trucker's chronicle

2012-01-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

First Winter's Snow On Freedom Plaza

As the first snows of D.C. winter swirled around the capless head of Chris Hedges and settled on the sweatered shoulders and hats of the well-bundled small gathering who came to Freedom Plaza in D.C. to hear him speak earlier today, a strange awareness enveloped me. Coming into Freedom Plaza, this little wedge of Park land where Occupy DC has been located for over three months right next to the State Department, I could not help but be moved to take in the odd yet beautifully dissonant juxtapositions of my surroundings... Right next to the busy 6 lane traffic Pennsylvania Ave., where cars and buses and police vans and government vehicles whizzed by just blocks from the White House stood this little village of pitched tents all multicolored in a loosely arranged yet ordered encampment with their flags and banners and tent flaps blowing in the wind in the shadow of the august buildings of empire with their staunch columns supporting pediments with boldly emblazoned friezes.

We’d come to hear Hedges profess about the great protest movements and civil actions of the past, of the late Vaclav Havel and the siege of Sarajevo, the falling of the Berlin Wall, and the cleansing tears that fell during the stirring refrains from the many hymns of freedom he witnessed and took part in these past 25 years - and how this one, this Occupy movement, needs to burden itself in full measure, and more, with all that was right and good about those movements because so much more is at stake now in the grand scale of things.

Here, near ground zero of the most powerful empire ever known to mankind, in the towering shadows of these massive edifices of government, as first winter’s flurries swirled around this seed cluster of a nascent movement, this huddled band of early civil actors in their tented little village listened to a man of average height, but of towering intellect, knowledge and most important, ethical grounding, tell us about the wellsprings of past democratic movements and why we should be encouraged to take heart and mind from these past acts of civil conscience. What were these movements of the late 19th and early 20th century and what were the forces that quelled those movements after WW1 and has anesthetized the thinking blood of this democracy for generations since. Why was this important to our undertaking now?

Was he, were we, huddled together in the cold there, with streamers flying from tent poles and posters all around this hoveled collection of fragile dwellings with a library, a cooking tent, a press tent, an information tent--a multi-colored reinforced nylon weave-tented village not 200 feet from where, behind the glass and Venetian-blinded cubicles, decisions of grave import to empire were being made at the Department of State….. were we serving any real purpose here?

Whose affairs of state have more import at this moment, I asked myself? Here we have these two disparate groups who are actively taking their respective parts in the affairs of state, one in heated rooms 40 feet above street level just across at the Department of State, with all its colonnaded Doric pillars topped by august pediments with their inscripted nostrums and friezes, the other outside on cold granite nearest bare earth, taking on the affairs of the governed as they talked about past songs of freedom and new heresies of the established churches, and how we must take up the old refrains and compose new ones for the work ahead while the whipping of tent flaps somehow graced the solemnity, or perhaps mocked the absurdity of it all? Can there be any more poignant dissonance than this apparent guiding of the affairs of men and women? Are we the dreamers? Is Hedges just the soft voice of a modern St Francis, or, like St Francis, does he remember the acute torpors of wars, jihads and terror and for this should we reserve our right to give him this small bully pulpit called, in silly script, “the soap box”, which he did not ascend, mind you—to speak from his crucibled experience?

Are we just a small huddled group (40 souls maybe) the fervent misguided, who hold evanescent dreams of a possible becoming by believing the human condition is perfectible from its present state, or at least if not perfectible in extremis, then perhaps improvable? In listening to Mr. Hedges’ inspiring narrative, are we just eluding ourselves listening to a well-informed and traveled troubadour/poet of a war correspondent, this modern apostle of the living gospel defrocked of all its cultural institutionalized religious gloss close to the bone- in this case hard on the granite panels of Freedom Plaza- affirming his seminal belief in the Gospel’s beatitudes and what they may hold for this occupation of conscience?

How noble is the plaintive spirit, mine, all of ours I chanced. Here and now wondering from this tented village pitched on the hard granite of empire whether or not our aspirations are more tempered with the reasoned hope that the good change is possible or are these aspirations just infused with the follies of groundless enthusiasms. I thought of those who know that any change worth its salt must be earned along the hard lines of seeming insurmountable obstacles in the face of almost impossible odds. At 57, this was the first time I would ever come to occupy my own conscious on such matters. I wondered about others in the little group. Hedges has earned the right to speak from his unmounted soap box. Yes. But do I have enough breadth to hear him and take guidance from his narrative?

Can the good germ, the People’s germ, hardy, yet still so few, eventually come to negotiate its fervent terms with the Colossus of empire? Is this even possible? Am I just part of a great dream that will remain just that or are these the daunting start up days that try men’s souls in the early offing where bonds are forged one to another and each to his/her own dictates of conscience, each occupying their own inner space before taking to the public commons. Am I, are we just such things dreams are made of that remain unrequited to reality? Will all these multi colored tents with their diverse signatures of freedom just fade away? Who will ever remember the name Chris Hedges in 30 years time, I ask myself? Will some troubadour or poet or historian yet unborn utter his name or other names like Zeese or Wolf or Scott Olsen, McKibben or Piven sometime whence when history finally embraces which affairs of state were of more import on this blustery, cold winter day: Will all these best laid plans just go away?

Somehow though, these question seemed to anoint in me the earning distance that would be necessary in order to gain the good and there, swirling in the flurries of first winter’s snow gathering on the shoulders of the tented villagers and on the scarf of Chris Hedges, I sensed an American Spring rising.

2011-12-29T11:47:00.000-08:00

To all "Occupiers Far and Wide, Present and Past"

..... In asking ourselves about the history of various "occupations" through this country's past, can there be a fair question that asks whether or not corporate wealth and narrow moneyed interests have preoccupied what is the very best of this democracy over the last 30 years? And maybe, just maybe what we see now at the various occupations across the country is just a waking up of sorts, finally hearing the tolling bells on the village greens and commons that have been stilled for so long...

...... In the present tolling of bells I also hear the occupiers of the past and it is to them that I want to pay a little tribute at year's end, a year where TIME magazine has made the"Protester" its banner person of the year.So, here's to all those who occupied in foreign or domestic wars, so that we at home might have the chance at keeping freedom's vigil. To those who revolted against monarchical rule after occupying their own consciences and deciding that taxation w/out representation was reason enough to risk their lives, thus through this sacred protest as enshrined in the Declaration Of Independence, did they take up their cause and birth this country

......To all those who occupied their conscience and committed themselves to the work of building and keeping the underground railroad or making their last stands at Harper's Ferry because they knew that slavery was a terrible bliight on humanity and that it must end. To all those in the great Prairie Revolt of the 1890's where farmers and settlers rose up against large corporate, moneyed interests and whose demands were finally met 30 years after their revolt was put down..... To the great feminists traditions and to their will to bring more compassion and care into state affairs and to women's suffrage. To the movements in the 30's and to FDR that great "occupier of his own conscience" and a "Traitor To His Class" (book) that helped the common man.

To all those at home and abroad who fought fascism and prevailed in WWII do I thank your occupations of conscience to take up arms and to your willingness to risk all for the yet unborn among us who now understand the full measure of your devotion and have not had to hail any fuhrer since then .... to all the great occupiers of conscience who changed this society so much for the better in the great Civil Rights movements. To all occupiers in all wars, who for better or worse, believed that they were sacrificing for the just causes of freedom. For my uncle David Kaul, who I am named after, who died on his 18'th birthday in Korea, not so sure about the causes that brought him there but willing to commit the last full measure of his devotion do I pay tribute and respect. To my father, a soldier in WWII, who flew over the hump of the Himalayas many times,( risking his life each time) into China to train the Chinese troops against the Japanese and was awarded a medal by "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell, and who may nearly have died from yellow fever do I pay my tribute. To his "occupation of conscience" that the right was done and that sacrifice is sometimes necessary.

This is my tribute to all occupiers of conscience now, in the past and in the future wherever they may be who have ever taken themselves to task for whatever reason they felt/now feel necessary so that the better good might be served by acting upon the dictates of their occupied conscience..

2011-12-29T11:26:00.001-08:00

to Imagine something better than what is is a Thanksgiving...

‎.. to little Eaarta Gaia and thoughts of Thanksgiving spun from wind, sand and stars

2011-12-29T11:21:00.000-08:00

A Grinch's Return to the Ghost of the Future.

2008 represents the beginning of the Great Change. We hit the world growth limit wall in 08. Many economic growth charts support this evidence. Given the current world population (7 billion) available resources and the fossil fuel sourced economies delivering those resources, we have hit a terminus of resistance that begins, at best, a flat growth sustained economy- in the beginning at least..
It has been an explicit and implicit expectation, especially since the 1980's, that the future is larger than the present and the past is smaller than the present.

That concept is now history...... into the distant foreseeable future anyway..

It is the realization of this historic moment that will cause most of the strife over the next 50 years. Before the Great Change begins in earnest, a correction period will ensue, and that process began in 2008. This correction period will mean great suffering for many, many millions, perhaps billions of people. This has already begun and will escalate over the next decade. Welcome to the future we warned our grandchildren about, folks! It's arrived a century earlier than expected.

2011-12-29T11:19:00.000-08:00

Government cost related to GDP

So, are we headed toward a socialist state run by the proletariat when government costs go from 20 to 25% of Gross Domestic Product? Randians and Laffer curve trickle downers will have you believing so and this has been a persistent and relentless theme of theirs since the Reagan years. GDP needs to be compared to trade disparities as well as unemployment, welfare, food stamps and other social programs during a depressed economy to establish the real figures on government size in relation to the gross figure of the national product.As just one measure, when GDP is stagnant due to a depressed economy, then government costs will naturally rise in relation to it.

A much better metric to evaluate income inequality would be to establish hard money figures coming from the corporate, finance, and multinational sectors as these dollars relate to legislative, judiciary and executive impacts, especially the tax code and social programs.

Just for the sake of a hypothetical, let's say that in 1965, 2 billion dollars was contributed from big bizz and corporate in legislative lobbies, campaign finance, getting Johnson out and Nixon in etc,. How would that figure relate to the cost of government,The Great Society programs and the common good of most of the people?

say, just for argument, that 1% of GDP came from the most moneyed and special interest sector then. How would social programs for the common good for most of the people be affected if, say 3% of GDP was funneled into all branches of government.

That's essentially what has happened. It has been a mergers and aquisitions campaign by the Randians over the last 30 years since Reagan. More money and thus more power and influence has been exerted all across government. Not only government, but, more importantly in some ways, the media too. The return on investment ratio is very high when the legislators write the tax codes that have billionaires paying 1% on their earnings.

2011-11-25T11:53:00.000-08:00

A Revival of the Code Duello?

It used to be by the Code Duello that many in Congress solved their differences. And it was the governed who really suffered the most while foolish men of false chivalrous honor shot each other. Hamilton comes to mind. Jackson comes to mind.The code should perhaps be revived , however, as our modern legislators fail the people by mass bipartisan code duellos nowdays anyway. The difference being that real bullets are not used anymore. Hence the gridlock.
No, the legislative gridlock today is as if all 435 members of Congress, the President and the Supreme Courtesans have all gone over to Wehawken Island, NJ, and taken up respective positions at close quarters across a field and have released fusillade after fusillade after fusillade of invective, acrimony, character assassination, obfuscation, lies and propagandic manipulations at each other w/ the rising smoke enveloping the entire mess in a haze of blind, aimless inaction. And we the governed are left holding the pistol boxes over and over again.
It's a shame they're all left standing after the smoke rises on any given issue. Where are we on budget deficits, education, Medicare and Medicaid and social security and bills on limiting the power of wealthy special interests?
One thing's for sure: Hamilton died the next day after his duel w/ Burr; but they did solve a problem in an expedited manner that morning and that was that Burr was a dangerous traitor who was never really heard from again in history. We do have Hamilton to thank for this. In this sense Hamilton's expedited code duello, and his sacrifice, may have saved the country from a sure road to perdition had Burr ever become president. Maybe something good can be said about this draconian rite from the era gone by- an era of romantic chivalry. God knows the standard practices by which our legislators hear and act upon the voice of the people today in "modern times" has clearly failed the governed.

2011-11-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

Dissent and the Patriot's Dream

Interesting and poignant and perhaps something uniquely telling in the American character that finds us viewing this OWS movement from such opposing perspectives.... yet both of us honor our respective dad's service and each of us might invoke what our fathers did in foreign wars to support the rights of this man to speak his mind -though you may view him an anti-patriot and me see him serving the spirit of answering Kennedy's asking by serving his country in dissent. One of the fiercest dissenters I met this summer when we both chose to be arrested at the White House was a decorated WWII vet, now a PHd who fought the Germans crossing the Rhine on the way to Berlin. Was his dissent against the the policies on climate change or oligarchic seizure of the 3 branches of government now seen as anti-patriot and in a different light than his sacrifice as a soldier?

Was mine because I chose to take part in a civil action answering to the dictates of my own conscience? Am I asking for a special entitlement or treatment,Tim? the country was founded upon dissent. Its life blood has always and only been instilled or reclaimed by dissent. The very first seminal American document was itself a protest manifesto called The “Declaration Of Independence" They keep this enshrined document in the National Archives. And this founding document was a direct revolt against wealthy interests. Just like today really. It's just that the suppression today comes in the form of a calculated mollification campaign where we are numbed, dumbed, and thumbed down unaware that the process of usurping is even happening..... and to a large extent those who are numbing and thumbing us down are not even aware that it is happening. It's only business you see and when a whole society subscribes to"it's only business" then we've lost our center, the center can not hold as WB Yeats might say. It's only business grants philosophical license to the Kochs of the world to increase their wealth from 7 billion in 2007 to 50 billion today- the exact same time frame during which the middle classes lost trillions of dollars. Can't you see how much it has changed since we were kids?

The suppression of a preponderantly powerful and wealthy monarchy was the cause for the separation then, and it is those same forces transposed and moved forward 230 years and coming from within that threaten now.... . It was easier then, because we had geography, an ocean, and nearly 200 years of " the separation" and the distinction and the identity of becoming " Americans" , agriculturalist, manifest destinians, settlers and stump pullers and cabin builders..... we earned the right to develop our own American identity.

Not only across a big water, but across a widening breadth of new notions on autonomous government based on for and by the people,,,, Jefferson and Adams and Paine and Franklin all agreed that John Locke would be their standard bearer and the wild notion that maybe democracy and true republican governance just might work.... again. .. a long time had passed since the 4'th century AD when Rome finally fell.. Can't you see how all this is history in redux, except that it is not monarchical rule anymore, It is a nexus of massive multi national corporate driven madness that are the usurpers now. They are the new radical insurrectionists. They aim to merge their narrow interests w/ the 3 branches of government and they answer to no ideology except one. And by now that one raison d'etre does not even need to be stated.

I'll tell you what I feel. This movement is not a revolution at all, it is a reclamation, preservation and re-instatement movement, and though you clearly interpret Kennedy's appeal , "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" above as an admonishment to this man's gripe in the above clip, it can just as cleanly be reversed to mean that he, like our folks, and like many military vets from Viet Nam and Iraq and Korea and Afghanistan I have talked to at a number of OWS assemblies, believe this man, in his dissent, misguided or not, is answering to the call of his country too in his own way. I may not champion his views on socialism and surely not anarchism, but whole heartily support him when he says something has gone terribly, terribly wrong..... and if you don't see it, Tim... if you don't see that something has gone fatally wrong with this democracy and millions of other Americans don’t see it either, I really do tremble for the fate of this country....

Anarchism? Socialism? nah, these are just tag along upstart vents of anger--- just first pass gripes that the legislative, executive and judicial branches and the 2 party system have failed the people. Party politics had been warned against vehemently by our early founders, especially Adams, and party politics is part of what is tearing it apart now. Ideologies and labels and propaganda brands and witch hunted purges to route out the traitors among us because their ideas dare to dissent from the staus quo-- this is what will tear this country apart and is doing it right now. If we are to get through this we should suspend and or neutralize both parties for they both have failed the governed from which they have derived their power and from whom they have deserted their duties. And why? It's only business don't you see? It's only a fair and inalienable free enterprise right granted in the US Constitution for the risers to the top, the corporate brahmans to be able to put together strategies of mergrs and aquisitions of all three branches of government. Tell me, how is it that a "Supreme Court " could ever, ever grant the status of an "individul" to a Corporate entity? As a citizen accorded all the right s and privelege of a citizen, but not the obligations or penalties should this individual/entity break the law? If a corporation committs atrocities like dumping toxic wastes near poor comunities where Indigenous people live for example, and many people die from cancers that have never been seen in their blood lines, and it can be traced w/out a doubt that these cancers are a direct result of the toxic` wastes dumped near these communities, might this individual entity, accorded the same right as an "individual" now be charged with 2'nd degree or even 1'st degree muder as any individual would acting w/ malice and forethought. Might this "individual entity" granted equal ststus by our Supreme Courtesans, now be tried by a jury of its peers, found guilty, and sentenced to death? If we execute individuals who murder, why not entire corporations who murder? The logic arcs out to conclusions that are fraught w/ ad absurdums and only belies just how far the democracy has come in morphing into something else yet retaining the same brand name " Democracy." It's only business, folks, doncha see? the This will die down and round out to reestablish the core --- elements that should not be seen to represent the overall aims- nor should this man's cherry picked somewhat incoherent screed be used to represent the entire movement.

Tim, some of my people were here long before the Revolution .USS Grant and John Hancock and a secretary to Washinton and a spy for tracking general Braddock's troop movement (a woman no less) , Commadore Joseph Pratt, a privateer who commanded the great 3 masted schooner, Grand Turk…and people who founded the American renaissance in literature w/ Thorerau and Emmerson et all... all in my blood line.

And you know what really saddens me after nearly 40 years in the study of history? That really intelligent people, people who I respect, people who have lived in the US over the last 30 years, do not sense the slow, creeping, insidious hollowing out of this democracy by a very narrow band of very wealthy interests, and these people call me an anti-patriot… and that I hate America as if they stand on the only high ground that true Americans must defend? Where have we gone? Where have we gone when people who have fought in wars, lost friends, been maimed and come down to OWS and are called idiots and bums and just people who expect something for nothing? Tell me, who claims the highest ground, Tim? This country stopped being the country Jefferson and Adams and Madison and Paine envisioned about 35 years ago. It began a slow insidious slide with the election of Ronald Reagan. Sure it worked ok for a couple of decades, for a small fraction of the people , but for most the so promised tide never rose. And though it has left its designer logo behind, this country is well on the way to just the kind of country Orwell and Huxley warned us about. Where have we gone? This is not the country De Tocqueville wrote about when the most wealthy were maybe 10 times as wealthy as the common yeoman.

No, the most pernicious and destructive movements that have ever threatened to tear this country asunder, other than the ideological revolution of 1800 and the economic and slavery question of the Civil War, have always been when the full hard edged,non-regulated self-interested laissez faire unfettered capitalism has been allowed to amass gross and dangerous amounts of wealth and power. That’s where we are now and those who do not accept this are but fodder for propaganda campaigns that spread this ridiculous notion that regu lation and financial checks and observance to laws already on the books like Glass- Steagle, FDIC and SEC regulations , or protections of social security, medicare and Medicaid etc., are all seen socialists subversion plots.? God what have we become when the ghosts of Joe Mc Carthy still run so rapant in this sick American attitude.

This is not new. It has happened 2 times before and this 3'rd time may bring Rome down again.... and only 230 years into empire. It happened during the Gilded age w/ the Rockerfellers, Morgans, Carnegies and Roschilds and it took strong actions from the first Roosevelt to prevent us from reverting to indentured serfdom then. 40 years later during the Great Depression it happened again when the wealth divide was just about as great as it is now except there was no real middle class then. Then, lucky you n' me and all us boomers. We lived through the most prosperous era ever known to any generation in any time in the entire history of mankind. Why? Because Jefferson's and Adams and Madison's and Paine's and even Hamilton's dream for America finally reached its beautiful and intended zenith where most of the people's pursuits of happiness were met, wealthy, upper classes, and the heart and ballast of it all, the middle class... all the governed electorate had access to better their lives and better their lots.

That’s almost all gone away and it’s not all the fault of a few Oliligarchs…. Probably only 0.01% of the total population, but they sure share a massive responsibility for all the financial crimes they have committed an for their orchestrated attempts to merge their narrow interests with the 3 branches of government. No, Hamilton and Adam Smith surely did not intend for this. Tim, I dearly love this country as my dad did. He served w/ the idea that we should long endure and that those who did sacrifice should not have left the last full measure of their devotion on the battlefield uncertain as to whether this nation could long endure. I’ll tell you what, I never served in a war. I was lucky to have missed Viet Nam and I lived down in the “Green World” for 13 years in Grand Turk. I feel this is my time to serve my country and I feel this movement, if it can strain out revolution and anarchy from its message and becomes truly democratic , is the last best hope we have of making sure this nation long endures. I feel Lincoln and Jefferson and Adams and my dad and many others feel the same. And another thing, whoever sits this out, I will not call anti-patriots, but will feel they have sadly misread the history of their own times and fallen prey to the influences of the very worst of our angels. Please don’t let this man in the above clip represent what you think OWS is all about.

2011-09-25T13:04:00.000-07:00

Flat Growth and Other Dark Portents The Gipper Left Us

So, get used to it.... The New , New thing is here to stay and it's called flat economic growth!!! Maybe even-heresy of treasonous heresies- decline, reset, and re-stabilization and then, horror of horrors, a meditative retrograde backslide for a few decades maybe… And it's a good thing too; and high time for all us mega gluttons (relative to world per capita) in the West. Sure Manifest Destiny was a good thing for about 100 years when the nation was young and full of that rootin tootin cowboy spirit- although it wiped out the true indigens of the Americas-but we won't get into that right now. And flat growth, even if we can achieve it, may still only mean a delay in rapid descent climate change maelstroms.

Ok, who we gonna blame? All of us really, but if we had to look to just one tiny figurehead atop the most massive economic colossus the world ever saw, it would have to be Ronald Reagan. Sorry Gipper.

