conversely,
as long as serious anomalies remain, dismissing questions and doubts
as a "conspiracy theory" is a highly unintelligent
response. It is also ironic as those ridiculing the questions
and doubts typically consider themselves intellectually superior
to the doubters. But they aren't because they stopped thinking
the moment someone in power told them a superficially plausible
answer. Further, to ridicule those still with doubts about such
matters is intellectually dishonest.
There
is the further irony that many who ridicule doubts about the
official version of events were typically trained at elite colleges
where, in political science and history, theories often take
precedent over facts and in which substantive decisions affecting
politics and history are presumed to be the work of a small number
of wise men (sic). They are trained, in effect, to trust in (1)
theories and (2) benign confederacies. Most major media political
coverage is based on the great man theory of history. This pattern
can be found in everything from Skull & Bones to the Washington
Post editorial board to the Council on Foreign Relations. You
might even call them conspiracy theorists.
Other
fields - such
as social history or anthropology - posit that change for better
or evil can come as cultural change or choices and not just from
the decisions of "great men." This is why one of the
biggest stories in modern American history was never well covered:
the declining birth rate. No great men decided it should happen.
The
unresolved major event is largely a modern phenomenon that coincides
with the collapse of America's constitutional government and
the decline of its culture. Beginning with the Kennedy assassination,
the number of inadequately explained major events has been mounting
steadily and with them a steady decline in the trust between
he people and their government.
You
don't need a conspiracy to lie, do something illegal or to be stupid.
If
you're going to debunk conspiracy theories about 9/11 you'd think you'd
start with the biggest one. That created by the Bush administration
to justify the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Somehow that never
made the debunker list.
Why
are we allowed to have theories on every topic from the creation
of the universe to who is going to win the World Series with
the sole exception of wondering who in power is screwing us and
how?
Cooperation
What we think of as
culture and history
is really a form of artificial evolution. While both cooperation
and selfishness have deep roots in our genetic core, nothing
in this core made inevitable the Civil War or the end of small
pox, Martin Luther King or Margaret Thatcher. Human choices did
that, choices that included deciding what tools, virtues, bludgeons
or trickery to pull out of the overstuffed closet of humanness.
Corporations
The rise of corporations
truly represented
a counter-coup against the values of the American Revolution.
It dramatically undermined both political and economic freedom,
corrupted politicians and ransacked national assets. It replaced
the feudalism of the monarchy with the feudalism of the corporation.
Corruption
1. Hit the corrupters at
least as hard as the corruptees. The real danger in corruption
is what the bribe buys, not the soul of the bought politician
(which probably never was in that great a shape anyway).
2. The worst corruption
tends to be legal, therefore hardly anyone notices it. Remember
that corrupt not only means dishonest, it also means without
integrity. In most jurisdictions the latter is not a violation
of the law.
3. Just because the corruption
is legal doesn't mean you have to accept it. Martin Luther didn't
-- and so helped to reform a little church-run protection racket
known as indulgences.
4. Simply because corruption
is bad, don't assume all reforms are good.
5. If forced to choose
between minor corruption and major incompetence, take the former.
It's cheaper and easier to live with.
6. Favor corruption that
is well distributed-- that gets down to the street over that
which only favors a few. Thus: reform zoning policies before
you worry about parking tickets.
[]
We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.
Crats
The people running America, its politics, its media and its corporations,
might well be called crats, after the semantic fantail signifying
members of a ruling body -- as in plutocrats, autocrats, mediacrats,
technocrats, and bureaucrats, just to name a few. Crats are characterized
by their loyalty to institutional and professional procedures
and values above all else. Unlike normal humans, which have to
be cloned in order to be copied, crats imitate each other by
choice. This is why one can gain a sense of deja vu even before
completing one zapper cycle on cable TV.
Culture
A culture may define the four winds as persons under certain circumstances, it may
also define a slave or someone from another tribe as not a person
at all. Nonetheless the slave or the outsider really exist so
at some level are treated as a person anyway. Hence people in
such societies may trade goods with the stranger or attempt to
convert the slave to Christianity even though they are not considered
human. Or the society may try to quantify such anomalies as Americans
did when they declared a black legally equal to three-fifths
of a white person. Or it may create a hierarchy as Aristotle
did when he confidently declared that "the deliberative
faculty in the soul is not present at all in a slave: in a female
is present but ineffective, in a child present but undeveloped."
Or it may declare that "all men are created equal"
but really mean only white male property owners. Or it may fight
a revolution for liberty but leave women as chattel. Or the culture
can painfully change such values over two centuries and still
have to go repeatedly to court to fight over what was really
meant by the change.
While the range of choices, values, and
constraints among cultures is stunning in its variety, it is
impossible to find a functioning society in which choices have
not been made. Similarly, though individuals may reject society
and even design their own micro-cultures, they are no less dependent
on their decisions, whether conscious or not. To not make them
is to drift aimlessly and lifelessly, pushed this way or that
by others quite anxious and ready to make choices for you. Unfortunately,
we receive little instruction in how to deal with this. Anthropologists,
other academics, and journalists prefer to aggregate individual
variety into something both grander and simpler, politely known
as a culture, paradigm, ideology, or trend, or (if you don't
care for the resulting generalizations) a stereotype. Thus we
have little sense of what it is like to be a punk Buddhist, a
Hindu convert to Unitarianism or a follower of both Confucianism
as well as the Dallas Cowboys. The mere number of cultural traits
and values available for adoption in a world in which the grandchildren
of Margaret Mead's anthropological subjects watch MTV has engorged
us with possibilities.
As we become more aware of our options
- or more sophisticated, as we like to call it -- the choices
we have already made, or have been made for us, may lose their
allure and we can find ourselves wandering in a cultural void
somewhere between the Trobriand Islands and Trenton. A detachment
from one's indigenous culture can set in, a trait observable
in diplomats, military personnel, international business executives,
and anthropologists. It is not that they are without a culture,
rather theirs becomes a culture that lacks place. This can have
some odd results, such as the anthropologist's high school daughter
who begged that the family at least stay in the US her senior
year so she would have a room to remember as "home"
when she went to college. One of the things driving such restlessness
is an assumption that our own culture must inevitably be locked
in combat with our own nature. In drawing this conclusion we
may place inordinate emphasis on the faults of our parents, the
sins of the marketplace, racism, and the "oppression of
the system." This is not to say that these wrongs do not
exist and need not be confronted, only that they hardly define
the whole of our culture's influence on us. As Americans, for
example, it tells nothing of values of pragmatism, fairness,
reinvention, and freedom that have survived the worst years of
our collective experience.
One response to society's assault on
human variation is the creation
of an "identity," around which the icons, values, and
artifacts of a culture are consciously built. Identity cultures
-- such as the black, lesbian or disabled "community"
-- are intentionally designed to end discrimination but perhaps
also are unconsciously part of a broader reaction to the threat
against culture itself. Many may feel the need for an identity
not merely because of prejudice against their ethnicity, but
against the biggest race of all, the human one. The obvious advantage
of identity culture is the protection of a group. The less obvious
disadvantage is that over-emphasis on one's status, sex, or ethnicity
can be just as much an obstacle to individualism as, say, loyalty
to the corporate culture. It converts context into classification.
When someone stands up in a meeting and says, "Speaking
as a gay Jew. . ." they are defining themselves as far less
than they really are.
The nature
of culture is drastically changing from being something in
which the individual is indoctrinated and absorbed, towards something
the individual must preserve, restore or recreate in order to
avoid the destruction of all culture save that of the corporate
market and the political systems that support it. The strategies
by which this can be accomplished depend on no small part on
the imagination, passion, obstinacy, and creativity of ordinary
people who refuse their consumptive assignments in the global
marketplace, who develop autonomous alternatives, and who laugh
when they are supposed to be saluting. The business of constructing
culture is no longer an inherited and precisely defined task
but a radical act demonstrating to others that they are not alone
and to ourselves that we are still human
Our culture feels like
a bad craft fair
where everything you see seems to have been made before, only
better.
Despite the improved
economic and social status of women and minorities, despite decades of economic progress,
despite Velcro, SUVs, MTV, NASA, DVD, cell phones, and the Internet
you can't raise a majority that is proud of this country. We
neither enjoy our myths nor our reality. We hate our politicians,
ignore our moral voices, and distrust our media. We have destroyed
natural habitats, created the nation's first downwardly mobile
generation, stagnated their parent's income, and removed the
jobs of each to distant lands. We have created rapacious oligopolies
of defense and medicine, frittered away public revenues and watched
indifferently as, around the world, the homeless and the miserable
pile up.
A culture that has so
lost its way and
forgotten so much is not the same as a flawed society bumbling
through history trying to make itself better. Worst of all, such
a fallen society lays the burden of its own failure upon each
of us. Just as a strong culture buoys the individual and provides
a stage upon which the brave, the compassionate, and the imaginative
can act, so a craven, crumbling culture makes every act of individual
will that much harder.
Culture
of impunity
In
a culture of impunity, rules serve the internal logic of the system
rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as
those of its constitution, church or tradition. The culture of
impunity encourages coups and cruelty, and at best practices
only titular democracy. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary
political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from
the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture
does not announce itself.
In a culture
of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition,
fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff?
Mainly greed. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate
over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic
struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more
press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the
only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught.
Debt
When
we talk about the national debt, we tend to make no distinction
between types of national debt. There is an immense difference
between going into debt for capital investments like schools
and bridges and going into debt to pay current operating costs.
That's why a bank will lend you money to buy a house but not
for dinner and a movie. Our national budget makes no distinction
between buying schools and buying doughnuts. It should.
Democracy
We can declare a free
America in the
space around us - either geographical, organizational or intellectual
- easing ourselves out of being victims of cultural collapse
and becoming the nascent builders of a second democratic republic
that may recover our land from the terrorists who have bombed
the American soul.
One can not tell how
much longer America
has before it gives up on democracy completely. What we can say,
however, is that the road has gotten much shorter.
The democratic franchise, while greatly broadened from a
time when only propertied white males could vote, has lost its
depth. We have, in effect, more people sharing less power. Take,
for example, the New England town meeting, often cited as a model
of direct democracy, in which each enfranchised resident had
a voice and a vote in the proceedings of the community. By the
1990s the term's meaning had been completely turned on its head:
now it is a meeting, perhaps nationally televised, in which citizens
of a remote, impermeable government listen to, and are cynically
manipulated by, an official or candidate. All three key elements
of the original town meeting -- community, decentralized power
and direct democracy -- have decayed and disappeared.
We can not be free if we can not retrieve
the part of politics that once made it a natural, integral and
pleasurable part of our lives, and if it now becomes so distant
or so dirty or so cruel that we would rather not even think or
speak about it, someone else, to our great danger, will fill
our silence.
About the most important
job of a democracy --
next to serving its people -- is to make sure it stays a democracy.
Forms of government don't have tenure, and governments that rely
on the consent of the governed -- rather than, say, on tanks
and prisons -- require constant tending. As things now stand,
we could easily become the first people in history to lose democracy
and its constitutional freedoms simply because we have forgotten
what they are about.
One of the best ways to revive democracy in our country
is to make sure that every organization, church, school, or club
is run according to its principles.
THE MAJOR POLITICAL struggle
has become not between conservative and liberal but between ourselves
and our political, economic, social and media elites. Between
the toxic and the natural, the corporate and the communal, the
technocratic and the human, the competitive and the cooperative,
the efficient and the just, meaningless data and meaningful understanding,
the destructive and the decent.
TODAY ALMOST every principle
upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head.
Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead
of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of
debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American
citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members
or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets
of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by
government.
WHY WOULD a hard-won democracy
willingly drift in such a direction? One reason is that if one
is going to tolerate a growing divide between rich and poor,
between those with power and those without, it is necessary to
deal with the anger and alienation that results. If the traditional
democratic approach -- making the system fairer -- is ruled out,
then some form of oppression is required.
Democratic
Party
The problem with the Democrats is that their
contributors and their constituents don't agree.
I left the Democratic
Party because I
didn't want to be liable under the RICO statute.
Despair
The most common reaction to despair may be no more dramatic
than a sense of boredom, of apathy, and indifference. In many
ways, this is precisely the response our culture would prefer.
It makes us ideal consumers of experience and excitement and
assures that we won't interfere with the flow of goods and services
by introducing novel notions of how society might be better rearranged.
To view our times as
decadent and dangerous,
to mistrust the government, to imagine that those in power as
not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid but perceptive;
to be depressed, angry or confused about such things is not delusional
but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture suggests otherwise.
But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer
is this: despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality
presses upon us, there still remains the possibility of imagining
something better, and in this dream remains the frontier of our
humanity and its possibilities To despair is to voluntarily close
a door that has not yet shut. The task is to bear knowledge without
it destroying ourselves, to challenge the wrong without ending
up on its casualty list.
Wrestling with the pain of living is one
of the surest signs that you are still alive. The problem is
that you never know when you're exaggerating and when you've
got it right.
Devolution
What works so well
in the manufacture of a Ford Taurus -- efficiency of scale and
mass production -- fails to work in social policy because, unlike
a Taurus, humans think, cry, love, get distracted, criticize,
worry or don't give a shit. Yet we keep acting as though such
traits don't exist or don't matter. We have come to accept the
notion that the enormous institutions of government, media, industry
and academia are natural to the human condition and then wonder
why they don't work better than they do.
All of our systems appear to be on steroids. And like the drugged athlete,
nature eventually pulls the plug. The institutions that have
imposed a tyranny of size upon us not only fail to accomplish
what they set out to do but are themselves disintegrating.
Umbria is a section of Italy north of Rome remarkably indifferent to centuries
of its history, where even the homes and whole villages seem
to grow like native plants out of the rural earth rather than
being placed there by human effort. Yet the Umbrians have been
invaded, burned, or bullied by the Etruscans, Roman Empire, Goths,
Longobards, Charlemagne, Pippin the Short, the Vatican, Mussolini,
the German Nazis, and, most recently, the World Trade organization.
Umbria is a reminder of the durability of the human spirit during
history's tumults, an extremely comforting thought to an American
these days.
Doubt
If we had been born in a time in which the therapy
for doubt was punishment, even death, we would not be in such
a fix. We would thank or fear whatever gods may be and go about
our business if not happily at least with certitude. But the
gift of decriminalized doubt changed all that. We are now free
to be wrong by our own hand, to not know -- worse, to have nothing
and no one to blame.
That's why there are so many attempts to put the question marks
safely back into the box, to recapture the illusion of security
found in circumscribed knowledge, to shut down that fleeting
moment of human existence in which at least some thought they
could do the work of kings and gods, that glimpse of possibility
we thought would be an endless future.
It is seductively attractive
to return to certainty at whatever cost, to a time when one's
every act carried its own explanation in the rules of the universe
or of the system or of the village. From the Old Testament to
neo-Nazism, humans have repeatedly found shelter in absolutes
and there is nothing in our evolution to suggest we have lost
the inclination, save during those extraordinary moments when
a wanderer, a stranger, a rebel picks up some flotsam and says,
"Hey, something's wrong here. . ." And those of us
just standing around say, "You know, you've got something
there." And we become truly human once more as we figure
out for ourselves, and among ourselves, what to do about it.
No one seeks doubt, yet
without it we become just one more coded creature moving through
nature under perpetual instruction. Doubt is the price we pay
for being able to think, play, pray and feel the way we wish,
if, of course, we can decide what that is. Which is why freedom
always has so many more questions than slavery. Which is why
democracy is so noisy and messy and why love so often confounds
us.
If we are not willing to
surrender our freedom, then we must accept the hard work that
holding on to it entails including the nagging sense that we
may not be doing it right after all; that we may not be rewarded
even if we do it right; and that we will never know whether we
have or not.
Drugs
The illegal drug trade
is estimated to
be about the size of the legal pharmaceutical business. If you
believe what you read and hear in the media, the drug trade must
be the most honest business going since it never has lobbyists
working Washington, it never contributes to political campaigns,
it never bribes a politician, it never runs PAC ads to get its
way. In fact, where politics are involved, it never seems to
do anything illegal.
Ecology
Ecologist Donella Meadows
pointed out that if a water lily doubling in size each day could
eventually cover a pond in 30 days, half that growth would occur
on the 29th day. Do you know what day it is for the climate?
A POKER PLAYER'S
GUIDE TO THE ENVIRONMENT
1. Calculate the stakes
as well as the odds.
2. The odds of something
happening at any moment are not the same as the odds of something
ever happening. In ecological calculations -- especially ones
in which the downside could ruin your whole millennium -- it
is the latter odds that are important.
3. When confronted with
conflicting odds, ask what happens if each projection is wrong.
Temporary job loss because of environmental restrictions may
come and go, but the loss of the ozone layer is something you
can have forever.
4. When confronted with
conflicting odds, remember that you don't have to play the game.
There are other things to do with your time -- or with the economy
or with the environment -- that may produce better results. Thus,
instead of playing poker you could be making love. Or instead
of getting jobs from some air or water degrading activity, the
same jobs could come from more benign industry such as retrofitting
a whole city for solar energy.
5. Don't let anyone --
in industry, government, or the media -- define an "acceptable
level of risk" for your own death or disease. They may not
have the same vested interest in the right answer as you do.
6. If the stakes are too
high, the game is not worth it. If you can't stand the pain,
don't attempt the gain.
Economics
We have turned our fire
engines over to the arsonists and you don't need a single number to know that
isn't a good idea.
Are economists a leading
cause of climate change? After
all, they've convinced us to be the only species on earth to
believe that over-population and over-consumption are the keys
to survival.
One of the best kept
secrets of economics is
that there are lots of systems that work provided, that is, you
don't care who they work for. Feudalism, for example, was great
if you were a lord, not so efficient a marketplace is you were
merely a serf. And each system works differently depending on
the culture in which it operates, which is why communism in the
Soviet Union, China and Italy meant such different things. In
the end, the real test of an economy is not its math but its
social, financial and moral effect on its culture and those who
live there.
