When the poet stands at nadir the world must indeed be upside-down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

— Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller

There is no reality-based argument denying this: The present system, as defined by the neoliberal economic order, is as destructive to the balance of nature as it is to the individual, both body and psyche. One’s body grows obese while Arctic ice and wetlands shrink. Biodiversity decreases as psyches are commodified by ever-proliferating, corporatist/consumer state banality.

But the raging soul of the world will not be assaulted without consequence. Mind and body are intertwined and inseparable from nature, and, when nature responds to our assaults, her replies are known to humankind as the stuff of mythic tragedy and natural catastrophe.

When the poet lives his hell, it is no longer possible for the common man to escape it.

— Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller

But take heart. As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.

Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.

To go into the dark with a light is to know the light. /To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,/ and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,/ and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

— Wendell Berry, To Know The Dark

What “tangible” and “constructive” things can a poetic sensibility contribute to everyday existence? Here’s one: The atomized denizens of neoliberal culture are in dire need of a novel yet durable sensibility, one bearing the creativity and stamina required, for example, to withstand the police state rebuffs inflicted by the ruthless authoritarian keepers of the present order…as is the case when OWS dissidents initiate attempts to retake, inhabit, and re-imagine public space.

Yet, while it is all well and good to be politically enlightened, approaching the tumult of human events guided by reason and restraint, if the self is not saturated in poetry, one will inhabit a dismal tower looking over a desiccated wasteland.

The crackpot realist’s notion that poetry has no value other than what can be quantified in practical terms emerges from the same mindset that deems nature to be merely worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume. The underlying meaning of this sentiment: The value of one’s existence is derived by the act of being an asset of the 1%.

Resultantly, the tattered remnants of the neoliberal imagination (embodied in lofty but content-devoid Obama speechifying and the clown car demolition derby of Republican politics) spends its days in a broken tower of the mind, insulated from this reality: The exponentially increasing consequences (e.g., economic collapse, perpetual war, ecocide) created by the excesses of the present paradigm will shake those insular towers to theirs foundations, and, will inevitably caused the structures to totter and collapse.

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals…And I, their sexton slave!

– Hart Crane , excerpt from The Broken Tower

We have been “sexton slave” to this destructive order long enough; its lodestar is a death star.

In polar opposition, a poetic view of existence insists that one embrace the sorrow that comes at the end of things. The times have bestowed on us a shuffle to the graveside of our culture, and, we, like members of a New Orleans-style, second line, funeral procession, must allow our hearts to be saturated by sorrowful songs. Yet when the service is complete, the march away from the boneyard should shake the air with the ebullient noise borne of insistent brass.

Often we’re not so much afraid of our own limitations, as we are of the infinite within us.

— Nelson Mandela (from an interview from his prison cell, conducted by the late Irish poet and priest, John O’Donnahey)

In this way, we are nourished by the ineffable, whereby unseen components of consciousness provide us the strength to carry the weight of darkness. Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring “concrete” answers to polite dialog–I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?

Moreover, is this not the building material and psychic criteria comprising the neoliberal paradigm? Is it any wonder that the concept of freedom is under siege?

Carl Jung averred, when a disconnect occurs between the inner life of the individual and the outward exigencies of daily life that “the Gods […] become diseases.” One way, this assertion can be taken is: There are multiple forces, tangible and intangible, in play in our lives and the trajectory of events; e.g., the personal, in the form of the ghosts of trauma that haunt individual memory, but there exist, as well, extant and within, the collective spirit of an age. Tragically, in our own time, within the precincts of power, our national house of spirits has become a madhouse.

Yet beneath the gibbering cacophony of the insane asylums of past eras, beneath the haze of pharmacologically induced stupors of the institutions of the present, there exists much pain. This is the toll taken by a manic flight from honest suffering. At present, this is what we’re given in our age of cultural and political disconnect and its attendant sense of nebulous dread.

Paradoxically, while the forces of nature are impersonal, the dilemma feels very personal. Therefore, on this journey to the end of empire, when impersonal elements are in play, one can become alienated from the dehumanizing trajectory of the times. Likewise, as exemplified by the U.S. political system, what process is more impersonal than the process of decay? Apropos, the air is permeated with a reek of putrefaction.

Yet the earth is kind, for one can use putrescent material in the process of renewal. The loam of earth is enriched by the rancid…just don’t swallow it down whole…doing so, will cause you to become ill.

Importantly, because a cultural breakdown is occurring, and culture carries the criteria of psyche, the acts of social engagement through dissent, cultural re-imagining and rebuilding can have a propitious effect upon individual consciousness, an endeavor James Hillman termed “soul-making”. Remember to disguise yourself as yourself when approached by ghosts of calcified habit and gods of tumultuous change. This is essential: Because what takes hold and brings about the collapse of an empire…is a loss of collective soul; e.g., the type of loss of meaning and purpose evinced when only a meaningless, zombie-like drive remains, because, even though, the culture is dead, it refuses to accept the shroud of the earth’s enveloping soil…to have its decomposing remains broken down and returned to the cycle of all things.

As circumstances stand, at present, for the 1%, their refusal to accept the inevitable has yielded grave ramifications for the people, fauna, and flora of the planet. Although, due to their seemingly vacuum-sealed insularity, ensured by vast wealth, the economic and political elite have yet to be touched by the consequences of their actions, much less forced down to earth.

Of course, this behavior defies logic, is in breach of the law, and is an affront to any workable code of ethics–as well as stands in defiance to the laws of nature, including the force of gravity. But you can count on this, “the unseen hand of the market” (actually the buckling backs of the 1%) can’t hold up the 99%’s swaying tower of hubris for much longer, and when it comes down, stand clear, for there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles.

“That’s just the way it is.”

As exhibited by the often bland, “normal” outward appearance of a serial killer, when the apologists and operatives of an exploitive, destructive system appear to be reasonable, they can go about their business without creating general alarm. By the same token, while many present day Republicans are zealots–barnburners raving into the flames of the conflagrations created by the militarist/national security/police/prison industrial state–Barack Obama and the Democratic Party serve as normalizers of the pathologies of late empire.

In this manner, atrocious acts can be committed by the state, with increasing frequency, because, over the passage of time, such outrages will have been allowed to pass into the realm of the mundane, and are thus bestowed with a patina of acceptability.

In nineteenth century Britain, the sugar that sweetened the tea of oh-so civilized, afternoon teatime was harvested by brutalized, Caribbean slaves, who rarely lived past the age of thirty, as, for example, in our time, in our blood-wrought moments of normalcy, we trudge about in sweatshop sewn clothing, brandishing i-Phones manufactured by factory enslaved teenage girls who are forced to work 14 hour plus shifts.

“That’s just the way it is” might be one of the most soul-defying phrases in the human lexicon.

Contrast this with the OSW slogan, “The beginning is near.” Hold both sentiments in your mind and discover which one allows your own heart to beat in sync with the heart of the world, and which will grant the imagination and stamina required to remake the world anew.

Why now? Part of the reason is because the majority of US troops are out of Iraq, thereby leaving a minimal number of American soldiers available for Iranian retaliation. A related reason could be the loss of prestige to Washington with the withdrawal of those troops. It’s not like Washington won its war in Iraq; it’s more like it was a stalemate with Tehran still holding on to a couple key cards. Israel, with an element of its ruling elites always ready to attack any perceived enemy, is of course a constant element in the drive to destroy Iran, as are the ruling families of certain Arab Gulf states that compete with Tehran in the oil market. Iran’s alleged support for various resistance movements in the Middle East and Asia provides Israel with but one more reason to call for war, especially since those resistance movements are primarily opposed to Israel’s expansionist anti-Palestinian policies.

For those warmongering pundits who haven’t yet quite jumped on the bandwagon for either an Israeli or joint US-Israeli attack comes an article in the January/February 2012 Foreign Affairs, a policy journal written by and for the US elites. The piece, written by Council of Foreign Relations member and Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig, is titled “Time to Attack Iran.” While the title of the article leaves nothing to the imagination, Kroenig’s long-winded piece utilizes an almost Jesuitical argument as to why the United States should attack Iran now.

Briefly put, the argument goes like this. Since it is clear that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons and Israel is intent on preventing that, it would be best if the United States military launched a limited attack on Iran’s nuclear-related facilities before Israel does and starts a war with much greater consequences. After all, continues Kroenig, Washington’s forces are sophisticated enough to limit civilian casualties and take out the necessary targets. Furthermore, any retaliation would be limited, suggests Kroenig, because most of what Tehran says regarding retaliation is bluster. If some US troops die, that risk is worth it. After all, for men like Kroenig a nuclear Iran is too great of a threat to US national security, human lives be damned.

Let me briefly address this piece of idiocy. First, Kroenig does not provide any proof for his supposition that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons. Instead, he accepts the common presentation of IAEA reports made in the Western press, a presentation that has been shown time and time again to be a misrepresentation of the facts in those reports. Naturally, that misrepresentation suggests that Iran is ready to go live at any time with a nuclear weapon and wants to do so. Second, Kroenig easily dismisses the possibility of Iranian retaliation. From the comfort of his office at Georgetown University he makes the statement that Washington could tell Iran certain acts would be subject to massive retaliation, while others like “token missile strikes against U.S. bases and ships in the region” would be acceptable. It’s as if Mr. Kroenig was talking about a game of World of Warcraft instead of an action that might start World War Three.

It is not time to attack Iran. It is time to back away from the insanity expressed in the recent GOP debates about the need to attack Iran. It is also time to end the nonsense put forth by men and women like Mr. Kroenig. Their use of neutral and technical language to demand an attack on Iran or any other nation is more reprehensible than the demagoguery of Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich. When I read the ramblings of technocrats like Mr. Kroenig, I can not help but be reminded of Adolf Eichmann and his office as they sent memos back and forth discussing the destruction of the European Jews. The language those men used was bureaucratic and neutral. The results were anything but.

Washington does not like the government in Tehran. The reasons for this are many, but the primary one is simple. Tehran opposes Washington’s designs for the region. It also opposes Tel Aviv’s. Washington aligns itself with Tel Aviv no matter what it does. Until Washington alters its “special relationship” with Tel Aviv so that other interests in the region are considered in a fair manner, Iran’s presence will always be a threat to Washington’s interests. As has been written many times over, Tehran has good reason not to trust the words and motivations of the United States. The last sixty years of history between the two nations is one that includes a CIA coup against a popular government; years of support to an autocratic and despotic regime whose secret police tortured and killed unknown numbers of opposition members; a secret deal between some of the most reactionary elements of the post-1979 Iranian revolutionary government and the Reagan administration that helped destroy the democratic socialist and secular elements of the revolution; and a series of attacks on Iranian ships, civilian aircraft and, most recently, its scientists.

Once again, it is not time to attack Iran. Opposing war and sanctions on that country is not equivalent to supporting the Tehran government. However, it does mean demanding that Washington to stop edging towards war on Iran, end the sanctions and do everything in its power (including suspending ALL aid and loans to Tel Aviv) to prevent Israel from launching an attack. If nuclear weapons really are the issue, then it would seem that it is time for all parties in the Mideast to begin unconditional talks establishing a nuclear free zone. It is certainly not the time to begin a war that will only convince more nations that nuclear arms are the only way they can ensure their continued existence. We must step back from the precipice.

Yet Newt Gingrich’s booty calls are forgivable. Stones shall not be cast. His transgressions humanize him and the balms of forgiveness of Christian believers rising from this sin-buffeted earth cause the Baby Jesus to coo into the dawn of a coming golden age.

When Bush/Cheney sat at the helm of empire and plundered foreign lands and breached the rule of law, Democratic partisans insisted that constitutional order be reestablished by having Bush et al marched in shackles from the halls of power. To do anything short of this was to risk the foundation of the republic being crushed to rubble and silt beneath the boot of tyranny.