Reaganomics DID accomplished all its aims of growth at all costs. And perhaps the Gip actually thought and hoped that trickle down would fortify the middle class. Sadly , naively, he was wrong. Grossly, tragically, dangerously wrong. Example: The Kochs are worth 50 billion dollars- most of it gained over the last 3 years! Koch Industries have lost employees over the same last 3 years, and wages and benefits stagnated or ended. Meanwhile millions of dollars per lost employee have gone into their coffers. Are you getting this? Two men's combined wealth is worth more than the complete worth of 25 entire nations and they let some of their employees go? And they cut some of the others benefits? Wait, wait.... you just have to stop here and resist the ADD a sec....
50 billion is 50 thousand million dollars..... and what can this humongous Leviathan of lucre buy? It's surely not buying any widgets. It's not buying any durables. It is going to continue to buy some hyped up hypodermic oil needles, yes, but what is the main object? What is it buying with a whole lot left over after the buyout? It's buying the entire f#^$#@g Democracy and making it over in its own kinder gentler designer image. That's what it's buying, folks! Now, tell me you are not still holding your breath after grasping that. Where have all boats been raised in this dark tide? The Gip, sadly,just did not see that off shore labor and globalization, and of course, the raison d’etre of “ the bottom line at all cost” ethic, would leave all the trickle down theorists w/ egg all over their Armani suits. It all trickled down off shore… and that’s not such a bad thing either, cept that as the teeming throngs all across the 3’rd world come into their own “middle class” hugely increasing budgets of coal and oil will be needed to support their long awaited standard of living boom.

THE BIG LIE IN THE LAST 35 YEARS HAS BEEN THE MASSIVE OBFUSCATION PROPAGANDA SMEAR THAT THE BOEHNERS AND NEWTS,CANTORS AND RYANS, WALKERS, AND ALL THE WELL ENTRENCHED RANDIAN PLANTS FROM THE KLEPTOCRATS AND WHAT THEY HAVE PERPETRATED BRANDING ALL SOCIAL PROGRAMS AND LEFT POLITICS AS UN- PATRIOTIC “SOCIALISM” MOVEMENTS.. and that we are becoming a social welfare state. The diametric opposite is much closer to the truth and no further ideological sentiment needs to be asserted to explain this reality other than hard and fast numbers of the massive accumulations of wealth, especially since 2000, at the very top end of the strata, and the deconstruction of the middle class, the slide into poverty of millions, the loss of jobs and benefits and millions uninsured and dying earlier because of it. Reagan was not really a keen enough student of history or economics-or even end days movies…though his oratory did slip the surly bonds sometimes, sadly as it all turns out, we all lost real big one for the Gipper.... but he did make us all feel good and did make us all believe it was truly "morning in America." It was twilight w/ one last star burst incendiary to go; one last massive pyrotechnic molotov made of oil...
He and the Randians of Milton Friedman and Al Greenspanners et all above, fired up the greatest hyper burn, solid rocket booster, final ascent economic laffer curving flame out the world will ever know....

Yes , these are the last gloaming days of the glazy eyed rush full bore consumerism, and we were all alive for this.... The kids alive today, those who make the Bering crossing the other way, they will be the ones to "remember the old world." They will be the oral keepers of the grail of the “Times Before” the last days when abject personal deficit spending and abject fossil fuel burning, churning fossil funk finally played out in one last mega bubble of funny money blown all away in the great epoch of the MEGA HURRICANES that began just before the end of the Mayan calendar.

History buffs of the blade runner future will call it the housing bust that was heard around the world just before the great droughts, the massive incursions of sea water, the great cyclonic CAT 6 tempests surged inland claiming millions of lives in a day; then pandemic die offs- the great sapienacide where billions perished. It will be called the real paradigm shift, the real New, New Thing… Like the Trinity sight in New Mexico in 1945 and Robert Oppenheimer’s famous quoting from the Bahavagita, “I am death become destroyer of worlds”……… just change the pronoun to “we.”

Ok, alright….. alright, it’s too much… it’s too much .. It’s too much horror to bear in the mind… just don’t think about it then. Things are still relatively comfy and from this level of comfort, we just can’t handle the truth. When though, please beseech us oh minions of the nimbus mists, who will sayeth unto us to stay our own hand the sacrifice of our mother? Tell me, if it’s not the Archangel Gabriel, then it will be all our darkest angels that will not stay our own office in extremis? We sure are headed that way now, real fast.

Perhaps some inborn Pentecost we are nigh upon…. Who knows? Is it written in the books? Are we looking too deeply into the past for all the ancient signs, symbols and runes for our demise? Were the Mayans on top of CO2 emissions? Perhaps the recent history in the numbers is all we should focus on now. If we just let the numbers speak their wordless wisdoms then we might begin to see that there are limits to what the earth can provide; we might begin to see that our divined dominion over all that we survey, over the animals in the forests, the fishes of the sea, and all that other schlock that tumbled like golden calves out of Reagan’s mouth, were all words about the falling dusk and not the bright morning… If not us, if not now, where will deliverance come?

2011-09-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

HURRICANE GULLIVER

Climate change is no longer a threat. Threats imply a future consequence; they suggest events coming. Forget that. Climate change is a NOW reality. It's upon us 100 years ahead of schedule by some measures. The so called "debate” as to cause lingers in propaganda mills because it has been rigged and protracted by those who stand to gain the most by pretending there is no such thing as human caused global warming. These are press mills of journalistic pulp only. These people operate only in frames of next quarter’s profits. They are blinded by a finite ignorance born of abject greed. They can be forgiven their sins for “they know not what they do”, but they must be relegated to the radical self-interest fringe now for the sake of the planet.

The debate is now over. OVER! The only debate, now must be about the most efficient actions to take to mitigate damages to the planet -and to ourselves. It is no longer "our grandchildren's futures" we need to protect. It is our own. The planet we now inhabit is not the same one we boomers grew up in. That planet is irretrievably lost. What the F!@# happened to “EARTH DAY” in 1970? Massive adaptive changes are already occurring in the natural world. For species who can not adapt that fast, extinctions are occurring at rates only seen during past natural world epochs like asteroid strikes. FUTURE SHOCK IS NOW,FOLKS! For the first time in “civilized history” there is no ice blocking the northwest passage from North America to Asia- and ships now travel those shipping lanes for the first time in human history. Does anyone get this?

CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were last at these levels (390 parts per million) 20 million years ago when mega volcanoes all over the world spewed cubic miles of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. We may be past the point of no return where feedback loops have already been tripped. Methane (natural gas) fields long covered by ice may now begin to release into the atmosphere on their own. Billions, maybe trillions of tons of carbon locked into the permafrost and bogs of the boreal forest rimming the northern hemisphere of the earth may now thaw and evaporate still more greenhouse gasses. This is not the future, this is NOW! The incremental changes only scientist notice now will soon take the form of catastrophic weather events noticed and felt by ALL! Woops, error, I keep thinking in terms of the future too. It's already happening now with increased frequency. In Vermont, post Irene, it's already "Apres Le Deluge." Remember Katrina, and Andrew and Ike? Future ones will cause biblical floods and famines, mass migrations and pandemic plagues, killing not thousands but billions of people. Will it take a “Breaking News Event” on CNN titled “Noah’s Revenge” for us to see? THIS FUTURE SHOCK NOW!

There is a long, long history of science denying. Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin just to name a few. Denying the science in these cases influenced sociological, religious and educational matters. But denying this present science and continuing full steam ahead with the status quo based on economic interests only, affects questions of profound consequence- It affects the fundamental questions of human survival- at least as we have known it since the dawn of Civilization.

Anyone remember Irene? Such a sweet,n’ petite lil southern belle she was... all gingham n' laced and bonneted- comin out to her debutante ball- prancin’ and dancin’ a genteel minuet before all dem high class gentry come out to see her from their beach houses on the board walks of the East Coast. Well, goodnight Irene you sweet lil thing, yooo. Y’all come back reel sooon. Barely a category 1 hurricane with winds topped out at 100mph along the coast. Very soon it’s going to be HURRICANE GULLIVER. Can anyone imagine a category 5 with winds exceeding 200mph w/huge berms of storm surge water driven out ahead in tsunamic proportions with the eye tracking only 75 miles further west than did lovely, sweet, dulcet toned Irene? Imagine it. It’s coming real soon to the east coast to a temperate climate near you. Try to imagine 60 million people along the east coast hit w/ a CAT 5 hurricane , where- forget the wind and waves and storm surge- where 5 feet of rains fall from the monster when it releases its biblical deluge? Don’t think back to Noah. Don’t think about “our grandkids.” Think Now. Think next summer or, better yet, turn on the weather channel right NOW!

This is FUTURE SHOCK IS NOW! Something must be done in earnest if our leaders will not follow through with International accords they vow to stand by in stirring oratory at these "summit talks." A more apt name might be " Plummet Talks." We are all to blame. Each of us should have a consumption meter on our own foreheads . All of us alive today in the Western World were born and baptized into a fossil fuel world. This is our “ original sin.” Virtually all of our prosperity and wealth, population explosion and food production, massive economic progress and military prowess- all- is totally underwritten by fossil fuels. As fish are born in water and do not know it, we were born in oil and so, like fish, do not notice the oil we swim in. It is not the bad guys "over there" we must flush out either It is not even the politicians. They were all born and baptized by oil too! Like the fish, they just don’t get it. We are all in this oil slick together. For the sake of our survival, we have to start “thinking,” we have to start "seeing" and we have to start acting in order to save our own lives. If we don’t start now then, sadly, there may not be any grandchildren for us to even worry about.

2011-08-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama and The Tarnished City On The Hill

I am so disappointed in Obama... I loved the man, was an admitted zealot. Some of my credentials to wit: My niece and I designed this poster/flyer. (see above). I was a mad Reverian troubadour who did not fit into the local Democratic chapters organizing in the burbs of D.C ., so I broke out solo with evangelical fervor passing this flyer out and barnstorming to get the man into office. Yes, I seized my one man franchise, my indivisible and inalienable right waving my partisan flag as vigorously as I could before I cast my single vote. I talked to any and everyone who would bear my apostolic gospel. My job as a truck driver for Home Depot was in jeopardy because I proselytized during work hours; I didn’t care and railed into the walkie talkie at my “Christian Minister” supervisor that he was- that we all are- “flesh cogs” and “consumer pods” on a Gargantuan corporate assembly line, (actually I used the term “Frankensteinian,” corporate assembly line) to which he replied, “What the…”? Upon reflection I now realize that this rantful radio cant was intelligently stupid of me, but , what the heh. Eventually, a year later, my “supervisor” fired me, and with relish too when the economy tanked. You see, “Corporate,” as he referred to the head office, could handle my rife and raging incantations over the walkie talkie, but fired me because the numbers, the profit margins were narrowing. It’s just business, you see. At least all parties in this little tale were true to their mission statements I guess….
Blah, blah… onto the task at hand…..

So now, Obama’s erudition and his well-schooled politiques- always honing to the metronomic middle ground- are liabilities. Now we desperately need strong, clear toned clarion calls, partisan to no party but common sense. The 2 parties are no longer relevant to meet the necessities of our situation; they are in fact countervailing deterrents to the Democracy itself! We need a leader to hold a core with simple conviction and passion, from whatever quarter he/she hails, it does not matter. Read some of FDR’s speeches from his first term and you’ll see what I mean. Obama’s cool, unflappable bearing now only undermines much of what he stood for b4 he became president. Now I see that it is my shortcoming, my overextended hope and Platonic projection that we could stem the sleazy tide, that we might arrest this dark corporate coup creeping insidiously in our midst and begin to really understand the peril we are in here; that Utopia might never be attained - even attainable, but that we might begin to think and act in that direction, and that Obama might’ve begun this awakening leadership. The fault is not Obama’s. It is mine for expecting and imagining that this was still possible through the time tested right and rite of the election process. I am not so sure it is possible anymore. I am of a mind that we are being slowly hollowed out and that corporate intelligent design has it all well rigged and veneered w/ so much calculation.

We need an apolitical standard bearer of reason and commonsense now, a leader who acts w/out regard to her own future in office, or to his “next term”. We need someone to fight an all-out and openly avowed insurgency against the dark prevailing wave of corporate cancer- as FDR surely was in word and deed!....we need someone now that screams passionately from the roof of the Whitehouse that we are in deep, deep shit and it's not only just about this country and its selfish myopics anymore, not just about this puritan notion of " The Shining City on a Hill," but, rather, this small, fragile, life threatened and miraculously unique little “blue dot” spinning in the cosmos...

As fer me, it’s Bernie Sanders for now. He’s the only guy on the horizon who might have the vision and who might start for these simple, yet so need changes. He has not a whit of a chance now, but who knows, considering a largely dumbed down and numbed up corporate formed electorate, but he’s the only potential candidate who might have a chance if the tide changes a bit- what marine biologists and weather people refer to as a “spring tide” is what we need.

As for me , I’m fed up w/ all my own fbook , easy chair, pole sitting , action-less schlock. I’m outta here and headed to Obama’s House, to our house, to the Whitehouse, to sit w/ the protesters against the massive XL Tar Sands oil pipeline project that threatens destruction of vast areas of arboreal Canadian forest. It has been so well hyped, and lobbied by the Dark Vader brothers ,David and Charles Koch. We all gotta start somewhere.

2011-08-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

"Growth" and the Real Paradigm Shift

The" paradigm" shift, the "new, new thing," Y2K and all that hyperbole smegma the Randian trickle downers were talking about at the turn of the century has finally arrived, thank god. It’s the real thing and it arrived in mid-07 and it will surely mark a dramatic milestone in world economic history, and maybe some transcendent consciousness moment too for all of us here on the little "Blue Dot" ........ all this running around looking for local causes, political partisan blaming, economic symposium and round table pundits posturing on the Sunday talk shows, whoring and wooing for their biased causes, will not stem the inevitability of historic inertia of massive fraud in the financial sector combined with Americans accruing gross deficit spending lifestyles over the last 35 years or so.
This is the Armageddon “White Buffalo” apocalypse now moment.

We're going on 7 billion people in the world now and it took 200,000 yrs. for our species to go from a few million to 1 billion in 1850 and then just 160 years to go from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion today. The paradigm shift that occurred in 07 was that the shit finally hit the fan in the Western Democracies when the ultimate funny money house of cards tumbled down and all the Randian, Reaganomic laffer curve "greed is good" trickle down thinking was finally exposed as a terribly pernicious movement favoring a massive aggregation of wealth and power in the hands of a few oligarchs in the corporatocracy. This corporatocracy is wasting away this democracy while only keeping its designer name. Growth? Are you kidding? Are we all kidding ourselves?

We are at a profound point of turning and the entire world- especially the so called leaders in the first world- need to realize that "growth" now needs to mean something dramatically different than it has in the past. The growth needs to be introspective and intelligent- not just wildly consumptive business myopias. We need to throw the bum oligarchs outta here and we need to do it NOW! If there is any growth it needs to be responsible and globally aware that billions of people now are waiting in the wings to bring their lives out of poverty and will require proportionate increases in basic living needs and concomitant power/energy requirements to meet these needs. Demand for fossil fuels can only go up at increasing rates and the costs will continue to rise as these finite supplies, especially oil, dwindle down.

A new" insight" paradigm needs to replace the old orders based on “national” GDP avaricious and narrow nation/state interest drivers. We need to see in terms of GGP(Gross Global Product) now and If we really "see" this, then we will have to realize that we gluttons in the West need to arrest our wild and wanton consumptive growth so that the rest of the developing world will be able to enhance their basic life support needs. The resource pie is finite and we hoard way more than our share. And through this hoarding, and all the massive power/ energy needs to support it, we are destroying the fragile womb of the earth, its water and atmosphere, and all the life forms that are dying at rates never seen before except during cosmic epochs from asteroid strikes.

This all has to be accomplished while fossil fuels are running out and an international collaborative effort, like the massive effort of the Manhattan Project, needs to find renewable and clean energy sources and appreciable alternatives as the oil/ coal/ industrial complex monopoly winds down. Every other alternative energy source combined -wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biofuels,etc., contribute slightly more than 10% of our total energy consumption here in the U.S. All these together will never meet our rising demands- even if we reduced consumption by 50%. The new paradigm shift needs to be one of global attitude and not the next growth surge derived from the old economics based on fossil fuels. This is why we have to throw the bums out because the oil/coal corporate industrial axis all depends on this finite and earth damaging system and they only base decisions on the next quarter's profit margins and not 50 year plans.

If we in the West all reduce our per- capita consumption of energy by, say, just 15%, and continue to pursue micro nuclear( local to demand) power plants and tapping and using natural gas for electricity generation, home heating and cooking, and even NG transportation vehicles while working together w/ the Chinese, and Indians – and the rest of the developing world, then maybe we will have a chance and an idea time window to at least pursue a realistic renewable technology like hydrogen cells perhaps and maybe algae bio fuels for an example .
Solar and wind , and especially this ridiculous ethanol big agribusiness caper, will never produce enough energy to meet our rising demands- even if we reduce wasteful consumption by drastic measures and increase these renewables to 20% of total demand over the next generation. All this need to be accomplished before we reach the no return point as far as CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the next 50 years- and because we do not really know what that point is, we should assume it is tomorrow, or better, yesterday. Growth? Hell, the paradigm shift we need now meets the rub of the issue right here with this intoxicated idea of growth- any kind- and at all cost mindset!

We don’t need growth, we need a long introspective and “conservative” plateau where massive amounts of stimulus capital needs to go into R&D, education, and infrastructure rehab. “No child left behond”? Hell, we’ve left an entire education system behind ! We need a massive hike in the tax rate of the super, super rich oligarchs of the corporatocracy and a rewrite of the tax code to incise all the gross loopholes for the super wealthy. We need to do it NOW to save the democracy. Just read a little history. Read a little bit about how FDR betrayed his own class and its interests, but likely saved the country from total implosion to hyper burn laissez faire market forces.

We need Obama to be as bold and aware of the real predicament we are in- as FDR surely was. In terms of the global consequences, we are in maxim global dire straits and not just national dire straits. Growth? Are we serious? These are the jobs that will help in the short run and should be the only growth we consider right now. We need an “arrest” and a recalibration movement, and not a new growth objective that meets all the corporate models of blind irresponsible mass consumer growth. The third world will do all the growing for the rest of us- and deservedly so - and we must help them to do it through as many “green” methods as we can while increasing our own growth in green technologies and not just a wild consumer generated economy based on superfluous ‘stuff”…… all this non-essentia kitsch ….

No, we have reached a critical moment in world history and if we continue to look at this problem as if it's only a cyclical “growth glitch” in western economies, an anomaly from the old status quo economic growth curve, then we fail to “see” the real overarching problem. We are experiencing the down slope in rapid descent of an energy sucking consumer driven “Ponzi -scheme” and until we truly understand at the species level what kind of growth we really need , we will continue to hasten our demise.

2011-07-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

Homer is my Father, and Christ is my Mother

Homer was and continues to be the single most predominant solute in the remembering blood of the Western Ethos. His epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, reside deep in the cultural DNA of our collective consciousness. He was the first architect to codify the original and still current paradigm of Citizen Virtue and he set the fundamental template of all that would follow in Greek and Roman traditions. We are the descendant diaspora of this tradition. It was not until Christ, that any of these virtues, values/ ethics were challenged in a populist way.
Christ not only posed threats to the Sanhedrin and to Rome, but to an entire 800 year Homeric legacy. He and his new populist gospel of compassion was a very dangerous counter current to both Jewish and Roman hegemony. We Westerners are the progeny of these two parents. We are still torn between the Homeric definition of the Virtuous Citizen of the State and the universal disciple of Christian compassion.

The Christian revolution attempted to reverse the effects of the Homeric tradition, and we are still in this "epoch" struggle to define what is the "nature human". We are far closer to Rome and Greece and to the original City States than we are to our far more enlightened becoming. The Christian/Homeric struggle is still being played out and it will not be until there is a universal legal end to all wars between nations that the Christian revolution finally prevails in the international body politic. It is not about the dogmas of religion at all. It is about fundamental underlying human morality and ethics that are part of the Evolutionary Imperative that constantly strives for species survival. Religion and its various dogmas are just the superficial structure upon which these underlying morals play out through religious institutions and their relationships w/ political structures..

Who knows when the ultimate milestone of Christian ethics of universal peace becomes a global ordering principle, but if we survive the nuclear weapons age, we will eventually reach this milestone where humans will solve their conflicts w/out having to kill one another and a legitimate "New Age" will have finally arrived. This new age will be established by enacting international laws outlawing wars between nation states of any kind.. This eventual modern age will incorporate the morality/ethics and codes of behavior as is told by countless saints and seers and spiritual icons of all cultures through time. The reason I go back to Homer, in the West anyway, is because there is no further back to go, as far as a cohesive written record- The East, Middle East and Far East is a whole different matter.

2011-07-06T22:58:00.001-07:00

Fortuitous Bedfellows

What condemns modern conglomerate corporate capitalism more than its increasing disproportionate distribution of wealth and callous disregard for environmental degradation,is its systematic recruitment and indoctrination of people who ideologically believe that popular injustice and predation is not only good for capitalism and good for themselves, but good for all. I only wish that Gordon Gekko had married Ayn Rand, and their offspring was a Mule- thus ending that line ;)

2011-07-06T22:52:00.000-07:00

Earth As "The Open Boat"

Like Steven Crane's classic "The Open Boat" the crew of 3 lost at sea in their little open boat realize they are at the mercy of a cruel and indifferent Mother Ocean w/ all her forces that would vanquish them.

This case now however, in a bitter irony, is that we are the cruel and indifferent and ignorant supposed "paragon of animals" slowly, insidiously, indifferently and ironically raping and pillaging and exploiting this earth beyond its capacity not only to sustain us but to sustain itself....

Let us only hope that if this "in house mass consumption Armageddon" finaly vanquishes the species one day- and if we never learn to "see ourselves," that there will be some primeval forest somewhere hence in 10,000 years who will whisper in glad graces and babbling brooks that the paragon of animlas is gone but the earth, still wounded in recovery, survives....

....... follow up from a fbook dialogue....

... I think we are at a crucial turning point. I think that the initial promise of the internal combustion engine and the exponential leap it propelled in the last 125 years of the Industrial Revolution, has run its course and now the returns more threaten precipitous catastrophe than promote progress.
This, along w/ the splitting of the atom, for all its good, are the 2 most looming technological specters that threaten us.

The problem is one of ratio as I see it. The means of production and the weapons we have to protect these means, are many, many magnitudes larger than the rate of our intellectual, and more importantly,spiritual development. The species, especially the developed superpowers, by and large, are still informed and still designed along the templates of earliest city states.