Economists are fundamentalists who believe
in money instead of in Jesus.
As with every society
that has ever existed,
our economy is not only a conglomerate, but a part of, and dependent
upon, a huge number of values, rules, systems, and characteristics
that comprise a culture. We can no more isolate the use of money
or labor from these factors than we could declare society to
be henceforth based on the free lunch.
Fortunately, economists
discovered money
as an organizing principle rather than, say, defecation. Otherwise
we would have a really gross national product.
Margaret Thatcher wrapped
herself in economic slogans
that justified greed not only to accomplish economic ends but
also to deal with gays and abortions and everything else she
didn't like. In her paradigm, the free market and Victorian tyranny
formed a civil union. By the time Reagan, Bush, and Clinton were
through with the concept, they had created a gaping corporate
exemption from common morality and decency. The market not only
offered adequate justification for any act, it had replaced God
as the highest source of law.
Education
Barack Obama and Arne Duncan are to public education as the right is to climate.
The right thinks the climate is all about last week's snow storm;
Obama and Duncan think public education is all about last week's
test..
While it may take only
a whole village to
raise the average child, in my case it required three counties,
two bioregions and an unincorporated territory, and I still don't
have it quite straight
For more than fifty
years, America
has been consolidating school districts and the main effect has
been to replace educators with bureaucrats and wardens,
Elite
We need a trial to judge
all those who bear
significant responsibility for the past century - the most murderous
and ecologically destructive in human history. We could call
it the war, air and fiscal crimes tribunal and we could put politicians
and CEOs and major media owners in the dock with earphones like
Eichmann and make them listen to the evidence of how they killed
millions of people and almost murdered the planet and made most
of us far more miserable than we needed to be. Of course, we
wouldn't have time to go after them one by one. We'd have to
lump Wall Street investment bankers in one trial, the Council
on Foreign Relations in another, and any remaining Harvard Business
School or Yale Law graduates in a third. We don't need this for
retribution, only for edification. So there would be no capital
punishment, but rather banishment to an overseas Nike factory
with a vow of perpetual silence.
Some day our leaders
may again be as
good as our firefighters.
Among the powerful,
"mistakes
were made" but no one has to admit that they were the ones
who made them. Instead, the elite rises as one to pronounce it
not the time for blame, but rather for moving forward together
into the future and putting this or that "behind us."
Everyone nods their heads and the foxes are allowed back into
the chicken coop one more time
Like a hit and run driver,
America's elite has
left the scene of the accident. More and more, those who run
this country have the character of wealthy, isolated strangers
-- armed but afraid, intrusive yet indifferent, personally profligate
but politically penurious, priggish in rhetoric yet corrupt in
action. No longer does national myth connect them with the greater
mass of America. Nor, any longer, does politics separate them
from each other; Republicans and Democrats have become, rather
than choices, degrees of the same dismal thing.
One of the greatest myths of America's elite is that it functions by logic
and reason and that it is devoid of myth. In truth, elites function
like other people; they choose their gods and worship them. The
gods, to be sure, are different. For example, many in Washington
believe fervently in the sanctity of data, the Ivy League, the
New York Times op pages and the Calvinist notion that their power
is an outward, visible sign of an inner, invisible grace. And
some, even while professing to be without myth, spend their lives
creating myths for others. We call them political consultants
and ghostwriters.
The old elite, in its purest form, went to Ivy schools, practiced law or investments,
and belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations. The new elite
has been raised in the groves of advertising, marketing and focus
groups, and is representative not of its legislative districts
but of the largest trade associations. Its members speak not
American but postmodern Orwellian. Listening to their rhetoric
is like being trapped at table 129 -- with a bursting bladder
and all the doors locked -- during a never-endng congressional
dinner of the Asbestos Manufacturers Association. The members
of this new elite may be different, yet by income, attitude and
isolation, they are every bit as elitist as those they have expelled.
This old elite particularly prided itself
in its wisdom and intelligence,
but its greatest true skill was the successful circumnavigation
of collective guilt. No embarrassment was too great, no crisis
too unnecessary, no expense too inexplicable, and no war too
unjustified, that it became ashamed. Instead, its members would
rise as one to pronounce it not the time for blame, but rather
for moving forward together into the future. Everyone would nod
their heads and the foxes would renovate the chicken house once
more.
Psychologically impervious to either misfortune
or fact, this elite never felt any need for rigorous self-examination.
When things got truly out of hand, as when a president was assassinated,
a blue ribbon investigation would be called, producing a ritual
of introspection that, almost without exception, came to conclusions
that were faulty, incomplete or deliberately deceptive.
When members of the elite faltered -- a Kissinger, Helms, McNamara, Abrams and so
forth -- their peers moved quickly to protect, rehabilitate and
restore them to the pantheon of the wise. Given that more than
ten percent of the Council on Foreign Relations -- a sort of
Elks Club for the tenured elite -- is composed of journalists,
it is not surprising to find the latter often serving as EMTs,
reviving some beloved source suffering a momentary attack of
imperfection. This service was not, of course, provided to all.
For example, surgeons general from the lesser ethnic groups could
not expect rehabilitation, nor could individuals whose misdeeds
were personal rather than merely an abrogation of the Constitution.
Empire
Unfortunately, complex
failing systems
have little capacity to save themselves. In part this is because
the solutions come from the same source as the problem. The public
rarely questions the common provenance; official Washington and
the media honor it. Even a failure as miserable as that of Vietnam
had little effect on the careers of its major protagonists, those
men who not only were wrong but were wrong at the cost of 50,000
American lives. They remain quoted copiously, cited as experts
and transmogrified into statesmen.
Empires and cultures
are not permanent
and while thinking about the possibility that ours is collapsing
may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than enduring the
dangerous frustrations and failures involved in having one's
contrary myth constantly butt up against reality like a boozer
who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home. Instead
of defending the non-existent we could turn our energies instead
towards devising a new and saner existence
Environment
The odds of something
happening at any
moment are not the same as the odds of something ever happening.
In ecological calculations - especially ones in which the downside
could ruin your whole millennium - it is the latter odds that
are important.
When confronted with
conflicting odds,
remember that you don't have to play the game. There are other
things to do with your time - or with the economy or with the
environment - that may produce better results. Thus, instead
of playing poker you could be making love. Or instead of getting
jobs from some air or water degrading activity, the same jobs
could come from more benign industry such as retrofitting a whole
city for solar energy.
Don't let anyone - in industry, government, or the
media - define an "acceptable level of risk" for your
own death or disease. They may not have the same vested interest
in the right answer as you do.
Entropy
Global dumbing involves
the virtually imperceptible but steady deterioration of the aggregate
human mind -- as well as of its institutions -- much as the temperature
of the earth is apparently rising at a rate so minuscule that
scientists will be still be debating its escalation even as the
waters of the Atlantic Ocean lap at the potted plants in the
lobby of the Trump Plaza. In fact, global warming and global
dumbing are intimately connected. Without the latter, something
actually might be done before that portion of Washington below
the fall line of the Potomac is totally submerged. And like global
warming, global dumbing concerns itself with losses incurred
by energy transfers and nature's ceaseless quest for the random
equilibrium of chaos. It is, in short, the entropy of the human
spirit and of the systems it has created.
In earlier times, it
was possible to avoid cultural entropy by stealing energy from
somewhere else. This, of course, was the foundation of slave
trade, the British Empire and various new world orders of the
first half of 20th century. While it still goes on, energy theft
has become more difficult as the world has steadily lost its
cultural, political, environmental and economic differentiation.
A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product
is wasted energy. Compute all the energy loss created by corporate
lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits,
advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors,
strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing
that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have
created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but
on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing,
tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what
might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly
productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic
activity, the leveraged buyout.
Fortunately there is no evidence that global dumbing has entered the human gene
pool. Nature, before people began fiddling with it, handled the
problem rather neatly by regularly killing off the entropic and
giving birth to new life and energy. I find considerable comfort
in the fact that I have never seen a small child facilitate anything
nor one enamored of process in any form. Instead, they like to
make things, do things, laugh and sing. Thus I strongly suspect
that we have just taught ourselves to be dumb and, however difficult,
it remains possible to re-educate ourselves, even if it means
going back to kindergarten to learn how.
If global dumbing is not halted, we may wake up one morning and find that no one
in this country knows how to make anything anymore. We may discover
our dearest friends and relatives in a catatonic state before
the TV and the device won't even be on. When we call for help
we may find that 911 has become an endless loop voice mail system
from which one can never disconnect. We may even, some day, elect
a hologram as president -- and we'll be too dumb to realize it.
Ethnicity
It is hard to imagine
a non-discriminatory,
unprejudiced society in which race and sex matter much. Yet in
our efforts to reach that goal, our society and its institutions
constantly send the conflicting message that they are extremely
important.
Many attempts to eradicate
racism from our
society have been based on the notion that those who harbor prejudice
towards others are abnormal and social deviants. Further, we
often describe these "deviants" only in terms of their
overt antipathies -- they are "anti-Semitic" or guilty
of "hate." In fact, once you have determined yourself
to be human and others less so, you need not hate them any more
than you need despise the fish you eat for dinner. This is why
those who participate in genocide can do so with such calm --
they have defined their targets as outside of humanity.
What if we were to start
with the unhappy truth
that humans have always had a hard time dealing with other peoples,
and that much ethnic and sexual antagonism stems not from hate
so much as from cultural narcissism? Then our repertoire of solutions
might tilt more towards education and mediation and away from
being self-righteous multi-cultural missionaries converting yahoos
in the wilds of the soul. We could turn towards something more
akin to what Andrew Young once described as a sense of "no
fault justice." We might begin to consider seriously Martin
Luther King's admonition to his colleagues that among their dreams
should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.
Just by dint of exposure
to TV, it is virtually
impossible to live in America and not have absorbed aspects of
other cultures. We all, in effect, belong to a part-culture,
which is to say that our ethnicity is somewhat defined by its
relationship to, and borrowing from, other cultures. There are
almost no pure anythings in America anymore. The sooner we accept
and enjoy this, the better off we'll be.
Remember that everyone
is an ethnic something.
There are no unethnic Americans.
In the end, how well
we get along will
be decided not by our cultural differences but by the significance
we place upon them. We may all be creatures of our own culture,
but we are also all free to determine just what that means. Most
important, the future is the one culture -- for better or worse
-- we will all inevitably share and all help to make. We are,
each of us, brothers and sisters in the tribe of tomorrow.
The inability of today's liberal elite
to differentiate between those
too slow to change and too rigid to change, those whose prejudice
stems from cultural ignorance and those permanently perverted
by cruelty, and the difference between knowledge undiscovered
and knowledge willfully ignored, has helped complicate our ethnic
problems.
Evolution
Let's go to a time and
place so distant
that no one knows when or where it was, a time and place whose
importance is as infinite as its obscurity. The moment we are
seeking is the one during which a single individual, or a small
group of individuals, did something so unusual that it helped
free their ilk forever from the shackles of the environment and
genetics -- grabbing destiny from the tree of nature and making
it human. This extraordinary coup against the unknown was the
simple taming of fire, the stealing of light and heat from a
cryptic, tyrannical universe, transforming it into a matter of
personal choice. No subsequent human event would be more important
yet the names and descriptions of the suspects are still unknown.
On the first day of
my freshman anthropology class, the professor drew an invisible evolutionary
time line on the wall of the lecture hall. As we twisted in our
seats the eras, periods, and epochs of musical name and mystical
significance boldly circumscribed the room. Finally we came back
to where the professor stood and when there was nearly no place
further to go, he announced that this was the beginnings of us.
We were only inches from the first fire maker.
Existentialism
The existential spirit,
its willingness to struggle in the dark to serve truth rather than power, to
seek the hat trick of integrity, passion and rebellion, is peculiarly
suited to our times. We need no more town meetings, no more expertise,
no more public interest activists playing technocratic chess
with government bureaucrats, no more changes in paragraph 324B
of an ineffectual law, no more talking heads. We need to think
the unthinkable even when the possible is undoable, the ideal
is unimaginable, when power overwhelms truth, when compulsion
replaces choice. We need to lift our eyes from the bottom line
unto the hills, from the screen to the sky, from the adjacent
to the hazy horizon.
Experts
All expertise is filtered
through the prejudices,
beliefs, culture and presumptions of those who possess it. For
example, one reason it is so difficult to get economic policies
that benefit ordinary people is because ordinary people can't
afford to hire an economist. Corporations and governments can.
Facebook
Facebook is the anti-Internet. It is a gated community designed
to protect its residents from the incredible variety of the real
Internet. Its guard house is there not to block undesired people,
but unwanted information. In the early days, people had to use
corporate sites such as AOL to tap into the Internet. Of course,
these sites controlled what you could see or visit. Then came
the free and open web and a huge increase in the information
available to the average viewer. Facebook is an attempt to revive
corporate control of the Internet by fooling people into thinking
they can get all they want from its links. Of course, one of
the prices you pay for this is that a guy named Zuckenberg gets
to decide what you see..
Fascism
Why is it safer to say
"fuck"
than to say "fascism?" One of the curiosities of post-cold-war
rhetoric is that we no longer have a term for those who practice
ideologies antithetical to democracy. One American politician
once put it this way: "The liberty of a democracy is not
safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a
point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.
That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by
an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
Would such a radical be allowed on Sunday morning talk shows
today? Probably not, even though his name was Franklin Delano
Roosevelt.
Orwell understood fascism. One of the characteristics of
his inner party, the ten percent who controlled the rest, was
that there was no sexual or racial discrimination. He understood
that ethnic eradication, while characteristic of nazism, was
not required for fascism. Even earlier, Aldous Huxley set up
a similar non-discriminatory dystopia in Brave New World. In
fact, one of the characteristics of the modern propaganda state
is the use of ethnic and sexual iconography to cover its tracks.
Thus Richard Nixon was slurring Jews in Oval Office conversations
even as he set a new record in their high-level appointments.
And W.J. Clinton was called our first black president by Toni
Morrison even as the government was sending young black males
to prison in unprecedented numbers.
Facts
Facts have became obsolete. They are at best a filler between arguments on
TV about what really matters -- perception and image. Facts are
background noise at a news conference, multi-colored jimmies
on scoops of policy and just plain annoying in private conversation.
Faith
What this country needs is more people
of faith: faith in the Constitution, in democracy, in fairness,
and in common sense.
It has been
wisely said that "hope don't pay the cable," and faith
is too often just another drug, producing hallucinogenic visions
of a flawless future. This is not to reject either, but rather
to return them to their rightful role, that of planting seeds
of possibility rather than sowing false prospects.
Fast
Lane
Psalm for
the fast lane
1986
The Lord is my mentor;
I shall want it all.
He feedeth me in world-class
restaurants and leadeth me beside the sparkling mineral waters.
He restoreth my house and
bringeth me in the path of good access.
Yea, though I jog through
the valley of the shadow of high rises I shall fear no viable
competition; thy clout and thy bottom line shall comfort me.
He shall prepare a game
plan against mine enemies, and shall bloweth dry my head and
my Volvo shall runneth over to Bloomingdales.
Surely perks and power
lunches shall follow me all the days of my life and 1 shall dwell
in an upscale neighborhood forever and ever.
For thine is the power
and the glory -
But not for long, sucker.
I'm right behind you.
Fear
Making some people afraid
of other people
is one of the best ways to control all of them.
While the reach of modern
media should make
us all more cosmopolitan, it often doesn't work like that. This
is in part because of what we choose to watch and in part because
what is chosen for us to see. TV's typical view of the outside
world is of a place rife with danger. Talk shows and programs
like Cops can make it feel like you're under siege. CNN constantly
scans the world for new battlegrounds. Before television, you
got most of the bad news from your own town and neighborhood.
Now you can get bad news from any part of the globe, any time
of day or night. It's hard not to worry.
Fifties
The 1950s
They called my generation
the "silent" one, the one America skipped in moving from George Bush
to Bill Clinton. Maybe some of us were quiet because we were
trying to figure out how to avoid becoming the man in the gray
flannel suit or part of the lonely crowd. The struggle, we thought,
was about individuality and no one spoke of movements. Our cultural
heroes didn't organize anything. They hit the road. Our goal
wasn't to overthrow the establishment, someone would say a decade
later, but to make it irrelevant. Or, like Miles Davis in concert,
play with your back to it. In the 1960s, when we were in our
30s, we were told that we already were too old to be trusted.
It wasn't really true; in many ways the 60s was just the mass
movement of something that had started in the 50s with our coffee
houses, music and conscious political apathy. We were the warmup
band for the 1960s.
Some of us made Humphrey
Bogart an anti-hero in part, I think, because we already suspected that America
was our own Casablanca, a place of seductive illusions and baroque
deceptions, where nothing was at it appeared. After all, we had
been taught that if we crawled under our desks, we would be safe
from The Bomb. Even our teachers lied to us. Bogie knew how to
live in a time of lies.
Unlike today's activists
we lacked a plan;
unlike those of the 60s we lacked anything to plan for; what
substituted for utopia and organization was the freedom to think,
to speak, to move at will in a culture that thought it had adequately
taken care of all such matters. Although the Beats are frequently
parodied for their dress, sartorial nonconformity was actually
more a matter of indifference rather than, as in the case of
some of the more recently alienated, conscious style. They even
wore ties from time to time. Cool resided in a nonchalant, negligent
non-conformity rather than in a considered counter style and
counter symbolism.To a far great degree than rebellions that
followed, the Beat culture created its message by being rather
than doing, rejection rather than confrontation, sensibility
rather than strategy, journeys instead of movements, words and
music instead of acts, and informal communities rather than formal
institutions.
The silence may only be the sound of something getting
ready to happen.
