Maybe that’s what it’s all about. … Maybe all that happens is, you get older and you know less.

– Frank Sinatra

Children:

In Amerika today we have two parties … the Fascist Union (also known as the F.U. party) and the Phony Cooperative Baloney party (also known as the P.C.B.).

The F.U. party stands for wholesome, Amerikan values–what we used to call “rugged individualism.” We don’t use this term anymore because today we understand the dangers of “individualism”–especially among the lower classes. We know that smart and crafty people always get together to form cartels, meshing economic, political and social lives to pursue their own best interests—and to hell with everyone else! This is a law of Nature known as “survival of the fittest.” It’s also known as the “invisible hand” of the market. Even the great slave-holder, Thomas Jefferson, understood this when he wrote about “liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness.” Notice that he did not write about “justice” and the “pursuit of truth.” Today we know that “justice” and “truth” are in the eyes of the beholder. Each person has his or her own idea of what those words mean and you can’t run the New World Order with a lot of loose threads hanging out, can you?

The P.C.B.’ers pretend they serve the interests of the “common people.” You can tell how much contempt they have for us right there—we are “common,” but they are not. Well, children, there is nothing “common” about me! And, I hope, nothing “common” about you! I am proud to be part of the crew that powers the ship. Let the captains decide where the ships are going. They have all the information and we couldn’t begin to understand it even if we tried. They tell us what to do and think through the mass media—including education–, and life is certainly a lot easier when you know what to do and think. Don’t be confused by idiots like Michael Moore. There are always some crackpots who believe they’re too good to be conditioned like everyone else. In one of the renegade Moore’s classic movies, Capitalism: A Love Story—a classic example of mis-alignment, one might say—he tries to make a distinction between capitalism and democracy! Yes, you are right to snicker! There really is no distinction. Democracy is rule by the people and the people obviously want capitalism or they wouldn’t keep this system in place year after year, decade after decade—as far back as any of us can remember, even back to the glorious Roman Empire of the sanctioned history books.

To prove that we are a capitalistic democracy we have to put up with the PCB crowd. They like to parade the old platitudes like “fairness,” and “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and all that Martin Luther King blather about “all God’s children,” blah, blah, blah … but everyone knows they are “in on the take.” They have to raise huge amounts of money to run their silly campaigns. A lot of them are “filthy rich” themselves and they get into politics as a hobby because they’re not clever enough to make more money and create jobs for the “working poor” they’re always crying over like spilt milk. If, perhaps, they don’t have their own money, they go hat-in-hand to the corporate bosses, cut deals—wink! wink!–, promise “the people” this, that and the other while all the time knowing they can’t or won’t deliver. Sometimes, a PCB’er breaks through. Remember President Obama? Yes, you can “boo”—it’s all right. Some people say now that he actually believed his own rhetoric. “Change we can believe in!” (Yes, you can hiss!) Would someone tell me what the hell that means?

Today we know that the people cannot change anything; only the elite, the elect, the select and the carefully groomed Guardians of the New World Order have the Intelligence necessary to ensure success. They gather Intelligence from everywhere—from every corner of the globe, from every nook and cranny. No one can escape. Resistance is futile. That is why we have these cameras and microphones in the classroom, in the cafeteria, in the halls, in the library, in the lockers, in the gym, etc. … so what we say, what we do, what we think, can be constantly observed, monitored, heard, vetted, discussed, dissected, appraised, and, if need be, corrected. If need be, deleted. Remember the saying: “Our predator drones are ever watchful, vigilant, never sleeping.” (A word to the wise is sufficient!) That is why there are cameras and microphones in your homes, in your computers, in your phones, in the watches you wear, the products you buy … in the streets, in your vehicles … in fact, everywhere. It is all designed to make us better citizens of the glorious New World Order—better soldiers in the armies, better, uncomplaining workers, better consumers of so-called “junk food,” so-called “junk information.” Today we know that the Guardians are watching—and, if they want us to die sooner, well, we should all be prepared to “win one for the Gipper,” stiffen our backbones and do what’s necessary because they see the bigger picture, they know our best interests. It’s because they are watching us—and watching out for us! It’s because they know our hearts and minds and very souls—and what is good and proper for all of us—better than we do.

Now, let us stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

The stock market crashed
Just like ‘29,
It took wheelbarrows of bucks
To buy Coca Cola
And the radio nuts
Blamed it all
On Mexican liberals
Crossing our borders.

I’ve been wondering lately
Should I pay off my bills?
But I haven’t decided
Whose side I’m on!
Am I with’em
Or agin’em,
Am I blue state or red,
Am I better off hoping
Or better off dead?

This world’s a delusion,
A junkie’s chimera,
A vampire’s kiss
Hissing in a cavern,
Pissing in the wind.
For the sake of a dollar,
A ribboned medallion,
We die for our country,
Kill for sweet liberty
As defined by,
As circumscribed by,
As constrained by,
Straight-jacketed by
Power and fear,
Glory and cupidity.

Maybe heaven
Is about starting over
With a fresh deck
Where the dice aren’t loaded.
Maybe it’s helping
Where it’s most needed,
With nothing ulterior,
Truth out in the open.

Hail, Mary, full of grace. …
Hail, Caesar,
We who are about to die
Salute you.
Heil! Heil! Heil!

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
By Chris Hedges
Hardcover: 232 pages
Publisher: Nation Books (2009)
ISBN: 9781568584379

If you’re looking for one of those treacly Oprah books—The Secret, and its variants—avoid this one. Those books nourish like potato chips and leave most people more confused, more desperate, more thirsty for fantasies than before. No amount of wishing, earnest yearning, visualizing and New Age mysticism is going to get us out of the morass we’re in. In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges takes a sober look down our hall of distorting mirrors. The son of a minister, with a degree in theology from Harvard, a columnist for Truthdigger.com, Hedges has worked as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists. He was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. Here are some of the pertinent facts he contemplates:

• The top 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
• World-wide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the Internet, topped $97 billion in 2006—more than that of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflixs, and EarthLink combined.
• The football coach is the University of California-Berkeley’s highest paid “employee”; he makes about $3 million a year. Nationwide, full-time faculty positions have been disappearing, replaced by adjunct positions, with itinerant instructors barely making living wages.
• Collapsing and overwhelmed sewage systems release more than 40,000 discharges of raw sewage into our drinking water, streams and homes each year.
• One-third of our schools are in such a severe state of disrepair that it interferes with the delivery of instruction.
• We spend $8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense systems that would be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb.
• A family of 4 now pays about $12,000 a year in premiums for healthcare—up about 90 percent from 2000 to 2006. About 50 million Americans are uninsured; another 25 million are “under-insured.”
• We have 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars. With less than 5% of the world’s popultion, we have 25% of the world’s prisoners (1/2 for non-violent drug crimes).

Any wonder there’s been a flight to fantasy? But, more profoundly, what’s the connection between fantasy and our decaying culture? How did we get here? Digging beneath the statistics, we find an increasing number of warm-blooded humans suffering like they never have before: lost in a world of promises broken; the American Dream of endless consumption and fulfillment–nightmarishly evinced.

“A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies,” Hedges writes. “And we are dying now. … Those who cling to fantasy in times of despair and turmoil inevitably turn to demagogues and charlatans to entertain and reassure them. …” As bad as things are now—the disconnectedness, fragmentation, loneliness, im- and a-morality–we can extrapolate, interpret the trend lines, read history, and find worse to come. Hedges dissects “our cultural embrace of illusion and the celebrity culture that has risen up around it” in five comprehensive chapters:

   The Illusion of Literacy
   The Illusion of Love
   The Illusion of Wisdom
   The Illusion of Happiness
   The Illusion of America

At his best, Hedges has a “true” journalist’s (i.e., the careful observer’s, the truth-digger’s) eye for detail, and a novelist’s ear and sense of flow. His book is a compilation of some of the best thinking on corporate power, the Corporate State, the decline of the American empire—deftly knitted together with wit and a lively writing style. (His chapter on the “Illusion of Love,” focusing on pornography, is both funny and poignantly sad.)

Empire begins with spectacle. We’re in a wrestling ring with jeering fans chanting at the villainous “tycoon” actor-wrestler, John Bradshaw Layfield: “You suck! You suck! You suck!” Layfield is pitted against the “Heartbreak Kid,” the crowd favorite, a working-class hero. “You lost your 401(k). You lost your retirement. … You lost your children’s education fund,” Layfield taunts the Kid and the audience. Then, he offers the Kid a job—working for him! All the Kid has to do is leave the ring. Humiliated, that’s just what the Kid does. And in their identification with their fallen hero, in their vicarious humiliation, the anger and resentment of the audience is stoked against the tycoon. They hunger for vengeance.

“The bouts are stylized rituals,” Hedges writes, “public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. … And the most potent story tonight, the most potent story across North America, is one of financial ruin … and enslavement of a frightened and abused working class.” This mirroring of the “ emotional wreckage of the fans” is the “appeal of much of popular culture, from Jerry Springer to ‘reality television’ to Oprah Winfrey.” It succeeds “because we ask to be fooled.”

Celebrities become our “vicarious selves” who provide us with release from anonymity and drudgery—“ultimate fulfillment before death.”

Given his background, its no small wonder that Hedges would spend much of his book wrestling with the angel. “Morality is the product of a civilization,” he writes; but, in “a society that has less and less national cohesion, a society that has broken down into warlike and antagonistic tribes where ‘winning is all that matters,’ morality is seen as ‘irrelevant.’”

Ours is a culture of manipulation, one of “inverted totalitaianism.” Hedges borrows the phrase from Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. “Inverted totalitarianism,” Hedges writes, “unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers. … Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists … who author the legislation. … Corporate media control nearly everything we read, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. …In classical totalitarian regimes … economics was subordinate to politics.” In America, economics is dominant.

“The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.” We need not stretch ourselves, I imagine. The hero of The Matrix will stretch for us. So will Plastic Man or Batman or Superman. In our culture of distractions and manipulations, Aldous Huxley “feared that what we love will ruin us.” Citing Neil Postman, he reproduces a dialectic between the authors of 1984 and Brave New World:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

I put it this way: We need not worry that Big Brother is watching us; we need worry about our dual fascinations with watching Big Brother—and with being watched! In fact, we’ve become a nation of double voyeurs: we watch people on “reality shows” who are being watched and monitored by the unblinking camera recording their humdrum lives.

We are what we eat and we’ve been eating a lot of baloney. It comes to us in various forms including the petrochemical-sprayed food we eat, the Big Pharma pills we take to keep us drugged, numb and complaisant. We watch our celebs gulping it and pitching it back at us. Our politicians sprinkle it with mustard and daub it with relish.

Conditioning. … Both those geniuses—George and Aldous–were trying to deal with it: the whole spectrum of the Propaganda State grown up around the theories of Edward Bernays—Freud’s nephew. They both understood the necessary concomitants of fear, repetition, tribal identity and group conformity. They gave it different expressions, but they grounded it in the imperative of psychological re-structuring and transformation. Orwell with the gut-wrenching fear of our worst chimeras; Huxley with mind-numbing lullabies to babies, easy, commitment-free sex from puberty onward, and lots of soma.

Hedges’ chapter on the “Illusion of Happiness” addresses the issue of psychological conditioning. It would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It has the same tenor of pathos as his chapter on sex, in which one enthusiast waxes eloquent about his $7500 anatomically correct silicone dolls. (He has eight, with removeable heads, and he exults over the simulated veins in the feet and the dorsal venous arch—“really, really cool.”)

The silicone pitch in academia is “positive psychology,” or what Professor Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University calls, “Transformational Positivity.” According to the professor, “Institutions can be a vehicle for bringing more courage into the world, for amplifying love in the world … temperance and justice, and so on.”

And so on it goes. Just think positive. (Remember that Indian guru who beguiled the Beetles? “Just be happy!” ) All we need is “appreciative inquiry” in order to “transform organizations into ‘Positive Institutions’.”

Cooperrider is hardly alone. There are more than a hundred courses on positive psychology on college campuses. The University of Pennsylvania offers a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology, and Claremont Graduate University offers Ph.D. and M.A. concentrations in “The Science of Positive Psychology.” Such degree programs are also available in England, Italy and Mexico. They focus on “cultivating strengths, optimism, gratitude, and a positive perspective.” Think positively and positive things will happen. Sound familiar? Perhaps we should call such programs, “Becoming Oprah.”

Hedges lifts his lens high enough to kindle fire here: “The purpose and goals of the corporation are never questioned. To question them, to engage in criticism of the goals of the collective, is to be obstructive and negative. … If we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. Debate and criticism, especially about the goals and structure of the corporation, are condemned as negative and ‘counterproductive.’” And he’s a good pitbull here:

“Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis.” It’s a “quack science” that “throws a smokescreen over corporate domination, abuse, and greed.”

So, if you’re looking for treacle, look elsewhere.

My one cavil is with the ending of the book, the last part of the last chapter. Hedges can be polemical and he does repeat himself. The last chapter needs less polemicism and summary arguments. And I can’t help but wonder: What is the other side? Is there any way to avoid catastrophe? Perhaps an interview with one of those heroes whose names pepper this important book would have sharpened the quill: people like Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Father Roy Bourgeois, Kathy Kelly, Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Jim Hensen—what sustains them, keeps them going?

Also missing in action is Marshall McLuhan, whose Understanding Media of some forty years ago established the scientific foundation of critiquing the media—the mesmeric effect of mentally connecting pixiles; the alpha waves generated in a half-waking, half-sleeping state.

Morris Berman and Derrick Jensen have argued that we’re already past the “tipping point.” NASA scientist Jim Hensen says we should have started yesterday to bring down C02 levels or face global cataclysm.
In the last couple of pages, Hedges seems to pull his punches for a gentle caress: “No tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love,” he writes. “The mediocrities who mask their feelings of worthlessness and emptiness behind the façade of power and illusion, who seek to make us serve their perverse ideologies, fear most the power of love. … Love will endure, even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.”

I don’t know. I’m not sure. The power of love is cold comfort to the corpses and the wasted lives. Love without wisdom, like freedom without wisdom, has caused as much mischief and grief as the genuinely malignant spirits and ideologies among us. Perhaps the overriding question now is how best to organize collective action against the tyranny of corporatism, the relentless pulsations of conformity. How do we return to a “literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas”?

One book cannot do it all, of course. Hedges has trained a brilliant light on our confused and murky, rather bizarre culture. In the last couple of pages he leaves us with another powerful idea, probably as good as love. He alludes to Rostand’s Cyrano: “The ability to stand as ‘an ironic point of light,’ that ‘flashes out wherever the just exchange their messages,’ is the ability to sustain a life of meaning.”

They will take evil and call it good. They will take the lie and call it truth.
– Isaiah

The unexamined life is not worth living.
–Socrates

War is always finally about betrayal.
– Chris Hedges

A static universe isn’t physically self-consistent. The sun can’t shine forever.
– James Peebles, Physics Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

Do I dare
disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
– T.S. Eliot

On July 11th, author William Blum e-mailed me a Washington Post article about Ken Meyercord. Fredrick Kunkle, a Post staff writer, described Meyercord as a 65-year old with a “high tech job at Freddie Mac, a local public-access cable television show … and a long history of writing about what he says are ‘myths’ of the Holocaust.” Meyercord, the article continued, hoped to win “an at-large seat on the board of the Reston Citizens Association, a quasi-government body … for the community of 60,000, which is not officially a municipality.” Reston is basically a D.C. suburb in Virginia.

I’d met Meyercord a few months before at a political celebration in downtown D.C. The party’s sponsors were elated over Obama’s inauguration. More cynical than most of those there, I’d latched onto Blum’s coat-tails for the invite—providing chauffeur services in my old van. I met Medea Benjamin, Meyercord and his Palestinian wife, Samira, and a few other interesting people. Nobody I met or overheard struck me as radical or dangerous. Some—not those I’ve mentioned here—struck me as naïve for believing that one election would change the direction of our latter-day Empire.

A few months later, friend Blum and I were at Eduardo Galeano’s reading at Politics and Prose, also in D.C.. We ran into Meyercord there and we decided to get some Chinese food nearby. Meyercord told me about his TV show then, but most of the conversation had more to do with Peking duck than with the sweet and sour business of contemporary, imperial politics.

Meyercord probably mentioned that he was running in the Reston election. A Maryland resident, unable to vote in Virginia, absorbed in my personal problems then, all of that sailed over my head. Conversation was mostly convivial; no one was trying to proselytize; and, in fact, nobody could have. Blum is 75 and he’s seen it all; I’m 63 and I’ve seen enough.

Four days after reading the first article on Meyercord, I was e-mailed another, also by Fredrick Kunkle at the Post. Under the headline, “Write-in Effort Blocks ‘Revisionist,” I learned: “A last-minute campaign to prevent a self-described Holocaust revisionist from serving on a civic body in Reston has succeeded with a landslide. … Ken Meyercord, who had been running unopposed for an at-large seat on the Reston Citizens Association’s 13-member volunteer board, received only 23 votes after his provocative views on Jews created a backlash.” Debra Steppel, who organized the write-in campaign, called it a “fabulous result.”

Mr. Kunkle wrote that Meyercord was “gracious in conceding,” and that he had congratulated Ms. Steppel for her efforts, although he thought her “misinformed.” Further, the article noted that Meyercord and his wife had lived in Reston since 1977, and that, in “writings and interviews,” he had expressed doubt that Nazi Germany had a “mission to annihilate European Jews, a plan known as the Final Solution.” Meyercord had also denied that Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews, and he had “expressed skepticism that the number of Holocaust victims reached 6 million.”

By now, my interest was more than piqued, and I asked Meyercord to send me some of his writing. As a half-Jew with Zionists, anti-Zionists and the indifferent, ignorant and uniformed within my own extended family; as a fan of Paine and Thoreau, Martin Buber, Rilke and Hesse; as a man vitally interested in my world and human psychology, I wanted to know more about this tempest in a teapot in Reston and how it might relate to our confused, violent and pernicious modern macro world.