Until we molt to a new global model, a new definition of planetary citizenship, a new spiritual identity that recognizes the family of man precariously balanced in the web of the earth rather than all these artificial divisions of religion, language, political boundaries, race, cultural and technological advance, etc., we will continue to live by the ancestral ethics of Troy, Greece, Rome, The Christian , and Islamic Empires;and if we continue to operate under these ethics, we will devolve our way collectively "back to the stone age" and more likely a self immolated extinction.

I'm giving us about a century and a half, though. I think we have a little more time to "see" and to prepare. I think it will take a monumental catastrophe, either a nuclear weapon used again, and /or both a biblical climate event that will spawn new viral pandemics killing billions of people. After this, sheer survival modes will force the severely impacted developed world to work together for comprehensive renewable and clean, green means of production.The internal combustion engine will not use fossil fuels any more. This new form of renewable and clean power may in turn seed a new global "consciousness" that will finally dismantle the ethics, morality and religions of the original city states once and for all. We then will truly be on the road to "Modernity."

If we do not begin soon to "see" ourselves from some transcendent vantage point ( like the original astronauts may have seen our fragile blue dot from the surface of the moon) then our relatively recent emergence as homo sapiens- paragon of animals- will have ended all too soon along the arc of our becoming....

contd... The people of Easter Island did not know, could not transcend, could not "see" from above, that they were destroying their entire way of life, and eventually their very existence, by consuming, generation after generation, all the rich forests they had on the island when their ancestors first came.

They did not realize, until the end was upon them, what they had done. This microcosm has played out many times in small niche web economies throughout history. Now, the entire ecosphere, THE ENTIRE EARTH Is the MICRO-COSMIC analogy to Easter Island.

We, on the other hand, as the ancients we still are in so many ways, have the "rune of knowledge" and thus the terrible burden of responsibility. Having this knowledge, we are just now beginning to "see." our task.

Question remains: Will we turn our heads away from this terrible burden of knowledge(the horror) , or, instead, make for the road of real modernity? Will we swear oaths and actions to ourselves and our continuing enlightenment, or continue to make ourselves supplicants and invoke the abrahamic divinities for deliverance once again as we have practiced since the advent of Agriculture and the first City States.

I trust there is a prodigal notion sprung now however; a notion forced by the survival imperative and moving in the global zeitgeist that will impel a move towards true modernity.
This is my prayer anyway....

2011-07-06T22:30:00.000-07:00

Adams and Jefferson Reconciled
And the common tyranny they might both find today: Corporate Values

After their long and bitter silence, once dear friends and former presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, began a 13 year correspondence that ended on July 4’th 1826, when both men died- within hours of each other- exactly 50 years to the day after they and their fellow conspirators signed a declaration beginning the great modern experiment that would refine and perfect what had not been tried since the best days of the Roman Republic. They knew then that the letters they wrote to each other in confidence would one day be left to posterity. And so they knowingly bequeathed these letters and wrote them well. And we read them today as a testament to their sharply divergent political philosophies during the precarious early years that threatened to tear it all asunder. It survived. It endured. And now we, the descendants of this founding experiment still wrestle with their inheritance- and what has come of it in its still early years just over 2 centuries hence- and to where it is destined. Both men feared tyranny above all else though the tyrants they fought came from different quarters on their political compass. So, on this day, I wonder if both men could stir from their slumber to survey just how far the horizon has stretched since July 4’th 1826, what tyrants they might see now, and if they might find the solidarity of apprehension that eluded them then …..
What follows is an edited version of a fb conversation I had with some patriots who hail from Martha’ s Vineyard.

……….Interesting discussion on the eve of Independence. ……. The experiment continues , however, but I do not think the slide we’re in is irrevocable, or that our demise is foregone. Not just yet, anyway. I think what Adams and Jefferson envisioned reached its pinnacle about 50 years ago where most of the descendants of the original founding principle shared the bounty across a strong middle class.

After that, the slide began. It began with the excesses of a runaway capitalism which has created a plutocracy of the very few who have managed to concentrate much of the wealth into fewer and fewer hands and who now threaten to buy the founders “democratic patent"' out right- to keep the name recognition, but actually morph into a permanent totalitarian plutocracy. A virtual hostile takeover is upon the "experiment;" a takeover that is packaged in a benign way where WE , the buyers, the consumers, are the animate "prizes" of the super-rich. WE are the “flesh cogs” , the " blue light consumer widgets " on aisle 7. And as long as WE continue to allow ourselves be shelved there, WE continue to "discount" ourselves. I think, I hope, that it is beginning to be seen by more and more of “we the governed” and that we see that big $ and big corporate are the new guerrilla warriors dressed in suits and seen on reality TV shows like Celebrity Apprentice" and other sordid schlock. They use democracy and hyper free enterprise, but do not believe in it once they achieve hyper success.

Thing is, I think and hope there are righting mechanisms still there in the constitution, but it will take a radical movement, a "radical reclamation- a radical conservatism" that sees what is happening and works to conserve and preserve what Adams saw at the outset as the best of all promise for the Republic.
The enemies are not from w/out any more- they are from within, and, tragically, they are championed and exalted on TV shows like the above stated, and media hyped as the super mensches to be emulated. It's a trickle down add campaign that seeps like lead into the blood zeitgeist of the governed.
When the “governed” begin to see Guys like Don Trump, Larry Ellison and the Koch brothers- and their ilk, as no longer our revered heroes, but as the agents of our undoing, and as the real enemies within, then hope will spring anew , and another kind of bell, one not heard for awhile, will once again toll on Lexington Common sounding sweetly in the ears of Adams and Jefferson.

2011-06-24T21:41:00.000-07:00

Morphing Norman Solomon with Martin Luther King

Read your recent piece on the 10 commandments flap down south and was thoroughly bemused and entertained. Was that your intention? I thought to myself: now here’s a guy w/ a considerable reader constituency, who from time to time has just, gotta fling some mud around w/ the good ole boys on the “left” (whatever the “left” means anymore), sort of an in house mud flinging Animal House thing. And I’m thinking… this has got to be some form of writer’s gestalt. An angry catharsis of brilliant cynicism packaged in insightful satire, creating true comic farce, meant to elicit laughs to the rafters from the in house audience. And that’s just about it Norman.. Lights out. Act’s over. As we leave the scripted theatre, all of the faith ful left feel goodly righteous in our view of how all the Ashcrofters are still stuck in the bullrushes of Mosaic law, while the soulless Murdochs run froth at the mouth into the media markets of middle America.

Excepting ideological content though, the style of your message titillates the same limbic registers that FAUX news is so brilliant at drawing out. Your form would fall under the heading of writer’s “sit down” comedy. It’s angry. It’s reactive. But, let Cl inton brilliantly remind -the other day in a church, “Those the Gods destroy, they would first make angry”. Ok, ok, I say. Not all that comes forth from silver tongued Solomon needs be full of those expansive wisdoms meant to bridge the chasms separating reasoned men fixed in their philosophical embattlements. Like so much limbic news purveying of late- from the news print l eft and News Corp.TV right- some measure of the written form may as well be so much low end gratuitous out gassing. Out gassing for its own sake. So be it. I felt good. Entertained…. You sold your piece. You reiterated my inner angry voice through the published media. I could rest smugly w/ the notion that at least one writer out there understands me and gives voice to why I rail at all the FAUX news pumped through our screens. Yes, I felt good. Too good for that matter- about how wrong the Murdochs, Bushites and their ilks are in their World view.....

Then, outta the blue I thought of Martin Luther King’s 1964“I Have a Dream” speech… I wondered how his gift for poetry, oratory and vision might have woven these same commandments, together w/ Jeffersonian cadence into a speech 40 years hence- speaking to these troubled times.. How he might have elevated the present world debate to higher ground. Maybe cresting to a place where partisan acrimony had no shadowed quarter for the illumined brilliance of his inspiration. And then I had a dream… sort of a day dream… What if he, transubstantiated to the here and now, had morphed into a Solomon –King test cross and was given the task of editing your piece for an address at the Lincoln Memorial. What, given the same material, might he have said? You see, Martin Luther King not only had dreams but inspired them. And so it went:….

1) “We live in times that make of us unwitting smelters of these golden calves, these false idols, that steal fast away our better angels. It is at task for each of us to once again reach our own headwaters where we might slake this false thirst of material wanting by cooling these smelting furnaces by the water’s source. And from these virgin springs renew our founding promise. We bend before these false gods, though we do not recognize them in our midst; for these money changers have slowly become us our daily occupations. And so I say to you: cleanse your vision w/ these waters that you may see these false idols amongst us. For only in recognition can self deliverance come.

2) Honor thy father and mother, and theirs and theirs. Honor our foremothers and forefathers who kindled and cradled this great dream in infancy. For this, our living history always becomes something better than what went before. That from our stumblings, for they are many, may we learn that our failings and their redress commits our striving to attain those heights our fathers and theirs and theirs dreamt for us beyond the many graves on the prairie and the village greens. And when we do this we honor our own folk and our neighbors near and far, we forgive them their trespasses, for they are ours as well. For what has become this spirit American, once wondered prodigal in the old world for the many iniquities of religion, race and economic repression that so blighted that old world and whose vestigial seeds we still work to cull in this, the new.

3) Thou shalt not kill. For no greater purpose can ever be met by the extinguishment of human life either by one man to another or the higher scales of killing by those who would do our bidding in the name of nation, creed, and country. That this nation never pre-empt the presumed intentions of other peoples by initiating policies of war. For pre-emptive war only collectivizes a policy whose lethal manifests only leads to the taking of life. How, in violation of this most sacred commandment, can our leaders ask a just God’s blessings for this nation? But still from higher ground the rarefied air affords us clarity to understand our leaders are but fallible in their humanity, and, in good faith, may seek these measures in the name of defending our cherished way of life. We must not be contemptuous of their intentions. They do not see that drawing on these old precedents, these blood anointed tests, can only lead to less security; can only lead to more danger for our childre n and theirs.. We must forgive them, they know not what they do. This is the past from which we have come. We are now at a divergent branch of history.. - and we must move to take the road not yet taken, but wanting much for wear- a new territory leading to a peaceful promised land……

And so Norman it went like that, this day dream. And so I must take you back to your oft used Camus quote on “words, not munitions as stronger than weapons”, and hold you to it; and then ask that you put this elevated axiom to everything you write- as acid test. These times are far more desperate than we yet can see. And so they require an incumbency of all who sense the early portents. An incumbency that must ne eds seek to speak w/ passionate reason, inspiring the so needed change. Your always admiring gadfly, (now living in Manassas, Va) Dave Warren, X Nantucket carpenter

2011-05-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

WAR AND PEACE

A Rigorous Philosophical Argument For Peace

By its very nature, peace as an idea is an elusive and nebulous concept w/ moral/ethical and religious overtones. It does not evoke any visual corollary in the imagination precisely because of its passive, non active nature. Traditionally, the "peace" movement has been perceived as a reactive and moral sentiment against aggressive action. It inherently describes passive resistance in forms of symbolic gestures responding to overt aggressive action and violence . For this reason, (its inherent passive nature) there is no dedicated body of structured thought other than anecdotal narratives describing various symbolic acts, such as Ghandi’s Satrygraha” or salt making and garment burning , or the Christ’ outstretched hand on the mount, as a few examples. All these are part of the mosaic stream of imagery in the cultural lexicon but do not in themselves constitute a cohesive body of thought. These are but reference symbols, mostly rendered as religious art that form a visual and oral menagerie. Many of these symbolic acts, like the proclamations of a conscientious objector or the burning of draft cards defy the laws and social codes of the established order. There is no systematized rigorous body of thought or dedicated philosophy of “peace,” however, other than the various allegorical parables in the Biblical or Quran traditions for example.

So, by example, what might clarify this point: Things that require action and effect material change or reorder can be written about and described in minute detail.. For example, in the construction of a high rise building there is an almost unlimited number of separate and distinct categories that require descriptive language as well as visual graphics and illustrations informing the various processes along the way. Something can be said and written about in a hundred different categories. What is said ,written, or illustrated on the page elicits visual imagery that is objective in nature. From soil compaction ratios, density and load bearing actuarial tables in the substructure, to the action potentials and variable range coefficients of the uppermost antennae on the top of the building, and all construction aspects in between. Because the construction of the building requires a series of interrelated and successive actions performed in a lineal chronology of events, much can be said of each separate phase as well as the entirety of processes leading to the end result. The essential process of building construction involves material change and reorder. This chronology and all the interdependent phases can be graphically displayed in a blue print.

Like the construction of an edifice, the science of war can and has been described in similar ways in infinite detail. There is a massive historical log on the "Culture of War" From Sun Tzu’s “ Art of War” to Clausewitz’ treatises, to the elaborate drawings of Da Vinci’s weapons, as jus a few examples. They necessarily require material change and reorder. The very first “narratives” enshrined in the canon of Western culture have to do w/ warring. In fact the very first “histories”, and for that matter epic poetries of the western tradition, describe wars and their attendant ethos. It is for this reason that we seem to have concluded that war and violence are more predominant human traits and more accurately describe the core nature of the human animal.

Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides Paloppenesian Wars, for example, are among the very first founding literary precedents upon which much of the subsequent written record builds its traditional footings. This is a crucial and profound point that needs constant reiteration if we’re to understand from what founding rock the western legacy stands upon, and , more importantly, the fundamental efficacy challenges that any of the so called “ Peace Movements” must face: The first notions of historical record keeping in the West, in written form, organized and utilized as social tool by “civilized man” have to do with the tales and ethos, the tragedies and triumphs of wars…
Now contrast that w/ what can be said of Peace… If this idea juxtaposition is rendered in acute focus, and understood, the task might seem incomprehensibly formidable: waging “peace” against war as a fundamental tenet of a more secure intra -national political order. We have inherited a legacy of storytelling where the major formative forces of history, and the character exemplars who enliven these stories seem to form hub points of turning around wars. Achilles and Hector come to mind as the proto character heroes of the Trojan War. In our American experience, for example, so much of what we hold dear, more, enshrine as the inalienable rubrics of “democratic liberties” have been preserved and enshrined through the sacrifice of warriors in the act of preserving the dear liberties cradled in the Mother or Fatherland. This ethos is precisely what drives the heroes of the Trojan War. This is what the historical record has archived.

In essence, the challenge “The Real New World Order” faces is based on the revolutionary concept of peace as the most efficient and utilitarian mode of political and economic interrelation for all. This is not an apologists appeal for the pacifist ideal at all. Wars have been necessary in an absolute sense, and still are necessary and will continue be a rationale answer into an uncertain future to some struggles for core freedoms that would be denied by despotry and totalitarian rule. But, if the concept of eternal peace can be conceived of and aimed for in a rigorous and structured body of thought, the groundwork might be laid for such a reality to actually become a part of human discourse.

What is the essential ontology of the peace movement? This seems a fairly straightforward question in the asking; but the answers are as nebulous as the concept itself.

The “peace movement” as it is referred to, is inextricably linked, in a form of binary and bipolar arrangement, to the war tradition. It arises out of reaction to and opposes actions of violence and war. It is not a first cause initiator, but rather a following response to first cause, or, less often, as a preemptive appeal to a priori threats of an aggressive nature. This is an essential point of psychology: It is not seen as a primary action , but rather as a secondary reaction.

The active volitional forces that are required to assert power by violence, ( war) vs. the passive inactive and neutral aspects of “peace” a) acts of violence and assertions of power and control are just those: acts, or action. Acts that require volitional and dedicated execution, physical exertion and material impositions of one aggressive group of people upon another people, and their property. Action resulting in material change. The active force, (war and violent acts) necessarily accomplishes and effects a material change. The passive one, peace only advances an idea which attempts to contravene the active one: war . This is why a single act of violence from a single gunman, for example, can overwhelm and control the material lives of many people who are passive, and inactive under his control though they may appeal to his relinquishing power by placating w/ ideas.

In order for the concept of peace to take hold as a unifying principle, it first must be seen to address and satisfy utilitarian concerns for national and intra-national relationships. At all political and social levels of interaction, its first necessity is to build an active, volitional and organized set of ordering principles. In short, a body of systemized, pro-active thought.In other words, “peace” needs to learn to be aggressive, needs to be an “outty” rather than an “inny” as an ordering philosophy- a first cause set of means, and not soley as a reactive 2’ nd force response. It's efficacy must have an underpinning that serves utility as it applies to human relations.

This is a sort of Hobbesian concept of achieving overall intra-societal security. The new Leviathan if you will. Instead of the “sovereign” dispensing unilateral powers at the cost of relinquishing certain individual liberties over the governed in exchange for ensured protections, it would be an idea graphed over many generations or perhaps centuries into the human collective stating that ultimate security for all must ultimately, and by strict necessity, only derive from the para mutually accepted concept of peaceful co-existence. In a sentence, a world where war is outlawed.

2011-05-10T09:31:00.000-07:00

A Case For Moral Ambiguity?

This whole question of bin Laden's killing is troubling on many counts and deserves more than just a cursory sigh of relief that the mother of all terrorists has finally met his demise. In particular it is the nature of his dispatch and the exquisite level of premeditation that went into the plan before the Seals "went in". For some the whole affair poses a dilemma of moral ambiguity, situation ethics, and pragmatics when trying to reconcile our constituted beliefs in due process with Obama's "justice done" statement. We will never know what will make for a safer world as only one course was taken and what might have been can only be studies in counterfactual conjecture. It does appear, however,that the Obama team set out on a search and kill mission as its only objective. From the very outset, long before the black hawks crossed into Pakistan air space, the plan was one of summary execution and swift burial at sea. This alone should cause some reflection. There will be no shrine erected to the "modern prophet" and the place where his bones lie unless one at some point is prefabricated.In an odd legal consideration,the writ of habeas corpus has been denied post mortem- denied those who might glorify him in death.
Was this the best thing to do, considering that the bones lying under any shrine may incite a more intensified jihad? Should we not at least admit to ourselves that an exceptional suspension of law, custom and decency was warranted in the case of bin Laden?

This is the rub of moral ambiguity which, for me, makes the question important- at least, to ask.
Qaddafi, Saddam pose no such dilemma, really.Are we laboring the death of Qaddafi's son from a surgical strike? I'm not. If Qaddafi was assassinated in a surgical strike, would there be this hue and cry? Not from me.
If a drone rocket had blown up bin Laden, his children and everybody in the compound, would we be asking any questions about moral ambiguity? If we knew his location for months, which it appears we did, observed the comings and goings of the people who lived in the compound, struck the compound when the children were not there--(were any of these options ever considered?) would the moral question even arise? Is there something about facing the enemy at close quarters with the whites of their eyes clearly visible that compels us to think longer, to apply a different set of standards? Why?

The fact of pre-meditation, pre-orchestration and preconceived
means of execution and burial rights in a seeming strict chronology gives me the chills. The question of whether or not his capture and trial on a world stage would have made the world a safer or more dangerous place will always remain an open question now. But I think it is an important question to ask any way.

2011-05-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

The Weight Of Osama's Millstone

Unless you've lived on some “green world” remove as far from the madding crowd as Fletcher Christian was on Pitcairn Island, the death of Osama bin Laden, for better or worse, has gotten under your skin. Who was this enigma now tied to a millstone alone, deep in a watery grave at the bottom of the Arabian Sea? For some of us the ignominious dispatch of bin Laden is seen as a just redress for his many crimes against humanity, thus his demise is rightly celebrated as the death of the devil himself. For others it is the martyred death of a modern prophet at the hands of the infidel West. Either way a virtual tsunami of pent emotion has found its breaking shore almost 10 years after its horrific release on 9/11.

What has given this wave its awesome world circumnavigating power? Why is there dancing in the streets in the USA and mourning in some cities in the Muslim world? How could this one man elicit such contradictory emotions? Who are we, those who rejoice in his death? Who are they, the people who lament? Why do some praise the man we behold as evil incarnate? Is it relevant to draw the question along such stark lines? Are there immutable principles of common human decency that should offer guidance on the right values, the right people, and the right god? How will the legend of Osama unfold now that he is gone and what portion of weight must each side bear of Osama's enigmatic millstone?

His death draws into sharp relief a deep and dark gulf between 2 divergent cultures and their respective religions. It is both the “Philistinism” and the ” xenophobic fear” with which each regards the “other” that defines most of this gulf and the rules of engagement with which they converge along bloody urban borders around the world. How is the West to come to terms with its misunderstanding of bin Laden? Are we even aware that there was an era in world history when Islam reached its own pinnacle and then precipitously fell from grace? For 600 years Islam was the renaissance culture of the world. It is hard for many westerners to imagine but western culture had all but forgotten its own intellectual, scientific and cultural roots as the rise of the Roman Church suppressed the glorious past of ancient Greece and Rome. This cultural amnesia was finally reborn with the help of the Muslim polymath Averroes and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides who began to translate into the vernacular all that had been lost through the Dark Ages. After this crescendo was reached in 14’th century Al Andalus, Spain and in old Baghdad, there have been many centuries of rapid descent and “cultural humiliation” felt by Muslims. The symbol of bin Laden, more than the man himself, may represent the desperate attempts of a culture trying to revive its own glorious past.

Wrought of this cultural humiliation Islam has clung to the only thing that connects it to its glorious past: Its Sacred Religion. Islam is a culture of deep and nostalgic remembrance of things past. Given so much poverty and dispossession experienced in the Muslim world today, it is only through this glorious past that this present humiliation can be assuaged. Bin Laden did not look forward, he looked back with a seething sense of the desecration of his sacred faith and his chosen means to expose this desecration was his violent jihad not only against the West, but also against moderate Islam as well. It seems essential to understand the crucial historical dichotomy between the Christianized West and the Islamic East. Where the West finally began its slow philosophical process of separating church from state, while still holding on to the vestigial exceptionalism that it is only through the sacrifice of Christ that salvation can be found, Islam, on the contrary, has never been able to accept this separation and has in fact seen the separation as blasphemous and infidel.
The Koran must be left in the pristine form with which Mohammad himself originally conceived it. For this reason it clings dearly to its Sacred Religion as the only thing that keeps the entire religious culture intact. The roots of this present jihad do not start with a war on the West, but, rather, a jihad within Islam itself, pitting the fundamentalists against the modernizing moderates within the faith. It has been largely an internal struggle starting in the 1950's.

This is why it is so important to understand the life and times of Osama bin Laden and just why he came to the fervent jihad he did. The raison d'etre of Osama bin Laden was not created in his own solipsist's vacuum, but brutally wrought in the crucible of these times. He is more than just an individual gone pathologically awry. He is both a symbol and an emblem to this defiance of cultural humiliation, this sense of being “cast out”. He was far more genuinely emblematic of his faith than was Saddam Hussein with his false Islamic Arabism. But, in the end, it was not so much his jihad to revive the pristine tenets of the faith that resonated with millions of Muslims around the world, but his defiance and unwillingness to submit, and most importantly, his efforts to turn back centuries of cultural humiliation and to find the lost pride of Islam that was once the jewel of the world.

