The last time I’d heard about a coordinated cultural event like this was when there were over a thousand productions of Lysistrata, an anti-war satire by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, taking place across the US and around the world on a single night—in March 2003, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq. Such events are hopeful in themselves: they invoke something primal and positive, the power of certain narratives, illuminated by the imagination, to persist and unite us in something other than hatred, clannishness and war—in fact, their opposite–across enormous swaths of time and space. They are a form of resistance, because they represent the survival of things most power structures would rather we be without: intelligence, consciousness, dignity.

The Facebook page for the much smaller rolling flash mob of ICHH readings (there were apparently about twenty-five across the US) has comments on the surprising relevance that many who attended them discovered in the seventy-five year old play. I was at the reading organized in San Francisco by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, one of the country’s oldest self-described political theater companies, itself founded just over fifty years ago.

It gave me pause the next day to realize that as a small group of us sat in the Mime Troupe’s darkened rehearsal space in the Mission District, across the bay in Oakland, police from eighteen different local law enforcement agencies (yes, you may well ask why there are that many to begin with, much less why they were all were involved) must have been mapping out a pre-dawn assault on the Occupy Oakland camp that would end up being one of the most violent in the nation so far. Hearing the Mime Troupe read Lewis’ play gave me lots of food for thought, but most of it was in the form of questions on just exactly what kind of relevance we’re talking about—or not—right now.

It Can’t Happen Here was modeled on the dispatches about Hitler’s rise that Lewis’ wife Dorothy Thompson, a prominent journalist, filed from Europe in the early 1930s. Its setting is mostly a fictitious small town in northern Vermont. The time period for the action is described, tellingly, as: “very soon, or never.” The title is obviously ironic.

While Euro-fascism is the frame, Lewis’s Buzz Windrip, the good ol’ boy in ICHH who rides his “Corporative” Party to power, is based largely on Louisiana governor and US Senator Huey Long, with a dose of the aw-shucks cornball humor of popular radio comedian Will Rogers thrown in. Long was actually (certainly by today’s standards) a left-wing populist, who frequently attacked the Roosevelt administration for not going far enough to restrain the greed of banks and redistribute wealth. He had a tendency to long oratory and fiery rhetoric. He did build a formidable political machine that eventually allowed him to control most of the political and economic deal-making in his state. In 1935 he was assassinated on the steps of the Louisiana state house, as he was preparing to launch a presidential run to challenge Roosevelt the following year.

ICHH, like a lot of Sinclair Lewis’ work, is steeped in his disgust at anti-intellectualism and the ease with which great numbers of what he perceived as the US’s unsophisticated and socially isolated people—Lewis called them “the booboisie”—can be swayed by rhetoric that appeals to their prejudices and base instincts, like opportunism and fear.

And in many portrayals, he did get something about that patented all-American blank stare of utter ignorance and simultaneous infinite self-importance dead-on correct. It’s a toxic combination that never seems to die in our culture, where publicly, these days, it seems mainly endemic in the political right. There are some comments from clueless characters in ICHH about how the youth of today (once again, this is the 1930s) don’t really want to work, have had everything given to them, don’t know how to do anything for themselves and are just a bunch of lazy whiners… and you can hear Rush Limbaugh bellowing to his ditto-heads as he tries to dismiss the growing numbers of Occupy-ers in just that way. One of the play’s worst villains is Shad Ledue, a brutal, lumpen goon. Interestingly, he is the only member of the lower classes among its main characters, and he is mainly characterized by resentment and envy of the well-meaning middle class characters who have patronized him, on whom he revenges himself as he rises in Windrip’s ranks.

But these bitter portrayals of a certain kind of US lowest common denominator stop short of any real understanding of the economics that underlie the culture, the skeleton under the skin. Like most of the liberal intelligentsia right down to today, Lewis mostly faulted personality types, not material conditions, for the evils that men do. It’s not that personal psychology is irrelevant, by any means (and it sure is dramatic, too), but if you’re going to take on political subjects, you have to realize that character defects alone do not explain why wars are fought, or millions of people lose their homes or jobs, or crucially, where and when and why dictators take power.

Rather than much of ICHH itself, it’s the social context of the 1930s that may be most relevant to the 2010s: a time of financial collapse, fear, unemployment, scapegoating, dislocation, and severe ecological stress. There is a lot of history that seems to be repeating itself these days, a sure sign that we have not learned its lessons. But history follows neither a straight line nor a circular path, maybe something more like a spiral, so that when certain phenomena reappear, they always reappear in a context that has changed, and those phenomena are, in turn, altered by their time and place.

What isn’t like the 1930s? The US is no longer an isolated, fortress republic, but deeply enmeshed in a global financial system in hyper-drive that is whipping not just its people but most of the world around like a rabbit in the mouth of a wild dog. And it now also has a hugely expanded global military presence to maintain, and a series of resource wars that aren’t serving as middle class-building public works programs with high moral objectives, like Roosevelt’s war, but only as venal and vicious corporate welfare boondoggles offering the deadly job of cannon fodder to the poor. It’s now 75 years since the Works Progress Administration put 8.5 million Americans directly to work (almost 13,000 of them in the Federal Theater Project) and there’s no sign of the possibility of anything like that in a political system that’s marked by a crawling servitude to private money in both major political parties, and has even granted corporations the legal status of persons in just about every significant respect (except serving time for crimes, apparently).

I started to think that many of Lewis’ stalking horses have already gone galloping out the barn door, since the beginning of the Reagan revolution at least. And so what we have is a situation where the kind of totalitarianism he feared now actually seems superfluous. Power and wealth have continued to concentrate in ever fewer hands, the spectrum of discourse to be narrowed, and dissenters to be functionally silenced by marginalization, without the need for formally suspending the constitution, disbanding parliament and declaring anyone president for life to make it so. “It” hasn’t happened here, because something else did: a kind of stealth coup, carried out over decades.

