Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Our Words Are Our Weapons - Rebecca Solnit

If I had one wish for something that every person in this country would read — and read carefully and thoughtfully — in this last week before the most consequential election in the last half-century, it would be the following short essay by Rebecca Solnit.

 

Our Words Are Our Weapons

by Rebecca Solnit,

TomDispatch

30 October 2012

In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by "the rectification of names," a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and language and its subjects correlated again. It was like a debt jubilee, only for meaning rather than money.

This was part of what made Barack Obama's first presidential campaign so electrifying: he seemed like a man who spoke our language and called many if not all things by their true names. Whatever caused that season of clarity, once elected, Obama promptly sank into the stale, muffled, parallel-universe language wielded by most politicians, and has remained there ever since. Meanwhile, the far right has gotten as far as it has by mislabeling just about everything in our world - a phenomenon which went supernova in this year of "legitimate rape," "the apology tour," and "job creators." Meanwhile, their fantasy version of economics keeps getting more fantastic. (Maybe there should be a rectification of numbers, too.)

Let's rectify some names ourselves. We often speak as though the source of so many of our problems is complex and even mysterious. I'm not sure it is. You can blame it all on greed: the refusal to do anything about climate change, the attempts by the .01% to destroy our democracy, the constant robbing of the poor, the resultant starving children, the war against most of what is beautiful on this Earth.

Calling lies "lies" and theft "theft" and violence "violence," loudly, clearly, and consistently, until truth becomes more than a bump in the road, is a powerful aspect of political activism. Much of the work around human rights begins with accurately and aggressively reframing the status quo as an outrage, whether it's misogyny or racism or poisoning the environment. What protects an outrage are disguises, circumlocutions, and euphemisms - "enhanced interrogation techniques" for torture, "collateral damage" for killing civilians, "the war on terror" for the war against you and me and our Bill of Rights. Change the language and you've begun to change the reality or at least to open the status quo to question.

Here is Confucius on the rectification of names:

"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything."

So let's start calling manifestations of greed by their true name. By greed, I mean the attempt of those who have plenty to get more, not the attempts of the rest of us to survive or lead a decent life. Look at the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame: the four main heirs are among the dozen richest people on the planet, each holding about $24 billion. Their wealth is equivalent to that of
the bottom 40% of Americans. The corporation Sam Walton founded now employs 2.2 million workers, two-thirds of them in the U.S., and the great majority are poorly paid, intimidated, often underemployed people who routinely depend on government benefits to survive. You could call that Walton Family welfare - a taxpayers' subsidy to their system. Strikes launched against Wal-Mart this summer and fall protested working conditions of astonishing barbarity - warehouses that reach 120 degrees, a woman eight months pregnant forced to work at a brutal pace, commonplace exposure to pollutants, and the intimidation of those who attempted to organize or unionize. You would think that $24,000,000,000 apiece would be enough, but the Walton family sits atop a machine intent upon brutalizing tens of millions of people - the suppliers of Wal-Mart notorious for their abysmal working conditions, as well as the employees of the stores - only to add to piles of wealth already obscenely vast.

Of course, what we call corporations are, in fact, perpetual motion machines, set up to endlessly extract wealth (and leave slagheaps of poverty behind) no matter what. They are generally organized in such a way that the brutality that leads to wealth extraction is committed by subcontractors at a distance or described in euphemisms, so that the stockholders, board members, and senior executives never really have to know what's being done in their names.

And yet it is their job to know - just as it is each of our jobs to know what systems feed us and exploit or defend us, and the job of writers, historians, and journalists to rectify the names for all these things. Groton to Moloch The most terrifying passage in whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's gripping book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is not about his time in Vietnam, or his life as a fugitive after he released the Pentagon Papers. It's about a 1969 dinnertime conversation with a co-worker in a swanky house in Pacific Palisades, California. It took place right after Ellsberg and five of his colleagues had written a letter to the New York Times arguing for immediate withdrawal from the unwinnable, brutal war in Vietnam, and Ellsberg's host said, "If I were willing to give up all this... if I were willing to renege on... my commitment to send my son to Groton... I would have signed the letter." In other words, his unnamed co-worker had weighed trying to prevent the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of people against the upper-middle-class perk of having his kid in a fancy prep school, and chosen the latter. The man who opted for Groton was, at least, someone who worked for what he had and who could imagine having painfully less. This is not true of the ultra-rich shaping the future of our planet. They could send tens of thousands to Groton, buy more Renoirs and ranches, and still not exploit the poor or destroy the environment, but they're as insatiable as they are ruthless. They are often celebrated in their aesthetic side effects: imposing mansions, cultural patronage, jewels, yachts. But in many, maybe most, cases they got rich through something a lot uglier, and that ugliness is still ongoing.

Rectifying the names would mean revealing the ugliness of the sources of their fortunes and the grotesque scale on which they contrive to amass them, rather than the gaudiness of the trinkets they buy with them. It would mean seeing and naming the destruction that is the corollary of most of this wealth creation.

A Storm Surge of Selfishness

Where this matters most is climate change. Why have we done almost nothing over the past 25 years about what was then a terrifying threat and is now a present catastrophe? Because it was bad for quarterly returns and fossil-fuel portfolios. When posterity indicts our era, this will be the feeble answer for why we did so little - that the rich and powerful with ties to the carbon-emitting industries have done everything in their power to prevent action on, or even recognition of, the problem. In this country in particular, they spent a fortune sowing doubt about the science of climate change and punishing politicians who brought the subject up.

In this way have we gone through four "debates" and nearly a full election cycle with climate change unmentioned and unmentionable. These three decades of refusing to respond have wasted crucial time. It's as though you were prevented from putting out a fire until it was raging: now the tundra is thawing and Greenland's ice shield is melting and nearly every natural system is disrupted, from the acidifying oceans to the erratic seasons to droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires, and the failure of crops. We can still respond, but the climate is changed; the damage we all spoke of, only a few years ago, as being in the future is here, now. You can look at the chief executive officers of the oil corporations - Chevron's John Watson, for example, who received almost $25 million ($1.57 million in salary and the rest in "compensation") in 2011 - or their major shareholders. They can want for nothing. They're so rich they could quit the game at any moment. When it comes to climate change, some of the wealthiest people in the world have weighed the fate of the Earth and every living thing on it for untold generations to come, the seasons and the harvests, this whole exquisite planet we evolved on, and they have come down on the side of more profit for themselves, the least needy people the world has ever seen.

Take those billionaire energy tycoons Charles and David Koch, who are all over American politics these days. They are spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat Obama, partly because he offends their conservative sensibilities, but also because he is less likely to be a completely devoted servant of their profit margins. He might, if we shout loud enough, rectify a few names. Under pressure, he might even listen to the public or environmental groups, while Romney poses no such problem (and under a Romney administration they will probably make more back in tax cuts than they are gambling on his election).

Two years ago, the Koch brothers spent $1 million on California's Proposition 23, an initiative written and put on the ballot by out-of-state oil companies to overturn our 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. It lost by a landslide, but the Koch brothers have also invested a small fortune in spreading climate-change denial and sponsoring the Tea Party (which they can count on to oppose climate change regulation as big government or interference with free enterprise). This year they're backing a California initiative to silence unions. They want nothing to stand in the way of corporate power and the exploitation of fossil fuels. Think of it as another kind of war, and consider the early casualties.

As the Irish Times put it in an editorial this summer:

"Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions are struggling to adapt to their changing climate. In the last three years, we have seen 10 million people displaced by floods in Pakistan, 13 million face hunger in east Africa, and over 10 million in the Sahel region of Africa face starvation. Even those figures only scrape the surface. According to the Global Humanitarian Forum, headed up by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, climate change is responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and affects 300 million people annually. By 2030, the annual death toll related to climate change is expected to rise to 500,000 and the economic cost to rocket to $600 billion."

This coming year may see a dramatic increase in hunger due to rising food prices from crop failures, including this summer's in the U.S. Midwest after a scorching drought in which the Mississippi River nearly ran dry and crops withered. We need to talk about climate change as a war against nature, against the poor (especially the poor of Africa), and against the rest of us. There are casualties, there are deaths, and there is destruction, and it's all mounting. Rectify the name, call it war. While we're at it, take back the term "pro-life" to talk about those who are trying to save the lives of all the creatures suffering from the collapse of the complex systems on which plant and animal as well as human lives depend. The other side: "pro-death." The complex array of effects from climate change and their global distribution, as well as their scale and the science behind them makes it harder to talk about than almost anything else on Earth, but we should talk about it all the more because of that. And yes, the rest of us should do more, but what is the great obstacle those who have already tried to do so much invariably come up against? The oil corporations, the coal companies, the energy industry, its staggering financial clout, its swarms of lobbyists, and the politicians in its clutches.

Those who benefit most from the status quo, I learned in studying disasters, are always the least willing to change. The Doublespeak on Taxes I'm a Californian so I faced the current version of American greed early. Proposition 13, the initiative that froze property taxes and made it nearly impossible to raise taxes in our state, went into effect in 1978, two years before California's former governor Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in part by catering to greed. Prop 13, as it came to be known, went into effect when California was still an affluent state with the best educational system in the world, including some of the top universities around, nearly free to in-staters all the way through graduate school. Tax cuts have trashed the state and that education system, and they are now doing the same to our country. The public sphere is to society what the biosphere is to life on earth: the space we live in together, and the attacks on them have parallels. What are taxes? They are that portion of your income that you contribute to the common good. Most of us are unhappy with how they're allocated - though few outside the left talk about the fact that more than half of federal discretionary expenditures go to our gargantuan military, more money than is spent on the next 14 militaries combined.

Ever since Reagan, the right has complained unceasingly about fantasy expenditures - from that president's "welfare queens" to Mitt Romney's attack on Big Bird and PBS (which consumes .001% of federal expenditures). As part of its religion of greed, the right invented a series of myths about where those taxes went, how paying them was the ultimate form of oppression, and what boons tax cuts were to bring us. They then delivered the biggest tax cuts of all to those who already had a superfluity of money and weren't going to pump the extra they got back into the economy. What they really were saying was that they wanted to hang onto every nickel, no matter how the public sphere was devastated, and that they really served the ultra-rich, over and over again, not the suckers who voted them into office. Despite decades of cutting to the bone, they continue to promote tax cuts as if they had yet to happen. Their constant refrain is that we are too poor to feed the poor or educate the young or heal the sick, but the poverty isn't monetary: it's moral and emotional.

Let's rectify some more language: even at this moment, the United States remains the richest nation the world has ever seen, and California - with the richest agricultural regions on the planet and a colossal high-tech boom still ongoing in Silicon Valley - is loaded, too. Whatever its problems, the U.S. is still swimming in abundance, even if that abundance is divided up ever more unequally. Really, there's more than enough to feed every child well, to treat every sick person, to educate everyone well without saddling them with hideous debt, to support the arts, to protect the environment - to produce, in short, a glorious society. The obstacle is greed.

We could still make the sorts of changes climate change requires of us and become a very different nation without overwhelming pain. We would then lead somewhat different lives - richer, not poorer, for most of us (in meaning, community, power, and hope). Because this culture of greed impoverishes all of us, it is, to call it by its true name, destruction.