I would like to apologize on behalf of my generation. Even members of Confederacy
had the grace to secede from the union; my generation has remained
within like a deadly virus, subverting it, shaming it, screwing
it, stealing from it, and finally strangling it. It will likely
be known as the worst generation - the one that brought the First
American Republic down - unmatched in the damage it has done
to the Constitution, the environment, and a two century struggle
to create a society democratic and decent in its politics, economics,
and social concourse. To be sure, when we were young we were,
as we said then, somethin' else. We launched the civil rights,
women's, gay, and environmental movements, not to mention creating
some memorable music before descending into disco. Soon other
things started to go downhill rapidly. We became not only the
generation that invented the phrase, 'never trust anyone over
thirty,' we proved it.
First
American Republic
The collapse of the
First American Republic
has been due in part to four major factors:
- Margaret Thatcher, personal
brain coach to Ronald Reagan, who started America's disintegration.
Reagan wasn't bright enough to do it without her.
- The Harvard Business
School, which taught its students that you didn't have to know
anything about what you were managing and which turned the once
ridiculed Organization Man into a sex symbol.
- The Yale Law School which
produced such decadent figures as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Samuel
Alito, and Clarence Thomas.
- The Kennedy School of
Government which has allowed the Harvard faculty to foul up American
domestic politics much as it did our foreign policy during the
Vietnam era.
The mechanism is a subtle
one, Our academic institutions serve as a sort of covert Jonestown
where potentially rebellious activists are enticed by grants
in order to drink intellectual Kool-Aid and never again truly
threaten the establishment.
Food
I believe in a modified
version of the
end-of-history theory, namely that most good combinations of
foods have already been discovered. Thus ordering mahi-mahi baked
in blueberry jam with a sawdust glaze is probably not a good
idea.
Freedom
We are clearly in a
post-constitutional era; the
end of the First American Republic. Depending on what day it
is we think of its replacement variously - ranging from an adhocracy
to proto-fascism. But one does not need to know the end of the
story to know that we headed at a rapid pace away from the extraordinary
principles of American democracy towards the dark hole of power
with impunity.
Every time an American
decides that it
is too dangerous to exercise a freedom, that freedom is diminished.
The first rule of staying free is to act free. The other most
necessary work of anyone who wishes to be free themselves is
to protect the freedom of everyone around them.
Free markets
On Wall Street there are plenty of free lunches
but no free markets. Generally speaking, the smaller the business
the more it resembles the great myths of capitalism. If you want
to find out what free enterprise is really about talk to a street
vendor and not a Fortune 500 executive.
One of the reasons a
free market is
so hard to come by is because it has never existed.
Free thinker
As far as the government and the media are concerned, the world's fourth
largest belief system doesn't exist. By one count, in number
of adherents it's behind Christianity, Islam and Buddhism but
ahead of Hinduism. Globally it's 85% the size of Catholicism
and in America just a little smaller than Episcopalians, Presbyterians
and Lutherans put together. Perhaps most astoundingly, given
today's politics, in the U.S. it is roughly the size of the Southern
Baptist congregation. Another count puts it in third place with
Buddhism a distant 6th. Its leaders, however, are not invited
to open Senate sessions. Our politicians do not quote them and
our news shows do not interview them. And while it is a sin,
if not a crime, to be anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic, disparaging
this faith is not only permitted, it is publicly encouraged.
The media acts as though it doesn't exist. You'd need an exceptional
lawyer to sue your employer for ridiculing your belief in it.
Its adherents are repeatedly and explicitly excluded from the
category of "people of faith" even though they are
among the most steadfast and well-grounded in their beliefs.
Finally, if one of its major figures dies, you will probably
not read about it, let alone find the president, two ex-presidents
and a couple of network anchors flying off for the service. So
completely is this belief system excluded from our national consciousness
that we do not even have a name for it. They are people who believe
in secularism, humanism, atheism, free thought, agnosticism,
and rationalism. These are 850 million people around the globe
and at least 20 million at home who are ignored, insulted, or
commonly considered less worthy than those who adhere to faiths
based on mythology and folklore rather than on logic, empiricism,
verifiable history, and science.
Mythologies -
religious and secular - have often made humans better and, at
times, saved them in ways that rationality simply couldn't. They
have prevented suicides, preserved families, rescued drunks,
and helped others climb mountains. But that is not the issue.
The issue is whether religious faith should be allowed to intrude
with impunity in such secular areas as politics or science and
still claim the protection of reverence and law. Once Southern
Baptists, Catholics, Jews or Muslims enter the political arena,
they are no more entitled to special protection or regulated
rhetoric than a Democrat or a Republican.
We need both faith and doubt, myth and science, but this yin and yang can not
work if only faith and myth are allowed to sing in public places.
We need to celebrate not just Christmas and Hanukah but the daily
faith of the Seventh Day Agnostic and of the free thinker. The
existentialist needs to be treated as respectfully as the evangelical,
the skeptic as well as the fundamentalist. And we need to hear
the wise words of secular philosophers as well as those of Jesus
Christ. Before unexamined religious faith causes more death and
misery we should at least allow doubt, logic, and secular solutions
to sit at the table and raise their voice.
French
A thank you to the much
maligned French. They
helped us win our best war - the Revolution - and tried mightily
to keep us out of two of our worst - Vietnam and Iraq.
Future
We may not have an awful
lot of time left. The
cynical cruelties of those who lead us are not subsiding. The
media has failed us, much of the church remains silent, and the
intelligentsia willingly conspires with those in power. In such
a time we must find allies not only among ourselves but among
strangers, in unlikely ways and in unlikely places. And above
all, we must each in our own way avoid the surrender of silence.
How we move from values
to action and thence
to influence is hard to conceive, but it may help to remember
that each honest heart is a political organization in waiting.
If it remains silent out of fear, lethargy, or embarrassment,
it becomes another locked-up vote for the status quo. All over
this country people are being abused by those in power. Their
stories must be told and those who tell them must say that these
stories are bad stories, even if this is the only power they
possess. Movements are, at their core, just people discovering
that they think the same thing and finally getting the courage
to say it and do something together.
If we accept the apparently
inevitable - that
is, the future as marketed to us by the media and our leaders
-- than we become merely the audience for our own demise. Our
society today teaches us in so many ways that matters are preordained:
you can't have a pay raise because it will cause inflation, you
are entitled to run the country because you went to Yale, you
are shiftless because you are poor; there is nothing you can
do to change what you see on TV. Campaign finance reform is hopeless.
You may not act in a moral fashion because you will look foolish;
you may not take action because you might offend someone; and
you may not govern -- you may only balance the budget. . .
And what if we follow this
advice and these messages? If you and I do nothing, say nothing,
risk nothing, then current trends will probably continue in which
case we can expect over the next decade or so: More corruption,
a wealthier and more isolated upper class, more homelessness,
increased militarization, a growth in censorship, less privacy,
further loss of constitutional protections, a decline in the
standard of living, fewer corporations owning more media, greatly
increased traffic jams, more waits for services and entertainment,
more illness from toxic chemicals, more influence by drug lords,
more climatic instability, fewer beaches, more violence, more
segregation, more propaganda, less responsive government, less
power for legislatures, more for bureaucrats, less truth, less
space, less democracy, less happiness. . . .
But what if, on the other
hand, we recognize that the future of our society and our planet
will in large part simply represent the aggregate of human choices
made between now and then? Then we can stop being passive spectators
and become actors -- even more, we start to rewrite the play.
We can become the hope we are looking for.
We are not strong enough
to be our own hope, you say.
Then tell me how often has positive social or political change
ever come about thanks to the beneficence, wisdom and imagination
of those in power. Now tell me when it has come about thanks
to the persistence of small, committed, weak groups of people
willing to fail over long periods of time until that rare, wonderful
moment when the dam of oppression, obstinacy and obtuseness finally
cracks and those in power finally accept what the people have
been saying all along.
The key to both a better
future and our own continuous faith in one is the constant, conscious
exercise of choice even in the face of absurdity, uncertainty
and daunting odds. We are constantly led, coaxed and ordered
away from such a practice. We are taught to respect power rather
than conscience, the grand rather than the good, the acquisition
rather than the discovery. The green glasses rather than our
own unimpeded vision. Oz rather than Kansas.
Any effort on behalf of
human or ecological justice and wisdom demands real courage rather
than false optimism, and responsibility even in times of utter
madness, even in times when decadence outpolls decency, even
in times when responsibility itself is ridiculed as the archaic
behavior of the weak and naive.
There is far more to this
than personal witness. In fact, it is when we learn to share
our witness with others -- in politics, in music, in rebellion,
in conversation, in love -- that what starts as singular testimony
can end in mass transformation. Here then is the real possibility:
that we are building something important even if it remains invisible
to us. And here then is the real story: that even without the
hope that such a thing is really happening there is nothing better
for us to do than to act as if it is -- or could be.
Here is an approach of
no excuses, no spectators, with plenty of doubt, plenty of questions,
plenty of dissatisfaction. But ultimately a philosophy of peace
and even joy because we will have thrown every inch and ounce
of our being into what we are meant to be doing which is to decide
what we are meant to be doing. And then to walk cheerfully over
the face of the earth doing it.
Gays
If you don't like gay
marriage, don't
marry a gay.
Ghostwriting
With writing, the standard for politicians should
be at least as high as that for college freshmen. If the latter
were to pay someone to write their papers, the full weight of
academia would come crashing down upon them. At the higher levels
of society, however, such behavior is considered normal and even
admirable. At the very least, politicians should be required
to list the names of their ghostwriters on the ballot and to
resign from public office should their scribes decide to change
clients.
Globalization
What corporate America has wanted was nothing less than
the Third Worlding of the US, a collapse of both present reality
and future expectations. The closer the life and wages of our
citizens could come to those of less developed nations, the happier
the huge stateless multinationals would be. Then, as they said
in the boardrooms and at the White House, the global playing
field would be leveled.
And so the greatest surrender
of sovereignty in US history was chalked up as an inevitable
result of a better world. A country which had defeated in turn
the British, the Mexicans, the Confederacy, the Spanish, the
Germans (twice), the Japanese, and outlived the Soviet Union,
had surrendered without a whimper to a junta of trade technocrats
armed with nothing more menacing than cell phones and Blackberries.
Once having capitulated
on economic matters,
Americans would be taught to accept a similar diminution of social
programs, civil liberties, democracy, and even some of the most
basic governmental services. Free of being the agent of our collective
will, government could then concentrate on the real business
of a corporatist state, such as reinforcing the military, subsidizing
selected industry, and strengthening police control over what
would inevitably be an increasingly alienated and fractured electorate.
We would be taught to deny ourselves progress and to blame others
for our loss.
Graduation
The title of my speech is "The Future Lies Ahead."
This pretty much sums up what people are meant to say at graduations,
so I thought I would take care of it in the title and move on
to some other business. It has always seemed to me that graduation
was a little late to be giving advice
Gravitas
A Washington synonym for mental ponderousness and verbal
obesity.
Guerrilla
warfare
There is one way to deal with guerrilla warfare
and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive.
The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by
dealing honestly with the problems of the most rational.
Harvard
Whatever intelligence I possessed did not
seem the sort required to excel at Harvard. Long afterwards I
would figure out that much of what Harvard was about was a giant
game of categories, in which real people, real events and real
phenomena were assigned to fictitious groupings such as the Enlightenment,
the Industrial Revolution, or the Freudian Tradition. If you
were brazen enough to examine evidence with as few paradigms
and as many questions as possible -- in short to use one's innate
capacity to imagine, to dream and to speculate -- you risked
being regarded as ignorant, or at least odd. In Harvard's cataloging
system, the accidental, the chaotic, the imagined, the malevolent,
the culturally unfamiliar, and the unique often got misplaced.
Education was something one received, rehearsed, and regurgitated.
You didn't play with it, experiment with it, and you certainly
didn't make it your own.
I
had come to Harvard full of passion for phenomena I could see,
feel and touch; now it was implicitly suggested that these were
childish things to be put away. The educated man concerned himself
primarily with what they meant, with which other phenomena they
belonged, and what theories could best explain their existence
in the first place. I didn't want to spend my life putting things
into little boxes; I wanted to take them out, turn them over,
examine them closely, do something with them, and tell others
what I had found. If you were brazen enough to think inductively,
that is to say to examine evidence and consider what it might
all mean -- in short to use one's innate capacity to imagine,
to dream and to create -- you risked being regarded ignorant,
or at least odd. You were, after all, being educated to digest
grand principles, major paradigms and random certainties and
then to sort and file all of life's phenomena by these convenient
categories.
In such a cataloging system, the accidental,
the chaotic, the imagined, the malevolent, the culturally unfamiliar,
and the unique often got misplaced. I had come to Harvard with
some vague notion that it would teach me how to use my own intelligence
better, that I would learn how to educate myself. I didn't understand
then, and wouldn't until many decades later, that the American
establishment wasn't really all that interested in that sort
of thing. From the intellectual epicenter of Cambridge to the
political apex of Washington, education was something one received,
rehearsed, and regurgitated. You didn't play with it, experiment
with it, and you certainly didn't make it your own -- even if,
like the shape of Harvard Square, it turned out not to be as
officially described. Life at Harvard was thus several steps
removed from life as I knew and hoped it to be. It seemed more
like conversations with upper class Philadelphians to whom anecdotes
were valued not for themselves but for their references to familiar
persons or places. A bad story about a Biddle or Northeast Harbor
was preferable to a good one about some person or place they
did not know. At Harvard, of course, it wasn't Biddles and Northeast
Harbor, but rather Hume and the Hegelian dialectic. . .
On the gate I first entered upon arriving
at Harvard Yard, there was that inscription which read: "Enter
to Grow in Wisdom." As you leave the Yard through the same
gate there is a different inscription on the other side. It reads:
"Depart Better to Serve thy Country and thy Kind."
No one can doubt Harvard has served its kind to the fullest.
And that is why, I came to believe, it is really there.
Heroes
Heroism is considered
in America a lifetime pass to patriotism even though, as Joseph
Conrad noted, the hero and the coward are those who, for one
brief moment, do something out of the ordinary. At least the
heroes we honor, that is. The career firefighter, the inner city
grandmother raising six grandchildren whose father is in jail
and mother has a lousy job, or the teacher year after year helping
to save those who society has preemptively discarded are not
treated as sacred, as heroes, or as worthy of special honor during
political campaigns and or on the evening news. But killing some
Iraqis or Bin Laden, or being killed by them, now that's the
real thing. Further, the myth grants tenure to the heroism of
one moment while a different sort of bravery is stunningly absent
from our honor, which is to say that marked by lives of steady,
constantly reiterated courage and integrity.
Hip
Hipness has become a fashion statement
- a consumer selection carefully
synchronized with corporate intent rather than outward evidence
of a state of mind free of the corporatized state.
History
For nearly all of human history, the dilemmas that cause people to write books,
visit psychiatrists, or take philosophy courses in college, were
largely moot. Certainly in the west, the idea that humans could
have significant control over the definition of their own morality
gained popularity only a few centuries ago, spurred by the spread
of the Enlightenment and other subversive ideas. With it, humans
were no longer depraved, unworthy applicants for post-mortal
celestial immigration. With it, they could have virtue, knowledge,
power, and possibility, all within their present existence. And
with it came choices and the responsibility to make them.
We live in an era not without ideas and
a sense of history but what ideas and what history. It's as if
the worst of the past had been resyndicated and put on Channel
20, with none of the other stations working. We draw from the
economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East India Company,
the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties of Palmer and McCarthy,
the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle of Babbitt and Gatsby,
the religion of Gantry, the political ethics of Teapot Dome,
the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness of Nietzsche, the
altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity of General Sherman,
the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding, the imagination
of Rutherford Hayes, the brilliance of Franklin Pierce, the expressiveness
of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary theories of William Jennings
Bryan.
Social historians
are really just covert anthropologists - filling in the tiny
gap between archeology and ethnography.
The past is like the first chapters of
a book. They don't reveal the ending but they sure give some
clues
The past is the present and future of another time
Holocaust
Here is the part of the Holocaust that is most frequently denied. Not that millions
were slaughtered but that those who did the deed might under
certain conditions be either you or I. And we would do it, as
Adolph Eichmann suggested, simply by finding the right words
for it, what he called 'office talk.' It
is this unrecognized, undiscussed denial, especially at moments
of solemn observance, that most frightens me. And our recovery
does not lie in still more talk, ceremonies, and professions
of horror. It lies instead in the study, honor, and practice
of the good and the decent.
If you watch good people closely, their
good comes as naturally as evil came to Eichmann. It does not
have to be propped up with memories of great wrongs; it is just
the everyday unconscious behavior of those graced with honor:
the banality of decency.
We need a museum of the
good, curricula in decency studies, and practice in its skills
and rhythms. We need peace experts instead of military experts
on Fox and MSNBC. We need mediators instead of just lawyers on
Court TV. We need movies, heroes, and moving stories that win
Academy Awards with models for our children that lead them to
the contentment of cooperation and fairness rather than to brutal
examples drawn from the play-by-play of violence and wrong that
appears with every other click of the zapper.
The frightening thing about Auschwitz is
not that some would deny it but how real it still seems. The
frightening thing about Auschwitz is that our leaders go to honor
it while still denying Guantanamo and Al Graib and Palestine.
We will know that we have finally learned the Holocaust's lessons
when we no longer hear new echoes of it.
Homeland
security
The amount of homeland
security we actually need is inversely related to how good our
foreign policy is.
Hope
The problem is that hope is not audacious at all. Audacious would be doing
something now, audacious would be taking a personal political
risk because the country needs it, audacious would be saying
something unconventional because the conventional is killing
us. Audacity is not turning one's back on present needs and praying
that the future will straighten it all out.
The opposite of hope is not despair, but action.
Humanities
The humanities
like to ask questions without providing answers while politics
tends to provide answers without asking questions.
So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can
give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering
something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember
what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make
because they've already been made and solutions we don't have
to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's
how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's
things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's
parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing
its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our
culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the
legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind"
the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing
it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden
behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their
protection. It's preserving the past and the future as well as
exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning
as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture
at the center of our world and making machines and technology
and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.