Perusing Meyercord’s work, I found him to be more apologetic than inflammatory. In “In Search of a Holocaust Denier,” he writes, “What I would like to offer here is a rationale—a plea, really—for investigating all aspects of the holocaust story in an atmosphere free of rancor, intolerance, and intimidation. I believe we can learn from history and that it will be a better world if we do. Of course, to learn from history, we have to have an accurate understanding of what happened. …”

Meyercord describes how the “goose-stepping … siegheiling” Nazis endlessly portrayed by Hollywood and the other media provided little insight into “how a man like Hitler could have risen to power in one of the most sophisticated countries on earth.” He deplores the fact that we have learned so little from the Nazi era, noting that the Foreign Minister of Israel [Avigdor Lieberman] has advocated the deportation of all Palestinians from Eretz [Greater] Israel. Those who have challenged holocaust orthodoxy have found themselves exiled to an academic wilderness—a la Norman Finkelstein in the U.S.—or imprisoned—like David Irving in Austria! And, in that same reasonable, almost apologetic mode, he asks, “Wouldn’t it be better to dispel the myths surrounding the holocaust now, while anti-Semitism is a neglibible factor in American society, than at some future date when hard times lead desperate, angry Americans to look around for a scapegoat?”

So much for the overview of Meyercord’s approach. He’s not some glib-tongued salesman for neo-Nazism. His argumentation is tightly reasoned and far less fiery and provocative than, say, Limbaugh’s, O’Reilly’s, Hannity’s or Coulter’s. He directs his readers (and directed me in a short phone interview of him) to two websites for further exploration of the issues.

Meyercord describes himself as a “revisionist,” not a holocaust denier. He notes: “What causes revisionists to be misrepresented and slandered by the believers is their denial of three constituent parts of the holocaust story:

   1. That there was a plan to exterminate the Jews, aka, “The Final Solution.”
   2. That gas chambers were used in the execution of that plan; and
   3. That no less than six million Jews died as a result.

He offers his own refutations of the predominant “holocaust story” and directs us to others for more detail.

The question I have to ask now is: How is this relevant to our post-9/11 world?

It is relevant because past is prelude, and those who don’t learn the lessons of the past, as Santayana said … well, you know the rest.

It’s relevant because we would rather kill each other to defend the sanctity of our myths—religious, ideological, nationalistic/patriotic—than smash the idols of our perceptions—and misperceptions.

It’s relevant because a thoughtful man’s views of history or religious dogma is irrelevant to the performance of his duties and responsibilities as a citizen in a local civic organization.

It is relevant because every tin-pot dictator who appears on the scene—a Noriega, a Saddam Hussein—who loses the favor of the U.S. imperial regime; and every populist leader—an Ahmadinejead, a Hugo Chavez, a Fidel Castro—is inevitably compared to Hitler and threatened with regime change, or having his country “wiped off the map,” or has, in fact, been invaded. Hitler has become the gold standard of evil—and that incubus colors every other form of evil. We have personalized and incarnated evil, ignorance and brutality, and exonerated the institutions, the social forms and mechanisms of control, the psychologies and hysterias still very much with us today.

It is relevant because most Americans don’t know squat about Zionism or the role that Jewish nationalism played in the run-up to World War I, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the disastrous Versailles treaty, the Balfour Declaration, etc. (Meyercord, in fact, does not touch on any of this in his writing or in his interviews with me or with Fred Kunkle at the Post.)

It is relevant because whether 6 million Jews died or 1 million died—there still is no justification for the expropriation of another people’s land, resources, country. (My mother taught me as a child, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”)

Meyercord’s little dust-up in a D.C. suburb leaves us with three big ponderables:

   1. A question of censorship
   2. A moral question
   3. The historical record

Ms. Steppel’s write-in campaign, and the voters of Reston, attempted to censor Meyercord’s words and beliefs. They did not vote on the man’s competence, his willingness and ability to serve his local community. They voted against his convictions, at which he had arrived after carefully examining the evidence, his life and the promptings of his conscience. He lived for six months in Beirut, traveled in Israel, has had a long, fulfilling marriage to a Palestinian woman. They raised two children who attended Reston’s public schools. No doubt his unique experiences have enriched his perspective. How does censorship and expurgation serve the public interest? In our intertwined world, are we not all safer reaching out, trying to understand “the other”?

The moral question has too often reduced itself to “my suffering is better than your suffering.” Suffering employed this way has little or nothing to do with morality, much to do with religious dogma. It is suffering as justification—for outrageous reparations (against Germans, for example, no more guilty for World War I than Brits, the French, the Americans, the Russians). It is suffering employed as the ultimate rationale for “man’s inhumanity to man,” “nature red in tooth and claw,” etc. It is suffering memorialized as stasis (James Peebles here: “a static universe isn’t physically self-consistent”). It is suffering as rationalization for continuing the empires of destruction, wreaking havoc and revenge on more innocents, continuing the whole ghastly process (“They will take evil and call it good. They will take the lie and call it the truth.”)

As for the historical record, it has always been a rather murky affair. In my entire lifetime, God has never spoken to me once out of the Whirlwind, and I have been waiting for 46 years to find out what really happened on November 22, 1963. Einstein said God doesn’t play dice with the Universe, and Bohr told Einstein to stop telling God what to do! God may not play dice, but He/She/It certainly keeps His/Her/Its cards close to His/Her/Its chest/bosom/ineffable mystery.

Which means I’ve got to keep digging. I have to keep disturbing the universe, checking my notes and revising my memes because in an expanding universe I don’t participate in cosmological events, but I can play my ant-like role in the evolution of awareness and consciousness. “War is finally about betrayal,” as Hedges succinctly and profoundly writes, and I need to know why and how a species that has evolved so magnificently in its technology has, when it comes to interacting with other sentient beings, stymied itself in the Age of Iron and Sky Gods. What gives? What mystery here?

Six million victims or one innocent victim—what compels us to slaughter the innocents under Herod, to crucify Christ for our sins, to burn John Hus for impiety? How shall we employ numbers to justify brutality? Did the death of 20 million Russians in the Great Patriotic War justify the rape of 2 million German women by Russian troops when the Third Reich collapsed? The ghost voices of tens of millions of native peoples of the Americas rise up and cry for justice. What reparations can we pay them? Millions of Africans, lost in the “Middle Passage” of the slave trips, sweated to death among the sugar canes of the Caribbean and the cotton and tobacco plantations of the New (old!) World—what memorials shall we build for them, what is their due?

How do we make equivalences? I suffered, my family suffered, my people suffered … therefore, I have the right to. … What? Wreak vengeance? Upon the innocents?

Probably it is too much to hope for forgiveness—either given or gotten. Humans are not, generally, constituted that way. Except for a few saints we’ve usually managed to crucify upside down, boil in oil, or murder with a thousand cuts.

But we may, possibly, hope for clarity, breaking the cycle of wrong for wrong, by excavating the truths, the hidden causes, penetrating the whirlwind of confusion and setting the record straight–because in this melange of pulsating life called Earth, it’s looking more and more like we’d better all pull on the oars together or we’re all going down together. And it looks more and more like Eugene Debs, who said so much well, said this one perfectly: “While there is one soul in prison, I am not free.”

What else but to know the true history of the human mind and heart—to extricate ourselves, to beam the searchlights in terra incognita, confront our demons, shake our wings loose from the chrysalis of so much ignorance, blood-lust, power-lusting, arrogance, fear, greed and stupidity?

What they regard as Tao is not Tao, and what they consider as right is often wrong. [They] do not really understand Tao, but understand some of it. … They are able to worst others by argument, but do not convince people in their hearts, because they are just playing around with words. … [They get] lost in the bypaths.

– Chuang Tse

What’s all this nonsense about torture?

Now, I ain’t no Einstein, but it seems to me, if it makes us safer, it’s a no-brainer!

In fact, maybe what we gotta do is torture a whole lot more.

I’m not talkin’ about droppin’ bombs on people from Predator drones. That’s a kind of torture if you get your limbs blown off or a beam thru your skull. But, it ain’t personal enuf. It’s what you call “collateral damage.” What we gotta do is intentional damage—up close and personal.

And let’s not stop with the so-called “terr’ists.” Let’s not pussy-foot.

I think everyone can agree that child-molesters should be tortured, right? If they do that kind of stuff once, they’re probably gonna do it again. Just like the terr’ists! And it’s gotta be tortured outa them. We gotta be intentional. That also means we gotta figure out their intentions! So, if we water-board ‘em a coupla hundred times, maybe they’re gonna get the point, confess their sins—and tell us what they’re thinking, what they’re planning! We gotta clean out that hornet’s nest in their brains. Cut’em off at the pass. (Or before the pass, if you know what I mean.) Now if somebody’s contemplatin’ that kind of stuff, it’s too bad. I don’t care a rat’s ass if their daddy was mean to ‘em or their mama didn’t give them enuf cuddlin’. What’s right is right!

Then there’s the stem-cell research guys. (I’ll get to the abortion “doctors,” in a minute.) These research types (yeah, women, too!) don’t even give the little embryo a chance to grow, a chance to feel the warmth of mama’s womb. Suppose somebody had done that to them? Well, turnabout’s fair play I’m sayin’. I say we get into their bone marrow and do some jiggering. Inject them with something chemical that’s gonna make’em feel like jello on a hot griddle.

As for them “doctors” that do abortions—hell’s too good for ‘em. I say we put’em in a little crawl space, get these giant forceps–and we crush their skulls. Do unto others, and all that.

’N’other thing: crime’s gotten outa hand since 9/11. There was some break while the criminals was layin’ low, bein’ cowards and all, but they been comin’ back full force. So, let’s not shut down Guantanamo! Let’s build a whole shebang more all over the world, carve out niches of land in commie regimes like Castroland, send these misfit criminal types there and let the locals at’em. Send’em to central Asia. They know how to boil people in oil over there. They been doin’ it since Jesus was in Bethlehem.

“What else?” you ask. …You got all this garbage on TV now. You got “cartoons” with foul-mouthed characters. Whaddaya gonna do? You can’t whup Homer Simpson. You can’t get to’em cause they ain’t real, but you can get to the “creators”–if you know what I mean. You got this show called “American Idol,” too. They got this guy wearing black nail polish! What kinda message is that sendin’ to the kids? Well, I say we extract his fingernails one by one—just like the Nazis used to do! I say we learn’em good. And that Simon Cowl judge-guy is an arrogant S.O.B. We oughta put him on the rack, see how much “stretchin” his ego can take!

Let’s not forget our Congress, either. You got Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi. I hear there’s some stuff they do with electricity in sensitive parts (!) that oughta shut those traitors up. And as for that white-black, smiley guy who stole the election—I’d put him through some “changes” I would. If you know what I mean!

All those guys that sold this country down the drain—yeah, bankers and CEO’s. What are we bailin’ them out for? We oughta be bailin’ them in. Right in the sewer! Ain’t they done enuf already? Ain’t they hurt the people good enuf? I say we strapado them! Put’em in the Iron Maiden!

We gotta quit this pussy-footin’. We gotta make examples of these vermin. Give’em gladius and sword and trident and net and let’em fight to death in the football stadiums and on the baseball diamonds. And the ones that win—we’ll make them figh again until old age or disease or mortal wounds finish’em off. Then we’ll hang their corpses from the nearest bridge. We’ll pike their heads! And we’ll show the world: we mean business! We’ll show them how tough democracy can be!

I ain’t sayin’ it’s pleasant for the torturer, but there’s some people who don’t mind it so much. Good, salt-of-the-earth folks like Lindsay England, for example—gonna smile for the camera while they tie up the scumbags and put out their cigarettes in the scumbags’ flesh. And good, honest patriots like Mr. Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. They ain’t gonna flinch. They’re gonna do what they gotta do. (And if we gotta rape the bastards,humiliate them before their Muftis and Allah–there’s plenty of cops who know where to put their billy clubs!)

We gotta get less “sensitive” about these things if we’re gonna win this War on Terror! We can’t let these Mueslis win or we’re gonna be back in the Dark Ages! War is hell as General Sherman said–and he oughta know! We gotta get some kick-ass backbone if we’re gonna save our country from all the garbage out there. Cause some things are worth savin’ and doin’ everything you gotta do to save’em. Some things ya just gotta do whether you like it or not. But there’s some people don’t mind it so much and we oughta use their talents!

“Why do you hurry and turn away—
You who are warmed by the sun?

“Once a year, on a ‘solemn occasion,’
You come for public mourning.
Officers offer orisons.
Politicians ply for votes.

“And we lie here in the dank cold
In Earth’s forlorn cathedral
Year after year recalling
Gilded words,
Lips we did not kiss and love,
Eyes that did not see our eyes,
And the eyes of enemies we did not know.”

Shush!
Be quiet! Be still!

Under the stones, under the raw sod,
Worry the worms, worry the casket’s
Satin, worry the groaning Earth,
Turning around on its axis,
Five billion years and counting.

On both sides of my family tree there were fools and sages, cynics and dreamers, the myopic and the far-seeing, the generous and the greedy. I grew up in a middle class Jewish neighborhood in Queens. On weekends we were far more likely to spend time with my father’s rather large extended Sicilian family than with my mother’s rather small Jewish family. My friends went to shul and studied for their bar mitzvahs. I went to my best friend’s bar mitzvah, and once I went to a Christmas Mass with one of my Italian aunts. I liked the bar mitzvah because I got to drink a little wine. I didn’t like the Mass so much because I didn’t understand the words, and I soon got tired of all the sitting and standing. But I liked my Aunt Sadie’s face when she prayed.

I think I was in junior high school when I learned the phrase “hybrid vigor.” It stuck because I imagined it applied to me. I felt privileged being what I was, able to look on both sides of the prism of truth. Occasionally, a friend, a relative, or someone just met, would tell me I would have to choose at some point between the religion of my father and that of my mother. But somehow that meant choosing between father and mother, and I never figured I could, for I knew them both to be decent people. If they found their own pathways to God, they managed to teach me by example that there were different ways up the mountain. By example they taught me to lead an honorable life, to be fair, to be just.

Though they argued often and loudly, I came to understand that their arguments, their volubility with words, were expressions of the dramatic nature of their characters. I never doubted the love between them. They argued because it was the way they danced, the way they sang to one another. They never argued about religion. Maybe they figured they could each ascend their own way up the mountain–so long as they were within calling distance of each other.

I was in my early teens before I understood much about the Shoah. We were in Miami Beach, in the famous Wolfies Restaurant on Lincoln Road, when an older man my mother knew slightly as a business associate of her father, joined us briefly at our table. He wore a short-sleeved “Florida” shirt, and I couldn’t help noticing the numbers tatooed on his forearm. Afterwards I asked my mother about it and she said she was glad I hadn’t asked while the man was sitting with us. Then she explained.

I had already learned about World War II, of course. I knew about World War I and the Civil War and the Revolution and I’d heard of the “Thirty Years’ War” and the “Hundred Years War.” Like it or not, I found myself smack-dab in the middle of the Cold War, liable to be emulsified by Russian missiles at any second. I was beginning to wonder if the history of humankind was nothing but the story of a long war punctuated by all-too-brief periods of tranquility.

The Russians were the enemy, but in those years, the years of a famously mumbling president (we’ve had a few since!), Interstate-building and the early, svelte Elvis, the Germans were the enemy, too. At least in my neighborhood. My best friend grew livid over my association with a German kid who lived three or four streets away. “I hate his guts,” he told me, “I hate his rotten guts.” He could never tell me why. It was nothing personal. It would be years before I understood he was mimicking the fear and loathing he’d learned at home.

I was sixteen when I experienced prejudice directly. I had fallen in love with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Polish-Jewish girl whose family forbade her from seeing me until her grandmother explained that it was all right since my mother was Jewish and that meant I was, too. I didn’t accept this formulation and I still don’t. I still wasn’t going to choose between father and mother, but if it meant I could go out with Susan, that was fine with me.

My family moved to Florida soon after, and by age eighteen the femme fatale was a dyed-in-the wool upper-class WASP, and this time it was her father who couldn’t stand my swarthy (good?) looks and my funny, hard-to-pronounce, operatic last name. So, by my late teens I was catching it from both ends of the ballpark. And all I wanted was a little nookie.

Prejudice…It cuts all ways…

The quality of mercy blesses him that gives and him that receives. But prejudice is a blade we hold in our bare hands. It cuts the giver and his object.

Somewhere along here, as I was experiencing all this pain that came out of loving, I decided that the only way I could win at this game was by not giving in; not becoming like the small-minded people who couldn’t see the love in me, the youthful reaching-out, the sense of wonder, the apprehension of beauty and grace in all its manifold forms.

I was reading a lot. I read Allan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny and a couple of other books on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. I understood the wretched Treaty of Versailles, the shame and humiliation of the Germans after “the war to end all wars.” I learned from William Shrier that a nation could go insane, that a people, just like a person, could suffer from megalomania and paranoia. I knew from the parents of my German friend that there were good Germans (my friend’s parents, less privileged, with heavy accents, were always hospitable and friendly). I knew from the books that many good Germans had tried to speak out to stop the Nazi juggernaut; but they’d been quashed, silenced, or killed; their lives destroyed, their writing and work discredited. Good guys don’t always win: it’s one of the painful lessons we learn from our childhood and from history.

I used to wonder if I would have had the courage to cry out against the madness, to take on mother and father, wife and brother, friend, son, sister, daughter to express myself forthrightly; to stake my claim in humanity, reason and justice. I wrestled with the angel of doubt. It was one thing to be the oppressed people–the Jews, the Roma, the Blacks. They had their life and death challenges, their cauldrons of fire, dens filled with lions. But to be a dissenter in the oppressors’ clan, the “weak link” in the chain of unity–the united front, the united-we-stand determination to root out evil or build a state or empire–that presented me with inestimable psychological challenges: nuances of identity and identification little different from a religious calling.

These challenges first came to the fore during the Vietnam War.