Yet, we critics of duopoly are accused of being impractical sorts who don’t dwell in this world, the world of the possible. Although, it seems that political partisans give themselves permission to dwell, simultaneously, in two worlds: This one, as well as a Bizarro World — the parallel universe limned in comic books — where all things are done in reverse, where true is false and false is true, as well as, apparently, a realm where Newt Gingrich is a shining standard bearer of moral rectitude and a defender of faith and family and President Obama is a protector of constitutional law and a friend of the downtrodden.

According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 77% of the citizens of the U.S. expressed the belief that the massive power imbalance in place in the nation is a direct result of the vast wealth inequity between the 1% and the 99%. In addition, according to a poll by Time Magazine, 86% of Americans held the conviction that Wall Street and its lobbyists exert undue influence over the U.S. political class.

Still, both major U.S. political parties remain unmoved by the opinions of their constituents and unresponsive to their needs. By having the right to vote under present day, political duopoly, one is granted the right to co-sign the ongoing fraud that the nation is a democratic republic. To vote for either a Democratic or Republican candidate (i.e., the well vetted stooges of the 1%) is to cast a vote in favor of the only political party allowed in the rigged process — The Big Money, Perpetual War Party.

Believing that replacing one of these candidates with the other…is in any way propitious is analogous to believing that the hanging of new wallpaper within a house with a rotted-out foundation constitutes renovating the structure.

Memo to those who cling to the hope you can change the order of a calcified system from within;  e.g., the U.S. political, corporate and governmental order:

What has caused you to believe you can change the insatiable appetite of a mindless beast from within the belly of said leviathan? Seemingly, your predicament presents you with these alternatives: 1) paste up some soothing wallpaper. 2) Learn to play the xylophone on its ribcage (i.e., turn your powerlessness into the stuff of art). 3) Light a fire and have the creature vomit you to freedom. Otherwise, you’re going to be digested; you will lose your mind and body to the dehumanizing system and become part of its monstrous form.

As they embody the Spiritus Mundi of empire’s end, Obama builds towering monuments of verbiage into empty air while Mitt Romney bores the soul of liberty into a soporific state, causing her to sleepwalk into a bottomless abyss of bland.

Obama and Romney manage to hide the malevolent, hungry ghost of empire behind a veneer of soul-defying, daylight normalcy. But Newt Gingrich’s bloated carcass displays imperium’s murderous id. What has become of the diminishing resources of the world? Newt grows ever fatter and more grotesque as he greedily devours these things. What terrible fate befell the U.S. constitution? Newt dry humped it to dust.

Regarding the mindset, libido, and modus operandi of the 1%: We are confronted with types who would clearcut the last tree standing in the last forest on earth to render down to toothpicks used to pick scraps of flesh from the teeth of the members of their class who just dined on the last Bird of Paradise.

To resist, we, as individuals and en masse, are advised to mitigate our sense of powerlessness by occupying our own libido, thereby allowing oneself to be drawn into the élan vital of the world…to ride the zeitgeist, embodying the eros of resistance and renewal, and, in so doing, refusing to defer to the corrupt-beyond-redemption machinations of the U.S. political and big media classes.

Ask yourself and those around you Rainer Maria Rilke’s deceptively simple question: How shall I spend my days?

To appropriate Cornell West’s phrase, launch yourself into the midst of “the funk of life” by means of the gritty sublime of cultural eros…This act is a marriage of earthly complaint and winged aspiration — both a lamentation and goof take — a conversation/a collaboration/a spirited debate between what has been lost to indifference, exploitation, and cupidity — and the insistent eros of the breathing moment — a commitment to occupy life’s restive pantheon of purpose and decay.

Show your face to the world. Occupy libido by acts large and small, public and private.

Conversely, in what way is it attractive, healthy, or even interesting to willingly submit to the dictates of a culture that has conjured from the zeitgeist the likes of Gingrich — a high chair tyrant of the lowest order — a grotesque man-brat banging on the sides of his elevated seat, insisting that all the things of the world he sees are, “MINE!”

Why did the zeitgeist regurgitate Gingrich into our midst? Newt embodies the misappropriated libido and attendant, oceanic sense of entitlement of the corporate consumer state; i.e., modes of being conjured by the dark magicians of advertising and finance to enslave the 99%, as, all the while, the system’s rapacious verities and doomed vectors serve as the lodestar and raison d’être of the 1%.

Eric Hoffer advised, “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.”

William Butler Yeats, on the subject of being overwhelmed by abundance:

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

– excerpt: Sailing to Byzantium

One’s character is forged amid this agon of excess and restraint; e.g., of discerning the difference between the habitual excesses of consumer addiction and the callings of one’s character; life lessons that are arrested by the shallow compulsions and time-sucking demands of the current neoliberal order.

As things stand, there exists no panacea to prevent this dilemma. Yet the messy, learning process known as creative resistance will suffice; i.e., a type of endeavor similar to an artist’s approach to his craft, involving his working with the materials at hand…At present, those materials being: you–your longings, your inspiration, your aspirations, your defeats, your mindful refusal to accept the diminished and demeaning status quo, and, of course, the found material of the status quo itself.

As revealed by the deeds of OWS, promoting a dialog between individual and cultural forces leaves one receptive to the transformation that unfolds when enjoined in the conversation of the times. Don’t allow the soul of discourse to be dominated by the half-mad, hungry ghosts possessing empire’s end.

Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, if only for a moment … What was at first the man’s obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance. The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself … [Resistance] lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel–therefore we exist.

— Albert Camus

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few.

— David Hume (Essays)

We’re being tested.  Republican politicians and pundits are busy testing the American public, trying to assess how ignorant and distracted we are.  While they already have a pretty good idea, they’re determined to get a precise reading.  Testing is vitally important to these people because, if the United States is to be turned into a plutocracy, our collective ignorance is an absolute necessity.

Republicans are aware that most of us don’t pay attention to stuff like history, government, and public policy.  They’re aware that basic facts and principles tend to elude us.  Some of that stuff is trivial, some isn’t.  Many don’t know that the population of the U.S. is almost 312 million, or that we have 535 congressmen and senators, or that women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920, or that state legislatures, rather than citizens, chose our U.S. senators until 1913 (with passage of the 17th amendment).  Some of this stuff is trivial, some isn’t.

Republicans already know that many middle and lower middle-class Americans don’t want to raise taxes on the rich because they’ve been conditioned to believe such a move represents the redistribution of wealth, and smacks of socialism or communism.  Despite the fact that Barack Obama would have been considered a “Rockefeller Republican” in 1974, people can still get away with referring to him as a “socialist.”  That’s because we’re being tested.

Although many people (including billionaire Warren Buffet) think it’s eminently fair to raise taxes on the rich, many still oppose it.  You ask people (I’m speaking of regular working people) if they think taxes on the rich should be raised, and a significant percentage will say no.  But when you ask if they think taxes on the rich should be lowered, they will also say no.

Apparently, they believe the tax structure is perfect, and that the rich are paying exactly what they should be paying.  But when you ask what that amount is—when you ask them to cite the highest tax rate—they can’t.  They haven’t a clue what it is.  They don’t realize that, at 35-percent, the marginal rate is the lowest it’s been in many decades, and that to be taxed at the maximum, you have to earn more than $379,150.  And that’s why we’re being tested.

We all remember, some time ago, hearing about that Tea Party delegate holding up a placard with the words, “Keep the government out of my Medicare!”  While the irony and ignorance revealed in those words were gist for much nighttime talk-show hilarity,  they were also terrifying.  That bizarre message revealed that we have people out there who approve of, and depend upon, government programs, but have no idea the government provides them.

I have a friend who describes himself as a “libertarian independent,” and who believes that there’s a good chance the 1969 moon landing was, in fact, a hoax.  Although he considers himself a genuine patriot, he hates the government and believes that virtually every elected official in Washington is a liar and a thief.

During a phone conversation, I pulled a prank on him.  Knowing how suspicious he was of political intrigue, I invented the story that the U.S. government had a secret plan to take us off the dollar, and put us on the yuan, China’s unit of currency.  I told him the plan was supposed to be top secret, but word had leaked out.  He became instantly energized by this news.  He was simultaneously outraged, inflamed, excited and utterly focused, as it reinforced every suspicion he’d ever had.

But when I confessed that I’d just made it up in order to demonstrate how gullible he was, the prank backfired.  Instead of taking a moment to step back and re-assess his personal biases, he said it didn’t matter that I’d made it up, because “it’s something that probably is being considered anyway.”  We’re all being tested.

I’ll admit that I’m one of those people that enjoys reading historical accounts of depraved Roman emperors, of brain-addled czars. I really don’t know why. I’m sure it’s a sickness and maybe it will appear soon in the latest DSM9. Maybe there’s an expensive big pharma-med in production that can help.  Perhaps that’s why I allow myself to listen to the piffle that these fellows are peddling. I’ve been desensitized from reading about the sexy historic train wreck characters. The thing is, this isn’t historical, but sadly very much in the now. Hence the need for the long showers. I’m so ashamed.

We’ve progressed little when a Mitt can look at the widespread misery, that only expands by the minute, and he can simply comment that the complaints stem from jealousy. We all want to be Wall Street zombies, of course. He projects his illness on the rest of us. The Mitt has actually said this in regard to the rumblings of the many — it is all just envy. I’m not sure if he said that at the gathering the other day which necessitated the removal of a young Harvard student who looked like someone that the Mitt didn’t want there. The poor kid spent the day in jail for looking like someone. But that’s the world the Mitt lives in. You get what you want. Period. And that kid looked like somebody. That kid is just lucky he wasn’t detained indefinitely for looking like somebody. You really need to be aware of your doppelgangers and what they are up to in this high security age.

In other psychotic plutocrat news, a guy in South Florida- one John Castle, a leveraged buy-out “king” was angry that the bill after a meal was brought to his table… so he promptly broke the waiter’s finger. Of course, you never bring a king, even a leveraged buy-out one, a bill. The waiter got off easy too.

In other, trod upon worker news, one of the infamous Foxconn plants in China  had workers threatening mass suicide due to salary lies and general dehumanizing jobs recently — all necessary privations to produce X boxes cheaply.

I could go on and on.

And right now, here in the US, almost everyone who has one thing go wrong will be pushed to the side of progress, to the stench of the alley. Preferably to die there.  Fuck you, waiters of the world. We will break your fingers. We might make you homeless.  It’s all at our whimsy. We have all the cards. We will make your conditions eventually so bad that you will think death might be preferable. The world is flat in it’s misery, or we will make it so, says Thomas Friedman. Because we get what we want. Period.

And the world will stand, awash in confusion. But what happened? How did we come to such a devolved time? Perhaps we should have noticed when they treated international humans with such disregard. Of course, it would come home eventually. They convinced us that poverty was our fault and that those not wealthy had no worth. But, in truth, they are the filth, the ravenous undead feeding on the fresh life of others. Because they can never know satiety. And they never look to slow their own malignancy.  They just look for ways to continue feeding at the expense of the healthy and the clean.

And the Obamas of the age will make a point of pretending to care, their only contribution is less directly worded insults. Obama won’t say you are jealous that you don’t have the power to keep people from breaking your fingers. He will talk about the loveliness of intact fingers, and how the many before us have worked for intact fingers and someday the world will only have intact fingers. Then the roses will fall from the sky and the soaring melody will swell in the hearts of the listeners. And the broken fingered waiter will clap awkwardly in the crowd.

Flee from these creatures, find meaning in your local. Unravel what you can, including their lies that reside in your mind. Some influences are so toxic there is nothing to do but denounce and shun them. Don’t for one moment take them to be anything that promotes “a common welfare” or general decency. They are the carnivores who have convinced the sheep that they deserve to be eaten.

Could I possibly use any more metaphors?

Probably not. But above all, try to limit your exposure to them — because after all, there just isn’t enough water. Trust me.

