It’s a short but pithy book, aimed at the hypocrisy of the modern U.S. stance on (some) drugs as much as at the stuffy classicists who maintained, in the face of reams of textual evidence, according to Hillman, that “[the Romans] just wouldn’t do such a thing.” I’m not a classicist, but Hillman doesn’t have to work very hard to convince me that Rome’s pleasure-seekers didn’t just drink lots and lots of wine in those saturnalian romps of theirs.

The Chemical Muse is a brief overview of the evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans were both aware and tolerant of the use of psychoactive substances: opiates, cannabis and other plant-based drugs, while they simultaneously warned of the dangers of “poisoning” (what we would refer to as overdose) and prescribed precautionary remedies for it. In fact, according to Hillman, the only aspect of drug use that was criminal in these societies was the intentional poisoning of another person with a drug.

Hillman is mostly interested in presenting his case from a civil libertarian standpoint; since our own imperfect understanding of civil liberties is largely derived from Classical society via the Enlightenment, he wonders how we can have descended to a position so much less enlightened in this regard than our primitive forebears in the ancient world.

But in his defense of Greek and Roman recreational drug use, Hillman barely touches on what is to me, the heart of the matter: drugs may have stimulated the very visions and insights that gave early poets and philosophers levels of understanding that Western civilization has built on ever since, while systematically purging the parts of those understandings that didn’t gibe with any practice not useful to refining social control and/or increasing the production of profit. Hillman does make note of the pre-Socratics, chief among them Pythagoras and Empedocles, for whom mysticism and rigorous investigation of the natural world were no contradiction. He says: “the roots of Western philosophy reach deep into the fertile soil of the human imagination, where shamanism, divination, and narcotic experiences have held sway for thousands of years.” While this idea alone could easily be the subject of a book, Hillman is more interested in documenting classical references to drug use than to linking it to the production of important concepts and archetypes, from mathematics to theology.

The Greeks themselves were not exempt from the process of ideological exclusion, which probably reached a point of no return when Plato threw poets out of his ideal republic and animism out of nature. Yet, as long as the pharmakon was not actively banned, the visions it produced were tolerated too, although from the misogynistic Greeks with their cautionary tales of murderous Medea or the Bacchae begins its long descent to complete anathema, the tool of witchcraft that would undermine the later Christian social order. Ending up, of course, in the gynocide that European Christianity required for its triumph, which washed right up on the shores of Plymouth and swept over the colonists at Salem.

Much as Hillman would like us to see the current war on drugs as a modern aberration, it’s still a very old story. Perhaps as old as the rise of monotheism: tellingly, there is no society where monotheism dominates in which psychoactive drug use is officially tolerated (and psychoactive is the key here) unless that society has since become much more thoroughly secular than our own. And that’s why drug use is not really a just a matter of civil liberties per se, of the “individual freedom” that libertarians maintain is the true legacy of Western civilization. The issue isn’t whether or not you have a personal right to alter your mood—after all we have caffeine, and we have alcohol and nicotine which are far more strongly addictive and dangerous to health than cannabis, but we don’t have cannabis. Why? Because cannabis can alter your perception of reality, not just your mood.

Reports of psychoactive drug experiences tend to support the idea that the user can become aware of multiple levels of reality all present simultaneously that are far more complex and yet more harmonious and unified than normal experience permits her to perceive. All sorts of understandings are possible, based on the particular mind and the particular drug, but this type of awareness is a through-line. Why would monotheism particularly be afraid of this? Because the experience tends to reinforce the idea that while there is undoubtedly a transcendent realm of existence, it doesn’t recognize those equally hallucinatory desert-engendered patriarchs Yahweh or Allah as its exclusive landlords. So, to coin a phrase: how’re ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Par-ee?

Yes, you will say, but Almighty God or no, whatever consumer capitalism wants consumer capitalism usually gets in our good ol’ U.S. of A. So why did we abolish Prohibition only to let the drug war run on and on with no sign of ever ending? What’s the difference, when pleasure can be turned so readily into cash?

There’s no doubt that American culture is schizoid as regards pleasure: for a consumer capitalist society, pleasure is the big money, the holy grail of profit, but for a never-truly secularized monotheistic society, dominated by a particularly sensation-hating brand of monotheism at that, pleasure is always deeply suspect, a terrorist in our midst. Still, I would maintain that insight, not pleasure, is the real target, or at least the real casualty, of the American war on the particular drugs it has chosen as the enemy. Sensual pleasure may be a danger to organized religion, but insight is dangerous to both religion and profit.

And let’s remember that Prohibition, once in place, was not repealed until after American capitalism crashed its car and was stumbling around, reeling, in the wreckage. A broke government couldn’t help save it, and Prohibition, just as in our day, was denying the government millions in revenue from taxation while forcing it to spend more millions on enforcement. God would have to rethink his position on this one.

Up to now, it’s clear our drug war has been extremely convenient for the powers that be. It’s conveniently mostly harmed only the poor in our society and in producing countries. It’s conveniently resulted in their mass incarceration in the U.S., keeping them from troublesome agitation for greater social equality. Consumer capitalism has found plenty of stuff to sell that’s just as lucrative or more than the cut it would get from marijuana dispensaries or cocaine fun pills (including all sorts of mood enhancing but not mind-altering pharmaceuticals, for the millions whose pleasure deficit has hit a clinically definable level). There’s no correlation of forces strong enough yet to push our strangely picky God to the side on this one, even though we’re getting closer all time: governments bankrupted by drug war enforcement and incarceration costs are less and less able to provide the infrastructural bootstrap that business unendingly needs to be pulled up by, or the social stability it needs to generate profit. Or even, at a certain point, enough skilled employees to manage its enterprises, since schools tend to die where prisons grow. But drug policy change, like actual job creation, will probably only come as an absolute last resort, so profoundly distasteful is it to those who have benefited most from its absence.

At the same time, while the social benefits are almost undeniable at this point, it’s naïve to expect that some kind of renaissance of insight-based living would sweep over this land if psychoactive drugs were legalized. Holland would be full of transcendentalist philosophers if that were true. I’m not saying there would be a linear consequence of greater intellectual maturity in the populace the more drug use was accepted. There’s nothing linear about psychoactive drug use; that’s of course another aspect that makes it an anathema to social policymakers. Hillman shows that Classical writers were well aware of the risks posed by psychoactive stuff; they warned against the power it had to distort personality and breed contempt for traditional lines of authority, particularly, as I’ve noted, in that hidebound patriarchy from which our own descends, in the hands of women.

Contempt for authority would be a fine consequence, in my view. But while a temporary subversion of authority may have been a laudable consequence, the anything-goes surge of psychoactive drug use in the ‘60s also left a lot of individual casualties strung out (so to speak) along the way. The salient word is individual. As long as the whole subject is confined to individual choice, we’re on the wrong track, just as with, say, health care, or organic food. If legalization is only about an individual’s “right” to an expanded menu of pleasures, well, ancient Rome already provides a fairly negative example of what that would look like.

At the same time, much as today’s spiritual questers, Burning Man trippers, ayahuasca tourists, and so forth may be hoping to trigger some new transformative wave of enlightenment that will wash over us all simultaneously as we align with the galactic center in 2012 (or whatever)—messianic, culturally-decontextualized attempts to jump-start our continued evolution, whether with drugs or machines, conveniently attempting to skip over the mess of social inequality, endemic violence and environmental collapse we’ve so far created could just as easily be elements of some junked up dystopia, an even more schizoid reality in which most people’s experience would still be the phenomenon of living inside somebody else’s nightmare. Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of religion who participated in Timothy Leary’s Harvard experiments with LSD, has written compellingly of the potential of psychoactive drugs to provide transcendental insights, even calling them entheogens, god-producing substances. But he also felt that the U.S. psychedelic movement was not mature enough to create a truly functional social alternative out of the possibilities of psychoactive substances. Without discipline and a sense of overriding obligation to some sort of collectively defined, sustainable way of life, its insights were not transferable.

So maybe we’re not worthy of anything better than what we’ve got, yet. Where psychoactive drugs seem to have been employed most usefully and with the fewest negative side effects is in small, low-tech societies where there is a high level of mutual trust built up over generations of co-habitation, aided by highly disciplined guides whose mission is to support the community, strengthening its web of relationships and showing how those relationships extend to the natural world. As a society we’re currently about as far from that as it’s possible to be. After all, we can’t even use tobacco correctly; it was a salubrious ceremonial substance for untold generations until we got hold of it, and turned it into a mass killer. But it’s conceivable that changing material conditions generated by the glaring contradictions in our current system will encourage at least some of us to move in a more communitarian direction simply in order to survive. And psychoactive drugs could be useful in catalyzing that process—why not? They’ve already been so for thousands of years.

Other reasons for ending the drug war a.s.a.p. are still compelling enough, and even absent an effective social reform movement, the economic forces no one really controls anymore may finally do it in. I hope that regardless of how it happens, our Manichean war will someday be seen simply as another of those quintessentially reactionary futilities that were once endemic to materially powerful institutions and societies: like attempts to stop the sun from rising by holding your hands in front of your eyes. Because without somehow disseminating expanded consciousness (along with the material basics for a decent life) more widely through our species, it’s difficult to see how we’ll avoid getting trapped in our own 4-D labyrinth, whose walls of unintended consequences just seem to get higher faster all the time now. The only way to neutralize the imprisoning power of a labyrinth is to be able to see it from above.

I was enthusiastic about working on this event because for some years I have found myself unable to muster any sense, other than an intellectual sense, that the organizing going on around me had any connection to my own life, to its rhythms and routines, which remained weirdly but happily untouched by the wars, strife, oppression, environmental collapse, destruction of the public sector, and so on that have accompanied this whole historical period of capital triumphant in this society where its triumph was most absolute, right down to our collective consciousness.