In fact, most people really didn’t seem to know why their lives were so out of their own control until recently, when the little Toto of the Occupy protests began to pull back a curtain and show how the men at the levers of the spin machine were wildly pulling them to blow smoke and bellow, while their promises and their threats were equally empty, because the real problem is not drugs, terrorists, immigrants, or homosexuality, and the real solution isn’t either of those bizarrely entwined American fantasies, the Free Market or Jesus. And who’s wielding the power is not a dictator, not any single person, benign or malign, but a percentage: the 1% who control more than 40% of the nation’s wealth, and have basically succeeded in rigging its political system to preserve and increase that share, at the expense of the rest of the population and the natural world. Sinclair Lewis may have imagined tyranny; he never foresaw oligarchy.

After the reading, my husband and I talked with R.G. Davis, who founded the Mime Troupe in 1961, and left it in 1970. It was something of a surprise to see him there: he has long been critical of what he considers the Mime Troupe’s loss of political acuity, and also its reliance on formulaic melodrama to produce its annual message plays, both of which unfortunately put it in tune with Lewis’s work here. Davis thought the only way ICHH could be considered relevant to what’s happening in the US right now is if you radically altered it in a way that would basically undermine both the play’s structure and its ideology. He talked about the “creative misreadings” that can sometimes produce a new interpretation that’s fertile in a different context and a completely different way than was intended by the author. Apparently the French students who carried out their own version of an Occupy movement in May 1968 had read Mao in such a creative way—so maybe anything is possible.

On the way home from the reading, we drove past an enormous police sting at the Valencia Gardens housing project: a whole block filled with squad cars, lights flashing, officers surrounding a group of black and brown young men on the steps of the complex, that looks for all the world like a minimum security prison. The next day, after an Iraq vet at Occupy was hospitalized with a cracked skull from a police projectile, and tear gas filled the streets of Oakland, the Washington Post had a picture of a cop petting a cute stray cat in the ruins of the Occupy Oakland camp. In other words, business as usual in 21st century America. “It” happens every day.

Subtitle: Histories of Radicalism
Editor: Dan Berger
Subject: American Studies
Paper: ISBN: 978-0-8135-4874-6
Pages: 302 pages
Publication Date: October 2010

But this classifying impulse can impose a kind of false historical memory syndrome and render obscure important events that demonstrate the persistence of trends and tendencies outside the boundaries that convenience imposes. There is an emerging scholarly idea of the “long sixties:” a period of heightened progressive (and radical) activism in the US that really began with the post-war struggle for civil rights and lasted well beyond 1968 or ‘69.

The Hidden 1970s (Rutgers University Press, 2010) is a collection of rigorously documented but engaging and accessible articles that aims to chart the continuance of radical organizations and movement activities in the US in a decade that has elsewhere been seen as a period of renewed complacency, political conformity and solipsism. The period limned here looks very different from Tom Wolfe’s facile “Me Decade.” Written by a mixture of long-time community activists, independent scholars and university professors, these studies add needed nuance and a corrective vividness to 20th century histories of the US left. At the same time, all the included writings have been produced within the last few years, that is, at least thirty years since the period of the events they describe (and thirty years of essentially unremitting political reaction in addition). Thus there is an inevitable air of twilight that hangs about them: The phenomenon we call “the sixties” may have lasted beyond 1969, but in the following decade it appears to have had its swan song.

Editor Dan Berger has selected fourteen articles grouped in three sections that identify the dominant characteristic of the radical movements and moments they describe, which he calls Insurgency, Solidarity, and Community. Collectively, the focus is on movements that persisted and even grew in radicalism (if not in expanded capacity to instigate the radical social transformation they sought) in the wake of the New Left. Feminist, LGBT, Native American, Puerto Rican, Chicano, and African American struggles are detailed, as are examples of pacifist and working class white radicalism. Berger’s classification helps break with traditional schema that simply follow and reinforce the fracturing of progressive movements into entities of so-called “identity politics.” All of the articles provide a worthwhile service in presenting a more complex understanding of these movements – a view from the inside, as it were, which gives context and relevance to both the period that preceded them and the period that followed.

With the exception of the American Indian Movement, very few of the organizations chronicled in The Hidden 1970s achieved national prominence or recognition of their priority demands in the period. Many of the studies deal with examples of local or regional organizations that undertook particular campaigns in their areas, and trace their arc of emergence and disintegration during the decade. If a characteristic seventies movement zeitgeist emerges, it’s that the participants were radicalized in the sixties and particularly by the degree of repressive reaction that the system unleashed against attempts to transform it through mass organizing. The movement organizations described here, such as the Black Liberation Army, Puerto Rico’s FALN, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, or the Sojourner Truth Organization, were not interested in mild reform. They had an essentially revolutionary analysis, but in most cases their bases were small relative even to their own demographic and never grew significantly during their existence. It’s clear in retrospect that this systemic analysis far outstripped the US majority’s receptivity to it; i.e., the degree to which the US population was in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary state at the time. That said, an impressive boldness of thought and action still marks many of the campaigns described, which would likely not have been possible at all in a time of less receptivity to radical ideas.

It’s significant that another characteristic that emerges is the degree to which some amount of reform also undercut the scope of 1970s radical movements, while further radicalizing small groups of committed activists who became aware that such reform, by its nature, would never lead to real social transformation. This dynamic is most effectively described in Liz Samuels’ article on the prison abolition movement. According to her, the concept of abolition gained credence almost step by step with prison authorities’ implementation of weak post-Attica reforms. And in her article on the American Indian Movement (AIM), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes that the Nixon administration expanded Native American rights to self-determination, and then-California governor Reagan implemented social programs to address the problems of urban Indians, temporarily slowing AIM’s momentum. The 1970s also saw Jimmy Carter grant clemency to Puerto Rican political prisoners and pardons to Vietnam War resisters. And as COINTELPRO began to collapse in the years after J. Edgar Hoover’s death, the Church Committee instigated reforms of US intelligence agencies. It’s a truism that the denial of reform by a sclerotic and autocratic state has historically created the strongest conditions for social revolution.

