Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

"Invoking Teddy Roosevelt, Obama Finds His Voice"

I wrote recently of my admiration for President Obama's speech on December 3.  In the last few days many better-known others have weighed in, also in admiration. Having read their views and gained a richer sense of Obama's words, I am prompted to revisit the occasion and offer readers some of their clarifying and well-informed intelligence. Here, for example, is Robert Reich:

“It’s the first time [Obama] or any other president has clearly stated the long-term structural problem that’s been widening the gap between the very top and everyone else for thirty years....Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008. Hopefully Obama will carry this message through 2012 — and in his second term will take on the growing inequities and game-rigging practices that have been undermining the American economy and American democracy for years."

The context for Obama's speech is manifold — his own personal and political history, the 2008 campaign in which his intelligence and talent for eloquence became evident to so many, especially to so many among the young, the history of progressivism in American politics preceding our own Gilded Age, especially that of Theodore Roosevelt and then more potently his admiring cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt. A close friend and fine historian and philosopher wrote me today,

"Isn't it ironic that the Civil War, having required Northern industry (especially railroads and the clothing industry) to go into high gear, should then have been the prologue to our Gilded Age, i.e. capitalism at full speed, the triumph of the haves. The Progressives briefly planted Slow Down and Stop signs, but not till FDR was an effective new way of thinking brought into play."

I think we shall realize in time that Barack Obama stands firmly in that progressive tradition. Whether he shall come to remind future generations of Canute or of Moses remains to be seen. Our immediate task is to see that he is decisively re-elected in 2012, preferably with Democratic majorities in both House and Senate.

That's a very tall order and a daunting challenge. The American electorate has never been subject to greater manipulation by the dogs of Wall Street and their media minions. Tom Engelhardt recently wrote a chilling piece about the continuing compound growth of money shaping elections, largely through the mainstream media and their owners, especially TV. "It’s clear enough -- or should be by now -- that the electoral process has been occupied by the 1%; which means that what you hear in this 'campaign' is largely refracted versions of their praise, their condemnation, their slurs, their views, their needs, their fears, and their wishes.  They are making money off, and electing a president via, you.  Which means that you -- that all of us -- are occupied, too. So stop calling this an 'election.'  Whatever it is, we need a new name for it." 

The most thoughtful response to Obama's speech I've read is that of John Cassidy, brilliant New Yorker staff writer, contributor to The New York Review of Books and purveyor of lively thinking on his New Yorker blog, "Rational Irrationality." 

December 6, 2011

INVOKING TEDDY ROOSEVELT, OBAMA FINDS HIS VOICE

Posted by John Cassidy

First an admission: just before President Obama followed in the footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt and went to Osawatomie, Kansas, to deliver a populist speech about inequality and the middle class, I had prepared a post criticizing the White House for having the temerity to compare him, at least implicitly, to one of America’s truly great Presidents.

Here is part of what I had written:

 

From a tactical perspective, summoning the ghost of Roosevelt is a clever move. It reinforces the White House line that the Republican Party has strayed from its center-right roots and morphed into an extremist organization populated by firebrands like Ron “abolish the Fed” Paul, Michele “send illegal immigrants home” Bachmann, and Newt “put poor kids to work” Gingrich. On a broader level, though, I am not sure that invoking Teddy Roosevelt is such a wise idea for the White House. When it comes to actual achievements, as opposed to rhetoric, Obama’s record cannot seriously be compared with Roosevelt’s.

 

 

During his seven years in office (1901-1908), Roosevelt pushed through a series of reforms that largely define what historians now call “the Progressive Era.”

 

As a matter of history, I stand by that. But once I read Obama’s speech, I realized I had missed the point, and the news. This isn’t the President saying he deserves to be on Mount Rushmore. This is Obama seeking to define the themes he intends to run on next year, to energize his disillusioned base, and to capitalize on a big change in the political climate. Teddy Roosevelt, whose famous “New Nationalism” speech in 1910 called upon the three branches of the federal government to put the public welfare before the interests of money and property, merely provided a convenient framing device.

Whatever one thinks of Occupy Wall Street—I’m broadly supportive—it has focussed public anger and changed the terms of the political debate, elevating issues such as bankers’ pay, tax evasion by rich people, and corporate lobbying. That’s all to the good. But from the White House’s perspective, it has also had the unfortunate effect of sidelining a President vulnerable to the charge of cozying up to Wall Street and wary of giving the Republicans another cudgel to beat him with. (Think 1968, hippies/anti-war protestors, and Hubert Humphrey.)

Today, Obama gave his first considered response to O.W.S., and it was surprisingly positive. He even adopted some of the protestors’ language, saying:

 

“I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”

 

Of course, Obama has talked before about rising inequality and falling tax burdens on the rich. (In the summer of 2010, he made a futile effort to rally support in Congress for ending the Bush tax cuts.) But what was new about today’s speech was the acuteness and depth of Obama’s analysis, and the way he turned it on the Republicans. Rising inequality isn’t only morally repugnant, he said, it is economically inefficient and damaging to the country.