It’s funny: bohemians have always been thought of as an edge class, starving in garrets, harassed by cops and so forth, but as a debt-free, non-addictive, childless, already down-scaled bohemian in a highly resourced city with rent control, I discovered the ironic luxury of being able to maintain a considerable level of stability and distance from the cataclysms that were crucifying the American working class and decimating the American middle class, whose core values of consumption and security as identity, which were used to hog-tie them so effectively, were never mine to begin with.

But of course that’s also largely because my back was never up against America’s deadly wall of bigotry based on color, class or sexual orientation… Ah, yes, the “chains of privilege,” a young white anarchist I met once remarked, with a kind of knowing condescension, when I neither proudly nor remorsefully described this scenario to her. As if she had escaped those “chains” merely by reading Derek Jensen. Yeah, well, whatever. I prefer to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: we are all in the net, but some of us are looking for the scissors…I don’t romanticize either relative privilege or the lack of it in this society. If the struggle wasn’t always for personal survival, it was, universally, about the meaning of living in the world.

Enter the arts. If there is one thing that redeems the highly compromised American experience for me, it is the fact that there continues to be fervid artistic expression here, at the grassroots: you can kill your TV and never listen to commercial radio, never read the bestseller list or go to any show that costs over $20 and you will still find it everywhere, in cities, suburbs and small towns, from bar bands to street theater, slam poets to storytellers, alley murals to raves and free festivals and much of it is more heartfelt than good, but a lot of it is really good. Or something or someone always emerges out of it that is really good.

And if that someone or something doesn’t get too sadly huge and self-parodying and then implode because of that gaseous mind-fuck that is American super-stardom (I’m sorry, but it’s impossible not to reference the death of Michael Jackson here) then it all serves to keep soul-death at bay. Not for the privileged who can’t necessarily buy freedom from soul-death even with box seats at the Met and record-setting auction buys at Christie’s, but for the hundred-fifty million plus Americans whose collective net worth is now worth less than the richest 400, and whose collective soul-death you might have long expected from the starvation diet that commercial mass culture gives them, but who still persist, when they experience it, in being touched and thrilled and awakened and moved by song, dance, image and word, happening live and in front of them. Which is precisely why, one thinks, art is so vilified and ghettoized and attacked as immoral by the relentless guardians of the status quo, and those millions are constantly slipped the mickey of high-gloss, soul-dead, remote-controlled entertainment instead, because art awakens people, because it enables them to see themselves differently when they experience it, and even more when they make it. And that’s when the uncomfortable questions can begin.

So, our optimistically titled Jobs for Artists! event attracted a good crowd even without any of the local media outlets, alternative or otherwise, plugging it, in fact many of those present seemed to have found out about it through my artist friend’s Facebook page; welcome to Organizing 2.0. We heard from Gray Brechin that over 8 million people were employed by the WPA at its height, and even though it only lasted seven years it left behind infrastructure, architecture and public art that were an expression of a belief that there is actually such a thing as a common good, a belief that in a country where manufactured polarization and hate-your-neighbor is what sells the most air time, seems increasingly hard to hold. We heard from Arlene Goldbard about a new manifesto calling for national “cultural recovery” and how to get it, being drafted by some of the arts activists who made it inside the White House doors in May. And we heard some gently nuanced head-scratching and bemusement from Jeff Chang about a generation at the crossroads, a generation of political latch key kids entirely abandoned by 30 years of Reaganomics and pushed to the corners by racism that had still managed to emerge as some sort of new American mainstream. Now what? Many of its members were entering their forties and might be reaching a point where they needed some kind of guidance from the past to show them how not to fall into the chasm that the future is opening before them. Even as they got a symbolic tip of the hat from the administration that is officiously trying to paper over that chasm with IOUs while still refusing to touch even the fretwork on the fundamental structures that created it. They’d been welcomed in, then told, in so many words: yes, well, we’re a little bit trapped by the chains of privilege here, so prove to us that you can bring some sort of movement to bear on (insert social issue here), and we’ll see what we can do…maybe…

We were moved by these speakers’ knowledge and insight to contemplate organizing a whole series of events locally to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the WPA next year, as a way to knit the past to the future and say: look, what up, if we’re talking about not just recovery but actually trying to turn this into a sustainable society BITL (before it’s too late), then artists at the community level are already playing a role in that process as fundamental as solar panel installers, transit planners and urban farmers. As fundamental as the schools in which many more of them would be working if the schools weren’t being starved to death. If enough people had the wisdom to see this when the country was on its knees, and in the teeth of exactly the same cobra-like animosity we get from today’s America First-ers, the neo-con punditry, maybe, well, maybe, if we push for it, we could too…

But the real revelation of the evening came during the Q&A at the end, when a man stood up and denounced these intelligent and passionate speakers as, in some not-too-subtle way, deluded sell-outs or actually dangerous for not using their time to vituperate the Obama Administration as the enemy. As if they had been wholly duped by the siren song of that supremely devious administration instead of taking a hard look at where any and every possible doorway for social progress might be right now and trying to figure out how to put a foot in it. Because their talks didn’t follow the correct line and thrust the flag of our oppression in our faces, they were therefore useless, possibly even pernicious.

He was an exemplar of the old (well, aging) sectarian left that still believes, in the absence of any supporting evidence, that you revolutionize people by standing up in a room and lecturing them in a way that implies just how ignorant you think they are and then urging the people whose intelligence you have insulted to leap up and take to the streets with you.

But beyond making me aware once again how our Bay Area niche shelters the politically marginal like limpets in a shrinking tide pool, his exercise in futility was the source of an unexpected revelation. When he chided the presenters for being “a-historical” (because they didn’t think they were living in 1933 or 1968 perhaps?) and lamented the “lack of support in the unions for the arts” and I thought about the last US manufacturing jobs flowing south and/or drying up altogether as the most recent consequence of capitalism’s periodic passing out the Kool-Aid, and the fact that 90% of US private sector workers under 40 will have had no experience of unionization in their lives anyway, and a super-majority will not have had it even in their parents’ lives, I realized that I was in the presence of something ghostly, fading, and unlikely ever to return in force to this country.

That something was not left radicalism, or social revolution, or mass organizations, or mass movements. Or even, theoretically at least, trade unions. It was the industrial model of organizing, which arose out of the industrial model of work, and was passing into history with it. Marx, that starry-eyed dreamer, thought that the very fact that workers were being thrown together in enormous numbers on the factory floors of Europe would give those workers a sense of themselves as a class and of their common interests as such—bringing them to full self-awareness and in fact, revolutionizing them. And left organizers have consciously or unconsciously hewed to that paradigm ever since. But Marx, the prescient and hard-eyed economist, also saw that capitalism survived its self-generated crises by constantly revolutionizing the means of production. What he didn’t anticipate, perhaps, was the degree to which the technological revolution which reduced the number of workers needed in any given operation would also revolutionize the mobility of capital. And the combination of those two factors, or what we’ve been calling corporate globalization for the last decade or so, enabled the second process to far outstrip the first. The factory floors dwindled and scattered around the globe, while imperial wars, bread and circuses were deployed effectively (with Europe perhaps focusing more on bread, the US on circuses) to defray class consciousness and social revolution in the global north and west, and starve it out in the south and east.

But now, in the final coup, the industrial model of mass production already on the ropes here has been revealed to be generative of a possible global ecocide, and not a place we can afford to go back to anyway. Whether the product is cars or cows, it is poisoning the bodies of both producers and consumers and denuding our planet of its vital resources. And in fact, another offshoot of industrialism, the industrial model of education, has worked largely to keep us uninformed, uninspired, and uncritical: that is, to poison our spirits as well. And yet the left, even the non-sectarian left, has internalized this obsolescent industrial model and kept on applying a factory-floor analysis to social conditions and articulating an assembly line view of what human beings are, generating diminishing returns and emptying rooms in droves as history spun out from under it.

Enter the arts again. What struck me most about the brief upsurge of mass organizing in the US that first took on globalization itself, beginning in Seattle, was the amount of creative expression that accompanied it. It was as if the medieval carnival, which the Russian critic Bakhtin identified as the wellspring of democratic and participatory culture, had melded with the march, the sit-in and the lock-down, as if somebody was finally trying to say: look, this is not just part of what we want, but of what we are. Not bread and circuses, but bread and roses. But what was even more inspiring was the realization that the conscious carnival was not just a kind of elite fin de siècle phosphorescence that cropped up at these ultimately quixotic but still necessary mass mobilizations. It was actually going on all the time, far below the myopic radar of the mass media or of much of the left itself. Beyond the intermittent demonstration, in the every day life of the street, public art, or community art, was at work in every corner of the country making our creative abilities collective and expressly putting them at the service of society.

This is by no means to imply that art itself was organizing people to struggle, or transforming society. Even revolutionary art movements do not a revolution make. The Surrealists and Dadaists found that out in the early 20th century, when in spite of all the wonderful paradigm-shifting that was going on in the arts, Europe went and annihilated a whole generation in a bloody bankers’ war. Others have been finding it out ever since; Chuck D already knows it and The Coup will figure it out sooner or later. We learned when the first decade of the 21st century launched a jet-propelled version of the Crusades that it’s not enough to put big puppets in protest marches. We actually have to start thinking of ourselves, collectively, in different ways. But (with a nod to Marx again) we will really only be able to do that in a profound and sustained way when our material conditions demand it. And that time may be coming, but evidently it is not yet.