The notion of even possessing a preference as to whom should be president of this crumbling, faux republic is a bit like asking what color uniform one would prefer that the crew tasked with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic should don as they go about their duties.

In times such as these, when escaping into one’s comfort zone is no longer a viable option, one is advised to evince the audacity of hopelessness, because the act leaves one desperate enough to embrace this daunting proposition:

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32

Although, for the present and foreseeable future, the propitious aspects of the sentiment will not hold true for Bradley Manning…whose plight displays the punitive, hyper-authoritarian nature of late U.S. empire. As is the case with Manning, in a national security state, few acts will cause one to lose his freedom in a more rapid manner than to reveal the secrets of lawless, ruthless power.

Apparently, Bradley Manning guarded secrets of his own–not shameful ones–but traits that would cause him to become subject to derision if revealed.

Manning desired to practice transvestism. This U.S. Army private was privy to illusion. Innately, he grasped how being coerced into suppressing one’s secrets damages one’s soul. Manning merely harbored the desire to practice a bit of gender bending; in contrast, the operatives of empire demand that they be allowed to bend and twist the world itself towards their exploitative ends.

To live in empire–in the service of its imperial military or in the thrall of the pursuit of careerist vanity and consumerist compulsions–is to live a selfish lie, day in and day out.

Rupaul (Andre Charles) averred, “We all came into this world naked. The rest is all drag.”

We all make choices as to what form of drag we practice. Does my lie promote the truth? Is my act educational, entertaining or edifying? Does it allow me to inhabit my true self yet transcend my narcissism? Does my act and attendant actions bring balm or does it deliver more suffering than necessary to a world where it is impossible to escape suffering?

Ask yourself and those around you these questions in regard to Private Manning and the operatives and denizens of U.S. Empire.

On the subject of identity, authentic or dubious: Even after being an almost constant public presence for more than half a decade, Barack Obama’s true nature and authentic identity remains elusive. After all this time, he still seems less man than marketing rollout, less of a political leader than an object lesson in product placement. The situation is like having the role of chief executive of the nation filled with a disposable razor or a heavily hyped iPhone application.

The U.S. presidency, as is the case with almost all aspects of life in the corporate consumer state, has become increasingly dominated and defined by commercial/public relations-type legerdemain. The constant commercial come-ons of the media hologram mask its hollow core; the proliferation of weightless lies serves to overwhelm the gravity of perilous times.

Obama’s nebulous nature works to ensure the continued irrational ardor of his supporters, who, against all evidence, insist on clinging to fantasy and projection regarding the president’s much in evidence anti-democratic tendencies; hence, progressive types seem prone to project their own redeeming qualities on the blank slate that Obama creates and deploys as his public persona–a method similar to that used by con artists who exploit the decency of their marks to achieve their criminal ends.

Apropos, this indefensible, Bush-era type of deceit connecting 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq:

“The war in Iraq will soon belong to history. Your service belongs to the ages. Never forget that you are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.”— President Obama speaking to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., December 14, 2011

In this instance, the shape-shifter Obama morphs from hollow man to Death’s slick, narrow-ass, public relations representative.

I’ve noticed that debates with Obama’s apologists have a very similar trajectory as those with Republican partisans. Because partisans are hard pressed to explain away the affronts to truthful discourse and good governance displayed by the politicians they support, any attempt to engage them in debate involving the merits (or lack thereof) of the policies of said politicians (e.g., their unwavering support of the 1% and U.S. militarist imperium)–quickly devolves into volleys of ad hominem attacks launched from the ranks of their supporters.

For example, from the right, OWS activists are labeled dirty, America-hatin’ hippies who supports swarthy terrorists, yet from the liberal camp, OWSers who refuse cooperation with the Democratic Party are cast as purer-than-thou types–too above it all to sully themselves by an acceptance of the pragmatic nature of political reality.

What is the reason for this irrational response from liberals–from folks who scoff at tea partyers and religious fundamentalists for their less than sane and sanguine approach to political discourse? There is simply no reasonable way to defend the acts of our blood-sustained empire abroad and the machinations of a predatory economic elite at home; hence, the testiness evinced by the enablers of the duopolistic state.

Withal, when I post an article or FaceBook status critical of President Obama–the tone and tenure of the ensuing debate with his defenders takes on a Bush era aura. As a general rule, when the rationalizations of both Bush and Obama supporters are countered with facts regarding their dismal governance, the invectives fly. Granted, the grammar and syntax of Obama apologists is superior to that of Republican loyalists–but their fallacy arguments are every bit as dodgy.

Consequently, the policies of both parties (bulwarked by the concretized support of partisans) translate into unnecessary suffering and death–the calling card and ground level criteria of the oligarchic/imperialist state. And sorry, Obama loyalists–your man is not the lesser-of-two evils candidate: He is among his peers. In many ways, he has proven himself a more deceitful, ruthless crime boss than his predatory, Republican predecessors, in other words, the chief executive of a militarist empire.

The 1% and their advocates and operatives in the U.S. political class have thrown us to the wolves. How does one make an ally of uncertainty and keep close the verities of the heart while negotiating this howling political wilderness?

Even in this era of oversized fear and diminished imagination, there are some among us–nonconformists, creative thinkers, artists and occupiers–who welcome (rather than cower before) the metaphorical image of wolves (that are recognized as fellow outcasts). Instead of being shamed by outsider status, they have been suckled and raised by wolves–i.e., by embracing their fate of having been cast-out into the wilderness.

Nourished by the spirit of defiance, some thrive when freed from the constraints of a habitual adherence to groupthink. The dark terrain of societal abandonment becomes their natural habitat: They howl at the moon; they reject the daylight world of bland consensus; they learn to see in the dark, apprehending their own interior darkness and, as a result, gaining understanding into the hearts of darkness beating within those in power.

The wilderness of political activism, of poetry, of art becomes their home: They don’t clean-up nicely for the polite company demanded by political duopoly; they don’t let themselves be bred down (as a few domesticated wolves did) to yapping Toy Poodles, in exchange for a few food scraps.

When you’re looking at a Toy Poodle–you’re looking at a former wolf, as, for example, when your looking at corporate press members, you’re looking at folks whose ancestors long ago were journalists.

One moment, you’re loping through the woods, snout held high, smelling the scent of fresh game on the wind, but the next thing you know–you’re being led around on a leash and collar, encrusted with tacky rhinestones, and you’re salivating at the sound of an electric can-opener. One moment, you’re a child, entranced in play, hardwired to eternity–next moment, you’re sitting at work and your passions, hopes and yearnings have been shrunk down to Toy Poodle-sized agendas . . . You’re truckling for your boss’s approval; you’re counting the minutes until break time. Like domesticated livestock and unfortunate animals incarcerated in zoos, you are no longer a noble animal–you have become a Thing That Waits For Lunch.

To resist, we must cast off the fear of being an outcast. The signs bode well for us: Over the last few months, in the company of the OWS pack, I have witnessed the awakening of many…have been graced with the privilege of being in their lupine company as we howled defiant into the darkness of the corporate state night.

One must remember this: We human beings are of nature as well. Accordingly, within us lies an indomitable self, encoded with the grace and fury of the natural world, and, if acknowledged and respected, our authentic nature will awaken and arise. Then the real dogfight begins: The fur will fly, as we fight, fang and claw, to retake the lost landscape of our collective humanity, and, by extension, begin the struggle to restore health, imagination and empathy to a nation of cage-accepting, imperium-countenancing, sick puppies.

1) Stop being apocalyptic. Stop expecting America to experience a crisis that “wakes” people up and changes everything. The American capitalist class has steadily ground down the working class majority since the early 1970s with no meaningful resistance and there’s no apparent reason this can’t continue indefinitely. Things don’t magically get better just because they’ve been lousy for a long time.

Git along, little sheeples, nothing to see here: thirty million Americans under or unemployed, 50 million with no health insurance, 47 million on food stamps, declining real wages and leisure time for almost 40 years, full speed ahead with illegal wars and robotic warfare, the slow strangling of prudent savers to give money to speculators (through prolonged artificially low interest rates),  indefinite detention and assassinations of American citizens, immunity from prosecution (or even any investigation) for government-approved criminals — from CIA torturers to spying telecom companies to Wall Street fraudsters, and the ongoing flash crash back to feudalism from trillions of dollars stolen in tech, housing, commodity and credit bubbles. If it walks like a crisis and quacks like a crisis but people don’t treat it like it’s a crisis, then it’s not a crisis. Through it all, there’s still no Million Gun March on Washington.

2)Look on the bright side of America’s closeness to Israel. The Great and Little Satan are arm in arm and jumping off a cliff together — they are happy and we should be happy for them. Clarity is always good. The latest outrageous act committed by an Israeli settler automatically becomes the baseline that will be defended by every American politician. Countries that confuse their interests with other nations are the Fool walking off the mountain in the Tarot card deck. Buh-bye! Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians also flushes out all those closet Custers on the American left. People who deny justice for victims of a land and water stealing ethnic cleansing project will always undermine (or walk away from) any movement for peace or justice — they are neo-cons in waiting.

America’s right wing doesn’t see the Israeli-Palestinian “issue” through the Nazi genocide portal so much as through the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of North America portal: they are cheering on the cowboys and cavalry. While they are having their masturbatory massacre fantasies of dark-skinned people, it’s good that the rest of the world sees America’s first black president warmly embrace the Bull Conner of the Middle East — it’s a reminder that America can never be trusted and that America’s foreign policy is mainly a play thing used by politicians to get elected. Support of Israel is America’s warning label, a skull and crossbones that says America doesn’t mean anything it says about freedom, equality, democracy, or one person one vote. “Separate and unequal, segregation now and forever!” says Barack Obama, where it concerns Palestinians.

3) Stop listening to people who talk about the “1% versus the 99%.” This phrase must have been thought up by someone who believes capitalism is basically good but some miscellaneous fiends just ruined it for everybody with their “cronyism” etc. They never tell us how the capitalist class got such a crushing financial advantage to begin with. Here’s the answer: They got all this money by stealing it from you at work each day where you are paid only a tiny fraction of the vast wealth that you help create. The capitalists siphon off the surplus booty for their opulent lifestyles plus assorted payoffs to the other purposeless parasites and anti-evolutionary freaks that comprise the tax, insurance, real estate, advertising and public relations industries. And don’t forget about the petty cash to bribe United States Senators. You work and pay for all of it, including your own enslavement. If you understand and believe this, you are now a Marxist — that didn’t hurt, did it? The problem isn’t the 1%, it’s 100% the capitalist system because it’s based on theft.

Other reasons to reject the “1% versus the 99%”: First, if we look at the people who respond to the “bread” component of the American empire’s bread and circuses, we find that millions are doing perfectly fine and feel they have way too much to lose by any change in the current system. On the “circuses” side of the equation there are plenty of people content with blaming their problems on immigrants and minorities and glorying in the spectacle of killing the latest Muslim villain of the month. (In Obamaville there are only two street signs and they both point in the same re-election direction: Dow Jones Green, Muslims Blood Red — it’s kind of a Christmassy-type intersection.) And if we add in all the members of the working class who either are ignorant of their own class interests or actually aspire to be members of the capitalist class, we might find that the percentage of “us” versus “them” doesn’t look so favorable.

Instead, I urge a different kind of percentage to move the debate forward. I believe that America will start to turn around at the exact moment that the capitalist class becomes more afraid of the working class than we are of them. As soon as 51% of us performs this judo, America begins to get well. Working out the expression of losing our fear is the only real issue. The capitalist class hasn’t had to give back anything in nearly 40 years and nothing really significant since the Great Depression. The 1% versus 99% is meaningless — 51% of the capitalist class being scared shitless for their lives is priceless.

4) Stay positive. No matter how bad things look for non-human animals and nature, one day Guyeah! (my version of Gaia) will prevail and that blight known as humanity will be gone or have to significantly (whimsically and ahimsacally) start over. O happy day!