In what was a long speech, here are what I consider to be the six nut grafs:

 

“Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top one percent has gone up by more than 250%, to $1.2 million per year. For the top one hundredth of one percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her workers now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about six percent.

 

“This kind of inequality—a level we haven’t seen since the Great Depression—hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy, from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity—that’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars they made. It’s also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

“Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. And it leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them—that our elected representatives aren’t looking out for the interests of most Americans.

“More fundamentally, this kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try. We tell people that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, hard work can get you into the middle class; and that your children will have the chance to do even better than you. That’s why immigrants from around the world flocked to our shores.

“And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk. A few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance fell to around 40%. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a 1 in 3 chance of making it to the middle class.

“It’s heartbreaking enough that there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal. But the idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for.”

 

Maybe I’m wrong. But to me that seems like strong and cogent stuff. Doubtless, the Republicans will dismiss it as “class warfare.” That is largely because they don’t have anything more convincing to say. And anyway, Obama has already anticipated their response:

 

“It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay a higher tax rate than somebody pulling in $50 million. It is wrong for Warren Buffett’s secretary to pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. And he agrees with me….

 

“This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare. It’s about making choices that benefit not just the people who’ve done fantastically well over the last few decades, but that benefits the middle class, and those fighting to get to the middle class, and the economy as a whole.”

 

Like many people who voted for Obama in 2008, I have been critical of some of his actions and inactions. What has bothered me most has not been any one thing in particular, but his overall failure to articulate and defend the vision of an activist government tackling market failures and protecting the public interest, which Teddy Roosevelt helped to create. Yes, the President has done some positive things and made some good speeches, and, yes too, he has faced enormous difficulties, but all too often his heart hasn’t seemed to be in the fight.

Today, at last, he found his voice, or Teddy Roosevelt’s voice—or, as some are suggesting, Elizabeth Warren’s voice. Anyway, it was a big improvement.

 

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/12/invoking-teddy-roosevelt-obama-finds-his-voice.html#ixzz1gFQ6tFb6

 

Two of Adrienne Rich's poems and the Occupy movement

Dear [poet friend],

I enjoy listening each week to Curtis Fox's short (15-minute) public radio program, "Poetry off the shelf." You very likely know it, both as part of your history and because it's produced by the Poetry Foundation, which does Poetry magazine. Fox usually has a bright younger guest poet join him in looking at a little of the work of another poet. This week the question was something like "Should Adrienne Rich be the poet laureate of the Occupy movement?" 

Not a promising query — the Occupy movement needs a poet laureate about as much as it needs a president and a first and 2nd vice president. Even Adrienne Rich.

Fox may be off the mark in this instance, but he's not dumb. And his guest thankfully spent little time dispatching the question.

But they also read and talked intelligently about two Rich poems, neither of which I knew, and both of them are fine, brilliant in the very English and Scottish senses of the word. One, the shorter of the two poems, is called simply "Wait," written just as the 2nd American invasion of Iraq was getting underway. It appears addressed to an American soldier sent by his anonymous elders to fight and risk inflicting and enduring injury and death in that war. "They never told you." I think it the more difficult of the two poems to the tin ear, and your audience must be assumed to have such disabled ears. What little you said of your editor's first response suggests it.

I'm inclined to incorporate this note into a current Reckonings post, but I won't identify you other than as "a poet friend," and of course won't use your address. [Our own home grown editor of our monthly newsletter in the community that is my home] advises us well not to take our friends' names into our ventures on the web without their permission.

I have no idea if Reckonings has more than a half-dozen readers, most of whom are surely my children. There is ample encouraging provision for online response to Reckonings posts, but the last one I had was probably in aught2. I gave the journal up while in Norway, but am happy to return to it now in a blessedly peaceful place and time. Roosevelt grandchildren and great-grandchildren should always put fame where it belongs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wait

by Adrienne Rich

In paradise every

the desert wind is rising

third thought

in hell there are no thoughts

is of earth

sand screams against your government

issued tent    

hell’s noise     in your nostrils      crawl

into your ear-shell

wrap yourself in no-thought

wait    no place for the little lyric

wedding-ring glint the reason why   

on earth

they never told you

“Wait,” from The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 2006 by Adrienne Rich. 

The second of Rich's poems is "What kinds of times are these," and it's that question and Rich's response that put me in mind of your wishing to expand upon your writing about the Occupy movement. I thought yes, her times are ours, and to add some brief discussion of that poem might expand your writing. See what you think.