At fourteen I’d composed a song on my saxophone. The lyrics went something like this: “Our forefathers built a nation, / Strong in every way– / A wonderful country that maintains peace / It’s name the U.S.A….”

Gentle reader, I will spare you the rest. The point is, I was a true believer.

Then, in 1965, a special assembly was held at the University of Florida. I was nineteen, still bearing my sophomoric infatuation with my Waspish girlfriend whose family couldn’t stand me (they never even knew I was half Jewish! That would have been the coup de grace!) and suddenly Lyndon Baines Johnson was trying to whip me into righteous fury against people I’d never met, people who had done me no personal harm. There was the president of the university, and the deans, and a couple of other V.I.P.’s up there on stage trying to impress upon me and every other student–especially the males–just how important this Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was and how it was going to change our lives, so we’d better start thinking seriously about R.O.T.C., our duty, our country, freedom and democracy.

But I was still reading books. Books by Black authors like Richard Wright, W. E. B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansbury, Amiri Baraka. I read books by the pacifist German author Herman Hesse, and books by the dissident, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. I read the dystopic visions of Orwell and Aldous Huxley. And I was listening to the speeches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. That awful period that began for me with that surreal assembly did not end until 1975, with the fall of Saigon, the abandonment of our imperial ambitions in that small part of Asia, the loss of some 60,000 Americans and over two million Vietnamese. I read magazines like Ramparts and alternative publications like The Great Speckled Bird and the Boston Phoenix. Later I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and I wept for the genocide of those free and reverent nomads. And when I put all the reading together and all the listening together–what the people who were telling me to go and kill other people were saying … well, it just didn’t jive.

In the course of that terrible decade I taught in public schools in California and Massachusetts, and taught at the University of Florida as an Instructor for three years. There was no way to keep the war out of the classroom. Not if one believed in dialogue and dialectic as the foundation of democracy. My students wanted to talk and write about their deepest thoughts and feelings. I encouraged them. My approach was heuristic. When they asked me my thoughts, I expressed myself as clearly as I could. I graded them on the clarity of their expression–my job as their teacher. If they reached conclusions different from mine, that was their prerogative. One of my best students was the daughter of a military man. She reached different conclusions. Yet she aced my course. Her arguments were clear and cogent, and if I believed she was wrong, I could only hope that in time she would see the light.

This liberal approach earned me the enmity of some colleagues and administrators. Liberal, as in “liberal education,” was not yet a dirty word, but it was rapidly becoming one with Nixon and his “silent majority.” I learned that reason and clarity are, like certain customs in Hamlet’s day, “more honored in the breach than the observance.” I also learned that I would not buckle under. It cost me. It probably cost me a couple of good jobs–academic positions I had earned my rights to, and viscerally wanted. If I had kept quiet, “toned it down,” “put my energies elsewhere,” perhaps I would have remained in academia. My college roommate, also outspoken, wound up in Canada, where he’s a respected social critic today. Never underestimate the power of luck in our lives. I think it was Mencken who said that.

Towards the end of his life, the great nonagenarian Jewish painter, Marc Chagall, was asked why he had spoken out so vigorously on the social and political issues of his day. He shrugged and said, “We have to live with ourselves.”

Sometime during that terrible and terribly exciting decade, my feelings about the Jewish people began to change. I had been proud of the Jews for standing shoulder to shoulder with Blacks during the early Civil Rights Movement. They had lent financial and moral support and had put their bodies and careers on the line. Some Black leaders now say there was too much support, too much guidance–and maybe it’s so. But Blacks had suffered the apartheid of the post-Civil War period for a hundred years and I don’t think the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s could have gotten off the ground without the support of an inside group that had made and was making it.

I was proud of my half-Jewish heritage then. I have come to believe that there are no people anywhere who cannot take pride in their background–if they know the best of their stories. The Tower of Babel was never completed simply because people did not know how to tell other people their best stories.

But a strange thing happened around 1967 with the Six-Day War. My mother and I were visiting relatives in New York at that time, and suddenly, people who had never been political, could talk of nothing else. They said Israel was being threatened as it had not been threatened at any time since its founding. It was incumbent on all Jews to support Israel. The dialogue was changing.

Reform Judaism had been an honorable term in my childhood. Slowly, like the word “liberal,” the word “reform” became pejorative.

A great many Jews who had put themselves out trying to reform and improve the US system seemed almost embarrassed by their former efforts as they now fixated upon Israel. As a resurgent, recrudescent Israel, attached more and more firmly to America’s globalist ambitions, won war after war, employing first-rate technology against left-over technology, triumphalism reared its ugly head again–even as it had in King David’s time–as Jews began to believe God was on their side, victory was inevitable, the Promised Land would be restored, the Temple rebuilt.

A dreamy shepherd boy named David helps the warrior Saul establish a kingdom. David builds a small empire, taking another man’s wife in the process, alienating his son Absalom. Upon David’s death, another son, Solomon, later judged the wisest of men, arranges the death of his brother, Adonijah, extends the empire, tightens the reins of rule. When he dies, the northern tribes seek redress of grievances, to which the son of Solomon responds, “My father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.” The northern tribes judiciously rebel against this tyranny, and the empire dissolves into the two warring states of Israel and Judah, led respectively by Jereboam and Rehoboam.

History would be a great antidote to mythology if the two weren’t so inextricably entwined. Men will die and kill for their myths and their dying and killing make history, with its own awful imperatives lasting through generations.

With Israel’s easy victory in the Six-Day War, a new clan of military heroes arose–Moyshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon among them–new myths were created, old truths laid aside. Jewish popular psychology began to change, noticeable to me at the most personal level, within my family and among my friends.

Every new plateau of awareness reveals new vistas of ignorance, new mountains to climb. The struggle for awareness is eternal. I guess that’s why God has to live forever. God, as the Abrahamic religions envision God, is the only one capable of perfect awareness. But if God needed six days to create the earth, I guess it could take all of eternity to realize perfection.

The rest of us struggle with our personal histories within the matrix of tribal and world history. It’s a confusing mishmash of memory and amnesia, legend, truth, half-truth, religious verities and fabrications. It is not so much that humans do not learn the lessons of history, as that they learn them incompletely—or simply learn the wrong lessons.

Judaism offers a time-honored way to confront the confusion. At its best, it is a religion of core values (The Ten Commandments) that accepts change with Job-like patience, and perseveres, like Job, in its quest for understanding and justice. It has been an evolving religion from the beginning. From Abraham’s time it surrendered iconography and human sacrifice. The Old Testament is an anthology amended by various editors over a period of hundreds of years. Some five hundred years after the fall of the House of David, the Torah is given its final form. Samaritans break from the mainstream of Judaism, and Persian influence brings in the angels, the figure of Satan, final judgment and the resurrection of the dead. A Jewish reformer from Nazareth changes Judaism by forcing it to dig in its heels and define itself in the light of a Christianizing Roman Empire. Judaism is Hellenized, Socratic dialogue metamorphosing into Talmud and Midrash. Fourteen hundred years after Rehoboam, the Babylonian Talmud replaces the Palestinian Talmud. Sects like the Karaites emerge and decline. Kabbalah and Hassidism emerge and remain. False messiahs like Sabbatai Zevi come and go.

It is a river: like any long-lasting tradition, full of rapids and shallows; deep, clear water and stagnant pools. Parmenides said one could not step into the same river twice. Rivers either dry up, or they flow, changing their course, taking the renewing rains, making their beds as they find their own direction. “All the rivers flow into the sea,” Solomon tells us, “yet the sea is not full.” We can always learn; the sea can never be full.

Modern Judaism has been defined by two events: Zionism and the Shoah. Both are the results of eighteenth and nineteenth century nationalist movements. Zionism emerges from the failure of Reform Judaism, the “science of Judaism,” to find a welcoming home in the Western European democracies and, more especially, the Russian empire. Furthermore, the nationalisms of our modern age have been spurred forward and justified by a misunderstanding (often deliberate) of Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859). Where Darwin had spoken of “natural selection” as a means of adaptation to environment, imperialist apologists (like Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham Sumner in the U.S.), heard “survival of the fittest”–the right to conquer and subdue. Darwin himself revisited the question of human survival and adaptation, specifically addressing the moral dimensions of the struggle in his less well-attended-to Descent of Man (1871), the book he considered more important.* (See David Loye’s Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love, iUniverse, 2000). In Descent, Darwin emphasized the moral dimension of human choice, our capacity for compassion, empathy and understanding; the divine role we have in shaping our destinies. Growing a longer tail might do very well in helping lizards adapt to new environments, but for the human species, a finely-tuned aesthetic sensibility is apt to work much better.

Regrettably, Darwin’s later considerations were lost in the hoopla over Origin. So we have Judaism attaching itself, perhaps understandably, to the jingoism of 19th Century Robber Barons and European expansionism. Within this industrially and scientifically fermenting age, we have the collapsing Ottoman Empire and a Germany that has reunited after 200 years of dissolution following the Treaty of Westphalia. Buttressing nationalism, also spurred on by mis-reading Darwin, is the misguided “scientific” theory of eugenics, championed in the US by health enthusiasts like Kellogg, and later finding a place in the frenetic writings of a little corporal and failed painter in defeated Germany.

A manic alchemist could not have concocted a more sinister, combustible brew.

The manifold lessons of the Shoah, the physical suffering, the mental anguish of betrayal, the guilt of survival, the sense of emasculation and impotence, the searing, indelible memories, have been encapsulated in a poignant phrase: Never again! That phrase, in all the languages of the world, is the birthright and obligation of every Jewish child and every Jewish sympathizer, inextinguishable as the light of the Maccabees, a new covenant Jews have made to one another.

It is a vital, vibrant phrase. …But how can it possibly encapsulate all that the Shoah has to teach?

There is another lesson of Shoah, too often neglected. Perhaps some think that it undercuts the first message, but I think, instead, it makes for a more compelling, even more obligatory vision: that is, that any people, no matter how highly educated and “civilized,” have the seeds of destruction within them; any people, losing their way in the wilderness, are liable to lash out at others in an atavistic, barbaric fashion.

Never again must the Jews allow what happened to them to happen to them. And, just as compellingly, never again must Jews allow anyone to perpetrate such malice and violence against another.

Much of the story of Judaism since the Six-Day War and the Occupation is now about the lessons of the Shoah. Zionists loudly proclaim the first part of the message, using it to justify an ever expanding occupation and expropriation of lands. Jews from Brooklyn and New Jersey arrive in occupied Palestine, thumping on Bibles like Southern tent-revivalists, pointing to obscure passages as though they were ancient deeds and land titles. Behind them, they marshal the powers of the I.D.F. and the American military-industrial complex. They can also point to any number of Biblical passages that depict Yahweh as a jealous God who will wipe out every man, woman, child, goat, sheep, cat, dog and goldfish who defies Him.

Never again! they shout, and they shout down those who have learned other lessons. In Leviticus I read, “If a stranger sojourn with you in your land, ye shall not vex him. The stranger who dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And, a little later, “If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee.” And, most conclusively, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Hasn’t it always been about strangers and sojourners and neighbors and brothers? Once outside of Paradise, the first great sin is fratricide. Then, Ishmael is sent packing by his half-brother Isaac; Joseph is sold into bondage by his jealous brothers; Esau is duped out of his inheritance by his brother.

Do we not live in strange times? Zionists have jumped into bed with Christian fundamentalists who believe in their heart of hearts that these same Zionists must be restored to the land of Israel so that they can die in hellfire when Christ returns to earth to save the believing Christians who are ferried up (naked!) to heaven in a rapture. Is there any more fantastic alliance in the Bible? Only the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin could stretch our credulity more!

And these same Zionists claim that anyone who would gently remind them of the other lessons of the Shoah, and, indeed, of the humane face of Judaism–these same modern-day Zealots abhor their gentle admonishers as nothing but self-hating, anti-Semitic Jews!

So the fratricidal war of the Semites continues. Jew against Jew, Jew against Arab, Semite against Semite. Zionists and their fundamentalist Christian allies are wedded to a vision of apocalypse that may very well turn the 21st century into humankind’s bloodiest yet–if not it’s last!

The handwriting is on the wall, and we are at a defining crossroads.

In the history of any long-enduring people, there is much to take pride in, and more than a little to look on with shame. The human story is fluid, unfinished, evolving.

Are there 18 million Jews in the world? Then there must be 18 million versions of what Judaism is. Or, in Clintonese, it all depends on what is is.

Dialogue and dialectic have been fundamental to the Jewish tradition since the Talmud and the Midrash. There is no longer a Sanhedrin to tell Jews what to think and to condemn heterodoxy. Thinking, liberal Jews have been silenced by the rhetoric of the right, cowed by extremists into supporting policies that demean and dehumanize the other brother, as well as the self. Judaism, like all religions, like the story of humankind, is still unfolding, the human spirit still evolving. We can look back three thousand years to the House of David, but can we also look forward three thousand years to the House of Peace? Or does our imagination and groping for truth only move backward?

Perhaps the words of Albert Einstein may guide us on our way: “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable, superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”

If we perceive the present time as the pivot upon which eternity rests, we gain a sense of the weight and immediacy of the moment. Every moment of our lives we are destined to choose, and we had best, like Einstein, approach the crossroads with humility. No one can say he has his finger on the pulse of a religion because no one can have his finger on the pulse of a river. We are in it and of it, and we may be carried away blindly or try to get our bearings and understand where we’re going and how best we may captain the frail vessels of our intelligence.

So here I am, a half-Jew of the diaspora, wondering if there is a role for people like me in Judaism, and, if not, why not, and if so, what? I have to speak out and protest because, as the Talmud teaches: “If I am not for myself, who am I? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” A hybrid can’t help thinking about wholeness and reconciliation. Diaspora Jews are, in a way, the “other brother,” the one who went wandering. They took their questioning attitudes with them. Abraham didn’t question God’s dictum to sacrifice his son, but Job, broken and tortured, finally did question God’s judgment. Out of the Whirlwind, God says, basically, Never mind, you couldn’t possibly understand! (The ending a later amendment of the original, more Promethean tale.) But timing, as always, is crucial. Job gets his just deserts only after the turmoil and after the questioning!

This spirit of questioning and challenging–both the eternal verities, and the verities of the Zeitgeist—I take to be the crucial, life-saving, life-affirming core legacies of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. “Iron sharpeneth iron…” Solomon wrote. “so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” The wise man counsels his friend not to drive when drunk, not to steal the wife of another man, not to hitch his wagon to a seemingly invulnerable military-industrial complex wedded to Westernity (Westernization and modernity). Perhaps as great a legacy is the striving after justice–justice forged by the layering of doubt, and hope, and hard-won wisdom.

I may be like Esau, the hairy, “matted” brother who came out first, with his brother’s hand on his heel. Tricked out of his inheritance, Esau plots murderous revenge on his brother, who flees when he hears of it. Jacob goes into the wilderness, pines for Rachel, suffers and sweats at the hands of Laban, and, after fourteen years, returns to the land of his father. He has learned much. Fearful of retaliation, Jacob sends Esau propitiatory gifts. Esau, too, has learned much. He has prospered. He has gathered four hundred men to his tent. A hunter and military man, he has the power to swoop down on Jacob, his wives and his children. Instead, he embraces him, he welcomes him home.

It is the embrace of reconciliation grown out of suffering and new-found acknowledgment of their heritage. It is the acknowledgment of mutual suffering, reparations, acceptance and forgiveness.

After a while, Esau travels on, perhaps to greener pastures, perhaps merely to fulfill the wanderlust of his spirit. Perhaps to impart the counsel of his years. Perhaps he met the descendants of Ishmael on his way and they embraced each other, too. (I like to imagine one of his offspring found his way to Sicily, where he married a zesty woman with Greek blood.)

For my money, it’s one of the gems of the Bible, one of the stories they might have told at the Tower of Babel to keep from splitting into fractious tribes. If they had got their stories right, they might have built something worth building.

In a sense, we are all hybrids, composed of many strains of race, creed and culture. There are many stories of violence, ignorance and betrayal. We can cling to them, cling to that vision of what we have been.

Or, we can acknowledge, evolve, reconcile, and move forward.

It appears that not only have Yahweh and Jesus Christ forsaken Gaza, but so have the U.N., the E.U., the US, the Arab League and every other institution and congregation of arrogant nation-states that have mis-managed our post Cold War era.

Israel tied up its slaughter in Gaza with a ribbon and handed it to Barack Obama just in time for his Inaugaral warning to Muslims: Don’t shake your fists at us or we’ll defeat you! And our news-media Sanhedrin blessed the proceedings. Two days before the Inaugaration, Bishop Lester Holt on NBC managed to anchor 30 minutes of drivel about the “historic event” of handing the “reigns of power” from one pitchman to another—and never mentioned once the fact that both Israel and Hamas had declared separate “truces” on that very day.

But, why should this surprise us? We are in a celebratory mood because a single half-Black-half-White man, with exceptional oratorical skills, and a fair dose of charisma, is re-writing our “history” and persuading the world by potent example that we are the can-do people in the can-do nation where anything is possible. We are good, and we are free! Probably when the German emperors took over the Roman empire, the circus-loving citizens also convinced themselves that increasing poverty at home and loss of respect and territory abroad were really proof that things were getting better. Plus ca change, and so forth!

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way for the Gazans to have the American media take their dying and suffering seriously is for all the males to declare that they have suddenly become gay, and for all the females to declare themselves feminists. Obama’s Pastor Rick Warren would have to at least make some kind of public statement: Yes, Israel is exacting God’s punishment; or, hemming and hawing, maybe not. Senator Barney Frank might even offer a resolution in the Senate condemning the slaughter of so many defenseless homophiles.

As for the evisceration of so many Gazan feminists—Gloria Steinham might cart herself out of time immemorial and take a principled stand. We can even assume that Oprah will do a show on the subject. Perhaps she’ll invite Dr. Phil to reprise his “genuine, caring, witty doctor role.”