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play a little Tetris. You don’t have any Tofutti Cuties on ya, do ya?

Military Contractor Gear, $499.95. For that aspiring mercenary in your family, now he can get off his couch and terrorize terrorists, without leaving his parents’ home even. Armed with a knife, grenades, M9 pistol and the latest Kalashnikov, the world’s most reliable infantry rifle, not that toy gun, M-16 piece of crap, your hired soldier can foray into his backyard and blast nasty holes into his dog, cat and lawn furniture. Emboldened, he can venture into adjacent properties and kick down his neighbors’ doors in the middle of the night and splatter them if they resist, or even if they submit. There’s no need for your deranged warrior to be bummed out over the end of the Iraq War, since he can bring all of that exciting carnage home. Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out later! Bored with nightly mayhem, your military contractor can even step on an improvised explosive device (at $79.95 extra, with only one needed, trust us) and feel the thrills of having his lower half, at least, shredded. Real life hired-guns don’t get Purple Heart, but we’ll ship you an authentic looking one, at $4.99 extra.

Big Sis Sex Doll, $65.99, with $9.99 for handcuffs and $29.99 for TSA uniform. Tired of Janet Napolitano rummaging in your pants? Now you can get into hers. This is no generic, almost life-size dummy with the usual, traditional orifices in more or less the right places, or even that rarified, glasses-wearing and Emily Dickinson-quoting vinyl girlfriend. No, Siree! This is the Secretary of Homeland Security in face and person, her unique body shape extraordinarily rendered by a world-renown, Chinese artisan, a classmate and rival, no less, to the sculptor of that hulking and fug ugly MLK statue on the Washington Mall. Spiffy in your TSA outfit, you can intone on your very first date, “This is merely procedural, ma’am,” as you legally insert your creepy claws inside Janet’s business pants and fondle her pubis, buttocks and more, with no foreplay whatsoever. Why waste time? Like any sane person, she will squirm, grimace or even curse in a realistic, battery operated shriek, AA cells not included, but should Janet resist your patriotic, post 9-11 molestation, you can harden your voice and growl, “I’ll send you to Guantanamo, bitch!” before you handcuff her and get really funky. Fun over, you can waterboard Janet’s face and gently wash her body with warm water and soap. Deflated, she is compact enough to store in a back pocket until the next airport patdown and/or enhanced interrogation technique session.

Home Slot Machine, $199.99. With offshoring, American factories are crumbling. Once the makers of high-quality merchandise, Americans now merely service or hustle each other, whether in investing banking, at street corner shell games or in casinos. Forty-one states now boast glittery gambling emporia, with these springing up even in an old church or a disused steel plant. It’s not farfetched to imagine a day when there are poker, blackjack, roulette and mahjong tables near each home. They’ll have to be within walking distance, of course, since Americans will be too broke to afford car or gasoline. Hell, it is probable that there will be a slot machine installed outside each dwelling, even of tarp or cardboard, where the mailbox used to be. The government won’t deliver your letters, since the postal service has long gone out of business, but it will stop by regularly to collect coins from your personal gambling contraption. Why not leap into the future, my friend, by having a slot machine right now in your living room? If you still have a living room, that is. Day or night, you can compulsively stuff your dwindling income into this cartoon-decorated steel box, then crank its handle without consequence. As in a real casino, your money will be magically transferred to unseen persons elsewhere. This mindless toy is tough enough to endure repeated kicks, bangs or even an atomic bomb, without showing any of your disappeared moolah. With each $200 spent, however, it will spit out a 25-cent coupon, to be spent at the supermarket of your choice.

“I can’t go on; I go on.” — Samuel Beckett

All alive are tasked with the challenge of, not only proceeding through life despite these kinds of insults to common sense and common decency, but to make a stand, in one’s own unique way, against prevailing forms of madness and oppression.

As a case in point, within the mainstream narratives of the corporate media and that of both major political parties, one bears constant witness to palaver involving the nebulous tyrannies of “big government”; although, incongruously, one scarcely receives from those sources focused complaints and critiques (much less probing investigative reports or congressional hearings) directed at the excesses of the national security/police state and Military/Big Media/Prison Industrial Complex. The “big government” narrative is a misdirection campaign — a smoke screen serving to obscure corporate/military dominance of political life and its effects on the social criteria of every day life in the nation. Accordingly, government is only as big as the 1% who own and operate it will allow it to be.

Therefore, due to the fact that elitist interests all but control the U.S. political class, in order to change government policies, a radical rethinking and revamping of the economic order of the nation must occur. Although, at this late date in the life of empire, change will have to come from the streets, from uprisings — by occupations, by a restructuring of the entire system, from its cracked foundation, to rotting support beams, to corroding particle board, to lousy paint job.

Yet, this will be an organic process… unpredictable, fraught with peril, freighted with the expansiveness of the novel, tinged with apprehensions borne of grief. But upheaval is inevitable because the present system is deep into the process of entropic runaway. And because uncertainty will be our constant companion, one is advised to make it an ally.

The neoliberal capitalist order is on a path towards extinction. And it will, most likely, die ugly. But it has lived ugly as well. The system never worked as advertised…was more sales pitch than substance in its promise to increase innovation and deliver prosperity worldwide. Conversely, the set-up leveled enslavement to powerful interests by means of a 21st century version of company town despotism; e.g., workhouses, sweat shops, unhealthy mining towns and industrial wastelands where the laboring classes are shackled by debt-slavery to company store-type coercion.

This global company town criteria has inflicted sub-living wages, no benefit, no future jobs, yet the corporate state’s 24/7, commercial propaganda apparatus has the consumer multitudes of the U.S. convinced that they are “living the dream”. As a result, great numbers still believe their oligarchic oppressors actually believe their own lies about freedom, liberty and equal opportunity for all.

That’s right: Scheming princes simply love the peasants of their kingdom…They do, as long as those wretches continue to bow down in the presence of the powerful, do all they are commanded to do, and unthinkingly serve the interests of their vain, arrogant rulers. Absurdly, large numbers in the U.S. still claim the burdensome economic yoke they bear is a glittering accessory of freedom gifted to them by their privileged betters.

Often, one hears the assertion: Although the U.S. is an empire, it is, in fact, a benign sort of empire…as far as empires go.

To the contrary, the nation’s post-Second World War, empire-building enterprise, as is the case throughout history with exercises in imperium, has leveled deathscapes abroad, corrupted the society’s elite and delivered anomie and alienation to the general population. From the soulless, dehumanizing nothingscapes of the U.S. interstate highway system and its resultant suburban project, to the douchescapes of hyper-commercialized pop culture, empire’s legacy is as pervasive as it is dismal.

And all delivered and maintained by trading in the bartered blood of the innocent abroad by mechanisms of imperial plunder while serving to create a gallery of heartless, authoritarian-minded, consumerism-addicted grotesques at home. One suspects this is the reason discussions involving the true nature of empire are not considered a subject fit for nice company.

Often, by attempting to adapt to the burdensome daily obligations and the spirit crushing, hierarchical structure of neoliberal capitalism, individuals will begin to internalize its pathologies. In the age of corporate state dominated media, to ensure the circular, self-reinforcing nature of the noxious narratives of empire remain in place, faux populist, conservative media talk show hosts, talking heads and rightist pundits — elitist bully boys and gals — i.e., the bigot whispers of the right — continually seed the dismal air with false narratives, contrived to misdirect anger and foment displaced resentments.

In turn, little bullies, out in the U.S. spleenland, rendered resentful and mean of spirit by the incessant humiliation leveled by a class-stratified, exploitive economic system take up these self-defeating talking points that serve the 1%. Accordingly, when, for example, participants in the OWS movement question the present social and economic structure, these downscale denizens of oligarchic rule personalize the critique; their identification with the system is so complete that they feel as though they have been attacked on a personal basis.

As a consequence, all too often their defenses are raised and they return volleys of ad hominem attacks that serve to defend a status quo that demeans them. This psychological phenomenon could be termed Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS) — a pathology suffered by personalities who have been traumatized by authority, but who endeavor to remedy the wounding and humiliation inflicted by a brutal, degrading order by identification with their oppressors.

To wit, the lack of outrage exhibited by the general public regarding the nations trudge toward a police/national security state. For example, the lack of deference displayed by city officials and local police forces regarding the First Amendment rights of OWS participants.

First off, let’s clear the pepper spray-fogged air on the matter: The vast majority of rank and file police officers do not now and, most likely, never will view themselves as part of the 99%. Simply stated, police officers identify with their fellow cops. The vocation, by its institutionalized, militaristic, tribal nature, creates a wall of separation between its insider members and outsiders; i.e., the civilian population at large.

It is an act of self-deception to insist that rank and file police officers, the so-called blue shirts, might even be tacit supporters of the 99% movement.

Good luck with that. But don’t be surprised if your entreaties are answered in the form of concentrated mists of pepper spray. In fact, as of late, that is exactly the reply we have received from the police, many times over.

Most police officers do not much identify with civilians. They harbor fealty to their careers and are indoctrinated to evince unquestioning loyalty to the department. Or as Bob Dylan presents the case in verse:

“Because the cops don’t need you and man they expect the same” — from “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”.

On a cultural basis, after years of hyper-authoritarian indoctrination by mass media sources and political influences, few, among the general public and in the political realm, seem willing to demand openness and accountability from law enforcement organizations. All too often, police (and U.S. soldiers as well) are viewed by a large percent of the general public as selfless heroes, noble souls, protecting life and liberty. And no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary, this image holds.

How is it that so many can cling to the illusion that cops and soldiers — grownups, armed with deadly weaponry, and who have shown themselves willing to engage in acts of state sanctioned violence and oppression — are innocent victims of circumstance? Have we, in this nation, lost the concept of free will?

How did the perspective of a people become so upside down that heavily armed, body armor-enswathed men and women wearing uniforms of state power are viewed as blameless innocents while those they perpetrate brutality against are somehow regarded as the aggressors in the situation…deserving of the violence inflicted upon them?

Let’s have a reckoning with reality regarding the nature of the forces coalescing against OWS and other global movements aligned against despotism: Authoritarian personality types detest the sight of freedom; its inherent uncertainties make them damn nervous. By reflex, they have a compulsion to lower a jackboot on its neck.

Or, in the words of one officer tasked with the duty of stifling the public’s right to free assembly at a recent OWS protest staged at the Winter Garden atrium of Brookfield Properties, within the World Financial Center located in lower Manhattan, “Don’t get in my face. I have a gun on me, okay? I don’t want any people coming that close to me.”

In acts of social and civic resistance, regardless of whether one evinces a Gandhi-like position of nonviolence or adopts a Malcolm X influenced stance of “by any means necessary”, the enforcers of a corrupt authoritarian order regard any and all displays of dissent as an invitation to force dissenters face down on the pavement, zip-cuffed and bleeding, then be remanded into custody — or worse.

At this critical point, it is imperative we let die our illusions involving the present order. Yet we must do so without becoming so disillusioned that we lack the resolve to remake the world. Often, we cling to fictions involving the benign nature of power because the act spares us angst. To the contrary, we must bear witness to the collisions of our illusions and the realities of the day, because it is from the debris created by these collisions that the world will be built anew.

The rock tells the story. Following the ascending volcanic dike to its crest, a wall of the red pebbly splatter rock lay hard against the cold andesite lava that had long ago poured out building this hill and flowing into the surrounding basins. But, the land is now only a collection of clues – if that is how one sees it. Or it is what it is: hills and valleys, temporary streams and canyons.