Ideas
The more high placed
is the person to
whom one introduces a new idea, the more likely this individual
is to be uncomfortable, dismissive, or suddenly in need of another
drink. Unchallenged myopia is one of the most cherished privileges
of power.
Immigrants
Every immigrant is
another saga of cultural insurrection, a tribute to the enduring
human capacity for individual choice.
Inaugurations
There is a conspiracy
of excess that develops at inauguration time. The president, the media and the
public all join in the charade, not unlike youths drawn to mischief
that will ultimately result in punishment but seems too much
fun to miss. A political situation that months earlier had been
seen possibly headed for a constitutional crisis is transformed
by January into a mandate, a Mardi Gras, a "season of renewal,"
the beginning of the best 100 days ever and one of those rare
moments when a poet is actually allowed on national TV.
Intellectual
property
Why do so many of the people who talk about
"intellectual property" seem not all that bright? On
precisely what date and under what circumstances did an advertising
jingle for a new type of tampon become intellectual property?
When I was writing one of my books, I had to write for permissions.
When I asked for permission to quote Woody Guthrie's "This
Land is Your Land," the venerable Ludlow Music Co. took
care of the matter in a page and a half. When I wanted to quote
from a book, the venerable University of Chicago Press worked
its way through the problem in one long page. When I wanted to
quote eight words from a Mac Davis song, however, I got a letter
from some big LA law firm wanting a synopsis of the book, a copy
of the chapter of the book in which it would be quoted, as well
as all future earnings of my first-bom son. I decided to write
my own intellectual property.
Intelligence
The appointment of an
intelligence czar
is about as futile as it naming a secretary of decency. Attempting
to solve real problems by bureaucratic reorganization is simply
a more costly way of not dealing with them. The administration
will continue to lack both intelligence and decency regardless
of who is purportedly in charge of them.
Integrity
Integrity is not just
honesty but a quality
in which all the parts fit together. Watertight integrity on
a ship, for example, means that the bulkheads are not three feet
thick in one place and rusted out elsewhere. Today those at the
top often undervalue completeness, consistency, reliability -
preferring the momentary impact, the single-minded pursuit, the
exceptional event.
Internet
I have
been a radio reporter; have edited newspapers and newsletters;
have written for local, national and foreign readers; have had
articles in more than two dozen publications. And then I took
to the Internet. Nothing has made me feel closer to the guardian
angels of journalism and more a honest part of the free press
than this latter adventure, while nothing has made me feel more
distant from those who haughtily claim custody of journalism's
holy grail even as they dishonor its most hallowed traditions.
Anyway, in the end, there is only one journalism credential that
really counts: telling good and true stories well.
Irony
Irony used to be a weapon used against the powerful. Today
it is increasingly used by the powerful to demean the weak.
Israel
The policy of the Israeli
government is clearly
distinguishable from the theology of Judaism to all but a small
yet powerful and noisy crowd including neo-conservatives, cable
TV anchors and semantic bomb throwers. Israeli policy reflects
Judaism about as well as the Republican right reflects Christianity.
Our policy towards Palestine,
based on polling, is one of the major issues dividing us from
the Muslim world. This policy helped lead to the World Trade
Center attack and the international disasters that have occurred
since. It has also made Israel less safe. We can not solve our
current crises nor end our manic fears of the Muslim world without
changing our policies towards Palestine and the Middle East.
If what goes on in the
synagogue doesn't stay in the synagogue than it can not be expected
to be treated as though it were still there. In other words,
if you're going to ask American taxpayers to subsidize Israel
and back its policies, the matter should be handled no differently
than building a B2 bomber or putting a federal agency's office
in some congress member's district. If you want to play by religion's
rules, act like a religion. Otherwise, the rules of politics
govern. And anyone who calls that anti-Semitic is either a cry
baby or a scoundrel.
Just because you're pro-Israel
doesn't mean you have to be anti-Islam. The present crisis stems
in no small part from conflating the two. American policy has
been anti-Islam or cynically manipulative of Islamic states for
decades. No policy of ours has been more wrong-headed.
If there is another disaster
such as the World Trade Center, it will also be in no small part
due to our policies in the Middle East including those toward
Palestine. No issue has done more damage to America and none
continues to cause a greater threat.
Jazz
The essence of jazz
is the same as
that of democracy: the greatest amount of individual freedom
consistent with a healthy community. Each musician is allowed
extraordinary liberty during a solo and then is expected to conscientiously
back up the other musicians in turn. The two most exciting moments
in jazz are during flights of individual virtuosity and when
the entire musical group seems to become one. The genius of jazz
(and democracy) is that the same people are willing and able
to do both.
Judaism
I grew up with the deep
and abiding belief that there were three branches of Judaism:
your Reform, your Orthodox, and your Liberal Democratic. Of these
three, the last was clearly the most important.
Juries
The principle of jury
rights involves
the power to say no to the excesses of government, and thus serves
as a final defense against tyranny.
Language
Speak United States.
This rule, taught
me by my high school math teacher, Mr. Breininger, was the best
literary advice I ever got.
Law
In Washington these days, morality is defined not by philosophy or principles
but by restrictive words written by lawyers and ambiguous phrases
concocted by public relations experts. Politicians, their academic
groupies in the think tanks, and the media accept these words
and phrases with little question. Thus justice becomes not a
matter of broad decency but of narrow definition and indefinable
euphemism.
The technology of torts, with its tyranny of precedents
and its infatuation with retribution over resolution, has, in
the words of the country & western song, walked across our
heart like it was Texas. No politics, no ideology, no culture
has been immune. All of American life has been hauled into court.
Thus we find in our path not only the endless droppings of corporate
attorneys, but civil rights advocates who insist that the law
will lead us to love each other, feminist counselors who believe
that the world's oldest conflict can be settled on appeal, colleges
that publish what amounts to a lawyer's guide to correct sex,
and public interest activists trying to run a revolution out
of the courthouse.
Obviously the law has had a crucial role in such
matters as civil rights and bringing the megacorporation to heel.
But such achievements hardly justify an exclusive contract to
direct the course of social change. If today's lawyer-leaders
had come to the fore thirty years ago, the 60s would have been
just a lawsuit, not a cultural and political revolution. There
would have been no music, no madness, no drama, and without them,
probably not much change as well.
Laws should be handled
like prescription drugs,
but many of our politicians think of them as being more like
popcorn or M&Ms -- something to munch on. This is unfortunate
since much of America's success to date can be traced to one
simple rule: don't make too many rules. Much of America's failure
to date has come from ignoring this rule.
Whatever the source,
it now takes longer,
requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability
to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our
rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship"
and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude
is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully
constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance.
We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time
and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a
testament to our fear and lack of trust.
Lawyers
The three institutions that most endanger the preservation
of any culture are Wal-Mart, TV and law school.
Lethargy
I like to go down to
the zoo
And there I sit and watch gnu
Yet lately it has seem to me
The gnu has started watching me.
For hours we just share a stare
A happy, unproductive pair
Stll its the GNU for me.
Let others boost the GNP.
Liberals
One
way you can tell liberals and conservatives apart is with a stop-watch.
A liberal thinks someone should be thrown off welfare after three
years while a conservative says two. A liberal thinks a drug
offender should spend 17 years rather than 35 years in prison.
Neo-liberal: Someone who thinks
the Constitution's commerce clause is more important to defend
and expand than the 1st or 4th Amendments. -
Future historians seeking to discover why America
so easily surrendered its democratic traditions and constitutional
government will find plenty to study in the rise of a liberal
aristocracy that became increasingly disinterested in such values.
Like all aristocracies, it existed primarily to protect itself,
had an impermeable faith in its own virtue, and held in contempt
those who did not share its values or accept its hegemony.
Three reasons liberals
have a hard time
winning elections:
1. NPR has a program called
"Marketplace" but it does not have one called "Workplace."
2. Liberals talk more about
gay marriage and abortion than they do about major social and
economic issues
3. Liberals give the impression
that if you want to vote Democratic you have to give up your
gun and your Bible.
Liberals might attract a lot more voters if they would stop dissin' them
so much. Once you eliminate all those who smoke, are too heavy,
live in the suburbs, believe in Jesus, belong to the Green Party,
own a gun, or lack etiquette when discussing ethnicity, you don't
have that much to work with.
Sending a liberal to
Washington these days is, in the words of the late civil rights
leader Julius Hobson, like sending a eunuch to an orgy.
Liberalism has
become the abused spouse of the Democratic right.
Liberty
Remember that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,
a good lawyer, and the right skin color.
Lies
The endless argument
about who said
what to whom about what demonstrates an illusion about honesty
shared by all sides. America - including its politicians, media
and ordinary citizens, have accepted a legal definition of honesty,
to wit: if a public person can not be proved to have lied by
the rules of a criminal court, he or she can't be called dishonest
and, in the case of a nominee, remains qualified for office.
In other words, our standard for confirmation to high office
had become no better than that for acquittal of a common thief.
But lying often has little
to do with court-defined perjury. It more typically involves
hyperbolic hoodwinking, unsubstantiated analogy, cynical incitement
of fear, deceitful distortion, slippery untruths, gossamer falsehoods,
disingenuous anecdote, artful agitprop, and the relentless repetition
of all the foregoing in an atmosphere in which facts are trampled
underfoot by a mendacious mob and their semantic weapons.
One does not have to analyze
such language legally to understand its evil. One need only have
enough understanding of the manner of the honest, the sincere
and the candid to know almost instinctively when their opposite
is in command..
Life
Life is a endless pick-up game between hope and despair, understanding and doubt,
crisis and resolution.
Life in America has become one big docudrama and you can't tell what's real
and what's make believe.
Kennedy,
Robert
There were attempts to respond to the slaying of Robert Kennedy with
affirmations of a will to change the old ways, but they appeared
hollow. The nation had watched John Kennedy die and had not changed;
it had watched Martin Luther King die and had not changed. Now
it watched Robert Kennedy die and even the most effervescent
and optimistic among us could not summon a viable vision of a
new order to lessen our brooding. . .
Managerial
class
Recent decades
have been characterized by the invasive influence of an arrogant,
autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs and similar
members of the technocratic elite. This class junked sixty years
of social democracy, helped wreck the economy, made every American
worker a temp-in-waiting, carpet bombed the English language,
trashed every moral concept in their way, and twisted reality
so effectively they even convinced many that they were sex objects.
And they are everywhere. You will find
them running schools and universities and managing once great
museums. They talk mush, think mush, market mush, report mush,
and defend mush. They attempt to make up in certitude what they
lack in wisdom; they can't tell the difference between a phrase
and a product; and they create infantile and self-serving distortions
of economic principles that they declare to be the only principles
in life worth observing. They are, in the end, just so many more
televangelists, but with themselves as God. Perhaps worst of
all, they are without the capacity for shame. Like other sociopaths,
they are remorseless.
The fraud, the huckster, the salesman are
not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so
strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a nature
that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang
up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children,
run our government, and tell us what to think. They are the Enron
generation, filled with postmodern version of Willy Loman: "He
don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give
you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on
a smile and a shoeshine."
Marxism
I can usually stop an eruption of Marxist rhetoric
for at least a few minutes by asking the simple question: who
will run the restaurants in utopia? I find few people even on
the hard left who wish to eat and drink the product of collectivism
for the rest of their lives. A similar question could be asked
of rapid free enterprisers: why do you ride public buses and
subways?
Marxists and capitalists share an obsession with money
and a taste for clichéd mantras about it. They also share
a willingness to reduce the complexity of human existence to
just a couple of choices.
Media
I started out as a political
reporter. Now I'm
a crime reporter. The kind of of people I cover hasn't changed,
only what they do.
The media and our leaders have given us
cultural Altzheimers and theyre not about to change
their ways. As Don DeLillo put it, History is the sum total
of the things theyre not telling us.
I have tried to help
keep alive the
beleaguered tradition of plain speaking and truth-seeking that
I understood to be at the heart of good journalism. But in a
time when much of the media prefers perceptions to facts, bullet
quotes to understanding and spin over reality, such efforts are
seen as eccentric at best, apostasy at worst. The proper journalist
has become, wittingly or not, the accomplice of a system in which
news, advertising and agitprop are hopelessly mingled and the
facts fatally adulterated. Truth has little to do with it anymore.
It is as if we are living in a new Middle Ages, only with the
myth being driven by cable TV rather than by the church.
I believe journalists
may safely interrogate,
investigate, predicate, cogitate, debate, relate and even advocate,
but they speculate, anticipate or prognosticate knowing that
the best prediction to come of such behavior is that they may
end up looking foolish. I know. I try it from time to time and
it doesn't work.
The so-called alternative weeklies , with sadly few exceptions, foster a compliant
corpacool culture in which hipness is defined by one's purchases;
dissent is limited to critiques of style, activism is something
you do at the gym, and politics the last refuge of the hopelessly
dull.
When the faux-hip "alternative
weeklies" began replacing
the underground newspapers of the 1960s and 70s, they gave the
impression that when the revolution started, the guerrillas would
come down the mountains on Head skis listening to their Walkmen.
The journalists' job is not to make the stew but to gather the ingredients.
So don't jump to too many conclusions about what I dump on the
table. It's only the result of today's forage.
Today's diuretic discourse over journalistic
values largely reflects an attempt
to justify the unjustifiable, namely the rapid decline of independent
sources of information and the monopolization of the vaunted
"market place of ideas." In the end, the hated Internet
is a far better heir of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, Frederick
Douglass, and Mark Twain than is the the typical American daily
or TV channel; and H.L. Mencken would infinitely prefer
a drink with Matt Drudge than with Ted Koppel.
The basic rules of good journalism in any time are fairly simple: tell the story right,
tell it well and, in the words of the late New Yorker editor,
Harold Ross, "if you can't be funny, be interesting."
News is something that has happened, something that is happening or something that
is going to happen. News is not what someone said about what
is happening nor what someone perceived was going to happen nor
what the editors thought the impact of something happening would
be on its readership
The media teaches us that life is a vicarious experience.
The trouble with MSNBC, Fox & CNN is that they can't tell the difference between
breaking news and broken news
Wouldn't it be nice if the media covered the breakup of the republic
as well as it covered the break-in of an office?
Many reporters aren't
reporters anymore; they're
just semiotic sharecroppers on some corporate plantation.
A news conference is a device by which the establishment
keeps large numbers of reporters in one room to keep them from
covering the news every place else.
If you want to complain about anonymous sources in journalism,
is it okay to quote "leading experts" in order to bolster
your case?
Why does the media always
refer to people
defending our civil liberties and the Constitution as "activists"
or "advocates?" Wouldn't "citizens" do just
as well?
Journalism is to thought
and understanding as the indictment is to the trial, the hypothesis to the truth,
the estimate to the audit. It is the first cry for help, the
hand groping for the light switch in the dark, the returns before
the outlying precincts have been heard from.
This writer proposes to serve not as an expert, but
rather in the more modest and more constructive journalistic
role of being the surrogate eyes and ears of the reader. Consider
me simply someone who has traveled this trail several times before
and thus might remember where the clean water is to be found,
the names of some of the rarer plants and possibly even a shortcut
home.
The first rule of media
survival is use
it; don't let it use you. We must ignore the role the media has
prescribed for us -- audience, consumer, addict -- and treat
it much as the trout treats a stream, a medium in which to swim
and not to drown. The trick is to stop the media from happening
to you and to treat it literally as a medium -- an environment,
a carrier. Then you can cease being a consumer or a victim and
become a hunter and a gatherer, foraging for signs that are good
and messages that are important and data you can use. Then the
zapper and the mouse become tools and weapons and not addictions.
Then you turn the TV off not because it is evil but because you
have gotten whatever it has to offer and now must look somewhere
else.
The media is purportedly
our surrogate priest,
parent, and teacher, but is, in fact, gangs of burglars breaking
and entering our brains and stealing time and space from us in
a way not even our parents experienced. What was once extraordinary
became merely unusual and finally universal as we moved from
manuscript to microphone to camera and cable. With each step,
context, environment, and points of reference became ever more
distant and external. With each step, we became ever more dependent
on things and people we would most likely never see in their
unprojected, unfilmed, unrecorded nature.
Today, outlets such
as C-SPAN and PBS
function as karioke bars of political centrism. Far from encouraging
the sort of vibrant debate our country needs, they apply a gag
on democracy by limiting how one may speak about it.
Reporters became the first group in human history to dramatically improve their
socio-economic status simply by writing about themselves, self-casting
themselves among the very elite from whom they had once been
expected to protect their audience.
Journalism has always been a craft - in rare moments- an art - but never a profession.
It depends too much on the perception, skill, empathy and honesty
of the practitioner rather than on the acquisition of technical
knowledge and skills. The techniques of reporting can be much
more easily taught than such human qualities and they can be
best learned in an apprentice-like situation rather than in a
classroom.
The First Amendment says nothing
about objectivity, professional standards, national news councils,
blind quotes, salaries, deep backgrounders, or how much publicity
to give a trial. Its authors understood far better than many
today that the pursuit of truth can not be codified and that
circumscribing the nature of the search will limit the potential
of its success. Nor can there be an institutionalization of the
search for the truth; it always comes back to the will and ability
of individuals.
The greatest power
of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about
this power is that you may not even know it's being used.
The media has created an America it chooses
to see, not the one that exists. It has denied access to its
pages and its channels to voices representing the majority of
Americans on key issues. And it has made us dislike each other
even when on many of the critical issues that it ignores or distorts
we have much in common.
Journalism has never been the art of the ideal. Its basic problem is that
it attempts to perpetrate the truth, relying for financial support
advertisers who have little interest in the pursuit of this goal.
It's a bit like a priest being supported by the proceeds of a
whorehouse. .
Part of my love of
the craft of journalism has been the simple joy of possessing
the license to go wherever curiosity leads, to consider no place
in the planet alien to my inquiry, to use words as a child uses
little plastic blocks. Part of it has been the pleasure of deliberately
learning more about something than any reasonable person would
want to know..