 
I drew from my listening that Rich took the title from Bertold Brecht, and Curtis Fox's guest poet spoke of Rich's themes of "poetry of witness" and empathic sensibility, our lack of memory and community, and the notion that Zucotti Park is not a physical place, nor is the true academy, the grove of trees, the meeting place. "It's necessary to talk about trees." 

I'll try to find the poem, though you may have it.

 
That poem seems suitably short and apropos of your own current theme, and I think it lovely. Not prosiac language of course, but lovely.

Cheers and good hunting,

John

PS: I noted that Rich, like you, is 10 years my senior. I have at least a decade of good learning ahead of me! (Joan Rivers is closer to my age.)

What Kind of Times Are These [I include a link to Adrienne Rich reading "What Kind of Times Are These," but I must warn you, dear reader, not to look at the subtitles, for they are wildly inaccurate renderings of her reading. Listen to her voice.]

by  Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—ghost-ridden crossroads, leaf

mold paradise:I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

“What Kind of Times Are These”. © 2002, 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich. 

Adrienne Rich, 1929 —

Vocation: Poet

Executive summary: An atlas of the difficult world

University: Radcliffe College (1951)   

Visiting professor, Brandeis University (1972-73)   

Visiting professor, Scripps College (1983-84)   

Visiting professor, Stanford University (1984-86)   

Professor of English, Stanford University (1986-93)

National Book Award for Poetry 1974 for Diving into the Wreck   

Bollingen Prize in Poetry 2003   

MacArthur Fellowship 1994-99   

Guggenheim Fellowship 1952   

Guggenheim Fellowship 1961   

Phi Beta Kappa Society    

American Academy of Arts and Letters    

American Academy of Arts and Sciences    

Women Against Pornography

 
Books:

A Change of World (1951, poetry)

Necessities of Life: Poems 1962-1965 (1966, poetry)

Diving into the Wreck (1973, poetry)

The Dream of a Common Language (1978, poetry)

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984 (1984, poetry)

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1986)

Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989, poetry)

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (1991, poetry)

Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970 (1993, poetry)

What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993, essays)

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995, poetry)

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999, poetry)

Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001, poetry)

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001, essays)

In memory of Edward R. Murrow

"Good night and good luck." It was his sign-off phrase. I shiver when I remember his distinctive voice saying those words when he closed his radio and later his television report of the news. He was a man of integrity unafraid to speak truth to power. He should be an exemplary presence in American journalism today.

I'm putting together this small tribute to Murrow for that reason, and because it's been six years since we saw the fine film narrated by George Clooney (it may be bought, rented or streamed from Amazon).

It has been much longer — before the beginning of World War II in Europe — since Edward R. Murrow's reporting career began, in effect bringing a revolution to American radio journalism with his short-wave broadcasts sent from London and aboard Allied bombers to listeners in the United States. He was a pioneer of a kind of journalism we see too little of in these days of media empires and news that must make its way by its entertainment value. 

Murrow began a new kind of radio news, CBS's "World News Round Up." H.V. Kaltenborn, who narrated the program from New York, could be heard with anxiety in his voice because the quality of radio connection was uneven and unpredictable, "Come in Ed Murrow, Come in Ed Murrow." During the Blitz, when German planes rained bombs on London, Murrow sometimes spoke from the steps of damaged St. Paul's Cathedral. Air raid sirens could be heard in the background.

Murrow and other journalists followed Allied troops into the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald in April 1945, as it happened on the very day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs. Georgia. Murrow, obviously shaken by what he saw, described the exhausted physical state of the 21,000 concentration camp prisoners who had survived (many died of their starvation in the following days and weeks), mentioning "rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood." And he refused to apologize for the horror of his words:

"I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry."

   

 

It is now more than a half century since, in his pioneering television reporting on "See It Now," Murrow courageously took on Joe McCarthy, the junior Senator from Wisconsin who had made a career of irresponsible, bullying and dishonest red-baiting. On that program Murrow said something that bears repeating in 2011, in every time and place.

"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.... No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices."

Edward R. Murrow in his office, 1957

Later he initiated a program called This I Believe , an opportunity for ordinary Americans to speak for five minutes on their fundamental values. Fifty-three years ago he gave a memorable speech in Chicago on October 15, 1958. It is a speech as pertinent now as it was then.

A chain smoker throughout his life, Murrow was known for almost never being seen without his trademark Camel cigarette. He evidently smoked from sixty to sixty-five cigarettes a day, roughly three packs. His own television program See It Now was the first to have a report about the connection between smoking and cancer. Murrow said during the show, "I doubt I could spend a half hour without a cigarette with any comfort or ease." 

His last major TV milestone was reporting and narrating the CBS Reports installment "Harvest of Shame," on the plight of migrant farm workers in the United States. 