As I walked and scrambled up the broken piles of rock toward the top of the old vent, a mule deer whistled below telling all and sundry that I was there. A few minutes later it whistled again and then once more. I had seen her tracks, quite fresh, in a hidden curve of the dike wall lower down and wondered how nearby the deer might be. The sound was shockingly familiar, like the hands-clasp whistle that my son uses to call his dog; and for a moment I searched the valley below me with binoculars looking for some other human walking in this remote place. (Later, as I returned to my evening spot, the deer hopped out of hiding, crossed the valley and disappeared into the tiny trees of an adjoining hillside. I watched its hindquarters disappear into heavy cover, and then, like the closing scene from Harry and the Hendersons, parts of several deer appeared briefly in the spaces between the trees and just as rapidly disappeared into the tall brush.)

I sat on the top of the tall hill, sat on the lava that for a few moments all those many years ago was 2000º F and pushing up out of the earth making a terrible mess of this place – it would have been catastrophe for the plants and animals living here. But the serenity and beauty of the present moment would not let me delve too far into the conflagration that visited, and built, this area over the space of about a million years, over a hundred or so square miles, all fed by about 100 volcanic vents like the one upon which I sat.

The serenity and beauty of this place and this moment also formed the mansion of experience in which to contemplate the present conflagration that was “flowing” in from only several miles away, but from millions of “vents” spread, literally, over the whole surface of the earth.

Not to be too dramatic, though perhaps unavoidably: the lights from Los Alamos shine down on this place. Oppenheimer, Groves, Teller and many others have seen this landscape from their physical and intellectual aerie as they plotted and, others like them, continue to plot several of the potential futures of the world: the atomic and hydrogen bombs born on the pyroclastic ash-flows from a super-volcano! But this was not on my mind more than as the recollection of the previous color that a room might have been painted; no, from this hilltop, looking out over the valleys and hills of this old volcanic shield, seeing the lights of Los Alamos to the west, Santa Fe to the east, the glow of Albuquerque to the south, it was the class war of the worlds that came into focus.

Sitting there at the crest of the long volcanic dike as the sun was setting, a geological feature called a ‘hog back’, my lack of being alone was more than palpable; it was reality. The doe just down the hill was, without question, giving my presence her attention; this was the center of the range of a mountain lion that I had once caught napping in a shaded canyon and had recently seen tracks and scat nearby; though unseen, coyotes were coming out to hunt all around me and would sing to me later in the evening; and all the smaller mammals: skunks, cottontails, jacks, the various rats and mice. I listened for them, watched the changing light define and undefine the land shapes in which they were certainly walking, stalking and secreting themselves.

Ravens flew in, 2 by two, calling to each other, swinging by overhead to have a look and treating me to the whoosh whoosh of their wing beats. I was of little interest, too far from their cliffs and had no visible long gun, a recognition that they make most readily. Other than their occasional sounds the rest was an embracing silence.

These partners in the experience of the moment were also part of my considerations. I was not alone in this place – not far away from “real life” under the twinkling lights. I was here, on purpose, to be with the creatures of the desert hills. I was here to feel my life in communion with theirs, seeking a different context. I was here to be free of language, to be hungry for every sound, every sight of movement; here to be free of level floors and paths, to walk on the uneven earth; here to be free of comfort, to feel the cold wind, to have to shield my eyes from the low angled sun.

So I sat on the hilltop and felt my way through the wash of sub-verbal ideas: the 100 thousand people in the valley east, west, north and south were an anxiety, an empathy, as I looked around beyond the low hills; their lives, hopes and dreams, rushed by like a super-speed fast-forward, all montaged together as in a bad movie; reaching out beyond the hills, beyond the Rio Grande Valley, beyond the western high plains to the coasts and on over the oceans; a billion voices in the whoosh whoosh of the raven’s wing.

It was really pretty simple: humans possess biological capacities that have been adapted into very powerful designs, and have lost control of the power that changes the world around them; and some humans had collected to themselves such vast power that a madness has been created in them beyond all help. All the behaviors, instincts and feelings that matter have been swept aside by domination of physical spaces, ability to carry out almost any desire, domination and control of other people, feelings of omnipotence and omniscience: the madness of power over others rather than the communion of common purpose.

The human species is ultimately flawed. The primate social pattern of domination, long since obsolete as an adaptive device, continues to be expressed in our economics and politics; and is now imbued with physical and organizational powers thousands, even millions, of times that which both enforced and inhibited the actions of our ancestors. We adapt, in our expectations and behaviors, to our present powers and the conditions that surround us and yet still feel about and act on them with the emotions of a tribal primate.

For all the complexity in the human world, our situation comes down to a class of humans acting in every possible circumstance to advance their interests without regard to the costs that are inflicted on living others and the future. As long as there is a significant surplus of material and services available, the native design of human species will move some of its members to try and collect that excess to their control. This creates the basis for an escalating process of wealth accumulation with primate hierarchical social patterns transforming into aberrant power-dominated class systems.

This process can take on a hundred different forms, and so confuses us. Those who follow this course as capitalists claim that it is the socialists that are making trouble and the communists say that it is the capitalists who trample people’s rights to the right kind of wealth. So-called Christians team up with capitalists and another set of Christian beliefs finds more commonality with socialists, yet both act with antagonism toward atheists or Muslims. And on it goes.

The one “religion” that seems to cut across all of these lines of difference is excesses of power and wealth: the obscenely rich may fight among themselves, but it is mutual understanding of their common relationship to the rest of humanity that draws them into communion for the maintenance of wealth, power and privilege: the actions that are needed to extract an abundance of wealth from the labors and fears of the human herd are a blood-bond for the elite.

The elite of Roman abused the common folk. The elite of Europe abused the common folk, first at home and then abroad in their colonies. The elite in the old Soviet Union abused the common folk. The elite in China have and are abusing the common folk. The elite in the US are abusing the common folk. The elite in India are abusing the common folk. The elite of the major institutional religions abuse the common folk. And in places where the common folk are not being abused, the elite are preparing conditions of the global economy to abuse them. When there is sufficient stored and tradable excess converted to private wealth, 10, 20, 50 times greater than basic need meeting wealth, this will always be the outcome.

If I can’t imagine life except within the circle of the distant lights, the whole package of “goods” must be accepted: mining, smelting, manufacturing, retailing; economic growth, progress, wealth accumulation and power; the overcoming of meaninglessness with the meaningless.

How is it possible to live without the light switch, without unlimited access to TV, refrigeration, wifi, year round 70º F regardless of ambient temperature, unlimited choices and supplies of food and ‘consumer goods?’ Who and how many would give these up willingly? And in these questions lies the understanding of the elite; who and how many would give up willingly absolute power to have and do as they wish, to live with impunity, and what actions would be taken to maintain such power?

The question isn’t what is happening so much as what can be done. What are the global responses; what are the personal responses?

It is easy to say that wealthy and corporate interests have leveraged their increasing control of economic and political institutions to the point that the primary legal foundation of the US and much of the world must be broken to accommodate them – these foundations, as habits of practice and expectations, have already been bent as far as they will go. It is what we, as a people, accept as correct and honorable, applied consistently and to an extreme – an extreme that we never intended – that is the essential engine driving us to this place.

Like all movements we have our prophets: Henry George, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, C. Wright Mills, E. F. Schumacher, Hervé Kempf, Joe Bageant, Noam Chomsky, David Cay Johnston, Chris Hedges, Chris Glugston, George Monbiot, Paul Craig Roberts, Herman Daly, Bill Mckibben, Derrick Jensen and dozens of notable others, most you will never have heard of, like Coralie Koonce who has written very readable, and scholarly, books bringing all of the issues together. And there are many many more, completely ignored by the media and the “world of influence”, who work everyday to better understand and to better inform their fellows of the grave danger and the hard choices that the immediate future holds.¹

It is so clear a summary of their work, and that of my companions on the hilltop, that great wealth must not be in private hands; human hands must belong to the same class – the human class. And the amount of wealth extracted and sequestered outside of the movement of environmental processes must be reduced to the barest minimum. Humans must take less from the total energy flux and material cycles. The human pleasures of life, and there are many, must and do come primarily from communion with our fellows, both human and non-human; we must again learn to distrust inventions of behavior and objects that separate us. All of this and more will come, if it comes at all, with the greatest of effort, pain and great luck.

As I sat on the hilltop all of these thoughts went through my mind as movements of emotion, as wordless sensations guided by the far away city lights. What was real was the doe below me in the cactus meadow. We were both occupying the same space in the desert hills with our similarities and differences. She was about 170 pounds, young, strong; sharp eyes, ears and sense of smell; fleet of foot and dangerous with sharp hoofs. She knew the terrain, the plants, where to find water, the dangers from mountain lions, coyotes, and humans. I am 170 pounds, old and strong enough, in a weak sort of way (I could not hop across the 200 meters to the trees in a few seconds). I have weak eyes that need prostheses; my hearing has been damaged by years in noisy places and especially the use of firearms; I can smell things placed under my nose and sewage treatment plants. I know the area in a general sort of way. I am very dangerous with a big pistol at hand and very fast, though limited, on a motorcycle. I can build a fire. I can think ahead. My delicate feet are cased in fine boots; my cold-prone head is cased in a wool fleece cap. My hairless, thin-skinned body is cased in wool and out-door approved synthetics. I have, in my panniers, food, water, emergency sleeping bag, flashlight, cameras, campstool and other useful items. I can leave this place if I wish.

The doe belongs here. Her lineage almost certainly goes back thousands of years in this general area, perhaps 1500 generations. 1500 generations for me would include the episodic pulses out from the African cradle, the cave painters of southern Europe, the explorers of the west Asian steppes and the intrepid probers at the Beringia passage to North America.² Not only do I bring the ideas and concerns of the present intellectual world to this hilltop, but also the generational history of a good part of the earth; where I belong is a matter of conjecture.

The deer should whistle a warning again and again, louder and louder, until all can hear it.

1. I apologize if I have left out one of your favorite prophets, my point in making a compact list is that there are many – enough to make up the rooster of a baseball team or of a representative body.
2. There are two ways to make such comparisons: directly with years; this area would have begun repopulating with the present fauna about 6000 years ago (after suffering a stifling thousand year drought), or by the number of generations comparing the number of birthing cycles which would indicate the degree to which the present population is related to the population of the past.

In case you haven’t heard the details (which is likely if you have spent much time watching traditional news), the bill essentially labels every spot on this earth as a battlefield, including the United States. It’s a telling moment when they concede, or, in fact, advance a never ending war, and its present under each rock, according to these lawmakers. It’s certainly the stuff of 1984 (we’ve always been at war with Eastasia). From this notion springs the advancement of military tribunals dealing with all citizens of the globe (once again, Americans included) without the bother of transparency. Detention and disappearance could be the order of the day.

The secretive nature and broad sweeps have already been used on those they deem foreign enemy combatants around the world. As if by fascist playbook, this sort of thing is trial ballooned on “the other” and then brought home for the enjoyment of those who didn’t complain the first time around.

An enormous issue with the militarization and deviation from open aired civilian courts is the very secretive nature of it all. If an individual has truly done a harm that merits intervention, then the light of day should shine on the accusations and stand on their own merits. That tired excuse that the information in these trials needs to be hidden is simply a ploy to avoid oversight and scrutiny. The stories have circulated about local warlords turning in neighbors (who get sent to Gitmo) often for decidedly illegitimate reasons. And then just enough scary terror bogymen really are in residence there to allow the average citizen to go back to sleep, avoiding the uncomfortable realization that some there did nothing wrong, except perhaps be in the wrong place at the wrong time or have enemies with the ear of Uncle Sam. It would be mindless to think it would go down in any other manner here. We aren’t that exceptional, I’m sorry to say.

Not to mention that this further advancement of the Military Industrial Complex must be making those entities who profit off of all of this salivate. As resources dwindle, the decision seems to have been made by the few to loot all that is available, consequences be damned.

At a time when Walmarts around the country have to add extra staff to handle the huge influx at midnight when food stamp cards get recharged….is this really the largest threat to the average American right now?. Of course not. Who is really destroying our nation?