The “Community” section contains the articles that demonstrate most clearly the evolution of US radicalism in the 1970s from doctrinaire ideological struggle to a unique, if ultimately equally limited “whole lifestyle” approach that countenanced sexuality, spirituality, and day-to-day collectivity as elements of social transformation. As globalization reduces the word community to a lexical phantom, used ubiquitously but mainly in instances that indicate its absence in any sense implying real cohesion (the “online community,” the “black community,” etc.), it’s in this section that the longing for that lost or never possessed but somehow fundamental organizing principle of human life emerges most powerfully. The Hidden 1970s helps to illustrate that so-called identity politics, while still subject to the full contradiction-wielding power of bourgeois individualism, was really always about collective identities: the development of ideal communities in which the individual, as per Marx, could be fully realized—as a collective being.

While Berger’s collection clearly strives to be panoramic in its scope, and mostly succeeds, there is only passing reference to the emergence of deep ecology or the back-to-the-land movements of the period. This may be because these movements tended to lack the ideological rigor or the orientation toward social revolution that most of those described in this collection possessed. And likely as well because their base was generally more privileged in US society, although this was also true of the anti-nuclear movement, which does get a more in-depth look.

The Hidden 1970s aims to demonstrate that US radicalism based in a concept of revolutionary transformation (and directed primarily by and towards the groups most affected by the system’s inequalities) both developed out of, and persisted well beyond, the almost spontaneous upsurge of transformative momentum with which the 1960s has become associated. It does this rigorously and compellingly. But such a focus also means that one of the most salient conjunctions of movement activity in today’s world – the joining of economic and racial justice movements with a vision of true ecological sustainability – is left without historical roots in the period. Love Canal, the first shot across the bow for the environmental justice movement, was a primarily white working class neighborhood transformed in the late 1970s by the revelation it had been built upon a dumpsite for toxic industrial waste. Activism by resident Lois Gibbs and others led to the creation of the EPA’s Superfund for toxic cleanup.

In the thirty years of political reaction that have followed the seventies, movement activity has never ceased in the US, but the collapse of socialist alternatives that took power through revolution and the emergence of a professional activist class working for NGOs funded by liberal foundations has significantly changed the context in which any kind of radical challenge has to take place. However, if there is a place where grassroots radicalism’s fires are still kept lit by the people most prejudiced by the current system, it is probably in the fight for environmental health in the US “third world:” mining communities, urban industrialized areas, the devastated city of New Orleans, reservations (still) fighting concessions to extractive industries, and many other examples. No struggle from now forward that does not make questions of ecological viability as well as economic and social justice central to its vision can be considered to address the fundamental transformation that the current system requires. The people with this vision are the inheritors of a rich tradition of US grassroots radicalism down the decades, from the long sixties and beyond.

The Hidden 1970s is still a valuable reminder that the struggle for social justice is continuous, even if it ebbs and flows, and that it provides a baseline for US history, even in periods that it does not define. It is also lived as vividly by those who participate in it in ebb times as in any other, and the detailed experience of lived history is another of the gifts this worthwhile book has to offer.

“Haunting” is a fashionable literary term that is often used to describe how a thing that has become absent can retain some effects of its former presence; it has ramifications in personal psychology (neurosis can be seen as a kind of haunting) and in some of the strains of contemporary critical thought that issued from or have been influenced by that questionable source.

But it is apt for describing a socio-political phenomenon as well: all systems of rule seek to make their holds more complete by attempting to erase any evidence that they were not eternally pre-existing, benign, and inevitable. The haunting of the human mind, and the corners of empire, by ideas of prior (or potential future) states of being that contradict this idea, and the effects that this haunting has on our individual and collective life, are fundamental aspects of our contemporary experience.

Literature has some nice examples of haunting as a political trope: like the struggles of Animal Farm’s denizens to recall the original wording of their manifesto of liberation as it is invisibly and relentlessly revised by the new elite, or the thousands of vanished corpses, evidence of a government massacre, that only one inhabitant of the mythical town of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude can ever seem to recall having seen.

The EZLN or Zapatista resistance movement that sprang from invisibility into world view from the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, to protest the consequences of the new neo-liberal world order (represented by Mexico’s official absorption on that date into the North American Free Trade zone) has now existed publicly for more than fifteen years. Its international (and Mexican) profile has ebbed and flowed in that time. Arguments about its current relevance beyond a small, isolated population in rural Mexico flare up from time to time in left-wing discourse. It might seem that the vast, world-reshaping events of the last fifteen years have relegated it, along with many other popular uprisings, armed or not, to a relatively minor role in determining how the 21st century world will be experienced by the billions now entering it.

Why then, would it be of interest, even pleasurable, to read a book-length analysis of this movement from the seemingly even more marginal perspective of its “poetics,” its creation of symbols and messages and imaginative use of them to support and maintain its political project?

Here is one reason: this is a place where the whole evocative issue of the haunting of the North, and what it means on a personal and a societal level, comes in.

A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency, a new book by Jeff Conant (AK Press, 2010) is, in fact, laudable for a number of reasons, but one of the suggestive ideas it contains is that the EZLN’s imaginatively expressed and widely disseminated communiqués, and in fact its whole political project, were designed to counter the factitious aura of inevitability of neo-liberal capitalism (and to forestall the extinction that it threatened for Mexico’s indigenous communities) rather than to overturn or replace it.

Seen through its poetics, the Zapatista project is fundamentally one of re-membering and re-articulating (as opposed to the dismembering, disarticulating project of capital towards its alternatives) other ways than the dominant one. And that work is performed through the carefully crafted symbolism of the Zapatistas’ public statements, actions, and displays. One of the resonant names they give their struggle is “the war against oblivion.” In Spanish as in English, oblivion means both unconsciousness and non-existence.