We Americans have always had trouble seeing the bigger picture. In the early days there was some justification: the land was so huge, and practically impenetrable. Torturously (and torturing the “savages” along the way), we pushed on. Still, who could comprehend it all? We bobbed along on currents of history like little dolls in a vast sea: behind us—600 years of the Holy Inquisition and a few hundred years of Luther’s Reformation; the barbarism of the Spanish Empire and the brutality of the British. British and French world wars that spanned continents–and somewhere a tiny outpost of colonials stands up and avers: We think we can exploit just as we ll as the King so why don’t you Redcoats get the hell out of here and let us maltreat our darkies just as we please? (Of course, we clean up the language for “history.”)

Just what is “history” anyway? During the recent commotion about the Inaugaration, our news prelates prattled on breathlessly about “the historic occasion.” And every Roman—I mean, American—who could articulate the party line seemed to appear on TV solemnly declaring his/her intention to “be part of history,” or “witness history.” Curmudgeon, I recalled what I’d learned in elementary school: history is what has been recorded. It began about 5,000 years ago with Sumerian (ancient Iraqi) cuneiform writing and today we are pretty much glutted with this history stuff. On the day of the Inaugaration, merely twelve miles from the center of it all, I decide d to participate in “history” by not going, but dutifully recording. Thus, my morning: “Arose late; checked my e-mails and the alternative news sites; concluded the world was still bad and sad; shat, showered,didn’t shave, ran around the block without trying to think of ‘history.’ (I failed.)”

Our excuse for not seeing the bigger picture now has quite metamorphosed. It’s not that we can’t take in the breadth of it all—most of us have seen the planet from the moon, after all—a pretty blue mothball swinging in eternity. The problem now is that we’re just overwhelmed—information overload. It’s all at our fingertips—a library on our computers. But, where to begin?

Hence, in the nick of time, the cavalry (or is that Calvary) of news prelates arrive to tell us what is history and what is not; what counts and what’s crap; whose lives matter and whose lives are scrapmetal. (Or, as Barbara Bush might say, Why bother our beautiful minds about all this unbeautiful bull-dinky?)

We’re left with a boutique morality. We no longer need concern ourselves with the “savage” red man. No point crying over spilt milk—even when it looks like blood! Let us pick and choose carefully—as in a boutique—the parts of the narrative that reflect well on us. You see, we have just allowed one hybrid to join the party—so, we can’t be all bad. Now we can rise and affirm our faith in the System once again. We will repeat the myths again: everyone can grow up to be president; everyone is equal. We will not say that the Class War will continue under President Obama, that the hard-won advances of the black, white and brown laboring classes have been annulled. We must excise those unpleasant, complicating stories from the popular narrative. Lincoln—good. Hitler—bad. Repeat: Muslims—terrorists. Must kill. Must maim. War bad … but, war often necessary. Evil-doers. … Etc.

We no longer comprehend “history” except as it is a manufactured event. And, as we have lost “history,” we have lost: our ability to contextualize, to see the bigger picture, to understand that causing suffering and not alleviating suffering are the great tests of our moral system; and, to understand that we have failed.

And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated and oppressed?—Men, women, and children whose cry is, “Our Lord! Rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from Thee one who will protect; And raise for us from Thee one who will help.
–The Holy Koran, Sura IV, Verse 75

Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You lock the kingdom of heaven before human beings. … You have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity.
– The Gospel of Matthew, 23: 13-27

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same.
–The Gospel of Luke, 6: 27

Just before the exit of the restaurant, my thoughtful, septuagenerian Leftist writer-friend is contemplating a poster of “The Rat Pack”–Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Lawford and Bishop in front of the old Sands hotel in Vegas, circa late 50’s/early 60’s. They’re all slim and young, hip and cool, smiling–and I comment, “The good old days! … Looks innocent now, doesn’t it?”

And he answers, “Are things worse now—or do we just know more about what’s going on … so they seem worse?”

“They are worse,” I aver, “because we know more—and because it is now.”

The tyranny of now! The poignancy of it. The brilliance of it. It’s fleeting beauty and its searing pain that notches itself into the psyche of the race, scours the memory and transfixes the future. “Too crowding, too confusing,” Frost wrote. “Too present to imagine.” The Now forever transcending Now.

It’s not just Santayana’s well-worn dictum about not learning the lessons of the past and having to repeat them. It is living long enough to watch the grotesque patterns constantly repeating themselves—an insane kaleidoscope of blood, gore, stupidity and treachery; a Mandelbrot set where Satan himself is the minuscule jester, infinitely repeating, dancing madly in the background of our lizard brains.

Whatever else it may achieve, Israel’s onslaught against women, children and the ridiculously mis-matched rag-tag “army” of Hamas men who are trying to protect them—whatever else it may accomplish, it has done this: It has destroyed the 60-year plus rationale of the Holocaust as Israel’s raison d’etre. The Zionist state has ensured that any claims it may have had against a war-weary world that “allowed” the Holocaust to happen must now be cancelled. Whatever moral high-ground Jews may have had to carve out of the Ottoman Empire a piece of their ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel is now ground turning to sludge beneath their war boots, their tanks, their US-paid-for F-16’s, their naval bombardments, their expansionist settlements, their apartheid policies.

I am not one to deny the Holocaust of the Jews (though research suggests ample reasons for questioning the numbers). One of the enduring horrors of the present state-terrorism against a practically defenceless population is that it has made “The Holocaust” irrelevant. There is no more Holocaust with a capital “H”! More than 60 years after the end of the holocaust of the Second World War—some 50 million dead; nearly 80 years after the holocaust of the First World War—some 20 million dead; more than a century after half a millennium of Euro-American holocausts against the natives of the Americas, Africa and Asia—100s of millions dead—we reach a forlorn conclusion: whatever else the attributes of the tool-using ape—the one that built the spires of Notre Dame, lofted the “St Mathew’s Passion” and erected the sublime scaffolding of the “Tao Te Ching”–, whatever else you may say about us, say this: We are a holocaust-making species. We’re not only genocidal, we appear to be geocidal, too. (Not all, of course; only the worst of us: most of our politicians, businessmen, preachers and entertainers!) While the names, nationalities, colors of our victims change with the generations, this central fact remains: powerful fanatics can always adduce imperatives to justify their rampages against the herded, far less powerful masses. And, yes, what the Zionist state is doing in Gaza now is a holocaust in the most degrading tradition of that horror genre!

If we recognize this little Satan dancing within our limbic systems—this tribal Id-itching for power and control—one next wonders if the sane, peaceful majority of our species can ever succeed in straight-jacketing the lethal maniacs? The way the question was framed when I was a kid in post-WW II and fin-tailed-cars-America was this: Where were the “Good” Germans? Next: Didn’t they know what was happening? Couldn’t they have stopped it? And if they knew, and did not stop the gaseous slaughters—weren’t they guilty, too? (And implied, therefore: Didn’t they deserve Dresden and the rest?) And if they did not know … shouldn’t they have known? And weren’t they guilty for not knowing? (Hannah Arendt, contemplating the accountant/owlish demeanor of Adolf Eichman even invented a term for the guilt of not-knowing and not caring to know: “the banality of evil.”) Now, should we not ask, Where are the Good Jews?

In fact, there are many “Good Jews” who are as disgusted with the steel-toed boots of Zionism as are their Gentile kindred. In fact, they are apt to feel more kinship with the uncircumcised Gentiles (and their Shiksas) than with their Bible-thumping, war-drumming cohorts who have exchanged helmets for yarmulkas. In fact, many Semitic children of Abraham and Sarah and Abraham and Hagar are wondering: Where did these Ashkenazi fanatics come from and how did they seize control of our religion, our politics, our very identities?

One place one is not going to find “Good Jews” is in the US Congress, especially the Senate. According to Wikipedia, the US Senate is 14% Jewish (out of a total US population of 1.4 % Jewish!) A chosen people, indeed, but what combination of international financing, media control and political corruption accounts for such divine choosing? (Just for fun, check out the number of Blacks in that exclusivist club: In 2005 when Barack Obama defeated the voluble but vacant Alan Keyes for the Illinois seat, he became the 5th African-American senator in US history. As of now, it remains to be seen whether Ron the Hair-guy’s choice of Ron Burris to fill Obama’s seat will bring the number of our black senators to the grand total of 1 (out of a total US population of about 14%!).

But not to worry! As Veep-Elect Joe Biden famously declared: “You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist!” Which means what exactly? Perhaps it means that whoever hoped for “change we can believe in” had better plant a few flowers at Paul Wellstone’s grave and pray for a resurrection. It means that the complexion of our president may change, but the Anglo-American-Zionist imperialist alliance that has bullied, ransacked, raped and murdered with a fair bit of impunity for some six decades now—that alliance is alive and well and still strutting at Balmoral Castle, Crawford Texas and in Bernie Madoff’s penthouse (at least for now).

It also means that Joe Biden can give Majority Leader Harry Reid a good run for his money as the dumbest politician in America today. Justifying the US Senate’s unanimous resolution to support Israel “in its conflict with Hamas,” the Good Mormon earnestly asked all Americans to consider how we would respond if Canada or Mexico were lobbing rockets at Buffalo, New York or San Antonio? Wouldn’t we respond just as the noble Israelis? Aside from the fact that most “Good Americans” don’t know the difference between a Zionist and a cinnamon twist, someone had best give Pastor Reid a brush-up course in Analogies.101. While Mexico may have weighty, recrudescent reasons to lob rockets our way, there is a considerable, rather inhospitable desert between our borders, and as long as their own crapulous politicoes can use the porous borders as a release valve to vent the steam of over-population, I believe we are fairly safe. And, even if a few jobless mariachi crooners suddenly go loco and fire a few rockets into the Salton Sea, would we then have the right to incinerate every man, woman, child and burro in greater Guadalajara? As for Canada—the main reason they have for sending rockets our way would be the inane TV shows we send their way. But we can probably rest easy. “ Law and Order” is not a real casus belli.

It is hard not to be cynical when one drives down Old Georgetown Road in the affluent D.C. suburb of Bethesda and sees a huge banner in front of a synagogue proclaiming, “We Support Israel!” First thought—a la Biden—what exactly does that mean? I have noticed this sign for several months now and each time I see it I wonder if there might be an amendment or two. And, each time, I sadly observe no refinement of the original impulse. The banneristas are what I like to call “Up to a Point” people. They reach some comfortable conclusion then will not go beyond it. They will kill and die, torture and be tortured to maintain that psychological comfort zone. If we were alien beings observing the phenomenon from space, we might shake our bulbous, gray heads and fly on. Unfortunately, the un-brain-dead among us are left dreading the next object of the proclamationists’ contemplation.

Second appertaining thought: Didn’t we used to have some laws and some consensus about the separation of Church (read synagogue, temple, mosque and shrine) and State? If the banneristas want to declare their allegiance to a foreign power in a my-country-right-or-wrong sort of jingoistic way, haven’t they broken at least one covenant with the rest of the community in which they flourish? Basically, if they insist on taking political positions—and what else are they doing?—can’t the rest of us start taxing them? Can’t we make a fuss? There must be a God-awful lot of tax moolah to be had from all those rattling collection plates and Bingo nights. (Not to mention Bernie Madoff type charities.)

A campaign to tax the warmongering churches and synagogues is one way we can begin to take back our world. And on that subject, we might wonder just how much of our tax dollars in our sinking US economy has been flushed down the porcelain bowl while supporting the Zionist entity’s acquisition and utilization of weapons of mass destruction? Since Anwar Sadat played footsie with Menachem Begin, there’s been an overt transfer of wealth of two billion a year in “foreign aid” to Israel and one billion a year to our favorite living mummy, Mubarak. A billion here and a billion there is real money—but it’s a pyramid of beans when compared to the covert aid in military equipment, training and intelligence. What if cheated, foreclosed-upon Americans, without health care, with lousy schools and a crumbling infrastructure, stopped hemorrhaging tax dollars to the murderous war-machinery of the American-Zionist empire?

If one needs anger and disgust to fire up the movement take a quick look at these US Representatives primping, preening and expostulating before the Israeli media of Ha’aretz, etc.:

(Frankly, I could not get beyond looking up the nose of Henry Waxman looking down his nose at the camera!) What are we paying these jackasses for? Have they made the world safe for democracy? Have they added an iota of humanity to the eternal struggle for light, truth, peace and understanding? Can we fire them? Can we rise up in rebellion? Can we stop being herded like cattle to election booths in order to pull levers for the sake of meaningless slogans that do not save a single child from these days of infamy?

Among the terrible pictures that I have seen on the Web, pictures that Palestinians and friends of Palestine have sent me, the most terrible was not of shattered, mutilated bodies, of blasted lives and unendurable pain. The most terrible was a picture of young Israelis standing within their secure borders (of occupied Palestine!) looking at the devastation being visited on the terrified civilians of Gaza a couple of miles away. And the unremitting horror of that image was that those who watched the bombs bursting in air and the puffs of death rising—they were smiling.

I searched my memory banks to recall where I’d seen such an image before. It was many years ago in a book about the Civil Rights struggle in America and it showed a lynching of a black man and a crowd of grinning whites—men, women and children in a party mood under the limbs of the tree upon which hung the burnt and crucified corpse. It used to be possible for travelers in the apartheid US south to purchase postcards depicting such scenes—and they had captions like, “One less Nigger to worry about!”

Nigger! Terrorist! How easily we have learned to dehumanize a population which was defrauded, whose lands were expropriated, whose children have been mutilated. What happens in Gaza will not stay in Gaza. What happens in Gaza will very likely happen in New York or London or Tel Aviv within the twinkling of an eye. We are all Niggers here! We are all “the other” in someone else’s nightmare. Very well, then. Let us stand with the Niggers of Gaza and everywhere against the grinning lynch mob. Niggers—unite!

Naomi Klein offers some good ideas.

We can boycott the lunatics. We can cut off their funding, the life-blood of money they suck out of the system. There’s a site, inminds, that names names and provides details.

Do we really need to spend $5 bucks for a cup of latte from Starbucks so that CEO Howard Shultz can be honored with a “Friend of Zion Tribute Award?” Must we stuff our faces with McDonald’s lousy burgers so that chairman and CEO Jack M Greenberg can work with the Jewish United Fund to “maintain American military, economic and diplomatic support for Israel; monitor and, when necessary, respond to media coverage of Israel”? We need a burger man monitoring our media? There are many more suggestions at the inminds boycott site. Let us cry out now and back it up with our dollars: Enough already!

Let us also boycott the cultural products of this insanity! Do we really need to see one more movie about the Jewish holocaust? Are there no other tragedies to ponder? Can I think of no better way to entertain my date than to take her to another Stephen Spielberg movie? Must I buy Elie Wiesel’s next book just because Oprah tells me I should? Can we learn to think for ourselves again?

A sound way to oppose the grinning lynchers is to expose them. Zionism can no longer be peripheral to American politics. We need to educate ourselves and demand that it be a central topic in our political campaigns. We can no longer excuse the genuflections of Obama, Biden, Hillary, et. al. before AIPAC—our most powerful lobby.

The Buddhists talk about Saddha—a questioning process for the soul. We grow through experience, self-interrogation about right and wrong—not by blind faith in a creed, an ideology, a religion, a national or ethnic identity. But, through study, meditation, good works and courage we may achieve a measure of enlightenment and a higher level of humanity.

Morality—our behavior towards our own human species and other species–supersedes any allegiance to the tribe. Whether it is Rabbi Hillel exhorting us not to do to others what we don’t want done to ourselves, or whether it is Jesus the Nazarene expressing the idea in the affirmative, the message is the same. Without empathy, we are a doomed species. Those without it will always be barbarous. Our modern “civilization” (finance capitalism with media/academic/military control) does everything to crush it, deny it. Arnold’s lines come to mind: “And we are here as on a darkling plane / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” Yet we endeavor to preserve our empathy because we know without it we are lost, we are nothing. Our only real strength is in our relationships.

Is there an empathy gene? Can it be switched on, switched off? Can it be cultivated? Is it there in some and not in others? Have we been “naturally selected” over the millennia to turn it off as the warrior traits were favored over the nurturing? Nine years into the New Millennium and we are drowning in our own excrement, wedded to the hag of ancient ideas.

But some of those old ideas are like amaranths, always ready to bloom again with proper nourishment. About wisdom, Solomon wrote, “She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.” And about opposing evil, exposing stupidity and acting with courage and morality: “Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it.”

Characteristically, a spokesman for the last Superpower blamed the herded people, the bombed and slaughtered, for their own miseries. It seems these herded Palestinians had had the effrontery to rebel against their Zionist masters in Tel Aviv, London, Jerusalem, New York and Washington.

Surely, one shoe-thrower protested, the world would see that they had as much right to rebel as Juddah Maccabee had to rebel against Hellenization—the alien creeds of Graeco-Romanism. Surely they had as much right to rebel as the Jews who rebelled against the emperor Tiberius; and, more recently, they had as much right to rebel as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Hadn’t the Superpower enshrined the right of rebellion in its own sacred document—its Declaration of Independence: all men (and women—they should have said!) are endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Further, whenever any government became destructive of those rights, it was the duty of the people to alter or abolish it.

For more than 60 years the Palestinian people had seen their lands taken from them, their olive groves ransacked, their children killed, their young men imprisoned, their women humiliated and beaten. During the decades that the last Superpower had fought a Cold War with the next-to-last Superpower, these people and their Arab cousins had been played and sacrificed like so many pawns on the chessboard of the Great Powers. Promises had been made, resolutions (like # 242) passed in the world body of the UN—but time passed, years passed and it was discovered that the words didn’t mean what they were supposed to mean. The Anglo-Americans and the Zionists made treaties of the kind that had been made with the native peoples of Turtle Island/North America. Treaties good as long as grass would grow and wind would blow. And the “sand niggers” of Palestine would discover, as the red man had discovered before him, sometimes grass don’t grow and wind don’t blow.