Occupy the Names

One of the great accomplishments of Occupy Wall Street was this rectification of names. Those who came together under that rubric named the greed, inequality, and injustice in our system; they made the brutality of debt and the subjugation of the debtors visible; they called out Wall Street's crimes; they labeled the wealthiest among us the "1%," those who have made a profession out of pumping great sums of our wealth upwards (quite a different kind of tax). It was a label that made instant sense across much of the political spectrum.

It was a good beginning. But there's so much more to do. Naming is only part of the work, but it's a crucial first step. A doctor initially diagnoses, then treats; an activist or citizen must begin by describing what is wrong before acting. To do that well is to call things by their true names. Merely calling out these names is a beam of light powerful enough to send the destroyers it shines upon scurrying for cover like roaches.

After that, you still need to name your vision, your plan, your hope, your dream of something better. Names matter; language matters; truth matters. In this era when the mainstream media serve obfuscation and evasion more than anything else (except distraction), alternative media, social media, demonstrations in the streets, and conversations between friends are the refuges of truth, the places where we can begin to rectify the names. So start talking.

Serendipity, and a poem, "Only Once," by Denise Levertov

The poetry of Denise Levertov has long been a valued companion. Six years ago I wrote why that has been so. Interested readers may find that post here, with three more Levertov poems.

The question "Why?" has it's origins in the very beginnings of our learning language. Children are fascinated and delighted by their growing capacities to speak their mother tongue, their mother's tongue, their parents' tongue — in fortunate families, such as that of my great-grandaughter, their parents tongues (plural).

My great-grandaughter lives with her parents in a small house on the outskirts of Quito, Ecuador. From infancy she has learned both Spanish and English. In her still small world, her still small voice, the voice we used to attribute to God, she pimarily speaks Spanish. Her father, my grandson, was born in Edinburgh, but now speaks Spanish better than he speaks English (or Scottish). We tend to forget languages we don't often use, just as we may forget — at least until we are next stirred by the mystery of memory — much about people we no longer see.

For example, I have forgotten my mother's voice. She did not leave me a recording or poems, but she left me a great deal for which I am grateful.

The reader by now will be accustomed to my habit of periphrasis and my incurable attachment to serendipity, the aptitude for making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. The word was used by Horace Walpole in the mid-1700s. Walpole said he took it from a Persian fairy tale, "The princes of Serendip," whose heroes, he said, "were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." For those determined to find origins (like Eric Partridge), Serendip was the Arab name for Sri Lanka, from the Arabic word serendib, roughly speaking, golden island.

I wish accident and sagacity would always go together. They often don't.

C.G Jung probably adapted serendipity (serendipitously, as it were) in coming upon his concept of synchronicity, which has found its way into English usage. Something is not sought, but it's found, and we then come to feel it was meant to come, or may have been there all along without our recognition, thus causing a shiver of pleasure or wonder. Denise Levertov knew such experiences.

 

Denise Levertov, 1923-1997

 With that introduction, here is a poem of Denise Levertov.

 

Only Once 

 
All which, because it was 
flame and song and granted us 
joy, we thought we'd do, be, revisit, 
turns out to have been what it was 
that once, only; every invitation 
did not begin 
a series, a build-up: the marvelous 
did happen in our lives, our stories 
are not drab with its absence: but don't 
expect to return for more. Whatever more 
there will be will be 
unique as those were unique. Try 
to acknowledge the next 
song in its body -- halo of flames as utterly 
present, as now or never.

 

Yes, the next song to appear will not — not clearly, not at once — maybe, as Levertov suggests, not at all, come from the last song you knew, or heard, or sang.

At least, your next song will be more likely to grace you with its presence, its joy, if you are prepared to imagine it 'in its own body" — and in yours, not in some other body, nor in your closet of ready-to-wear songs.

 

 

Licking and grooming

Nick Kristof’s title is too cute, like a teddy bear. But he writes an inspired commentary on our culture and what we can do at home and in our back yards to make our own and our loved ones’ lives - our family and friends and community - fuller, happier and more productive, right now and for the rest of our and their time on this earth. Who knows, maybe we could do something useful for mother earth herself.

Nicholas Kristof

Cuddle your kid

New York Times, 21 October 2012

A McGill University neurologist, Michael Meaney, noticed that some of the mother rats he worked with spent a great deal of time licking and grooming their babies. Other rat moms were much less cuddly.

This natural variation had long-term consequences. Meaney’s team found that when the rats grew up, those that had been licked and groomed did better at finding their way through mazes.

They were more social and curious. They even lived longer.

Meaney’s team dissected adult rats and found that licking led to differences in brain anatomy, so that rats that had been licked more were better able to control stress responses.

So, could the human version of licking and grooming — hugging and kissing babies, and reading to them — fortify our offspring and even our society as well?

One University of Minnesota study that began in the 1970s followed 267 children of first-time low-income mothers for nearly four decades. It found that whether a child received supportive parenting in the first few years of life was at least as good a predictor as I.Q. of whether he or she would graduate from high school.

This may illuminate one way that poverty replicates itself from generation to generation. Children in poor households grow up under constant stress, disproportionately raised by young, single mothers also under tremendous stress, and the result may be brain architecture that makes it harder for the children to thrive at school or succeed in the work force.

Yet the cycle can be broken, and the implication is that the most cost-effective way to address poverty isn’t necessarily housing vouchers or welfare initiatives or prison-building. Rather, it may be early childhood education and parenting programs.

Scholars like James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Dr. Jack Shonkoff of Harvard have pioneered this field, and decades of fascinating research is now wonderfully assembled in Paul Tough’s important new book, “How Children Succeed.” Long may this book dwell on the best-seller lists!

As Tough suggests, the evidence is mounting that conservatives are right about some fundamental issues relating to poverty. For starters, we can’t talk just about welfare or tax policy but must also consider culture and character.

“There is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable,” Tough writes, than grit, resilience, perseverance and optimism.

Yet conservatives sometimes mistakenly see that as the end of the conversation.

“This science suggests a very different reality,” Tough writes. “It says that the character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which kids grow up. That means the rest of us — society as a whole — can do an enormous amount to influence their development.”

Here’s an example: the Nurse-Family Partnership, one of my favorite groups fighting poverty in America. It sends nurses on regular visits to at-risk first-time moms, from pregnancy until the child turns 2. The nurses warn about alcohol or drug abuse and encourage habits of attentive parenting, like reading to the child. The results are stunning: at age 15, these children are less than half as likely to have been arrested as kids from similar circumstances who were not enrolled.

Maybe we’re beginning to crack the code of how to chip away at so many of America’s domestic problems. Tough cites evidence that while toxic stress or unsupportive parenting damages the prefrontal cortex in infancy, this damage can often be undone at least through adolescence.

Daniel Ellsberg on the Choice between Obama and Romney

I almost worked with Dan Ellsberg. He left The RAND Corporation with what became "The Pentagon Papers" just before I arrived at RAND to do a year of research in the mid-1960s. If he had waited a year to leave, my own book on the US's high altitude B-52 air war against Laos and North Vietnam, so terribly ill-conceived and destructive of the Vietnamese people, would likely now have been part of the public record of a shameful time in American foreign and military policy.  As it is, having not availed myself of the Freedom of Information Act, there may be two copies of my book in existence, one in the basement of RAND, the other in the basement of the Pentagon. It would be of significance now only to historians of the war, or students of hubris.

I admire Ellsberg for his intelligence and courage, for his willingness to put himself on the line for what he believes. He's less fond of president Obama than I am, less willing to forgive the failures of progressive changes in the president's first term, less hopeful about the second term. But he, like I am, is convinced that the first priority is to deny the White House to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who would be catastrophic for the United States and the world. He isn't in a swing state and will not vote for Obama. I live in California, hardly a swing state either. I am voting for Obama. I have real and tangible hope that his second term will confirm my faith in his presidency. In any case, Dan Ellsberg is worthy of a read.

And something more I recently learned from Rebecca Solnit. These are her words:

 

The most terrifying passage in whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s gripping book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, is not about his time in Vietnam, or his life as a fugitive after he released the Pentagon Papers. It’s about a 1969 dinnertime conversation with a co-worker in a swanky house in Pacific Palisades, California.  It took place right after Ellsberg and five of his colleagues had written a letter to the New York Times arguing for immediate withdrawal from the unwinnable, brutal war in Vietnam, and Ellsberg’s host said, “If I were willing to give up all this... if I were willing to renege on... my commitment to send my son to Groton... I would have signed the letter.”

In other words, his unnamed co-worker had weighed trying to prevent the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of people against the upper-middle-class perk of having his kid in a fancy prep school, and chosen the latter. The man who opted for Groton was, at least, someone who worked for what he had and who could imagine having painfully less. This is not true of the ultra-rich shaping the future of our planet.

They could send tens of thousands to Groton, buy more Renoirs and ranches, and still not exploit the poor or destroy the environment, but they’re as insatiable as they are ruthless. They are often celebrated in their aesthetic side effects: imposing mansions, cultural patronage, jewels,yachts.  But in many, maybe most, cases they got rich through something a lot uglier, and that ugliness is still ongoing. Rectifying the names would mean revealing the ugliness of the sources of their fortunes and the grotesque scale on which they contrive to amass them, rather than the gaudiness of the trinkets they buy with them. It would mean seeing and naming the destruction that is the corollary of most of this wealth creation.

 

Defeat Romney, Without Illusions About Obama

By Daniel Ellsberg, Reader Supported News

18 October 2012

 

t is urgently important to prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.

The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine -- progressives, especially activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities during this period.

An activist colleague recently said to me: "I hear you're supporting Obama."

I was startled, and took offense. "Supporting Obama? Me?!"

"I lose no opportunity publicly," I told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who's decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who's launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than all previous presidents put together. "Would you call that support?"

My friend said, "But on Democracy Now you urged people in swing states to vote for him! How could you say that? I don't live in a swing state, but I will not and could not vote for Obama under any circumstances."

My answer was: a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better -- no different -- on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women's reproductive rights, health coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.

I told him: "I don't 'support Obama.' I oppose the current Republican Party. This is not a contest between Barack Obama and a progressive candidate. The voters in a handful or a dozen close-fought swing states are going to determine whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years, or not."

As Noam Chomsky said recently, "The Republican organization today is extremely dangerous, not just to this country, but to the world. It's worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to power, without sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives."

Following that logic, he's said to an interviewer what my friend heard me say to Amy Goodman: "If I were a person in a swing state, I'd vote against Romney/Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other choice."

The election is at this moment a toss-up. That means this is one of the uncommon occasions when we progressives -- a small minority of the electorate -- could actually have a significant influence on the outcome of a national election, swinging it one way or the other.

The only way for progressives and Democrats to block Romney from office, at this date, is to persuade enough people in swing states to vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone else. And that has to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned liberals who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a third-party candidate (because like me they've been not just disappointed but disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and will probably keep doing).

They have to be persuaded to vote, and to vote in a battleground state for Obama not anyone else, despite the terrible flaws of the less-bad candidate, the incumbent. That's not easy. As I see it, that's precisely the "effort" Noam is referring to as worth expending right now to prevent the Republicans' rise to power. And it will take progressives -- some of you reading this, I hope -- to make that effort of persuasion effectively.