End note:
If the reader concludes that this is an essay that attempts to justify bin Laden’s sacred jihad, then I have failed to clarify the point of the essay. It was not written in the spirit of an apologist’s appeal, nor as a rational defense of bin Laden’s horrific crimes against humanity. There is no doubt that all rules of international law and common decency demanded that bin Laden be pursued and brought to justice. Question is, was this final justice worthy of modern international jurisprudence or was it the same kind of justice- one of retribution and vengeance- that bin Laden himself believed so justified his sacred, bloody jihad?I think there is enough moral and practical ambiguity here to at least ask ourselves these questions.

2011-04-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

Did Someone Say Economic Recovery?

The notion of economic "recovery" poses a problem of understanding and carries an expectation that economic recovery will follow similar historical patterns of the past. I don’t think this is going to happen. I don' pretend to understand the deep science of economics but statistical minutiae does not really help us here. We might now be marking a sea change event in Western economics that constitutes the real "paradigm shift" all those Wall St. sales people hyped 10 years ago.

The real economic paradigm shift for the developed world finally took place in 2008. The shift is not a lateral shift, a tech or an information shift; it is a downward shift in real wages. This trend has been occurring for a number of decades but finally reached a tectonic subduction moment when the world housing market collapsed. It is an economic correction that was bound to happen sooner or later when trillions of dollars of perceived value suddenly evaporates. This is what happened when the West, starting with the US, could no longer float the humongous and over inflated funny money housing bubble

I don’t believe we will ever recover in the traditional manner- at least for the next few generations and until the world gets used to a mean global distribution of Gross Global Economic Product. We will never recover the lifestyle, the buying power, the security of wealth that our generation (the heart of the baby boomers) had the fortuitous luxury to live through since the 1950’s. When we were kids, world population was 3 billion. It took nearly 2,000 years for world population to go from 200 million to 3 billion in 1960. It took a mere 50 years to go from 3 billion to the 7 billion we have now. This is an astonishing and telling statistic about the economic problems we face ahead, not only domestically but globally.

It's going to be much harder for the coming generations, the dwindling middle classes and the poor in Western societies to continue to consume @ the Wal* Marts of the US and the world. Energy prices will continue to rise and as they do millions of consumers will continue to be anal retentive as a natural reaction-realizing that food , medicine and mortgage payments are more important than I pads, three wheelers and Disney World trips. As energy costs rise, everything else rises too.

As far as material wealth, we boomers have been the beneficiaries of the single most prosperous generation world history has ever known. Real wages on a per capita of GDP basis however, have gone down since boomers came into their prime. In the U.S. fewer and fewer people have gained more and more wealth over the last 40 years as well. This oligarchic shift of wealth and power also impedes real economic recovery for 85% of American households. This “popular recovery” just ain’t gonna happen until this crucial economic demographic begins to trend back towards the middle classes.

Even in the best of all possible worlds these halcyon days of material exorbitance for the west are over. It simply cannot be sustained at the levels we have maintained w/ a developing world burgeoning population coming into the world economy in the form of massive labor and manufacturing out sourcing. The whole world is beginning its slow bend toward the mean. China represents the tipping country toward this trend. This means we bend down as the developing world trends up.

This IS the paradigm shift that is occurring now. This is why our entitlements, social security, etc., will slowly begin to go bankrupt. The "recovery" as I see it, will be one of psychology and practical awareness, and not an increasing per capita real wage recovery. We will have to realize that to recover means we will have to learn to make do w/less on a per capita basis and that we will have to learn to be far more efficient with what we have.

2011-04-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

Pink Elephants and the Male God

I'm not as studied a student of the monotheisms as I should be, but even if the instruction manuals do not include a specific reference on the male god as el grande hefe deity, it has always gone as a given that this is what god is: a man. Forget the pink elephant. Think GOD!........ See what I mean??

In Islam, what is seen in the mind's eye during prayer when going prostrate before Allah? In Christianity, when the host is being con celebrated by a number of male priests, what figure inhabits the mind? Try as I might, I simply cannot conceive of god in the feminine. Can you? Does anybody? I'd love to change all this just in my own mind. I can't. It is firmly steeped in our myth, our social code, our genetic meme. The only way I can get out of it briefly is by building intellectual structures that seem artificial and contrived to me while trying to reconcile my own philosophical predispositions. This is what I'm doing right now in this fb post.

I'm sure at some point, when I am feeble of mind and dervishing toward the great spiraling Gyre,I will likely mumble a plaintive prayer to the male god meme fused into my brain in its gloaming decline.
The early drafters of the Christian saga- the Paulines and the Augustinians- thought there might be some sticking power if the messiah deity became man incarnate and the "son of god" too. What a brilliant stroke to co-opt the creation and sacrifice themes well part of the Hebrew tradition for millennial before the birth of Christ.
So folks the preponderant historical weight and thrust of the male god inhabits our collective conscious. It's hard to "step out" even if you plasticize your mind to break the molded ceramic of its conditioning. It is in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the songs we sing, the icons we pay homage to. It's everywhere omnipervasive. It speaks to an overarching emphasis that invests more power, wisdom, intelligence, self-sacrifice, hero fixation, moral turpitude and all that stuff that has been overlaid on the masculine side of god's creation. One can ponder for a moment, while loosed from the shackles of this male heist,where the world and its inhabitants would be if the god idea had been infused with the feminine force instead.

The world would be a far better place I think if the feminine mystique had prevailed a few thousand years ago and was cast as the predominant player in human nature.

2011-04-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

NATO BECOMING GATO

Libya And The Bloody Roads To Peace Ahead

NATO, once again, has recently proven its efficacy on the world stage with its recent gains in efforts to topple Qaddafi's brutal dictatorship. The response from NATO with its pending objective to oust the despot should act as a sea changing template in how global organizations might approach many global flash points that loom ahead. NATO now needs to morph into GATO, (Global Alliance Treaty Organization). It seems that a clear evaluation of history makes it imperative that the form and structure of intervention at the global level should be the highest priority for the community of nations to consider. The new game changer nations in the near future should include China, India, Brazil and Russia- but also symbolically, every nation that believes global solidarity protects their own security interests as well. NATO should undergo a radical paradigm change. This change and how it is conducted will determine whether or not humanity progresses or precipitously falls back into a retrograde devolution.The form and structure (global coalitions) and their joint decision to go into Libya far outweighs the justifying content for the action.

This article now jukes into a philosophical digression, but will meander back to tie into the Libyan crisis..

It is becoming increasingly apparent that if the superpowers of the developed world do not begin to dispossess ourselves of this concept of “National Interest” as the prime mover in all our domestic and foreign policy decisions, then we are marking ourselves as a species for an early exit; that the very concept of the “Nation State,” (a relatively recent liberal upstart model in the historical calendar)needs to be understood in its contextual necessity, and from this understanding, realize the paradigm shift needs to recognize a new global model.

The global model must begin to see that the vital work ahead involves a keen insight that sees the profound differences in the rates of civilizational maturity co-existing on the planet at the same time. We still have pockets of hunter gatherers animating their primal survival rituals through moon dances that ensure the gods continue to bless their harvests and their hunts. At the same time, within the same species, we have astronauts that have actually danced on that same moon the primitives dance and sing and chant to.
We have the whole range in between these 2 extremes. From cultures that barely survive in abject poverty , still informed by dark age religious fervor, and are ruled by dictators and theocrats who oppress by fear and coercion, to we democrats who have no want of our next meal, and have little regard or knowledge that this abject hunger and want still stirs in the belly of a near majority of the people on the planet.

We have institutions of great learning and technologies that devise the physics to get us to the moon by harnessing the force that holds stars together. We need to understand that we are still competing with those other modern civilizations that are either our near equals or gaining quickly on the curve of material living standard, and that this very competition is killing the fragile veil of atmosphere that we breathe and is destroying the mother womb of the earth and all her life giving waters. But that the real threat in the long run will come from this exponentially populating other world still snagged desperately back there in time, but who might get their hands on the dark tools that we moderns have unleashed through the centers of higher learning referred to above. And they will be compelled from this want in their bellies, the fervor of their gods and the humiliation of their lot in life to unleash the power that holds stars together. It is this gap, this very dark and deep gulf, that threatens all of humanity; from the primitives yawping at the moon to the astrophysicist who devises space engines that may get us to Alpha Centauri sometime soon. That old isolationist and geographical separations no longer can insure our security.

It seems to me that 10 year’ plans have to give way to 100 year plans. It seems to me that for this reason it is supremely necessary that some new emphasis on ”Global Interest” -where what fits the needs of one, fits the needs of all in the future. This new mental ideation graft needs to be radically ramped up. The models of the UN and NATO are already there but must undergo a massive upscale program that changes the lexicon from “wars” to development and humanitarian missions. That the great Kennedyesque goals of making the moon by the end of the decade to “beat the Russians” does not apply today. In fact it fatally threatens.

It is from this premise that we should see the incumbency for the developed nations to begin to evolve a conscious awareness that the only way to close this enormous gulf of disparity, and thus to protect their own interests concomitant w/ the developing world, is to begin the project of these humanitarian/nation assisting missions. Libya is one such project.

from the fbook discussion.... [Your argument is that we do not have a game plan over all that addresses the aims of the mission, who we support, the brutal realities of a long simmering and intractable civil war and what’ outcomes we can expect seem local issues as compared to the task at hand over the next 100 years.]

Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history” notion is actually a very telling analysis of the great ideological struggles between the great superpowers and the nation states they hail from. The mutual understanding in the near aftermath of nuclear “moment” at Trinity, at Nagasaki,at Hiroshima, compels an existential re-evaluation that these old failed attempts at diplomacy in extremis (world wars) no longer can be remotely considered in strategic terms between behemoth powers, and can only lead to the rapid descent of man in the long run, and it is for this reason that we, meaning the world community, both developed and developing, must begin the long haul humanitarian missions like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Afghanistan, etc., and the many that loom dark on the horizon over the next half century. That the old term “war” should be rendered obsolete in the lexicon of the developed countries, and that a new term be put into place when coalitions go into countries with the idea that to do good for one is to do good for all.

2011-03-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

Vive La France and Vive Patience!
facebook post by Dave Warren on Monday, March 21, 2011 at 12:04pm

Thank god the US did not go into Libya unilaterally. Instead- and wisely so- waiting for a UN mandated vote sanctioning the move. This mandate’s crucial element includes the Arab League. I don’t think the IMPORTANCE of this can be stresses strongly enough; not only for actions against Qaddafi, but as a global policy compass for the rest of the 21’st century. NOW is the time to fortify the UN by an exponential factor far from its current milque toast, largely symbolic global role. If Obama’s "waiting and waffling" is seen as low profiling hesitancy, then so be it. That’s what it is- and wisely so. To wait for the UN and-the irony of ironies- the French (remember how “wimpy” they were smeared when Bush violated the law and rogued into Iraq?) to actually and symbolically be the first ones to violate Libyan air space was a very powerful and pragmatic choice. Yea for the French. Vive la France!!

No, in this case, it was a prudent stroke of multilateral wisdom to wait until all “international legal ducks” were in a row-even though lives have been lost during this crucial waiting period. The form and legal structure determining the rules of engagement going forward are far more important today than the justifying content leading to hostilities. Unilateral action should legally give way to multilateral mandates. Our entrance into Afghanistan after 9/11 took 6 weeks and that clearly had immediate national security issues justifying the action at the time. Even then, in the best of all possible worlds, a coalition of nations, all of whom have concerns about terror in their own capitols, should have moved as a consolidated unit. The reality is that whether or not we go in to Muslim countries to defend Muslims from Muslims, which, count them, has happened 6 times over the last 20 years: Kuwait, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, we should ALWAYS, ALWAYS move as a world community and it should simply be outlawed to move unilaterally, EVER, PERIOD.
The" right side of history" is a slippery piece of propaganda based on biased historical analysis when used to defend right minded arguments in the here and now. Currently the term is used as almost an action verb to suggest future outcomes that are consistent with correct thinking. But, it can safely be said that things like Russian gulags, Cambodian re-education camps, totalitarian communisms, fascist genocides, ethnic concentration camps, slavery- and even the softer institutions like colonialism, can be hindsighted (verbed here) as on the “wrong side of history.” Well, despotry should now be evaluated on that same historical auction block when solutions need to be exacted in theNOW. Intervention should be asserted as mandatory solutions to making the world a safer place as all, all threats of terrorism on a mass scale from here on out will likely come from either military or theocratic dictatorships, as they have in the past. For the necessities of NOW, all totalitarian dictatorships w/ bogus democratic effigy labels like"democratic republic of....." in their country's names, should be forewarned and considered on the “wrong side of history.” This should be reason enough for the world community to intervene. Crucial caveat here: WORLD COMMUNITY and never single interest nations. There are clear reasons why people like Thatcher, Meir Power, Indira Gandhi, Clinton- all clear minded women- acted as hawkettes for the right reasons. ( this is an allusion to a CNN article written by David Gergin on hawkish women)

With the recent moves toward freedom coming from north Africa, the opportunities that have been virally loosed, are spreading in the den of depots countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya with others in the wings. This is the time for the world community, NATO, the UN to seize this historical opportunity and to overhaul their charters so that they have real teeth to arbitrate and stabilize the extremely volatile scenarios that lie ahead. The right side of history, which should be used hesitantly here, should be that nation coalitions should jointly move against all despots employing a variety of tactics short of war first, bit if these do not work, invasions, boots on the ground, no fly zones, humanitarian missions, support for rebel insurgents should all be considered as viable options. This will send a very strong message to not only the despots but all elements within these countries that it is ok to break for freedom and even hope for proto democratic reforms and that the WORLD COMMUNITY, not just single interest nations will support them.

2011-01-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

Caught On The Trojan Plain

What really captivates me about Homer's Iliad is not so much the story/myth itself, but, rather its sheer endurance in Western thought for nearly three thousand years. What is it about a long ago war on the Trojan Plain that continues to haunt the consciousness of Western Man? Since its inception,why have Homer's heroes become classic archetypes personified through the ages? Has this original Homeric signature informed, perhaps formed the proto model of the virtuous citizen, the warrior, the patriot?

I believe it has. I believe the Iliad was The Inception itself. I believe the Iliad marks the first significant point of departure where cultural evolution and reflective art begins to formulate a new kind of coherent and archivable consciousness in Western Culture. Removed from the harsh rigors of our hunter/ gathering roots with the advent of agriculture some seven thousand years before, Homer's epic poem begins to build the interior framework of ancient Greek thought. And it is from this initial early Greek epic that the diaspora of Western ethics finds its founding form. To the present day it is Homer to which we can attribute much of our belief that to be human is to war and that war is an essential state in human affairs. What I am postulating here is that it is not biology by which we are compelled naturally to war, but, rather, by artifice of reflective art in the form of the epic poem that established the romantic ethic surrounding war, thus instituting a code of behavior that survives and thrives to this day.

Since this inception, Homer's epic poem has countless permutations through all the succeeding western literary forms; from the more modern thinkers and playwrights of Classic Greece( both Plato and Aristotle lionized Homer) moving forward and transformed by Virgil into the Roman hero model in the Aeneid, through the highpoint of the Islamic Renaissance, Egypt and Byzantine culture, the Divine Comedy, Goethe, Pope, Joyce, etc., not to mention modern movies and drama.

Homer's pervasive legacy may have far more to do with the fact that the Iliad was the very first story (in the direct line of this Western Tradition anyway) ever put down on paper for "the record." It is Homer's soaring tragic pathos that, in eternal return, continues to arc like streaming hyperbolic arrows through time. The idea of reading, writing and archiving was new in 8'th century BC Greece. The great library at Alexandria, Egypt lay 500 years in the future. Breaking the spoken word down into units of sound through an alphabet that could then be rendered as symbols on parchment paper thus transferring information without it having to be spoken, was a profound revolution. This was brave new world stuff 800 years before Christ, and the first people who could read and write in this new form were regarded almost as gods. Books, which were also new, could transfer information from generation to generation relatively intact. His Iliad, being the first book, transformed the long tradition of the oral or singing bard into "hard copy-" - onto parchment or papyrus scrolls. It is hard for the modern mind to conceive of just how remarkable this was. We need to plumb deeper into this single facet of Homer's inception.

Other than archeology, myth, and pseudo historical interpretation, nothing goes any further back than Homer in the West. Nothing…..Who did Homer read? Did he read Dante or Aristotle, Sophocles, Virgil, Ptolemy, Plotinus, the Stoics, Cicero? No, he did not but all mentioned here read him, and some of them hail Homer as the greatest writer who ever lived. Did they know he was the first? Was there even a rough notion of the concept of Philosophy or History in 800 BC? If these disciplines were not yet invented, should we confer the wisdom of primal insight upon Homer?

This fact alone seems a powerful thing to consider. Homer was the "proto founder" of Western written Culture. Before him lay a ’clean slate” unblemished by prior written forms. From this beginning, his muse was pristine and unencumbered. Did this primal innocence create his unprejudiced genius? Were his insights on the core elements of human nature more accurate than ours today? With millions of books in the legacy these 3 thousand years later, are we contaminated with an opaque and biased taint of history? Are we less or more informed to come to conclusions as to our essential nature than Homer was? He read no one as there was no one to read before him.

It begs the question: Does the artist merely reflect and render his forms subjectively from observed surroundings or can the artists, especially the proto artists, actually shape, form, and affect the descendant forms revered in the collective conscious ever there after? Does Homer really capture the immutable truths of Human nature with all its frailties and superlatives, or did he aggrandize to the highest altar this homage to the hero with all his Kleos and Time. Did his sublime hexameter popularize, romanticize, and finally institutionalize the hero ethic into the Western canon?

Are we always bound by our nature to war and to sacrifice our lives for the cause of nation, honor, glory, or the rights to kill other human beings because we are shamed, lose faith, or because our women are absconded with.? Does Homer make folly of all this or is he championing the integrity and warrior ship of Hector, the varied wraths of Achilles, the wisdom of Nestor, the sorrow of Priam- the ethic of glorious war for the fatherland? Has war always been? Is it an inextricable edict in human behavior? Will it always be? Was he trying to better the human condition of his time by noting the false conceits and pride, the ultimate tragedy of war, of which our essential nature, expressed in his heroes and in the gods, will never be able to escape?

Did he better the human condition by writing epics that would inspire and be carried, literally in book form by Alexander The Great on his conquests? (He would sleep at night in his tent, with the Iliad under his pillow). What did Alexander learn from The Iliad? If the Iliad is an anti -war morality lesson then why does Aristotle sing its praises and why does Alexander begin the biggest series of conquest wars of the known world? Did Alexander note and learn from the tragedy of Troy or was he compelled to dominate the world through the glory and honor and anger that Homer seems to place on so high an altar? Was the tragedy left only for the analyzers, the learned of literature and poetry, the intellectual class that can afford reflection through careful study?

Was the tragedy of Troy lost on Alexander, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Sherman, Patton, MacArthur, and so many geniuses of the military tradition? If the tragedy was taken to heart, fully understood, would these warriors have begun their great conquests? Should they have learned from the Iliad the ultimate futility of war, and if so, why does it continue today and why are the virtues of honor and glory still such compelling themes burning in the heart of the young patriot?
Will we ever learn and pay heed to the ultimate futility of war, even being the descendants of the victors, or are we condemned to continue its legacy for millennia to come? Is this our fate, a fate we can do nothing about? Is Homer the first seer and sage to recognize this fate or is he the initial glorifier and initiator of the tradition as it has been chronicled and retold in histories and literature and poetry ever since?

Heady rhetorical questions, I know, but somehow my deepest intuitions are that human nature is unique in its malleability, its imaginative power to transform itself through conscious evolutionary becoming, into a better more pragmatic thing; that it is perfectible though never perfect. I believe that in a universe that maybe reaches back 13 billion years, that there have been countless cosmic civilizations that have developed over millions of years then declined or became extinct and vanished into cosmic dust. Maybe even here on earth there were really ancient million year plus civilizations going back eons ago in time- long before the most ancient known asteroids struck the earth almost ½ billion years ago.

And if this is the case, then cultures that have million year traditions of self aware history, make our 4 thousand year or so of written/ myth history seem very fleeting and very infant and in this I see our conceited and anthropocentric error in calling ourselves “moderns.” We are still very, very ancient people seems me. And in this, there should be much room for improvement of our kind .We are largely still informed ethically and culturally by the first city states that necessarily formed around the new agricultural economy that began about 10,000 years ago, still very recent, in the sweep of time.

I think that Homer is crucial in so many ways, most important of which is that he is among the first cultural stone masons who laid the first foundation stones on a structure that may survive for a million years or more. We have scarcely begun the first course of stones in this foundation and it can only survive if we really begin to see what is best from Homer, and I’m not so sure that what is best from Homer was even evident to him, and learn from the ultimate futility and folly of war; that to be born, to struggle, to come to the revelation that we are mortal, that we will die, and that there can be a benign honor and glory conferred upon those who ennoble the struggle of life itself, especially when this struggle is life giving and life sustaining; that these tenets alone become things worthy of honor and glory and that someday- hopefully sooner rather than later- war itself will become an artifact, stripped of its honor and glory, found only as a relic in the human narrative.

posted by dave warren at 1:36 PM

2011-01-22T15:03:00.000-08:00

The long shadow of the Iliad and will Venus and Mars ever align in the Age of Aquarius.

Recently had an interesting fb discussion on the role of the poets and poetry in war.

I'd originally thought that all involved in the discussion were women. You see all participants, except me, hailed from the east, Bengladesh to be precise. Not having enough knowledge or experience in Bengali, I assumed that the names and the profile pics in the thread- which were not conclusive as to sex- were all women. Well, says alot for premature assumptions as all in the discussion were indeed men and only one women. So egg and my shirt goes well together. It was through this misinformed frisson of the man/ woman dynamic, however, that I drew some of my most inspired arguments, at least I thought so. The discussion got off to a poignant and sad start by noting the flag draped coffin of yet another soldier arriving home who died on foreign soil.

As follows starting the thread:

Bakhtiar Shahjahan Hafeez

Why do innocent lives have to be extinguished on a politicians whim? Such loss.