The book is a substantive, scholarly, but never tendentious or obscure look at Zapatista as a kind of literature, or more comprehensively, a created mythos, that serves to inspire and catalyze diffuse efforts to counter the steamroller effects of capitalism’s post-Cold War play for full-spectrum global dominance.

Jeff Conant examines everything from the Zapatistas’ chief spokesman Subcomandante Marcos’ storytelling to the little masked Zapatista dolls in the markets of the Chiapanecan tourist center San Cristobal from this perspective, and brings in an erudite and historically-grounded understanding of the umbilical link between revolutionary social movements and symbol-making.

While he presents the complicated relationship between poetics and struggle in the Zapatista project with a full awareness of the dangers of romanticizing that it entails, and deals fairly with critiques of its limitations, there are still one or two questionable contentions here, and one of them is in the somewhat cavalier use of the term “public relations” to describe what is being done.

PR and Its Discontents: Public relations grew from the foundational idea that not only are humans not primarily rational beings but that their faint stirrings of rationality ought not to be encouraged—rather their fundamental irrationality and apparently infinite selfishness should be massaged and managed by a self-designated elite that constantly feeds them with the subconscious cues necessary to keep them submissive to it.

PR, other words, was designed expressly to keep people from knowing not just what they know, but what they are. It is not a tool that is well-suited to the purposes of widespread consciousness-raising to which Conant would like to see it put here. This is another subject of perennial debate on the left: to what degree can the master’s tools serve other purposes than the master’s? But at the very least, you can’t really put the public relations genie back in the bottle by simply inserting the “right sort” of symbolism, one that fits our political ideals. Real consciousness-raising, as Marx realized, comes out of direct experience, and is grounded in material conditions. This is why even a revolutionary poetics can trend towards emptiness when it is distanced from its source in direct experience.

And the limitations of Zapatista poetics as a transformative tool, whether you call it public relations or not, may have to do precisely with the meaning of symbolic representation in different cultures. Conant’s thesis is that the Zapatista “brand” does not alienate the subject from herself and her environment, like corporate branding, but functions to reconnect them. But such reconnection may only really occur in a meaningful way within a culture where symbol has not already been so successfully divorced from substance, where fetishism (the investiture of material objects or symbols with real, living presence) is not discredited as mystification (see “magical thinking” or the “fetishism of commodities”) or a dubious means of personal gratification but has an unbroken historical tradition as socially valuable and accepted fact.

In a ceremony described near the beginning of the book, seven objects are invoked and used to invest what would otherwise be merely a simple oath of allegiance into a binding statement of collective identity. This identity is not just informed by its relationship to what in our culture are called “abstract ideals:” peace, justice, truth, democracy; it is as inseparable from them as they are from the objects that are called to represent them. And it is the objects’ very familiarity, locality and participation in the audience’s long-standing traditions (the Mexican flag, corn, earth, for example) that gives this ceremony much of its power of connection. The seven object-ideals are then linked to the seven indigenous peoples joined in the Zapatista cause. The transformation is multi-layered and complete—for that constituency.

Their production of such vibrant and integral symbolism has indisputably been useful in profoundly transforming the lives and material conditions of the Zapatista bases. And more diffusively, their ideas and images have recurred in other contexts, many of which Jeff Conant cites, where opposition to predatory capitalism coalesces.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say you are a conscientious, even socially engaged, but relatively comfortable reader who lives far from the mountains of southeastern Mexico, enshrouded in the Cartesian world of the North, body separated from mind, individual set against collective, society alienated from nature. Ten generations of your ancestors emerged from within that world, and reified it. You cannot significantly alter your reality merely by consuming someone else’s symbolism. The Zapatistas’ decades-long struggle for dignified survival, a real, daily path for them, dwindles in your world to a doll on your shelf, a poster on your wall. Your material existence is little if at all affected by it, and though the conscious reminder serves as a goad to some form of increasingly intermittent sympathy, as time goes by and, despite your efforts and the efforts of many others, no profound alteration of power relations or material conditions occurs in your private world, your immediate community or your society, the symbols of social transformation with which you may surround yourself are gradually (although never entirely) emptied of their agency—they become like ghosts.

An opening epigraph to A Poetics of Resistance comes from the Nasa people of Colombia: “Words and action outside of the spirit of community are death.” Well then, we who were raised in and still live surrounded by the all-encompassing reality of Western Civilization, with its now “infinite number of ways to die” as one Zapatista puts it, are ourselves the ghosts and speak and act from the land of the dead. Because the spirit of community referred to here is as alien to us as the moon. The idea of “community” is a perfect example of Western conceptual haunting—a word that has been emptied of its significance in this society (the faith “community,” the black “community,” the online “community”—what do these mean?) but is used repeatedly because the remnants of a longed-for, though absent, reality still cling to it.

Here’s an example of how our popular culture captures conceptual haunting—by using the metaphor of real haunting. In contemporary horror movies like The Sixth Sense or The Others, the twist is that sympathetic, protagonistic characters with whom we are meant to identify, and who we actually believe are alive for most of the movie—occupying apartments or houses, having jobs, taking care of children—turn out to be dead. The terminally alienated are the dead, though they move and think and believe they are alive. Indigenous cultures recognize this difference. While their symbolizing is invested with organic, breathing life, ours has been emptied of it, and haunts us with our own longings for un-alienated presence and our confusion as to our own status among the living or the dead.

The Postmodern Romance: The other question I would raise has to do with what the author calls the Zapatistas’ “postmodernism,” which he maintains is a source of their vitality and continued relevance. He underscores their refusal to embrace a single narrative, a dominant ideology, a line of thought or march.