What the arts can do, meantime, is give us ways to think about ourselves that aren’t based on internalizing some machine-model of human society or psychology. For example, human creativity has infiltrated modern communications technology, developed to spy and make war, and turned it into something like a natural structure called a rhizome, an underground root system through which chemical information is transmitted even over extensive distance, and life is sustained. And this is quite useful. But even more fundamentally, art can still happen if every system crashes, every plug is pulled, every ideology fails us and mass society shrinks to ten people around a fire. It doesn’t need technology, it just needs human beings.

Art is not really a hammer to shape reality, as Brecht declared. But neither is it a mirror, a glossy, dead, reflective surface. It’s a portal, by walking through it you find that it functions simultaneously to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. Like the natural systems we are barely literate in anymore, and desperately need to rediscover, its real purpose is to reduce entropy and waste, and to continually generate possibility. It’s more than a pretty but superfluous outgrowth of our evolution; if we are to continue to evolve, it will be our most crucial partner in that process. It will have to fulfill an ecological role, infiltrating all the mechanisms that are failing us now: commerce, science, politics, education—to turn them back into living things.

Thus what inspires me about cultural activism and some forms of green activism today is that, from their starting points in the arts and ecology, they envision ways of thinking about what human beings are and what our fundamental needs are that don’t rely on industrial paradigms. Global awareness is growing that these paradigms are racing on to our general destruction, even as we have tried and failed, since Marx, to use their own tenets to oppose their consequences in oppression and war.

It’s early days to know whether ecological and creative models of organizing will actually arise en masse out of the detritus of industrial society and rescue Marx’s dream from its rusty shackles, but the disorderly ferment that occurs at the local level (where all politics starts and finishes) when we start looking for ways to build creative, participatory and ecological economies is way more promising than the death-struggles of America’s mega-unions, as they eviscerate one another in pathetic turf battles like polar bears on a melting ice berg and continue to stuff cash into the pockets of the millionaire politicians who cluck their tongues and then, like the overpaid call girls they are, waltz off into the night with their big business patrons’ arms wrapped around their waists. Or than the non-profit corporation (that about says it all) left for that matter, just as much a machine model, trussed to the apron strings of private foundations and beginning to discover, since the financial crisis began, just how expendable it is to them. Both are mechanisms that in the era of globalization have proven successful only at organizing people to fight each other over crumbs, in a creepy battle royal. Neither currently offers us a way forward through collective consciousness-raising (remember when we used to use that term?), that is, through developing an integral understanding of our nature as creative, social and ecological beings.

The late Carol Tarlen, a San Francisco poet, organizer and clerical worker, expressed with a poet’s vision and concision the essence of the existential problem when she wrote a poem for Korean garment worker Jean Toer-Il, who immolated himself to protest working conditions:

   His clothes soak gasoline
   his face sweats gasoline
   his hair shines gasoline
   he flicks the lighter
   flames surge up his arms and back
   illuminate the dark alley
   of his labor.
   we are not machines he cries
   fire consumes his flesh
   we are not metal he screams […]

   I am flames
   I am not a machine
   I am not a machine
   I am spirit
   I am light
   I am love

We need these understandings, these expressions, that can take us in a lived instant from the deepest obscurity into the brightest illumination, we need them to infuse everything we do. How fortunate for us they continue to be out there, all around us every day.

Less well-remembered now, but no less worthy of mention in this company, was Terry Southern.¹ Southern was and is primarily known as a satirist, I suppose, but that’s like saying the guys who designed the atom bomb were “just” mechanics. He wrote both satirical and non-satirical pieces in a variety of genres: journalism, novels, short stories, screenplays, reviews, and precocious, unclassifiable mélanges of fact and fiction.

Probably the best-known work attached to his name is Dr. Strangelove, the classic Cold War farce-majeur of nuclear annihilation. Director Stanley Kubrick is Strangelove’s originating genius, of course, but Southern collaborated with him on its unforgettable screenplay. The extent of his contribution is apparently still contentious, and this may be an indication of why his career path led him to greater obscurity than many of his peers. The movies have been a cruel medium for many writers, and Southern’s later writing was almost entirely in collaborations on screenplays.

But if you read any of his prose, you’ll see that his particular sensibility, highly involved with depicting the clownishness and deadly “preversity” (his preferred rendering of this term) of the powerful is there throughout the film. You can bet that signature dialogue from each of its indelible cast of characters, and possibly their monikers themselves, from General Buck Turgidson to Colonel “Bat” Guano (“If indeed that is your name,” as Peter Sellers’ Captain Mandrake remarks tellingly during a crucial exchange) come from Southern. And personally I would hazard that General Ripper’s obsession with Russian infiltration of “our precious bodily fluids” through the monstrous Commie plot of fluoridation, which initiates the whole chain of events that ends in Armageddon, is a Southern contribution as well. And thus many equally brilliant touches in one of the world’s great satirical works, in any medium, of any age or land.

Another Southern collaboration, with Mason Hoffenberg, produced the novel Candy, in which Voltaire’s iconic innocent Candide is reconceived as a dim but preternaturally sexy small town girl who travels far (and wide) and finds her ultimate happiness in a very preverse manner. On his own, Terry Southern is perhaps best known for the novel The Magic Christian, a less transcendent but intermittently brilliant lampoon of human greed. Both of these stories became not-so-great movies, their wild imaginativeness stunted by a medium that Southern may have had too much confidence in, after experiencing it at its best with Kubrick. Later interviews with him indicate that he saw the medium to which he’d hitched his fortunes with a very jaded eye.

That’s why you need to read the stories. Southern’s short stories, both satirical and “serious,” are distinguished by prose mastery, subtlety and a truly mind-blowing range of genre and subject matter, possibly unique in U.S. fiction, from the magic realism avant la lettre of a Texas dirt farmer battling a mythical sea-monster in his melon patch, through the minutely examined lives of tragically hip expatriates in Paris, and insider views of the French working class, to the anomie and casual sadism of disaffected young boys. Whether the boys in these stories are in south Texas (where Southern grew up) or New York City, the dialogue is always pitch perfect and the milieu is coolly exact.

Most of his best stories were collected in the superb 1967 anthology Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, along with some classic pieces of New Journalism, such as “Twirling at Ole Miss,” from 1962, which Tom Wolfe considered foundational to the genre. Here Southern reports on a baton-twirling convention at the eponymous deep South university, full of creamy white pubescent girls in drill team fetish attire, at the height of the dogs-and-firehoses period of the Civil Rights movement. His voice is deadpan and his eye for the telling detail is dead on. There is an exemplary moment in his visit to the college library, when he opens a first edition copy of William Faulkner’s Light in August and finds it raggedly inscribed with “Nigger-Lover” on the title page.

Southern’s most creative period was spent toiling in what he dubbed the “Quality Lit Game,” the smug and self-serving world of New York magazine publishing. This world can only be barely imagined by most of us today, not because it’s gotten any less smug and self-serving, but because it’s so diminished in cultural power. But through those then-ascendant, smoke-filled Madison Avenue corridors Southern rambled in a drug-enhanced state of ribald bemusement. He gives us inside looks in completely crazy-ass pieces like “Blood of a Wig,” whose fantastical sequence of events still grounds itself in a kind of realism with fly-on-the-wall boardroom dialogue, in the form of editors who say things like “let’s stroke this one for awhile and see if we get any jism out of it.”

Southern, somewhat like his contemporary Lenny Bruce, was fascinated with our night-selves, the unexpurgated utterers of all that language that narrow-minded ideologues of all stripes tend to fear and despise. This marks him as a spirit impossibly out of synch with our times, but quintessential in his own. The stuff he dredged up out of the mid-20th century psyche has all seen the light of day many times over now; concupiscence among the powerful and repressed no longer has the power to shock most of us. Incest, necrophilia, coprophagy, whatever: it’s a commonplace of 24-7 news feeds. And yet, in some way because the times demanded it, Terry Southern made his own uniquely delicious froth out of it all, that’s still tasty today. And still radical, even if it doesn’t shock. (The two qualities are often confused.) Why? Because he forces us to permit ourselves to imagine anything, and his wild and generous humor shows us what a pleasurable act such imagining can be.

Southern’s fecund sexual fantasies are always so over the top as to be self-satirizing—which this feminist critic at least would say is quite an apt way of looking at bourgeois male heterosexuality. For a slightly different take on gender relations, there is his gleefully mock-outraged letter to Ms. Magazine in the posthumous collection edited by his son Nile, Now Dig This! (which contains a whole section dedicated to Terry’s spoof complaint letters). He admonishes the editors that if women wish to be taken seriously as full citizens in modern society, they will have to stop acting like “rutting [...] wildcat[s],” during sex: “moaning, sobbing, writhing, scratching, biting,” and so forth (Southern’s italicized list of shocking female copulatory behaviors is much longer). There is an unusual generosity of spirit here—often lacking in satirists from Jonathan Swift onward—that is the antithesis of misogyny or misanthropy.

I haven’t even begun to talk about his boundless love of drugs. You’ll have to experience that for yourself; suffice it to say that avid consumer doesn’t do justice to it, and that Southern’s reality is always somehow like a drug experience, even when no drugs are involved. Now Dig This! contains a hilarious transcript of a conversation with Burroughs, as he and Southern go through a bag of pharmaceutical samples Terry has acquired in a mostly futile quest for the real thing. Terry’s exclamation-pointed enthusiasm for the trial and error method of drug testing is dryly riposted by the world-weary Burrows. It’s an overlooked classic of drug literature. Southern paid for that exuberance with his health of course, in later life, as everybody does. How drearily real.