The lumbering corporate facilitators in Congress who let our people languish as they advance Military Industrial Complex hardcore porn legislation such as this.

I have trouble believing that all of the legislators are truly evil. Rancid little snowflakes, all of them, to be sure, some evil, but some merely venal and ignorant — all hideous in their own unique manner. We will find no assistance from this pool of infamy.

This bill is flying under the radar; few seem to know about it. But, of course, that’s understandable; a new woman has popped up to talk about an inappropriate affair with Herman Cain. And if she hadn’t materialized, some damn baby would have to go missing or a hooker’s ipad with Congressional fetish requests would have to be unearthed at a booth in Chili’s – as they debate legislation that would allow the foundations for a new class of “disappeared” to occur in this nation.

If you still have any lingering thoughts that a Democrat (Crip) or a Republican (Blood) might save you, then this should serve as your final wake up call. If the teams truly believed their rhetoric, an abomination like this would have never been advanced — the fear of the other party occupying the Commander in Chief throne would be too frightening to ponder for the opposite party. Sure, they say this is for Al-Queda, but that’s what they always say. It only morphs into the others, such as political dissidents down the road.

McCain joked about his daughter going “to the dark side”, presumably for taking a job at MSNBC (as aside, it’s astounding the talent pool in these children of politicians, isn’t it….they seem to be getting jobs in the media all over the place.) But if McCain believed the bread and circus nonsense he is peddling, would he ever want to advance this kind of bill during a “dark side of the force” presidency? Of course not — because all of that is simply an illusion. They work together for corporate interests, never us. When a clown like Newt Gingrich says “child labor laws are dumb”, it inflames and occupies the national discourse. It’s meant to be that way, and hey…. if he can score one for kids going back to 1827 and get soot to cover their little faces, so much the better. Callista looks good amongst that squalor. Her Tiffany diamonds shine all the brighter in comparison.

It can be a soul crushing moment when it is realized that there are no politicians advancing a core decency for the average American life (and heaven forbid for foreign lives). I’m sure it’s not a new realization for most of the readers of the legitimate free press still operating in the internet hinterland, but for the bulk of Americans, it’s a painful leap they have yet to make. A bill like this is inflammatory to most – when they truly realize what it means – ironically, a bridge between those who still think of themselves with political labels.

It’s all evolving, what this information means. Occupy movements are nebulous, but they seem to have this basic understanding mastered — that the current system is flawed beyond repair. The consent of the governed is being eroded slowly. We still have many decent people who don’t understand, though. Where they use fear and manipulation, we need to use reason, love, and inclusiveness to advance the notion of an equitable society based on mutual respect. We may lose, but what choice do we have?

But time is running out. I’m impressed that Occupy hasn’t turned to violence that places them in the meat grinder. You just know that they are salivating for that. The powerful probably fully expected it to go that manner after beating those kids. How funny to disappoint them so. I see a quite asymmetrical situation — I think it will call for something more nuanced — that of turning the opinion of the masses. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it certainly has been done to great effect by the manipulators of our time. One would hope that truth would have an advantage, but base emotions often rule.

I don’t pretend to know the answers, but I do know that it’s necessary for the broader populace to understand the coup that is underway. That’s the foundation we need. Attempts at localization will likely be necessary as well. A government that seems to care little for any of us, and simply expects us to behave as cogs in machinery of big commerce will continue to run amok when met with resounding silence. But finally, the silence is waning.

But we are on a path that will lead to our own version of “disappeareds” and that is no exaggeration. We have no choice but to resist.

If you say someone shoplifted something 50 years ago, or got drunk and unruly 50 years ago, or was arrested for vandalism 50 years, most of us would be able to process that information; we’d write it off as evidence of immaturity or stupidity or bad judgment, and move on. Thankfully, we humans have an inordinate capacity for forgiveness. But when we hear that someone molested a child, even if it happened 50 years ago, it’s a whole other deal.

Even if that person denies the crime and is subsequently acquitted of all charges a dreadful stigma remains attached, one that’s close to impossible to cleanse. When sex is concerned, people tend never to look at that person in quite the same way again. I’m not suggesting that sex crimes (particularly those involving minors) aren’t egregious, only that they have a half-life that far exceeds other offenses. And, of course, there’s an ugly corollary attached: If you want to ruin someone’s reputation, accuse them of a sexual impropriety.

While I was president of a labor union, one of our members (“Susan”) came to me with a horrific story. Her father had been falsely accused of molesting two 15-year old neighborhood girls. The girls’ version of the story was that they’d been lured into this man’s garage with the promise of free Cokes. Once inside, he had talked lewdly to them, fondled their bottoms, and offered to show them pornographic videos.

Susan’s father’s version was decidedly different. He said that the girls approached him while he was working in his garage and asked if he’d buy them a 12-pack of beer. He refused. They pleaded with him, even offered him money to do it. He refused again and ordered them off his property. They cursed at him, gave him the finger and, on their way out, ripped down a tarpaulin that covered some tools. They later went to the police and made the false accusations.

According to Susan the police determined that the girls were “emotionally disturbed” and had made up or wildly exaggerated the entire story. But even though her father wasn’t arrested, and no charges were filed, the neighborhood subsequently treated him like a pariah. Taking the old “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” point of view, they viewed him as some sort of sexual deviate. After all, who can say with any certainty what perverted sexual thoughts lurk inside the minds of men. Susan said her dad was shattered by the experience.

Even though Herman Cain never had a realistic shot at winning the Republican nomination, the sexual harassment charges made against him sent him plummeting in the polls. I’m not suggesting that the women were lying. Indeed, I believed their stories. But while Cain’s stunning ignorance of U.S. foreign policy would have eventually torpedoed him, that ignorance won’t plague him for the rest of life the way those sexual accusations will. People won’t say, “Aren’t you the guy who didn’t know about Libya?” They’ll say, “Aren’t you the guy who groped that woman?”

Sex is its own special category, and sexual accusations are incendiary in politics. Virtually any politician is vulnerable. Arguably, the only current candidate who wouldn’t be damaged by accusations of having groped or uttered indecencies to a woman is Mitt Romney. Given Romney’s programmatic, robot-like blandness, such accusations would only serve to humanize him.

The state’s Sunshine Act [65 Pa.C.S.A §701–710] requires all public bodies to publish notices at least 24 hours before their meetings. The purpose is to eliminate secret meetings. Penn State, a private university, which received $279 million from the Commonwealth for its 2011–2012 budget, is bound by the Sunshine Act.

A public notice did appear in the Centre Daily Times, State College’s hometown newspaper, three days before a regularly-scheduled board meeting, Friday November 11. But the Trustees were caught flat-footed the week before by what eventually turned into the largest scandal in its history. These are events the Trustees should have been aware of for at least two years; certainly, the Board should have known there was a problem when the Harrisburg Patriot-News broke a story in March that the Grand Jury was investigating former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky.

But, based upon Board incompetence, there wasn’t even a crisis management plan in place when Sandusky was arrested November 5, and Athletic Director Tim Curley; and Gary Schultz, senior vice-president of finance and administration, were charged with perjury and failure to report a crime to police. The Trustees allowed Curley to take an administrative leave, and Schultz to return to retirement. Schultz, who had worked for Penn State for 40 years, had retired in 2009, but had been brought back on an interim basis in July. Both Curley’s and Schultz’s decisions were probably influenced by the Board demands.

During the two weeks, beginning November 5, the Board had conference calls, executive sessions, and emergency meetings, all without public notice.

Conference calls involving a quorum without public notice aren’t allowed. At least one conference call was conducted on Saturday, November 5. A meeting by telephone is just as illegal as a meeting with all persons at a table if it isn’t publically announced.

Several emergency meetings were held the next few days. The Sunshine Act allows emergency meetings. The Trustees conducted meetings Sunday, November 6, Monday, November 7, and Wednesday, November 9. By law, an emergency meeting can be called, without public notice, only for “the purpose of dealing with a real or potential emergency involving a clear and present danger to life or property.” [65 Pa.C.S.A §703] Even in the wildest stretch of that definition, there was no clear and present danger. That occurred years ago when the university didn’t contact police to report the actions of a man believed to be a child molester.

Executive sessions to discuss personnel issues and some other items are allowed—if they are announced at public meetings “immediately prior or subsequent to the executive session.” [65 Pa.C.S.S. §708(b)] But they were not. About 10 p.m., November 9, following an emergency meeting, Board vice-chair John P. Surma, flanked by 21 of the 31 trustees, publicly announced it had fired Paterno and PSU president Graham Spanier. Surma told the media the decision was unanimous, thus indicating a vote was done in secret and not under public scrutiny as required.

The Trustees also violated both Paterno’s and Spanier’s rights under law. It’s doubtful the Board members, most of them in corporate business, even care. How they handled Paterno’s firing is indicative they have little regard for employee rights and due process. Paterno had previously said he would retire at the end of the season, since he believed, “the Board of Trustees should not spend a single minute discussing my status. They have far more important matters to address. I want to make this as easy for them as I possibly can.” The Trustees, undoubtedly, believed firing Paterno immediately would take heat off the university. Again, it was wrong.

Although executive sessions may be conducted in private, the Sunshine Act requires that “individual employees or appointees whose rights could be adversely affected may request, in writing, that the matter or matters be discussed at an open meeting.” [65 Pa.C.S.A. §708(a)(1)] The Board, according to a report in the Easton Express-Times, had ordered Spanier to resign or be fired. He chose to resign. Paterno was not contacted by the Board prior to termination, either to request to be heard or to request an open meeting. Paterno was informed of his termination by a hand-delivered letter that demanded he place a phone call to a board member. There was no indication in that letter of what the Board’s decision was.

Violating the law could result in invalidating decisions made at those meetings, and penalties of $1,000 for each violation; until September, the penalty had been a paltry $100. But here’s a nice twist. The Trustees probably don’t care.

A district attorney must approve prosecution for Sunshine Act violations. Although the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association receives about 1,000 inquiries about what may be Sunshine Act and Right-to-Know law violations each year, “it’s rare for criminal prosecutions of the Sunshine Act,” according to Melissa Melewsky, media law council for the PNA. Civil actions by individuals are likewise difficult to pursue because of significant costs.

Here’s another surprise. Because of heavy lobbying to the legislature, whose members are feasted at one home game a year and can also receive comp football tickets to other home football games, Penn State is not bound by the state’s Right-to-Know law. This means that innumerable records, including minutes of all meetings— both public and those that are illegal under the Sunshine Act—can still be secret.

Here’s something not so surprising, however. Penn State’s Public Affairs office punted all questions to the Board. The Board arrogantly has refused to answer both verbal and written questions. However, possibly using public funds, it did hire a PR firm to handle crisis management issues. We won’t know the cost—that’s something it doesn’t have to tell the taxpayers.

• Assisting on this story was Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association.

In his latest article, Haaretz writer Gideon Levy turns his focus from Israeli crimes against Palestinians to Iran which threatens no Palestinians.² So what is Levy’s problem with Iran?

Levy writes, “Iran will apparently have an atom bomb [what does Levy base this on? Are mere words enough to adduce his assertion?], and that is very bad news.”

Nuclear weapons are bad news, but Levy does decry the “very bad news” of Israel possessing nuclear weapons and upgrading its stockpile of nuclear weapons. Instead Israel is criticized for double standards and hypocrisy — something Iran cannot be criticized for regarding nuclear weapons. Levy does not discuss whether Iran would feel any need to pursue (without acknowledging that it does so) nuclear weapons if other countries, such as Israel and the United States, did not possess such weapons. Levy did not mention that Iran supports a Middle East Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone unlike Israel. Why omit such relevant facts?