The design of a daily newspaper is the result of - among other things - tradition,
market surveys, the prejudices of the owner and the editors'
attempt to figure out what these prejudices are. It can be, by
consequence, a product that nobody really wants.
Contrary to the view of many editors, most people still like finding out who, what,
when, where, why and how more than hearing in the first sentence
how it all affected Roberta Mellencamp, 46, of East Quincy. Try
to sneak the news as near the beginning of the story as your
editor will allow.
One of the traits of a good reporter
is boundless curiosity. If you
can pass a bulletin board without looking at it, you may be in
the wrong trade.
Reporters don't have to be smart; they just have to know how to find smart people.
I've never met an objective journalist because every one of them has been a human. Try
going after the truth instead. It's an easier and more fulfilling
goal.
Act like a homicide detective. Follow and report the evidence but only as far
as it takes you. Be prepared for lots of unsolved stories.
Mid East
The most misleading
myth about the
Middle East is that an end to violence is a necessary precondition
to peace negotiations. An end to violence should rather be one
the goals of peace negotiations. Killings emphasize the need
for such talks rather than serving as justification for avoiding
them.
Israel is a state like all the rest.
AIPAC is just another
political group
like the National Rifle Association. It is not a religion but
one more Washington lobby corrupting the political process and
making American voters less powerful.
The policy of the Israeli government is clearly distinguishable
from the theology of Judaism to all but a small yet powerful
and noisy crowd including neo-conservatives, cable TV anchors
and semantic bomb throwers. Israeli policy reflects Judaism about
as well as George Bush reflects Christianity.
If what goes on in the
synagogue doesn't
stay in the synagogue than it can not be expected to be treated
as though it were still there. In other words, if you're going
to ask American taxpayers to subsidize Israel and back its policies,
the matter should be handled no differently than building a B2
bomber or putting a federal agency's office in some congress
member's district. If you want to play by religion's rules act
like a religion. Otherwise, the rules of politics govern. And
anyone who calls that anti-Semitic is either a cry baby or a
scoundrel.
The curable cause of the present disaster is not
to be found in a cave in Afghanistan nor at a military headquarters
in Palestine. Rather it is to be found in a half century of abusive
American policy towards the Islamic world including a deadly,
criminal embargo against Iraq; the permanent suppression of Palestinian
statehood; the promotion, assassination and/or manipulation of
a string of leaders against the best interests of peace and our
own security; the covert employment (to our later regret) of
the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; and our repeated
refusal to listen to the nearly unanimous voice of the United
Nations in general assembly.
Military
The untold truth
is that the post-WW2 American military hasn't that much to be
proud of. It fought to a draw in Korea, was humiliated in Vietnam,
removed a drug dealer from Panama but left all his peers and
all the drugs, slunk off from Somalia and was careful not to
hang around too long in Haiti. And then we had the Iraq problem
and Afghanistan, the longest, futile war in American history.
The one place where the modern American military has been successful
is right here in the US, where it has long occupied much of the
budget and captured many of the politicians.
Minorities
The great 20th century
social movements
have been successful enough to create their own old boy and girl
networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and
indifferent enough to ignore those left behind. The minority
elites have joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and
the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most prosperous,
and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history. But as the
best and brightest drive around town in their Range Rovers, who
speaks for those who, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, remain fugitives
from the law of averages?
Moral values
Why do all moral values have to go into families and TV?
Can't we save a few for public policy and budgets?
Multi-culturalism
Once we accept the unpleasant
persistence of human prejudice, once we give up the notion that it is merely social
deviance controllable by sanctions, we drift away from a priggish
and puritanical corrective approach towards one that emphasizes
techniques of mitigating harm and towards emphasizing countervailing
human qualities that can serve as antibiotics against hate and
fear. We move from being victims to being survivors. We start
to deal with some of the real problems of creating a multicultural
community; we actually start to envision it, to build it not
on false politeness but upon realistic interdependence.
Multicultural communities
will be constructed not by the hustlers of the diversity trade
but by a growing local and personal regard for common sense,
fairness and, yes, reasonable self interest. The new multicultural
community will work because it is jointly and severally proud
of itself.
Why is it so hard to deal with multicultural issues
while the Arab carry-out across from my office offers a "kosher
hoagie?" It is, in part, because most of us are like Bismarck
who said when offered German champagne that his patriotism stopped
at his stomach. It is also that the ethnic restaurant offers
a fair multicultural deal: a good living for one culture in return
for good food for the others.
Museums
There is a tendency
in the museum world these
days, as elsewhere in America, to use design as a substitute
for evidence, style as a substitute for reality, empty space
as a substitute for substance, and abstract words as a substitute
for specific knowledge. Ironically, it all costs a lot of money
that could better be spent on creating the sort of alternate
realities that actually draws people to such places.
Music
As a musician with more than 50 years
of gigs behind me I know that among
the many services of music is to say things we can't find the
words for - perhaps not yet or perhaps not ever. As a writer
with over 50 years of gigs behind me I am still often humbled
by what a better job music often does of it.
Myths
One of the problems
with living around
powerful myths is that you can start to feel personally responsible
when they don't work out. If you don't lose weight, have better
sex, kick your phobia, earn 20% annually in the stock market,
or get the job you want, there are few around to tell you that
such outcomes are pretty normal. Instead, we are surrounded by
hucksters of success and salvation constantly luring us towards
illusory certainty. If we succumb to these chimeras of profit
and prophesy, if we accept the idea that God rightly favors the
successful, the economy justly favors the lucky, and society
fairly favors the glamorous, it can ultimately leave us with
a sense of failure for no greater fault than being a normal human
being.
New world order
The new world order emanates from a mandarin class
that is neither left or right. Its members often are the sort
of which it has been said that when they are alone in a room,
there is no one there. In such a culture the marketplace of ideas
essentially shuts down. There is no longer any real politics,
only deals. No victories, only leveraged buyouts. No ideology;
only brand loyalty. No conservative and liberal, only Coke and
Pepsi.
Non-profit
All non profit boards
will fail totally if
the one great principle of board governance is ignored: success
is directly correlated to the quality of the food served. This
does not necessarily mean expensive food so much as attention
to detail and taste. For example, many a worthy cause has foundered
on an inadequate selection of donuts. Others have assumed, quite
wrongly, that because their cause was noble and pure, their provisions
should be likewise. A board meeting is no time for nutritional
proselytizing. Or for skimping. Above all, the cookies should
be fresh and the mayonnaise plentiful. I have watched once outstanding
non-profits wither into obscurity for failing to observe these
simple rules.
The best boards are conspiracies of the creative and confederacies
of the competent, filled with guerrillas of the good and Aquarian
anarchists working for something far grander than themselves.
In recent decades we have come to speak of public
interest groups as non-profits and non-governmental organizations.
This is like speaking of girls as non-boys or Presbyterians as
non-Catholics. And suggests where the real power remains.
Nuclear
pollution
Down the little snowflakes
fall
Bring hazards to us all
Spreading for the years to come
Particles of strontium
Gently falling helter skelter
On each roof and every shelter
I really wouldn't give a hoot
But three eyed kids just don't look cute.
Obama
The most conservative
Democratic president
of modern times pretends promise is a product and that life is
just a game of Scrabble in which the best are those who find
the right word.
Obama is the sort of
guy who offers
to split his Swiss cheese with you and then gives you the holes,
while he takes the cheese.
Based on his current
policies, it is
fair to say that if he had been president at the time, Obama
would have appealed court decisions granting civil rights to
blacks, he would have expanded the war in Vietnam, and he would
have opposed the ending of prohibition.
If you watch Obama closely he seems in public to have
only two moods, happy or look-how-serious-I-am-about-this, the
latter being the quality that allows Washington officials - and
Harvard Law grads - to convince everyone else they should invade
Iraq and Vietnam or forget about global warming for the time
being. The problem is that, as one journalist noted, there is
a big difference between being somber and being serious. And
gravitas - with which Obama overflows - seems often just a karaoke
version of seriousness.
Barack Obama didn't kill liberalism; he's just
doing a nice job of burying it. The end of liberalism as a meaningful
ideology came with the nomination of Bill Clinton. The argument
was - although hardly phrased so accurately - that it was far
better for liberals to dump their policies and become the indentured
servants of an elected Democrat than to continue to press for
their beliefs and miss out on all the power and the parties.
Obama isn't ideological. He takes the positions he does
for the same reason that Willie Sutton said he robbed banks:
because that's where the money is
The little available
evidence suggests
that Obama would more likely be a disappointment than a disgrace.
Still in the end it's a sad choice between the venal and the
vacuum. - 2008
A good
way to think
of Barack Obama's second term is as a job application for his
post-White House employment.
Objectivity
Objectivity is just another religion
Parents
Peter Ustinov says that the trouble with middle-aged
people is that they're too far away from either of the most important
mysteries of life: birth and death. My father used to say that
the reason that grandparents and grandchildren got on so well
was because they had a common enemy. For myself, I think one
of the problems with parents is that they can never decide whether
you should be in the White House or in jail. They exaggerate
both their expectations and their disappointments. But remember
that most of this exaggeration comes from two sources; hope and
love. They have higher hopes for you than anyone other than yourself
and this is nice. But you know your hopes often disappoint you
and that's hard enough. It's even harder sometimes to deal with
someone else who has high hopes for you.
Love is also a two-edged
blade. It provides
warmth, humanity, and comfort, but it also demands and takes.
Remember that Mr. Spock didn't understand love because it wasn't'
logical. In fact, especially with your parents, its manifestations
sometimes seem to border on mental illness. Which is why, perhaps,
so many people go to psychiatrists looking for love.
Adults conform just
as much as teenagers do. The
problem is that teenagers are asked to conform to both adult
and teenager values at the same time. This can be a little confusing.
But there's something else wrong with the setup. Adults tend
to regard your age as the ragged, unruly end of childhood, rather
than the beginning of adulthood. Go back a couple of centuries
and you'll find 16-year olds who were captains of ships and 14
year olds who were serving as apprentices or doing a full day's
adult work on the farm.
Patriotism
We pledge allegiance to the republic for which America
stands and not to its empire for which it is now suffering.
Peace
Peace is a state without
violence, interrogations,
and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically
based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists
not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naiveté but
because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works
for everyone.
Planning
We tend to discount
the importance
of unplanned moments because of our fealty to the business school
paradigm in which change properly occurs because of a careful
strategic plan, an organized vision, procedures, and process.
During the past quarter century when such ideas have been in
ascendancy, however, America has demonstratively deteriorated
as a political, economic, and moral force. In reality, many of
the best things happen by accident and indirection. While it
may be true, as Louis Pasteur said, that "chance smiles
only upon well prepared minds," part of that preparation
is to be in the right place at the right time. In other words,
it is necessary to create an ecology of change rather than a
precise and often illusory process
Police
We've got too many people in this country employed
trying to prevent other people from being bad and not enough
people employed helping other people to be good.
Politics
One of the problems with insiders is that they don't
go outside enough.
The voters think they are being asked to choose
between leaders. In fact they are selecting their battlefield.
The 2008 election was
a hat trick of infidelity. One candidate's husband had cheated
on her. Another candidate was found to be cheating on his wife.
And the winner began cheating on his strongest supporters as
soon as he was in office.
I had stumbled
upon the outlines of a new American political fault line. It
was so new that it lacked a name, stereotypes, cliches, experts
and prophets. In many ways it seemed more a refugee camp than
a voluntary assembly, yet, as I thought about it, the more its
logic seemed only concealed rather than lacking. On one side
were libertarians, blacks, greens, populists, free thinkers,
the alienated apathetic, the rural abandoned, the apolitical
young, as well as others convinced America was losing its democracy,
its sovereignty and its decency. On the other side was a technocratic,
media, legal, business and cultural elite centered in New York
and Washington. At times it felt as if all of America outside
of these two centers had turned into a gigantic, chaotic salon
des refusés. - 1990s
The political scene can be fairly divided into three camps: the hustlers,
the apathetic and the defeated
Politics used to be
about remembrance. The
best politicians were those who remembered and were remembered
the most -- the most people, the littlest favors, the smallest
slights, the best anecdotes tying one's politics to the common
memory of the constituency. Politics was also about gratitude.
Politicians were always thanking people, "without whom"
whatever under discussion could not have happened. You not only
thanked those in the room -- as many as possible by name -- you
even thanked those without -- for "having prepared the wonderful
meal which we have just partaken of." The politician was
the creation of others, and never failed to mention it. Above
all, politics was about relationships. The politician grew organically
out of a constituency and remained rooted to it as long as incumbency
lasted. Today, we increasingly elect people about whom we have
little to remember, to whom we owe no gratitude and with whom
we have no relationship except that formed during the great carnie
show we call a campaign.
Reform breeds its own
hubris and so few
noticed that as we destroyed the evils of machine politics we
also were breaking the links between politics and the individual,
politics and community, politics and social life. We were beginning
to segregate politics from ourselves.
The world of machine
politics was not
something handed down to the people through such intermediaries
as Larry King It was not the product of spin doctors, campaign
hired guns or phony town meetings. It welled up from the bottom.
What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience,
memory and gratitude.
Sure, it was corrupt. But
we don't have much to be priggish about. The corruption of Watergate,
Iran-Contra or the S&Ls fed no widows, found no jobs for
the needy or, in the words of one Tammany leader, "grafted
to the Republic" no newly arrived immigrants. At least Tammny's
brand of corruption got down to the streets. Manipulation of
the voter and corruption describe both Tammany and contemporary
politics. The big difference is that in the former the voter
could with greater regularity count on something in return.
Politics is the sound
of the air coming
out of the balloon of our expectations and it is the music of
hope. Politics is laundry lists and dirty laundry, new hospitals
and old hates, finding out what others think about it, and the
willing suspension of our closest beliefs in order to get through
the next month or year. It is, suggested one writer, a matter
of who gets what, when, where, and how. Not least, as Paul Begala
says, "it is show business for ugly people," a theater
in which each voter and candidate writes a different morality
play. In the end, the only test of political faith is when it
is put to work. It is a test that is graded on a curve -- not
by its proximity to perfection but by its improvement over all
previous, adjacent and potential imperfections. Vaclav Havel
says that "It is not true that a person of principle does
not belong in politics; it is enough for his principles to be
leavened with patience, deliberation, a sense of proportion,
and an understanding of others." This is the part of politics
that doesn't appear in any platform. Done badly, it becomes demagoguery
and manipulation. Done well it makes every voter a part of the
office the politician holds. It is a standard to which every
person in office, including our presidents, can be held.
We have to move towards a politics that
offers not a choice between left and right but between corporatism
and democracy, not between big government and big business but
between overbearing institutions and supportive communities,
not between winning and losing but between power and sharing,
and not between oppression and anarchy but between the force
of the state and the good sense of its citizens.
If you're going to be
serious about politics --
the way a race track aficionado is serious about horses -- then
the first thing you got to figure out is what's fact and what's
fluff, what you can believe and what you can't. Fantasies are
for sex, not politics. And democracies fail not because of excessive
skepticism about their leaders, but rather due to a mass illusion
that everything is going to be all right.
GK Chesterton the British liberal and populist,
argued that the only place a practical politician could start
was with the ideal. Any other commencement of the political journey
invites the creation of illogical and unsatisfactory remedies.
The ideal provides a constant and necessary navigational marker
from which one can compute a compromise's true cost in distance
and time. Without such a marker, a purposeful trip becomes mere
random motion. In politics, this can -- over the years -- produce
directionless compromises lumped upon each other leaving us finally,
with a system that nobody wanted.
We live now with dishonest politics, disinformed and disinforming media, disconnected
cultures, disjointed economics, dysfunctional communities and
disrespected citizens. To attempt to repair such conditions without
a morally conscious politics makes as much sense as trying to
revive a body without a heart. This is not romanticism, idealism
or naivete, just basic political anatomy. That we have come to
accept a politics that offers no choice save between our acquisition
of abusive power or our submission to it speaks only to the depths
of our delusion; it says nothing about that which is possible.
We can, as those in charge would like,
continue to define ourselves primarily
by neatly described identities -- either natural or acquired.
We can remain interminably and ineffectually absorbed and angry
about the particulars of infinite special injustices. Or we can
ask what is it that makes our society seem so unfair to so many
who are so different? If the young black in Watts and the militia
member in Montana and the mother of six in Dorchester share untended
miseries, might not those miseries share some common origins?
Can we find universal stories in particular pain? If we can,
it is the beginning of true change.
For many years now,
the Republican right has engaged in a politics of cultural bullying
that is the direct descendent of the southern segregationists.
It is based on anathematizing a minority in order to solidify
its own political base around false assumptions of purity and
superiority. It is an illusion that deceives much of its own
constituency into thinking that ultimately minor cultural differences
are more important than such issues as economics, healthcare
or public education. Thus it is not only mean, it is masochistic.
One minority ends up being hurt by another that is being conned
and hurt in other ways.
There is a lusty tradition in American politics of citizens of disparate sorts,
places, and status coming together to put power back in its proper
place. At such times, the divides of politics, the divisions
of class, the contrasts of experience fade long enough to reassert
the primacy of the individual over the state, democracy over
oligopoly, fairness over exploitation, and community over institution.
This could be such a time if we are willing to risk it, and one
of the soundest way to start is to trade a few old shibboleths
for a few new friends.
The system that envelops us becomes normal by its mere mass, its ubiquitous
messages, its sheer noise. Our society faces what William Burroughs
called a biologic crisis -- "like being dead and not knowing
it." The unwitting dead -- universities, newspapers, publishing
houses, institutes, councils, foundations, churches, political
parties -- reach out from the past to rule us with fetid paradigms
from the bloodiest and most ecologically destructive century
of human existence. What should be merely portraits on the wall
of our memories run our lives still, like parents who retain
perpetual hegemony over the souls of their children.