•Charmane Rashid Ahmed

• It goes back to the myths of male strength that must be tried and tested. The epic poets are partially to blame, Illiad, Mahabharata, etc. and partially it is because human beings have egos.

•Venkat Patla

•Some things never change. Why is it that the lives of so many are in the hands of so few? Don't blame the poets though. They merely mirror the state of the society. If not, all we'll need to fix the world would be a few good women poets!!!

•Charmane Rashid Ahmed

Ram, while I agree in part, I also do feel that poets romanticize war as honorable and glorious and the Victor gets the spoils, etc. There's Alexander 'the Great'--why great? Conquering countries that were doing fine on their own before the... Greeks came along shouldn't make him a great conqueror or strategist just because he won over weaker rulers. Of course, history might have been written very differently if invaders didn't exist, but as they say, history repeats itself and, unfortunately, it is oft repeated by the spilling of innocent blood....

•Venkat Patla

• Agree with all you say. Except the part about the poets. The prevailing mood in the society is what they reflect. If a bunch of people show up ranting with pitchforks, the poets join in. As along as there is life on earth there will be wars. Too morbid for a Friday! Lighten me up! I love seeing all those old pictures of your family. Very nostalgic.

•Bakhtiar Shahjahan Hafeez

• I've always maintained that religion, politics & governance should be headed by the fairer sex. Not because I'm surrounded by them at home. Goes directly to the ego/testosterone issue.

•Charmane Rashid Ahmed

• Ha! Ha! Alright, enough said. God bless the poets..

•
•Charmane Rashid Ahmed

• Bakhtiar, you're going from one extreme to the other. We need a balanced approach here. Go read some poetry. :-)

•Venkat Patla Mr. Bakhtiar,

• I wouldn't go that far. Left to the "fairer" sex, we'll go the praying mantis route!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_cannibalism

LOL!
■And now the long wind starting with the penchant for female praying mantids to devour their male consorts...

"Don't wanna get caught between the flaying mandibles of fairer sex mantids here, but I see both sides of the discussion between C A and V P (above) on the role of poets and poetry. Just so happens that poetry can cover the whole spectrum from the passive and reflective to the active sowing of seeds setting the grand stage for such virtues as honor and glory in battle. The Iliad, as CA notes above, surely does capture, for the first time in the Western literary tradition, the virtues of war’s honor and glory for all succeeding generations to come - not in preserving and protecting human life, but in destroying it.

It is the romance that is attached to war, seems to me, that is the most telling flaw some of the poets have helped to perpetuate in seductive, stirring hexameters and rhyme. Kipling comes to mind, but there are so many others in this tradition.

It is a sad testament really that the very first "story" in all of the western literary tradition is the story of a war written by a poet. Not a story about how we learned to grow crops, develop cooperative systems of commerce and government, establish laws, or utilize developing technologies--essentially, how we built sustainable societies--but of how we killed each other long ago on the Trojan Plain.

The very first story-teller (Homer), the very first poet that we become aware of- in western tradition anyway- is Homer; Homer who chronicles a “history” (perhaps myth) about the gratuitous ways that men killed men, thus earning their just rewards with the supposed glory, honor, and sacrifice conferred upon them by the “Gods” and by their fellow men.

I go along w/ what BS says about the fairer sex: Just imagine, cannibalizing mantids aside, and on a utopic tangent, if the very first epic poem, for example, had been written by the great woman poet, Sappho, who might have made grand in sublime hexameter the glory and honor and goodness there was in learning how to cure sickness, grow crops, read the stars, enrich language, raise children--essentially how to sustain life, not destroy it… one might hope that one day, long after these "ancient times," in which we still live as far as I'm concerned, that wars will be no more and the stirring romantic ethos of some of the poets will be seen only as social artifacts along the road of human becoming..

...some light reading for a Friday afternoon, eh?

.

2010-11-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

The Gutting of a Democracy

In a people's democracy the ideal is that the people, if informed and motivated, can affect the outcome of their own destinies- if they get involved.. We really don't do this enough anymore on a large enough scale to effect real change. Recently, this populist ideal of self determination has become more threatened by massive though narrow corporate interests that have undermined this ideal with a series of covert and insidious buying and control coups- the most recent being the massive frauds in the financial sector. These are purposely structured “legal” ways of gaining control of a democratic system while still pandering to the label "democracy." It's like engineering a designer brand of democracy that can be bought and sold like ideologic commodities. They are essentially buying the democracy w/ huge financial incentives that are really no more than legal bribes presented to legislators to weaken controls and de-teeth governmental regulation. This is not new. It has been around almost since the founding of the country reaching its first climax around the beginning of the 20'th century with the robber barons and the first real attempts at regulation with Theodore Roosevelt's trust busting.

The irony of the American character and perhaps the philosophical license that allows this quasi ethic to continue, is that it has always championed individual initiative to rise above the Madding Crowd. For this, and rightly so, many people have been conditioned to admire those who have learned how to rise above in the hopes that one day they too will be able to rise above the rest. In the past, most of the people who have risen have done so through legitimate enterprise that have contributed to vibrant economies and increased in real ways the GNP .

The modern day CEO, however, and the huge corporation with fraudulent accountants is a whole new predatory animal that has subverted this traditional method of wealth gaining.It is creating wealth on bogus grounds through immoral and fraudulent means. Yet this American character still lionizes those who “get ahead,” not distinguishing between the traditional means and these new insidious means. The sad miscalculation is that any movements to regulate these huge financial and corporate entities that are buying the democracy are seen as “socialists” movements. The humanistic qualities of any of the presidents who have moved to address these serious flaws are seen as weak and leftward leaning movements to quash and socialize free enterprise. It’s happening again with Obama as it did with FDR, Carter, LBJ, etc. Any president who attempts to liberalize wealth through programs that socialize gross national product( humanistic approaches) has been seen as weak and socialist leaning.

Until this scam is realized on a massive scale, the democracy will continue to be bought by these behemoth and fraudulent corporate interests until they have hollowed out the democracy leaving only the facade gutted of its founding principles.

2010-10-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

Homer and the Smell of Napalm in the Morning

this is an excerpt from a dialog on fb.

> It is the pungent smell of Homer in the morning that continues to draw the heady smoke enwreathed ethos consecrating the fallen warriors on the haunted battlefields down the centuries. Homer is the root cause of all this . It is the Homer in all of us who still sucks in the rife napalm rising off the burnt remains of the noble soldier strewn across history. War is simply the grossest of human conduct, period. Though sometimes necessary, in defense against venturing despots who propel their cannon fodder through stirring tear rending orations on the "fatherland," and the like, war is the single most abominable and anomalous of human behaviors. All this romance bequeathed to the progeny of the Homeric ideal, speak of the violent hegemonic gene that has been portrayed as the dominant expression in the human allele. If we do not war, the reasoning goes, we are reduced to a feminized culture, neutered of the male gamete sack. This has been a long standing Homeric refrain sung for hundreds of generations. Well, fuck Homer and all his idealistic progeny wrought of his epic poetry. Fuck all his warring honor schlock the Western canon has swallowed and mimicked through all the descending ages hence. What andocratic taint we have codified into human nature erroneously because of the power and cascading influence of his poetry.

It's high time for us to just get over it!

It is high time to associate masculine qualities with the “peaceful gene,” departing from the sheer mass inertia of history, w/ all its emphases on the glory, honor and valor of the masculine warrior; the romantic warrior carried in all these hymns de la guerre, these epic blood drenched poems; these noble statues and masterpieces of literature and history that weigh so heavily upon the virtue-less decline of an emasculated culture if we do not war. This is an inherited madness we as a species are simply too underdeveloped to imagine. We are still The Ancients if we do not begin to see this. This is not an apologist's position for pacifism either. Pacifism in a world where despots like Saddam Hussein still thrive, is madness. But to glorify and romanticize war only perpetuates its continuing legacy.

The real Glory and Purification that is our due after three thousand years of trial and error, is the ultimate transcendent mind of humanity when collectively it decides that there is no just cause that can possibly impel a nation to venture an offensive war. And if this ever comes to pass, there will be no cause ever to fight a defensive wars either. The essence of the true masculine to protect through peace might finally be realized. If we begin for this mark, the other recessive allele of peace might finally be seen in a masculine light. The seeds to this ultimate logic can only be planted by deconstructing this past ethos spun by Homer first, but then all the succeeding cultures who have carried the torch of war as a defining element in human nature and of the virtuous citizen. This is the Kool-Aid we have been drinking for nearly three thousand years, totally unaware that we are even drinking it.

So fuck Homer and all his glorious epic poetry of violence,valor and death and sacrifice!

·

2010-10-27T09:49:00.000-07:00

Gettyburg Oration
Quantifying and calibrating by order of greatness in anything is a difficult order to fill, especially in the arts. Lincoln's address, however, stands alone in many ways.It is both high rhetorical art combined w/ an acute sense of the historical moment. Word for spoken word, there is little doubt that the Gettysburg Address, as a public drama, has no peer in American history. It fills the bill on all the measures of sublime oratorical composition. As recited here by Mr. Rapoport, it approaches an operatic splendor. In euphony, austerity of word, and pitch perfect composition, it has no match. Lincoln's only lacking, and this is probably why the speech was so lost on his audience at the time, was his high vocal register and un-resonant vocal timbre.

Part of its indelible mark in time has to do w/ this precise compositional architecture as it coincides w/ the perfect historical moment to which the address met in/ exquisite proportion. What truly marks Lincoln's genius, though, was that he was as much a dramatist in the highest tradition of the Greek tragedy as a poet with a gifted ear at the same time. And what distinguishes him, almost exclusively among world leaders in all of history, is that he was writing and acting his own character upon the real dramatic stage of history in real time. In this sense, reality imitates art in its most transcendent form.

2010-10-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

Do We Live In The Best Of All Possible Worlds? I imagine not.

part of a conversation on fbook.

There once was a philosopher named Liebniz who maintained that we live in the "Best of all Possible Worlds." His logic ran like this: God would not create and then perpetuate through eons of time anything less than a perfect world. This seems a plausible rationale in the diorama of a thinking man's mind where religion, guided by a single diety, informs his thinking and his behavior.

I think I would agree w/this position if the prerequisite of a single God creating the universe was a known given. Not having this luxury though,one simple yet sublime facet of the human character-imagination- renders us incapable of accepting that the world we inhabit is the best of all possible ones. The genius of the imagination constitutes my refutation of this proposition- a position that prevailed in many philosophical schools of the Enlightenment trying to reconcile God and Science during the 17'th and 18'th centuries. A position even the great Enlightenment thinker, Voltaire, considered plausible until he witnessed the great Lisbon earthquake in 1755.

It is pretty simple argument I make here w/ only one principle in my camp. As follows: We do not live in the best of all possible worlds precisely because we are vested w/ the burden of trying to imagine ways to make it better. Lichens, fungi, mosses and molds live in the best of all possible worlds simply because they cannot imagine a better one. We are the tool making specie Homo habilis. But I would like to coin a more precise way to describe us..... ta daaa Homo- Imaginus! Descartes said, in effect,"I think, therefore I exist"
Me says; We imagine, therefore we [still exist]... we still survive..

Recap: To imagine is to aspire to a "conscious" bliss but never attain it.... Therefore, w/ the sweet burden of imagination, we can never attain the "Best of all Possible Worlds."

2010-10-26T07:50:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on the Financial Crisis, Campaign Finance and Echoes of Jefferson, Lincoln and Eisenhower.

Jefferson and Lincoln warned of finance and banking "corporatization" during their times. Such prescience from these guys way back when. These now threaten the very roots of the democracy still so early in its development.

Combine these warnings w/ what Eisenhower said more recently about the military/ industrial complex, and you begin to see that learned people of common sense have cautioned about these dangers for more than 200 years. Why can't these wisdoms prevail in a more governmentally regulized industry today, where human nature itself is the most likely culprit to fall into moral hazard? Why is it that more regulation can't occur w/out it being feared as "socialism," or worse, "communism?" When will the specter of Joseph McCarthy finally go away?

These regulating measures, in light of what has happened over the last 10 years, should only be seen as baseline pragmatism devoid of ideology. If left to their own devices, it is these corporatized/ finance industries that are at most risk of moral hazard because they deal in the pure commerce of money itself. Legislators become legislators because they first learn the arts of politicking. And the art of politicking today depends on money coming from large vested interests. Large vested interests care more for the machinery that generates their profits, not the social good for the greatest number. And it follows that slowly, over time, the corporate ologarchy buys the democracy. And when the democracy is totally bought, it ceases to be a democracy. We are rapidly approaching this terminus in my mind.

Publically funded political forums, equally distributed among competing politicians, of course, would be the ideal forum in the best of all possible worlds. And it is precisely this model that will have to happen at some point in order to save the liberal democracies everywhere. The problem is the titanic inertia of the staus quo corporate and big money lobbies. It has become intractably entrenched in our system of government.

We need a soft revolution in thought to occur. It will take a transcended sense of self -seeing for the democracy to see that this is happening right now. Not enough people are seeing it and therefore it continues unchecked.Maybe one day there will come a principled cadre of legislators, dems and republicans alike, who will be willing to sacrifice their personal careers in the short run by passing laws that prohibit any kind of private funding for political candidates. It would take a totally non-partisan revolution in the house and senate to accomplish this though. Can this, will this ever happen? Are we near the point of no return? Is the fat lady clearing her throat? And,of course, this legislative revolution would be seen as a socialist coup to stifle free enterprise and all that. Can you imagine the kind of leadership and the open commerce of new ideas that would come from such a radical and righting course change like this?

To me,the single most dangerous factor thretening the liberal democracies today, is the slowly seeping, insidiouis and relentlessly creeping malaise of the corporate/ finance mind.It, like Rome in its demise, is a narrow oligarchy of the few who are passively subjugating the many. This American experiment will be over in 50 years if this corporate mind continues unchecked.

2010-09-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

God vs. Evolution. Why Argue?

Seeing the issue of God and Evolution in mutually antithetical and opposing camps seems shortsighted for both camps.The problem is when one camp makes absolute statements about the falacies of the other. Both faith and the scientific method fall short in certian areas involving the ultimate questions of human knowledge. My stance is somewhat oblique in that it does not pit one idea against the other as antagonistic approaches to the question. I put both together on a mosaic w/ complex interfacing joints. Why choose between God or evolution? They are both part of the stream of human creativity. Why frame questions of faith and science as opposite weights on the scale? Both are evident and verifiable as part of human experience. Faith and religion exist; there is a long record of this fact. Evolution also exists as a modern development in human thought. On one hand, if we approach the question of God's existence by exacting the pure scientific method, basing our conclusions on empirical facts, we can no more preclude or include God in the great cosmological design. It is an act of faith that posits God as the creator of the world and the heavens; On the other hand, Darwin himself knew of the profound implications of his theory, but he never spoke or wrote definitively that his work necessarily inferred the death of god either. Evolution attempts to explain the phenomena of mutational change over time; it does not attempt, per se, to disprove the existence of God.

It is a strange and somewhat novel approach to the religion/evolution question I am posing here. What I mean to suggest is that the notion, the idea, the concept of "God" as it developed in the human narrative, and in the actual anatomic development of the human brain, is indeed part of the evolutionary process itself. Religion, and the notion of "God" for all their ills and iniquities -and great benefits- was a crucial development in the survival strategy of the species Homo sapiens.

In other words, evolution contains and explains the notion of "God" and religion. God and religion, however, cannot contain, nor can it explain evolution. Where in the Bible or Koran, or any religious text for that matter, does the idea of slow adaptation explain how species change in small increments over time? Can Lao Tzu explain the eons of time found in the geologic record of rocks ? As we further understand the power of evolutionary thought, we will come to accept that God and religion, though seemingly antithetical to evolution, are crucial developments, just as opposible thumbs, and the development of language were to species survival. Still, having said all this, the notion of a God should always remain an open question.The enemy is the absolutism that structures some faiths and some scientific gospels alike. They need not fix themselves at opposing ends of the question.

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2010-09-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

On The Problem Of Language

Maybe we put too much emphasis on the phenomena of language as the only facilitator of meaningful thought. As crucial a development as language has been, it seems that wordless thought has been held captive by millennia of this arbitrary creation.Can you think without that silent voice streaming in your head? We who now communicate our minds out loud to one another in spoken words are the descendants of distant ancestors who did not do this. They could contemplate in solitude with unencumbered, wordless thought. What must this have been like? Has this languageless mind been disremembered somewhere back along our evolutionary path? Is this why the saints and mystics try to bring us back there by contemplating our own breathing and stilling the relentless stream of internal talking? Have they remembered what common folk have forgotten? OOOOooooohhmmmmmm.

Imagine what thought forms went through our ancestors brains before the invention of language? It was an astonishing stroke of fortuitous luck that the human animal became aware of its own anatomical capacity to fashion various sounds that could symbolize coherent internal thoughts that could then be audibly transferred from mind to mind.

But however marvelous it is, it is often left wanting; often too blunt an instrument to articulate the finest filigree of nuanced thought or feeling. How can we possibly relate the strange emotional surrounds in certain dreams for example? How can questions on the absolute existence or non existence of God ever be reconciled by spoken or written word? It seems that a pruden standing down is what's needed here with the ultimate questions irreducible to language; or at least admitting to its limits. Maybe wordless thought should be reinstated in the human condition when it comes to the infinitely mysterious questions.

Perhaps a definition of being human is the drive to reach. Reach like the lemurs and gibbons in the primeval forests. To reach limb to moss covered limb higher into the crowns is to be human. This is why we speak to each other. We reached out and higher up figuratively after millions of years of reaching out physically alone. We reached out of the silence and solitude of individual existence to form sounds that would come to song and poetry one day. In this way our individual loneliness was lifted a little.

But still, striving as we must, we put too much stock in the efficacy of language to figure out all the mysteries that thought contemplates. After written language became an established form in human intercourse, we came to save all these writings in great accumulating records called Bibles, Philosophical Discourses, Text Books, Qurans, Homeric Epics and such. And in time these writings became immutable truths steeped in time, unquestioned and inviolable. This time honored homage seems to me to be one of the fundamental problems in human conflict.

How can any language, spoken or written, regardless of its apparent logic, poetry or practical purpose, presume to conjugate in absolute terms, the existence or not of so profound a concept as God? It is supremely fatuous at best to even think that this is possible. Yet, this has been attempted for millennia without any definite answers and much strife and struggle for the competing versions of such ineffable questions. Perhaps in these areas the inner sanctum must remain alone in the realms of language less thought.

As positive and progressive a force language has been, it cannot and should not be depended upon to render the answers to these muses in any final form. Neither the majesties of song and poetry fable and parable in the verses of the Quran or the Bible and Torah should lead us to any final terminus on the existence or not of God. Nor should the beauties and power of an exquisite scientific theorem be expected to deduce the ultimate answers to first cause. Both of these majesties can only speak to us in a form of self realized narcissism, of the beauty and power of human creation.

Listen to Bach or Handel or Mozart- whale song, the cry of the loon, so human an expression on the stone face of the Pieta' and speak or write not of origins and universal causes then. Let the internal language stop and maybe it is the God force within that is trying to come through in the form of languageless thought.

2010-07-08T20:51:00.000-07:00

Jefferson Requited In You

You too…… sprung of Lockean seed , ruddy freckled, as the “Red Head” from Virginia’s Little Mountain.
His words,
like dogwood blossomed truths,
borne on the winds of the Enlightenment.
in flurries,
still swirling round,
falling from your lips,
two centuries gone.

You, still grasping for proofs through time inalienable,
ever becoming self evident,
never lighting down, never resting.
You, languorously lay across his writing desk,
his waiting Martha,
his Sally, his Cosway,
catching the longing in his eye,
ever waiting…
You, his phantom sophist lover,
beckon his descendant dreams,
down the centuries,
his fallen horizons revived,
in his own time untenable.

And in his Little Mountain hollows searching,
in some illumined midnight hence,
his prodigal homunculus finds you instead,

and there loosed,
now swimming in a fillamentous swale,
motile in the labyrynthined brine, of your cerebrum.

How flawed to not have found you then?
in the sacred Declaration,
equally created.

Such for these divined endowments….
so lost on him… his time....
What, to have not seen you then ?
blind to these lamp lit flecks enlightened…
caught flittering in your iris,
in lambent slants of light, caressing your freckled neck,
your cheek,
glinting through your russet hair.
…

Of this we can forgive him… his humanity is ours.

Up from his writing desk,
always rife with dialogue, of head,
of heart,
of mind…. Then by moonlight, stealing under lilac perfumed shadows,
into his limbic tenements..

What irreconciled debts bequeathed to us, by deeds undone,
on the parchment left unworded,
he treads upon those dogwood blossomed truths, strewn across his grave....
But in you,
through you,
he finds his rudder lost,
His long sleeping Martha. and from his unrested slumber stirring, he turns into the gale that long has run before him.
With you,
his Sappho,
his Athene Nike,
You, his Helen.
He turns into the storm, and makes Virginia headland once again…
and there waiting on his sunlit lawn he finds you, and face to ruddy freckled face, you finally meet.

On his Little Mountain/ on even ground/ eye to freckled eye,

equally created.

2010-07-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

An open inquiry ....
This is an answer to a question about whether or not I believe in a "Divine Presence" The writing hits the ground running so to speak.

....Such a plaintive question this. Taints of j'accuse attend the silence of those who cannot answer directly, w/out hesitation, on whether or not they believe in a provident God who listens to our prayers and sometimes intercedes in our favor. Yes, I guess I have to say if pushed into the docket of social judgement for a single yes or no. Yes, but perhaps not a provident divinity that is cognizant of my every thought and deed and who keeps an account of these things for some future time of reckoning.... A Deist maybe. Not sure. No category claims my thoughts on the matter as they are so uncharted by spoken or written language.
I do feel, however, that there is something divine in the very notion that we are even contemplating the idea of divinity itself; That this sublime contemplation could be the God force w/in us in the act of self reflection; that the great works of art in music, literature, painting,science, theology, philosophy, drama and dance try to comprehend and then manifest this force either in its horrors or its majesties seems a likely conduit to the spirit. How can one listen to Bach or view the Sistine chapel, read the sermon on the mount,the lyric prose of the Koran and not think some divine presence whispered in the ear of the artist?

For this reason, I would be more an agnostic than an atheist I guess. The maxim would go like this: "Cogito Ergo Cogitat Deus,(I think, therefore God thinks too). 500 years ago I'd have been put to the rack then burned for saying such things in these parts (and I know that I've lost many readers solely because of the previous sentence). Even today in some parts of the fundamentalists world, a drawing and quartering would be an adequate redress for such heresy.