While postmodernism may possibly be a term as emptied by its use as “community,” it is possible to identify some qualifying precepts. The postmodern consensus is that rationalism and the Enlightenment, from which, among other things, Marxism and the idea of universally applicable qualities derive, are dead, and this is basically a good thing. Postmodern critical thought helped expose the toxicity of Western hegemony disguised as universal enlightenment, but in doing so it also left us with the vacancy of meaning, the incoherency at the heart of all communication, a triumph, not of the imagination, but of a kind of undifferentiated linguistic universe, the heat death in which humanism and rationalism dissolve.

In their place we are given the attractive Zapatista idea of “one no and many yeses,” and their struggle for indigenous rights becomes a call for “the recognition of difference.” But this is the conundrum at the very heart of any postmodern struggle: how can you call for rights that must be universally recognized to be meaningful at all with one breath and decry universals as oppressive and essentialist with the next? What standards will then apply? How will they be established? If your attitude towards contestation for power is to reject it, what means will you use to make potent those demands without which power concedes nothing?

It seems that another ghostly concept that continues to haunt the postmodern, post-Marxist world is the old Enlightenment idea that human history is actually progressive in a meaningful way: towards more human dignity, more harmony, more peaceful cooperation and so forth. This has produced the truism that no matter what else happens, as long as organized protest and resistance movements exist anywhere, they are unquestionable signs that we are still on that path.

But what if this is not actually true? What then would prevent “difference” from merely being division, fragmentation, incoherence, weakness?

What rescues the Zapatista communications project from these conundra is the real value and necessity of their war against oblivion, whether waged by indigenous peoples, industrial and technological workers or world-weary intelligentsia fighting against a persistent sense of death-in-life on the fringes of an oblivious dominant society.

Oblivion is the place where even the memory and the dream of human equity and solidarity, not to mention vibrant interdependence with the natural world, are gone. It is where “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia,” where all are well-trained dogs who need no whip, where it is not only “easier to imagine the end of the world than a world without capitalism,” as the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson said, but impossible to imagine that world at all. Where the ghosts of possibility no longer haunt the living.

In fact, another good reason to take the time to read this book, besides simply enjoying the wealth of vivid imagination and eloquent analysis it contains, is that the kind of long-form thinking this fifteen-years-in-the-making work presents and requires is itself essential to the war against oblivion it correctly understands as a project fundamental to the survival of alternative social movements in the 21st century. Oblivion is not merely a function of controlled space but of eliminated time as well.

The Zapatistas, as a force beyond the autonomous communities in Chiapas, remain bound by the postmodern conundrum, facing the abyss of marginalization that radical anti-authoritarian politics, however visionary and necessary, always risks collapsing into. And the communities themselves, where the real gains of Zapatismo are evident, still live on the knife-edge of extinction confronting land-based peoples around the globe. But the war against oblivion in which they played, and continue to play, a key role, rages on, in every house, on every street. It is one struggle in which there is a place for all of us, through which even the most alienated can regain a place in the nexus that sustains us, that brings us back into life.

Jeff Conant plays his part in that struggle admirably by giving us this thoughtful and impassioned book.

I think the answer is obvious: movies are actually capable of reflecting at us, projected to a mythic dimension, our often unspoken understandings of the forces shaping our existence. The current delivery system would like us to believe that those forces are exclusively personal psychological ones: desire and fear primarily, Freud’s old eros and thanatos. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays is responsible for masterminding the triumph of personal psychology in the socio-political realm: we call it PR. You can see it at work every day in the mainstream media. The excellent documentary The Century of the Self is still the unparalleled description of this historical phenomenon. It also points out that when peoples’ collective experience contrasts too strongly with the projections of the PR machine, they can begin to see other forces at work beyond their own personal desires and fears. The Matrix definitely kept its bread buttered on both sides with ample projections of personal power (all that kickboxing). But it also projected a legitimate collective sense that we had all become raw material to be extracted by a system that hid its predatory nature from us through a totalizing illusion.

Dystopia is not an ideologically fixed form: the enormously popular (at least in the US) Christian fundamentalist Left Behind series fits the bill as well. In Ecology of Fear, eco-sociologist Mike Davis has a whole chapter devoted to looking at how dystopian visions can turn into simple revenge fantasies: a convenient way to eradicate a cultural enemy: effete liberals, the working class, the Chinese: all have been dystopian straw men in one work or another. But the resonance of the corporation as predator paradigm in this century, like the paradigm of Mutually Assured Destruction in the last, ripples across the political spectrum. Whatever catastrophe-du-jour is used to metaphorize it, the dystopian mythos is usually in some way about enormous imbalances of power and the small collectives that form to try to redress them.

Well, zeitgeist-wise, then, let’s take a look at this scenario for a dystopian sci-fi blockbuster: on a near-future earth, an endgame has begun. In the previous century the only potential counterforce to a rapacious world system designed to extract the planet’s wealth at any cost and place it in the hands of a tiny elite has utterly failed. A new century begins with a spectacular series of terrorist attacks by a reactionary organization that was wholly created by the oligarchic empire it purports to destroy: blowback. But it’s a final rearguard action against the system by a group that offers no plausible alternative to it, only a hate-filled return to an hallucinated past.

While a declining but still powerful mega-state wastes its substance on an endless series of wars against this self-inflicted and misidentified foe, the processes of accelerated wealth extraction set in motion decades before continue to unfold, at an ever faster pace. But predictably, and yet somehow unexpectedly, these processes begin to slip out of the control even of those who had recently obtained the most apparently unlimited power because of them. Like a brakeless semi on a 7% grade, or maybe more like that subway train in The Taking of Pelham, 1-2-3, the overheated system roars toward a seemingly inevitable, and final, crash. Bits and pieces of its machinery begin to fail, more and more passengers are thrown under the wheels, even ones who’d been sitting comfortably just moments before. Panic and despair begin to spread.