Edward R. Murrow died on April 27, 1965, two days after his 57th birthday. His colleague and friend Eric Sevareid said of him,

"He was a shooting star; and we will live in his afterglow a very long time."

 

We are the 99.9%

Return to the figure above. Note that it's 99.9%, not 99%.

Paul Krugman, in the important New York Times essay reprinted below, says "We are the 99%" is an admirable slogan that nonetheless aims too low. It should be altered to specify the considerably higher figure of 99.9%, nine-tenths of 1% higher. That is not an insignificant difference, nor does that difference represent a small number of us. About 2,814,000, give or take a few.

Put another way, Krugman demonstrates with reliable data that 0.1% of the American population, about 312,000 people today, have accumulated, possess and show no measurable intent to relinquish, 99.9% of "our" nation's wealth. After taxes. That is economic inequality — and the stuff of oligarchy rather than genuine democracy — on a scale unequaled in American history.

"We are the 99.9%" is not as catchy a slogan as "We are the 99%," but it makes a helluva difference in the quality of a lot of Americans' lives, measured in material well-being and access to government, education and health care. It also suggests that democracy in the United States is largely a fiction, a fig leaf imposed upon a working oligarchy. Does it mean that elections are meaningless, that freedom of expression and freedom of religion are non-existent? No, it does not.

It does — or should — raise serious concern that the third and fourth freedoms Franklin D. Roosevelt described and advocated 70 years ago for the United States and "everywhere in the world," freedom from want and freedom from fear, are deeply endangered species right here at home and indeed everywhere in the world. We must disenthrall ourselves, devote ourselves to their protection and nourishment for the 100%.

The Occupy Wall Street movement represents something new in America, even while it bears some similarity to earlier Gilded Ages. It's not surprising that we don't yet understand it well. The analogies ready at hand in the media don't apply. Our ready responses, pro or con, approving or hostile, are inapplicable, or only very partially applicable. The movement may fail. The most recent news of its birthing ground in Zuccoti Park is not encouraging. The movement may succeed. If it does, some of the credit, ironically, should go to the Republican party, which, as John Feffer of the Institute for Policy Studies writes, "has been so extreme in its defense of the 1 percent – actually the 0.1 percent, as Paul Krugman points out – that it has effectively seceded from the country to create a confederacy of cupidity."

Of this only we may be sure: We are watching — or seeking ways to nourish or undermine — something of potentially great consequence.

 Krugman does his best to suggest some reasons why the movement should succeed. Your attention will be repaid.

 

We Are the 99.9%

By PAUL KRUGMAN

November 24, 2011

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

Paul Krugman

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers.

The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.

Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?

Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies.

After all, in an idealized market economy each worker would be paid exactly what he or she contributes to the economy by choosing to work, no more and no less. And this would be equally true for workers making $30,000 a year and executives making $30 million a year. There would be no reason to consider the contributions of the $30 million folks as deserving of special treatment.

But, you say, the rich pay taxes! Indeed, they do. And they could — and should, from the point of view of the 99.9 percent — be paying substantially more in taxes, not offered even more tax breaks, despite the alleged budget crisis, because of the wonderful things they supposedly do.

Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

 

The prodigal son - a thanksgiving toast

Thanksgiving evokes the theme of homecoming, return of the prodigal son. Rejoice, for he and she who were lost are found.

Rembrandt's vision is, for me, the most moving and profound of interpretations.

Look at the father's arms and hands, as expressive as his face. And the son's sandals worn to almost nothing, his head cradled upon his father's chest. Finally, the light upon them both. Jesus's parable — the last in a sequence of three stories about redemption in the Gospel of Luke — is a story of forgiveness, following an archytypal journey of a father's extravagent misjudgment, his younger son's longing, quest, loss, return and in this moment redemption. It is the father's prodigality that starts the ball rolling, the son's that carries it along, and their reunion, transformed, that brings it to conclusion.

This is meant to be a Thanksgiving toast. To offer such without mention of those who are genuinely without adequate shelter, food, health care and educational opportunity — the symbolic 99% —  would be uncharitable and cruel. The poor in these United States and elsewhere are invisible enough. We need not compound that absence of vision by ignoring them at Thanksgiving. As today's lead editorial in the New York Times says, "One in three Americans — 100 million people —  is either poor or perilously close to it." Nearly 50 million people are below the poverty line. Seventeen million of them are children.

As the Times concludes, "There is a growing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem....The poor do without and the near poor, at best, live from paycheck to paycheck. Most Americans don’t know what that is like, but unless the nation reverses direction, more are going to find out." A dour but realistic note on which to end this Thanksgiving toast to all. Remember, it isn't the 1% who will inherit the earth. 

Striking in anger - some reflections of yesteryear

I need to learn to celebrate the unpredictability of my memory. If I only knew its logic I would feel some recompense. The mere idea that it may have logic gives heart.