Then Levy says of Iran, “It is a country that sows evil.” Levy’s sentence can only be construed as racist in sentiment. Levy does criticize the crimes of his own country against Palestinians, but has he ever criticized his country to the extent of saying it sows evil? Maybe. One wonders, however, how is it that Iran sows evil? Does Iran occupy another people’s land? Does Iran commit massacres against other peoples? Does Iran initiate wars against neighboring countries? Does it initiate wars against any countries? How is it then that Iran might compare in the slightest to Israel when it comes to sowing evil?

Levy adds to the demonization of Iran while purporting not to do so: “There is no need to add words about its dreadful threats or its dark regime – the Israeli media does so more than enough.”

Why is the Iranian government a “dark regime”? And if the Iranian government is a “dark regime,” then how much darker (or in Levy’s mind, “lighter”) is the Israeli regime?

Levy asserts: “True, Iran is threatening Israel and the United States, …”

Where is the evidence? Where are these threats by Iran? Good journalists back up what they say.

Yet Levy repeats his unsubstantiated claim “… that Iran is threatening us, Israel …” Either the state of Iran is incredibly stupid to challenge a state believed armed with over 200 nuclear weapons and backed by the hyperempire which has used nuclear weapons, or Levy is propagandizing.

Levy concludes his piece with a question: “But does Israel want in any way to resemble Iran?”

Levy is demonizing. Without offering one reason for his ad hominem aimed at Iran, and although criticizing Israel, Levy has nonetheless attempted to paint Iran as the “dark regime” that the occupation/apartheid/aggressive regime in Tel Aviv must avoid becoming – despite Iran not being an occupier, a racist state, or an aggressive state.

Iran deserves criticism on social justice issues (for example, homophobia, gender issues, and capital punishment), and so do many other states. These issues do not rise to the level of opprobrium that state-sanctioned racism and discrimination, slow-motion genocide, dispossession and occupation of an indigenous people merit.

Assertion is empty rhetoric, but that is what Levy proffers? Such “journalism” is an insult to critically thinking readers. So why did Levy engage in such shoddy “journalism”? Whose purposes does Levy’s writing serve coming as it does when many speak of an impending Israel-US attack on Iran?

Demonization is not meant to correct an errant country; demonization, itself, likelier has a more sinister intent.

1. Kim Petersen, “Subtle Loyalties to Zionism,” Dissident Voice, 4 July 2006; “Talk Is Cheap, Human Life Is Not: Justice and Freedom for Palestinians Now!” Dissident Voice, 22 December 2008.
2. Gideon Levy, “What Israel can learn from Iran,” Haaretz, 10 November 2011.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The success of the strike action in Oakland has led to a very predictable situation. Debates around tactics and attempts to exclude various elements from the group because of their use of tactics unacceptable to others seem to be the causes of this situation. In short, there were a few dozen (from most reports) protesters that broke from the peaceful marches and broke stuff. Some of the attacks made sense from a political point of view, although not from a tactical one. For example Whole Foods is not a simple health foods store. Like most of the organic foods industry, it is a big grocery chain that acts a lot like Safeway that would like to have a monopoly on the health foods retail business. The reason for the attacks on the Oakland store was a rumor that the store manager did not honor the strike and refused to let his workers take the day off. This rumor apparently was false. Would I have joined in the trashing of the store? No! Do I think those that did were cops or should be ostracized from the movement. No!

As for most of the the other targets–banks, etc–I have no problem with trashing them at the appropriate time. Was November 2, 2011 the appropriate time? I don’t think so. The focus of that day was shutting down the port and that could only be achieved by amassing large numbers of people at the port’s entrances. To Occupy Oakland’s credit this action was a success.

On to the evening. From what I can garner from news reports and conversations, email interchanges and other exchanges with friends and acquaintances who hung in the November 2 actions all day and into the early morning of November 3rd, the action ended with an attempt to take over the empty and foreclosed Traveler’s Aid building in downtown Oakland. Great idea and one that was approved by the Oakland General Assembly in principle. According to a friend who was at this action, the initial building takeover went okay. The trouble began when the police gathered into formation and began to move down Telegraph to retake the building. The crowd was rather frenzied and the ensuing attack and reaction by the crowd only served to exacerbate the situation. Unfortunately, several people were injured on both sides and the building was lost to the defenders of the bank’s property. In press releases immediately following the clashes, the police said they moved in because they assumed that there were some in the crowd of civilians that were starting fires to burn down the building. While this was not apparently the case (why would you burn down a building you wanted to occupy?), the excuse flew until it was dropped for a better one. The underlying lesson here is that if people are serious about squatting foreclosed buildings and turning them into living spaces, then they shouldn’t try and occupy them at 3 in the morning while the cops are watching, tired and ready to kick some ass. Were the occupiers right to fight back against the police? It seems to me that if they hadn’t even more protesters might have been hurt by the cops. Should they have provoked the cops by occupying the building and allowing fires to be built in trashcans and so on? See my remark above where I question the idea of occupying buildings while a bunch of angry cops are watching.

Okay. That is the situation as I understand it. A very successful strike/direct action took place in Oakland on November 2nd. It was primarily peaceful, militant and moved the struggle against the excesses of monopoly capitalism forward. No matter how hard the capitalist media tries, it can not change this objective fact. This is where the overwrought focus on the actions of a few comes in. As far back as I can remember (and that’s at least back to 1968), the mainstream media has always focused on the more histrionic actions that take place at almost every protest worth its salt. My dad used to say that that’s what sells papers. He’s right of course, but there is also something more sinister going on. The intentions of those editors who encourage their reporters to highlight the instances of violence against property and clashes with cops is to discredit the movement that organized the protest. It’s not necessarily even a conscious effort by the editors. It’s just how they are “educated” to think. In fact, it’s how most of us are “educated” to think. Many of the people that actually participated in the protest read this media too. They then began to accept that media’s framing of the protest, forgetting what they know form their own experience: that the protest was not very violent and was very successful. This acceptance then too often turns into a moral rejection not only of the scattered violence that occurred, but a rejection of those the “peaceful” protesters think carried it out. Simultaneously, the police are let off the hook for the violence they provoke and create all on their own. After all, says the capitalist press, they were only doing their job. This may be true, but begs the very real question: what exactly is their job? A simple and honest answer is that for the most part their job is to protect and serve those that own the means of production. In other words, the wealthy among us. This doesn’t deny their humanity. It just makes it clear that their jobs proscribe a certain mindset. It is important to remember that police are not nonviolent any more than any other military force.

The discussions reverberating online and in Occupy camps around the country over the trashing and clashes with police that took place in Oakland are instructive for a multitude of reasons. The primary debate is around the question of trashing. The opposition to this action that essentially involves breaking stuff runs from those who see it as a tactical error at this point of the movement to those that have a moral repugnance to it. Among those in the latter camp are those whose repugnance has led them to label the “trashers” as everything from moral cowards to provocateurs to punks and scum. This type of reaction is not only as juvenile as the name-callers consider the trashing actions to be, it misses the point. The fact is, there will always be an element in every movement worth its salt that sees trashing as a legitimate act. Some in that element may well be cops, but most are just impatient, often frustrated, and individualistic at least in terms of the longer view. They should not be ostracized (unless they are cops) but informed about the need for thoughtful actions appropriate to the time and place. Those that say they will divorce themselves from the movement unless the movement disowns the “trashers” are being every bit as selfish as those they want removed.

Another criticism from the people opposed to trashing and fighting back against the police is that those who are doing this must be outsiders and not from the “good” protesters’ Oakland. This kind of comment is mostly silly. We aren’t fans at a sporting event. This isn’t about Oakland or New York or Asheville, NC or Berlin. It is an international struggle. There is no home team. The opposition is organized internationally. The Occupy movement and those that support it must do the same. Your Oakland is my Oakland just as much as the planet Earth belongs to us all. There are no geographical outsiders, only ones defined by their class. I am in solidarity with Oakland and Berlin and every other place where, like the song says: working men (and women) defend their rights.

The issue about trashing is first and foremost, like Boots Riley continues to insist in his Facebook posts, a question of tactics. It will not be solved by dividing the movement into those who support one tactic and those that don’t. It is a serious question that should be discussed, but the stance that those who are not pacifist or nonviolent do not belong in the Occupy movement is a bullshit stance encouraged by those that wish to see the movement fail. The true violence that goes on every freaking day is precipitated by those that the movement calls the 1%. That is the thought we need to keep at the front of every conversation about violence. Not as a justification for violence by protesters, but as a reminder of the real purveyor of violence on this planet.

I want to borrow a line or two from an old leaflet I have hanging around. It was distributed back in 1984 after San Francisco police attacked a protest against Henry Kissinger (talk about purveyors of violence) and beat dozens of them. After the protest, mainstream media attempted to divide the protesters into good protesters and bad ones. The good ones were the ones that obeyed the police when they told people to move away from the hotel where Kissinger was speaking. The bad ones were those who didn’t and remained to resist the police charges and attacks.

“The media works with the government to red-bait and attack militant demonstrations. We need to reject such charges. They are attempts to force us to give up our militancy and independence and to accept the state’s terms for protests.”

The protest on November2nd, 2011 in Oakland was militant. The trashing that occurred during the day did not add to that militancy and was tactically inappropriate. The most militant action was achieved by thousands of people closing down the Port of Oakland in a nonviolent direct action. The clashes with police early the next morning were the result of the tactically poor decision to try and occupy the foreclosed Traveler’s Aid building while a bunch of angry, tired and ready-to-rumble police and protesters faced off on Telegraph Avenue. The idea to squat empty buildings is a great one. Sometimes it is appropriate to break bank windows. From my perspective, November 2nd in Oakland was not the right time for either of these actions. At the same time, the fact remains, the day of action/general strike was an outstanding success for the movement.

Is civil strife a good indicator?

What about wide-scale despair or a prevalent lack of hope for the future?

In 2003, I spent some time in Cambodia. I crossed the border at Poi Pet and traveled up the main, red dirt highway to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. It was one of the most uncomfortable journeys of my life.

I sat in the back seat of a cramped sedan and stared out the side windows. Every few hundred meters or so, on either side of the car, I saw warning signs indicating land mines. The hazard was communicated by a skull and crossbones symbol, and we passed hundreds if not thousands.

Cambodia is still dotted with six million land mines, remnants of the Vietnam War and the perilous reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The red dirt highway was relatively safe, and the communities that lie along it could be navigated by established paths, cleared by trial and error. But if you left the established paths, you took your life (and limbs) in your own hands. One in every 200 Cambodians is an amputee.

The ratio is staggering. And when you roam through local markets or bazaars, it is not uncommon to see begging double and triple amputees, dragging themselves along by their remaining limbs on the grimy pavement between market stalls.

Cambodia is a tragic, unsettling place. And the misfortune there is compounded by abject poverty, desperation and exploitation. It is not a healthy place to live; but neither is my country, though for far different reasons.

According to a recent report published by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one out of every 300 U.S. adults attempted suicide in the past year. That’s 2700 a day, 100 per hour and almost two per minute. There were almost as many attempted suicides as abortions last year.

The two biggest reasons people attempt suicide are depression and psychosis. There are, of course, folks who harbor a sober, philosophical desire to die, whether to control their own destiny or alleviate suffering, but most are simply depressed or psychotic.

There’s obviously plenty to be depressed or sick about in this country. We’re not healthy. We’re knowingly and willfully self-destructive in terms of our diets, our sedimentary lifestyles and our environment. We’re obsessively fixated on youthfulness and resort to injections and implants and try crèmes and pills to stay looking young—anything to avoid the appearance of wisdom.

We toil away at non-vital vocations that turn us into listless automatons. We’re surrounded by technologies that allow us to communicate with everyone, but we rarely have anything reasonable or meaningful to say. Our nation and our species are going down the proverbial tubes and we have very little idea of what can be done about it.

We’re obviously depressed. But when one in every 300 members of a nation’s citizenry tries to kill themselves in a given year, it’s time to consider whether individual depression isn’t simply a symptom of collective psychosis.