Okay, it seems a thriller plot has hijacked our science fiction film (elevator pitch: It’s Speed meets Gattaca!). So let’s go with the thriller for now. The twist is that it’s not a lunatic terrorist at the helm of the runaway train, it’s the owners of the train itself. The speed-maddened owners and their drivers, even though they’ve now all become merely front seat passengers, are themselves the ones who sabotage all efforts by other passengers to slow or change the vehicle’s course. It’s actually dawning on them that a train-wreck is becoming inevitable (since they are helping make it so), but they have an endgame strategy: grab everything that’s left inside of any value and use it to position themselves not merely to survive the wreck but to come out of it with their power and possessions intact. (Technical advice for this portion of the script will be credited to investment counselors at the Wall Street Journal.)

This is a fantasy that even the oligarchs themselves don’t entirely believe—they know at least some of the currently well-positioned will be sacrificed too, along with the great masses of powerless and thus expendable humanity, if there’s a system-wide smash. But they are gamblers, and their gambling ability has utterly rewarded them up to this point (although admittedly they’d always gambled only with other peoples’ lives and money before).

So they press on, using the panic they’ve created as a successful distraction, setting passengers against one another as each blames the others for their predicament, while the owners systematically loot the remaining supplies: food, water, metals, energy. (Technical advice for this section can be credited to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.)

One has to ask here: once it reaches this endgame stage, what kind of resistance force could possibly succeed against the sheer mad logic of such a system, a runaway train whose drivers were the ones who destroyed the brakes? It would seem none. There would be skirmishes breaking out here and there—heroic last stands in one railway car or another, but on a system-wide scale, it’s TINA-time: There Is No Alternative. Was this what you meant, Margaret Thatcher?

Alright then, back to our science fiction scenario: in the chaos of permanent war, financial crisis and mass impoverishment that this unfettered system has unleashed, the distracted populace at first pays only momentary attention to a new series of devastating, random strikes taking place around the world. A tidal wave kills hundreds of thousands of people in a single day. A giant storm depopulates a major city, exposing a criminally deficient infrastructure. A series of earthquakes kill tens of thousands and reveals that corrupt governments and developers have colluded to construct shoddy buildings that result in disproportionately large numbers of children, the old and infirm being killed. One single quake reduces an entire nation to a refugee camp. Massive floods displace hundreds of thousands around the world. A volcano erupts, and a wealthy continent’s commerce is disrupted for weeks.

Then, a master-stroke: a negligently maintained oil well explodes deep under water, and an entire sea is poisoned. Like the reactionary terrorists on their suicide missions, the agent of this strike is able to bear the consequences of self-inflicted damage without fear, without concern. And the strike is an unprecedented blow to the industry that powers the whole train.

The victims of all these events are not specifically targeted, and those who are killed or seriously injured are overwhelmingly the poor; i.e., not those most responsible for the system’s violence and suicidal tendencies. The disruptions largely affect civilian installations and personnel, not military ones. It is the very definition of terrorism, except for one thing: there is no human agent behind these acts, no will, no intent to terrorize. Because the perpetrator is the planet itself.

But it is blowback, because the scale of the destruction wrought is ultimately a result of humanity’s own heedless growth, stratification, and hubris towards the natural world. The planet is simply the only agent still powerful enough to weaken the totalizing system that humanity has failed to transform.

The planet is not a vigilante or a rebel army, it doesn’t seek anything like justice, vengeance, a new world order, any of that. It’s just doing what it does. This makes its destructiveness all the more terrifying. A slow awareness dawns, among almost everyone but the power-mad elites and a shrinking number of hangers-on: if humanity forces a final conflict between its own survival and the planet’s — the planet will win. The idea of a special destiny for man, whose survival, alone among species, had supposedly become dependent solely on his own skill and intellect, or was guaranteed because of his purported descendency from a supernatural being who conveniently looked just like him, is revealed to be, well, can you say “pathetic fallacy?”

But wait, it’s only a movie, right? And as thoughtful people are fond of saying, life isn’t like the movies. To which I respond: actually, that’s really only true of the endings.

And, of course, the ending of capitalism’s story, if that’s what this is, hasn’t been written yet. A typically thoughtful and erudite piece by John Michael Greer in his blog The Archdruid Report mentions the failure of imagination that results in many of those who view contemporary events critically (particularly in the Peak Oil crowd he belongs to) being unable to envision the future in other terms than “doomer porn” like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s catastrophists vs. cornucopians, those boosters who believe capitalism will pull a bright-green better mousetrap out of its hat right at the crucial last moment, and we’ll all be able to keep on driving to the multiplex (to watch Avatar II, III, IV…) for generations to come. And they’ll all get clean water in Africa, and solar-powered TVs in China, and electric trains in Latin America too.

Greer himself has another scenario, one I’ve heard increasingly among many of our Bay Area greens: it may be harsh, the post-abundance future, but in the formerly rich world, anyway, we’ll all get to know one another better, life will “re-localize,” people will be forced to collaborate to survive, a multiplicity of creative strategies for living will emerge amid the hardship and we will ultimately have fuller and better lives.

This is obviously appealing, and circumspectly non-utopian, but one has to remark that such abundance as there is, much of which is what the situationists called “pseudo-abundance” anyway, is extremely unevenly distributed. I live in a city where day-release prisoners sweep the streets in upscale neighborhoods so the residents don’t have to be wakened by those nasty loud trucks or move their Lexus every Monday. Where purebred Lhasa Apsos have better diets than children in public school. Where the impoverished and insane who dare to be visible are routinely demonized as “scum” on newspaper commentary pages. I just have this nagging doubt because I don’t see any limits to the lengths to which privileged people will go when their privilege is threatened, and inequity and privilege will not simply vanish when oil hits $200 a barrel, or whatever. Concentrations of power and power’s savvy ability to divide and conquer could still put a serious crimp in any efforts to obtain more real control over our own lives, just as they did even before capitalism’s shadow was cast over the quiet earth, or a single oil well was drilled. I’m just saying: if your analysis doesn’t include extreme inequality, and your proposed solution doesn’t address it (and a lot of alt-green thinking still does not), then you really are just fantasizing. Pitch it to Hollywood.