It will take someone these disheartened progressives and liberals will listen to. Someone manifestly without illusions about the Democrats, someone who sees what they see when they look at the president these days: but who can also see through candidates Romney or Ryan on the split-screen, and keep their real, disastrous policies in focus.

It's true that the differences between the major parties are not nearly as large as they and their candidates claim, let alone what we would want. It's even fair to use Gore Vidal's metaphor that they form two wings ("two right wings," as some have put it) of a single party, the Property or Plutocracy Party, or as Justin Raimondo says, the War Party.

Still, the political reality is that there are two distinguishable wings, and one is reliably even worse than the other, currently much worse overall. To be in denial or to act in neglect of that reality serves only the possibly imminent, yet presently avoidable, victory of the worse.

The traditional third-party mantra, "There's no significant difference between the major parties" amounts to saying: "The Republicans are no worse, overall." And that's absurd. It constitutes shameless apologetics for the Republicans, however unintended. It's crazily divorced from present reality.

And it's not at all harmless to be propagating that absurd falsehood. It has the effect of encouraging progressives even in battleground states to refrain from voting or to vote in a close election for someone other than Obama, and more importantly, to influence others to act likewise.That's an effect that serves no one but the Republicans, and ultimately the 1 percent.

It's not merely understandable, it's entirely appropriate to be enraged at Barack Obama. As I am. He has often acted outrageously, not merely timidly or "disappointingly." If impeachment were politically imaginable on constitutional grounds, he's earned it (like George W. Bush, and many of his predecessors!) It is entirely human to want to punish him, not to "reward" him with another term or a vote that might be taken to express trust, hope or approval.

But rage is not generally conducive to clear thinking. And it often gets worked out against innocent victims, as would be the case here domestically, if refusals to vote for him resulted in Romney's taking key battleground states that decide the outcome of this election.

To punish Obama in this particular way, on Election Day -- by depriving him of votes in swing states and hence of office in favor of Romney and Ryan -- would punish most of all the poor and marginal in society, and workers and middle class as well: not only in the U.S. but worldwide in terms of the economy (I believe the Republicans could still convert this recession to a Great Depression), the environment and climate change. It could well lead to war with Iran (which Obama has been creditably resisting, against pressure from within his own party). And it would spell, via Supreme Court appointments, the end of Roe v. Wade and of the occasional five to four decisions in favor of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The reelection of Barack Obama, in itself, is not going to bring serious progressive change, end militarism and empire, or restore the Constitution and the rule of law. That's for us and the rest of the people to bring about after this election and in the rest of our lives -- through organizing, building movements and agitating.

In the eight to twelve close-fought states -- especially Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, but also Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin -- for any progressive to encourage fellow progressives and others in those states to vote for a third-party candidate is, I would say, to be complicit in facilitating the election of Romney and Ryan, with all its consequences.

To think of that as urging people in swing states to "vote their conscience" is, I believe, dangerously misleading advice. I would say to a progressive that if your conscience tells you on Election Day to vote for someone other than Obama in a battleground state, you need a second opinion. Your conscience is giving you bad counsel.

I often quote a line by Thoreau that had great impact for me: "Cast your whole vote: not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." He was referring, in that essay, to civil disobedience, or as he titled it himself, "Resistance to Civil Authority."

It still means that to me. But this is a year when for people who think like me -- and who, unlike me, live in battleground states -- casting a strip of paper is also important. Using your whole influence this month to get others to do that, to best effect, is even more important.

That means for progressives in the next couple of weeks -- in addition to the rallies, demonstrations, petitions, lobbying (largely against policies or prospective policies of President Obama, including austerity budgeting next month), movement-building and civil disobedience that are needed all year round and every year -- using one's voice and one's e-mails and op-eds and social media to encourage citizens in swing states to vote against a Romney victory by voting for the only real alternative, Barack Obama.

Daniel Ellsberg is a former State and Defense Department official who has been arrested for acts of non-violent civil disobedience over eighty times, initially for copying and releasing the top secret Pentagon Papers, for which he faced 115 years in prison. Living in a non-swing state, he does not intend to vote for President Obama.

The soul, by Wislawa Symborska

I continue to marvel.

 

NOTHING'S A GIFT

 

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.

I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.

I'll have to pay for myself

with my self,

give up my life for my life.

 

Here's how it's arranged:

The heart can be repossessed,

the liver, too,

and each single finger and toe.

 

Too late to tear up the terms,

my debts will be repaid,

and I'll be fleeced,

or, more precisely, flayed.

 

I move about the planet

in a crush of other debtors.

some are saddled with the burden

of paying off their wings.

Others must, willy-nilly,

account for every leaf.

 

Every tissue in us lies

on the debit side.

Not a tentacle or tendril

is for keeps.

 

The inventory, infinitely detailed,

implies we'll be left

not just empty-handed

but handless too.

 

I can't remember

where, when, and why

I let someone open

this account in my name.

 

We call the protest against this

the soul.

And it's the only item

not included on the list.

 

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

Stockholm: Wislawa Szymborska and the 1996 Nobel Prize for Poetry

I've been immersed of late in the writings of Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1996. Mostly I've been reading and re-reading her poems, but then I found myself wanting to know if she traveled from her home in Kraków to Stockholm to receive the Prize in person, because if she did, she would probably have given a speech when she accepted the Prize. I wanted to read that speech.

I'm very glad I followed my nose, because I've been richly rewarded. By two gems. First, by her reflections on the importance of the sentence, "I don't know." It seems like an ordinary, unexceptional sentence, only three words, and expressive of our ignorance at that. Or maybe not only that. Roll it around in your mind. Imagine different ways of saying it, different ways you have said it to yourself or others. Was it the end of a story or the beginning, or — taking a little inspiration from quantum physics — perhaps both at once?

That is just what Wislawa Szymborska was thinking about, and finding a way to say, in her speech on that gray day in Stockholm, the 7th of December 1996. Perhaps she was thinking, dreaming and jotting notes on the train from Kraków to Stockholm. (I imagine her on a train.) Anyway, she said something important about that maligned phrase, "I don't know."  And her reflections took her wonderously from inspiration, to "I don't know," to astonishment. 

"[I]nspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

"That little phrase 'I don't know' is small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

"Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

"I sometimes dream of situations that can't possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least. That done, I would grab his hand. "'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress that you're sitting under hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I'd also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you're planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you've already expressed? Or maybe you're tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy - so what if it's fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt you'll say, 'I've written everything down, I've got nothing left to add.' There's no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself.

"The world - whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing.

"But 'astonishing' is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We're astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn't based on comparison with something else.

"Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like 'the ordinary world,' 'ordinary life,' 'the ordinary course of events' ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

"It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them."

 

 

 

Wislawa Szymborska, poet, 1923-2012

Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received

international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature 

in 1996. 

In awarding the prize, the Academy praised her “poetry that with 

ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come 

to light in fragments of human reality.” 

— From a biographical note on the website of the Poetry Foundation.

Collections of her poems and prose that have been translated into English:

Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts (1981)

People on a Bridge: Poems (1990)

View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995)

Poems New and Collected (2000)

Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska (2002)

Non-Required Reading: Prose Pieces (2002)

Monologue of a Dog (2005)

Here (2012)

The same short note of the Poetry Foundation includes these two sentences: 

Readers of Szymborska's poetry have often noted its wit, irony, 
and deceptive simplicity. Her poetry examines domestic details 
and occasions, playing these against the backdrop of history.




Szymborska has taught me especially about the potential and realizable intimacy of 
poetry and politics, a theme to which I return in my life and writing again and again.


In her memory, here are six of her poems that have moved me:

Life While-You-Wait

 
Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.
 
I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.
 
I have to guess on the spot
just what this play's all about.
 
Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can't conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.
 
Words and impulses you can't take back,
stars you'll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run?
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.
 
If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).
 
You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I've done.

Consolation

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.   


True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.
Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.


Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,   
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,   
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

 
Children of Our Age


We are children of our age,
it's a political age.

All day long, all through the night,
all affairs--yours, ours, theirs--
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don't say speaks for itself.
So either way you're talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it's a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning
you don't even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months;
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.




The End and the Beginning


After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post 
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

 

Hitler's First Photograph


And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!
Will he grow up to be an LL.D?
Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know:
printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride?
Maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter?

Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey bun.
While he was being born, a year ago,
there was no dearth of signs on the earth and in the sky:
spring sun, geraniums in windows,
the organ-grinder's music in the yard,
a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper.
Then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream.
A dove seen in a dream means joyful news--
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartchen knocking.

A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib,
our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well,
looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,
like the tots in every other family album.
Sh-h-h, let's not start crying, sugar.
The camera will click from under that black hood.

The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau.
And Braunau is a small, but worthy town--
honest businesses, obliging neighbors,
smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.


A Few Words on the Soul
We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.







 



 

Joanna Macy and Rebecca Solnit, two of my heros

I want simply to introduce two of my heros. Both, not accidentally, are women. I grew up with strong, thoughtful, compassionate women, survivors and straight shooters all, and all had a great sense of humor: my mother Anna Roosevelt, my grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt, and my older sister, Ellie Seagraves. (All, by the way, bore the same family name, still being passed from generation to generation in the Roosevelt family — Anna Eleanor. They were, and remain, my intimate heros. 

But one has heros in the wider world as well. My grandmother Eleanor bridged the two for me. Here, in their own words, are two women I have never met, but I have been deeply influenced by their writing and their character, which shines through in their writing. They are Joanna Macy and Rebecca Solnit. Please meet them.

Joanna Macy

Joanna still travels the earth, if less often and closer to home. Her wisdom still shines. She still makes me weep, laugh, hope, love and work. Here are some of her current and stunning comments:

 

 

For peace, justice, and life on Earth, fresh ways of seeing arise, and ancient ways return....I share....in service to the revolution of our time: the "Great Turning" from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.

The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way todestroying 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.

 

The key: overcoming denial

We need to recognize that denial itself is the greatest danger we face. We have the technology to make sweeping and fairly effective changes. But not much can be done until we’re ready to acknowledge the situation we’re in, to let it sink in.

That kind of acknowledgement isn’t easy. Our fear of despair functions to filter out painful information, and furthermore it’s not in the interest of our economic system, as it is presently structured, for us to get alarmed. It’s in the perceived self-interest of the state, the corporations, and the media which serve them for us to imagine that everything is just fine and that we are happy – or that we’re just about to be happy if we buy this product or that product. So to break through this protective screen we’ve erected, it’s very helpful to see it as a spell, like in the old fairy tales.

It’s like the spell that grips the courtiers in the castle of the Fisher King in the legend of the Holy Grail: They’re in the middle of the Wasteland where nothing grows anymore, and both the land and the rulers have lost their powers of regeneration. But they’re mesmerized, so they maintain the status quo. They all move around on automatic, like smiling robots. We are under a comparable spell, and we can break out of it the way the Fisher King and his courtiers did. Thanks to Parsifal’s caring questions – "What aileth thee?" – they encountered what they already knew beneath the denial and the repressed despair, and that smack of reality woke them up. That direct connection – the great erotic connection of telling the truth – was like the kiss that woke up Sleeping Beauty.