During the Festival of Lights, 2008, the lights went out all over Gaza. In two days of unabated horrors, 300 people were massacred, 900 wounded and thousands of lives of mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children and friends were forever despoiled. During the Festival of Lights, 2008, the Zionists shamed the ancient religion of Judaism and proved to the world that theirs is not the universal religion of high-minded Leviticus: “And if thy brother be waxen poor and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner; that he may live with thee.” The Zionists have shown that they are the children of a lesser God—a schizoid God who blesses and curses in the same chapter of the same text: “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. … Of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.”

In the films of my childhood, the “big movies” about World War II, the Nazis were easily identifiable as evil incarnate. They were stiff and military in their pressed uniforms and high, polished boots. Their gestures were stiff salutes, forearm thrust from heart to all the world in front of them, proclaiming “Heil Hitler!” But the clearest sign of their brutishness was their notion of collective punishment. If one person in an occupied town was driven to madness by the occupiers’ savagery and inhumanity; if one person struck out for the inalienable right to liberty; if one among the hundreds or thousands of villagers or townsfolk struck a Nazi officer—or killed a Nazi soldier—then the men of the occupied territory were lined up and forced to count, 1 to 10, 1 to 10, over and over and the tenth man in each group was bid to step forward and then executed.

Collective punishment. Not a new idea of modern warfare. As old as Yahweh ordering the destruction of every man, woman, child, sheep, goat and parakeet in some village in Canaan. And when the Superpower wanted to test out it’s mad-scientist weapon, its “terrible, swift sword,” it did not hesitate to collectively punish hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because their leaders had had the effrontery to attack a naval station that was being prepped for war against them. How dare the occupied rebel? How dare the war-trodden resist?

Occupation. After the French and Indian War (really a side-show in the World War between France and Britain) the Brits believed they had the right to quarter their soldiers in the homes of the colonists whom they’d spent blood and treasure to “defend.” The colonists, on the other hand, thought they’d be a lot better off without the damned redcoats pinching their daughters and mucking up the place.

Have we become a species too stupid to learn? HUMAN BEINGS DON’T LIKE BEING OCCUPIED. THEY WILL REBEL. THEY WILL CAST STONES. Even against a Goliath, they will cast stones. A Goliath that has spent the last six months of a “peace treaty” closing borders through a stranglehold of checkpoints, obstructing the flow of food and medicine to a malnourished and sickened population of one and a half million imprisoned souls, is likely to get a few sling-shots and home-made rockets pointed in his direction!

A century ago, Zionist zealots hijacked the little religion of Judaism, got on the bandwagon of 19th Century nationalist movements and dreamed very big. They dreamed of a homeland for the wandering Jews. Good enough … but when they cast about to see where to plant New Jerusalem they failed to see, they failed to imagine—because they could not imagine the humanity!—that other people—Semites—were living in the land, some of whom could trace their origins back to before the time of the Hebrews. And the Great Powers—Britain and America, especially—nursed the deluded dreams of the Zionists because it was in the interests of the Great Powers to challenge the old empire of the Ottomans and the emerging power of Germany.

During the Festival of Lights, 2008, before the last candle of the menorah could be lit, while the children played with their dreidles and received their Hannukah gelt, their blind and deranged parents and grandparents rained terror upon a shackled people in an open-air prison, ensuring that the children in the Holy Land and elsewhere in our tortured world would know neither peace nor joy nor light for many years to come.

“Military-industrial”; “Humvee”;
“Bombs bursting in air”;
“Predator”; “duty … honor … country. …”

BAM! Ker-pling! Ka-boom! BAM!

Even “pride,” even “love”–
Drafted into service.
Every word has a medal
Stapled on its buttocks.
Every word’s a hero
In an honor-guard casket
With a flag drooling over.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. …
S p l a t !

Armor-piercing bullets say,
“Accept the world as it is!”
The shock and awe of their logic
Like cancer in children’s dreams.

Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom….
BAM!

Guns talk to guns–
A crimson tete-a-tete.
Nothing succeeds like excess.
Under the din of mourning–
Litigious sirens wail.

Snap! Crackle! Pop!

There is no light except for
Laser-guided missiles … and … possibly

Whoosh!

Enhanced night-vision goggles.

Minerva, Juno, Mother Mary, you sent us your messenger, Barack Obama, who delivered his sermon, called, “Change We Can Believe In.” And the wind soughed, filling my world with pine freshness, and the clouds scudded and I thought: It’s change I can’t believe in that I want! I can’t believe that America will declare peace on the world, cut its military budget by 9/10 and work towards the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, by 2010. I can’t believe our hospitals will open their doors to the needy, treat our citizens to the kind of health care enjoyed by the Japanese, Venezuelans, Germans, Scandinavians and other people in rich and poor lands around the world. I cannot belie ve that we shall have socialism in America—not real socialism with a little “s,” based on fairness and egalitarianism (though I do believe we shall continue to have “socialism for the rich” which is really just another phrase for fascism!). I cannot believe that our media will relinquish control of the airwaves they’ve stolen; that they’ll disseminate views countervailing and discordant to the cozy relationship between our corporations and government. I cannot believe there will be campaign finance reform thanks to said cozy relationship and the fact that the System has prevailed again. I cannot believe that we shall have a “re-birth of freedom” in our arts; that we shall have more public financing of “people’s art”—art that captures the Zeitgeist, unites people, and informs our minds, hearts and spirits. I cannot believe that funding for our schools will be based on a national tax—not local taxes—so that the children of rich and poor communities will have equal opportunities to learn, grow and fledge their wings. I cannot believe that we shall abolish student loans and that we shall open our universities to all who seek proficiency and greater understanding. I cannot believe that we shall have free television to bring us language-learning programs, and local, national and international theater. I cannot believe that we shall have high-speed, clean-running trains as in France or Japan. I cannot believe our police officers will stop arresting our youths—especially minority youths—because they smoke a joint for recreation or are addicted to crack or hero in e, seeking release from pain or poverty, drudgery or desperation. I cannot believe we shall double or triple the minimum wage, and cap wages or maximize taxation at the top in order to restore ideas like noblesse oblige and a shared humanity. I cannot believe we shall find you again, Pan—wild god of the forest—and make peace with you, honor your sanctuaries, restore your ravaged heritage. I cannot believe we shall clean Neptune’s oceans and Hermes’ skies. I cannot believe we shall change our diets, grow our own food, stop the industrial slaughter and torture of animals. I cannot believe we shall stop torturing other human beings, or that we can control our own growth, our population explosion. I cannot believe we’ll trade in our insane culture of greed, celebrity and power-lust for one of compassion, community and common sense. I cannot believe we can restore balance to our fractured world.

Oh, God, send me a check for a quadrillion, make it out to the poor, forgotten and desperate–those still longing to believe, though they cannot now believe.

Then … silence. …

You think you’re okay, but you look down and your forearm
lies in the street like a dead snake and you collapse.

You don’t think:

“It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the blasts that went off within minutes of each other, but the region is torn by dozens of militant separatist groups that have long fought the government and one another.”

This will come within minutes from those who were far away–
cool and calm analysis, almost reassuring in its syntactic coherence.

You are suddenly cold from the loss of blood
and you wonder if you will die and you cry out
in someone else’s voice underwater.
But none of the rushing men notice.

You are twenty two and you have/had a good job–
you were earnestly trying to help.
But now you think there was no point to your life,
and you remember your mother and father
whose voices are in the sirens.

You are embarrassed to have
emptied your bowels,
and your white shirt is red and muddy,
your tie is choking you
and the men and women are running wildly but slowly.

You wonder if the gleaming metal in the street
is part of the motorcycle that sheared off your arm.

Somebody squats down, peers at your face, then rushes on.

There are many people screaming now
but you can’t know if one of them is you
because nothing sounds like it used to.

You watch the sun come down into the road
and then there is only
soughing, impregnable blackness
sucking air from your lungs.

Gary Corseri: Just a little background: I was reading your articles on the Web, with much interest, getting a lot of information; then, I was pleased to find your favorable comments on something I’d written. I wrote you that, should you find yourself in the D.C. area, give a holler—and, you’re the only guy I ever wrote that to who actually hollered!

Richard Cook: (Laughs.)

GC: So … here we are … I want to get into your ideas—your views on the economy … But first, can you tell us a little about yourself? I’ve read some of your first book, Challenger Revealed, and I think it’s fair to say that you established your reputation as a whistle-blower back in 1987 in front of the Presidential Commission on the space shuttle disaster. You worked for NASA, you were prescient back then, your warnings were ignored or dismissed. I hope that some of us are a little smarter, and that there are more of us who can better heed your warnings now about our free-falling economy. First, Who is Richard Cook?

RC: When people ask, I say I’m a Native American: I was born in Montana, grew up in Michigan and Virginia. My ancestors have been part of American history; one of them was in the Oklahoma land rush; a great, great, great grandfather was in a Civil War unit that served with Grant; my grandfather and father served in the navy in the World Wars.

When my parents moved to Virginia, my mother worked as a tour guide in colonial Williamsburge, and I learnedl about American history through her. … I graduated from William and Mary, where I majored in English and studied the history of the Western world, as well as Eastern religions. I became a student of cultures then.

Upon graduation, in 1970, I got a job working for the U.S. civil service commission. It was the height of the Vietnam War—a war I strongly opposed! I worked for the government for a couple of years, then taught history at a private school for two years. I returned to the same civil service agency—I felt a call back to government service. I worked for two more years in planning and evaluation. Then I was offered a job in the Food and Drug Administration.

GC: You’re basically trained as an analyst; you look at figures, examine budgets, you—

RC: I was trained as a writer in college. I wrote a novel for my honors project. When I came to work in D.C., I was a policy analyst. They’d give me a topic—What do we do about lower-grade employees, how to assist their advance up the ladder? I’d talk to the experts, gather information, present my findings. After working at FDA for two years, in 1979, I was given a job in the Carter White House, where I worked on the staff of the special assistant for consumer affairs. When the Reagan administration came in, I got a close-up view of the presidential campaign. Being in the White House office, we saw what was going on; for example, the Reagan campaign stole Jimmy Carter’s briefing book to prep Reagan for the debates. When Reagan won, I was moved out of the old executive office building. I didn’t have much to do for a couple of years; consumer affairs was not a high priority with Reagan.

My wife and I decided to leave Washington; we bought a farm in West Virginia; worked the farm for two years. After a while, I returned to Washington, worked for several months for a defense contractor. I wasn’t making much money and my wife was pregnant! I applied for civil service jobs and was surprised when I got the call from NASA. I had no hard science background. But they hired me as a resource analyst in the comptroller’s office. My first assignment was to go to the office of Space Flight, talk to the engineers about this problem they were having with the solid rocket booster O-rings. These engineers opened up to me and began telling me how dangerous the problem was with the O-rings. They spoke almost in whispers. One of them said “We hold our breath every time this thing goes up.”

GC: What would happen if these O-rings failed?

RC: The space shuttle would blow up. … These were not things I had to dig out of these guys. They wanted to tell me. … I think they were trying to get a message up to headquarters around their own management because there was a sense in the office of Space Flight that bad news should not get out; they wanted to “manage” these problems without publicity.

GC: Pre-emptive cover-up!

RC: Right! Although I did find, after the disaster, that the top people did know about these problems. Not from thick, analytical reports that were documented and went up the line; they knew because somebody told them at a meeting—or in a hallway.

GC: But, the problems weren’t documented … so, they could cover their own asses!

RC: Right. By that time I knew very well how analysis should be done. These problems with the O-rings, etc., should have been the subject of major studies. But the space shuttle program was highly politicized; it was heavily dependent on reimbursement from customers—including foreign governments flying their satellites on the shuttle; and, including the scientific community putting their space probes on the shuttle. … But the most important customer was the Department of Defense. At the DoD, it was the same: the top people might have been told in hallway conversations that certain things were going on—but nothing was documented. … Congress knew nothing about any of this. The press knew nothing. The White House, the OMB knew nothing—I mean, not just the O-ring problems, but other problems such as space shuttle main engines, spare parts shortages, accidents that were occurring at the Kennedy Space center because of the accelerating flight schedule. So, people who funded the program—Congress–, people who oversaw the program—the Executive office, the President—and the Press were very much in the dark. There were a series of problems that could have stopped the program … and I think, they assumed in the Office of Space Flight that something was going to stop it, something was going to fail—

GC: –To blow up?

RC: Right … that sooner or later we’re going to have a disaster and it’ll stop—because we can’t keep going at this pace; sooner or later we’ll have to stop and fix the problems, but we can’t tell our customers we’re not able to fly for them and meet our commitments!

GC: You write about the accelerating flight schedule in your book.

RC: 15 flights a year in 1986. The target was to get it up to two flights per month!

GC: And this was to make the program pay for itself?

RC: By then, no one believed it could pay for itself. But that didn’t mean that the reimbursements that NASA was getting wasn’t … nice. They were getting a billion dollars a year from the DoD. That’s a lot of payroll to meet. They needed the money, but they also needed to maintain their monopoly on the space launches. The purpose of the shuttle was to fly everything. This was to be the launch system for the Free World. All foreign satellites, all space probes, all defense missions were to fly on the shuttle—spy satellites, etc. Yhe pressure was on to fly everything the National Security world needed, everything our scientists needed, everything our foreign allies needed. Nobody was willing to say, We’ve got to stop!

GC: Isn’t this endemic to systems? Whether we’re talking Communist, socialist, capitalist, corporatist—there’s something within the system that builds this pressure to succeed, to justify itself—and that’s where, ideally, people like you come in. … You’re the watchman on the tower and you’re supposed to be saying, “Hey, wait a minute, something’s not right here!” But then, it’s also characteristic of systems that people like you are shunted aside.

RC: We’re the canaries in the mine! I was told when I got to NASA, when I spoke to the Space Flight people, that I was supposed to be an adversary. Adversarial on the budget side. … But, you’re right—the analyst is the one who’s supposed to prick the balloon. But, the system at NASA was a juggernaut. … I was there at the time that Peter Drucker’s ideas on management mission statements had come into vogue. Management set the objectives and everyone was supposed to fall into line. If there were problems, the engineers were supposed to fix them—but without a major re-design.

GC: Because that would slow things down, cost a lot of money?

RC: Right … one of the features of the space shuttle program was that they never tested the way the aeorospace engineering community was used to testing—on a component by component basis. Once you’ve tested your components, you put those together in a unit, then you test the unit, then you build up to a live test. They didn’t do that. They built everything together at once and tested it, then went back and said, If it’s too bad, we might do something, but if it’s little things, we won’t. The shuttle never had a test flight. They built it, put the crew in it and hoped everything work. But on the second flight, they began to see the O-rings fail.

GC: So this is where you come in … You write powerfully in your book about the day of the Challenger disaster; you go rifling through your files; you search your old files; something is ringing in your ears; you’ve seen this in your mind’s eye; and you find your files and it turns out you’ve written about the potential for this disaster and it was ignored or dismissed.

RC: That’s how it happened! My first report was about the potential for failure of the O-rings. And I gave that to my supervisor who asked me to “keep tracking the issue.” I would meet fairly regularly with the engineers, tracking their findings and concerns. What I didn’t know was that in August of 1985, they had called in the engineers from the Thiokol corporation, along with the program office from the Marshall Space Flight Center, and they had this big meeting in Washington where they decided how to try to fix the O-rings joints (They never told me about this before or after!) Ironically, they figured out how to fix the problem then, but they weren’t able to implement these changes before the Challenger launch!

GC: One thing I’d like to get into—because it startled me when I read it. … To understand what this O-ring is, it’s where the segments of the rocket come together, and it allows for the decoupling in space, and that would allow for the re-use of the whole system … and you described how this is put together with putty! That amazed me.

RC: The putty is in there as a heat shield … (Gestures with his hands as he explains the technical aspects of the segmented rocket.)

GC: So, this is the kind of putty I put around my bathtub?

RC: (Laughs.) You can buy O-rings in a hardware store. Yes, heat-resistant putty.

GC: You said the scientistsdidn’t completely understand the physics—why there had been no charring of the O-rings on the second test-flight. But yet there was this pressure to go on.

RC: That’s right … Around this time, I was given another assignment to look at the Centaur upper stage of the rocket. I was supposed to write a history of the Centaur program. And, as I delved into it, I began to think—Jeez, this is even worse than the O-rings! I became convinced that the Centaur was the immediate threat to the shuttle … (A brief explanation of where the Centaur is located on the shuttle; jet propulsion, etc.) The Centaur was the upper-stage rocket and it was the heaviest, most dangerous upper-stage ever built because it ran on liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

GC: Isn’t that what the Hindenberg was all about?

RC: Yeah, that’s a good analogy. The astronauts would launch while carrying a Hindenberg in the payload bay.

GC: Wow! … Obviously, there’s a lot more of this in your book. … But, for now, I’d like to return to the question of your credibility, which is essential to appreciate your views on the economy. … I see you as somebody who’s somewhat prophetic: you saw the danger, you tried to sound the warning, and, like my friend, Laocoon, you were ignored. And so, tell me just a little bit about that process … Your first report was about the potential failure of the O-rings. You file your report and you’re told to keep track of it. You do so, but nothing changes. Then, the disaster occurs, what next? Before too long you go before Congress and—

RC: –before the Presidential Commission and … What happens is that NASA started a cover-up. They were not going to tell anyone that there was a long history of problems. Eventually, they’d let the technical people come up with a technical explanation. They were never going to let the whole story come out. And I was there with the documents I had, sitting at my farm in West Virginia, and I said to my wife, I can’t go through with this. They expected me to go along. They expected me to be part of the cover-up of one of the greatest disasters in US history. I felt very challenged. I felt indignant. No one ever told me, Rick, we want you to cover this up … but it was obvious. … it was taken for granted that you would go along. There were orders that went out from the head of the agency—not to talk to the press and not to speculate about the causes of the accident. I felt some kind of inner drive to disrupt this. That wasn’t what I’d signed on for when I came to be a civil servant.

GC: You were putting your career at risk?

RC: Oh, yeah. And, even my life. I was told, “They kill people for less than this.”

GC: Who told you that?