At root, our problem is that politicians have come to have more fear
of their campaign contributors than they have of the voters.
We have to teach politicians to be afraid of us again. And nothing
will do it better than a coming together of a righteously outraged
and unified constituency demanding an end to bribery of politicians,
whether it occurs before, during, or after a campaign.
To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment, the explosion
of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the dismantling
of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for
the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and the
zero tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems
beyond us. We do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage
without an overwhelming sense of surrender; far easier to just
keep dancing and hope someone else fixes it all.
Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament
makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We
can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn
our energies instead to the construction of a new time.
It is this willingness to walk away from
the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere
reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's
own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but
as a frontier
We have lost much of what was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our
passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational,
technocratic and media ways of our leaders. We will not overcome
the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living
rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not
alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk
guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin.
The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King.
Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming
together because they disagree on every subject save one: the
need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry.
Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and
simple suppers. Above all, we must understand that in leaving
the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places,
and our planet. We rebel not as a last act of desperation but
as a first act of creation.
It is a lifetime's work to clear away enough debris of fraudulent divinities,
false premises, and fatuous fantasies to experience a glasnost
of the soul, to strip away enough lies that have been painted
on our minds, layer after layer, year after year, until we come
to the bare walls of our being. Still, it is this exercise, however
Sisyphian, that helps mightily to keep us human. Inevitably such
an effort initially produces not beauty or satisfaction, but
merely a surface upon which we can work our will should we so
choose, a barren facade empty of meaning, devoid of purpose,
without rules or even clues to lead us forward. We stand before
the wall as empty as it is.
Even the best politics are a pretty poor substitute for life and the worst
politics compound their felony by forcing us to leave the front
stoop to do something about them. Our quarrel with the abuse
of power should be not only be that it is cruel and stupid but
that it takes so much time way from other things -- like loving
and being loved, and music, and a good meal and the sunset of
a gentle day. In a nation ablaze with struggles for power, we
are too often forced to choose between being a co-conspirator
in the arson or a member of the volunteer fire department. And,
too often, as we immerse ourselves in the terrible relevance
of our times, beauty and happiness seem to drift away.
We got rid machines like Tammany because we came to believe in something called
good government. But in throwing out the machines we also tossed
out a culture and an art of politics. It is as though, in seeking
to destroy the Mafia, we had determined that family values and
personal loyalty were somehow by association criminal as well.
More and more, living in America seems like living up in a badly dysfunctional
family. I sometimes imagine the Republicans as being a collective
version of an alcoholic, abusive husband and father while the
Democrats are the battered but completely submissive spouse.
And the rest of us are the mistreated, powerless kids. But as
some in such situations learn, one is not powerless. You are
weak but not helpless. You have to find ways to build a new rational
reality, something that can happen even in the midst of madness.
Neither one's father nor mother - not Mitt Romney nor Barack
Obama - will help with you with this. Your condition is not your
fault, but your response is up to you.
A good place to start is with the fact
that dysfunction is not normal. Test it out. Count in your own
community the percent of people as dishonest and irrational as
many of our leading politicians and other establishment figures.
Yes, they're there, but typically they're in jail, on probation
or in therapy. They are not dominating the whole culture. Or
read some history and be reminded how rare and frightening is
our establishment.
So here we are with only a handful of national
figures making much sense or even trying to. We have a major
media that has largely lost its ability to think independently
of this elite. And we live in a time in which everyone's visual
and auditory space is overwhelmingly filled with images that
are either commercial or political fantasy and largely unrelated
to the lives we actually live each day. The diaspora of dysfunction
has swept over our lives. And nobody can change it but us.
Population
I recently drove from Chicago's O'Hare airport towards the city at 230
pm on a Friday afternoon. It took one hour to cover eleven miles.
On Saturday morning I found myself in a similar jam on a five
lane freeway. It occurred to me that it's not peak oil we need
to worry about so much as it is peak us.
Populism
More than any other
political philosophy,
populism offers the potential for those who serve this country
to seize a bit of it back from those who control it. It brings
right and left libertarians together against the totalitarianism
of the American middle. It creates common ground for whites and
blacks to stand upon as they fight their common predator. It
emphasizes the issue that should be emphasized: economic justice,
decentralized democracy and an end to the concentration of power.
Post modernism
IN THE postmodern society -- one that supposedly rises above
the false teachings of ideology -- we find ourselves with little
to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens
to be in power. Thus we may really only have progressed from
the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some
might say, from democracy to authoritarianism. Among equals,
indifference to shared meaning might produce nothing worse than
lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist is President of
the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to
be fed, as they say, anything it wants.
President
If you're seeking progress, all presidents are the opposition.
You're just fighting different kinds of battles
Preservation
We need a movement
to preserve and
celebrate our communities and cultures as well as we have come
to honor our history and natural environment.
Privatization
A real simple rule on
privatization:
Ask the following question: Is this something about which citizens
should have a say? If the answer is yes, don't privatize.
Process
You meet alot of process
people in Washington.
They're like vehicles without a drive belt. They make a lot of
noise; they just can't go anywhere. Getting things done is now
a radical act. Then there are the virtual people. They only exist
as images of themselves. Talking to one of them is like watching
a bad cable show without a zapper. Some scientists believe that
at the rate things are going, process people and virtual people
will eventually evolve into species reproductively incompatible
with the rest of us. There are already reports of process people
and real people mating and producing only sterile offspring ~
a sort of mule that understands all the main policy points.
Progressives
The American left has a choice. Either it remains a victim of alternative predators
- the right on one hand, the Clintons and Obamas on the other.
Or it takes charge of its own future and that of the country
by agreeing within itself on a clear program and then - in the
manner of the abolitionists, populists, socialists, suffragettes
and civil rights activists - takes this message to every little
corner of the land it is trying to change for the better.
People who complain about progressives are like the man from Virginia who went to college
on the GI Bill and bought his first house with a VA loan. When
a hurricane struck he got federal disaster aid. When he got sick
he was treated at a veteran's hospital. When he was laid off
he received unemployment insurance and then got a SBA loan to
start his own business. His bank funds were protected under federal
deposit insurance laws. Now he's retired and on social security
and Medicare. The other day, however, he got so mad that he climbed
into his car, drove the federal interstate to the railroad station,
took Amtrak to Washington and went to Capitol Hill to ask his
congressman to get the government off his back.
Public interest
groups
Go back to the 60s and Ralph Nader was about
the only public interest lawyer in town who wore a suit and his
wasn't pressed. Today, many advocacy groups have drifted into
the lawyerly style and pace of the establishment they are supposedly
trying to change. They have, in their own way, become capital
institutions, part of the ritualized, status-conscious, and very
safe, trench warfare of the city.
Quakers
Quakerism exemplifies the power of personal choice because
it prescribes personal witness as guided by conscience - regardless
of the era in which we live in or the circumstances in which
we find ourselves. And the witness need not be in words. The
Quakers say "let your life speak," echoing St. Francis
of Assisis' advice that one should "preach the gospel at
all times. If necessary, use words"
There are about as many
Quakers today in
America as there were in the 18th century, around 100,000. Yet
near the center of every great moment of American social and
political change one finds members of the Society of Friends.
Why? In part because they have been willing to fail year after
year between those great moments. Because they have been willing
in good times and bad -- in the instructions of their early leader
George Fox -- "to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth
answering that of God in every one "
Reaganism
With the election of Reagan, this country began to turn its back on values
that had sustained it throughout its first two centuries - values
that included balancing power and wealth with concern for, cooperation
with, and compassion towards others in the community we called
America. In their place came a psychotic faith in the ubiquitous
virtue of the market, a faith almost creationist in its absence
of objective foundation, intellectually barren when not actually
dishonest, and as monomaniacal as the creed of the religious
fundamentalist. Every other aspect of existence - religion, family,
morality, creativity, politics, community, tradition, ethnicity
- was declared merely a byproduct of the marketplace. For the
first time in our history, the self-serving delusions of the
privileged few became the standard for the whole nation, propagated
in politics, on campuses and in the media.
Radicalism
I'm not a radical; I'm just a moderate of time that
has not yet come. I'm like a bad comedian. I get the punch line
right but my timing is all off.
Reality
Some time around the middle of the 1980s
I suddenly noticed that the truth was no longer setting people
free; it was only making them drowsy.
The synthetic images once
largely contained within the spheres of entertainment, recreation
and culture have become ubiquitous. In fact, an extraordinary
portion of the gross domestic product is currently devoted to
deception in one form or another, concealed though it may be
as marketing, advertising, management, leadership seminars, news,
entertainment, politics, public relations, religion, psychic
hotlines, education, ab machine infomercials, and the law. We
have become a nation of hustlers and charlatans, increasingly
choosing attitude over action and presentation over performance
and becoming unable to tell the difference. It's not all that
surprising because, whether for pleasure, profit, or promotion,
and in ways subtle and direct, our society encourages and rewards
those who out-sell, out-argue, and out-maneuver those around
them -- with decreasing concern for any harm caused along the
way.
We live in a time of
democratic disguises when everyone -- at least until they reach their place of employment
-- can be whoever they want. A nation of poseurs treating life
as though it were an endless masque ball. Those who fail at the
deception are the poor, the fat, the shy, the awkward, and the
otherwise terminally declasse. For the rest, a manic preoccupation
with style and attitude tempts them to become not a reflection
of who they are but what they want others to think they are.
Our primary business as Americans is to fool each other.
In a society informed
by theme park announcements
and run by theme park rules, reality becomes the property of
the management. Life becomes a giant magic show in which the
audience is not allowed to see the real action or the mechanisms
that create the real action, but only a dramatization of the
action. Our participation is limited to the consumption of false
images and false words as we become permanent hostages of the
prestidigitators. Even a moderately skeptical and energetic media
might help us remember again. But the media is an essential part
of the legerdemain, making information ever more a lever of control
rather than of freedom. Just to glimpse the problem could change
the way a journalist wrote or spoke of the world. But the rules
of the magic kingdom rigidly discourage that.
Rebellion
Without revolution and
rebellion we would
let mating and mutation do their thing. Instead, regularly dissatisfied
with our condition, our body, our home, and our government we
overthrow genetics through application of imagination, dreams,
ambition, skill, perseverance, and strength. Every new idea is
an act of rebellion, every work of art, every stretch for something
we couldn't do before, every question that begins "what
if. . ."
Every act in the face
of wrong carries
twin responsibilities: to end the evil and to avoid replacing
it with another. This twin burden is analogous to what a doctor
confronts when attempting to cure a disease. There is even a
name for medical failure in such cases; the resulting illness
is called iatrogenic - caused by the physician. In politics,
however, we have been taught to believe that simply having good
intentions and an evil foe are sufficient..
Most rebellions don't
produce revolutions.
A revolution claims, often falsely, to have an known end; a rebellion
needs only a known means.
In truth, a large part
of me still would
have liked to have been one of the popular boys in the class,
but things kept getting in the way - some addictive confluence
of moral aggravation, periodic accident, undisciplined imagination,
sporadic and unpremeditated courage randomly suppressing chronic
shyness and cowardice, sloppy romanticism, episodic existentialism,
recurrent hope, stultifying stubbornness and an abiding intolerance
for the dull. A child's dreams and an adult's faith pounding
tide after tide on the rock of reality, thinking that maybe this
time I'll float off. Some people take it personally, as though
I rebelled simply to annoy them. They make little jokes about
the fact that I'm different, as if I had a moral obligation to
be like them. When they see someone like me coming, they close
the doors of their institutions, their imaginations, and their
hearts. We are, after all, thieves who might abscond with their
most precious possession: the tranquility of unexamined certainty.
Still, you can't talk about
such things because it would further confirm the belief that
you are best ignored, dismissed, or considered absurd. So you
become the charming stranger from a strange place, you tell the
jokes first, and you change the subject when it starts to get
too close to the real. Better yet, you fool them into thinking
that you are one of them even though you really blend better
with those the urban itinerant Joe Gould once described as the
"cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens
and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats
I can't recommend such
a way; I can't even justify having tried it. A lot of it doesn't
make sense. I spurned the normal icons of ambition, yet was so
ambitious that I sought the unattainable. I gave the outward
impression of a radical but in my heart was just a moderate of
a time that had yet to arrive. I constantly sought change but
was most happy enjoying the changeless virtues of music and conversation
and returning to the mooring after a long, happy day on the bay.
Religion
Religion is absolutely
fair territory
for critics when it leaves in its wake war, a crusade against
another religion, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of constitutional
government, or the endangerment of domestic tranquility.
We have always had Christian
fundamentalists
in this country. We just used to call them New Deal Democrats.
Whether you call it
God or Nature, argued Thor Heyerdahl, "the disagreement is about the spelling
of a word." Unfortunately, a great many people have died
in the name of correct orthography.
If you violated the
conformity of the ancient church you might have found yourself branded a heretic
or an apostate. Today, if you violate the rules of the secular
culture you may find yourself branded a neurotic or dysfunctional.
Not all churches are run by people in robes.
It helps to separate
our moral decisions
from those of religious form, not because they are necessarily
exclusive, but because it allows us to see morality out of costume.
The ultimate irony of
the conservatives
is that they pretend to be a bastion of Christian politics when,
in fact, they are comprised in no small part of despoilers, usurers,
war-mongers, hypocrites, idolaters and groupies of false prophets
- all of whom are frowned upon by the book they pretend to follow.
And their opponents, who are more faithful to the words the conservatives
only quote, are often such good Christians that they never say
a mumblin' word about it all.
Oh, I know you're out there, Reverend
Dude. That's not my point. My point
is that the system and its media only cares these days about
religionists who are out to kill, control, or defeat someone.
The worker priests, the cool preachers, the progressive rabbis
are still there but struggling in a wilderness of silence and
indifference. It's not my beat to tell you how to change this.
I've got enough problems of my own to worry about. But I just
wanted to let you know that I miss you badly.
I have always tried to separate cause and character and have enjoyed a happy if inconsistent
relationship with those of the cloth. Besides, we are all members
of what Weber called the pariah intelligentsia, including teachers,
ministers, writers, intellectuals and activists. In other words,
moral outsiders of supposed integrity, passion, and faith providing
guidance to a market, politics, and culture that would often
just as soon do without it.
Respect
Respect is essential
in a functioning society,
yet not only are we losing the concept, we don't even hear much
about it. In a society where citizens exhibit mutual respect,
class and ethnic conflict is mediated, people feel better about
themselves and children are sent in good directions. In a society
lacking respect, we start to behave like too many rats in a cage,
we lose the sense of both the needs of others and of their value
to us, and adult and children alike become lonely warriors in
false empires of one.
Revolution
Revolutions are defined
not by the wonder of their promise but by the horrors of what preceded them. They
replace evil, but without a warranty.
Riots,
1968
The strange ambivalence of the riots
-- the slashes of violence mixed
indiscriminately with the sparkle of carnival, the sounds of
racial war penetrating the tranquility of a white couple's home
four blocks from disaster, our strangely ordinary experiences
in an extraordinary situation -- made the disorder a crazy amalgam
that took weeks to sort out.
Romney
Mitt
Mitt Romney succeeded with outsourced jobs and unsourced claims
Safety
net
Both conservatives and
liberals use the
term "safety net" to refer to matters that used to
be called "social welfare," "decent healthcare,"
or a "war on poverty. The phrase reveals how far we are
from doing anything about these things because a safety net is
something typically placed to prevent death in case one falls
or has to jump from a building. In other words, your last chance
in the midst of a major disaster. A safety net may rescue you
from the consequences of a few seconds' leap; it doesn't get
you to hospital or fix your broken limbs rescue your child still
inside the building, give you decent housing, or restore your
livelihood after a recession.
There are two basic ways of securing oneself against others: (1) not making
them mad at you and (2) defending yourself when they are. What
is so striking about our leaders is that they spend so little
effort on the first option and so much on the second. The problem
with this is that you not only have to shield yourself from bullets
but from the rest of life as well. And it's worth remembering
that no one lives in a medieval castle for protection anymore.
It turned out that they weren't as safe as the inhabitants thought..
Sea
The sea seems determined to force men to fight it with their bare hands. It is a teacher
of humility, an enforcer of respect, a revealer of fraud. It
is indifferent to paper distinctions between men, without regard
for fine words, and contemptuous of the niceties of society.
September
11
The wondrous mystery
of America is found
not in its perfection but in its ability to improve, its perpetual
search for a more perfect union. The idea had been fading for
some time, not just because we came to think of power as an adequate
substitute, but because we came to ignore such mundane matters
as teaching children democracy with the same vigor that we teach
them how to drive or about the dangers of drugs. And so we tried
to recover from 9/11 with a flag and loyalty to a place called
America, but without its dream. We used instead military power,
anti-democratic security measures, seductive technology, and
yet another elephantine bureaucracy -- offering still more temptations
for guerillas with simple weapons and no love of life. The 9/11
attackers, and the tens of millions around the world who share
some measure of their anger, have only seen our money and our
fist -- not the decency, democracy and dream that made America
strong in the first place. These virtues are still lying in the
rubble. Our job is to recover them, revive them, share them,
and become once more a model rather than a target. Only then
will we be both safe and free.
o
Many years ago some
people built castles
and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked
for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured
out how to get across the moats and climb the walls and send
balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even
catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.
The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are
all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately
futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of
human presumption.
Like the castle-dwellers
behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves
inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide
either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for
we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.This
is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without
violence, interrogations and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity,
of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about
to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or
rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding
that that it works for everyone.
This discovery is often
hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately
far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen,
which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat
keeps the others out.
o
The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had
no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast
military, financial, and technological resources, was able to
stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes
over and over. Our war against "terrorism" has been
in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep
making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we
could afford to. One of these has been to define the problem
by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable
political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because
while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle
East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerilla violence
that grows from the failure to end it.
In other words, if you define the problem
as "a struggle against terrorism" you have already
admitted defeat because the guerilla will always have the upper
hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such
as ours. There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that
is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick
is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly
with the complaints of the most rational.