So we break the spell by loving ourselves and each other enough to tell the truth. Our own experience, as inhabitants of an endangered planet, gives us the authority and the authenticity to tell the truth about what we see and feel and know is happening to our world. That profound inner movement of acknowledgement brings a great release of intelligence and creativity, because repressing what we know is a tremendous energy drain. It’s not so much a question of incorporating new information – sitting down at the desk and learning a new lesson – but rather relaxing our defenses and saying, "Okay, yeah, I know this is going on." There is a level on which this awareness is already present.

Obviously, we still need to transmit critically important information, but let’s do it in a way that respects the fact that on some deep level, people know they are living on an endangered planet. And indeed, it is that inner knowledge which produces what we mistakenly take for apathy or indifference. The work that I have been doing over the last ten years convinces me that so-called "public apathy" does not stem from indifference or callousness or even ignorance so much as from fear of pain. And that pain itself stems from an innate capacity to suffer with our world.

We make the mistake of thinking that we are essentially separate and fragile, and that if we acknowledge this terrifying information we’ll break. It’s a mistake that is fostered by our culture and our political-economic system. So we need to respect ourselves and realize how tough we are – tough enough to be fully present to our world and not break.

 

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is a marvel of perspicacious generosity and determined hope. A Californian like Joanna, I would be very surprised if they are not good friends. Here she is, in her own words. See how they echo Joanna's intelligence and graceful, passionate expression, how their fundamental values are very similar. She writes prolifically, and travels widely. I draw almost arbitrarily from a very recent essay on TomDispatch. She calls it "The Rain on my Parade: A Letter to my Dismal Allies":

Dear Allies,

Forgive me if briefly I take my eyes away from the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal and it is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love, and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.

O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.

The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they’re hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things.

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

So here I want to lay out an insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it and maybe even work with it. 

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

When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that’s not a good reason to continue to pound down anything in the vicinity. Consider what needs to be raised up as well.  Consider our powers, our victories, our possibilities; ask yourself just what you’re contributing, what kind of story you’re telling, and what kind you want to be telling.

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

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.

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

Nine years ago I began writing about hope, and I eventually began to refer to my project as “snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left." All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don’t matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable. If you’re privileged you can then go home and watch bad TV or reinforce your grumpiness with equally grumpy friends.

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

There are really only two questions for activists: What do you want to achieve?  And who do you want to be?  And those two questions are deeply entwined. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.

That is the small ongoing victory on which great victories can be built, and you do want victories, don’t you? Make sure you’re clear on the answer to that, and think about what they would look like.

Love,

Rebecca

________________________

 

In the voices of Rebecca Solnit and Joanna Macy -— two generations of women activists — I hear the voices of my sister, my mother and my grandmother, and I feel pride and gratitude for them all.

Ghosts of The New Deal: Time to Summon FDR

This post has been a long time coming. Major media — print and television — even PBS and NPR — are under the sway of wealthy corporate interests as much as President Obama and the U.S. Congress. The article I reprint below is truth-telling as most Americans alive today — Americans who do not remember the Great Depression or the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt —  have never heard.

The first generation of historians and biographers attentive to Roosevelt and the New Deal no longer lives; the second generation of such scholarship has reached its maturity. The third generation is up and coming. (Between the second and the third see, for example, H.W. Brands' fine biography published in 2008, "Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.")

Roosevelt, as Professor Richard D. Wolff indicates in the article I reprint below, did not anticipate the ongoing power of the moneyed interests he managed to draw into what Professor Wolff appropriately calls his "grand social compromise." The New Deal was eviscerated after the Second World War, and was effectively buried in the 1980s under the bland presidency of Ronald Reagan. Its sole surviving symbol, the Social Security program, continues to nourish a generation of older Americans — including myself — a large portion of whom don't remember its origin in 1935. 

It was my privilege during much of World War II to live in The White House with my mother, Anna Roosevelt, my grandfather, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and grandmother, Eleanor Roosevelt. I was a child, but the imprint of those formative years is vivid and indelible. For a tangle of reasons, none of them of importance and none of them very sound, it is an experience I've been reluctant to share, although I began to do so with a book I wrote over forty years ago, "A Love in Shadow: The Story of Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, told by their son" (W.W. Norton, 1978). My grandfather died in office shortly after the beginning of his fourth term as president, on April 12, 1945, a casualty of the war he did so much to win. My grandmother Eleanor lived to age 78; she died in 1962. I lived with her during my undergraduate years at Amherst College, in the late 1950s almost until her death. She was my first and finest mentor. Her values still are bedrock.

The article reprinted below, drawn to my attention by a close friend, stirred memories of those early years. Reading it and related other literature has fed an evolving idea of experimentally revisiting that time in my current writing.

I haven't met the author, Richard D. Wolff, although he and I lived and worked very near each other, in Amherst, Massachusetts, during the years I was researching and writing "A Love in Shadow." He  is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008.

The political, economic and social crises we face today, as Professor Wolff indicates, are every bit as grave as the circumstances FDR faced in crafting and piloting the New Deal in his twelve years as president. There are potent similarities between those times and our own. And there are enormous differences. There is not even much similarity between the Republican party of the 1930s and 40s and that of Mitt Romney, although both are hapless. The Southern Dixiecrats, so important and so limiting in FDR's coalition, have long ago turned Republican.

The currently most salient crisis of this country and this earth — the devastating impact of global warming, corporate pollution of life, the Wal-Martization of America, the utter failure of consumer capitalism to create a sustainable world — were not FDR's issues, although they bear some similarity. If there is a single most challenging difference, it is that the American people of the Great Depression tangibly knew they were suffering. Today's Americans, by and large, do not — at least not yet. If Professor Wolff's account and analysis below have a prominent failing, it is his inexplicable lack of attention to this most serious of challenges. As in FDR's time, the prevailing model of economic and political governance has failed. The need, now as then, is not for temporizing and modest initiative or continuing economic growth; the need is for paradigmatic change. I fear we don't have the leadership to make it happen. Grass roots and shoots may thrive, but there is no modern FDR to nourish them and make of them a dominant political movement. Some eloquent clarion calls are heard — I think of a recent collection of essays that appeared in Orion Magazine, "Change Everything Now," and its sibling collection of shorter pieces, "Fifty-Year Plan" — but it is hard, as yet, to see how they can turn into real bottom up systemic change.

True, we can't judge Barack Obama by the standards we apply in historical retrospect to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Obama is not as canny a political leader as Roosevelt, nor as gifted. Roosevelt had genuine magic, real mojo. Much as he needs and deserves our support, President Obama doesn't have magic. He leads a nation deeply divided against itself. He stands in a world in as much peril as that encountered by FDR in his presidency of unparalled length and accomplishment from 1933 to 1945 — through a great Depression and World War II. We must wish Obama well and work for his reelection in less than a month. The alternative would be terrible and unconscionable, though sadly it isn't inconceivable. 

___________________________________

 

Richard D. Wolff is currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New Shool University, New York City. Earlier he taught economics at Yale (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). He writes for Truthout and is providing post-presidential debate analysis on Pacifica radio stations throughout the country. 

 

 

 

Ghost of the New Deal Haunts Democrats' Agenda, but It's Time to Summon FDR

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis

President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, at approximately 3:30 pm EST on August 14, 1935. (Photo: Social Security Online)

 

Obama and most Democrats are so dependent on contributions and support from business and the rich that they dare not discuss, let alone implement, the kinds of policies Roosevelt employed the last time US capitalism crashed.

While Bush's absence was obvious at the 2012 Republican convention, so was another president's absence at the Democratic convention. Romney banished Bush because his last year, 2008, linked Republicans in office with economic crisis and big bank bailouts: not a vote-getting association. The Democrats banished President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but for a different reason, and in a different way. They feared reminding people of what FDR did the last time US capitalism crashed. Obama and most Democrats are so dependent on contributions and support from business and the rich that they dare not discuss, let alone implement, Roosevelt-type policies. Obama's convention speech passingly referred to FDR's "bold, persistent experimentation." Obama said nothing about what FDR actually did in the last great collapse of capitalism, nothing about his policies' achievements or their shortcomings.

What FDR accomplished needs rescue from banishment by Obama and Democratic leaders. In the deep 1930s Depression, FDR massively assisted average Americans. He created the Social Security and unemployment compensation systems that directly helped tens of millions. His federal jobs programs provided jobs and incomes for additional tens of millions from 1934 to 1941. These "stimulus plans" helped average citizens with financial supports, jobs and paychecks. Those citizens then spent on goods and services that realized profits trickling up for businesses. FDR's trickle-up economics worked: far from perfectly, but better for most Americans than Bush's or Obama's policies.

Leading Democrats today lack the courage even to propose what FDR did. Obama keeps offering incentives for the private sector to hire more, but that policy failed over the last five years to return employment to pre-crisis levels. Obama refuses to expand Social Security as an anti-crisis policy. Instead, Obama and the Democrats pursue chiefly trickle-down policies: bail out banks and select mega-corporations, boost credit and stock markets with infusions of cheap money, and hope something trickles down to lift average peoples' incomes. Despite five years of failed trickle-down economics, Democrats today still fear to consider FDR's alternatives, acting as if they never happened.

Powerfully organized worker demands caused FDR's conversion to trickle-up economics. Stunningly successful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unionization campaigns in the 1930s coordinated with rising memberships, activities, and influences of socialist and communist parties. These forces demanded and obtained direct help for the mass of people, while some among them also advocated basic social change as the best crisis solution. Today, Obama and most Democrats try to repress emerging parallel forces such as Occupy Wall Street. They simultaneously excuse their weak, so-called "moderate" policies by blaming the supposed lack of public support for more progressive policies.

FDR leveraged and channeled organized worker pressures into a grand social compromise, his New Deal. It pleased majorities of the American public and of capitalists and the richest 5 percent. That won him repeated re-election. The New Deal got corporations and the wealthy to finance Washington's provision of help to average Americans in exchange for the CIO, socialists and communists muting demands within their ranks for system change. By warning capitalists and the rich that his New Deal was their only alternative to revolution along Soviet lines, FDR split their ranks and won support from many. He likewise got most in the CIO, socialist and communist parties to marginalize their anti-capitalism in return for a real social safety net. FDR never persuaded all capitalists and all the rich; serious, determined opposition arose. Likewise, dissenting socialists and communists persisted in fighting for basic economic and political changes. However, FDR's New Deal social compromise prevailed.

Corporations and the rich thus paid high taxes and made large loans to finance Social Security, unemployment compensation and federal jobs programs. From the 1940s to the 1960s, corporate income tax rates and tax rates on high-income individuals were much higher than today. FDR took the money his policies needed from corporations and the rich. That's where the money was then, and that's where it is now. But unlike FDR, today's Democrats have no plan or program to get it. So, discussing what FDR actually did got banished from their convention.

Choosing trickle-up economics to cope with capitalism's crash was key to FDR being re-elected four consecutive times. No other president in US history had such success. After FDR's death, Republicans moved to limit presidents to a maximum of two consecutive terms. Like FDR, Obama rode a capitalist crash into power, but Obama risks being ridden out because of failed economic policies. Yet Democrats dare not offend their financial backers to follow FDR's way or even acknowledge its relevance.