So why am I invoking Terry Southern now, when he’s been gone for almost 15 years? Because even in another landmark period for the triumph of folly, I’ve found no other writer in any medium who can generate the deep, hard, hearty and (still) surprised laughter at quintessential Amur-rican absurdity that Southern can, and who is able to do so precisely because of his mastery of the written word. Almost regrettably for those of us who savor the power of words alone to move and enlighten, Southern was not a lit snob: he moved into film and basically left fiction behind because he saw the cinema’s potential to tell the stories he wanted to tell in a powerful way. And so we have Dr. Strangelove, thank God. And of lesser brilliance but still worthy: The Loved One, Barbarella, Easy Rider and The Magic Christian. He even took a stab at writing for Saturday Night Live, but it was way too tame, by the early ‘80s, when it was largely considered to have gone seriously bad anyway. He would have had to survive into the era of cable, perhaps, to find a home in TV writing.

And even so, I don’t think so. Southern lived until 1995 but produced almost nothing of note from the early 1970s onward. The times had changed, you see. The historical moment from and to which he spoke most eloquently, when “All Power to the Imagination” was not an empty slogan, was utterly gone. (His unforgettable piece “Groovin’ in Chi” about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, suggests that that hope-slaughtering horror show may have been precisely when and where it died.) While our lives have continued to be coldly revolutionized in the technological sense, far too much human failure, particularly of the social imagination, has intervened since that statement was made for it to resonate in the same way with us now.

While some may think the U.S. has become more a more open, more culturally sophisticated society since Terry Southern’s time, I have my doubts. Rather we often seem to me like weird masochists choosing to keep ourselves in cultural lockdown, breathlessly mouthing the words “individual freedom” and “creative potential” and “no limits” and what-not, while our corporatist system, looking metaphorically like the gruesome self-caricature of the late-period Mae West dressed in red-white-and-blue burlesque house lamé, gleefully and unstintingly whacks us with its Naugahyde cat-o-nine tails. Oh, Freedom™.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t fresh and marvelous (and funny) stuff bubbling out there today amid all the homeland insecurity, or that there won’t continue to be. Reports of our cultural death tends to be greatly exaggerated. At the same time, factors too numerous to list here—everything from demographics (an aging U.S.) to global economics (an impoverished U.S.) and the exhaustion of natural resources (ditto)—all of which affect the production of culture in ways we ignore at our peril—bode against another upwelling of creative energies in the U.S. with the transformative power and scope of Southern’s time in the foreseeable future.

So now in this metaphorical late winter light, as we wait for some chance of another spring, let’s raise a joint or a syringe or a glass or a spoon and toast Terry Southern. Reading his best work gives you the pleasure of believing again, however fleetingly, that anything is possible and everything is permitted.

1. A host of other Southerniana is available here.

The rest of the details, when I learned them, raised a queasy, less certain complex of feeling. Kirsten Brydum was shot in the upper 9th ward, apparently while riding her bike through the ward after leaving a dance club, sometime after 2 am. She was from suburban southern California, she had never been to New Orleans, had arrived only days before, on a road trip, the point of which was to look for “collective autonomy…strangers helping strangers for free,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. As I read about the circumstances of her death, I began to feel any sense of the “real” Kirsten, whom I did not know in any case, slipping away into the realm of metaphor, a metaphor of what the shiny, youthful idealism of people from comfortable backgrounds is up against when it makes contact with people and places that have also become iconic: as the products of malign, genocidal neglect by a system interested only in the protection of privilege.

Some would say that where murder is involved, such symbolizing does no justice to victim or perpetrator. In a legalistic sense, none of this metaphorical stuff matters. That is true, under “our” current system of law—a criminal case rests on the behavior of individuals and a determination of their actions. Nor is it necessarily helpful on the psychological level of trying to comprehend and grieve a real person’s violent death. But that doesn’t mean that events involving individuals don’t simultaneously take place on a social and political plane where they can become highly symbolic. How we understand what such events mean determines what political actions we will ultimately take or support. New Orleans had already entered the symbolic realm as of August, 2005, when the drowned city became an example to the bizarre haters on the Christian right of God’s efficacy at ethnic cleansing. (I haven’t heard what the word from the pulpit has been on the more recent divinely-inspired destruction in Dubya’s home state—His ways are indeed a mystery…) The upper 9th ward, the addled mind of the mainstream news consumer tries to remember: isn’t that where “those people” (now an acceptable, even mild euphemism at Republican campaign rallies) ran amuck when the city broke down, looting and shooting?

But these were not the only symbols in the mix in Katrina’s wake. The left had its analysis, which I’ve summarized above, environmentalists of any political stripe saw Katrina’s New Orleans hit as a menacing sign that Nature would be up at bat again before long: last in the lineup at the bottom of the ninth. Only environmental justice activists, long accustomed to making the connections others ignored, between race, poverty, politics and the environment, saw Katrina as merely the largest event so far demonstrating the link they’d been desperately trying to disseminate for decades, in one locality after another, reviled by business interests and ignored by mainstream environmentalism.

What Kirsten might have represented to me is less familiar to most people, at least those who live outside the Bay Area, or a small number of progressive hotspots clustered in or near university towns or coastal cities.

Because while small towns in Red States disappear like buffalo on the frontier, becoming nothing but two-block main streets of dingy ghost shops with gigantic Wal-marts attached to their outermost unincorporated parts like engorged ticks, while prison populations explode and livelihoods dwindle in the heartland and even many coastal cities as well, leaving economic Nagasakis overhung with despair, the San Francisco Bay Area has been and remains a place, like Oz, where a luminescent green glow of optimism hangs in the air. It persists in being a kind of hot bed of utopian ideas, silly and serious, straight and queer: street pageantry and performance, secularism, post-capitalism abundance, sexual freedom, direct democracy, pagan earth-worship, permaculture, local self-reliance, recycling and freecycling, urban gardening and gleaning, green entrepreneurship, bicycling, muralism, you name it. But when, particularly in the boutique-y San Francisco epicenter, you look at the rents, and the people who can afford them, and (to the symbolically minded) the astounding number of large, pretty, well-groomed dogs on display on the streets, who are treated almost like beneficent house deities and so are in better shape than many if not most of the children in the city’s southeastern neighborhoods (with access to better health care) and simultaneously somehow exempted by many progressives from prevailing concerns of environmental sustainability, veganism/vegetarianism or even animal rights (to me, San Francisco’s legions of pampered dogs are creepily reminiscent of Roman love-slaves, but let’s not get into that), it is hard to escape the suspicion that the cheerful promotion of many of these ideas in this so-pretty city by so-pretty young (mostly) white people is part of an enormous and still largely unheeded and misunderstood disconnect between the most under-resourced parts of the country, and its most highly (not to say over-) resourced. This doesn’t mean many of these utopianist ideas aren’t powerful, feasible, or useful. It doesn’t mean some of them, particularly the most rational ones, have no resonance or validity in marginalized communities. They are already being championed there, and have been for some time — but it’s easy to see why a fresh fruit and vegetable van in a low-income neighborhood gets a lot less attention and support than the Slow Food Festival. The city gets kudos for hosting a Green Cities summit, while handing over development of a toxic former Naval base to a corporate developer whom the mostly working class residents have fought against for years, knowing that neither full clean up of what the Navy left behind nor affordable housing stock for those who have lived with the contamination for decades is likely to be the result. So how green are we?

But stepping outside of Oz for a minute — a lot of youthful idealism has been unleashed by the Presidential campaign, not all of it among the privileged. The Onion’s recent barb about Obama capturing the Joe Cabernet –Sauvignon vote is irresistibly true of course, as a non-statistical tally of the window signs in San Francisco’s million dollar homes attests, but I’m willing to venture that the 1.3 million new voters ACORN has registered nationwide are not primarily well-fed oenophiles. The idealistic refrain one hears again and again is that, regardless of what happens in the election, these people are not just going to “go away,” as in, to demobilize afterwards. Really? What will keep them together? Under what structure will they be mobilized? The Democratic Party? Please. And for what ends? Sorry to harsh your mellow, but . . . I’ve heard this before: the “Teamsters and Turtles” (labor and environmentalists) coalition from the Seattle WTO protests, those apolitical everybodies who swelled to massive the ranks of those marching against the Iraq invasion — where are they now? Are progressives a nation of Charlie Browns, doomed to keep kicking at this football forever, only to end up on our backs every time, the face of the system looming over us, madly grinning?

My own most fundamental experiences with idealism, organizing and social movements have a somewhat exotic frame of reference: the Central American insurgencies of the 1980s. I went to Central America as a young, abstractly idealistic person from a relatively privileged background because I answered a call to do so; it was thought useful in those years for some of us to hold our little blue eagle-embossed passports up as shields between Central American progressive organizers and the guns that hard-working U.S. Americans were buying to shoot them with. The degree of usefulness of our presence was debatable at every step of the way, and of course it was full of the contradictions of our status. But whatever the larger usefulness or not of direct solidarity, I did manage to learn a thing or two about idealism that is grounded in actual struggles for survival instead of stemming from the pleasant state of abstraction that privilege makes possible. Not to mention learning in very concrete ways about how to survive in “life during wartime,” no longer just a Talking Heads song (though surprisingly, that song gets a lot of the details right. I always wondered how they knew).

Idealism wasn’t injected into the Central American guerrilla insurgencies, or the civilian movement that supported them. (This “radical” struggle had begun with students and farmers calling for mild, Roosevelt-like reforms to a feudal economy). It stemmed from them, from the sheer ability to survive collectively, and even, in a strange way, to thrive, against a seemingly implacable enemy. Yes, young college educated folks went into the mountains with rifles, but the idealism that drove them was translated in concrete ways to the people who joined them: though many died, their survival rate was better than thousands of others who trusted the system these idealistic kids opposed. Not only that, but their lives were actually enhanced in many ways: through the discovery of dignity, self-worth, mutual aid. For as long as this was true (and of course it was not universally true, just generally true), the idealism survived, and a positive feedback loop was created between ideals and actions. That feedback loop is hard to find in the U.S., where collective identity is weak and bread and circuses have always been more widely available — but not because only something as drastic as a guerrilla war can generate it. Wherever the connection between enhanced survival and transformative ideals becomes explicit and concrete, through whatever form of struggle, say, the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s, that loop is created. Where transformative ideals are just a haut-cuisine part of the available menu of consumption, they are inert; “transformative” becomes a non-sequitur.