Digressions aside, that we even contemplate the "space of mind" to wonder at all beyond the day to day exigencies of animal survival, is a benediction of sentience in itself. Regardless of whether we contemplate such things from w/ in the Christian, Islamic, Confucian tradition -whatever- it is still a wildly radical departure from the rest of the animal world that we dream of places from where we might have come and to where we, and the world, and the universe containing it are bound. Might these contemplations be the act of God coming to terms w/ creation in a conscious way? A manifest form of benediction through a pondering of the cosmos? Pourquoi pas?

However, as noble his quest was,there really is no such thing as the "tabla rasa" Descartes tried to establish. Except, perhaps at the dawn of our species becoming aware of his consciousness for the first time, millions of years ago, there can be no tabla rasa for the descending thousands of generations of which we are the latter day inheritors. If there is any original sin, this would be it to me: the culturally induced taint we are born into that assumes the veracity of much of the accepted beliefs that have come before the moment of our births. I suppose I take my lead from Thoreau and Emerson and much of the American Transcendental movement, but Spinoza really is one of my true heroes too. And we surely can't forget Jean Jacques Rousseau's noble savage either on these topics. All we can do is attempt to break a small deviation we call original thinking along the path of immense cultural inertia which we can not help but be absorbed in.

But, further,what is the driving force in our nature that compels such a drive to build belief systems in the form of the divine narrative- in this case the Bible or the Koran- that promises to deliver us from the mortal coil of death? Delivers us if we just believe in the glory of a God whose story was written by men still well steeped in the technology of the stone age???? . Indeed there is something of the questing spirit w/ eyes turned toward the butterfly nebula, that asks these questions and has asked these questions since long before the stone circles of Stonehenge were built. Like ants build ant hills, this is what we do.

That you and I are having this discussion at this time on facebook, in this way, is closer to the spirit world than the transubstantiation of the body of Christ into the ritual of communion seems me. This ritual was incorporated into the Christ story nearly 2,000 years ago by a group of church fathers so that men could transmute the temporal trappings of the flesh, w/ all its pains and failings, with the notion of the flesh of a God made incarnate in the flesh of the messiah. . But this is just my belief system, as fraught w/ bias as any other I suppose.

Tell me,do whales or starfish or wolves contemplate such abstract projections on the heavens,or where in the past they come from, and to where they are bound after the sun consumes the planet? The very fact that we can be assured through the tool of science that the sun will consume the earth in some remote time hence, is something divine. That this deductive "mind" transcends the ancient mind that has cast so much dogma into iconographic symbols like the torture device of the christian cross for example. This religious legacy is like a millstone we are still lugging around, so full of its guilts and byzantine dark age rubrics, though this is a terribly biased statement of mine as well.

There simply is no escape from the trappings of culture or the developments of the individual mind to come to some terminus of truth. There is no process that begins with the uncontaminated purity of the tabla rasa. This is why certain belief systems, must, by necessity, become dogmatic in order to survive. There must be certainty in order to ensure continuity. Socrates said this: "There is but one thing that I know for sure and that is that I know nothing." Gotta like that stance. So, as for me, the only thing to come way knowing for sure is the vast universe of ignorance into which we must wade each day until our last breath infuses these thoughts blowing around in the gourd we call mind.

And yet behold this: As far as we can fathom within our ken, this flesh in the gourd we call "mind" is the single most complicated and intricate piece of wonderment in the known universe. The act of the thing itself contemplating its own "miracle" is a form of empirical mysticism seems me. 2 opposing concepts you might protest: empirical and mystic. But I think these terms lie in exquisite equipoise on either side of the equation. The miracle w/out is only reflected by the miracle w/in. So, the butterfly nebula caught by Hubble in its resplendent beauty, full winged across the universe trillions of miles away, is only reflected and beheld as "beauty" w/in the inner universe of the aesthetic mind w/ so many diverse "faiths" that keep it tethered both to the earth and to the stars.

. This is part of the pantheist unutterable creed.

Facebook | Broderick Fox's Photos - SIlverlake Rally

2008-11-19T19:40:00.000-08:00

Facebook | Broderick Fox's Photos - SIlverlake Rally

2008-11-19T19:25:00.000-08:00

Signs and Symbols of proposition 8 on gay marriage

note: click the above link broderick fox photos to view the poster i refer to in the below essay

This is a powerful and moving poster indeed! But,does it move the message in a concilliatory direction or further polarize entrenched positions in the gay rights movement ? I think it polarizes. Full of anger, defiance, resolve, and solidarity, the poster is very "early 20'th century" iconography, and reminds of the ones where oppressed workers of the world unite in the face of overbearing oppression. Its message leaves little ambiguity indeed... But,what are we trying to acheive here if not some compassionate break witht the past. While the signs , symbols, and images for the gay liberation movement must suggest this anger as the driving initial impetus,it must also contain the symbol of an all encompassing understanding that the news anchor Keith Olbermann spoke of in his moving 11/10/08 comment on CNBC.

Perhaps a compassionate appreciation of the history of the institution of marriage, and the the fear that compels these long held religious definitions concerning what constitutes the legal and social bonds of love between couples, is what's needed here. FEAR of change and fear of moral breakdown is the driving element that tempers and fixes these values. Using another line from the book of Jesus: "Forgive them for they know not what they do."

Seems me that the highest form of love is a disinterested compassion that strives to understand the deeper origins of human failing in self and in "other" and thus can be loving towards those who are stuck in history... stuck still in all of our failings to accept the multitude of minority posiitions whether racial, sexual, gender preference, tribe, whatever. These people are not anything if they are not stuck in history. Dug in back along an ascending arc of human understanding.

.
We all come from this failing, we have passed this spot; and some of us have begun to move beyond it. If love remains throughout, the rest will come in time.It's just gonna happen. It's just a question of time, intensity, and endurance... and how many people peacefully join the movement. NO DOUBT THIS WILL BE OVERCOME

2008-11-17T23:02:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin's Misogyny
..... how misogyny stole the Christian message

this essay is all over the place.... if you are prepared to feel g forces of theme flux, then read on...

The essential irony of Palin's candidacy is that the feminist movement is firmly rooted in progressive left thinking, yet Palin hails from the whacky soccer mom far out right. Granted. Palin's beliefs are not progressive at all,but actually part of the continuing studies in the ancient mold of the early mysogynists who set up the current macho thinking we have inherited over a couple millennia or so. In sex alone does she buck the system. In every other utterance she is anything but rooted in progressive thought. Indeed, Palin's world view in its pure form represents one of the most antiquated and unimaginative still surviving views of "man's" narrative on the planet. One that was founded upon state and religious based misogyny thousands of years ago. Though the early "church fathers,"after the death of Christ, would never have referred to themselves as misogynists, establishing moral codes and state laws that made women the property of men, that's what they were. That's what we all come from and still are to a large extent. It is a bible based view, with an historical record and it still represents the foundation of much of our cutural value system today. In the West this view became fixed with the acceptance of Christianity as the state religion by the declining Roman Empire desperately trying to keep it all together. This world view early on linked religious structures w/ male dominated power based hierarchies......

These beliefs today, if adhered to in their literal forms, are counter Enlightenment, and are outright dangerous when incorporated into the philosophical framework of those who would "lead us" from the highest offices in the world..... whether Christian, Muslim .... whatever.... For example, if the Rapture is near at hand, why work toward any global warming policy to save the planet, or reach out to sit down unconditionally with the swarthy "Muslim Moor" billions of people strong planet wide.

........Truly the ultimate tragedy of this age old misogyny proves consequent in the 3'rd world where people are still bought and sold, mostly women and children, and daily continue to die of starvation, lack of water and disease.........

.......So, therefore, the conservative position by strictphilosophical definition, is against feminism, because frminism suggests radical and fundamental change It is amazing and encouraging that less than 100 years after women's suffrage here in America, the feminist movement has effected the collective psyche enough to the
point where a critical mass has tipped the balance enough for a women to be a viable candidatefor the highest office here in the U.S.. Finally, though, here in the American empire, and Europe as well, the dominant and most
we are still firmly based on male dominated
hierarchical structures......... We are still closer to our ancient roots, closer to Rome, than we are to our potential becoming.

a brief digression into Obama... then back to the Palin phenomena
.

Barack Obama perhaps is unaware of this dimension of his presidency, and does not seem to act consciously toward cultivating the cult of his own personality,thank god, but just the symbol of the man OUT OF AFRICA ,and Indonesia, Hawaii and Harvard law school.....the man w/ 3 vowells in his name open O in the beginning; open A in the middle.... opening out again with an A ...... compare all the other Presidents names and nothing comes close to this open vowelled name. They are all white male anglo saxon names. Reminds me of the French sybolist poet Rimbaud- this fix on the vowellic sounds of the man's name ... the music and rythm of it all..... this is a far more profound yet sweetly passive a revolution than we Americans yet realise. The stage upon which this Obama revolution will pay out effecting subliminal modes of thought here in America and in more overt ways as he strides out into the world w/ new notions of the rules of engagement on a global level,remains to be seen. All signs though seem to suggest, and this is premature wishfull thinking, that this is the true genius of his intelligence.

In essence the hope is that the change we all seek, whether unwittingly, symbolically, consciously or not, in OUR CHOICE FOR LEADERSHIP moves the entire species in ever so small social tectonic shifts. But these shifts in the direction of this new mode traject out to a place that history itself calls for if we are to survive the nuclear era. How on earth are we to survive this era when the likes of Bush and Cheney, and their heir apparents in McCain/Palin, pronounce the very word nuclear as "nucular", as Bush does for criss sakes!!! In so many ways, in signs and symbols; in how we entertain ourselves, in the cults of hollywood, further entrenching our collective ignorance WE ARE STLL THE ANCIENTS... just look at the pediments and freizes the Doric columns supporting the lintels of the grand edifices in all the capitols of the West.We are still stuck in the ethos of Rome and Greece. Lovely heritage both, but we must now move on and Obama represents our best bet, here anyway, of making the first leap to the next level of becoming aware of eachother in the global sense.In essence the shackles born over hundreds of generations steeping us in insular nationalisms and tribalisms and all things suggesting belonging to local biases are at least beginning to be noticed at last. Palin, bless her beautiful feminine countenance, harkens backward in her thinking if not in her sex. It will likely be a few generations passing before we actually manifest the changes coming out of this awareness, but Obama, the symbol of the man, more than the man himself, is our best bet now moving in this direction...

back to Palin

...................Sad for us and for Palin that in every other way, via her creationism, witch exorcisms, attempted book censoring stuff, .......on and on- her conservative views represent some of the worst of the old male dominated model that
we need so much to dismantle if true progress is to be made in
terms of not only how the sexes in this country relate but how the
countries of mother earth or Gaia relate. The term "feminism" needs
to be broadened so that it incorporates the concept of the feminist
chi, or the "mother energy" in all of us... men and women....
......This "mother energy" was long ago expunged from both sexes,
(mostly men),when the conquering barbarian cultures and the
ancient Homeric and Hebrew, ( I am not talking about the Jews here
and this is not an anti semitic stance here), began to dominate
not only the world, but to imprison the mind into how it relates to
self and to Mother Earth. This is why Palin wants to drill,drill, drill, as in rape, rape, rape, thrust, thrust, thrust, dominate, dominate, dominate. This
world was given to "Man" , bequeathed to man by god as "his agent
to do his will and to use the fruits of the land etc.,

Sarah, unbeknownst to her is an inheritor of this philosophy. She believes
that "fucking the earth" is our divine right because it was given
to us, (To Adam and his male seed actually) by a male god 6 thousand years
ago and is solely for the paragon of beings to exert power and dominion over. It
was indeed mostly men that proceeded from the so called "garden"
and began this campaign of dominion over all the earth. We are
still living in this age. In this sense we are still the ANCIENTS

.......As far as Palin goes, what an irony to have such male oriented
misogyny packaged in such a petite and alluring feminine form!....
This is hard to digest for men who, from their cerebral highground, wrestle with their limbic systems

….I'm working on an essay titled "The Dream of Sarah" It is a male wet
dream desiring the best for Palin's erotic as well as cerebral enlightenment moving through time........ Sarah time travels through the ages cast out from the "garden" , and as a "fallen temptress" she takes a number of lovers and husbands, (all in the male dominant model), and finally arrives at the
the windswept- curtains billowed in window sill of Voltaire @ his writing desk at the highpoint of the French Enlightenment.
Voltaire then morphs into the libertine Casanova who looks like Fabio.They spend rapacious nights reading Sapphos poetry by candlelight, Rousseau's and
Dennis Diederots writings, Candide and all the rest. She is beginning to break as she combines the sensual beauty of Sappho's poetry with Rousseau's championing of the noble savage finally revealing herself in a sensuous striptease under Voltaire's brightly lit candlelabra. Revealing herself to voltaire and to the "Enlightenment" finally becoming truly modern by casting off these age old shackles that have been with her since the days she left paradise..

as dust gathers on her Old Testament bible

2008-11-17T22:19:00.001-08:00

Thomas Paine, Jonathan Swift, and Sean Hanity mixin it up

This is an ongoing correspondence between 2 of the brothers Warren- Dave and Pete.
This response was answering a poem he has written based on McCain's statement referring to Obama as "that one" in the recent debate in Nashville. In reading my response back though I decided to not include Pete's poem in this essay as it took on a life of its own and pretty well makes a case for the corruption and reformation of the term "liberal" and "liberalism" as it is bandied about today on infotainment networks like FOX News.

Pete,
....Now to your thoughts and quotes from Swift and Thomas Paine, apropos of their satirical brilliance and your poem entitled"That One." Further along an imagined course, I'd bring both Swift and Paine forward to sit on a typical set w/ the renowned Sean Hannity of FOX news during one of his anti liberal
mini screeds. It would be interesting to see how Swift ,or Paine,
or Patrick Henry for that matter, would withstand Hannity's anti
liberal vitriolic screedograms... It would be evident to Paine @
the outset however,that Hannity simply has not done his
homework-that he would be taken by Paine as a talking head Torre lightweight and Paine would immediately leave the set.

Swift, however, saved by his keen sense of humor, farce, and irony, would hang in
there awhile just to see what form anti liberalism had taken these
250 years or so later. He would quickly conclude though that Hannity has
not read Thomas Hobbes,David Hume or Bishop Berkley or much of
European history at all from the Age of Reason forward. Or maybe he
might think that if Hannity had read any of these people, and
compared them to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment like John
Locke or Adam Smith, or JS Mill, that he just did not get it. He simply
did not understand that the former thinkers were brilliant apologist with
reasoned arguments supporting the case for conservative philosophy.
And there surely were reasonable arguments defending conservative thought given the contexts of the times, with the civil and religious wars in England, and, especially, the debaucheries of the French Revolution, as cases examplar of liberalism run amok.

If he read the Scots at all,he simply did not understand how profound was the liberal idea that reimagined self determination in the hands of an enfranchised
democracy, and that this liberal and radical form became us here in the U.S.! I say reimagined because this idea had its precedence
but died in the 4'th century AD with the demise of Rome.
He simply does not get the self evident truth that we are all
children of a profoundly liberal approach to how people govern themselves.

Conservative philosophers like Hobbes for example, proclaimed more
or less that sovereignty was best placed in the safe hands of a
single monarch, or sovereign, and in exchange for relinquishing
individual freedoms, subjects would be guaranteed protection and
security by such a sovereign. Pretty sound reasoning here seems me. That was the deal . Give me the bulk of your rights to self determination and I'll protect you from your fellow subjects within under the rule of law ,and from without,
from foreign enemies of the state. All the liberal intellectual and
philosophical movements of the late 17'th century and early 18'th
flew directly in the face of this "conservative" thinking. This
movement led by John Locke and others of the Scottish
Enlightenment became the political realities and applied
structures of the later 18'th century and continues today.

Does Hannity know, (I think McCain does, but Palin surely does
not), that we are indeed the living demonstration of extremely
liberal and radical ideas. We in the surviving modern democracies
are all the children and benefactors of radically liberal thought.
What would Hannity say to this? If he'd been alive during the
revolution he'd have surely been a loyalist or a Torre. The whole
of the 18'th century, as far as the political structures it
produced, is all about overturning conservative thinking as in
monarchical rule, and risking the enfranchisement and power
granting to the "mob", to the masses, and finally framed so
beautifully, so simply, so enduringly, in the first lines of the
Constitution "WE THE PEOPLE" Up until then, all " parliamentary
constitutions" would have started thus: THE KING DECREES BY DIVINE
RIGHT THAT........ blah, blah, blah

Hannity would have likely branded Jefferson, Adams, and Paine all
dangerous liberal insurrectionists and demanded their heads on a
plate delivered up to the king.

What's so dangerous today is this idea that liberalism
conjugates out to "anti patriotism. Go back to school Sean!!!!!
It was liberalism and the guts to risk all its diverse promise that
gave us what we have today and why liberalism excercising it's measures of conservative reinstatemnet of the amendments to the constitution and the constitution itself which has been under serious assault these last 8 years
thatwill save us from this drift toward what Hobbes and Berkley, with
all their noble thinking, championed in their thoughts granting
absolute rule in the hands of a single sovereign. This drift is
happening right now with more and more power granted to the executive branch of government long before Bush.

Give me Hobbes any day over Hannity, for given the context of his birth, (he was born 3 mos. premature on the evening of the destruction of the Spanish Armada
in 1588). He was born literally in a womb of fear as his mother looked out to sea from the English coastline at the specter of the looming Armada. So, how and when he came into the world directly effected the way he thought for the rest of his life. He thought a single empowered sovereign was the only way to ensure the safest and most stable form of government. He may have been right for his context but clearly wrong in terms of the eventual best of all possible worlds ensuring security.But he would not have had the prescience then to see what has happened in the new world 300 years hence after that fateful night when tumultuous seas and wind made
quick and easy dispatch of the formidable Armada in 1588.

But Sean, Hobbes went to school in a way that we have
forgotten to go to school even if we get ourselves into the Ivy Leagues. He did his homework with thousands of hours of study and
analysis producing his brilliant work in The Leviathan, not
instant stardom and a buly pulpitauction block to hock your books and
T-shirts!!!! Because you're on fucking TV!!!! .
Poor Sean though, he is but an emblematic talking head of these sorely dumb
downed times in that he is a very narrowly educated ideologue who
is granted license to spread propaganda and calling it fair and
balanced news. It's as bad as trying to put Intelligent Design scientifically
into a biology text. Eric Severied and my Dad would puke all over H Hannity's notes each night he gets going, but each would feel so much more loss for what
has happened to the electorate and the American Mind.

2007-09-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

Open Letter To The Prince Of Denmark

note:Italics are my open letter to Hamlet...
interspersed is a form of inter locution

Dear Hamlet,

Saw you recently at the Shakespeare Theatre's newest version of your 400 year old saga. And being in the spit zone in the wash of the foot lights, stage right, found myself in a good joust with my own ghosts about your story. Ghosts that have been haunting for some time in ways that I hardly could fathom. So, proceeding with outlandish presumption,and cathartic release, I take on not only you, but your illustrious creator as well as the 400 year literary establishment hailing you as the quintessential "modern", with particular emphasis here on your most recent apostle, Harold Bloom. And I really don’t know just why the play has troubled me so. Maybe this writing is an attempt, I guess, at gestalting some unrest in me.

The resulting essay begins my own ridiculously audacious task of unfolding a counter factual story that borrows from the original quasi historical "Amleth" of 12'th century Denmark which likely draws on the Ur-Hamlet myths as far back as Roman times. My revision attempts to save you from the bloodbath of your final scene and touches, in a distant remove, on this current Muslim/Christian predicament we find ourselves in. My allegory merges these 2 traditions by bringing the Muslim Philosopher Averroes and your namesake, "Amleth",a Dane, together when he is very young. Very tall order indeed. But, interestingly, from an historical standpoint, both Averroes of Andalucia, Spain, and Amleth of Denmark were relative contemporaries.

So, your tale has been laced into the canonic memes-the remebering DNA of our Western ethos for some time now, and my issues with it are fundamental ones taking opposition at the content as much as the plot of the play at some primal level. It is not lost on me that this is a grossly presumptuous assault.But if my gall provokes you along to see just how preposterous my insult is to so illustrious a figure as "The Bard" representative of the species, then so be it. I am mad at Shakespeare and madder at Homer, but we won't get into that now! This is my blog and so far it has essentially served as an echo chamber for my own plaintive cries under a taciturn moon and have largely gone comment less save some sweet cousins, a few friends and myself. Satisfying the mean sensibilities of some broad audience of readers is obviously not my intent.

....Ah well, perhaps posterity awaits some response after this author is housed in some other realm. Anyway, I thank the reader in advance if you have the pluck to make it to the end of my rant. The writing gets much stronger as it advances.This is a drama and serves as a play within a play within my internal drama.Please have at my hubris here and see if any of my "on guards" to Shakespeare, or to Bloom, or to the literary establishment excites some turbulence unrustled in you that I have brought some flux to. If nothing else at all, if I have done this in some way than I consider my efforts successful...

.........So, there we were in the spit zone at the Shakespeare theatre in DC, recently, w/ your juices flying out at us through the beams of the foot lights like some rite where holy water is flung out into the congregation to anoint the faithful… Well Hamlet, not so much you, but more your creator, and what we have done with your story since causes this unrest… I think my anger comes at your exalted stature in the west more than your personal undoing in the tale of which you were the key architect by the way, so don’t spit on me and just get a hold of yourself now,and it is your ghost and not your father's that I invite to haunt some frightful muse out of me is what I found myself thinking that night...

It seems too long that the lessons of your story have been dictated as classic dogmas w/out reproach at some fundamental level. Well, just what the hell am I trying to say here? Stay with it and I hope it will begin to make some sense.
That your character is centered as the seminal personality in the western canon,embodying the core essences, the Freudian conflicts, the Christian archetypes, and all that stuff …… Is this how you see yourself by the way? Are your soliloquies the first whispers from the interior recesses of an aware subconscious come to light, creating the first solitary thinker of the renaissance????…… Well, and this goes to you, Mr. Bloom, have we forgotten Cicero, Christ, Socrates, Augustine and so many others? Here we have Hamlet creating a western prototype against the backdrops of country, family, father/ mother, and all the mix that puts together and unravels personality.