The New Deal also had flaws that enabled it to be destroyed. Those capitalists and rich individuals who never welcomed the New Deal were determined to undo it once the war ended in 1945. Because FDR's compromise had preserved the capitalist system, shareholders and the boards of directors they selected kept their positions inside the structure of corporations. There, they retained the incentives and accumulated the power and resources to undermine the New Deal and its major supports. Sometimes these enemies of the New Deal shaped government policies: for example, to eradicate communist and socialist parties (McCarthyism, etcetera) or to weaken unions (Taft-Hartley, etcetera). Sometimes, corporate owners and leaders directly funded foundations, think tanks and organizations molding public opinion. As dissenting socialists and communists had warned about FDR's grand compromise: by leaving enterprises in the hands of major shareholders and their boards of directors, the New Deal had signed its own death warrant.

By the 1980s, corporations and the rich had sufficiently weakened labor and the left to more openly dismantle what remained of the New Deal. Market deregulation, tax cuts, neoliberalism, neo-conservatism and privatization were the new era's processes and watchwords - with Reagan as mascot. Because they developed no effective counterstrategy to affirmatively defend what the business community and the rich assaulted, Democrats lost parts of their electoral base and, thus, strengthened the Republicans. Keeping FDR's achievements away from their 2012 convention marked another step in the Democrats' decline.

 

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission of the author.

Finding the Scarf

A lovely poem about memory and the passage of time by Wyatt Townley, who is a 4th generation Kansan. I did not know of her work until today. The poem is from her most recent book of poems, The Afterlives of Trees, Woodley Press, 2011. Trees, she says, "are quiet teachers. Their height relies on their depth. They show us how to hold on, and how to let go—and how to begin again, season after season, year after year."

"Her new collection of poems uses trees as a motif to explore the theme of transformation and features stunning black-and-white images by Michael Johnson, a master photographer likened by critics to Ansel Adams."

I am particularly grateful for her use of the word shushes,gracefully conveying the memory of silence and movement. Perhaps it is memory itself that shushes, as well as the chill of "late November light." Perhaps like the remembered light, all memory slants. "The spreading twilight" is among the most treasured times, along with the more elusive dawn, the slow coming and closing of day.

 

Finding the Scarf 

The woods are the book

we read over and over as children.

Now trees lie at angles, felled

by lightning, torn by tornados,

silvered trunks turning back

 

to earth. Late November light

slants through the oaks

as our small parade, father, mother, child,

shushes along, the wind searching treetops

for the last leaf. Childhood lies

 

on the forest floor, not evergreen

but oaken, its branches latched

to a graying sky. Here is the scarf

we left years ago like a bookmark,

 

meaning to return the next day,

having just turned our heads

toward a noise in the bushes,

toward the dinnerbell in the distance,

 

toward what we knew and did not know

we knew, in the spreading twilight

that returns changed to a changed place.

                           — Wyatt Townley

 

 

More from Wyatt Townley's website:

 

Wyatt Townley writes books, teaches yoga, and is tall for her age. Her work has been read by Garrison Keillor on NPR, featured by Ted Kooser in hisAmerican Life in Poetry column, and published in journals ranging from The Paris Review to Newsweek. Among her books of poems: The Breathing Field (Little, Brown), Perfectly Normal (The Smith), and her new collection, The Afterlives of Trees (Woodley Press). She won a Master Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Kansas Arts Commission to complete it.

She has also written nonfiction. HarperCollins published Wyatt's yoga book,Yoganetics: Be Fit, Healthy, and Relaxed One Breath at a Time, deemed an "Editor's Choice" by Yoga Journal. Using her background as both dancer and journalist, she wrote the commemorative 50^th anniversary history of Kansas City Ballet (The Kansas City Star).

Her work has been featured widely in journals including North American Review, Dance Magazine, Newsweek, The Paris Review, New Letters, Piano & Keyboard, Margie, Parents, Southern Poetry Review, Yoga Journal, Heliotrope, Western Humanities Review, Kansas City Magazine, Orion, Connecticut River Review, Self, Small Press, TV Guide, The New York Times, among others.

Professionally, Wyatt has always lived something of a double life, straddling the worlds of motion (dance/yoga) and stasis (writing: as in Hemingway's "apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair"). She continues along both paths and delights as they entwine.

_______________________

 

 

Wyatt Townley also teaches and offers readings of her work. Here is a review:

"It was absolutely wonderful to have a poet of her caliber....Letters from Home: Writing from the Body was an extraordinary journey into the landscape of the senses. The combination of guided imagery and experiential prompts produced a deep and at times startling awareness of the synergistic relationship between mind, body, and the mystery sometimes referred to as soul."

—Maril Crabtree, director of education, The Writers Place

________________________

 

 

And here, some response to The Afterlives of Trees:

The Afterlives of Trees was introduced on NPR by Garrison Keillor, featured by US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in his American Life in Poetry column, and completed with a Master Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Kansas Arts Commission.

"The Afterlives of Trees brings together exquisite poetry of great tenderness, strength, and beauty, but it is also a book of revelation....a love song to the life force."

—Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, poet laureate of Kansas

"Go into the woods, which are these pages. These accomplished poems open a clearing through which to see the world afresh. Lucid, imaginative, present, they focus on small details and expand to encompass the universe...I wish I could have written these poems, perhaps especially the love poems—but then, they are all love poems."

—Laurel Blossom

 

_________________________

 

Wyatt Townley's husband, Roderick Townley, is an author of absorbing children's fiction, including most recently The Door in the Forest. 

 

How to die

Bill Keller's reflections are excellent, a wise perspective and description of a way that in the US must still be anticipated and fought for by patient and family, as it is far from common medical practice in most kinds of mortal illness, with the sometime exception of cancer.

, October 7, 2012

How to Die

By BILL KELLER

ONE morning last month, Anthony Gilbey awakened from anesthesia in a hospital in the east of England. At his bedside were his daughter and an attending physician.

The surgery had been unsuccessful, the doctor informed him. There was nothing more that could be done.

“So I’m dying?” the patient asked.

The doctor hesitated. “Yes,” he said.

“You’re dying, Dad,” his daughter affirmed.

“So,” the patient mused, “no more whoop-de-doo.”

“On the other side, there’ll be loads,” his daughter — my wife — promised.

The patient laughed. “Yes,” he said. He was dead six days later, a few months shy of his 80th birthday.

When they told my father-in-law the hospital had done all it could, that was not, in the strictest sense, true. There was nothing the doctors could do about the large, inoperable tumor colonizing his insides. But they could have maintained his failing kidneys by putting him on dialysis. They could have continued pumping insulin to control his diabetes. He wore a pacemaker that kept his heart beating regardless of what else was happening to him, so with aggressive treatment they could — and many hospitals would — have sustained a kind of life for a while.

But the hospital that treated him offers a protocol called the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, which was conceived in the 90s at a Liverpool cancer facility as a more humane alternative to the frantic end-of-life assault of desperate measures. “The Hippocratic oath just drives clinicians toward constantly treating the patient, right until the moment they die,” said Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett, who was until recently the chief executive of the center where the protocol was designed. English doctors, he said, tell a joke about this imperative: “Why in Ireland do they put screws in coffins? To keep the doctors out.”

The Liverpool Pathway brings many of the practices of hospice care into a hospital setting, where it can reach many more patients approaching death. “It’s not about hastening death,” Sir Thomas told me. “It’s about recognizing that someone is dying, and giving them choices. Do you want an oxygen mask over your face? Or would you like to kiss your wife?”

Anthony Gilbey’s doctors concluded that it was pointless to prolong a life that was very near the end, and that had been increasingly consumed by pain, immobility, incontinence, depression and creeping dementia. The patient and his family concurred.

And so the hospital unplugged his insulin and antibiotics, disconnected his intravenous nourishment and hydration, leaving only a drip to keep pain and nausea at bay. The earlier bustle of oxygen masks and thermometers and blood-pressure sleeves and pulse-taking ceased. Nurses wheeled him away from the wheezing, beeping machinery of intensive care to a quiet room to await his move to “the other side.”

Here in the United States, nothing bedevils our discussion of health care like the question of when and how to withhold it. The Liverpool Pathway or variations of it are now standard in most British hospitals and in several other countries — but not ours. When I asked one American end-of-life specialist what chance he saw that something of the kind could be replicated here, the answer was immediate: “Zero.” There is an obvious reason for that, and a less obvious reason.

The obvious reason, of course, is that advocates of such programs have been demonized. They have been criticized by the Catholic Church in the name of “life,” and vilified by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann in the pursuit of cheap political gain. “Anything that looks like an official protocol, or guideline — you’re going to get death-paneled,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the bioethicist and expert on end-of-life care who has been a target of the rabble-rousers. (He is also a contributing opinion writer for The Times.) Humane end-of-life practices have quietly found their way into cancer treatment, but other specialties lag behind.

The British advocates of the Liverpool approach have endured similar attacks, mainly from “pro-life” lobbyists who portray it as a back-door form of euthanasia. (They also get it from euthanasia advocates who say it isn’t euthanasia-like enough.) Surveys of families that use this protocol report overwhelming satisfaction, but inevitably in a field that touches families at their most emotionally raw, and that requires trained coordination of several medical disciplines, nursing and family counseling, the end is not always as smooth as my father-in-law’s.

The less obvious problem, I suspect, is that those who favor such programs in this country often frame it as a cost issue. Their starting point is the arresting fact that a quarter or more of Medicare costs are incurred in the last year of life, which suggests that we are squandering a fortune to buy a few weeks or months of a life spent hooked to machinery and consumed by fear and discomfort. That last year of life offers a tempting target if we want to contain costs and assure that Medicare and Medicaid exist for future generations.

No doubt, we have a crying need to contain health care costs. We pay more than many other developed countries for comparable or inferior health care, and the total bill consumes a growing share of our national wealth. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — makes a start by establishing a board to identify savings in Medicare, by emphasizing preventive care, and by financing pilot programs to pay doctors for achieving outcomes rather than performing procedures. But it is barely a start. Common sense suggests that if officials were not afraid of being “death-paneled,” we could save some money by withholding care when, rather than saving a life, it serves only to prolong misery for a little while.

But I’m beginning to think that is both questionable economics and bad politics.

For one thing, whatever your common sense tells you, there is little evidence so far that these guidelines do save money. Emanuel has studied the fairly sketchy research and concluded that, with the possible exception of hospice care for cancer patients, measures to eliminate futile care in dying patients have not proved to be significant cost-savers. That seems to be partly because the programs kick in so late, and partly because good palliative care is not free.

Even if it turns out that programs like the Liverpool Pathway save big money, promoting end-of-life care on fiscal grounds just plays into fears that the medical-industrial complex is rushing our loved ones to the morgue to save on doctors and hospital beds.

When I asked British specialists whether the Liverpool protocol cut costs, they insisted they had never asked the question — and never would.