The day Kirsten Brydum was shot in New Orleans, my husband and I were standing in a crowd that may well have contained people who knew her. We were watching another addition to San Francisco’s remarkable collection of murals unveiled in Noe Valley, celebrating the local, organic farmer’s market there. Noe Valley, which borders the Mission, is a world — or at least a continent — away racially and economically. It’s been called a suburb of Silicon Valley; the tech firms run their own shuttles from there. But the residents were mostly busy pushing strollers or eating brunch, and the parking lot site was filled with pretty bohemians, all falling into one another’s arms with those gentle, smiling, extended embraces that create a somehow incongruous sense of exclusion. A well-known local activist, one of the main organizers of the Seattle WTO protests, presented a lively puppet show featuring a rousing battle between evil corporate GMO crops and intrepid family-farmed organics. In it there was a brief but eloquent plea to help the hungry here in our own city who couldn’t afford the high prices that family farmers have to charge for their labor intensive product, by supporting people growing their own food in empty lots, the kind of thing my farm stand friend is trying to do. But most of the crowd was distracted, chatting away with cocktail party zeal — there was no sense of urgency in this pleasant moment among them. An old, ragged man with a twisted back pushed a shopping cart full of plastic bottles around the space, eying the eco-conscious audience for possible throw-aways. This had been billed as a “utopian” moment by the organizers, but I wasn’t feeling it. “Yes,” my husband remarked, “when privilege disappears, things will look very different.” (He has never abandoned the Marxism of his youth, perhaps that’s why he can say “when.”)

This is the question the sad death of a young idealist forced upon me: can a truly worthwhile idealism stem from enclaves of relative social and economic privilege? Maybe, but somehow it has to be transformed along the way into the concrete actions of people aware of their privilege and consciously intent on betraying it. In any case, a transformative idealism can flourish outside the economic cushion that privilege provides, but only so long as it is seen by those who suffer the worst systemic abuses as directly connected to their enhanced survival. The test of that shiny idealism that people like Kirsten have wanted to carry out from its bases in coastal California to the world at large, is, firstly, does it work as a part of a closed system that enhances the survival of those who most need it, and secondly, does it understand the world enough to survive out there — for the long, long haul?

One afternoon the New Yorker came. I wasn’t sure why it arrived on my doorstep, as I couldn’t remember ordering it, but I was glad to get it. I was longing for something which would engage my attention without meaning that I had to get out of bed. My extreme lethargy was appalling to me, but it literally made me sick to move about much, or even to think about moving.

As I lay in bed and leafed through the magazine, which in and out of my intellectual life had been some sort of benchmark for it for at least two decades, I was very conscious, suddenly, of entering a world that I remembered as once seeming wide and seamless as the world itself, and that I now found, in all its staid presumption, to be highly circumscribed and narrowly defined. It had almost nothing to do with what I had come to perceive as the truth of my own experience. The New Yorker, I realized, was not a magazine so much as the distillation of a very particular culture.

This in and of itself was no major revelation. But my feelings about it were contradictory and somehow related to the nature of what ailed me then, and ails me still, if not physically then psychologically, even spiritually.

What astounded me was the complete fantasy at the core of the New Yorker worldview, the unshakeable assumption of the fundamental truth of an illusion. And also, how attractive this enclosed world was to me, because it was a known quantity. It was unquestionably the world of the old “liberal elite.” Its mythology, secular humanism, is one I grew up steeped in and surrounded by. Its believers suggest, without ever overtly boasting, that within its boundaries lie all that is reasonable, elegant, insightful and just, i.e., all that is truly real. Accordingly, the impoverishment, cruelty, isolation and rage that I see grimacing out of so many exhausted faces on every street, are not the defining parameters of our society. They are not the real world.

The real world, according to the New Yorker, is the world of concepts, the struggle of the soul of man to express itself in art, or commerce—or one of the boundary worlds between the two, like fashion or cinema–or politics or science or some field of endeavor. It is a quiet, sunlit world of cottages on the Long Island shore and travel in Europe (look at the ads). It is peopled at the center by comfortable educated persons ensconced in the Western tradition but firmly believing they are possessed of open, enquiring minds. Though it prides itself on skepticism and inquiry, this mindset retains a number of unspoken preconceptions: totalitarianism (i.e. what used to be the ruling system in the former Soviet Union) is evil by nature; western civilization is flawed but basically good; other cultures are generally primitive or strange, but often have aspects of grandeur and mystery which serve primarily to enrich “our” culture and understanding. Personal income is not relevant to an individual’s ability to perform, unless it is excessively large or small. Political or socially engaged art is de facto inferior art. Class, as an institutional, structural, economic and political fundament of society does not exist, at least in this country, and is of fairly minor relevance even in more overtly stratified societies. The U.S. government functions as mediator among a variety of conflicting interests, not a mere servant of the interests of a powerful elite. Or it did when “we” were running it. Whenever that was.

I could pull an article or review out of any issue of the New Yorker at random and find examples of one or more of these ideas in it. I remember that the particular issue I received that afternoon was rich with them. I first read a long, glowing article on the life and work of James Merrill, a great American poet recently dead. I knew little of his work, and yet several poems of his encountered serendipitously have stayed with me as lovely evocations, in shimmering, opalescent language, of a particular moment or truth. As a man, he seems to have embodied the ideals of the liberal elite, to have been an example of all that it sees as noble, vibrant and great in itself. He was the son of Charles Merrill, one of the founders of Merrill Lynch (now, of course, in this moment of roosting chickens, as defunct as the Soviet Union). His family was phenomenally wealthy, but he himself was apparently not obsessed with money, though he did not reject it either. He and his male lover lived for many years in a cottage on the Long Island shore and on a hilltop in Greece; he was generous and witty and loyal to his friends and produced some of America’s best poetry. It was not once mentioned, in this long, comprehensive piece, whether James Merrill ever held a job.

I felt a great sense of longing when I read about his life, for, freed from the constraints of livelihood which continually oppress so many talented people, he dedicated himself to his art and excelled at it, and he seems not to have been perverse or cruel or tormented or isolated (stereotypical artistic “types”) but warm and happy and human. He embodied that liberal argument which says: “money is really irrelevant; it’s what’s inside that counts.” Ironically, his life was actually proof that the only circumstance in which money is truly irrelevant is when one is privileged to have enough of it (and not to want more than enough). The point is not that art cannot be created out of poverty–historically, far more art, even great art, I would venture to say, has been created by poor artists than by wealthy ones. The real point, in my view, is that James Merrill got by accident of birth what all human souls ought to have by right. His inherited affluence gave him freedom from physical hardship, from having to sell his labor for another’s benefit, freedom to live his life in pursuit of his dreams, loves and, in his case, deep insights about human nature and life itself. Not everyone has his talent. But I cannot see that creative excellence, or any particular strength of character, should be offered to justify the fact that his freedom and comfort is humanity’s exception, not its rule.

There were other representative articles in the issue: a weak defense of affirmative action (the classic liberal “it’s not great but it’s better than the alternative” argument), and a film review complaining predictably about an entertainment which weakened itself, in the reviewer’s view, by trying to convey some kind of social message.

The most striking thing about the whole experience of reading the New Yorker that day was my extreme sense of cognitive dissonance. The tolerant, liberal, economically privileged social group which even now continues, in the teeth of the last decade of reaction, to promote its views in these glossy, colorful mouthpieces as central, firmly established and omnipresent is, according to my knowledge of this society and several others, not only marginal and irrelevant to most of the beings on the planet, but actually under threat of extinction here in the U.S., the Obama campaign notwithstanding. The creepy shotgun marriage between Christian and market fundamentalisms that has been in our faces for the last eight years is so mired in its own mind-boggling contradictions right now that if U.S. liberalism—including its specious race-blindness—were not also so thoroughly and understandably discredited and on the ropes, for reasons Thomas Frank, among others, has had the insight to explain to us, the polls would be running 80%-20% in Obama’s favor.

The society we live in now is openly fragmented into economically stratified classes and dozens, if not hundreds, of culturally distinct groups that utterly distrust one another, with some good reason. These groupings have few shared interests or passions (“…how ‘bout those Red Sox?”) Our social dividedness goes still deeper, because economic classes do not unite across cultural lines, nor cultures across lines of class. The middle class where all our vaunted melting was supposed to happen has been shrinking every year for at least the last ten. Thus all illusion vanishes of an educated, sophisticated and tolerant liberal bastion being some sort of societal center of gravity.

With it, in my case, vanishes my upbringing and most of the traditions and precepts in which I was educated, in those soon-to-be-hazily remembered boom years of the 20th century. Since maturity I have lived in parts of the world where most people live as most people do everywhere, that is, bound nearly hand and foot by the political, economic and ethnic circumstances of their birth. I have seen that the true norm for the majority of the planet’s human inhabitants is not spaciousness, physical comfort and quiet ratiocination, but vibrant and desperate daily struggles with the severe, imposed limitations of their lives. My cognitive center has long vanished, that world of soi-disant reason, beauty, knowledge of human frailty but faith in human progress. It now seems a quaint, fading Victorian place, out of one of the costume dramas that are such a popular component of the bland PBS programming favored by old-style liberals. (Actually, except for their lack of local fashion and gossip, public television and radio could be seen as some kind of audiovisual equivalent of the New Yorker.)