Richard Davidson, one of my best friends, asked me about eight years ago my experience with “striking in anger.” My near autonomic response — written though after some reflection — was

I don’t strike; I am struck. I don’t even strike when struck. Neither, however, do I offer the other cheek. I just let the numb red one face whatever’s to come. No, I honestly can’t remember striking anyone in anger. I do recall being struck in anger, for example by the former boyfriend of a girl sitting in the car beside me. I’d rather look, and sometimes of course I don't see (I didn't see him coming, just his fist).

Although by God I have been angry, and I have a considerable repertoire of sublimation and repression. Upon early reflection, my assumption became: I haven’t struck because if I struck the impact would be so dire that prison and poverty were inevitable and the globe was at risk. Superman run amok; an island, not an atoll or a rock, but a real island, blown sky-high with the flash and then the mushroom cloud. Cosmic devastation.

Then a fork in the road (metaphor suddenly wrenched into another warp), and at least three Johns:

• (1) I feel ashamed and stupid and stuck; 
• (2) I understand all the many-layered implications of such fantasy, and feel wry humor and sympathy; and
• (3) I’m just tickled pink and scared shitless that I harbor such destructiveness —even if, especially if, the victim is but one other person (a wife, say; or a parent, to really draw circles within circles). 

Being angry and facing anger straight on, directed at me, literally make and made me sick. I do damned near anything to avoid it.... been true I think my whole life. Was I emotionally abused as a child? By neglect, not ill will, but yes. Will I remain that child for the rest of my small remaining span? Yes. Who else am I at heart, if anyone, and how could there possibly be room? A smidgen at least.

It has something to do with voices, first and third and whatever. Whose narrative is it? There are so damned many voices; if we listened to them all we would be reduced to schizophrenic coleslaw. If we don’t, we may be gambling with our souls. Some of the voices are true, some false, most misted in partiality and ambiguity. And how long is it incumbent upon us to wait? To even ask that question is arrant foolishness.

It still is.

 

Frederico Fellini's "La Strada"

Frederico Fellini's magnificent "La Strada" (The Road, 1954) was the first ever to receive the Academy Award for best foreign language film, in 1956. Its impact upon American audiences persuaded members of the Academy of Motion Pictures, normally focused on the produce of Hollywood, to recognize that fine films had long been made elsewhere in the world.

"La Strada" deeply moved me. Filmed in stark black and white, its rural Italian landscapes are spare and hard, suggesting poverty, age, ravage of war. The story and characters are simple and manifold, comedic and tragic, like those of a fairy tale.

Indeed, the word "fey" has been used to describe the brilliance of "La Strada's" central presence, Gelsomina. She is played by the Italian actress Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife and muse. "Fey" means magical, fairy-like, strange, more literally and deeply, "fated to die." Gelsomina, a truly magical woman, does die, as do the film's two other principal characters, Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) and The Fool, touchingly portrayed by Richard Besehart. 

The story is simple and profound. A girl is sold by her impoverished mother to a crude traveling "strong man," entertainer and illusionist Zampanò. Gelsomina becomes Zampanò's assistant and companion, and as they travel by wonderful contraption — half wagon, half ancient motorcycle — from town to town, fair to fair, season to season, Gelsomina offers Zampanò a gift of true magic and love. She is a mythic presence of eros, a gift he is incapable of recognizing or reciprocating. 

The Fool, in this instance an aerialist, classical embodiment of humor, cleverness, tenderness and wisdom, recognizes Gelsomina as Zampanò cannot. But The Fool can only show the way. He himself, unlike those he serves, is powerless to effect transformation. He knows that gifts die if not recognized and passed on.

An Italian film critic wrote of this film, "how much meaning, how much ferment enrich this apparent simplicity. It is all there although not always evident." 

"La Strada" is a beautiful embodiment of human frailty, longing, resilience and aching loss. Like the enduring stories of old, it may be viewed and understood on many levels, at once manifest and elusive.

 

FDR's Four Freedoms then and now, 1941 and 2011

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union Address to Congress on 6 January 1941 deserves renewed attention today. 

It became known thereafter as one of his most eloquent and important speeches. FDR proposed four essential human freedoms people throughout the world should enjoy, and went on to say more concretly what they imply for any of us.

We might begin by reading and reflecting upon his own words, and listening, as  we still can, to his resonant clarion voice.

More important, we have both reason and opportunity to read and listen as if we heard the same words spoken today, for Roosevelt evoked values and needs, fear and thanksgiving, deeply of this day as well as his own.

He spoke of freedoms grounded in the U.S. Constitution — freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship. Then Roosevelt added two more, drawn from his New Deal for an American people suffering from the Depression:

• freedom of people everywhere to enjoy economic security, and 
• freedom from aggression, as he memorably put it, "freedom from fear" at home and everywhere in the world.