“I don’t think we would dare,” said Sir Thomas. “There was some very nasty press here in this country this year about the Pathway, saying it was a way of killing people quickly to free up hospital beds. The moment you go into that argument, you might threaten the whole program.”

In America, nothing happens without a cost-benefit analysis. But the case for a less excruciating death can stand on a more neutral, less disturbing foundation, namely that it is simply a kinder way of death.

“There are lots of reasons to believe you could save money,” said Emanuel. “I just think we can’t do it for the reason of saving money.”

During Anthony Gilbey’s six days of dying he floated in and out of awareness on a cloud of morphine. Unfettered by tubes and unpestered by hovering medics, he reminisced and made some amends, exchanged jokes and assurances of love with his family, received Catholic rites and managed to swallow a communion host that was probably his last meal. Then he fell into a coma. He died gently, loved and knowing it, dignified and ready.

“I have fought death for so long,” he told my wife near the end. “It is such a relief to give up.”

We should all die so well.

Who's in charge inside your head?

The following article - or at least its catchy-question title and hook-me first few paragraphs - may put you off, perhaps seem initially like something you caught out of the corner of your eye in the National Enquirer while you waited in a check-out line at the market.

In fact, the author is evidently a solidly grounded evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, and his topic is a the fascinating study of interdependence at work and play among human beings, the abundant and diverse parasites with which we interact, largely unconsciously, the widespread interactivity of species, indeed of all living things.

This is science, and (not but) I am reminded of the similar concept of "interbeing," a term coined by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh as he has sought to pass on to modern Western students and praticioners the centuries old wisdom of Buddhism. 

 

New York Times

Who’s in Charge Inside Your Head?

By David P. Barash

October 6, 2012

ZOMBIE bees?

That’s right: zombie bees. First reported in California in 2008, these stranger-than-fiction creatures have spread to North Dakota and, just recently, to my home in Washington State.

Of course, they’re not really zombies, although they act disquietingly like them, showing abnormal behavior like flying at night (almost unheard-of in healthy bees), moving erratically and then dying. These “zombees” are victims of a parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis. The fly lays eggs within honeybees, inducing their hosts to make a nocturnal “flight of the living dead,” after which the larval flies emerge, having consumed the bee from the inside out.

These events, although bizarre, aren’t all that unusual in the animal world. Many fly and wasp species lay their eggs inside hosts. What is especially interesting, and a bit more unusual, is the way an internal parasite not only feeds on its host, but also frequently alters its behavior, in a way that favors the continued survival and reproduction of the parasite.

Not all internal parasites kill their hosts, of course: pretty much every multicellular animal is home to numerous fellow travelers, each of which has its own agenda, which in some cases involves influencing, or taking control of, part or all of the body in which they temporarily reside.

And this, in turn, leads to the question: who’s in charge of your own mind? Think of the morgue scene in the movie “Men in Black,” when a human corpse is revealed to be a robot, its skull inhabited by a little green man from outer space. Science fiction, but less bizarre than you might expect, or want to believe.

Providing room and board to other life-forms doesn’t only compromise one’s nutritional status (not to mention peace of mind), it often reduces freedom of action, too. The technical phrase is “host manipulation.”

Take the tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis, which causes its mouse host to become obese and sluggish, making it easy pickings for predators, notably foxes, which — not coincidentally — provide an optimal environment for the tapeworm to move into the next phase in its life cycle.

Sometimes the process is truly strange. For example, a kind of fluke known as Dicrocoelium dentriticum does time inside a snail, then an ant, followed by a sheep. Ensconced within an ant, some of the resourceful worms migrate to their host’s brain, where they manage to rewire its neurons, essentially hijacking its body.

The manipulated ant, in response to Dicrocoelium’s demands, then climbs to the top of a blade of grass and waits patiently and conspicuously until it is consumed by a grazing sheep. Once in its desired happy breeding ground, the worm releases its eggs, which depart with a healthy helping of sheep poop, only to be consumed once more by snails, which eventually excrete the immature worms for another generation of unlucky ants to consume.

It may be distressing to those committed to “autonomy,” but such manipulators have inherited the earth. Including us.

Take coughing, or sneezing. It may be beneficial for an infected person to cough up or sneeze out some of her tiny organismic invaders, although it isn’t so healthful for others nearby. But what if coughing and sneezing aren’t merely symptoms but also, even primarily, a manipulation of us, the “host,” by influenza viruses? Shades of zombie bees, fattened mice and grass-blade-besotted ants.

Just as Lenin urged us to ask “who, whom?” with regard to social interactions — who benefits at the expense of whom? — the new science of evolutionary medicine urges a similar question: who benefits when people show symptoms of a disease? Often, it’s the critters that are causing the disease in the first place.

But what about the daily, undiseased lives most of us experience? Voluntary actions are, we like to insist, ours and ours alone, not for the benefit of some parasitic or pathogenic occupying army. When we fall in love, we do so for ourselves, not at the behest of a romance-addled tapeworm. When we help a friend, we aren’t being manipulated by an altruistic bacterium. If we eat when hungry, sleep when tired, scratch an itch or write a poem, we aren’t knuckling under to the vices of our viruses.

But it isn’t that simple.

Think about having a child, and ask who — or rather, what — benefits from reproduction? It’s the genes. As modern biologists recognize, babies are our genes’ way of projecting themselves into the future.

Unlike the cases of parasites or pathogens, when genes manipulate “their” bodies, the situation seems less dire, if only because instead of foreign occupation it’s our genes, our selves. But those presumably personal genes aren’t any more hesitant about manipulating our bodies, and by extension our actions, than is a parasitic fly hijacking a honeybee.

Here, then, is heresy: maybe there is no one in charge — no independent, self-serving, order-issuing homunculus. Buddhists note that our skin doesn’t separate us from the environment, but joins us, just as biologists know that “we” are manipulated by, no less than manipulators of, the rest of life. Who is left after “you” are separated from your genes? Where does the rest of the world end, and each of us begin?

Let’s leave the last words to a modern icon of organic, oceanic wisdom: SpongeBob SquarePants. Mr. SquarePants, a cheerful, talkative — although admittedly, somewhat cartoonish — fellow of the phylum Porifera, “lives in a pineapple under the sea... Absorbent and yellow and porous is he.” I don’t know about the pineapple or the yellow, but absorbent and porous are we, too.

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the author, most recently, of “Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature.”

A candid conversation between Jeb Bartlett and Barack Obama

(Courtesy of Maureen Dowd, The New York Times (October 6, 2012) and Arnold Sorokin.)

The lights from the presidential motorcade illuminate a New Hampshire farmhouse at night in the sprawling New England landscape. JED BARTLET steps out onto his porch as the motorcade slows to a stop.

BARTLET (calling out) Don’t even get out of the car!

BARACK OBAMA (opening the door of his limo) Five minutes, that’s all I want.

BARTLET Were you sleepy?

OBAMA Jed —

BARTLET Was that the problem? Had you just taken allergy medication? General anesthesia?

OBAMA I had an off night.

BARTLET What makes you say that? The fact that the Cheesecake Factory is preparing an ad campaign boasting that it served Romney his pre-debate meal? Law school graduates all over America are preparing to take the bar exam by going to the freakin’ Cheesecake Factory!

OBAMA (following Bartlet inside) I can understand why you’re upset, Jed.

BARTLET Did your staff let you know the debate was gonna be on television?

OBAMA (looking in the other room) Is that Jeff Daniels?

BARTLET That’s Will McAvoy, he just looks like Jeff Daniels.

OBAMA Why’s he got Jim Lehrer in a hammerlock?

BARTLET That’s called an Apache Persuasion Hold. McAvoy thinks it’s the responsibility of the moderator to expose — what are they called? — lies.

WILL (shouting) Did Obama remove the work requirement from Welfare-to-Work?!

LEHRER No!

WILL And you didn’t want to ask Romney about that because? It would’ve been impolite?!

BARTLET Let’s go in another room, Mr. President. You want a cigarette?

OBAMA I stopped smoking.

BARTLET Start again. (Leading the way into his study) I’m a father of daughters, you’re a father of daughters. It looked to me like right before you went on stage, Sasha told you she likes a boy in her class who has a tattoo.

OBAMA That’s not what hap —

BARTLET Here’s what you do. You invite the boy over for dinner, you have a couple of fellas from your detail brush their suit coats back just enough so the lad can see the .44 Magnums — problem solved. You have what every father of a daughter dreams of — an army and a good dog.

OBAMA The girls are fine, that wasn’t the problem. In the debate prep we —

BARTLET Whoa ... there was prep?

OBAMA (shouting) Enough! (taking a cigarette and lighting it) I appreciate that the view’s pretty good from the cheap seats. Gore chalked up my debate performance to the altitude. He debated at sea level — what was his excuse?

BARTLET They told you to make sure you didn’t seem condescending, right? They told you, “First, do no harm,” and in your case that means don’t appear condescending, and you bought it. ’Cause for the American right, condescension is the worst crime you can commit.

OBAMA What’s your suggestion?

BARTLET Appear condescending. Now it comes naturally to me —

OBAMA I know.

BARTLET It’s a gift, but I’m likable and you’re likable enough. Thirty straight months of job growth — blown off. G.M. showing record profits — unmentioned. “Governor, would you still let Detroit go bankrupt as you urged us to do four years ago?” — unasked.(shouting) I’m talkin’ to you, too, Lehrer!

WILL (in the other room) I got him, sir!

BARTLET All right! (back to OBAMA) And that was quite a display of hard-nosed, fiscal conservatism when he slashed one one-hundredth of 1 percent from the federal budget by canceling “Sesame Street” and “Downton Abbey.” I think we’re halfway home. Mr. President, your prep for the next debate need not consist of anything more than learning to pronounce three words: “Governor, you’re lying.” Let’s replay some of Wednesday night’s more jaw-dropping visits to the Land Where Facts Go to Die. “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale you’re talking about.”

OBAMA The Tax Policy Center analysis of your proposal for a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut in all federal income tax rates, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax, the estate tax and other reductions, says it would be a $5 trillion tax cut.

BARTLET In other words ...

OBAMA You’re lying, Governor.

BARTLET “I saw a study that came out today that said you’re going to raise taxes by $3,000 to $4,000 on middle-income families.”

OBAMA The American Enterprise Institute found my budget actually would reduce the share of taxes that each taxpayer pays to service the debt by $1,289.89 for taxpayers earning in the $100,000 to $200,000 range.

BARTLET Which is another way of saying ...

OBAMA You’re lying, Governor.

BARTLET “I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare.”

OBAMA The $716 billion I’ve cut is from the providers, not the beneficiaries. I think that’s a better idea than cutting the exact same $716 billion and replacing it with a gift certificate, which is what’s contained in the plan that’s named for your running mate.

BARTLET “Pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.”

OBAMA Not unless you’ve come up with a new plan since this afternoon.

BARTLET “You doubled the deficit.”

OBAMA When I took office in 2009, the deficit was 1.4 trillion. According to the C.B.O., the deficit for 2012 will be 1.1 trillion. Either you have the mathematics aptitude of a Shetland pony or, much more likely, you’re lying.

BARTLET “All of the increase in natural gas has happened on private land, not on government land. On government land, your administration has cut the number of permits and licenses in half.”