I realized back then that my liberal birth culture had become inadequate to the times we were entering, and have been living in since. It did not provide sufficient strength for me to function, much less accomplish in the world, once its falsely optimistic unities were gone. It did not supply the conceptual tools I needed to survive outside its shrinking boundaries, in the vicious glare of the rapidly-collapsing but determined-to-take you-with-it-when-it-goes New World Order.

I’m not the first to say that liberalism’s fundamental conceptual flaw is its pretentious dismissal of class-based socio-economic analysis. Such analysis, liberalism implies, lacks any relevance to matters of the human spirit. Historically it has only produced the theoretical basis for totalitarianism. The liberal view, by refusing in this way to accept any explanation for oppression beyond flaws in the individual human character, is no match for the easy vicious demagoguery that has fueled reaction. In fact it plays right into it: the only reason for terrorism, for example, becomes the existence of evil people called terrorists, and evil people need no rights, no justification, no context. Nor does liberalism offer any balm to the spirit wounded and trapped in the enormous machineries of power. In our time, as this machinery, utterly unfettered, demands ever more resources to maintain, throwing more lives into dislocation and suffering, liberalism’s analysis is so inadequate that the situation is a fun-house mirror version of the end of socialism in Orwell’s Animal Farm: on the most fundamental issues of the day, you can look from “liberal” candidate to “conservative” candidate and find it impossible to tell which is which.

The voice of class-based analysis is one still perceived in the liberal mindset to be too shrill, too didactic, too “divisive” for the symposium of rational discourse. Certain passions are allowed to inspire meaningful action and thought in the liberal worldview; anger is not one of them. Yet a deep, abiding anger at injustice does inform much class analysis. This anger is tolerantly seen as misguided and counterproductive by liberal rationalism. This is another reason why old-style liberalism is so completely out of step with and inadequate to the times. If there is one thing characteristic of public discourse in the U.S. today, from politicians to call-in shows to “real life” television, it is anger. It is rage that rankles and simmers and explodes, and much of it is anger at injustices real or perceived. Denying this anger any real, systemic reason for existing is a serious failing of any conceptual system. In the face of verbal and physical terrorism by populist reactionaries, as in the face of radical social upheaval among marginalized groups, the liberal response is to bleat for some sort of institutional mediation, as if class warfare could be mitigated by a combination of legislation, policing and therapy. (Outside the U.S., class war is of course to be waged with troops in arms, but not in the “angry” way those right-wingers do it.)

Tarring all anger as destructive and misinformed is simply wrongheaded. It is as misguided as it would be to stigmatize all desire, all pain. These emotions carry truth, and can be creative, transformational forces, if the person who feels them has an understanding of her society’s fundamental mechanisms and her relation to them.

I have been reflecting as I look back on those rainy days in bed with the New Yorker that perhaps my unidentifiable nausea was more than just a strain of super-flu. For weeks I lay huddled under blankets in a damp, cold, disintegrating tenement, paid for during my unemployment by a companion who was never there because he was working three separate ill-paying jobs. Without the deus ex machina of a lottery win, we had little hope of ever being able to improve our economic situation beyond subsistence. I felt eerily dissociated from the society that surrounded me. I felt as if my power to shape my own destiny were being sapped, drawn from me in direct proportion to my increasing alienation. All I could hear around me was the generalized mutterings of unfocused and barely suppressed rage, as the privileged continued to raise the already impossible ante in their loaded game against the poor, and the poor fought and howled at and destroyed one another in their despair. Now, so many years later, even with market fundamentalism’s program in an utter shambles, no election contest between two equally discredited liberalisms, old-style and neo- seems likely to change that scenario.

As I put the New Yorker aside that day, it seemed bizarre to me that so much effort and money were expended to maintain so foundationless and irrelevant a world. But to this moment it remains a very necessary illusion to those (increasingly) privileged (and increasingly) few who can afford to maintain it. In that vast sphere outside its orderly little gated square, where most of life actually happens for most people, inchoate and incalculable struggles rage.

Dick Cheney: So?

Webster Tarpley used to be a La Rouchie. I have to admit that’s not really grounds for credibility in my book. He has since distanced himself from the bizarre political cult that is La Rouchism, only to become one of the primary voices among 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Another reason for caution, perhaps—although his book on the subject: 9/11, Synthetic Terror Made in the USA, received high praise from at least one serious reviewer. Be all that as it may, on March 19th, while a few hundred people were disrupting traffic in the streets of San Francisco in order to protest five years of US aggression in Iraq, I was listening to him talk about the evils of monetarism on the local Pacifica radio station. This is one of Tarpley’s big subjects, and it turns out that he is no more fringe-y in his economic analysis or his economic prescriptions than a garden-variety Roosevelt Democrat (which I suppose, in this day and age in America is like saying he is a Bolshevik or a child molester or something).

As I listened to his detailed analysis of the financial crisis, many pieces of the frantically fractured contemporary scene seemed to click softly into place. I got the sense of a system that some years ago had already begun—erratically, almost lazily, and still imperceptibly to many—to spin out of control. In 1999, around the time the departing Clinton administration tore down the wall between commercial and investment banking that had stood since the Great Depression, Tarpley wrote about the symptoms of economic collapse as a result of monetary policy and uncontrolled speculation, and how to identify the sequential stages of a coming US collapse and its consequences. His stages have since begun unfolding before our eyes. I’m not an economist; I wield metaphors, not statistics. To me, what he was saying was, if you take the brakes off a car and floor the gas pedal, sooner or later you’re going to crash.

Tarpley’s 1999 book was entitled Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Through the Worst Financial Crash in History. His sixth chapter was on Collapse, his seventh on Disintegration. The cheery title of his radio talk on the 19th was “Beyond Collapse to Disintegration: Surviving the Coming Depression.” Apparently he still thinks we’re proceeding on schedule. Tarpley was also sounding a note of historic caution; he went into great detail about the parallels between Weimar Germany and the present day U.S.—if we get hyperinflation, or a crash of the dollar, which the Fed’s desperately pouring money into the system could cause, as they well know, we can start looking at those pictures of impoverished Germans in the 1920s trying to buy eggs with wheelbarrows full of cash and say to ourselves: how could we be so stupid as to let this happen to us? Once you clear the gassy, seductive fog produced by speculative bubbles, two things really matter in terms of economic stability under capitalism: that your society actually produces a sufficient number of things to buy and sell, and that a critical mass of people owns land/property from which it cannot easily be dispossessed. Well, no one who hasn’t been living in cable-TV induced stupor for the last 15 years can miss that we make almost nothing anymore, and now we’re losing our homes too. One in ten U. S. homeowners now owes more on their property than it is worth in the current market.

As I watched the Feds come galloping in to rescue Wall Street’s burning house this week, with their fire hoses sloshing 30 billion dollars of our money on the charred heap of Bear Stearns, and then listened to Tarpley, I couldn’t help remembering a scene in Dumb and Dumber (don’t ask me why I saw that movie, but it’s truly a touchstone for me now) where Jim Carrey says brightly to Jeff Daniels: “Well, we’re in a hole now, and we’re just going to have DIG ourselves OUT of it!”

And then, of course, there’s this endless state of war. The really disturbing parallel with 20th century Germany for Tarpley is that even though economically we are Weimar, we already have our Hitler in office: his name is Dick Cheney, and he wants us to go to war with Iran. Cheney is nowhere near as popular as Hitler was in 1939, when he urged his generals to invade Poland, and may even have arranged a provocative event to justify the decision once they agreed to do so. But Cheney is no less powerful for all that, no less determined, and for the same reasons: ideology and (voodoo) economics. And now time is really short: only 10 months to go. Like Hitler, in a conversation Tarpley cites from William Shirer’s book on the Third Reich, Cheney knows that the U.S. could soon be too poor and too embroiled in expanding economic unrest to maintain the degree of military might it still possesses. And the banking sector, which keeps grasping for ground and finding that the quicksand is already everywhere, is ripe for uncontrolled panic, from which, as Tarpley says, “the leap forward into war has often come as a relief.” The only heartening news in Tarpley’s worsening-case scenario comes from inside the military itself, which knows better than anyone how overstretched it already is. A desperate struggle is being waged behind the wall of silence that the military brass maintains with the public, and it has to be the main, if not the only, reason we have not already begun bombing Iran.

Because what I listened to and watched these past few days also gave me the sense of an opposition movement that has been utterly outstripped by events. In the San Francisco streets, cops outnumbered demonstrators in every protest. Almost everybody hates the war, but the amount of vitriol being poured out on various media comments pages, from the San Francisco Chronicle to You Tube, against the very notion of protest itself is at least a circumstance to be reckoned with. It is Cheney’s contempt writ large. What else seems to be on the verge of collapse, in our public culture at least, is empathy: we spend so little face-time with our fellow citizens that we are ever-more inclined to lash out at shadow-culprits or Judas-goats online, from the comfortable darkness of anonymity. We’re all strangers to one another in the virtual polity, even to many of the people we euphemistically call “friends.”

Pointless. Useless. Pitiful display of retro-posturing by wannabe-activist-hipster types who parade around and PRETEND they are doing something. “Look at us we’re maarrcchhiinnggg…weeee!!”. POSERS!! GO TO WASHINGTON AND MARCH! These people are doing nothing but “preaching to the choir” and tying up SF traffic. What a pathetic mess…

This comment was typical of a large percentage of what I “listened” to online that day—although it was far from universal. Perhaps because many more conservative places throughout the country held protests or vigils, the dismissal of protest as mere acting out by a privileged and self-indulgent subculture was not as deafening as I have seen it here in the past.