Norman Rockwell's painting of Freedom from Fear

In the autumn of 2011, this nation — 99% of us — know too little economic security, and have reason to fear, with others of this world, the political and military policies of our own American government, a corporate and military oligarchy as much as or more than a democracy.

We need the energy, transparency, clarity and leadership represented by Franklin Roosevelt as deeply as did the nation he addressed in the war-shadowed and war-torn year of 1941, seventy years ago.

It is valuable, then, to assess the relevance of the four freedoms to this earth's and its people's well-being.

In the next few days and weeks, I hope to do that, and I welcome response from others.

The Occupy movement is at a crossroads; we must not let it wither in the face of oligarchic opposition and suppression.

 

Below are the critical moments in FDR's address. (Emphases are mine, added to draw out for the reader unfulfilled needs in our own time.)

Eleanor Roosevelt, in her own right one of the most admired people of the 20th century, was an important voice in her husband's conception of the four freedoms. She went on, after his death in April 1945, to serve their accomplishment — everywhere in the world — for the remaining years of her life, until her death on November 7, 1962.

The nation takes great satisfaction and much strength from the things which have been done to make its people conscious of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America.  Those things have toughened the fiber of our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect.

Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world. For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.

The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

• Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
• Jobs for those who can work.
• Security for those who need it.
• The ending of special privilege for the few.
• The preservation of civil liberties for all.
• The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:

• We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
• We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
• We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and

• the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay 

should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the Congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

1. The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
2. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
3. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
4. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. 

That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. 

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. 

Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

 

A Levertov poem for friends on my 72nd birthday, with thanks to Joe Riley

WITNESS

 

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.

 

~ Denise Levertov ~

 

(Selected Poems)

 

W.S. Merwin's "To the New Year"

Read at the conclusion of a memorial service in Tucson; posted here on Martin Luther King Day 2011

 

To the New Year

 

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

 

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

 

RECKONINGS: A brief introduction

Blueberries and granite, photo by John R. Boettiger

Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimension - personal, social, economic, environmental.

Attention to such themes is typically expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckoning is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos than chronos. They are linear only in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said they are circular. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others -- ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly, john@reckonings.net. Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (I trust needless to say, your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

"a deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror"

I don’t think, for all my occasional respect for David Brooks of The New York Times, I would nominate him to define the changes needed in our mental health policy. (See his column of January 10, “The Politicized Mind,” primarily addressed to our press punditry’s failure to account for the likely schizophrenia of Jared Loughner, the accused Arizona assassin.)

But when Brooks makes reference, at the end, to a need to understand “a deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror,” it’s a shame he doesn’t point his readers beyond the potential violence of some schizophrenics.

Loughner’s isolation and prevailing thought patterns were extreme; he does probably, from the evidence Brooks offers, suffer from an unusually violent form of schizophrenia. But we would be seriously remiss to relegate that deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror to a relatively unusual form of mental illness.

 It lives as an undercurrent, however unattended or sublimated, in most of our lives, and we are often drawn to its depiction in the media with a fascination born of identification.

 Confronting and dealing with—I will say befriending, because we are in the realm of powerful transformation—such shadow presence in our own psyches is an essential dimension of redeeming and realizing our capacity for humane order, for love, affection and empathic response to others, for the grace and gift of the light of the world.

 

 

A Growing Culture of Violence

In his most recent columns in The New York Times, Paul Krugman has been examining the dynamics of the growing evidence of violence in the US. He is on the mark, and what he has to say deserves our attention and reflection. It's worth digging deeper. Krugman doesn't address all—and particularly the more deeply—underlying causes of the increasing evidence of a "culture of violence."

I think there is a major cultural breakdown occurring in the US, and it has to do with the erosion of connectedness and empathy, the rise of isolation, fear and anger. "Virtual" connectedness is too often—not always, it should be obvious to say, but see The Times' recent series—a mask for disconnection, like—again, with obvious exceptions—watching TV or playing video games.

Tiger Woods and Barack Obama as Persons of the Year?

Why did I imagine - admittedly with a touch of fear - that this sharp piece on Tiger Woods and our culture of marketing and deception (by Frank Rich a week ago in the NY Times) would end with at least some speculation about Barack Obama? 

This president walks so many tight ropes that the soles of his feet must feel like those struck by the ropes of interrogators. Thus far, though, he has been true to the character and intent of the man portrayed in his books and, on the whole, in the 2008 elections. Those who feel betrayed have misread, or simply not read.

We should still be celebrating - and praying for the safety and integrity of - the man we voted for last November and watched with lingering disbelief and unalloyed pride in Grant Park and on the Washington Mall a year ago. And praying and working for a larger Democratic majority in Congress next November  - against the odds, perhaps, but progressives are used to that, and it's a little early to calculate them securely.