I don’t know how the movie comes out either, but I do know that the system that delivers food, water, energy and goods to us is radically unstable, and its instability increases every time more of those necessities are placed in fewer hands. I also know that while the systems of control we erect are perpetually tumbling, the human species is resilient. But that’s all I know right now. Has capitalism’s endgame really begun? Is there still a viable counterforce or a white (or green) rabbit, and I’ve just missed them? In either case, how will pushback from the planet alter the scenario?

I know I don’t see  (or even want to see) John Wayne or Bruce Willis or Kevin Costner or Mel Gibson (!) on the horizon coming to redeem our gargantuan social and ecological failures with a well-placed kick to the groin. I do see a lot of good people, known and unknown, scrambling frantically on the wheel of social activism during the long day, trying to make a dollar out of the fifteen cents the system has left them to work with. But at night I just see all of us, activists, fellow travelers or baffled bystanders, sitting quietly, waiting in the dark. And wondering what’s going to happen next.

Maybe that’s okay. Right now, I trust the people who admit they don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t trust the people who say they do.

Moments of mass militancy in the long march of human history, most of whose span is made up of voluntary or involuntary accommodation to power (if it were not, of course, we would not have the world we have), are inevitably romantic. Every person with any semblance of a social conscience should know, at least once, what it feels like to fight the good fight and win a collective moral victory against the odds, however provisional that victory. A lifetime of compromise and submission can be redeemed by such an experience. There is no doubt that Seattle offered that to many of us who were in the streets there in 1999. It was one of those very rare occasions when a mass protest actually had an almost immediate impact upon its target, and even more extraordinary that it was a target with global significance.

I remember a more subjective, even metaphysical effect. Early in the morning of November 30, before the Darth Vader-geared cops were deployed and rioted, before the tear gas began to fly and choke the streets, the physical space of downtown Seattle, like most northern cities a glossy, upscale testament to the power of money, a space which on that day as every other should basically have been dedicated almost entirely to the making and spending of money, to the display and consumption of goods—that space was transformed. The stores were closed and shuttered, there were no cars, and there were thousands of people in the streets, but they weren’t rushing by, faces blank, heads down, making a daily beeline for offices or stores. They (we) were all intensely awake and aware.

Most of us weren’t, at that point, confined to strict “protest” posture either. Those who were going to blockade the convention center were deploying, but the rest of us were an enormous, diffuse crowd. Some people were singing together, some performing for small groups of onlookers, many talking. No money was being exchanged, many thoughts and ideas were. There was a carnival atmosphere, not because what we were about wasn’t serious, but because we could feel on that morning that the capitalist spell cast so deeply upon these city spaces had momentarily been broken, and it was suddenly evident that they could be inhabited in a completely different way. Our society had been constructed, like a stage set; like a stage set it could be changed.

Then the system had a nervous breakdown. Like Napoleon unleashing the dogs in Animal Farm, Seattle showed us at a single stroke where all that tax money that our cities don’t have for schools and hospitals and libraries had gone all these years: into thousands and thousands of cops costumed by George Lucas and be-weaponed by the NSA. That underneath the “everything’s fine” mask of the liberal state was the deadly face of organized violence that the middle class majority almost never see, and the scale on which it could operate was truly overwhelming. But that day it wasn’t as ready as we were and so we still “won.” The size and militancy of the street protests, especially when the large, if rather docile presence of organized labor was thrown in, woke the global south delegates to the WTO from their own capitalist dreamspell – if there was this much resistance here in the richest place on earth, how would their own really desperate masses respond if they sold them out?

So much for the historical moment, which should rightly be seen as significant. But what about what’s happened since? I’m feeling less hortatory than others I’ve read. Committed activists, particularly direct action proponents, remain convinced such moments are infinitely replicable, according to some sort of rational calculation which apparently has nothing to do with imponderables like the state of state power at a particular historical moment, its level of awareness of where and what the resistance to it looks like, the depth and breadth of the crisis, the depth and breadth of real organization that the resistance has, and the amount of room most people have to do what most people historically do if they can, which is simply to turn the other way.

I would say rather that substantive and direct impacts from public protest really only occur in two situations: when the target has become so complacent and/or distracted that it doesn’t know or care anything about the level of opposition to it, and is caught off guard, or when the level of opposition is so militant, persistent and widespread (all must be true) that power must finally concede. Seattle, to my mind, was an example of the first instance, while the mass demonstrations in France against the dismantling of the social security system a few years earlier were an example of the second.

The US actually has few historical examples of either moment. While public protest has undoubtedly been an essential component of reform in the US, and has given elected officials the cover they needed to enact reforms that are generally some belated and watered down version of what has been demanded by some organized sector of the public, massive public protest, since our earliest days as a nation, has never caused a US government to fall and be replaced by another more responsive to social concerns (as in Bolivia or Ecuador, for example), or even to announce the abandonment of a given administration’s stated policy and the adoption of another (as in France). At the local level in this country, of course, public protest certainly has had direct effects on public policy, although not always to the benefit of a progressive agenda. The insurgent protests against teaching about sex education, evolution or gay rights are prominent examples.

The large public demonstrations that have a critical impact in other societies are often attached to a type of mass direct action which almost never happens here, that is, the massive withholding of labor from entities that private and state power both need to function. That is to say, people in large, well-organized numbers, walk off the job.

But of course when organizers and many participants are employed by some aspect of the movement itself, as they often are here through the myriad issue-oriented non-profit organizations that have become what passes for a progressive movement in this country, then of course, walking off the job to protest really doesn’t stick any thumbs in the eye of the state.

My concern is that in the US, a lot of what has happened in the ten years since Seattle is an accelerated version of what has been happening for a lot longer: the professionalization of dissent. We may now have the best educated, most tech-savvy, most grant-worthy, best-staffed progressive movement in the world. But that and three bucks will buy you a coffee at Starbucks, as the saying goes. If you have a situation where the comfortable are directing the struggle far more than the afflicted, then you have a pretty toothless movement.