But how about where the rubber hits the Silk Road? At the Winter Soldier hearings in the D.C. area over the weekend, Iraq and Afghanistan vets testified passionately, eloquently and insightfully about what empire does to human lives: the lives of those who prosecute it, and the lives of those who are in its way. In an historical repeat of the 1971 Vietnam-focused original, there was no corporate media coverage of their words or images. This was, if nothing else, a tremendous chance for empathy missed. On a local radio talk show on the 19th, unrelated to the hearings, a Bay Area vet who had been homeless after he was discharged and now works for Swords to Ploughshares finally came out and said, in a tired but determined voice, what millions of cowed consumers of the relentless barrage of Big Lies apparently still need to be told: “You don’t have to support the war to support the troops.”

On the 19th in the afternoon, I went out to San Francisco State University, where I had heard students were planning to rally against the war. Fees have gone up almost 100% in the past five years. New fee hikes and cuts in programs are looming—throughout California social services are on the chopping block. Unemployment is up. Working class students are obvious cannon fodder. The connections couldn’t be clearer.

Yet there was no rally. A few dispirited looking organizers stood around the student union plaza. Someone seemed to have forgotten the crucial step of organizing for this action. Instead, as on any other day, hundreds of students milled along the paths, heads crooked into their cellphones, skateboarders (some also on cellphones) wove with eyes glazed through the crowds. I couldn’t help thinking: with all these communications devices getting in the way, how do we reach one another anymore? And I remembered the wife of another soldier on that radio talk show saying how grateful she was for the miracle of modern technology, because now she could talk to her husband in Iraq almost every day by satellite phone. As she described what it was like to watch their child take its first steps without him there, the bandage-on-a-gaping-wound syndrome was painfully obvious. Yet she was determined to look on the bright side. Meet the new, improved opiate of the masses: communications technology.

Ironically, I reflected, the only political group that has had a visible, persistent presence on the SFSU campus in the three years I’ve been pursuing a graduate degree there has been Lyndon La Rouche’s.

I knew that the SFSU students were not terminally apathetic or incapable of being mobilized. Hundreds showed up recently for a national teach-in on global warming. But even though I think anti-protest comments like the one I quoted above are missing the point, there still seems to be a gap you could fit a battalion in between public protest and actual organizing against the war, and the people that I know in activist circles don’t know what to do about it any more than I do, because they are mostly part of a professional sector that has little connection with the public beyond the base they’ve built to support the particular set of issues or concerns of the non-profit or union they work for. Iraq Veterans Against the War may have recognized this disconnect when it asked that mass demonstrations not be called in Washington during the Winter Soldier hearings, although if the idea was that media attention would be distracted, well, that proved to be moot. But IVAW seemed undeterred by the absence of corporate media, probably because they are engaged in the slow, un-dramatic, day-to-day process of organizing the unorganized, “at the point of production” as the Marxists would say, that is, among the most critical sector of the public for effectively challenging militarism: the active duty military.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my activist friends; I honor their dedication and their willingness to act on their beliefs, to time and time again be some kind of lightning rod for public opinion, and if they don’t feel the crippling isolation I feel from the unorganized majority, if they don’t think that public anti-war rallies and civil disobedience actions, because they are disconnected from organizing efforts outside the activist sector, have tended to devolve into a tired, professionalized and easily marginalized theatrics, then I stand corrected. But this year, for the first time in many years, instead of joining them in the streets, I decided to stay home in the shadowlands of America and just listen.

What else did I did hear this week? The Obama speech on race in America, which seemed nuanced, intelligent, cautious, highly ethical, reasonable, and in no way earth-shattering. The result? He plummets in the polls. What quote comes to mind there? Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat in All the President’s Men: “They didn’t want to run against Muskie; look what happened to Muskie. They wanted to run against McGovern; look who they’re running against.” You can hear the wheels turning in the party strategists’ brains: if McCain runs against Clinton, the Clinton haters who might have sat it out will show up, the progressives who might have held their noses once again and voted for Obama, and the new voters, will drop out, and McCain will win. He’s already beating both of them in national polls anyway… Any takers? And then: remember “Ba-ba-ba, ba-bomb Iran?” Cheney wins again.

Tarpley sees collapse now unfolding, a hair’s breadth away from unleashing more militarism, and even the shadow of martial law, the end game of end games. I distrust apocalyptic collapse scenarios (as I’ve already written in Dissident Voice) as much as I distrust conspiratorial hypotheses that allow no room for human creativity, altruism, conscience and critical awareness to play a role in shaping history. But Cheney will not allow himself to be deterred, as he told us on Meet the Press over the weekend, particularly if the spreading economic pain begins to lap at the shores of his rich friends’ islands. And so my personal choice after listening around these past few days was, belatedly, to do something concrete to support the troops who oppose the occupation or who want to come home ASAP or get out or talk others out of going in. Having lived inside the activist bubble for years, I’m as isolated from the military as anyone. But when it comes down to it, if I could find some way to do so, I’d even support some of their commanders, the ones who aren’t power-mad or corrupt or craven, and are right now the thin green line standing between us and the Persian Abyss (because I think we know it’s no longer just a Gulf, friends). Not to mention martial law.

Tarpley finished his talk by citing the additions to the Bill of Rights which he said Roosevelt had wanted to insert into the Constitution: the right to health care, education through college, housing, dignified work. Nationalize the Federal Reserve now, said Tarpley. All that seems fairly quaint, for the moment, in spite of the fact that even the mainstream media has acknowledged a “crisis” in every single one of those areas. But things could—no, will—change, are changing. Will the Depression hit for real, and if so, what then? Will it be Weimar or the Waltons? Russia or Argentina? Stay tuned. And in the meantime, support the troops…

You can’t think your way to right action. You can only act your way to right thinking.

– AA proverb

Vine Deloria, Jr. died in 2005, leaving behind as eloquent and comprehensive a critique Western society and culture as anything else I’ve read or am likely to read. Taken together, works like Custer Died For Your Sins, We Talk, You Listen, God is Red, and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties were not just catalogues of historical wrongs, but indictments of an entire civilization and, most importantly, the fundamental modes of thought that have provided ballast for its centuries of conquest and exploitation. His writings and talks were also, happily, full of wit and humor, and a real engagement with the particularities of the Western (his term) mind. Deloria was fascinated by the Western scholarly tradition, and sought tirelessly within it for thinkers who truly represented alternatives to the mindset that had unleashed ecocide and genocide on the American continent.

Deloria’s holistic view of the catastrophic effects of Western expansion led him to critique Western religion and Western science (in both its “hard” and social formulations). The 1999 collection of essays called Spirit and Reason, a selection of writings from the abovementioned works and others, contains exemplary work in this regard. Deloria went unhesitatingly out on some shaky theoretical limbs, supporting outsider-thinkers like Immanuel Velikovsky, whose ideas of catastrophic cosmological interventions into human history have been pretty much discredited by scientific and historical research. But his real goal was to attack the creation of scholarly consensus itself, and he bemusedly cited his own experiences in academia and publishing as indicative of just how supine to the demands of power the manufacturers of such consensus can be. (It’s a coincidence but not a surprise to be writing this as I am listening to the news of Ward Churchill’s firing by the University of Colorado.)

In the midst of the Kansas-centered culture wars, Deloria published Evolution, Creationism and Other Myths, which cursed the houses of both Darwinians and Dominionists. For someone like me, deeply committed to the idea of evolution as nature’s ultimate expression of purpose, some of this is hard going, especially his dismissal of someone as genial, intelligent and humane as the late Stephen Jay Gould. (I’m happy to report I found their books coexisting quite peacefully on the library shelf, with only a slender Matthew Fox volume between them). But here again, Deloria was after a bigger idea: that both the materialistic explanations of science and the teleological historicism of Judaeo-Christianity leave no room for a sacred, respectful, and wholly encompassing relationship of humans to the rest of nature, because both deny that the natural world is wholly alive and sentient.

The only difference in thinking that makes a difference where nature is concerned is the difference between humility and arrogance. Deloria makes it clear that both Western science and Western religion are hopelessly permeated with hubris. Much as I would like to believe that science teaches us the vastness of our ignorance and the scientific method gives us rigor to keep us real, I have only to look at the basic presumption of experimental research: that the world and any element of it can be treated without further protocol as a corpse to be dissected, as matter to be manipulated, to see where it all goes wrong for Deloria. Only some ecologists have come close, thousands of years after the First Nations discovered “sustainability,” to a similar understanding of the real complexity of natural systems, of their living, intelligent nature and of the posture of humility we ought to assume towards them. But they are the minority report. As Deloria points out, wherever science begins to hold hands with the mysticism that a sense of awe produces, it quickly gets jerked back into place by the constraints of its own method. Unless, I would add, that mysticism is marketable, like the “physics” of personal transformation. In which case it bubbles along in its own channel, producing weird but wildly lucrative froth like What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret. And of course the desire for personal power over material reality is absolutely the opposite of real humility and awe. But it’s predictable, given how desperately powerless even the relatively privileged and relentlessly individualized beneficiaries of Western civilization know they are, in their heart of hearts.

Religion is a more passionate and vital subject for Deloria, because for him it means something quite different from the individualistic power fantasies of both New Agers and fundamentalists (with their personal relationship to Jesus), or the abstract and hypocritical proscriptions of mainstream Christianity. Time Magazine appears to have deemed Deloria one of the “11 most important religious thinkers” of the 20th century. (Such are the discontents of these media-generated “best of” categories; I keep wondering who edged him out of the top ten). Deloria’s insistence on the centrality of religion is a challenge to anyone like me who tends to feels that religion is superstition used as a form of social control — period. But the more you read, the more you understand how distant the doctrinal harangues of Western religion are from the set of fundamental relationships he describes as the “moral universe.” His religion is the awareness of inter-dependence at every level of reality and the discovery of purpose and intelligence throughout. Humans are important, but they are also neophytes in the scheme of creation, and need to spend most of their time on earth learning from other life forms how to be. The ultimate goal of any individual is to understand and practice right relationship to all things, which Deloria simply calls maturity.