Op-Ed Columnist - Tiger Woods, Person of the Year - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com

"Tiger Woods, whose sham beatific image was questioned by no one until it collapsed, exemplifies the decade of Enron, in which most of us have been so easily bamboozled."

Going to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies

Leigh's and my invitations to the Nobel Peace Prize events next week arrived today. I did service in Norway at (and before) election time and on the evening before the inauguration in January -- I suppose as the closest thing to an Obama cousin as could be found. There was, particularly in those months, much interest here in Obama and inevitable comparisons to FDR, who is remembered and honored here with enormously high regard and gratitude. 

I'm still full of hope for this president, as well as pride in his election; I don't agree with those here and elsewhere who fault Obama's choice by the Nobel committee. The challenges he faces, the trade-offs that must be made in our deeply flawed system of oligarchical democracy, are daunting. I look forward to meeting him and to hearing his address. I feel honored to be invited.

Obama's opposition

Frank Rich does all of us a service in the following NY Times op-ed article today, as he seeks to identify the sources and character of a minority but significant populist libertarian opposition to - approaching hatred of - Barack Obama, an opposition that is palpably racist but isn't only fueled by racism.

Obama inherited the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, one that continues to frighten and anger ordinary Americans, who continue to lose jobs, health care and homes, and he hasn't demonstrably succeeded in his goal of making American lives more secure. I'm convinced that is his goal, but it's hard to see it in the context of gutted health care reform, absence of Wall Street regulation, and terrible ongoing - now seemingly endless - war.

It's easier to see that the United States continues to have a government that is functionally more oligarchic than democratic, severely constrained if not thoroughly dominated by wealthy corporate elites with powerful vested interests in a deeply inequitable status quo. 

______________________

---

September 20, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day

By FRANK RICH

IF only it were just about the color of his skin.

With all due respect to Jimmy Carter, the racist component of Obama-hatred has been undeniable since the summer of 2008, when Sarah Palin rallied all-white mobs to the defense of the “real America.” Joe Wilson may or may not be in that camp, but, either way, that’s not the news. As we watched and rewatched the South Carolina congressman’s star turn, what grabbed us was the act itself.

What made the lone, piercing cry of “You lie!” shocking was that it breached a previously secure barrier. It was the first time that the violent rage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as the president. Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. When he later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous” rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people.

The White House was right not to second Carter’s motion and cue another “national conversation about race.” No matter how many teachable moments we have, some people won’t be taught. (Though how satisfying it would have been for Obama to dismiss Wilson, like the boorish Kanye West, as a “jackass.”) But there is a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed.

Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either. Michael Steele, who was declared persona non grata at one of the mad “tea parties” in April, was not invited to that right-wing 9/12 March on Washington last weekend. There were no public encomiums for McCain or Bush. No Senate leader spoke to the gathering, and perhaps only Palin and Ron Paul would have been welcome from the ranks of what passes for G.O.P. presidential timber. If there was a real hero to this crowd, it was the protest’s most prominent promoter, the radio and TV talker Glenn Beck.

Time put Beck on its cover this week. Man of the Year may not be far behind. Beck is not, as many liberals assume, merely the latest incarnation of Rush Limbaugh. He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents — and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts.

Though Beck’s daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic. It’s not just because he is younger (45). This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike Hannity, he is not a Republican apparatchik.

Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).

Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator — with appropriately overheated capital letters — in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.

Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.

Too many Americans are impatiently waiting for results. It’s hard to argue that the stimulus package reviled by big government-loathers is a success when unemployment continues to rise and most Americans feel none of the incipient “recovery” spotted by Ben Bernanke. The potential dividends to be gained at the end of the protracted health care debate also remain, for now, an abstraction to many who have lost and are continuing to lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.

Nor has Obama succeeded in persuading critics on the left or right that he will do as much for those Americans who are suffering as he has for the corporations his administration and his predecessor’s rushed to rescue. To mark the anniversary of Lehman’s fall, the president gave a speech on Wall Street last Monday again vowing reform. But everyone’s back to business as usual: The Wall Street Journal reported that not a single C.E.O. from a top bank attended. The speech sank with scant notice because there has been so little action to back it up and because its conciliatory stance was tone-deaf to the anger beyond the financial district.

That same day a United States District Court judge in New York, Jed S. Rakoff, scathingly condemned the Obama Securities and Exchange Commission for letting Bank of America skate away with what Rakoff called an immoral and unjust wrist tap to settle charges that it covered up $3.6 billion paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch. How is this S.E.C. a change from the Clinton-Bush S.E.C. that ignored all the red flags on Bernie Madoff?