Mr.Bloom’s wildly amplified contention that Shakespeare’s genius found some essential grail in you Hamlet, his character that went further than anything before or since, and that we need go no further than you Hamlet to understand the core elements of modern human nature- of not only western nature but some universal constant as well….. Looking for a fire break here Harold !!!!
Here is an outlandish quote from Bloom:, "at least to me anyway, I cannot think of another literary dramatic character who has anything like Hamlet's sheer intelligence, who is so original a mind, and who is actually endowed by Shakespeare with a kind of authorial consciousness ... so that you can start quoting Hamlet the way you quote Nietzsche, or Emerson, or Freud, or Montaigne on almost any subject," he said.
"So he really has a kind of cognitive music that he hears all the time, and he is in a perpetual state of change because of it, because he is, as Dr. Samuel Johnson first said, the most serious and volatile of Shakespearean protagonists." .
……So, following my own muse, and “cognitive music“- which is a sublime term Mr. Bloom- I feel I must chase something down here or it will always remain fugitive and troubling to me as so much is in this western Pelagia in which we find ourselves does. hey hamlet, Pelagia is not a word… don’t think so anyway…. but comes from the word pelagic which encompasses the billions of planktonic tons suspended in the oceans and all the ocean water that this stuff is suspended in) - I like it anyway, how about you?

Maybe you can enlighten from your 400 yearstill blood stained slumber here, but I do feel that there is some unified cohesion, we are still distant from capturing intelligibly, that ties in much of our iconic identification with classic model parables such as your tale Mr. Hamlet, that weave themselves somehow into the collective morality fields we all are affected by, if not justifying then illuminating the things we do as a nation or as individuals or political entities; perhaps this is an element of what troubles me about how you decide to deal with all those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that are your undoing- and drawn out broader, perhaps there is some connection to the way this nation, this “Elsinore” wields itself now as a colossus of an empire losing all its sensitivity, and in some way this story, or how it is interpreted anyway… how Henry IV and others, most notably the Homeric Myths,play some baseline part in this watered down kinder/ gentler form of hegemonic conquest that America finds itself in...
... yes, remotely distant associations perhaps to tie to you Hamlet, or maybe no connection at all but for what my synapses conjure…. Who knows?…. It would take 2 lifetimes of work to flesh out , and for a trucker who finds his therapy in the movement of “landscape parallax”, I just don’t have the time but for these brief touches…..

So,allow me my own undoing of you and a retelling that has the likes of the great Muslim philosopher Averoes who saves you by his early training from the grave slings and arrows of fate you must endure in adulthood. Averroes, a real historic figure who actually lived in 13’th century cosmopolitan Andalucía, Spain. Your father, the king, sees a precocious and head strong son in development, and knows the heir apparent needs some wise guidance, some teacher who can bring out the best in you. b He feels he himself has failed the kingdom in some way because he lacks the deep wisdom and keen intelligence required to be a good philosopher/ king sovereign. He sees great potential in you though, a potential far greater than his own, and, for the sake of Elsinore, he wants to bring you up in the most liberal and open way he can.

He hears of this great philosopher teacher Averroes who is an advisor to the Muslim caliphate in far off Cordova , Spain, among other things , and whose knowledge and passions are more ecumenical and scholarly, as in Aristotelian scholarly, than religious. Though he is Muslim, he spends much of his time and scholarship translating the newly rediscovered in the west original works of Aristotle, into the common tongue. So, here he is in the middle of the 12’th century in the Muslim and Jewish capitol of Andalucía Spain, rediscovering the Greek legacy during the golden era lost to the west during the dark ages when the Roman church decided that all knowledge but what god left us in the bible was heretical. The king wants to expose you to the broadest spectrum of learning available in Europe and thinks Averroes is among the most liberally educated and broadminded man in all the land. So, off you go to Andalucía for a 3 yr sabbatical. And it is from this exposure in early life that a very different story unfolds in how you deal with all these fateful slings and arrows in later life. Needless to say , you are not riven w/ the impulse to revenge though these things form an acute torpor in you...

And so it goes in my version where this Muslim saves Amleth from Shakespeare’s final bloodied scene where he asks just to be remembered as we have all these yrs. later baptized in his own blood and the blood of his foes.By the way, this Muslim, Averroes, was perhaps the central figure in reintroducing the western mind to its cultural artistic, and historic roots, thus seeding the renaissance… (one wonders if Bush is aware of this)… one also wonders how Bush might respond to the question of who Aristotle was and how he,(Bush), can be compared to his pupil Alexander in some way and when did he live?? Thus at the seedling stage we find Averroes before the classical rendition or flowering that takes place in Florence that gets all the historical notice --- especially w/ the translation and interpretation on Aristotle that Averoes did. This Averoes is a much underrated link in world history I am thinking and that is why I have Amleth under his intellectual and more important , his ethical guidance. When I visited Cordova recently, I went to see his statue which does not command much focus , but for the pigeons lighting upon the noble head and arms,on the outside of the old mosque walls. Interestingly, even Christian Spain today hardly notes this guy who essentially brought back Aristotle from the shadows of the dark ages. If meetings w/ remarkable men in time travel could happen he’d be near the top of my list!!!!

To me, in today’s world, Hamlet, this touting of your character is a specie of danger if you are accepted as a parity, as an accurate composite of the deepest elements of human nature; of all our natures. Hamlet,you blindly stab through the curtains to kill an innocent man, and a good one , and then hardly stops to ponder this grossly rash act you have just committed…. only commenting that Polonius was a windbag … not seeing how great the impact would be on the love of your life by blindly killing the father of Ophelia even… where were the noble lines forthcoming from Shakespeare that sees the real tragedy of this behind the curtain killing ? Incredulous and incredible missed opportunity here for your creator, if you ask me to accept that this is a seminal figure in our common emotional makeup, and at the deepest levels we are all in some way implicated because you personify our true nature. And yet this seems to be the accepted dogma because it has come down from on high from Shakespeare initially???, I’m not so sure of this …… then Harold Bloom and all this literary legacy from which he borrows…… This could be compared to a president who blindly acts out of solipsists self absorbed terms and invades countries willy nilly to avenge the father‘s unrealized threats from the tyrant Moor….. Or you could also be drawn up as the quintessential tragic case history of the totally self absorbed sociopath if transposed into another setting another time…. If you are so aware of this inner nature, as Bloom describes in you, of your preternatural hold of your own native soul and the core soul of human behavior, then how might this keen sense awareness combined w/ supreme intelligence have delivered you from this blood bath?…. You reek of the extreme elements of tragic murdering illness at the runaway periphery, and not the core elements of common nature or behavior in humans seems me … at least as I feel my own humanity and observe day to day in others….

END OF LETTER TO HAMLET

Though, no doubt, granting Shakespeare’s genius, the fates in his tragic drama did deliver up to Hamlet the gravest of chanced slings and arrows, what w/ an uncle who kills his father with his mother’s complicity… it does not get much more deprave than this. His reactions though, precisely because he is presumably preternaturally aware of their deepest motives, suggest the highest degree of premeditated murder with exquisite forethought and malice. The play within a play only further dramatizes this acute awareness. The foreshadowing of this keen foresight in Hamlet’s device within a play is devious enough, but to recklessly, and with fatal abandon, stab through the curtain blindly at Polonius is beyond redemption of any kind seems me, unless one forgives temporary insanity, as Shakespeare may be trying to evoke here, and hopes that the audience may sympathize. Bloom maintains that Hamlet’s is the keenest of intelligence ever conceived in the mind of man. Preposterous Impostor I say! And if this is the case, I tremble for our species fate.

Intelligence though, if it is to be a global measure of character, moving from the rhythms of some sublime “cognitive music” as Bloom states, must include a connection with and a sense of control over those deep impulses that have removed us in fits and starts from our ancient stone hearths spattered with the "other's" blood and into some semblance of ascending decency. Hamlet, rather than the “proto modern,” harkens back precipitously with sword and dagger, and any other tool of aggression, including emotional and physical abuse to his mother and to Ophelia his supposed true love by the way….. harkens back to these blood drenched hearth stones of our common antiquity. So, if anything, through this breakdown, Hamlet shows us how far we have come from the maw and shadows of the cave, and perhaps how far we can fall if we abandon what millennia of trial and error has taught us at the species level. Perhaps this can be posited as a definition of madness though, and why this diametric opposite in his character is so extremely conflicted between presence of mind and execution of action and at the same time so supremely aware. Yes, perhaps Shakespeare, and not his character coming alive on the parchment at the playwright’s desk, is keenly aware of this and it is Bloom who has created so much intellectual din to obscure this nut.

On the contrary, what makes his character so compelling is how much he abandons the joys and lessons of his youth- after being born on Yorick’s back so lovingly, finding a morbid fascination from the pits with his beloved jester’s skull as a foreshadowing of his own impending skulduggery. He seems far more akin to Cro Magnon than the first proto human renaissance man, as Bloom exalts. Hamlet’s mind may indeed be transcendent, but his actions are case exposes in retrocede dislocation. And so, ultimately, how is the ultimate fidelity of mind to be measured or valued as it relates to the actions sprung of its thoughts? And perhaps this is the root object of Shakespeare’s tragedy by the way- and what I have missed in this critique . Though his pitiable tale endears us to him, and his suffering charm, it is through the thinnest veneer of Shakespeare’s sublime language through his character that we are seduced …. If all the elements of the plot in the tale are the same, yet mediocre language reported the story to us, how would it play or would it play at all at the Folger theater 500 yrs. later? So, I guess I’m saying that we should be more wary of sublime language in its ability to seduce as an art than we are, for example, of music to do the same. One hopes that each might come to his or her own reckoning that would involve far less blood should such terrible fates chance fall our lives.

I do not feel , as the cliché directs us, that there is a seething madness or anger just under the surface in all of us that civilization with its attendant laws and customs keep a thin veil over … and that Hamlet personifies, through his actions, our deepest impulses of aggression, despite how Freud might applaud the loudest here; but that there is a preponderance of evidence more telling and proven if one just observes in their daily lives that admits the silent record of untold trillions of benign deeds committed daily worldwide through millennia defining our deepest natures of cooperation with far more open to light observation than these deep theories of aggression suggest of our common human nature , that there is an essence of daily verified goodness and willing cooperation which plays more of a constant rhythm in our everyday behavior -that perhaps tunes into some ethical harmonic strumming some chord in the double helix that tunes into some perhaps profundo continuo scale pervasive in the cosmos….

…….Well that does not say much really beyond the poetry of this wild notion that intuit’s the ethical base to our nature and how it might follow the laws of nature and evolution just as the law of gravity keeps the moon and earth in exquisite equipoise….. no I guess not, but especially in the west w/ all our recent revival of manifest destiny in the world under Bush, we need some new projected models of morality that needs to slip the surly bonds of the Hebrew Bible, or the Homeric Myths, of which Hamlet may be seen as a latter day descendant, though brilliantly depicted by Shakespeare; yes , some umbilical severing is needed here that offers some promise of becoming, some intuitive jumping of the gap….. Perhaps this sources my plaintive cry that assails this character of Shakespeare’s and now, Bloom’s recreation and wildly overblown enhancement of…. this Hamlet ….… assails this “Hamlet” as not the “proto modern” at all, but, rather, the quintessential opposite -as compared to beings from other worlds for example- as there is no “control” group to compare our own nature really, despite how close our DNA matches chimps- these beings, who warp through galactic worm holes peering in on our experiment from their cosmic light born ships , who have millions of years of civilization might be “moderns” - but rather this character of Hamlet, enlivened brilliantly on Shakespeare’s mother tongue, shows us just how ancient he is still, and, ultimately, and more importantly, by our identification and fascination w/ him still on his 400‘th birthday, just how ancient we still are.

We have so far to go in departure from his last blood stained and poisoned scene where, essentially we still find ourselves if you ponder on what entertains us on all these screens , and what about these atomic swords and daggers of starburst death we still have hidden in the earth to protect us from the many “others” found outside “Elsinore’s” walls. In what way dear Hamlet have we remembered you?…….not until now, this moment, through the process of this writing am I beginning to source out the origins of this unrest I’ve felt about this Hamlet and how we supposed “moderns “ can be reflected in his image and likeness. Only at the distant edges , in the extreme situation ethics, at the periphery can I see any kinship whatsoever despite your central fixing Mr. Bloom or even you Mr. Shakespeare. So, on guard, and touche!!..... softly though

Epilog

I maintain that Hamlet represents more the periphery, the anomalies run amok of some of our volatile extreme natures unharnessed and, though brilliant in its capacity at self seeing, still loses to his baser impulses and goes out of control into pathologia or some such experiential trauma that dislocates the cerebrum and lets the bull of the limbic out to full run in the insensitive dark, and not just the parts that civilized order has suppressed in the character or is reflected in us for that matter as Bloom wants to build.

Yes, no doubt, of course, it is a wonderful play, all this is a given premise and the reason I feel so provoked to answer in some way according to my own muse of which I value highly. But is it the tectonic starting point where metamorphic slurry, still soft , becomes the granitic character of western man post renaissance and his public and private conscious, as Bloom maintains,? Well I don’t know at all but frankly, I think its much ado bout nothing and that sometimes titanic intellectual eccentrism combined with a force of charismatic will, which Bloom’s rotundity surely encompasses, combine to create a Falstaffian sense of dogma around a subject, as I think Bloom has created around this character Hamlet.

In defense and in deference to Bloom here, though, my theories and their fleshed out expressions in my takeoff here, are based largely on intuitive leaps, shallow and superficial as they might be , skimming at best with perhaps some delving into other related “fields,” and not serious classical scholarship as Bloom has done throughout his career. So, my hat is off to him for he has done far more work into this study, as prosaic and classical as it may be, than I will ever do, and this is a reaction to his prodigious work, so, it all starts w/ Shakespeare, of course, but it Bloom to which the greater part of this reactionary inspiration I am indebted to for his florid covering of this supposed seminal character.

2007-03-27T21:43:00.000-07:00

“The Wal-Martization of the Public Mind and the passing of the "Red Barn in the Field"

Thoreau, quoting Emerson, said that all men lead lives of quiet,
[solitary] desperation. Most likely he was speaking to those most kindred to his philosophical ilk,those who believed the examined life, though perhaps more lonely, was still more worthy of pursuit than one of convention. But precisely what he meant by the "examined" life, and just what "pursuits" distinguish this life from an unexamined one of perpetual sleep, rests w/ his perpetual slumber on some hillside green in Concord, MA.

But Thoreau, in his Walden solitude, on his solo walks, was not left wanting for companions during his sojourn in the Walden woods. He conceded as much in the many jaunty passages of his literary classic. And one sometimes wonders how the company of such taciturn companions inspired such a clear and cogent view of the rapidly developing market imperatives and the knawing sense of disconnection with nature he felt went w/ the modernity of his times.

The sentiment of this essay borrows from some of his somber prognostications regarding the seemingly insensate march of market imperatives that, as in his day, seem to justify a singular ethic by subjugating all other considerations save the bottom line. In his day he chose the railroad- the "Iron Horse" as the looming specter- the imposing symbol of these inexorable market forces. By comparative analogy, this essay chooses the preeminent presence of Wal-Mart as its whipping boy.

Seems not such a great stretch, projecting forward, based on the gaining momentum of its exponential growth , that Wal*Mart is destined for increasing magnitude in its formative force exerted not only on the American landscape, but the greater world as well.. There is a much greater transcendent possibility unfolding about Wal-Mart, the world we find ourselves in, our current so called leader, his electorate, (to which he is but a composite emblem), and the eventual para mutual conjunction between “Sam’s Club,”the US government, and the rest of the world to which this conjunction considers not only its labor force but its client base buying fodder as well.

Sadly, we are in the final stages of the of the 2’nd “Modern
World,( at least the second modern movement of the western world that is). We are in a transitional gap of sorts, a gloaming maybe. The 1’st modern world being Greece and Rome. This 2’nd, starting w/ the renaissance through the 16’th century w/ the likes of such thought germinals as Francis Bacon, Martin Luther, Isaac Newton and, as just a few examples Kant, Locke, Hegel, Marx. These epochs seem to be curving downward toward a slow extinguishmen now; and as the receding lights of the scientific and philosophical Enlightenment flicker out, a new ordering principle supplants the quintessential distillates of this Enlightenment and all its diverse champions. Sounds pretty dire but look around and you'll see much evidence of this downspiral.

We currently find ourselves suspended in the gloaming, caught in the gap at the interface between the 2’nd and 3’rd historical epochs, (well, human epochs anyway).
New forms arise that fill out the structure of this new epoch. New
Shivas destroying the old, heralding in the New “kinder and gentler
world order.” An early commercial prototype of these usurping forms would be
Ford’s assembly line concept - but the extrapolated full bore blowout of
this concept is: ta daaa… Wal*Mart. Wal*Mart is mass assembly line production, distribution and sales writ on the universal scale. Ford’s concept had a single product line: cars. The Wal*Mart Conglomerate, (a new word needs to be
found here), will soon market everything from toothpaste and
produce, to educational concepts, and modes of thought to boot.

Just beyond the discernable horizon, Wal-Mart Pavilions, (under a franchised
out sourced pseudonym of course), might encompass huge tracts of space in a
Blade Runner style cement, glass and plastic dioramas.
Sadly, the “Red Barn in the Field,” the Greek Revival mansion in the hill and
dale green.. all have to go to make way for these "Global
Pavilions". And sadly, the independent minded thinker must also be
wary of the back hoe and macadam.

Dwight D Eisenhower’s forewarned portents on the Military/ Industrial
complex showed a seer’s prescience. The industrial era has
essentially merged with the Information/Commercial epoch. The
Military/ Industrial and the Information /Commercial are, in kind,
monolithic relatives. The prima facie mien, as yet not fully
developed, is recognized early on in the countenance of the budding
colossus Wal_Mart. Not so much this particular retail Wal- Mart,
but the concept “Wal-Mart” as a means of product and service purveying. Sam
himself had no vision of the hegemonic promised land on this scale,
but there is no stopping it now... Frankenstein is at large in a
frozen wasteland.

These Pavilions will be total immersion experiences. Every nuanced
subtlety of the buyer’s limbic system will be accounted for and
catered to. For example, there will be schools w/in the Pavilion
Compound that invite children and their parents to “choose” the
brand of “Evolutionary Theory” they wish to learn. Over here the
10,000 year old Earth created in six days by the divine Patriarch
w/ the arcade game that has you shuttling all the paired animals
into Noah‘s.. or maybe it will be Sam’s or George’s Arc. Over
there, the Godless model called Darwinism, that suggests chance and
random occurrence.. These out moded forms of the "old science" will
amount to a form of market heresy. So this particular school of
thought, ( Darwinian Evolution) will likely reach extinction in a
few generations…of its own accord, by its own lack of scientific
merit of course.. (planned obsolescence)
( strange irony here as that it was social Darwinism and laizzes faire economics-that formed the first arguments underpinning capitalism raison d'etre in the late 19'th century). There is a malignant Gulliver that blindly roams the land looking
for labensraum- for space to expand. This Gulliver is us, this
clamoring culture in mass consumption….

This is one reason I do what I do… The Red Barn in the Field is a
beautiful and dying thing. All who sense the early portents, whose
minds are not yet “Martinized” should be reading Gibbon’s “Decline
And Fall Of The Roman Empire” and Thoreau’s Walden … End of rant. Care to join me on a run while a few Red Barns are left?

2007-03-24T23:08:00.000-07:00

J.S. MILL, WAR AND PEACE, AND THE IMMATERIAL SOLUTION.

John Stuart Mill said , paraphrasing: "A far worse state than war would be a world where there was nothing worth fighting for"... Well, for a philosopher whose primary utilitarian themes insist on the greatest good served for the greatest number of people, I'm not so sure his apathetic aphorism would hold water today. In fact, just a minor change in syntax, and shifting the intellectual perspective just slightly, produces a neutralizing twist on this rationalized ethos for war. Mill, living today, might even see this statement for the historical anachronism it has become -at least when applied to this particular element of his "greatest good served" philosophy.

Considering rational futures based on how profoundly different, and "trigger hair sensitive" our world has become since his time -especially post Hiroshima- then his philosophical water falls through like a sieve. When the overall consequences are multi magnitudes greater on the world scale, wars today become sheer illogical mass madness.

Yet,why do political leadership structures still have tens of thousands of nuclear warheads entrenched all over the world? And why, when all coherent systems of logic are applied to the question-why does this illogic fleet away to infinitely regressive paradox/absurdum? The rhetorical question begs: why does such an absurd state still remain the status quo? What might Mill put in place when his greatest good served axiom is applied to the question of war's implications today.

It's at this point-a point where a seemingly paradoxical impasse has been reached- that collective solutions might be sought at the "immaterial" level-figuratively immaterial anyway. Going inward as a world community to search for clues to the myriad configuration of neurons in the human mind for example is one way, perhaps the only way to salvation- a journey deep into the neuronal tissues of human behaviors collectively as well as individually to study this "mind attachment" as it relates to country/nation/ religion and search for how these concepts are biologically and somatically interwoven into notions of freedom/rights/liberty/and moral alignment w/ god in the "minds" of human beings. This is what "going inward" means. Can we truly call ourselves the paragon of thinking animals, Mr Mill, if we don't at least try for this immaterial "non war" imperative as a sheer survival strategy when making crucial decisions?

Power brokers on the world scale ie., politicians, political theorists, industrial hegemons, those who are empowered to make such crucial decisions in the future must realize that a fundamental sea change occurred at Hiroshima. The splitting of the atom should have come w/some cosmic "how to survive" rules of responsibility. Sadly we are left on our own here.

A certain historical depth perception is required here; an understanding that comprehends that the harnessing of the force holding stars together changed everything all in that instant at the Trinity sight in New Mexico, when Robert Oppenheimer whispered his famous/infamous quote from Dante, "I am death become, destroyer of worlds". Technologically, Hiroshima was further from Dresden, Tokyo, Normandy or the London Raids than were all of these from Homer's Trojan wars.

This depth perception becomes self evident when past wars are understood in their historical contexts before the invention of the atom bomb. There reconstructions and Marshall plans and the like. On a global scale of warfare today, where Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), are the stakes, aftermath means essentially mass destruction,cultural deconstruction, and starting all over again. What once might have substantiated utilitarian argument for world wars before Hiroshima, become no longer tenable as "diplomatic tool solutions". No longer tenable in the modern world w/ a hair trigger's capacity to release unimaginable megaton forces that perhaps a single individual in a public place can unleash.