Silent
generation
Perhaps our problem was that we rebelled before the age of rebellion.
Dissident students would later attack frontally many of the things
we only picked at.
Of all the monickered demographics, few
have attracted as little interest as this one. We were, for example,
one of two generations to have never produced a president. My
generational peer, Larry Aubach, once said to me, "We will
come and we will go and hardly anyone will know we were there."
If true, it won't be entirely fair. Caught
between the far more assertive, self-asssured and self-important
World War II and Boomer eras, my generation did something for
which credit is not usually given by power-absorbed historians:
we adapted. And one would be hard pressed to find in the past
many examples where a group as dominant as the white heterosexual
American male of the mid to late 20th century gave up so much
power so peacefully so quickly.
By the time we reached full adulthood,
the white males of the generation would find the status that
we had been promised already threatened. By the time we had reached
full maturity almost everything of social significance that we
had been taught had been proved or declared wrong. Instead of
continuing the role allegedly held for us in usufruct by our
elders, our task, it turned out, was to pass it on to, and share
it with, blacks, women and gays.
While this was true of all white American
men of the time, it was particularly true of our generation because
we served as translators of the new to the old. We had, after
all, quietly planted some of the change ourselves with the beat
rebellion, the irreverence of modern jazz and the civil rights
movement. Our generation was the sleeper cell of the Sixties.
Historians don't care for inchoate change
built on things like anarchistic acquiescence but perhaps some
revisionist scholar will discover the unnoted truth that the
Silent Generation, by choosing adaptation over resistance, did
far more for its country than if it had simply followed suit
and elected some presidents and started a few wars. A truth unnoted
but perhaps to be expected of those who had, after all, given
America the idea of "cool" and "hip."
Sixties
We have lost much
of what was gained in
the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy,
our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media
ways of our leaders. We will not overcome the current crisis
solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those
in which women once discovered others like themselves. The freedom
schools of the civil rights movement. The politics of the folk
guitar.. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman.
The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted
coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every
subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire
and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation.
Grand assemblies and simple conversations.
Up close, the 1960s
often lacked the
romance that time has given them. After all, at the end of the
decade Nixon was president; tens of thousands of young American
men and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had died in a pointless
war; charismatic leaders had been assassinated, and the cities
were still smoldering. We had moved from "I have a dream
" backwards to a dream deferred.
In my neighborhood on Capitol Hill, the Age of Aquarius
often looked more like a war zone. Many of the people there were
not part of a counter-culture but of an abandoned culture.
As a product of the fifties
in which cynicism and disengagement were the highest forms of
political activity, I found myself unable to identify with the
Aquarian optimism of those just a few years younger than myself.
Aquarius was not an age, I thought, but brief happy fireworks
in the long night before human understanding.
The 1960s, in many ways, was a huge example of what Hakim
Bey called a temporary autonomous zone, as are many periods of
great social and political change. The fragility of such chronologic
cultures hurtling through a small window of opportunity is often
missed by participants. In the 1960s, Bobby Seale presciently
warned, "seize the time," but for many it seemed no
more likely that the Age of Aquarius would disintegrate than
it might have seemed possible to post-Civil War radical Republicans
that their work of reconstruction would be undone barely a dozen
years after it started. Still, history favors eruptions more
than steady processions, and these uprisings, brief as they may
be, are the major seasons of social and political change.
Struggle
The advocate, the committed,
the seeker, the
free thinker, the rebel may live in a world that is seldom depicted
let alone honored. They may be ignored, disparaged, or even punished;
they may lack constituency, funds, or moral support. They may,
like the urban itinerant Joe Gould, feel most at home "down
among the cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens
and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats."
Yet in the end, they can attain that most precious victory of
remaining truly human, a state confirmed not by their ultimate
triumph but by their interminable effort, and not by their fame
but by their fortitude.
Those who think history
has left us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830,
the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, or the gay
or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose
their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what
they did with it. Knowing what we know now about how it's turned
out, what would we do if we suddenly found ourselves back in
1830? Would we bother?
Success
One of the problems with living around powerful myths
is that you can start to feel personally responsible when they
don't work out. If you don't lose weight, have better sex, kick
your phobia, earn 20% annually in the stock market, or get the
job you want, there are few around to tell you that such outcomes
are pretty normal. Instead, we are surrounded by hucksters of
success and salvation constantly luring us towards illusory certainty.
If we succumb to these chimeras of profit and prophesy, if we
accept the idea that God rightly favors the successful, the economy
justly favors the lucky, and society fairly favors the glamorous,
it can ultimately leave us with a sense of failure for no greater
fault than being a normal human being. It is hard in such a context
to remember that nearly all people who dial the 900 number beckoning
them on the cable screen continue to find hard times on easy
street. And it is hard to remember a time when humans had other
than monetary value.
Successful people in an earlier time had more fun
because they got to live life their way. Imagine Orson Welles
working with David Geffen? J.P. Morgan standing still for a photo
op with George Bush? Eleanor Roosevelt going on Saturday Night
Live to boost her numbers! Once a reward of success meant YOU
got to make rules. Today all rules are given you via conference
call with your manager, agent, and lawyer
Survivors
Survivors of abuse, oppression
and isolation somehow discover not so much how to beat the odds,
but how to wriggle around them. They have, without formal instruction,
learned two of the most fundamental lessons of psychiatry, philosophy
and religion:
- You are not responsible
for that into which you were born.
- You are responsible for
doing something about it.
These individuals move
through life like a skilled mariner in a storm rather than as
a victim at a sacrifice. Relatively unburdened by pointless and
debilitating guilt about the past, uninterested in the endless
regurgitation of the unalterable, they free themselves to concentrate
upon the present and the future. They face the gale as a sturdy
combatant rather than as cowering supplicant.
Systems
In public education and
other government matters, we are spending enormous sums to make
sure nothing goes wrong but in fact are just increasing the number
of people able to screw things up.
Complex systems usually
try to save themselves by doing the same they have been doing
badly all along -- only harder. This is because the salvation
of the system is implicitly considered far more important than
the solution of any problems causing the system to fail.
The "system"
is not America. The "system" is not us. It represents
neither the land nor its people, neither our ideals nor our souls.
Rather the "system" is a set of institutions, values,
rules and forces that have been imposed on our lives and upon
the culture of America. One reason so many of us feel disaffected
is because we know in our hearts -- even if we can't find the
right words or actions -- that much of what we find in the "system"
no longer matches what we believe America should be about. Yet
the "system" runs America.
Technocracy
Most Americans only
profess Christianity,
but increasingly - and in a deeply fundamentalist manner - they
practice technocracy, relying unquestioningly upon the systems
that make it work. Almost without exception, the reaction centers
on technocratic solutions of security, warfare, propaganda, and
surveillance. At every level - academic, media, and government
- such issues are considered stripped of moral, philosophical,
ethical, historical, or anthropological content. One need look
no further than your own TV screen to observe this. The "experts"
on the network news and talk shows are invariably those of technocratic
skill rather than those who have demonstrated wisdom, foresight,
or human understanding. They exemplify a quality that John Ruskin
called "intricate bestiality."
Teenagers
Adults conform just as
much as teenagers do. The problem is that teenagers are asked
to conform to both adult and teenager values at the same time.
This can be a little confusing.
Television
Everything that television
does becomes television rather than what it starts out to be.
Terrorism
If killing
Bin Laden was so important, how come we didn't slash the budget
of Homeland Security in its wake?
The war against terrorism
is the political equivalent of a stock market bubble - hope,
hubris and hyperbole parading as fact.
Three thousand people is, of course, too
many to die for any reason. But it is also far too weak an argument
for the end of democracy.
Of course, there can be peace with so-called
terrorist organizations; it's just a matter of whether one waits
the better part of a century like the British in Northern Ireland
or you start talking and negotiating now.
The media and politicians call what happened
on 9/11 terrorism. This is a propagandistic rather than a descriptive
term and replaces the more useful traditional phrases, guerilla
action or guerilla warfare. The former places a mythical shroud
around the event while the latter depicts its true nature. Guerillas
do not play by the rules of state organization or military tactics.
This does not make them cowardly, as some have suggested, but
can make them fiendishly clever. The essence of guerilla warfare
is to attack at times and places unsuspected and return to places
unknown. You can not invade the land of guerillas, you can not
bomb them out of existence, you can not overwhelm them with your
technological wonders. This was a lesson we were supposed to
have learned in Vietnam but appear to have forgotten.
There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare
and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive.
The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by
dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.
The people who built castles
and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts
at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their
unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption. Like
the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge
sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is
unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace
for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others
get a chance.
Soon after September 11,our leaders and much of our media drew
the conclusion that our salvation lay in world dominance, in
empire. Within just days we moved from tragic reality to delusional
myth. Empires don't have their major military and economic icons
damaged or destroyed by a handful of young men with box cutters.
Empires don't turn suddenly phobic at everything foreign, everything
sharp, every place crowded. Empires don't jettison their Constitution
and turn on their own people out of blind fear.
The journalist Bernard Fall early
in our Vietnam conflict noted that the French, after their failed
battle at Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast
Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological
resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep
making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism"
has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy.
We keep making the same mistakes over and over because we can
still afford to. Or think we can.
Think
tanks
THE EASIEST WAY for the
media to give the impression of independent analysis is to call
upon "experts" at the various think-tanks . Many of
these experts are, in fact, former government officials biding
their time until recalled to the inner sanctums of power or are
currently serving as consultants to those in office. While think
tanks can sometimes be productive and occasionally provide a
haven for truly original thinkers, they primarily function as
the Catholic Church of conventional politics, their priests propagating
the faith, blessing the faithful, redirecting the errant and
showing up at fundraising dinners to add a little class and offer
the benediction. And their collection plates are regularly filled
by large corporations with some distinctly non-academic goals
in mind.
Time
and space
Time and space were once
an essential part of our nature. Gertrude Stein wrote that "in
America there is more space where nobody is than where anybody
is. This is what makes America what it is." By the 1950s,
however, Alan Ginsberg was already speaking of "an America
which no longer exists except in Greyhound bus terminals, except
in small dusty towns seen from the window of a speeding car."
The deeply religious, the
utopian, the cybernetic, and the fraternal can still escape into
frontiers set at odd angles to the geographic. In fact, the freest
people left in America may include the computer nerd and the
contemplative nun, for each exist in a liberated zone of tolerance
for the human soul and imagination.
Others of us pass in and
out, shaping our homes, our offices, our associations, and our
families into temporary zones of unregulated humanity, finding
little oases in the desert of technocratic progress. Or we move
furtively into the countryside, like Winston Smith escaping Big
Brother, seeking what we have lost.
But most of it we do either
alone or in small, polite equivalents of the gangs to which urban
adolescents gravitate in their search for something they haven't
lost because they never had it. . .
Then there is the media,
purportedly our surrogate priest, parent, and teacher but in
fact functioning like gangs of burglars breaking and entering
our brains and stealing time and space from us in a way not even
our parents experienced. What was once extraordinary became merely
unusual and finally ubiquitous as we moved from manuscript to
microphone to camera and cable. With each step, context, environment,
and points of reference became ever more distant and external.
With each step, we became ever more dependent on things and people
we would most likely never see in their unprojected, unfilmed,
unrecorded nature. Sitting in a bar, riding an exercycle at the
gym, or waiting in the airport, we trade proximate reality for
a distant, visible, decibeled but ultimately unreachable substitute.
Whatever the source, it
now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations
of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did.
While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship"
and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude
is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully
constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance.
We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time
and space, they might implode into us.
In fact, there are now
more people in prison in than there are farmers, which is to
say that you are more likely to find Americans kept in a cage
than you are to find driving their tractor along a country road.
America has moved from frontier to supermax.
Tolerance
Tolerance is a word much
out of favor these days yet its organization and promulgation
is the underlying genius of the American system. It has been
also described as the concept of reciprocal liberty: I can't
have my freedom unless I give you yours. It is based not so much
on shared values as indifference to unshared values.
Trade
For nearly all our history, any US official
who dared give up American territory without a struggle would
be pilloried or worse. Yet today the greatest surrender of sovereignty
in US history, our signature on the GATT agreement, is chalked
up as an inevitable result of globalism. This abandonment is
not controversial, nor even readily apparent, because Americans
simply have not been told that it has occurred. They do not know
that their country -- which defeated in turn the British, the
Mexicans, the Confederacy, the Spanish, the Germans (twice),
the Japanese and outlasted the Soviet Union, has surrendered
without a whimper to a junta of trade technocrats armed with
nothing more menacing than cell phones.
Trains
The adjective beautiful
before the noun locomotive is semantic deadheading. I've never
seen a locomotive that wasn't beautiful.
Trains could be dirty,
cold, hot, late, cancelled, overcrowded, or sit for hours in
a wheat field for no fathomable reason. I learned that the silver
temperature control knobs in Pullmans were either dummy switches
or that the legends on them had been printed in random order.
But such annoyances were more than balanced by the pleasures
of standing in the vestibule with the top of the dutch door open
feeling the air and the country rush by. Or watching from the
last car as the roadbed disappeared into a point. Or pasting
your nose to the window and seeing the engine pull you around
a curve. Or peering into the backyard of America. Or climbing
into the top bunk. Or getting off the train in the middle of
nowhere and wondering with another passenger what the problem
was.
Truth
The endless argument about
who said what to whom about what demonstrates an illusion about
honesty shared by all sides. It is yet another iteration of a
phenomenon I first noticed during the Edwin Meese nomination
hearings. It became clear then, and so many times since, that
America - including its politicians, media and ordinary citizens,
had accepted a legal definition of honesty, to wit: if a public
person can not be proved to have lied by the rules of a criminal
court, he or she can't be called dishonest and, in the case of
a nominee, remains qualified for office. In other words, our
standard for confirmation to high office had become no better
than that for acquittal of a common thief.
In real life, the truth
must always be spoken, but the truth need not always be told.
In politics, neither are necessary and both are sometimes fatal.
In 2003, I was asked by
Harper's to compile a history of the beginning of the Iraq war
told entirely in lies by Bush officials and advisers. As I began
to work on the project, I was reminded over and over of how little
lying often has to do with court-defined perjury. It more typically
involves hyperbolic hoodwinking, unsubstantiated analogy, cynical
incitement of fear, deceitful distortion, slippery untruths,
gossamer falsehoods, disingenuous anecdote, artful agitprop,
and the relentless repetition of all the foregoing in an atmosphere
in which facts are trampled underfoot by a mendacious mob and
their semantic weapons.
One does not have to analyze
such language legally to understand its evil. One need only have
enough understanding of the manner of the honest, the sincere
and the candid to know almost instinctively when their opposite
is in command.
Yes, some of the Bush capos
may have done it so poorly from time to time that they can be
successfully prosecuted. But our ultimate standard for judging
their words and claims - whether as a Sunday talk show commentator
or as an ordinary citizen - should be an ethical and not a legal
one. If we let such con artists get away with their ultimate
trick - which is having us believe that if we can not prove their
swindle we must accept it - we will have fully surrendered to
their treachery.
I thought the truth would
set us free. Instead it just seems to have made us lethargic.
Values
With the election of Reagan, this country
began to turn its back on values that had sustained it throughout
its first two centuries - values that included balancing power
and wealth with concern for, cooperation with, and compassion
towards others in the community we called America. In their place
came a psychotic faith in the ubiquitous virtue of the market,
a faith almost creationist in its absence of objective foundation,
intellectually barren when not actually dishonest, and as monomaniacal
as the creed of the religious fundamentalist. Every other aspect
of existence - religion, family, morality, creativity, politics,
community, tradition, ethnicity - was declared merely a byproduct
of the marketplace. For the first time in our history, the self-serving
delusions of the privileged few became the standard for the whole
nation, propagated in politics, on campuses and in the media.
War
War is the joint exercise of things we
were trained not to do as children.
War is doing things overseas that we would
go to prison for at home.
Anyone can start a war. Starting a peace
is really hard. Therefore it is much harder to be a peace expert
than a war expert.
The media treats war as just another professional
sport.
War has rules, which means that we can
change the rules.
Murder, rape and slavery still exist. But
that doesn't mean we shouldn't have banned them. The same is
true of war.
Telling a country we won't negotiate with
it until it does what you want is like saying you won't play
a game unless you are allowed to win.
There is no evidence that supporting war,
or telling presidents to do so, improves your testosterone level,
so Ivy League professors are better advised to stick to tennis.
There is one way to deal with guerrilla
warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to
thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter
by dealing honestly with the problems and complaints of the most
rational.
Of course, there can be peace with so-called
terrorist organizations; it's just a matter of whether one waits
the better part of a century, as the British did in Northern
Ireland, or whether you start talking and negotiating now.
Three thousand people is, of course, far
too many to die for any reason. But it is also far too weak an
argument for the end of democracy.
Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust,
of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you
in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete
but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it
works for everyone.
Implicit in the "what about their
violence?" argument is the idea that what we do wrong is
excusable because it has been matched by the other side. Of course,
the other side sees it the same way so you end up with a perfect
stalemate of violence. When I raised a similar argument as a
kid, my mother's response was, "If Johnny were to jump off
a cliff, would you jump off a cliff, too?" I never could
come up with good answer to that and so eventually had to concede
that somebody else's stupidity was not a good excuse for my own.
From the moment we commence a moral intervention
we become a part of the story, and part of the good and evil.