OBAMA Maybe your difficulty is with the words “half” and “double.” Oil production on federal land is higher, not lower. And the oil and gas industry are currently sitting on 7,000 approved permits to drill on government land that they’ve not yet begun developing.

BARTLET “I think about half the green firms you’ve invested in have gone out of business.”

OBAMA Yeah, your problem’s definitely with the word “half.” As of this moment there have been 26 recipients of loan guarantees — 23 of which are very much in business. What was Bain’s bankruptcy record again?

BARTLET And finally?

OBAMA Governor, if your ideas are the right ideas for our country, if you have a plan and it’s the best plan for our future, if your vision is the best vision for all of us and not 53 percent of us, why aren’t you able to make that case in the same ZIP code as the truth?

BARTLET And?

OBAMA Tell John Sununu anytime he wants to teach me how to be more American he knows my address for the next four years. He used to have an office there before he was fired.

BARTLET You picked a bad night to have a bad night, that’s all. You’ve got two more chances to change the scoreboard, and Joe unplugged should be pretty good television too. Make Romney your cabana boy in New York.

OBAMA Got it.

BARTLET (taking the cigarette out of OBAMA’s hand and stubbing it out) These things’ll kill you. Pull McAvoy off Lehrer on your way out.

 

 

Attending to the seasons

Verlyn Klinkenborg is always a joy to read. "Falling Behind the Season" in yesterday's Times is no exception. He reminds me that since returning to northern California from New England and Norway I've often been struck by the contrasts of the coming of seasons. They move more subtly here; they exist — I have only to look out my window now at the autumn colors of maple trees — but that color is usually less bold than in New England, and — I'm grateful at this stage of life — winter registers more as chill in the air and only occasional frost. One can more easily garden year round, and the light is wonderful. So is the fog rolling over the hills from the Pacific Ocean.

 

New York Times

---

October 5, 2012

Falling Behind the Season

By Verlyn Klinkenborg

The dog wakes me at 5:15 and we go out. The only sound is dew falling from the maple branches. Directly overhead, the Moon and Jupiter are traveling together, as they will for another night or two. In the east, Venus coasts high above the horizon. Ceilidh steps high through the wet grass, hoping to keep her belly dry, but then plunges her face into the pasture thatch following a scent. It is never too early to follow a scent.

You can tell from the sky overhead that the day will burn off bright and clear by late morning. But for now the fog waits motionless, soaking everything.

In upstate New York, the maples are nearly done shedding their leaves. The goldenrod has gone out. The hickories are just now preparing their histrionics, billowing upward in yellow, waiting for the day when the wind and the rain will bring their leaves down all at once. I shuffle my feet in the leaves on the pasture edge, and can’t help wondering where the light has gone when there seemed so much of it not long ago.

Perhaps Ceilidh can sense what kind of winter we’ll be having. Not me. I caught three mice in the kitchen traps in a single night last week, and found myself wondering, as I disposed of their bodies, what had made the mice so bold. I’d like to know what the chipmunk middens look like now and how well the red squirrels have provisioned themselves. One of these mornings, I’ll hear the sound of geese overhead, hidden by the fog. For now, I make do with ladybugs landing silently on the kitchen windows.

Every day I look around in disbelief, remembering how surprised I was when spring began. I’m still busy being surprised by spring. I’ll be ready for fall by February, always behind the season and pretty certain I’ll never catch up. 

 

Undecided voters: should we worry?

Only about 1 in 20 voters appear to be undecided, about 5% of likely voters (compared to 1 in 7 in 2008). And they may count less than we imagine. As Timothy Egan writes in The New York Times, "Undecided voters were not among the millions of Americans who watched the first presidential debate. Of all voters, the undecided were the least interested in the debates, a Washington Post poll found last week." Egan goes on, with his fine humor, to address undecided voters: "After the debate, a CNN focus group of your type found that eight of you were now leaning toward Romney, and eight of you were coming over to the Obama side. No real movement, in other words."

Obama, Romney and the first debate

Most people I know or read think the debate was awful. Romney was a bully and lied throughout. Jim Lehrer was run over again and again, with the exception of one shining moment when he did manage to shut Romney up. And President Obama, weight of the world on his shoulders, 20th wedding anniversary in hand, disappointed time after time, letting pass opportunity after opportunity in the interest of staying reasonable.

Have the Obama campaign and the President himself recognized that he blew an important opportunity in front of 60 million people? Of course. Is that reason to doubt the wisdom of re-electing President Obama? Of course not. A President Romney would be catastrophic for the United States and its people. His proposals to eviscerate Medicaid and Medicare alone — aside from his lying about them throughout the 90 minutes of the debate — would roll back two generations of hard won progress toward serving the health and well being of all Americans. (See Paul Krugman's careful analysis of those proposals here.)

Here's a reasonable Bob Herbert, taking Obama to task. But don't miss a key sentence: "One of the more remarkable things about the debate was Mitt Romney's absolute contempt for anything resembling facts, truth or reality. Deliberate deception was the bedrock foundation of his strategy." In the end, theatre criticism aside, we saw an honorable man and a thoroughly dishonest one. We need to re-elect the honorable one, and then help to make his second term as president better than his first.

No More Excuses

Posted: 10/04/2012 6:47 pm

 Bob Herbert

It's time to stop making excuses for Barack Obama. With so much at stake in this election, his performance at the debate on Wednesday night was indefensible.

Ever since he was elected, there have been reasons offered, either publicly or privately, for why Obama has been unable to fully engage some of the nation's most important challenges. Despite the rampant increase in poverty in the worst downturn since the Depression, Obama supporters whispered that he couldn't do more for the poor and couldn't speak out more forcefully on their behalf because that would not be politically advantageous. So nearly all of his economic initiatives had to be couched in language that referred to the middle class, even though the poor were being hurt far worse. LBJ could launch a war on poverty but not Barack Obama.

Black Americans have been disproportionately clobbered by the Great Recession and its aftermath, losing both income and wealth at staggering rates. Much of the black community is enduring a full-blown economic depression. But Obama and his advisers have been unwilling to address this catastrophe openly and forcefully out of fear that the president would be perceived as too black by prejudiced white voters, thus losing their support.

There is always some excuse, some reason for not bringing all of the president's energy and resources to the fight.

On jobs, the biggest crisis facing the country, the excuse for not having done more has been Republican obstructionism. There is no doubt the Republicans have tried to thwart the president every which way from sundown. But Obama never fought back in kind. He never found his inner Harry Truman, never took his case forcefully to the people. He kept trying to accommodate the other side long after it was clear that no accommodation was possible.

In the face of the worst economic calamity since the 1930s, the United States needed a mammoth job-creation and economic revitalization program, a New Deal for the 21st century. But that would have required presidential leadership capable of challenging the formidable opposition mounted by the very folks who caused the crisis in the first place. Instead we got a woefully insufficient stimulus program and a failed effort at some kind of grand bargain between the president and the retrograde Republicans in Congress. That grand bargain would have imposed austerity measures that would have further crushed the poor and the black and the middle class.

On Wednesday night nearly 60 million television viewers got to witness this chronic unwillingness of Barack Obama to fight. He did not hammer Mitt Romney for his ugly, all-too-revealing comments that demeaned nearly half the population as slackers and ne-er-do-wells. He did not go after Romney's terrible job-creation record as governor of Massachusetts. He did not assail Romney for his callous contention on 60 Minutes that people who don't have health insurance actually do get care -- in the nation's emergency rooms. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die," said Romney. "We pick them up in an ambulance and take them to the hospital and give them care."

Obama never bothered to bring up that cold-hearted comment during the debate, never bothered to explain why the reliance on emergency room treatment is one of the worst possible approaches imaginable to providing health care.

One of the more remarkable things about the debate was Mitt Romney's absolute contempt for anything resembling facts, truth or reality. Deliberate deception was the bedrock foundation of his strategy. He wouldn't even come clean on the tax cuts that are a cornerstone of his campaign. And yet it was Romney who had the chutzpah to look Obama in the eye and assert: "Mr. President, you're entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts."

How in heaven's name could Obama let him get away with that?

The harsh truth is that President Obama seemed unprepared for the debate. He came off as a man who didn't really want to be there, who wondered why he should have to be bothered fending off the impertinent attacks and serial untruths being flung at him by his opponent. The millions of Obama supporters who wanted to see flashes of passion and fire from their guy -- from a president fighting effectively on their behalf -- were left with nothing but the bitter taste of disappointment.

Romney, in contrast, seemed not just confident but in command. He was dynamic (as he fashioned one falsehood after another), while Obama seemed flat, uncomfortable and unwilling to vigorously counteract the falsehoods. Most important, Romney was the one far more willing to fight.

There will be more debates. And the election has not been decided by any means. But Obama's supporters need to make it clear that the time for excuses is over. The president had no right to show up for a debate unprepared and offer an expectant nation an embarrassingly half-hearted performance. Progressive leaders, who represent Obama's strongest and most faithful supporters, have an obligation to convey that message in the strongest possible terms.

The president let his people down. And if he's capable of doing that in an election that is clearly so important, it means he's capable of doing it again if he wins a second term.

 

Parable - Wislawa Szymborska

Parable

 

Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of paper,

with these words: "Somebody save me! I'm here. The ocean cast me on this desert island.

I am standing on the shore waiting for help. Hurry! I'm here!"
 
"There's no date. I bet it's already too late anyway.

It could have been floating for years," the first fisherman said.
 
"And he doesn't say where. It's not even clear which ocean," the second fisherman said.
 
"It's not too late, or too far. The island Here is everywhere," the third fisherman said.

 

They all felt awkward. No one spoke. That's how it goes with universal truths.

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

 

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

 

Indeed, that's how it goes with universal truths. Awkwardness, silence, missing the mark.

God ladles,

Merries go round.

The ring shrinks

With every storm.

Our reach weakens,

Our seat hardens.

The bell tolls.

The phone rings.

Opportunity knocks.

God ladles.

Inequality Report Card — A Congressional Report Card for the 99%

Inequality Report Card

 Institute for Policy Studies

 By Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Scott Klinger, Sam Pizzigati

 October 3, 2012

 We evaluate how well members of congress do in supporting legislation and measures to narrow America's widening economic divide.

Members of Congress have the capacity to make sure that all Americans, not just a privileged few, share in the wealth that we all together create. This first IPS “inequality report card” evaluates current members on how well they are exercising this power.

The report card is based on 40 legislative actions taken over the past two years that relate to inequality. The bills range from legislation to establish a “Buffett Rule” minimum tax rate that all wealthy Americans must pay to a measure that would raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation.

The report includes an overall “honor roll” — to highlight those representatives and senators who have done the most to narrow America’s economic divide — as well as a “dishonor roll” of lawmakers who have repeatedly tilted the “1%” way. The report card also details the “most 1% friendly” and “most 99% friendly” by party affiliation.

Among the report’s key findings:

• Republicans dominate the report card’s “dishonor roll.” They make up the entire list of the 48 representatives and 11 senators with an “F” grade. A dozen Republicans made the “honor roll” with “C” level grades.

• Not all Democrats distinguish themselves as champions of greater equality. Seventeen lawmakers who caucus with the Democrats rate only at the “C” level.