One of the chief symptoms of psychosis is delusion. Victims harbor false beliefs that are persistent and organized and resistant to correction or logic.

Doesn’t that describe us perfectly?

We believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. We deny evolutionary theory even though our understanding of our own biology is based on it. We deny climate change even though its effects are already changing our existence. We believe that America is a good place to live even though success in our society is based more on ruthlessness than responsibility, and real honesty, in general, is considered naïve. And we insist the United States is still a great nation even though it hasn’t been a positive force in the world for years.

Something is wrong with us.

We are depressed as a nation and psychotic as a people.

As the middle class—the chief bastion of normalcy and, arguably, decency, in our society—is slowly being amputated, our thought processes are confused. As our national glory fades, we talk now, mostly to ourselves. Our behavior is becoming strange and possibly dangerous, but we only absorb and process information that confirms our psychosis.

There needs to be intervention, but we protect our delusions with patriotic fervor. And we guard our dementia as if it were religion.

I just don’t seem to get to movies much anymore; it’s truly not even much of a temptation. We have a local theater, though, with cushy velvet seats, homemade cookies and oatmeal stout beer so sometimes you have to give in to all that and just buy a ticket. A movie about neolithic cave drawings, of all things, came up at the theater so I opted to see that one. I’m sure I’ve never seen a movie about that!

In other venues the film was offered in 3-D which sounds terribly hokey, but I guess it was used to nice effect showing the stony undulations of the cave wall surface.  Anyway, my theater has beer, as I mentioned, but no 3-D. A technological trade-off, I suppose.

It’s called “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” and it’s a lovely film, allowing the viewer a glimpse of this world that will never be fully opened to the outside (for its own protection — other caves have had mold issues from the breath of tourists).

The drawings found in Chauvet cave were of such exquisite quality that when they were discovered in the 90s, it was originally thought that they represented the very pinnacle of the art, so would likely be newer than the known caves, but when the dating came back it shocked everyone, as the work is evidently much older than the examples in places like Lascaux, in the realm of 30,000-35,000 years old.

It cast my mind in a painful direction, however. I immediately felt queasy, acutely aware of the ugly grid where we reside, everyone with fears, but hard to battle creatures. All in the presence of unsatisfying agents pressed together as facsimiles of nature and shelter. It’s all so terribly ugly, especially here in North America where the strip malls scream loudly, even though they are half empty most of the time. I want to close my eyes when I see them, but I don’t since I’m driving. And I want to vomit if they house businesses that leech off the unfortunate, and that’s most of the time. I don’t think there’s any place left to just be, as many of the Occupy movement participants have found out. They want to legislate away the strays. In all of this your mind must be as a blueprint, easily read as you pull into your allotted spot, if you are fortunate enough to have one.

Would anyone find beauty in our reproductions, our factory pressed wheels with no creator beneath? Or at least not a creator we dare consider — probably a soft spoken young person in a sweatshop of sorts in a far flung place.  This cave is in also in a far flung place. (I say that about every place I’m not). It’s a valley in the South of France with little but vineyards in the immediate vicinity. The area used to be home to every animal Maurice Sendak could imagine. Modern humans walked with them as did Neanderthal man. Chauvet Cave was hidden for such a time due to a rock slide; the depictions of long gone species have this one place they still can live.

I wonder if we could all draw with such fluid strokes if we weren’t so trapped by highways and right angles? Was he unique, that man who did so much of the work in the cave? If I were there, I’d hold his head in my hands, peering past the eyes to figure it out.  Why did you do this? But I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

But the reason wouldn’t have words any more than those drawings do, just a compelling pull.

One of the bison has eight legs. I’m sure in firelight it looks like he is running. Everything is beautiful seen in the glow of a fire; fluorescent light might give you a seizure.

That one artist stands out because his hand prints are literally everywhere, and you know it’s him because of the crooked — maybe once broken –pinkie finger. I’d like to have tasted the red ochre off that live finger, old dust even 30,000 years ago, made of all manner of earth, the heavier flakes from the furnace of a star. I wonder if they felt that original source in the ochre, even if they didn’t have words to describe it. I don’t have words to describe it either.

But always, the broad, sweeping strokes.  I think they are still alive, more than our over-duplicated forms, copied yesterday, and always from hard lines. We don’t ever seem to use anything else.

I hope he made these images because he wanted to show he was part of the world of carnivores as well as massive grazers, a frail but clever participant who had no need to destroy anything, just to give them a spot to run. I don’t think the images would be so beautiful if the mind behind them wanted dominion. That’s what our world carries and demands, always more than what it really takes to survive.

I want to see a world with softer lines that blur into the incorporeal, not the cages we sit in and pass the time with anxiety and clutter. How did we come to this unnatural place? There’s no words for that either and I don’t know the reason.

The things that can cross your mind when the hard lines start to dissolve.

They were confounded by the redundant plains. They were disoriented by what seemed to them a landmark-less sea of grass.

As I recently turned off US Hwy 287 at Claude, Texas and got on County Road 1151, venturing due west towards Canyon, Texas and Palo Duro Canyon, I crossed what used to comprise one of these amazing plains. But instead of indigenous grasslands, most of the area is now farmland. The beginning and end of this quiet 30-mile stretch is dotted with occasional houses, metal churches and closed-down firework stands. The middle features wide expanses of shorn cotton fields and ember-like splashes of maize crops, some fenced, some not. There’s at least two ancient buffalo wallows along the way (if you know what you’re looking for) and now and again you’ll see a disenfranchised coyote sneak across the road in broad daylight; you’ll see three or four times that dead on the side of the road.

Every once and awhile, however, there’s a break in the crops and fences and you find yourself quizzically gazing out across a vast grassland, just like Coronado did.

It’s frightening to consider how quickly and utterly we’ve filled these wild expanses. Four hundred and seventy years ago, no one would have imagined it possible. But in the blink of an eye, really, we’ve done it. And sometimes we have the nerve to call it progress.

Out at Palo Duro, folks are building subdivisions practically right up to the canyons. Wild untamable places are turning out to be docile and wobbly in the path of human “civilization” and technology. The frontier that was first sliced up by fences is now scarred by highway asphalt, so we can gaze upon our plunder.

We have to have highways now, to see our country. We’ve lost the old ways, Indigenous, Spanish, settler and all the rest. And we can now visit most of Texas from the comfort of fully-enclosed, air-conditioned, rolling bio-domes, with power windows and GPS on board.

There are still a few spots where we can get lost, but they’re shrinking as fast as our water supply. Stretches in the Big Bend region come to mind; and the forests and thickets of the Piney Woods area. But I fear for them.

We like to talk about Texas as if we were proud of it and proud to be Texans. But some of the ways we’re exploiting our lands are nothing to be proud of. Andrews County out west of Big Spring now hosts a 1,338-acre dumping facility for low-grade nuclear waste. Thirty-six other states around the nation are currently invited to deposit their nuclear trash here, and the dump sits in the precarious vicinity of our massive, precious Ogallala Aquifer.

Some folks talk about Texas secession as if Texas could be a First World contender; but our politicians have allowed a billionaire from Dallas to turn a part of the state into a Third World dumping ground. Three true Texan scientists resigned from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality rather than sign off on the nuclear dump’s licensing, but their protests were like three pebbles tossed into Lake Travis. They hardly made ripples. Especially compared to the flood of hundreds of thousands of lobbyist dollars that washed thru Austin to seal the deal.

We’re not just losing Texas in far-off, empty places either. Right here in our own backyard, the natural gas cartel has utilized billions of gallons of our limited water supply to fracture the crust we live on and their pumping processes’ toxic byproducts have been injected into disposal wells that are about as safe as the nuclear dump out past Big Spring.

There are now billboards all around town that herald the notion that the resultant natural gas harvest will last 100 years, but it’s a head-scratcher for any Texans that still have brains left to scratch.

One hundred years is nothing–except in terms of human encroachment.

There are hardly any great explorers left because there are hardly any great spaces.

Today, a Coronado wouldn’t bother with Texas, and who could blame him. We’re selling off our state and our state of being to the highest bidder. It is intensely sad.

At its heart the book conveys a simple fact.  The rate of population growth has been decelerating for decades – well before the publication in the 1970s of Paul Ehrlich’s alarmist, implicitly racist, and dead wrong neo-Malthusian tract, The Population Bomb.    It is amazing that many environmentalists are unaware of the crucial fact of slowing population growth, and that some react with hostility to it.  Further, somewhere between 2050 and 2100, growth will stop and then come crashing down.  It is not the sky that will be falling but the population.  From Eastern Europe to Southern Italy to Singapore, that day has already arrived and sooner or later it will come to all parts of the planet.  In fact, it may well be that in the next century the problem will be a population that is not large enough to be optimal; but that will be for the 22nd century humans to decide and act on.

And why has this happened?  The key is the successful assault on patriarchy by women determined to control their fertility and their lives.   Yes, prosperity helps; and population control programs, most notably in China, have had some effect, but they are not the essential factors.  In rich countries and poor, religious and secular, Islamic and Christian, the trend is under way and irreversible.  Of that there can be no doubt.

The reason is simple.  In the latter half of the 20th Century the survival rate of infants increased dramatically so that women did not have to continue to have children for a reproductive lifetime to replenish the population.  At the same time, the sexual revolution and easy contraception came along.  Now bearing children takes only 10-15 percent of the adult lifetime of a woman.

As Pearce puts it, “Women have grabbed the chance created by that change.  While having children remains important to most women’s lives, it is no longer the only thing or even the main thing they do.  They cease to wield power only within the home. Now they are out of the front door.  Across the rich world and in much of the poorer world too, women outnumber men on university campuses and dominate entry to professions like medicine, media and the law.  They run the farms and even the governments, sometimes.  The reproductive revolution has created a feminist revolution that has a long way to go.  But it has already changed the world. For thousands of years men ruled the world.  Patriarchy was regarded as necessary to produce the next generation.  It was deeply engrained and tenaciously defended by men,” their social institutions, both church and state, and mores that condemned lesbianism and homosexuality.

The reproductive revolution kicked away this system of patriarchy, because it was no longer necessary to sustain populations.  Women have always wanted equal rights.  Feminism is not a new idea And some women have always broken free.  But for most women the reproductive revolution has taken feminism from the ‘realm of utopia to practical possibility’.

So while we hear a great deal of alarmist talk about “peak oil” from certain quarters we scarcely ever hear of “peak population.”  Fertility in the world peaked at between five and six children per woman in the 1950s.  It is now down to 2.6 and still dropping.  Replacement is about 2.1, and we are almost there.

What about the aging of this population?  The other side of contemporary Malthusianism is the claim that an older population means more mouths to feed and fewer younger working hands to feed them.  But that is also false.  We have gone from a revolution in agriculture, where it takes an ever smaller fraction of the population, and an ever smaller amount of land per capita, to feed us, to an advanced technological revolution where, for example, productivity in manufacturing in the U.S. is growing exponentially with a rate constant of .035 per year and in all areas at an exponential rate of 0.02 per year.  (Productivity here is output per person hour.)  So when you hear a voice telling you that we cannot afford Social Security or Medicare benefits for all that is the voice of Malthus, always wrong, calling from his grave.

In fact, Pearce sees a great benefit in an older population.  Not only will it be healthier than in the past and capable of making contributions well into the eighth decade of life, but it will be less testosterone driven, with more historical sense and more wisdom and less given to the calls of demagogues.  Let us hope so.

In the end the greatest philosophical debate of the modern era may be the one between Marx (and Godwin) versus Malthus.  Marx famously labeled Malthus’s views as a “slander on humanity” and its capabilities.  Malthus’s views have been used, explicitly or implicitly, to justify some of the worst atrocities in human history, way beyond that of the great Irish famine.  But in addition to being cruel, Malthus has always been wrong.  He remains so to this day.  If we ignore his false prophecies and those of his heirs, we have a very bright future indeed.