RC: A newsman. …

GC: Okay, the bottom line is, you submitted your reports, your sounded the warning, and there’s no real change. The damn thing blows up, kills Christa MacAuliffe and six other astronauts … and then there’s a cover-up. So, what next? You went to the media?

RC: It was thought at first that NASA would investigate itself; but soon afterward, a Presidential Commission was appointed, headed by Donald Regan, Reagan’s chief of staff. I later determined that the Presidential Commission was set up to deflect the investigation from the White House … because the real reason they launched the Challenger that morning was for Reagan’s publicity purposes—particularly for his State of the Union speech where he was going to talk about Christa MacAuliffe. That was where the real pressure came. NASA had a flawed system—a cruddy spaceship that could blow up … but the pressure to launch came from the White House. So, the Presidential Commission was supposed to manage the news and protect the White House. When I saw the cover-up emerging, I took all of my O-ring papers down to the New York Times, met with their science reporter and explained how the whole thing had happened. I gave them my documents, including my memo from the previous July where I was named as the person who had investigated this and had given warnings … When the story came out, the Commission met behind closed doors and decided they were going to discredit me and the O-ring papers. When I got on the stand, the chairman started grilling me, stating that I was a new employee with no technical knowledge—and what was I doing questioning my betters? I stood my ground, went through the history of what I knew. That was the first the world heard that NASA knew what had happened. … I never returned to NASA after that. I had a job offer from Treasury and I reported to Treasury the following week. However, I did continue investigating the issue, on my own, over the next two years. Finally, I tracked how the Reagan White House had actually caused this disaster. I talked to someone who was Reagan’s astrologer [!]—learned how they had recommended to Reagan that he not launch, but he went ahead and did it anyway, in spite of his knowing there was trouble with cold temperature launches. It was Reagan who made the final decision—all that pressure he brought to bear for publicity’s sake … But, by that time, it was out of the news. The media didn’t want to hear about it any more, they gave Reagan a free ride. I put my notes away for 15 years. When I could see the approach of my retirement from government, I got my notes out again and wrote the book, which documents the inside story.

GC: This tells us a lot about this society. … Even when the information is out there, the cover-up continues; the media just ignores it or lets the story die. … We can segue to where we are now, 21 years after the disaster. We’re facing a different kind of disaster, a financial one … and you’ve written a lot about it. Now, you didn’t have a technical background, and yet you were a whistle-blower for technical problems. You don’t have an economics background, but you’re a whistle blower on the economy and the way our economic system works. How do you have credibility in economics?

RC: It just happened that I ended up in NASA … Well, after NASA, it just so happened that I ended up in the Treasury Department—the heart of the beast. I spent 21 years there studying the economic system of the US government—the financial system. I had a lot of time on my hands. I was a pretty good analyst and I could do what they wanted me to do pretty readily. So, I studied in depth. If you look at it going back to colonial days and the history coming out of England—the history of how the governments operated–corporate finance is a big part of Western history. These corporate financial systems really were developed through the Roman Catholic church. Western financial systems came out of the medieval papacy. They were the ones with the money—and they put together a very good system of public finance that has carried down through today.

GC: I’ve got to ask you—where do the Jews come into this? Because many people think it’s all controlled by the Jews.

RC: In medieval days, because the Church prohibited usury, the Jews became the ones who did the dirty work—handling finances for the Pope and the King. Having no religious prohibitions against finance and usury, the Jews became the financial class of Europe. They also became the gold merchants who were the first ones to practice fractional reserve banking. People would place their gold with the gold merchants who would then issue certificates against it, and then they would issue certificates against gold that they didn’t really have—the issuance would exceed the actual reserve.

GC: Fractional reserve is the idea that a bank can lend more than it actually has. Ten times or more. Isn’t it 30 times these days?

RC: It depends on what the reserve requirement is. Today it’s fairly low. … Anyway, that whole system came out of the Middle Ages … When William of Orange came over with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he brought people with him who set up the Bank of England. The Bank of England has been the model for Central Banks to this day! It was created to loan money to the British government to fight its wars. That’s the model that we have today … it’s the system of our Federal Reserve when it was put in place in 1913. …

At Treasury, we worked very closely with the Fed. The Fed is the fiscal agent for the US Treasury. So, I learned about the Fed and how it worked in the trenches at Treasury. By the time I was getting ready to leave Treasury—around 2002/2003, I began to delve into the monetary reform movement that had existed in the US for a very long time, but which I had just begun to study in some detail. At the Carter White House, I had begun to learn about the British Social Credit Movement which came out of Britain in the 1920s and ‘30s as kind of the first monetary reform movement in the Western world. And all of this fit together in my mind around 2002-3, and I began to post some articles on the Internet under a pen name—though I still worked for Treasury. I also had gotten to know Stephen Zarlenga, the director of the American Monetary Institute, and I advised him on writing his monetary reform legislation—the American Monetary Act that he has in his brief to members of Congress. I also met Dennis Kucinich when he was running for President in 2004, and I gave some briefings to Dennis on US monetary history.

GC: Does Kucinich favor your monetary system?

RC: In fact, in the article I’m writing now, I note that Dennis just came out with a 16-point economic program—and one of the points focuses on the American Monetary Act on which I worked with Zerlanger.

GC: What’s the gist of it?

RC: It’s rather complex … but it starts with nationalizing the Federal Reserve system. Anyway, I never went to grad school in economics, but I learned monetary economics as a practitioner and a student of it in Treasury. I retired in January, 07, and that month I published the Challenger book. Then, I thought, What do I do now? Well, I’d written these Internet articles, I had my briefings for Kucinich, I had another article that I wrote that I posted at Global Research in January, and I thought, well, this is another book!—so I guess I’ll write a monetary book now. It turned out that Global Research, headed by Michel Chossudovsky up in Montreal, really liked my work. So, I had an outlet, and I became one of his chief economics writers. By April, I had digested the Social Credit ideas–based on the “dividend concept” that the way you release money into circulation is through a citizen’s dividend, not through bank-lending, which is the basic idea of the Alaska Permanent Fund. Well, by April, 2007, I had posted an article at Global Research titled, “An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform” because I felt very strongly that we were heading towards a collapse.

GC: And you foresaw this last year?

RC: Yes. … I continued to write these theoretical articles for the next two or three months. Then, in June, based on all of that plus signals I was getting from the Washington Post (which I call the newsletter of the financial elite), I posted an article entitled, “It’s Official: The Crash of the US Economy Has Begun.” That was 07. And, I can tell you, people who began to follow my writing at that time saved themselves a lot of money! I know people who started to get out of the stock market then.

GC: So … why didn’t you let me know?

RC: (Laughs …) Anyway, suddenly, I was now being called the whistle-blower on the US economy! I just had this compulsion to lift up the rocks and see what’s under them.

GC: And you’re looking at the slimy, crawling things. … You remind me again that autodidacts are among my favorite people … because they’re not “institutionalized,” they’re looking at things from the outside, and often are the best truth-tellers. That’s what you were doing at NASA—and now you’re doing it in the economic field. … So, you’ve done the research going back to the Middle Ages and how we’ve evolved this crazy system. You probably go back to colonial times—Hamilton setting his system up, and back to 1913 and the Federal Reserve. You’ve no doubt studied the Great Depression. … So, where are we now? We hear that we’re in the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression; others say this could be worse because it’s now global. Where are we in your analysis? And then we’ll get to “The Cook Plan.”

RC: I think we’re at the beginning of a terrible global depression, a terrible collapse. The problem is not just that the economic indicators point to that. The leading indicator in economics is purchasing power; that is, how much money do members of the economy have to purchase the necessities of life, and where do they get that money? Obviously, one way you get purchasing power is through your job—you earn it; another way is through dividends; another is capital gains; another is to borrow it. An increasing amount of purchasing power, not just for our nation, but for people around the world, has been through borrowing. So, if there’s a collapse in lending—it isn’t just that you can’t get a loan and you need to postpone some purchases; for many people, that means that you can’t live. If you’ve been living off your home equity loans, for example, and that’s gone, what’s going to replace it? Right now, we’re seeing not just a failure of the monied powers—because they’re so over-leveraged—we’re seeing a collapse of purchasing power among the people of the world. If that purchasing power can’t be replaced—the purchasing power that has entered the economy through lending over the past 10, 20, 30 years—where’s it going to come from? There’s no other source of purchasing power; so people can’t pay their mortgages or their utility bills, or buy food. If that happens on a global basis … and the credit economy isn’t filling the gap anymore because they realize that the loans they’re putting out aren’t going to be repaid—that’s the big problem. It’s not that the credit isn’t available because banks and governments can create as much credit as they want. Just off of ledgers. They can conjure up as much money to lend as they want to. The problem is paying the loans back. If people don’t have the money to pay the loans back, where’s it going to come from?

GC: And the housing crisis precipitated all of this?

RC: It was the trigger. It was the spark that lit something that was ready to blow up.

GC: Because a lot of these people were dependent on home equity loans, they’re using their houses as their credit cards, and then the value of their houses declines, and the banks don’t want to extend more credit—is that the way these dominoes have fallen?

RC: Well, yeah, but there are other twists and turns. For example, when the dot.com bubble burst in 2001—that was the Clinton bubble—it was created deliberately; that’s why Clinton looked so good because he made it all the way to 2000 on that bubble. His Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, engineered that bubble by pulling in huge amounts of foreign capital. When that bubble crashed and George W. Bush was sitting there looking at a long-term recession/depression at the beginning of his term and he was in the process of the first tax-cut for the rich in March of 01—he’s wondering what to do (the Bush Administration). They’ve given away money to the rich and they’re going to fight some really big wars. So, where’s the money coming from? In walks Alan Greenspan. Now, I’ve documented that once Bush became president, Greenspan’s visits to the White House rapidly accelerated. Greenspan began lowering interest rates and that began to free up capital for mortgage lending. People found they could much more easily get money to buy houses. But, also in 2001, I had a long interview that I conducted with a mortgage broker who told me that at that time the word came down through the mortgage industry to start falsifying applications for mortages; to start lying about the applicants’ income. One of my contacts who was borrowing money to buy a house at that time told me that on the mortgage applicant’s income—they would write in a number that was considerably above her real income.

GC: Where do you think word was coming down from? Ultimately from Greenspan?

RC: And Bush. The Bush administration and Greenspan. There was collusion between the Bush White House and the Federal Reserve.

GC: Did they know exactly what they were doing?

RC: Exactly.

GC: They had to finance their wars, make up for the tax cuts to the wealthy. …

RC: It was the economic engine of 2001 to 2006. You know, when Eliot Spitzer–just before he had to resign–he came out with a report that said when he was the attorney general in New York, he and the other attorneys general of the state decided that he had to crack down on mortgage fraud. They were prevented from doing so by a regulation that was put out at that time by the US Treasury Department. There’s also a report about Washington Mutual—it was on ABC of all places … all of their risk analysts who had prevented WM from getting caught up in these bad loans were suddenly told to stop—stop monitoring. The word was passed down: start lending at a much higher rate than before. Now, there’s no way these actions can be done without the regulators knowing it … without the Federal Reserve knowing. At some point, the whole system became a fraud to produce the economic engine for the Bush administration.

GC: And did they not know that there would be a reckoning at some point?

RC: What really triggered the collapse? Well, we say that at some point the sub-prime mortgages simply became untenable. But, what triggered that? It was triggered by two things: One is that part of the lending that was done was through these adjustable rate mortgage escalators where your rate was good for two or three years and then you suddenly find yourself paying $1,000 more each month. Borrowers were told, don’t worry, the value of the house will keep rising and you can sell your house and make some money. So, the fraud was built in not only by falsifying income, but through these adjustable rate mortgages (ARMS) that were time-bombs in the system. Allan Greenspan was behind that; he told people these ARMS were fine. Then, knowing that the ARMS were going to explode, the Fed under Greenspan began to raise interest rates in 2006. He started the bubble and then he blew it up.

GC: To protect the assets of the wealthy?

RC: We don’t quite know yet.

GC: And what about inflation and purchasing power? Doesn’t that kick into this also?

RC: Inflation came through the house values.

GC: And the wealthy hate inflation, right? Because it spoils the value of their assets.

RC: The inflation was in housing assets, and the wealthy were the lenders; so they didn’t care. Because once the plug is pulled and these houses are in foreclosure—and we’re over 4 million now since 2006—it’s the wealthy who come in and buy these houses at the crash prices.

GC: Those who have liquid assets.

RC: Yes … or the banks. The banks now own millions of houses.

GC: You talk about a “gap” … and you don’t mean the clothing store. … What is the gap between prices and purchasing power?

RC: This is the whole theory of Keynsian economics. (I learned a lot more about it on my own than I would have learned in college.) Basically, the problem in modern economics is poverty in the midst of plenty. You would think, with modern industrial methods, you could produce enough for everybody. For decades and longer, people would talk about the “leisure dividend”—everything could be mechanized to produce wealth, people won’t have to work so hard, they’ll have more time off … and it just never happened. Poverty in the midst of plenty has plagued our world ever since the Industrial Revolution really got rolling. Keynes set out to explain the problem. I’ll try to make it simple. … Everything that you produce has a price attached to it. You’re going to charge whatever you need to cover your costs and make a little profit. Profits are not high. In most industries, profits run somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. Part of that is paid in dividends and part is saved. The part that is saved is called “retained earnings.” Retained earnings are a necessity. Because of entropy—or the Law of Diminishing Returns. The idea is that, when you produce something, you’re producing at an efficiency rate that can’t be maintained indefinitely. Because, everything you buy, you’re buying at the best price you can get … but, over time, it gets more expensive because the easy stuff to sell comes first; but, over time, you’re going to incur more costs when you sell it. For example, when you hire people to work for you, you’re going to hire the most capable people and they’ll be the most productive. If you hire more people, they’ll probably need more training or are less capable—so you’ve got a Law of Diminishing Returns—your costs are going to rise. So, in order to cover those cost increases, you need to hold back payment (as retained earnings). That means that the money you pay out—that’s the purchasing power of the community; so the prices that the community is going to pay are always going to be higher than the purchasing power. That’s the gap, that’s the gap that I write about.

GC: And the savings–

RC: That’s in the bank. And the bank generally lends for asset purchase, not investment. It’s a storage function, it’s not a capital investment function. In fact, in the last 30 years there’s probably been no growth at all in capital investment in the United States. All of the money that’s gone into the banks has gone into asset appreciation—because they make money on capital gains; that’s the chief source of wealth in our modern banking system—capital gains, which means inflation. At any rate, there’s this gap between prices and purchasing power. Keynes said that the whole system can collapse back to purchasing power, but then you’ll develop another gap and the whole system will keep ratcheting down—and that’s called a depression. During the Great Depression, there wasn’t purchasing power in the system to buy what was produced at the price that had to be charged in order to assure the continuation of the process.

GC: Again, there’s something systemic here … in the entropy. Is there any way around this?

RC: Keynes’ solution was to fill the gap by government debt—by pump-priming. Beginning in the 1930’s, we see Roosevelt running government deficits to fund things like job creation, the civil conservation corps, Works Progress Administration—that type of thing. He also used it to capitalize the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which began to lend at very low rates of interest into the private sector and into state and local governments and into the hands of farmers. Roosevelt essentially took over the credit creation function of government, he took it from the banks. The New Deal was created by government deficit financing. Additionally, he had very high marginal tax rates. The rich paid through the nose during the New Deal. … All of this really took off during World War II. The borrowing there shot up to the highest level we’ve ever had. Even today, we’re not that high, though we may get there in the next year or two! Now, another way you can fill the gap is through a positive trade balance. Because if you’ve got money coming into your system because we’re selling more stuff than we import—that becomes income. So, every nation wants to use trade—and that’s why you’ve got trade rivalries—

GC: Beggar your neighbor.

RC: Exactly. And, of course we saw that before World War I when Britain was fighting a trade war with Germany. After World War II, the US had a tremendous surplus in our balance of trade, which we lost in the 60’s and 70’s. So that was another thing that floated the economy. Still another way to close the gap is through economic growth. Because if you can outgrow your gap or outspend it through the velocity of money you can close it. And, you can close the gap through inflation! If you’ve got $100 in debt and you inflate the currency so it’s only worth $80, then it’s easier to pay off. So, inflation has been a bedrock of government fiscal policy since the 30’s. Why does the government have a cost of living every year for social security and for federal employees? Not to keep up with inflation, but to create inflation. Because its cumulative. Even if inflation is only 3 or 4 percent a year, you’re going to create an exponential curve; so, that’s one reason why—yeah, we may have just given away $750 billion to the banks, but we’re going to inflate the currency so much, we’ll get back $200 billion by the time we’re done … Another thing inflation does—and we saw this with the alternative minimum tax—it drives people into a higher tax bracket. … Now, one other thing about the gap—the gap was known when Keynes was writing, and the Social Credit Movement in Britain knew about it fifteen years earlier. Their solution was to fill the gap through dividends. Because the theory is that the gap is going to exist no matter what you do; but you modify it in some way. That’s what borrowing does in today’s system. You borrow money to modify retained earnings.

GC: Now we’re getting deeper into this. … So, monetizing the gap … I have to admit I’m getting a little fuzzy here … I had a conversation with Stephen Shafarman a month or so ago and he explained some of this, but I wondered: Here’s a government which will not finance universal health care, does not invest in education, and yet, Shafarman and you are proposing that this government will give us $1,000 a month for every adult and $500 a month for every child … where’s the money coming from? I thought money was about having some kind of tangible asset behind it—gold or a house, some kind of collateral. And therefore you could say that more money means more value in the asset. But your proposal is based on something else. You’re saying, print the money and give it to everyone. What am I missing?