Unfortunately for me, this enticing vision can’t simply be appropriated by meaning-deficient non-Indians. Deloria explains more clearly than anyone I’ve ever heard why Native American religion doesn’t “work” when avid white acolytes try to pick it up: because it is entirely based in the concrete conditions of kinship, place and collective experience. There are no scriptures to codify it, no set of general precepts that can simply be adopted by any person, no matter how conscientious or how willing, who does not share those formative conditions. And, in his view, any well-paid shaman who tells you otherwise is lying.

The wonderful portability of Western thought paradigms, like ethical codes, for example, was precisely because of their level of abstraction from specific context. They could exist and be considered “true” in a myriad of settings because they were not inextricably bound to actual forms of social organization or to a geographical place, unlike the truths of Deloria’s religion. But this also means that the collective behavior of a society could bear little or no resemblance to its code of ethics. This capacity for abstraction (which is not the same, in my view, as true complex thought) allows us to straddle the most absurd contradictions, like the co-existence of perpetual warfare with “thou shalt not kill.” Not to mention logical contradictions, of course. Deloria might have gotten a bitter chuckle out of a recent poll that showed that a slight majority of Americans actually believe in both creationism and evolution.

What all this suggests to me is that, as a collective phenomenon, Western civilization will never be able to use its conceptualizing ability to make itself sustainable in practice, to correct its fundamental wrongs — that is, to think itself to right action. The Marxist project was the most comprehensive attempt in history to use an intelligent, rational foundation to produce a complete alteration of social norms. And look what we did with that. The other great pillars of Western modernity fared no better: as everyone knows, Einstein’s new understanding of the unity of the cosmos was used to fulfill our civilization’s bloody endgame fantasies by creating the atomic bomb; Freud’s revolutionary dissection of personality unleashed the PR industry, the marketing machine, and the infinite regression of therapeutically-enabled individual self-absorption. Bring it right up to our moment, if you will, and look at James Lovelock, whose Gaia hypothesis was noted, although skeptically, by Deloria as a possible sign of a more promising direction in Western thought. Lovelock hasn’t even waited for society to pervert his idea; the potential decline of Western civilization due to the effects of global warming has him so fraught, that his answer is the unbridled expansion of nuclear power (something that nature’s skirt-shaking is already giving them reason to rethink in Japan). The terrifying, just now-beginning-to-dawn realization of the post-Enlightenment is that reason appears to have produced the same number of monsters as the sleep of reason. And because they are technologically enhanced monsters, they are a lot more destructive too.

At the same time, Deloria’s work offers a powerful caveat to what I would call the “Get Out Gang,” social critics like Derrick Jensen, Chellis Glendinning and John Zerzan, who urge that the conscientious among us simply abandon the whole doomed and bloody mess of Western civilization. Deloria’s argument that fundamental understandings are determined by kinship, place and collective experience can help us understand why the Get Out Gang’s prescription, however intellectually attractive to many with a radical perspective, is un-followable.

Like Native American experience, our historical experience as Westerns is collective and formative. And the formative conditions are all around us every day in globalized society: there is no “away” to run to. Chellis Glendinning’s metaphor of “recovery” from Western civilization is particularly specious. She wants us to stop denying that we have been repeatedly raped and abused by our serial killer parent civilization and stop hurting ourselves by associating with it. But this, again, is the old hopeless fallacy (of the West, in fact) that prescriptions which may work for the individual can somehow be applied to situations that are determinatively collective, and still be valid. The problem with framing the issue thus is that you have to somehow get your mind out and leave your body behind, because Western civilization is the total material (not to mention most of the cognitive) environment in which you find yourself. Every single daily slap of my shod feet on pavement emerges from and feeds back into a whole conceptual universe, whether I like it or not. And any mind/body separation puts you right back in abstraction. If you accept Glendinning’s metaphor as literally true, it leaves you with the unbearable horror that you have finally realized just how sick and evil your abusive Dad is, but you can never actually get out of his house. This makes your emotional life something like a politicized version of the girl’s in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I think this is exactly the conscious bind many political radicals find themselves in, and it is utterly psychically unsustainable. It produces an intolerably heightened level of alienation, as if good old every day alienation wasn’t bad enough.

The problem is that no substantive change in our total cultural ecology will be created by individuals instructing us to “Think Different,” whether they are visionary social activists or creative consultants at cynical marketing firms. In fact, the irony of a powerful info-tech corporation choosing that slogan and papering the walls of our cities with gargantuan images of titans of 20th century history is a galling, if fleeting, example of the cultural hall of mirrors in which we find ourselves. I’ll give another example: an alienated cultural critic is walking back to her apartment in a comfortable neighborhood in one of the richest cities in the world, listening on an iPod to the Ugandan singer Geoffrey Oryema (from an album on the Sony label) give a chilling rendition of a superb Talking Heads song called “Listening Wind,” (originally from an album on the Warner Brothers label) about a terrorist in an unnamed country dreaming of driving away the Americans destroying his culture. So tell me, even given the critic’s unquestionably raised consciousness (and that of the musicians), where is the “out” in this scenario? How many levels of irony, that very Western acknowledgment of the distance between abstract ideals and concrete reality, does one have to pass through to get to any authentic revolutionary impulse or action in it, since the capitalist delivery system inserts itself at every stage of the way? At the very least, it’s not so simple as just thinking different.

Then what good is thinking, in our context? Well, on an individual level, contrary to AA’s point of view, the quote I began with is actually quite false. An individual can use her cognitive powers to influence and alter her actions, and successful therapeutic strategies attest to this. Thoughtful individuals, at the very least, tend to do less harm to themselves or others than thoughtless ones. I am absolutely pro-thinking, on an individual basis; “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and all that. But at least in this forum, we can probably all agree that the human species as a species cannot be rescued from itself by individual action, no matter how visionary, conscientious or compassionate. Collectively, societies have either acted with humility and maturity towards their natural environment, or they have acted with rapaciousness and unremitting violence. In both cases, they ensured the actions that had proven “successful” would be replicated by codifying them in a set of beliefs, which fed back to promote further such actions, and so on. Material conditions created behaviors, which led to bodies of thought, once we were capable of creating them, which promoted behaviors — and that feedback loop is what we call civilization. And we are wholly creations of ours, regardless of our desire to be otherwise.

Of course, the first person to rip apart such a materialistic interpretation of the relationship of collective beliefs to collective action over time (that is, human history) would be Vine Deloria himself. Deloria’s thinking emerged from a culture that sees human history as organically related to the divine, which is omnipresent in nature. He berated and cursed secularism (my only religion), and as I noted, took no joy in the so-called advances of Western science. But he would likely have agreed that the collective behavior of globalized Western society won’t change fundamentally as the result of any idea set, because it forces all ideas to participate in the vicious circle in which collective behaviors that are violent, extractive, and hierarchical continue because they generate power and profit, and these behaviors are at best accommodated, at worst rationalized and reinforced, by abstract beliefs. (Do the words “Live Earth Concerts” suggest anything to you here?)

And still New Agers go on using magical thinking to invent a mass transformation of human consciousness that is just around the corner, cornucopians dream of technological fixes, the Get Out Gang tells us to save seeds, monkey-wrench the corporate pillagers and “build community,” which however concrete they sound, are complete abstractions to most people, utterly out of context for a global society in which so many are still fighting tenaciously for the last spaces in the steerage compartment of the departing Titanic.

But Vine Deloria was different. He had an existing alternative with an historical track record to promote. The survival of Native American lifeways was not just a question of some abstract (i.e. Western) notion of justice to him. It went beyond identification with “minority rights,” or “civil rights,” both of which he critiqued as concepts hopelessly enmeshed in the hypocrisy of Western ethical codes that were once again compromised by the abstract nature of Western thought paradigms. Its importance was, rather, in the possibility that humanity could learn from itself how to survive, but only if the people who knew how were permitted to continue to exist. And they would only continue to exist if they were able to transmit belief systems that were inseparable from collective action, from social behavior, and had been proven sustainable by nature herself, if ten thousand years of inhabitation is any evidence. His last book, The Way We Used to Live, unflinchingly addressed the diminished acceptance of those belief systems among tribal people themselves, by presenting an archive of examples of Native American religious experience. He hoped to provide a kind of textbook that could be used to reignite awareness of the religious way as a fundamental survival strategy, as well as, in his view, the most advanced thinking humankind has produced. This is a matter that ought to be of the gravest concern to all of us who think that Western civilization’s clever cat may already have regenerated for the ninth and last time.

But even the continued existence of these particular belief systems, an open question, does not mean they would necessarily become the dominant paradigm for a suitably chastened global society. Rather, our actual material circumstances will (and are already beginning to) compel us to change in some way, but it is still by no means a given that we will therefore ultimately adapt ourselves to a path that bears any resemblance to the best practices of the plains Indians or the Navajo or the Iroquois. Nor should it, if we accept Deloria’s admonition that the truth of a people always has to come out of its own particular experience. Our path is still directed at every turn by the walls of the labyrinth that seven thousand years of extractive, accumulative and techno-centric civilization have constructed, on every possible landscape, including the landscape of our minds. If nature gets us to listen to her soon enough, because she speaks so loudly we can no longer ignore her, then it’s possible we may also hear the voices of Deloria’s elders clearly, for the first time. If we can be taught true humility by our collective experience, then those walls may come down before we as a species do. In the mean time, Vine Deloria, Jr. left anyone who wants to start listening now a lot of words worth hearing.