Beck frequently strikes the pose of an apocalyptic prophet, even insisting that he predicted 9/11. This summer he also started warning of domestic terrorism in the form of a new Timothy McVeigh. On this, one fears he knows whereof he speaks. For all our nation’s unfinished business on race, racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession. He — and our political system — are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Paul Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest," Part 2

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

__________________________

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

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A short bulletin from Bill McKibben on the old culture and the new

I've put together below some brief excerpts from Bill McKibben's current work, the first from his book Deep Economy (2008), a critique of the concept of economic growth and persuasive case for a new economic model based upon sustainable local economies. The second - in a sense the expression of need to which Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest offers at least an interim response - is drawn from an essay McKibben contributed to the current issue of Yes Magazine. Bill McKibben teaches at Middlebury College and is a much admired journalist whose writing focuses primarily upon environmental issues. One of his current movement-building projects, attentive particularly to global warming, is described at 1sky.org. He has also suggested need for a vision of generosity bearing similarity to the Marshall Plan concept of Michael Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and intriguingly, to the Christopher Reynolds Foundation's early focus on the US and China.

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"The old realism—an endless More—is morphing into a dangerous fantasy…In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next. And just in time… [T]he new, deeper economy will be built, in pieces and from below. It’s a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.”

...............

"We need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement—as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we’re not going to best the fossil fuel companies and the automakers and the rest of the vested interests that are keeping us from change."

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"The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

"Which leaves us with the one piece of undeniably good news: we were built for community. Everything we know about human beings, from the state of our immune systems to the state of our psyches, testifies to our desire for real connection of just the kind that an advanced consumer society makes so difficult. We need that kind of community to slow down the environmental changes coming at us, and we need that kind of community to survive the changes we can’t prevent. And we need that kind of community because it’s what makes us fully human.

"This is our final exam, and so far we’re failing. But we don’t have to put our pencils down quite yet. We’ll see."

Pause for a political imperative

I want to pause in my review of Paul Hawken's book on environmental and social justice to note that the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania occurred yesterday with a solid victory for Hillary Clinton, but hardly the margin of victory that would have altered the likelihood that Barack Obama is moving toward nomination and a battle for the presidency with John McCain.

Still, with every day that the two Democrats undermine each other, revealing weaknesses in each other's plausibility as standard bearer, a McCain victory in November becomes more likely.

As the Times lead editorial put it this morning, "The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it." Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee said last night, “This is exactly what I was afraid was going to happen. They are going to just keep standing there and pounding each other and bloodying each other, and no one is winning. It underlines the need to find some way to bring this to conclusion.” The Times added, "At a time when the Democratic Party would dearly like to turn its attention to Mr. McCain, it now faces continued damage to the images of both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama."

So how could the Democratic party turn its attention to McCain, the catastrophically bloody and unwinnable war in Iraq and the dire need for economic and environmental turnabout at home? 

John Edwards or Al Gore or a significant number of still undecided superdelegates could make a difference if they endorsed Obama. But there is opportunity in another idea. Consider: if Obama now makes the turn that is publicly anticipated later--in May or June or July when it may or may not be too late. Preempt the high ground, declare the need, in the country's best interests, that starting now he will turn from damaging conflict with Clinton and focus on confronting the awful legacy of the Bush administration and the fact that a McCain presidency will be if possible more catastrophic.

Obama cannot forego the need to defend himself if Clinton continues her increasingly shrill and and vacuous attacks. But he can put the burden of such attacks squarely on Clinton, publicly and prominently declare the preeminent necessity to turn to Bush and McCain, to Iraq and the economy, and then do it, and do it now, in a series of highly publicized addresses.

Sabbath 2 - Reflections on a Parable

The following reflections and retelling - reimagining - of a familiar story are drawn from one of a series of talks shared in the winter and spring of 2007 with staff and patients at Modum Bad, a psychiatric hospital, retreat center and learning community in Vikersund, Norway.

I discovered Modum Bad in 2005, and returned for a second extended time as a consultant in February 2007. Of course I've learned more than I've taught. My first impressions of Modum Bad, gathered after a first leisurely visit in 2005, are gathered in an informal essay on Modum Bad's website. I am revising and extending that essay for publication later in 2007, Modum Bad's 50th anniversary year -  in fact,  its 150th anniversary year, as it began as a healing spa in 1857. Modum Bad means The Baths at Modum, gathered around St. Olavs Kilde, St. Olav's Spring. My own retelling of Jesus's parable owes a great deal to the translation and commentary of Stephen Mitchell in his Gospel According to Jesus Christ (2001).

The story I retell here is the last and longest of three parables of Jesus recounted in Luke's gospel. The thread they share is that of losing and finding and rejoicing in the renewal or life-redeeming experience. It is a tale of critical turning in life's journey. The theme of turning – a cycle of loss, of tender, halting discovery, and of redemption – is a central one in the history of the human psyche and soul, in the generations that gave us birth, in our Judeo-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth.

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