RC: We’re not talking about money, we’re talking about credit. Credit is the producing potential of an economy. It’s a way of calling forth production. For example, if I give you—and this is why I’m doing it through vouchers, not cash payments because I don’t want people to take their cash and buy lottery tickets—it’s not productive. But if I give you a voucher, let’s say it’s for $10—let’s say it’s a food stamp. You can take that to the market place, and people will raise food because they’ll get $10 from you. That becomes an incentive for them to produce. What you’re doing when you introduce money into circulation this way, you’re monetizing future production—in response to that, people will do something they didn’t do before. This is the way a huge part of the US economy functioned during the 19th century. Gold and silver were monetized then at a ratio of 12 to 1, gold to silver. The government didn’t buy gold and silver and turn it into coins. The government ran a mint. In that mint, people who owned gold or silver—they brought it into the mint, and the mint would then take your gold and they’d stamp it into coins. And the mint would give it back to you—it was a free service. Now, you had a bag of gold bullion and now you have a hundred dollars in gold coins. You then go and spend that into the economy; and because you have gold now and you’re spending it, that incentivizes production; a whole system of production builds up because now there’s something of value that can be earned. This was why, for example, the California Gold Rush became such a spur to production in the US. … This was why the new cyanide process of extracting gold ore around 1900 was such a tremendous economic boon for the world—because it called forth production. It’s the same reason why the mining of gold and silver by the Spanish in the Americas in the 1500s brought into existence the modern productive economy. Because they were bringing gold and silver back. The government didn’t create that. It was brought back as a monetary commodity, and now suddenly people began to produce and produce and produce. The dividend is exactly the same principle. …

GC: Something you said turned a light on in my head. This phrase: “monetizing future production”. … These vouchers represent the future, they are a stake in the future! I’m going to give you this voucher and you’re going to spend it and this is going to call forth future production. So, how come we’re not already doing that?

RC: Because the banks control the system. The banks would rather loan you the money and extract interest from you than give you a voucher. For example, if you go down to U Street here in D.C., and you see the urban blight; if you began to hand out vouchers to the people who live there that place would be transformed—probably in a few months. It would be based on small business, you would have food products coming in, you would have a lot of new things being done. … This actually happened during the 70s when the community services administration was introducing grants into the inner cities to vitalize the local economy. But, as the 70s progressed, and all of those social programs were killed—that’s when the center cities fell back into the poverty that we see today. And when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in the early 70s to a tremendously high level and killed off our producing economy, they did the same to the inner cities by withdrawing a source of credit that had begun to fuel commerce in those areas and had begun to transform our urban landscape.

GC: So, the banks have been making money on the system as it exists. But, now, the banks are in trouble. They’ve come to the taxpayers for a bailout … to perpetuate the whole system.

RC: The banking system is a parasite that is killing the host.

GC: And, this goes back to the Middle Ages. … You’re talking revolution, aren’t you?

RC: Yeah.

GC: And you’re talking real socialism. And maybe you can get into this a little bit because I think Americans are extremely confused about what socialism is. So, we hear this banter on right wing talk radio about how we’re becoming a socialist country because our government is involved in helping the banks, and taking over A.I.G. and so forth. But I say that’s more about National Socialism—which is what Hitler was all about. Or about Corporatism which is what Mussolini called his system—and it’s really Fascism, but you never hear the right using that term. What you’re talking about, I call it socialism with a small “s.” It’s real socialism that helps people where they live; helps them with the essentials and leads to survival and a thriving community.

RC: These right wingers should read Article One of the Constitution. Article One says that Congress shall regulate interstate commerce. It also says that Congress shall coin money and establish the value thereof. That Congress has not just the right, but the duty to regulate the economy, to regulate the monetary system. To what end? Well, then you go back to the Preamble of the Constitution—

GC: “To insure domestic tranquility”—

RC: “and promote the general welfare.” The people who wrote the Constitution knew that to promote the general welfare, Congress—the elected representatives—had to have the right to regulate interstate commerce and to coin money and establish its value. That’s what we’ve thrown away! For the sake of this right-wing, market nonsense that has totally failed and that has produced a catastrophe.

GC: And it works by creating bubbles, bursting bubbles, creating another bubble. …

RC: The banks really began to take over the economy in a big way in the 70s. That was the transition decade.

GC: When we went off the gold standard?

RC: That opened the door to unlimited inflation of money through the petro-dollar, and allowed the dollar to become the world reserve currency. But, also, interest rates began to climb, began to burst, in the 70s. By the end of the Volker recession interest rates were over 20 percent, which destroyed the US producing economy—and that was deliberate. From then on, every period of economic growth in this country has been a bubble!

GC: What you’re calling the “producing economy,” I’ve heard called the “real economy,” as opposed to the financialized economy.

RC: The guy who’s really defined this best is Dr. Michael Hudson. The producing economy is where people like you and I go to work every day and make stuff. The financial economy is money that’s leant into circulation or that is manipulated for profit without any productive value being created. Hudson calls it the FIRE economy—finance, insurance and real estate. The FIRE economy has killed the producing economy.

GC: As we start our last tape, I want to thank you for this tutorial! There’s a lot more we can talk about, but I’m hearing “time’s wing’d chariot” at my ear, so as we move towards the fire exits, let me ask you, since you’re talking revolution, What are you going to do when they come after you?

RC: (Laughs …) I really don’t think about that. I just do what I feel I’m supposed to do.

GC: It’s your moral commitment. …

RC: Yeah.

GC: You did mention that you studied comparative religions at William and Mary, so this is an important part of who you are. And, along those lines, you’ve also thought about what kind of future communities we might be living in in the US in twenty years. … Tell me about your vision of the future.

RC: Well, you can look at it in one of two ways, I think. One is economics that’s based upon the trickle down philosophy that we got starting with the Reagan years, which was that the rich will invest and produce, and the wealth that comes through that will somehow pass down into the hands of working people through jobs. And that whole idea of a top-down economy is not new; this was essentially what medieval feudalism was all about when the rich lived in their manors and had moats around their castles. (Of course, we see that today with our gated communities!) And the poor just fended for themselves. I think we’re going in that direction now. I think our culture is increasingly aristocratic, increasingly about passing wealth to the rich. And no better means of doing that has ever been invented than bank finance, where, through the magic of compound interest, I don’t work anymore but my money works for me; all the wealth of the community is sucked upward through that vortex up to the hands of the people at the top. We’ve seen this before in history, and we’re seeing it now. … The other way is approaching it from the bottom up. It’s giving people who work for a living the ability not only to survive but to flourish. And to do that, there must be a way of providing access to people in the community for wealth creation—for savings, for investment. Why should we do that? Basically, I believe in the concept that all men are created equal, we’re all equal in the eyes of God, and that every human being has a right to live on this earth and to take part in the life that is possible to us through the opportunity to manifest our potential. I’m a democrat with a small “d,” and I think that those periods of history where that has been possible have been the times when America has truly been a great nation.

GC: When were those times?

RC: One was after 1800, when, through the Louisiana Purchase, the whole West was opened up and people were free to go out and establish a farm or a business. We opened ourselves up to immigration to people from all around the world and I think a tremendous force was unleashed for opportunity, for achievement and for genius that we haven’t had since then.

GC: That’s a long time back!

RC: I think the New Deal was that. My family were New Dealers. My parents got their education through New Deal programs. I got mine through the National Defense Education Act; programs were available so that students from the working or middle class could become part of our social life, part of our economy. And, those days are ending. Increasingly, the only students who can go to college are those who have money or can mortgage their futures with these tremendous student loans—and even those loans are disappearing with the credit crisis. I believe that the true genius of the human race can be unlocked from the bottom—from ordinary people being given the opportunity to fulfill their God-given destiny. I think that, essentially, for me, this is what the teaching of Jesus was about. The best economics is the one based on the principle of doing unto your neighbor as you would have them do unto you. You don’t rob from your neighbor, you give to your neighbor. And I believe our present economic system is robbing from our neighbor. Taking what belongs from them, and essentially enslaving your neighbor into working not for him and his posterity and his family, but for you—because you’re the one who is living off the fat of the land through your compound interest, your financial lending system and all that comes with it.

GC: I agree with you, but let me play devil’s advocate. What I hear, more and more, is that we can’t afford this; because we have to compete with China, India. How can we possibly compete? They have so many more people; they can work so much cheaper. So, how does your system make sense in this emerging world market?

RC: We don’t have to compete with anybody. The reason that China and India appear so competitive is that they’re so poor to begin with. They’re able to throw millions of laborers into making our Christmas tree ornaments! For them to grow from abject poverty to where a portion of them are approaching middle class status looks like great economic growth. And because they’re willing to work so cheaply they can under-price us—if we’re dependent upon a competitive market place in order to earn the money that we need to keep our economy afloat because we’re so in debt to ourselves or our banking system that we can’t produce at that same level of efficiency. Now, a dividend-based economy … well, take farming for example: right now our family farm is dead; a family farm can’t afford to compete in the market place. But, if we were able to monetize our farming economy through dividends where you had the vouchers I’ve been talking about and you could take them down to the farmers’ market, if you could feed money into the system from that source—that would allow people who can’t afford to farm today to begin farming again. … So, the only reason you have these competitive relations between nations is because you have a global economy based upon top-down bank-financing which ultimately is usury and ultimately sucks the cream off the top of the productive system for the benefit and profit of the bankers, the bond-holders, the interest holders—and it impoverishes everyone else. Essentially you’ve got a bunch of starving people in China competing against a bunch of starving people in India competing against a bunch of people who soon are going to be starving in America to get that slight edge in order to allow a top-down, debt-based monetary system to live off the fat of the land. Once you get rid of that system and introduce currency at the grass-roots level, you create a whole new economic paradigm that will change everything. And, you’re right. It’s a political revolution … because the only reason we don’t do that today is because of the increasing power in the hands of the financiers and the politicians they own.

GC: So how are we going to overturn this system? What’s it going to take? A Russian revolution? 20 million dead?

RC: Actually, the Russian revolution was a bankers’ revolution. Lenin and Trotsky were financed by Rothschild and Rockefeller and the big New York banks. Actually, the Romanovs did not have a central bank, the way there was a Federal Reserve or a Bank of England. The Russian economy was being financed by indigenous land banks out in the Russian countryside that would lend based on land mortgages at very little rates of interest. That was creating what was becoming one of the strongest economies in the world. And the Bolsheviks essentially made an agreement with the bankers in the West: if you finance us, we’ll put a central bank in Russia that you will own—and that’s exactly what happened. And Russia afterwards became dependent on Western banking and commerce. In fact, one of the biggest supporters of the growth of Russian industry under Stalin was the Rockefellers. The Rockefellers were granted leases in the Baku oilfields around the Caspian—

GC: Oh man!

RC: Yeah, it’s all very. … So, the kind of revolution I’m talking about is a monetary revolution that would place purchasing power directly in the hands of the people for them to spend as they wish at the local level. Then, once you begin to produce in that way, you do create a certain level of savings, and that savings can then capitalize true capital markets where people pool their resources and savings. We don’t have true capital markets anymore—that kind of pooling of resources by average people where they can make investments. What we have instead is speculators buying stocks on margin or buying whole companies through equity purchases on margin where 90-95%–or more–of capital used in the system is bank leveraging; it’s speculative money that has polluted and poisoned the capital markets.

GC: I understand what you’re saying about a peaceful monetary revolution. But … they’re not going to turn it over to you and to me.

RC: The people have to demand it!

GC: They’ll shoot us in the streets!

RC: I don’t have an answer for this. I can see in the last two years a big change in the number of people who have begun to see things in this way and to identify the banking and financial systems as the root of the problem. I think Ron Paul had a lot to do with it. He’s introduced legislation to abolish the Federal Reserve system. And, the Libertarians, as misguided as some of their solutions are—like, for example, the idea of returning to the gold standard, which is just a red herring—at least they have the idea that the people are capable of running their own affairs without government oversight or interference. That’s one reason I like the Alaska Permanent Fund so much. During the 70s when they were setting this up, the state government wanted to take these royalties from the oil companies and then distribute them to the people through social programs, etc. And there was an outcry among the people: Just give us the money and we’ll decide how to spend it! There was no reason to go through the government bureaucracies and then disburse the money to the people through means testing, etc. The Alaskans had a referendum, and now every year a cash payment is made to every resident there. This last year the payment was $3,269 per resident. Now, if you’re in a household with 4 people, you’re making $13,000 cash, a substantial amount of money that Alaskans have given to them to do whatever they want! There’s no reason why we can’t do that—or even more—for every resident of the United States. And that’s what we should be demanding. People shouldn’t be going up to Congress for more social programs. … When Bush gave out the $600 rebate during the second quarter of 2008, that’s one of the few right things he ever did. That’s what prevented the economy from going into recession during the second quarter. Even that piddling amount. We’ve got substantial movement in this country through the Basic Income Guarantee movement, through Shafarman’s movement, we’ve got the same thing in Europe; we have countries in Latin America which are moving in this direction. There is awareness that can be built on. But at some point the current has to tip in favor of the people over the banks. Who will run the economy of the world—the people who work and hope and sweat and have aspirations, or is it the banks that suck the life out of every economy they’ve ever been associated with? At a certain point people just have to say they’ve had enough. One way or another that’s happening. A lot of people are defaulting on their credit card debts, for example. My daughter was paying over 28% on her cards. She can’t pay it anymore. She doesn’t have the money. They’re gonna kill the economy; they’re gonna kill people who can’t continue to work to support the financial controllers. Something has to change. And if they drive the country into a collapse—and they will—then at some point, people who have the ability to say no are going to have to do it. Through whatever means is available.

GC: You think it’s imminent, or will they mangage to pull themselves out again?

RC: I can’t see the system being rescued. Because it’s spread globally. The credit system has collapsed because people cannot pay their loans any more. I mean, if we have a winter where the grocery stores can’t put food on their shelves, people will be starving in this country. There’s already 35 million who are “nutritionally deprived”—the term they use nowaday. Food stamps applications are growing tremendously. Surplus food has declined. Something’s gotta give. This could become tragically serious in one to two years. Unless something is done to revitalize the local, producing economies.

GC: I think we’re especially vulnerable in the winter months.

RC: We could see real starvation coming in the next one to two years. The current level of population in the US exists because of our industrial economy. If that economy collapses, so will our population.

GC: Which has more than doubled in our lifetime.

RC: Yeah. The people who run our government understand the dangers, but they don’t know how to fix it because they’ve been taken over by this cancer which is the financial system.

GC: Maybe they understand, but they’re so vested in it, they’re like the people at NASA—they don’t want to stop it.

RC: I think that’s fair.

GC: Well, on that grim note, I guess we can wrap this up. Now, to go even deeper into this, the good folks ought to read your forthcoming book. The title was?

RC: WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS: THE HOPE OF MONETARY REFORM.

GC: And the press?

RC: Tendril Press.

GC: Thank you very much, Rick. You’ve given us a lot to ponder—and to act on!

Equo ne credite, Teucri. / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

(”Do not trust the Horse, Trojans. / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.”)

–Virgil, The Aeneid

The Trojan horses of our demise: ignorance, arrogance, violence and greed. If we seek analogies for our financial collapse, Trojan horses are more instructive than horsemen of the apocalypse. The latter may be useful to the Fundies with their tiresome end-time fantasies. The horsemen externalize evil; they are children’s boogeymen, writ large in adult type, to frighten adult minds that should know better but cling to victimhood. Trojan horses, instead, internalize dangers—from the assassins crouching within their wooden hulls; to the gullible celebrants taking them into their fortress-city. In our blame-game culture, where and how we affix blame now is crucial to any possible restitution, let alone redemption. The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty; it is a looking-glass through which we may know ourselves.

“A deadly fraud is this,” Laocoon warned his fellow Trojans, “devised by the Achaean chiefs.” For “Achaean [Greek] chiefs” read: banksters, Wall Street, K-Street, mealy-mouthed politicoes, media and academic pundits. And the “fraud” is our credit-based economy. Laocoon was a prophet cursed to be heard but ignored; his reward for prescience was strangulation by two of Minerva’s serpents. (And have we not had our Laocoons? Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; John Lennon and Richard Wright; Paine and Thoreau? Artists like Jeffers, Patchen, Millay and London—ignored, dismissed or reviled.)

Ignorance. In 1987 Allan Bloom kicked up dust with The Closing of the American Mind. It wasn’t just our schools that were failing, but our culture. Not simply that Johnny couldn’t read, but that whatever Johnny and Jean saw on TV or heard from their elders—and the music and songs they listened to—lacked context, depth and framing. Not that they didn’t know who had fought the Civil War or what the First Amendment guaranteed, but that they saw no reason to care. In fast-food America it was about getting the next burger-fix, shot of Coke (-a-Cola!); passing quizzes, padding resumes, screwing cheerleaders or jocks– and the hell with the world. When Clinton signed the repeal of Glass Steagall, annulling the reforms that had kept our banks solvent since the 30’s—what did it mean? Who knew? Who cared? When the progeny of Reagan railed against government, we howled with the wolves till our house crashed down. Instead of conceiving government as the intermediary between ourselves and the financial institutions that have dominated human affairs since the Industrial Revolution, instead of sharpening our tools to build a sturdier government attuned to the bottom 90%, we sang the siren song of de-regulation; we transfixed ourselves in our shattered shelters.

Arrogance. Married to arrogance, ignorance can kill. After World War II, we out-produced the world. American “know-how” we said. We forgot we had conquered a continent, committed our own holocaust/genocide, robbed the natives and generations of Blacks. The Brits collapsed in the Middle East and the French pulled out of Indochina and we said, We are “can-do” people; we’ll do it! Nixon went off the gold standard and abrogated the Bretton Woods agreements that had knitted the economic fabric of the post-war world. God’s chosen people, we destroyed Vietnam to save it. Calvin’s God had made us wealthy and Wilson had bequeathed his mission to make the world safe for democracy. We slaughtered a coupla million “gooks,” fertilized the “killing fields” of Kampuchea. We crushed rebellions in Central America and Chile. We killed a million in Iraq and stomped on Palestine. And when the blowback came and the twin towers crumbled like Samson’s pillars, the boy-emperor stood on the rubble and said we would make them pay. And the men who had lost friends and brothers chanted like a deranged Greek chorus: “USA! USA! USA!”