Only organizing based on a urgent sense of necessity ever enables real social progress. Only people who have become convinced that it is not possible for them to do otherwise will participate fully, for the long term. While it may sound like heresy to say so, the real strength of public protest actually has little to do with how many news outlets pick up on it. Public protest should literally be only the tip of the iceberg of organized opposition. Overall, we need to look at protest as a by-product of the increasing organization of those not-already committed to (or employed by) a movement, and judge it in the degree to which it foments or exemplifies a real crisis in the structures of power. We desperately need to stop seeing it mainly as a PR tool, however nice the pictures look on our non-profit’s website afterwards. Otherwise it risks becoming a defanged ritual just as devoid of any larger transformational significance as, say, the Catholic Mass.

Rituals are legitimate and important things deriving from our species’ deepest cultural history. But their function is to sustain social norms by repeating propitiatory or expiatory actions, not transform or even reform them. Rituals overcome chronological time and bring all actions into an eternal now, which gives them a transcendental meaning. Protest may include ritual elements as a nod to the deep roots upon which it draws, but it only actually has a hope of catalyzing social change if it is fully a function of the historical moment and the effort to make something in the future radically different from something in the present. This is always what the people who participate in public protest think they are about, but it is not always the effect protest actually produces in our society. Ironically, in some circumstances, we may be doing nothing more than ritualizing a seemingly eternal relationship of the relative powerlessness of the majority to a power elite.

In the meantime reality, ever the joker, continues to gallivant ahead of both the US left and the power elites. The WTO never recovered from its meltdown in Seattle, not because of continuing protest against it, but because it was outrun and run over by the logic of its own paradigm: capitalism without brakes. Does anyone still want that snake oil now? Protectionism, if you want to use the Wall Street Journal’s term, is understandably on the rise again, in both the global north and south. The fact that the WTO is at this inopportune moment still trying to push deregulated financial markets on poor countries is almost laughable, it’s a kind of Marx (Brothers) –ian “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” situation, and global south nations are rightly betting on their own eyes.

Basically, global capitalism crashed its own car, with very little help from protest movements, less than ten years after the last regulatory shackles were removed from finance capital in the US, twenty years after capitalism’s ideological bogeyman melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West.

A superb French noir film, The Wages of Fear, comes to mind here as a nice example of self-induced crash as capitalist metaphor. It is often described as “existentialist,” which utterly denudes it of social relevance; in my view, it is straight ahead, two-fisted anti-capitalist noir, perhaps the finest example there is. You should see it. But having said that, a spoiler alert: I’m about to describe the climactic final scene.

At the end of the film, Yves Montand has just become the last survivor of a grueling contest to drive a load of nitroglycerine through the brutal back country of the Honduran mountains to an oil company that wants it quick and cheap. The human cost of the trip is the story of the movie, but Montand’s cynical, charismatic and ruthless character makes it through, collects his wages, and heads his empty truck back over the mountains to his girl. The sheer exhilaration of his complete freedom, of having overcome every obstacle and being the last man standing, causes him to drive with a kind of mad abandon on the same precipitous roads he had just been inching along, but faster and faster now, howling with glee until the moment the truck heads off a cliff, and he only has time for a few seconds of terror before he’s lying at the bottom of a ravine with a broken neck, his pay envelope beside him. The End.

Director Henri-Georges Clouzot, who went through the Nazi occupation and saw and told the unheroic, but general story of collaboration and accommodation instead of the hero saga of the Resistance, was not an optimistic man. This film is his, in my view, perfect metaphor for capitalism’s triumph, the nightmare that the hallucinatory Ayn Rand presents as the ultimate human fulfillment: this is the life unfettered by any kind of responsibility, any sense of obligation to anything other than pure self-interest. You want total freedom? I got your total freedom right here. At the bottom of a cliff.

And now, with corporate-induced climate chaos the left’s next challenge, ironically (again) earth’s climate has been done more of an immediate favor by capitalism’s internal contradictions than by all the protest and advocacy actions in the last ten years. Because of the financial meltdown and the recession, per capita global energy consumption is actually projected to have dropped significantly in 2009, for the first time in almost 30 years. But lest that all sound too cynical and defeatist for a card-carrying radical, I hasten to add that only advocacy movements (let’s dump the fetishist “protest” moniker, shall we?) can actually posit, articulate and fight for real and long-term alternatives to the toxic logic of prior investment that pervades the thinking of global elites. In a power vacuum, those ideas can be decisive. The fact that the increasingly desperate tactics of climate change deniers have done little or nothing to slow what momentum there is among global elites for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a testament to the emergence of a stewardship movement that has actually been able to envision and articulate alternatives to the status quo that have to be taken seriously.

Anyway, as a couple hundred folks called out by the Mobilization for Climate Justice were heading up San Francisco’s Market Street on N30 + 10, bearing bright, attractive banners, and a handful blocked the revolving doors at Bank of America for a little while before being led away, as if they were in the SFPD’s version of a catch and release program, I was walking up my street to a neighbor’s house, where I help her tend a newly dug vegetable garden, whose surplus produce is given away each week at a local free (as in no-cost) market. I can never really begrudge anyone’s desire to join a street protest, but I felt that in this time, in this place, there were many actions people could be taking in collectives as small as two or as large as a thousand, that I thought would be equally worthy of the spirit of Seattle.

This week in Copenhagen, discussions about how to deal with humanity’s biggest challenge ever: the consequences of its own gargantuan tendencies of greed and aggression, are underway. The elites seem to have acquired a vague sense of urgency while still looking desperately for ways to keep their own nests feathered. What role will mass protest play in these talks? With all there is at stake, one hopes it is a role more modeled on the example of the general strike than the professionalized ritual.

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.