We are no longer the innocent bystander but a full participant
whose acts will either help or make things worse. Our intentions
become irrelevant; they are overwhelmed by the character of our
response to them. The morality of the disease is supplanted by
the morality of the cure. In fact, every moral act in the face
of mental or physical injury carries twin responsibilities: to
mend the injury and to avoid replacing it with another
One of the reasons America is in so much
trouble is because it happily makes all sorts of compromises
in order to get along with large dictatorships such as Russia
and China, but thinks it can handle smaller operations like Hamas,
North Korea, and Iran by simple obstinacy and belligerence. In
other words, it is happy to talk with big terrorists, but not
little ones. In fact, most of these small entities - and those
who lead them - suffer from extreme inferiority complexes. By
threatening war, imposing massive embargos and so forth, America
merely feeds the sense of persecution and encourages the least
rational reaction. A more sensible approach would be to constantly
negotiate with these leaders and edge them towards reasonable
participation in world affairs.
Imagine if we had told Israel and Palestine
a few years ago that if they would just make nice we would give
them enough money to equal Israel's GDP for one year and Palestine's
for three. Take the time off, go to the Riviera or the Catskills,
forget about productivity, and just party on thanks to the American
taxpayer. Or if Israel and Palestine wanted to be really sensible,
they could have invested in their countries' future instead.
Think how much safer we would be today. . . But where would such
a large sum of money come from? Well, all we would have had to
have done was to cancel the invasion of Iraq and used the money
as a carrot rather than as a bludgeon. For that is just what
it has cost us so far. (2007)
The people who built castles and walled
cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security
seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended
monuments to the vanity of human presumption. Like the castle-dwellers
behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves
inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide
either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for
we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.
Empires and cultures are not permanent
and while thinking about the possibility that ours is collapsing
may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than enduring the
dangerous frustrations and failures involved in having one's
contrary myth constantly butt up against reality - like a boozer
who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home. Instead
of defending the non-existent, we could turn our energies instead
towards devising a new and saner reality.
Places like Harvard and Oxford - and their
after-school programs such as the Washington think tanks - teach
the few how to control the many and it is impossible to do this
without various forms of abuse ranging from sophism to corporate
control systems to napalm. It is no accident that a large number
of advocates of war - in government and the media - are the products
of elite educations where they were taught both the inevitability
of their hegemony and the tools with which to enforce it. It
will, therefore, be some time before places such as Harvard and
the Council on Foreign Relations are seen for what they are:
the White Citizens Councils of state violence.
Castro, in his early days, spoke at the
UN. But the hotels of New York refused him space. The result:
Malcolm X found him a hotel in Harlem and a key early step was
taken in the alienation of a man who, with just a little respect
and effort, might not have tormented every American president
since by refusing to die or fade away. Respect is important because
it is a door wide enough for peace to enter. We need to try it
more often.
Violence
We live
in a society that condones violence in our public policy and
are excessively entertained by it in our private lives.
Washington
The difference between being intelligent and being smart
is that the former only requires data, the latter requires judgment
in how you use it. The capital is full of intelligent people
but short on smart ones.
Washington's "greater
sophistication"
is virtually indistinguishable from rampant cynicism and mindless
profligacy, and its autoerotic fascination with power for its
own sake threatens to prove that masturbation does cause insanity.
At times I felt trapped in the compound of some bizarre cult of overwrought
rhetoric, infantile premises and manic mythology. There were
no ideas, only a leader; no ideology, only icons; no inquiry,
only arrogant certitude.
In June the soft stillness of southern summer returns to Washington. In the
everything-controlled environment of the newer city it's easy
to ignore but along the one-syllable, two-syllable, three-syllable
blocks of older Washington you can't miss it: the leafy canopy,
the human tableaux on porches and stoops, and the sounds -- a
siren, a cry, a song -- all the more startling because of the
broken quiet. It is during these slow, pregnant green days that
Washington becomes most true to itself, and a sweet place still.
A city in which the American dream and the American tragedy passed each other on
the street and do not speak.
The new Washington disdains
nearly every contact
with the city as a community and treats the place as part shopping
mall and part Plato's Retreat for the ego. It is the city of
real estate dealers rather than merchants, the city where you
damn well better not leave home without It, clone of Gotham,
sire of scandal so tawdry that it has discredited political corruption,
the city in which a day's work can consist of a memorandum revised,
a two-hour quiche lorraine and martini lunch and four phone calls
to say you're all tied up. The city in which never have so many
been paid so much to do so little. The city which has changed
from a sleepy southern village to a catatonic northern metropolis.
I am most days an exile in my native
town, living in a place whose values
I don't like, whose symbols are jarring, whose language is neither
colorful nor convincing, whose obsession with security just creates
new fears, and whose ambience often has all the soul, substance,
and permanence of a downtown hotel lobby."
Much that is written about Washington
stays comfortably within the two
by three mile area in which one finds the White House and the
Congress, the Supreme Court and the State Department, the Pentagon,
the Watergate and the National Press Club. As typical pasture
in the American west, this spread could support about 120 cows
and their calves.
How one comes to matter
in Washington politics
is guided by few precise rules, although in comparison to fifty
years ago the views of lobbyists and fundraisers are far more
significant than the opinion, say, of the mayor of Chicago or
the governor of Pennsylvania. This is a big difference; somewhere
behind the old bosses in their smoke-filled rooms were live constituents;
behind the political cash lords of today there is mostly just
more money and the few who control it. Thus coming to matter
has much less to do with traditional politics, especially local
politics, than it once did. Today, other things count: the patronage
of those who already matter, a blessing bestowed casually by
one right person to another right person over lunch at the Metropolitan
Club, a columnist's praise, a well-received speech before a well-placed
organization, the assessment of a lobbyist as sure-eyed as a
fight manager checking out new fists at the local gym. There
are still machines in American politics; they just dress and
talk better. There is another rule. The public plays no part.
The public is the audience; the audience does not write or cast
the play.
Official Washington
-- including government,
media and the lobbies -- functions in many ways like America's
largest and most prestigious club, a sort of indoor, east coast
Bohemian Grove in which members engage in endless rites of mutual
affirmation combined with an intense but genteel competition
that determines the city's tennis ladder of political and social
power. What appears to the stranger as a major struggle is often
only an intramural game between members of the same club, lending
an aura of dynamism to what is in truth deeply stable.
Federal Washington is a culture in which much seems
to happen but little gets accomplished. It is a culture in which
neither the battles nor the words about them are necessarily
real, in which the interests of the federal enclave inevitably
proceed those of the country, and in which speaking of something
is considered the moral equivalent of actually doing it. It is
a culture that can admit neither to itself nor to the larger
world the degree to which its various systems are out of control.
Nor can it admit that when it defines corruption only by its
most precise legal limits it exempts itself from any broader
decency. It is finally a culture that has been remarkably successful
at isolating itself from the reality it is attempting to govern.
The abstract, soulless security of the capital protects it from
the pain it causes, the suffering it neglects and the concerns
it can quantify but not ameliorate. Here statistics substitute
for tears, data for anger, and mechanically modulated voices
recounting promises never to be fulfilled serve as a placebo
for real hope and joy. It is, in the end, the place described
in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real: "Turn back, traveler,
for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place and there
are no birds in the country except wild birds that are tamed
and kept in cages."
Just as the Soviets
tolerated free thought
only within the limits of "socialist dialogue," so
debate in Washington is circumscribed by the limits of what might
be called Beltway discourse. Ideas that adjust or advance the
conventional wisdom are valued. Those that challenge it are ignored
or treated with contempt. Beltway discourse is informed by a
number of disciplines but tends to ignore others. The teachings
of law and political science as well as those of economics are
considered important; those of history, anthropology, religion,
literature, philosophy and the arts tend to be discounted.
Although the media presents
Washington as a
city grappling with the major issues of our time, much of the
town's workday is absorbed by highly specific concerns. The president
is worried about the spin to give a statement or appearance.
The lobbyist is obsessed with a very particular amendment to
a very particular bill. The size of the capital's bureaucracy
is necessitated in no small part by the number and specificity
of regulations it must administer. And woe to the member of Congress
who lets larger concerns surpass the parochial needs of the district.
Washington is awash in the politics of particulars.
The town's most common
skill, its trade
of choice, is finding what is wrong with something. For the bureaucrat,
this eliminates the need for action. For the politician, it lessens
risk. For the lobbyist, it means points with the client. For
the public interest group, democracy and justice are at stake.
And for the lawyer and reporter, it is just instinctual. All
day long, Washington hums with people trying to stop other people
from doing something, and with considerable frequency they are
successful. At times Washington seems a series of endless loop
videos in which policies are debated, lobbied and almost acted
upon before the tape repeats itself once more.
If the federal government
were a state it
would be the fifth largest in the country --- bigger than Illinlois
It takes a lot of energy to run Illinois, but then that's Illinois'
business. It takes a lot of energy to run the federal government,
but the federal government is supposed to be doing something
other than just running itself. Nonetheless, in that government
every decision of every day must be weighed against two often
uncomplimentary sets of requirements -- those of America and
those of the system that runs it, the fifth largest state. Even
in the best of times, the system may come first; in the worst
of times its demands become obsessive as it struggles to maintain
itself.
The effect of numbers
on the city has
been profound. At times it seems that there are no governments
anymore, only budget offices. The idea of a budget bureau at
the federal level only goes back to Warren Harding. As late as
1975, Austin Kiplinger could write that the president's budget
officials were outnumbered by those of the various departments
and thus "have to be especially sharp" and make up
in clout what they lack in numbers. Today, few feel sorry for
the White House budget squad, which has not only replaced many
of the functions of departmental financial officials but those
of the departments themselves.
As the numerologists rose
in power, programs increasingly became transformed into line
items. Numbers began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced
to figures and policy became a matter of where one placed the
decimal point.. Thus, what should be a debate about programs
becomes one about arithmetic.
Every day in Washington,
many of the best and the brightest occupy themselves computing
figures, defending them before Congress, citing them before a
trade association or recalling them on C-SPAN. Adding and subtracting
are among Washington's favorite activities, often providing a
digital shield against discussing what the figures actually represent.
No
other American city had so much
written and spoken about it by people who had no organic connection
with it and who expended so little effort on its behalf. From
presidents to Time reporters, the city was what they wished (or
had time) to see, and the resulting reporting veered from descriptions
of a Grossinger's for megalomaniacs to a Tolkien-like netherworld
inhabited by orcs, goblins, brigands and things that go bump
in the night and take all your money. The Washingtonian found
few friends among those who passed through. Jack Kennedy called
it a place of 'northern charm and southern efficiency.' Senate
District Committee chairman Thomas Eagleton responded to a complaint
that a proposed home rule bill would leave Congress with a veto
over all local actions by saying, "The Lord giveth and the
Lord taketh away." Congressmen with impeccable liberal credentials
curried favor with their conservative constituents and financial
backers by supporting freeways, developers and 'law and order'
schemes for the District. Such were our friends.
Then there was the legion of race-baiters,
demagogues, and legislators using the District to make deals,
political and business, that would have been a scandal if they
had occurred in their home districts, and others who used their
power over the city to make sure they got cheap liquor and cheap
taxi rides.
Washington was a city of dichotomies, contrasts, and striking inequalities. It was
the capital of a major democracy that lacked local democracy.
It was a citadel of power whose residents lacked power. It was
a city with an excess of multimillion dollar office buildings
and a shortage of housing. It was a city that was wealthier than
most in which a sizable minority lives in great poverty. It had
a 70 percent black population but the major decisions were still
made by whites. It was a city in which the American dream and
the American tragedy passed each other on the street and did
not speak. It was, finally, a city that had suffered a form of
deprivation known primarily to the poor and the imprisoned, a
psychological deprivation born of the constant suppression and
denial of one's identity, worth, or purpose by those in control.
Washington to those in power was not a place but a hall to rent.
The people of Washington were the custodian staff. And the renters
were as likely to visit the world in which this staff lived as
a parishioner is to inspect the boiler room of the church. The
purpose of Washington's community was to serve not to be.
The public often misunderstands the
importance of Washington scandals,
assuming them to be a simple dalliance, individual failing, or
private offense. What makes both sex and crime in DC different,
at least when those in power are involved, is that there is far
more opportunity for blackmail and far more skill at covering
things up. . . .In
short, there is far more politically related sex and crime in
Washington then is generally reported, it is less competently
investigated than is generally thought, and it is far easier
to cover up than is generally appreciated.
It is a city of magnificent
views and dismal
viewpoints, wonderful communities and dubious egos, natural spaces
and artificial words. It is a city that too often can't tell
the difference between intelligence and wisdom and, as Russell
Baker once noted, the difference between being serious and being
somber
Weather
forecasts
Between the time your editor
awoke and the time he got out of bed this morning, three to four
inches of snow had disappeared. Between breakfast and four pm
another two inches vanished. At this rate we may be facing a
serious drought by bedtime.
White
men
One of the besetting sins of many
in the progressive movement is that they have made white men
the enemy. In fact, no ethnic group in history has given up so
much power so quickly and so peacefully. Every social movement
of the past 40 years has depended on either the acquiescence
or active participation of large numbers of white men. To bash
them is both bad politics and bad philosophy, tossing out constituency
and logic at the same time. One of the basic reasons for the
Democrats' current problems is that they have implicitly treated
minorities and women, on the one hand, and white males, on the
other, as mutually exclusive groups. This perception has helped
to send white males to the Republicans. While it is obvious that
white men have been responsible for most of the horrendous political
and ecological policies that have left us in our current situation,
it should be similarly obvious that most white men have also
been their victims -- in everything from war to black lung disease
to economic exploitation.
Whistleblowers
Whistleblowers, in the
course of doing their jobs, typically stumble upon facts that
point to danger, neglect, waste, or corruption. Far too often
this discovery is met not with approbation and as a sign of exemplary
public service, but rather as a threat to the agency or company.
Among the consequences: firing, reassignment, isolation, forced
resignation, threats, referral to psychiatric treatment, public
exposure of private life and other humiliations, being set up
for failure, prosecution, elimination of one's job, blacklisting,
or even death.
From the doctor in Ibsen's Enemy of the
People to Karen Silkwood, the nuclear industry worker killed
after her car was forced off the road on her way to talk to a
reporter, speaking truth to power has proved costly. The Mongolians
say that when you do it, you should keep one foot in the stirrup.
Or as Admiral Hyman Rickover told a group of Pentagon cost analysts:
"If you must sin, sin against God, not against the bureaucracy.
God may forgive you, but the bureaucracy never will."
Why
bother?
Let's turn off the television, step into the sunlight, and count
the bodies. As we were watching inside, the non-virtual continued
at its own pace and on its own path, indifferent to our indifference,
unamused by our ironic detachment, unsympathetic to our political
impotence, unmoved by our carefully selected apparel, unfrightened
by our nihilism, unimpressed by our braggadocio, unaware of our
pain. Evolution and entropy remained outside the cocoon of complacent
images, refusing to be hurried or delayed, declining to cut to
the chase, unwilling to reveal either ending or meaning.
We shade our eyes and
scan the decay.
We know that this place, this country, this planet, is not the
same as the last time we looked. There are more bodies. And fewer
other things: choices, unlocked doors, democracy, satisfying
jobs, reality, unplanned moments, clean water, a species of frog
whose name we forget, community, and the trusting, trustworthy
smile of a stranger.
Someone has been careless, cruel, greedy, stupid. But it
wasn't us, was it? We were inside, just watching. It all happened
without us -- by the hand of forces we can't see, understand,
or control. We can always go in again and zap ourselves back
to a place where the riots and tornadoes and wars are never larger
than 27 inches on the diagonal. We can do nothing out here. Why
bother?
Why bother? Only to be alive. Only to be real,
to be made not just of what we acquire or our adherence to instruction,
but of what we think and do of our own free will. Only, Winston
Churchill said, to fight while there is still a small chance
so we don't have to fight when there is none. Only to climb the
rock face of risk and doubt in order to engage in the most extreme
sport of all -- that of being a free and conscious human. Free
and conscious even in a society that seems determined to reduce
our lives to a barren pair of mandatory functions: compliance
and consumption.
Life is a endless pick-up
game between hope
and despair, understanding and doubt, crisis and resolution.
Words
We don't have to worry
about Trojan horses much any more. The real danger comes from
Trojan words and phrases appealing statues of rhetoric
concealing the enemy.
Writing
- Speak United States. Avoid
the private languages of academia, technocracy and corporations.
- As an English teacher
wisely noted, you are allowed only three exclamation points in
a lifetime. Use them carefully.
- Remember that you are
talking to a reader, not your therapist. Since you're don't pay
your readers what you pay your therapist, you should give them
something they will enjoy.
- If you're having a hard
time, write for one reader: a friend, a relative, your child,
Barack Obama. This helps remove the speechifying and makes the
task less confusing.
- If you suffer from writer's
block, just sit down and write crap. Pay no attention to style,
content, or spelling. Just write something. Then read it again
tomorrow and save all the good stuff.
- Capitalized words can
be used for anything that would go on a door, a map, a gravestone,
in an address book or at the beginning of a sentence. They are
not for words you just think are important.
- If you're being funny
or ironic, don't feel you have to say so. Never explain a joke.
It annoys your good readers and the dumb ones still won't get
it.
- Harold Ross, editor of
the New Yorker used to say if you can't be funny, be interesting.
- Avoid abstractions. If
the evening was indeed 'fabulous,' give us some solid evidence.
And if you do a good enough job of describing an incident, you
won't need to call it 'racist.' Think of yourself as a photographer
using words instead of a camera. Good photographs speak for themselves.
- Stories are almost always
more interesting than opinions. Use the southern approach and
argue by anecdote.
1950s
In odd, inconsistent and
sometimes crude ways, we in the 1950s served as a sleeper cell
for the 1960s.
1980s
This is an era not without
ideas and a sense of history but what ideas and what history.
Its as if the worst of the past had been resyndicated and
put on Channel 20, with none of the other stations working. We
draw from the economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East
India Company, the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties
of Palmer and McCarthy, the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle
of Babbitt and Gatsby, the religion of Gantry, the political
ethics of Teapot Dome, the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness
of Nietzsche, the altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity
of General Sherman, the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding,
the imagination of Rutherford Hayes, the brilliance of Franklin
Pierce, the expressiveness of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary
theories of William Jennings Bryan.
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