Violence. We drink it with morning coffee. Wedding party bombed in Afghanistan. IED kills two Americans. 1500 killed by Katrina (Cuba lost 4 to Ike!). 100,000 die in our hospitals every year from hospital infections or neglect. 20,000 die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Our kids inhabit a stroboscopic world of high school bullies, gory video games, TV cop shows of rapes, torture, murder. Kids kill kids. TV, that came humbly into our living rooms, now fragments the family, holds each member hostage in his/her room. Pop-tarts for dessert.

Greed. It’s good, Gecko said in “Wall Street.” Greed for knowledge, wealth, power. How easily we were seduced, judgment suspended. Isn’t it hunger for knowledge? And how much wealth do we need, how much power?

In Tolstoy’s story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?,” a peasant is allowed to claim as much land as he can circumambulate in a day. He must return to his starting point by sunset. He starts out measuring his paces, but soon realizes he has tried to cover too much ground. He runs at the end to reach his starting point again; then drops dead from exhaustion. He’s buried in a six-foot long grave.

How much do we need? Isn’t that the moral question? Do we really want a world of billionaires and paupers? Is there no ceiling to our lusts? Must we celebrate these killer-thieves, earth-rapists? We devised a system of checks and balances to rein in political power and the foxes raided the henhouse and stole the golden eggs. We must realize now: we cannot separate political and economic power. We have a moral imperative to make judgments; we evince our humanity according to the judgments we make.

What is a fair differential between the “average” worker and his/her “boss”? Can we replace “bosses” with “facilitators”? If $40,000 a year is average, isn’t $400,000 enough? (That’s what we pay the president we vote for!)

Ignorance, arrogance, violence, greed—we opened the gates, let them into our minds, our hearts, our children’s dreams. Is it too late to heed Laocoon? The snakes are coiling around our legs.

I’m not selling apples, quite yet, from my door,
nor standing in breadlines–but I do feel a draft
coming on strong from a future secure
only in the sense it will be still more daft.

How did it happen? Who slept at the rudder?
Did fighting two wars fine-hone our stupidity?
Blame Congress or Wall Street or someone Down Under.
We’re caught in this maelstrom, seeking lucidity.

The best we can hope for, the best we can muster
is a Mae West tossed at a sinking Titanic.
What next? What after? More greed and more bluster?
Whatever we do, we’d better not Panic!

–W.H. Auden, “September, 1939”

Historians may look back on September, 2008 as America’s economic 9/11. Major financial institutions are collapsing—to use a bitter analogy–like the twin towers: first, Bear Stearns (already 6 months ago!); and now, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and the insurance giant A.I.G. Just like 7 years ago, we cry out: What hit us? Who did this? Why?

Merrill Lynch helped finance the cotton trade before the Civil War! Say it was an essential “linch-pin” in the rise of the South on the backs of black slaves. Say that “free-market,” deregulated capitalism is now getting its due; if I am in steerage on the Titanic and I hear that the swells who have been dancing above our heads are about to take a dip in the sea, Schadenfreude doesn’t calm my queasy stomach.

NBC begins its broadcast with the news that I am now the proud owner of the world’s largest insurance company. Bull!. If I own something I can determine how to dispense with it; I can decide who will oversee my assets. Obviously, I and millions of other American taxpayers do not own a particle of A.I.G.; we’re just bailing it out. A.I.G. will be owned by America, Inc. and managed by people very similar to its former managers. The question is, Who owns America, Inc.?

It has become clear by September, 2008 that Americans own less and less. In the past year, hundreds of thousands have lost their homes. Millions no longer own their jobs. Jobs have been shipped overseas by the real owners of America, Inc.—our corporate bosses and their political shills. With our jobs went our job-related health care. We do not own our own health in W’s “ownership” society.

As I write this, some 3 million Americans are without power in Houston/Galveston and along the Gulf Coast. At least 50 Americans died as a result of Hurricane Ike. Cuba, far poorer than Texas, was hit much harder–and they lost 4 people. Cuba managed to safely evacuate 1 million people from its coasts. A couple of years ago, Texas tried to evacuate people before Hurricane Rita and more than 100 died along the roads—there wasn’t enough gas to supply the evacuees’ cars, and ambulances, etc., couldn’t get through the traffic. Do Americans collectively own their roads, their ambulances, FEMA, gas stations, oil refineries? What do we own except a ton of personal and national debt? “Americans” are trillions of dollars in debt to Japan, China, Western Europe, Russia and Middle East sheikdoms. Hail the New World Order!

I put “Americans” in quotes because we are no longer who we were. We can no longer claim to live in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is nothing free here except the “free-market” our corporate bosses have foisteed on us and the rest of the world to open up foreign markets to our brand-name companies so that foreign workers can make products that “Americans” will buy at exorbitant prices. How did that happen? Hypnosis through the mass media that “Americans” were supposed to own—hypnosis through repetition, spectacle, diversion.

This September I am supposed to believe Press Secretary Dana Perino: “The president’s economic advisors had determined that some of these companies were so big—that to allow them to fail would have caused even greater harm … .” Unstated: apparently the president does not believe that the 50 million Americans without healthcare are “so big” that allowing them to fail would cause greater harm.
I am supposed to believe that John McCain is a “war-hero.” On the campaign trail, this decrepit muppet cannot get through his set speech without looking at his notes, but he repeats the mantra tirelessly. Frankly, I see nothing “heroic” in dropping bombs on civilians thousands of feet below. The true heroes of the Vietnam War died at Kent State, trying to stop that illegal, imperialist war. Say their names with reverence: Jeffrey, Allison, William, Sandra.

This September I am sick of the Reagan Revolution that comandeered our economy and our good sense over two decades ago. We’ve had Reagan’s orgy of deregulation, Bush Sr.’s “Gulf War,” Clinton’s backtracking on NAFTA and bombing of Serbia, and we have had more than enough of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption. And what have we reaped? What Chalmers Johnson calls the “blowback” of 9/11; and, dereliction of duty by elected officials; the abrogation of constitutional protections against government abuse and police powers; public media used as weapons of mass deception.

Isn’t it time to think in terms of a new revolution? What about a new constitution? Can’t we eliminate this ponderous, ludicrous electoral college? Must we have Palin-like surprises at the end of an 18-month process? Perhaps a parliamentary system in which we have a government-in-waiting, constantly vetted, makes better sense? Can we not institute referenda, as in Venezuela, so that scofflaws like Bush and Cheney do not run riot for four years (after stealing one, probably two, elections)? Must we have life-time appointments for Supreme Court “justices”? Can we not have a Bill of Economic Rights?

On the day Hitler invaded Poland Auden wrote that he was “Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” And that: “I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn: / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Is it not past time to take back America? Or is Auden right: “The habit-forming pain, / Mismanagement and grief: / We must suffer them all again.”

I want to believe he is most right here: “All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie … / … the lie of Authority. …” And here: “ … no one exists alone. … / We must love one another or die.”

2. Russia is too big for its britches. It still possess a sizeable chunk of the planet’s real estate—twice as much as the U.S. (not counting our foreign bases and various client states). They’ve less than half as many people as we have (and they’re mostly Slavs, anyway). Obviously, a lot of the land conquered under the Tsars ought to be up for grabs in the New World Order. The West needs those resources. It’s our planet too!

3. Russia doesn’t play fair. When we get our apparatchiks in Poland to install missile interceptors on Polish land—the Russkies balk and claim Poland is now a legit target for Russky missiles. What’s this? Diplomacy through intimidation? Just because we do it, does that mean they should? Monkey see, monkey does? Russkovia is full of monkeys with nuclear warhead missiles!

4. Russmonkeya has been howling ever since we broke the ABM treaties. Don’t they realize we have the “freedom” to break treaties at will? Didn’t they ever hear about our “Indians,” with whom we broke all our treaties?

5. Russia has too many good writers whom they take seriously! Solzhenitsyn, for example. He was critical of the Soviet system, found it “soul-less,” etc. and the Russkies listened intently, put the heat on him, and he up and exiles himself to bucolic Vermont, where, fast as a fast-food, deep-fried chicken burger will bring on heartburn, he gets jaundice-eyed about America—calls us “decadent,” “consumerist,” “materialistic,” “immature” and yada yada yada. We, of course, ignore him—which is death to serious writers. So he up-ends himself again, returns to Russkovia, is critical of Mother Russiasky again and this time the Russkies burnish the samovars and conscientiously reflect on what he’s saying. … Naturally, we continue to ignore him.

6. Haven’t the Putin reforms gone far enough? Wouldn’t we rather have a good-ole-boy vodka-boozer like Yeltsin in place, selling off the state’s resources to well-placed Russkie frat-boy-like oligarchs close to Western frat-boy-like oligarchs? Putin is too popular in Leninslavia! With a New Cold War, he’s bound to rein in the reforms, wrest more power to himself and bring on uprisings against him—uprisings our National Endowment for Democracy can shape and mold. Obviously, we need a guy like Brezhnev in there—a somnambulistic status-quo man who will keep a New Cold War simmering.

7. A New Cold War is good for the dollar. The War on Terrorism is getting a bit frayed. Americans are starting to bawl: What’s in this for me? (Typical!) They’re whining about no health care or homes foreclosed or lousy schools, and the memory of 9/11 is already fading, in spite of our best rhetorical efforts. (Can you believe it? There are 6-year olds who weren’t even alive then?) Also, Americans don’t see progress in our War on Terror. Are we any safer now? they ask. We need to ratchet up the fear with a formidable enemy like Russia-Slavia. We need to put people to work making more bombs, missiles, aircraft carriers, etc.

8. If we don’t have a New Cold War with Russia, we’re going to face other problems from uppity nations like China and Iran. The ‘08 Olympics proved to the world the Chinese are just as good as we at presenting a “really good shew.” Better! (Anyone remember the Atlanta Olympics? It was much smaller; people got killed; there was police repression, and besides all that, it was boring!) The Chinese are feeling their oats now and they’re bound to get more assertive as they seek the same oil we’ve been drilling in the Middle East since John McCain wore knickers. They’ve got all those jobs our corporations outsourced to them and in a couple of decades they’ll have a bigger GNP than us, and in a couple beyond that, a bigger per capita! Weren’t they a nation of “coolies” just 100 years ago, and dyed in their wool Mao-jackets just 30 yrs ago? We’ve got to stand up to Russostan now so China, Inc. doesn’t stand up to us later! We’ve got to show these Socialistas who’s the boss cause force is all people like that can understand! As for Iran—it’s a nation of towell-heads and terrorists who hate us for our freedom! If we don’t have a New Cold War now, those Iranians will go on developing their nukes and they’ll join forces with the Russoviks and the noodle-slurpers and we and Israel can kiss our tuchus dasvidanya!

9. A New Cold War is good for our politicians and our media. Our politicians are already humming the tunes. Pretty soon they’ll be “dancing with the stars.” They won’t be able to deliver on 10% of what they’re promising because the corporations and the lobbyists and the media ain’t gonna tie the ribbons until they get their greasy palms greased. And the way to over-grease the palms is to enforce “war taxes.” Which means taking middle class taxes and forking them over to industries and institutions that thrive on death and chaos. It means more of the likes of Jack Bauer on TV making the world safe for democracy by torturing Russkies who mean the farm boys in Kansas and the mothers in Alaska bodily harm. (Isn’t it better to torture one Russkie suspect who might have info to save a million American lives? And if we once in a while waterboard the wrong Yuri or Lara—isn’t that better than little Johnny down the street getting anthraxed even though he still can’t read?)

10. Russian novels are too long and depressing; no American bothers to finish them. A New Cold War, on the other hand, will accelerate Armageddon. We already know that ends in the triumph of Good over Evil. So, in the immortal words of G.W.B., “Bring it on!”

Should we shake our heads, wondering, when the candidate for “change we can believe in” chooses a consummate Washington “insider” as his co-agent for that change? Not if we understand that we have lived for decades in a military-industrial, media-fashioned, academia-certified, legally sanctioned Disney World/Murdoch World in which the future never comes.

Expecting the promised future is like expecting to find Weapons of Mass Destruction. Eventually, it becomes a vicious joke: like Bush looking under a table in the White House, then smirking at the camera, “Nope, not here, either.”

When I was a child, our teachers ushered us into the auditorium at PS 178 in Queens, New York … The ponderous movie screen lowered from the ceiling and the future unrolled: wives and mothers in evening gowns (!) danced (!) around spotless kitchens preparing gustatory delights for hubbies and kids. We would all drive shiny autos on super-elevated expressways winding around gleaming city towers. There was no traffic and everything went smoothly, thanks to guidance systems under the thoroughfares. The city was enclosed in a giant bubble dome for perfect climate control and protection from the nastier elements—hurricanes and blizzards. Other huge domes around the city sheltered the abundant food supply. Machines did the hard work, and people devoted themselves to leisure and self-improvement. There was, of course, no war, no violence. Everyone lived long and was youthful—in a technological Shang-ri-la, brought to our youthful attention by G.E. (only later did I learn that meant General Electric, maker of kitchen appliance-wonders and nuclear bombs). “We bring good things to life” was one of their slogans. Another was: “Progress is our most important product.”

No one asked, “Progress towards what?”

As I sauntered a little further down the primrose path, I was assured by no less of an heroic-romantic figure than John F. Kennedy that the U.S. was engaged in a “twilight” struggle against the forces of darkness and tyranny. Once we triumphed in the struggle (and our triumph was assured because we were—though no one would quite say it—on the side of righteousness and God), once we triumphed it would all be sweetness and light and we’d reap the harvest of our sacrifices: the world of the spotless kitchens and gleaming city towers, and, of course, later, California dreamin’. Then Kennedy was dead, King was dead, and year after year the future was prorogued in Vietnam. Someone had to pay for that postponement and no better unshaven character was available than Richard M. Nixon. No better one until Jimmy Carter caught us napping with his speech about our “national malaise.” In cardigan sweater and with fireplace logs crackling, he tried to warn us that the future of cheap oil and endless consumption wasn’t coming. How dare he? the media roared, and we got back on track with the man on the horse who not only saw the gleaming towers, but the “city on the hill,” as well. Reagan’s stooge-in-waiting, George Bush Sr., packaged the future in an end-of-the-Cold War “dividend”; while his successor–sax-playing, cool-shaded Clinton–surfed the wave of an orgiastic stock market dot.com bubble, and somehow the healthcare system that he and the missus were elected to repair and improve got lost in the shuffle in Serbia. And when kids got killed in Waco or Iraq, Janet Reno and Madeleine Albright assured us all it was worth it—the future would be better!

So, by now, I’ve given up on it. When mealy-mouthed Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice assured me of quick victory in Iraq, a world made safer because a dictatorship would be dismantled, I didn’t bat an eye. I knew that future would not come.

The future does not come largely because the past upon which these liars and fantasists fabricate edifices of deception never was. We never were a glorious little Republic that had taken on the nefarious British empire in order to establish freedom and democracy on a new continent. How could we make such a claim in the year of our Constitution’s ratification when a fifth of the nation’s denizens (not “citizens”) were slaves? Did we then fight a Civil War to amend that evil? Did we amend that evil only to have a now “united” nation continue its genocide against its tribal peoples? Remember the Alamo? Did we conquer half of Mexico to avenge the attack on Davy Crockett or because we wanted the gold in California? Did we beat down Spain to help the Cubans, or to conquer the Cubans and the Filipinos as well? Did we take on Germany in the War to End All Wars because of the Kaiser’s iniquities, or because we wanted a seat at the victors’ table—to save that still nefarious British empire and get our share of the spoils? Did we take on Hitler to save the Jews (a half century of movie and book propaganda seems to indicate this)—or was it to establish our hegemony in the capitalist world, the burgeoning New World Order that followed the horrific blood-letting?

“History,” Napoleon said, “is an agreed-upon myth.” If the future never comes, and the past never was, what have we got to stand on now in this impinging moment? “The present is too much on the senses,” Robert Frost wrote, “too present to imagine.” And that is the crisis we democrats with small “d’s” must face now. We are a people bereft of real choices because our capacity to imagine a real world–a doable, viable world–has been shattered. We find that we have been gulled about the real nature of our world and our very circumscribed lives within it. Our politicians are not the only ones with “handlers.” We have all been “handled” by fraudulent dream-makers and shape-shifters. One wonders if we dead will awaken in time?

– Emily Dickinson

George Carlin’s dead!

He was a funny guy.

He’d take a truth and dance with it.
The truth was like a big rag doll.
It could be bent.
It would fall down.
He’d hold it up and pirouette.

George Carlin was on a rant.
He’d rant about the government.
He’d show the stupid grin behind
Tyranny spying on its drones.
He’d show a people
Stewing in their fear.
It was funny –
The way nightmares are funny.

George Carlin, the murderer, is dead.
He was a dangerous man.
He’d walk around with his machete swinging.
He’d macerate myths and propaganda.
You’d never know where or when he’d strike.

“I have only one life to give for my country.”
Crap!
We keep killing the same fools over and over.
We raise them to kill and be killed.
Whack!
“Government of the people, by the people
And for the people –”
Whack!
“– Shall not perish from the earth.”
Whack! Whack! Whack!
He carved it into a pretty dish.
He served it with a lot of salt.
“This is the war to end all wars!”
Whack! Whack-whack-whack!
He stood it on its big fat head.
All its shiny coins fell out.
Blood skirled over the coins.
“The only thing we have to fear –”
Whack!
“– Is fear itself.”
Whack! Whack! Whack-whack-whack!
There was nothing to fear about fear.
We could figure that out ourselves.
There was everything else to alert ourselves to–
Especially lies from those who said
We had nothing to fear but fear.
“We the People”
Whack!
“–In order to form a more perfect government …”
Whack!
Government’s always imperfect–
It deals with human beings.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident …”
Whack!
Truth is never self-evident.
It wears a thousand transforming masks.

Reverend Carlin’s dead.
He ministered to our wounds.
He applied the balm of love and laughter.
He walked us up to the Kingdom of Light.
He dared we make ourselves free to enter.
He left smiling.