Historically, the "Hiroshima Moment" is where the critical juncture must be sensed. Based on the intuitive understanding of the profundity of what Hiroshima represented, world leadership must correspondingly break from aggressive default positions inherited from the past. It is from this intellectual beholding - one that understands and utilizes how fissionable "material" is held together that the counter intuitive "immaterial" solution begins to be vitalized.Going inward may be the only way to emerge from the labyrinth so to speak.

With all its attendant high tech efficiencies, the advent of nuclear bombs has drastically altered the traditional theatres of war. In reality, there are no "fronts" today. There may be hostile borders such as N Korea and antagonists nations sharing borders, but there are no tactical arrangements of battalions, or massive armies amassing at various locations-none of these old strategies apply when megaton devices can be hurled over the poles at supersonic speeds, or concealed in the backpacks of "tourists". We need new modes of thought that break radically w/ the past as the atom bomb radically and totally changes the means and more importantly, the consequences of all out war.

We need pragmatists like Thomas Hobbes and Mill, and others of like mind to draw upon in these discussions trying to figure out where we are headed as a "thinking race".The arguments must be rigorous, and founded in pragmatism, not sentiment, if it will have the power of logic to captivate those who will assume positions to affect a change.

Past peace movements,essentially reactive movements against aggressive moves, have been primarily idealistic or altruistic/ moral/religious by nature. These plaintive arguments- ones that came out of "Frankfurt School" , or utopian aspirations on "Man Becoming" ideals,for example, must find proactive, non reactive based philosophical structure.

Leadership structures, entrusted with nation state security, with its seeming cultural inherencies, must be radically reevaluated from the standpoint of what constitutes national interest "protective measures" today. In the past, more was always better. More was always safer . More guns, more bombs,cannons, men to fight etc. The inward, non material solution seeks more as well; more inward enlightenment.. more illumination on what the mushroom cloud portends if it remains an "icon tool" in our mental arsenals. ----

The weak and short sighted resignation that wars have always existed therefore must be intrinsic to human nature and thus will always exist is no longer just an idle position to hold, but, if held universally, has only a catastrophic end point as its terminal expression in today's world.

More precisely put as a question: what goes down in the myriad connections of the brain of a terrorist that compels an override of the most basic of all instincts, that to survive, and what causes - by acts of asserted will- what causes him/her to kill themselves and thousands of others in the process by flying airplanes into buildings? These 19 individuals were compelled by "jihad", compelled to "war"- even if symbolic in nature- killing thousands of innocents, (if "infidels"can be considered innocents in the minds of the jihadists), including themselves in the process. What kind of "scorched earth" religious zealotry has taken in the minds of such individuals? What remarkable constellation of organic molecules in the folded labyrinths of the "terrorist's" minds could propel such action? If barely affecting the colossus of the American superstructure, they surely succeeded in getting the world's attention from what these aural structures of mind compelled.

Think of it, what were the main issues in the tissues of the minds of those who flew those planes into the twin towers? If just one reason can be cited, maybe going to heaven by killing thousands of innocent infidels seems close to the heart of it. The question is, just what essentials from the environment and what from the uniqueness of each man's gray matter might have compelled them to commit such horrendous acts?
And, when in the past could a band of only 19 individuals unleash such a magnitude of powerful destruction.?
9/11 was just a relatively small but ghastly prelude to what is theoretically and practically possible and probable in the future if some form of "inward solution" is not sought now. Aside from the peopled conspiracy leading up to the final act, could 19 individuals alone have caused anywhere near this magnitude of destruction in any time in history?. Impossible. Theoretically and practically impossible, as far as the history we are presently aware of. Not so today. This meager number of persons with great capacity for incredible destruction is the world we inhabit today. It is for this practical reason that another inward, and immaterial approach must be sought and fast.
And this crucial power released to manpower required ratio must be understood by policymakers today. More and more destructive power can now be released by fewer and fewer individuals in smaller and smaller packages. The curve indicates this downsizing trend just as the first computers and their power capacities have gone from devices that required 2 large rooms to what today are essentially hand held palm devices .
Think of how many individuals and volumes of material and how much power released over a period of time was required for the Dresden raids during WW2 for example. Magnitudes of power, coordination, and effort in for a corresponding yield of power out over an extended period of time. Now imagine 1 person w/ one easily concealed tactical nuclear warhead who detonates on the steps of the U. S. capitol and instantly obliterates hundreds of thousands of lives.
How much power, effort, coordination in to power yield out was required for this single individual ? How has the ratio radically changed since Dresden? But from Dresden to Hiroshima the world changed radically and irrevocably. And from Hiroshima to now it is only an efficiency, concealability, and power increase factor that creates the Armageddon scenarios we are talking about.

What might Mill conclude today when applying his greatest good served for the greatest number when arguing for just war rationales? Nothing holds up to the old arguments for just war on the world scale, or any scale at all for that matter. Nothing holds up anymore and everything changed when we discovered how to harness the power that holds stars together.
After the force holding stars together-what is essentially a material force- was finally understood and harnessed as weapons of mass destruction, then the only solution preventing self immolation eventually by the "discoverers" of this force seem to tend toward inward "immaterial" solutions.

To the extent that Mill's statement seems more a national psychological assessment describing accumulated ennui such that might describe Rome in decline for example , then it becomes apparent that an earned decadence cultured from within over time would create such apathy that nothing would be worth defending from this malaise- this stupor of decadence- a place and mind set that America seems arguably to be drifting towards then I'd agree, and consider his statement an applicable conundrum in that any society that had slid to this level of decadence, where the premise maintains that nothing is conceived as dear enough in the "nation collective" to be worthy of armed defense. That this society has likely, in descent, done moral violence unto itself in some manner-- and suggest that historically, cultures that imprint into the social code, the valor and romance of war, especially those of conquest, commit this moral violence, and have already begun the deconstruction process from within anyway. So Mr. Mill, as you roll over in your grave, let's put a positive twist with a small subtraction and addition on your aphorism…..

War is ugly, [so] a far [better] state would be a World where all nations held in unison that no conflict was worth warring for. This state would be called Peace........ Yes, Mr. Mill……… this would be called Peace .

2006-09-03T00:43:00.000-07:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Freedom from Hate Ideologies,The Straining of the Melting Pots- a trucker's parallax view

We pick up the action here w/ edited excerpts from a well circulated e-mail concerning a particular Muslim proclamation of faith under what is known as "Sharia Law", and what the Australian government has done to address concerns over this professed Muslim dogma. This e-mail has circulated around the internet and found its way to me. Long harboured views on this topic-not necessarily Sharia Law- but the Muslim faith in America, found some release in answering this e-mail...
All excerpts from the e-mail are in italics. The answer below the italics are my words...

"I wish that the U.S.would get it's act together and make a stand like
Australia apparently has done about the problem of radical Muslims"...

...Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to
get out of Australia, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head
off potential terror attacks. A day after a group of mainstream Muslim
leaders pledged loyalty to Australia and her Queen at a special meeting with
Prime Minister John Howard, he and his Ministers made it clear that
extremists would face a crackdown..

Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some
radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept
that Australia was a secular state, and its laws were made by parliament.
"If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or
a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you"!

...Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not
want to accept local values should "clear off. Basically people who don't
want to be Australians,and who don't want to live by Australian values and
understand them, well then, they can basically clear off,he said.

..."This idea of Australia being a multicultural community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Australians, we have our own
culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle." "This
culture has been developed over two centuries of struggles, trials and
victories by millions of men and women who have
sought freedom".......
"We speak mainly ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic,
Chinese, Japanese, Russian,
or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to
become part of our society,
Learn the language!"

"Most Australians believe in God. This is not some
Christian, right wing, political push, but a fact, because Christian men
and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly
documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of
our schools.....
...because God is part of our culture."
"We will accept your beliefs, and will not question
why. All we ask is that
you accept ours, and live in harmony and peaceful enjoyment with us." "If
the Southern Cross offends you, or you don't like "A
Fair Go", then you should seriously consider a move to another part of
this planet. >> > culture, but do not force it on others.....

"This is OUR COUNTRY, OUR LAND, and OUR LIFESTYLE, and we will allow you
every opportunity to enjoy all this. But once you
are done complaining, whining, and griping about Our Flag, Our Pledge, Our
Christian beliefs, or our Way of Life, I highly encourage you take
advantage of one other great
Australian freedom, 'THE RIGHT TO LEAVE'....

....Maybe if we circulate this amongst ourselves, American citizens will find
the backbone to start speaking and voting the same truths!!

Interesting points here all

Should any one group, religious, ethnic, racial, whatever- living in one of these open democracies be asked to renounce any particular set of codes or beliefs newly introduced - like Sharia law for example- brought from their respective countries or religions of origin, and pledge allegiance to these new values? A difficult ethical and practical question for a country that espouses and was founded upon the principle of religious toleration and pluralism; but one that gets to the crux of the matter of why essential religious divisions are so much more dangerous to all humanity today than at any time in human history.

Yet, perhaps not ironically, the formative elements that establish these national values @ inception,over time might become the roots of rabid xenophobic exclusion w/ all its narrow biases determining which group values should be subscribed to as the seminal ones required to pledge allegiance in order to be counted among the "belongers.
Just who are the true indigenous peoples of America- and of Australia for that matter-if they were not the original Amer-Indians or the Aborigine peoples- and why is it that their ancient hunting/gathering values have been subsumed and not included in this current collection of so called American or Australian values? This is an opening aside to the issues addressed here, but it ties in an historic way.

All the established democracies, the U.S. and Australia in particular in this case, have gone through their historical earning and learning curves where the disenfranchised, persecuted and economically isolated peoples all over Europe came together under a new banner of a more open society of laws established by either parliaments or congress... but when these peoples first arrived after the original founding stock of Scotch/English/German, they were considered “the other”- a new breed of European, Irish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese- arriving later than these first settlers claiming original rights to establish these a priori emblematic values. So, by turn, all these second and third wave immigrants went through rites of passage in persecution and exclusion, etc., much the same way as the Muslims endure today...

"So just what we must say and do today to be most effective in ensuring safety and civil society for all"?

The difference today is that instead of nationality or race being the base of xenophobic prejudice,(although these reasons are still very potent ), it's essentially religion... religion is even displacing race as the single most volatile divisive factor . ...... A sharp irony here in that one of the radical departures from Monarchical rule, written into the constitutions of these seminal democracies of the 18'th and 19'th centuries, in America and Australia, (have not read the Australian constitution, so this is assumed), was religious toleration; was the conceptual embracing of tolerant pluralism as a keystone to building a vibrant system of how converging peoples meet in the melting pot, and, through the intercourse of their respective diversities, how they collaboratively thrive.

My question is this : What are the true, intrinsic "American Values”; the true Australian ones? Who decides what these values should be at any given time in the fluid move of trends through history? And just who lies outside these "accepted norms"? Who gets to decide these standards? Do the descendant progeny of the first conquering settlers get to decide? Would they be the Scotch/ English settlers? The great thing about the formation of America, (and Australia too I'd assume), is the great latitude of acceptance they seemed to write into the spirit and letter of their founding charters -the championing of Pluralism and tolerance of the new group, the new language, the new concepts, the new religion.

To bring it into present day America, do the values of the current U.S. president w/ his beliefs that his interests for this nation coincide w/ a provident Christian god who intends to protect this nation, and this nation only, speak for the composite values of some absolute collection of American ideals???
Truth be told, many of the most influential founders of this country, (America), were Deists, Jefferson and Franklin come to mind as standouts. They did not believe in a provident Christian god that heard the prayers of a single nation and answered in kind preferentially toward that nation thereby disadvantaging other nation's not under this god's protective affections.
The issue of the Muslim moving into the heretofore established realms of Scotch English/ German/ French colonies is basically driven by fear and ignorance and the inborn wariness of the "other", in this case “the dark swarthy Moor“. The problem is almost insoluble in that colliding forces seem to be in late stage advance where radical religious fundamentalism, whether it's Christian or Muslim lie opposed in diametric philosophical planes and seem destined for a terrible reckoning, a clash of culture and religion that threatens the entire cohesion of modern society. (read Sam Huntington’s classic essay “The Clash of Civilizations”), of which 9/11 was just an opening salvo.

This question has no easy answer. All religions that claim a provident god w/ “his” vested set of rules speaking for their interests only, juxtaposed as they are across the globe on bloody borders, now pose the gravest threat to humanity other than do asteroids or natural disasters such as global warming . The main ones presently posing this threat are Muslim, Christian, and Hindu... probably in that order.

It seems a reasonable position to contend that any set of beliefs, whether they are religious, political, economic, philosophical... whatever, that actively pursues and encourages gross violence and terrorism as a means to gain their ends must be dealt with in accordance w/ the practical laws of civil society across the world. These laws should be universals though, writ large on the world scale..... Transcendent Kantian Imperatives that are not preferentially tainted by concepts of "National Character" or individual Nation interest.
It seems that if one set of faith based beliefs, and the violent actions these beliefs cause, appears to be the most dangerous to the civil peace of all the rest and itself presently, it is the Muslim faith as beheld by the extremist elements. But by contrasts to other faiths is it so dangerous both at its fundamental base but also by implication at its moderately practiced levels as well. But it is the tinder box now because its core code, carried in the Koran appears unambiguously as a direct antithesis to the Christian faiths, and the concept of Jihad seems to be gaining adherents at one level or another and, by contrast, it is the Christian faith across these various democracies that hold the preponderant military and economic power base in the world today The looming imminent danger is how these 2 faiths seem to be converging disastrously. In other words the danger is not in one or another alone, but how they converge relative to one another.

We might all hope that some deliverance is at hand and that that deliverance comes by some form of scientific or intellectual enlightenment where ideas and the compassionate understanding of history may help all to avoid these colliding forces, and not the hoped for intercession of some provident god choosing one set of notions or beliefs held by a particular faith or nation over another set.
All of humanity needs to stop and reflect together to examine the present values of absolute religions, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, whatever, in regards to the overall concerns for all humanity or we will all fall back together calamitously invoking both God and Allah and whatever violent Shivas in the fall...

2006-08-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

To Wish Upon a Harvest Mars

or

Alice's Late Summer Night's "Looking Glass" Dream for the Red Planet

>>>>>>Read all about it!<<<<<<<<<

>>>>>>Hot on the Internet Wires<<<<<<

>>>>>>Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter!<<<<<<

>>>>> The Red Planet is about to be spectacular<<<<< >>>> will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest75-power ….check the fine print above …..

>>>>>>>Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye<<<<<

>>>>>>NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN<<<<

>>>>nor will the people of the next 50-to-1,000 Life Times!<<<<<

>>>>>>Share this with your children and grandchildren<<<<<

~INTERMISSION ~

Hey scientists, sea captains,(retired), deckhands and star trackers of all stripe, I wanna get in on this astronomical condiment too- this sweet confection of a wonderment- as we truckers on the north/south axis of the Midwest will likely get some choice opportunities for clear Mars sightings out on the prairie somewhere along the "aorta" of Interstate ~35~ between Dallas and the Twin cities sometime this summer...
Seems, according to some reported enthusiasms, that Mars is gonna beam as broad faced as the full harvest Moon come late August. That's quite a spectacular claim. Are we talking the full or the new moon here? Well, this assertion standing alone, stated w/ sincere erudition from the mad "retired" astronomy prof now well strolled about the grounds of some state institution would be one thing, but this anticipated beholding has bounded all over the internet this summer and talk is abuzz about a harvest Mars to rival the Moon in size and intensity.

All true believers need not read the next paragraph.

Maybe egg's gonna be all over my shirt come the waning days of this late summer night’s dream of a beaming Mars, but such filamentous confection from out of the ether do these internet looms sometimes weave! I'll add this caviar though... oops, caveat: if Mars meets our eyes like a big pizza pie come the dog days, I'll eat the egg and my shirt and the caviar to boot. And gladly too, as the little boy refusing adulthood in me wants for such phantasmajoric wishlings. This bodes very well for collective imagination's power though, and, in the era of Harry Potter and Lord of the Ring, it's a lovely thing to wish upon. More likely though this tells a wonderful tale of how a simple sentence juxtaposition error in a much forwarded e-mail from an "expert" has transposed into a quasi “Looking Glass” fantasy in real time.

As for the breadbasket and the prairie though, already in late July there are square miles upon square miles of crops thriving under our day star's searing intensity. Seems our sun is now even getting more blistering as all these trapped photons are glomming on longer to the green house funk before they reflect back out into space. Spanning the broad sweep of the Mississippi/Missouri water shed thriving in "waves of amber grain" out here all this leafy biomass keeps pushing toward the arc of the earthly covenant... [ the atmosphere].... sorry, no one was gonna get that one!

Turning the glass just so one can imagine the secret life of plants talking amongst themselves;imagining and dreaming for a better way for the supposed “Paragon of Animals” to conduct themselves as the "thinking" stewards of the Green Planet. Wondering what they might gossip about should the red planet beam her full passion red through one of Alice's “looking glass” refractions.

Yeah, plenty of private "dreaming fields" with rustling plants as background murmuring in these prairie night winds to stop and ponder under a Alice’s night sky out here. Corn and other leafy verdancies... (not a word.)... at least I don't think it's a word... do you??? ... anyway, verdant roughages of all kinds. Yes, and considering the moon’s new twin blushed in red , the Jabberwock will be frumiously bandersnatched skittering twilly in the prairie hollows above 2 shadows of equal intensity.

She/ he and her/his comrades, anticipating all this illicit night light joy, now w/ a new red cast, are already building for the excitement of August’s waning days under a big red Martian face. And all these crops too- billions of biomass tonnage weighty, spread out all across the wide belt of heartland just waiting for a "Harvest Mars" before the combine's Vorpal blades begin to whirr.

Wait a minute, did you say harvest mars?....
.... “What it is mon.... dis harvest mars????
“Hey rasta carrot top mon you be shakin dem dreads clean wit de sea lettuce and look’n in de night sky come august en you be see’n what it is mon…. dis harvest mars wit de big face"

Seeking respite from the sun's searing late summer rays, surely all these plants, especially the star leaning photo-tactic ones like the sunflowers, will be sun singed to confusion as to which bright faced heavenly countenance they should turn their sunny faces to for some cool refreshing night light. Should they face the new “big red” or the old “gold standard.” Should they pine to mars, the new passion lady/ femme fatale in red, or to the old familiar standby in gold, this ageless illumined sphere upon which so much lunacy has for so long been spent on flourishes as varied as Romeo'd yearnings, minstrel's song and...poet's sonnet and soliloquy.

“Good god there both the same size”, the soy sprout says to the sorghum spray, "one in gold, one in red”! "Just imagine", the North Dakotan alfalfa sprig whispers to the safflower stalk in late august, “one of’em gold, one of’em red with the aurora borealis dancing reggae in the background. “Which one for you”? Wow, the red planet w/ all her veiled passions, full hipped in the equatorials, will seem an alluring and novel provocateur w/ole Captain Hook singing "Oh my Mysterious Lady" to her in a tremulous baritone having broken the long top billing the Moon has held these past 5,000 years or so since Mars’ last passing so close.

On considering the mixed wisdoms of the thinking species,the wise old cabbage and the fluttering lettuce ruminate: “this 5,000 yrs just about spans 1/2 the time since the "thinking” species decided to come out of the foraging steppes and forests and start building fences and grand monuments like the pyramids and world trade towers’ n such, and started squatting as agriculturalists and started planting us leafy ones en-masse.. And soon thereafter began naming, mapping and numbering in brightness hierarchies these stars and other heavenly bodies and planets and moons’n such while wondering on them much less by the way, save for an occasional Shakespeare and a minstrel or 2. And when all the great orders of being began to fall into place, they started forming camps as to who had it right on just what the original intentions of the creator of the universe were".

"Well It was shortly after this “coming out” into the waves of amber grain that things started to get real organized too leafy one. So organized that legions of ancient mariners waged great sea battles all because of a single face. Guided by these starry constellations at night, and planning these ghastly beachheads by day, they ventured headlong into a history that their progeny would somehow glorify in legend, poetry and song. "Just imagine Laratese Lettuce Head, a single pretty face all lit up in the ancient moonlight launching a thousand war ships! That’s organization for ya my man. What's that you said, maybe they should’ve stayed in the woods. And now this great order has led to all these civilized schisms colliding all because each camp is so certain about the primordial intentions of the creator of the universe, including the creator of new red provocateur’s imminent cameo. Is it Allah’s moon Laratese? Is it the godhead of the trinity’s Mars? As for me, those mariners were the “ancients” and their progeny still are the “ancients” under these same constellations in the night sky, with still so much more darkness than light. So there!”

“Ah let’s leave it alone Laratese Lettuce Head. Let’s just look at the twin beauties, listen to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and leave all that alone for now, ok”?

But, just one more thing, for better or worse all these supposed "efficiencies" the thinking species have come to has led to this Laratese: Wondering on the stars and planets and we leafy greens much less and worrying more about when a closer Wal*Mart might come to the neighborhood….. but I digress from these orbed twins, illumined in red and gold” “Well, as I was just saying, let’s just leave all that alone, and get back to these twin skittering shadows dancing in the mars/ moon light".
.
“Ah,well,” the Jabberwock whispers to the alfalfa sprig, “there's still enough old fossilized biomass cisterned in the ground, and stuck in rocks to hyper burn awhile longer, gassing up the arc of the earthly covenant, with all these green house emissions a churnin and a burnin just enough green house funk to create the magnified illusion amongst the “thinking” species of an equal sized apparition - a celestial ghost of the red planet”. “How many arc seconds, or was it minutes across the night sky you say paints the apparent size of the red planet Palonius? Oh shit… ooops, sorry, just a few fleeting arc seconds you said.. The moon’s got the minutes my man and by a factor of some 60 times still appears larger, though in absolute terms it is not … Alas it still gets top billing after all.”
Ah, well, one can still dream for the next passing in 60,000 yrs. Dream through all the churnin, burnin haze….
Epilogue
God, we can wish for Mars to rival the breadth of the Moon's harvest face, and for plants talking to warn us about the churnin and a burnin funk. And we can imagine what nightly countenance the sunflower might turn her face toward, or to what brutal realities we turn our own faces away from when reflecting upon our crimes against the arc of the earthly covenant and to the belly of this Green Planet too. Or we can skip to ma lou, as we’ve done so long now, through the prairie grasses at night with the Jabberwock under 2 different shadows of the Tumtum tree, while humming Lennon’s tune, and wait and see what the dog days will bring…

….See ya out on the prairie…