• Of the ten states with the nation’s most uneven distribution of income, according to just-released Census data, only one — Massachusetts — has senators and representatives with a composite average “A” level score.

• None of the 11 senators earning an “F” grade come from any of the nation’s five most equal states, as rated by the new Census figures. Likewise, of the 48 “flunking” members of the House of Representatives, only one — Republican Jason Chaffetz of Utah — comes from one of the nation’s five most equal states.

 

 

Alice Walker: "I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder."

"I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder."

"Go to the places that scare you."

An interview with Alice Walker by Valerie Schloredt of YES! Magazine

posted Oct 02, 2012

 

Photo by Harley Soltes.

Alice Walker is a poet, essayist, and commentator, but she’s best known for her prodigious accomplishments as a writer of literary fiction. Her novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983 and quickly became a classic of world literature. Set in an African-American community in the rural South during the decades before World War II, the novel is told in letters written by Celie, a woman who survives oppression and abuse with her spirit not only intact, but transcendent.

Walker’s writing is characterized by an ever-present awareness of injustice and inequality. But whether describing political struggle—as in Meridian, which deals with the civil rights movement—or meditating on the human relationship to nature and animals, as in her latest book, The Chicken Chronicles, her work conveys the possibility of change. In Walker’s vision, grace is available through love and a deep connection to the beauty of the world.

"I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder."

Walker was born in the segregated South, the eighth child in a family who made their living as sharecroppers in Georgia. She came of age during the civil rights movement, and emerged early in her career as a defining voice in feminism and an advocate for African-American women writers. She is a prominent activist who has worked, marched, traveled, and spoken out to support the causes of justice, peace, and the welfare of the earth.

Alice Walker spoke to YES! about the challenges of working for change, and the possibility of living with awareness—and joy.

Valerie Schloredt: Over the past few days I’ve been immersed in your work, and I’ve been wondering how you do it. Being able to move someone to tears with a few words on a page is extraordinary to me.

Alice Walker: I want very much for you to feel for whoever I’m talking about, or whatever I’m talking about. Because it is only by empathy being aroused that we change. That is the power of writing. I’ve experienced exactly what you’re saying, reading other writers. I remember the book I first had that experience with wasJane Eyre, being right there with Jane, and understanding, yes, we have to change these horrible institutions where they abuse children. Today, I’m the supporter of an orphanage in Kenya. And one of the reasons comes from having been so moved by reading about Jane at Lowood.

Schloredt: It’s interesting to hear about what you read as a child, because some of your best-known work, like The Color Purple, draws on the stories of your ancestors and your family and aspects of the world you knew as a child.

Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth
A new documentary on how the poet, activist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author has changed the world with her words.

Walker: I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder. We were way out in the country, and why wouldn’t you just absolutely wonder at the splendor of nature? It’s true I had various sufferings, but nothing really compares to understanding that you live in a place that, moment by moment, is incredible. That your mother could say, “I think we’ll have tea tonight,” pull up a sassafras root, take it home, boil it, and you have sassafras tea. I mean, it’s such a miraculous universe. For a child, this magic is something that supports us, even through the hard times.

Schloredt: Do you go back to your childhood home?

Walker: It doesn’t exist.

Schloredt: No?

Walker: No. And there were many of them. We lived in shacks. Each year the people who owned the land (that they had stolen from the Indians), after they had taken the labor for the year, forced us to another shack. How could people do that, to people that they recognized as people? They did this to babies, they did this to small children, they could look at the people they were exploiting and actually see that they were working them into ill health and early death. It didn’t stop them.

"You have to go to the places that scare you so that you can see: What do you really believe? Who are you really?"

The most beautiful parts of the area that I lived in are now an enclave of upper-class white housing tracts with a huge golf course. They built a road that went right through the front yard of our church. Most of the people moved to cities, they moved to projects. So, it doesn’t exist.

Schloredt: Something I wanted to ask after listening to you talk last night [at the YES! celebration in Seattle], is the idea that some people don’t experience empathy, and don’t have a conscience that bothers them when they’re treating people extremely badly. Where can progressives go with that idea? How do we relate to knowing that?

Walker: You relate to it by being honest. We’re sitting back thinking that every single person has a conscience, if you could just reach it. Why should we believe that? I mean, what would make you actually believe that? Certainly not the history of the world as we know it. So it’s about trying to understand the history of the world, how it’s been shaped, and by whom, and for what purposes.

Understanding trumps compassion at this point. When people are forcing you out of your home, starving your children, destroying your planet—you should bring understanding of them to bear. Not everybody is loving of children, not everybody cares about the ocean. I think if we collectively decide that we are going to confront this, we have a chance. Because humanity is very smart, and we’d like to survive. And we’re not going to survive the way we’re going. I think we know that.

Schloredt: Your novels are among those books that cause people to say, “This book changed my life,” or “This book changed my way of thinking.” For me the book of yours that really did something to my way of thinking was Meridian.

That is a very powerful book. One thing that really affected me was the description of the cost of racism to the psyche, what a struggle it is to fight such embedded injustice. I think I saw you as the character Meridian. Are you—have you got some Meridian in you?

Walker: I think all people who struggle at the risk of their lives have some Meridian in them. It’s an acceptance of a kind of suffering. You hope that something will come of it, but there’s no way of knowing. What I didn’t realize was so close to me was how Meridian gets really sick as she encounters various struggles. She’s using every ounce of her will, her intelligence, her heart, her soul. It often leaves her debilitated. And that has certainly been true in my life. And it’s something that I have to accept.

"If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions, and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it."

In Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights movement, the mayor had a tank that the town bought just to use against us. So there’s the possibility of the tank running over you, and you have to stand there. So I understood that, well, this is probably going to mean a few weeks of just being immobilized. And then you figure out ways to recuperate.

It’s learning to accept that the cost is great. It would have to be, because we’re talking about emotional intelligence and growth and stretching yourself, reaching for the sun, kind of as if you were a plant. It’s a difficult thing to change the world, your neighborhood, your family, your self.

Schloredt: Not only is Meridian risking her life, like the other civil rights activists in the South, but there’s also internal oppression, an inner struggle the characters deal with. 
Walker: The inner struggle is extremely difficult for all of us, because we all have faults, severe ones, that we will struggle with forever. One of the things that I like about Meridian is that it is about how we like to have almost a stereotype about leaders and revolutionaries and world-changers, that they are always whole. It’s wise to accept that [human faults] are inevitable. Factor that in and keep going.

Schloredt: I love the passage where Meridian visits a black church after the assassination of Martin Luther King and finds that they’ve incorporated his rhetoric into the sermon.

Walker: This is the segment where B.B. King is in the stained-glass window with a sword—where the people needed to incorporate, as far as I was concerned at the time, a bit more militancy. More awareness of what you’re up against, and confronting that with real clarity. In some ways it’s the same issue that we’re talking about. You have to go to the places that scare you so that you can see: What do you really believe? Who are you really? Are you prepared to take this all the way to wherever the truth leads you and accept that you have to figure out different ways of confronting reality?

Schloredt: I wanted to ask you about Occupy and uprisings in the Middle East. You’ve been politically active over your lifetime. Is there advice that you would give to people who are organizing now in the United States?

Walker: If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions, and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it. You have to go wherever you need to go, and you have to be wherever you need to be, and place yourself there against the forces that would distort you and destroy you.

I love the uprisings, I love the Occupy movement, and I think the young people especially are doing something that is very natural. It is natural to want to have a future. It is very natural to want to live in peace and joy. What is lovely about this time is the awareness that is sweeping the planet. People are just waking up, every moment.

Schloredt: One thing that I worry about for progressives is that we are often distracted from effective direct action by the project of improving ourselves, of being good.

Walker: And also, “good” in that sense can sometimes be very facile. And a good cover, you know, “I’m doing good, so I don’t have to change very much.” But I think for most Americans, the change that’s required is huge.

Schloredt: How do we make that change happen?

Walker: Well, you know, you’re doing it. I think YES! Magazine is part of what’s changing people’s consciousness. And I think the spread of Buddhism—the retreat centers, the meditation practice—has had a huge impact on people’s consciousness. Americans learning Buddhist tradition has helped a lot of people understand that they actually have a power that is theirs. They have their own mind. It’s not somebody else’s mind, and it’s not controllable, unless you permit it. That’s a foundation for huge change.

Schloredt: Your writing has, I’m sure, also changed consciousnesses. How does it feel to know that your work has in some way changed the world?

Walker: Well, it’s a gift the universe has permitted you to achieve—but it’s not just dropped in your lap, you have to really work for it. For instance, years ago when I wrote Possessing the Secret of Joy, the campaign against female genital mutilation [FGM] was a dangerous subject. There was a great deal of flak about my wanting to address it.

I wrote the book, and then Pratibha Parmar and I made the film [Warrior Marks, a documentary about FGM], and lugged it around Africa, and London, New York, all over. It allowed women who had no voice about FGM to speak. Progress is slow, and sometimes it’s discouraging. It’s like knocking on doors in the South asking people to vote, and they’re terrified of voting. And then seeing over the course of years that people started understanding that they had a right to reject the practice of FGM, that they had a voice. I feel grateful that I could be an instrument to stop any kind of suffering. I mean, what a joy.

Schloredt: In your novels you describe profound suffering and pain, but there is also often the potential for reconciliation and healing. If you could create healing and reconciliation for something that’s happening in our country today, what would it be?

Walker: I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism. The hypocrisy of that is corrosive, and we should not accept it. There is no way to stop terrorism if you insist on making enemies of most of the people on the planet. Why should they care about you? All they feel is fear. 

So I would stop the War on Terror, and I would start making peace with the peoples of the planet by trying to understand them. I would like us to be able to say, “If that happened to me, I would feel exactly the way you do. And what can we do from here, from this understanding? What can we do together?” 

---

Valerie Schloredt interviewed Alice Walker for It's Your Body, the Fall 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. Valerie is associate editor of YES! Magazine.

 

 

"The Real Referendum" - in the US election - by Paul Krugman

‎"This election is....shaping up as a referendum on our social insurance system, and it looks as if Mr. Obama will emerge with a clear mandate for preserving and extending that system. It would be a terrible mistake, both politically and for the nation’s future, for him to let himself be talked into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory." It may be politically naive to add that our social insurance system, our safety net, pales when compared to the relative vigor of those in European social democracies like those in Scandinavia. Still, I'm bound to add the point as a footnote to Paul Krugman's fine assessment of our election in prospect.

NewYork Times
September 30, 2012
The Real Referendum
By Paul Krugman
Republicans came into this campaign believing that it would be a referendum on President
Obama, and that still-high unemployment would hand them victory on a silver
platter. But given the usual caveats — a month can be a long time in politics,
it’s not over until the votes are actually counted, and so on — it doesn’t seem
to be turning out that way.
Yet there is a sense in which the election is indeed a referendum, but of a
different kind. Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a verdict on the
legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social Security, Medicare and,
yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of that legacy. Will they vote
for politicians who want to replace Medicare with Vouchercare, who denounce
Social Security as “collectivist” (as Paul Ryan once did), who dismiss those
who turn to social insurance programs as people unwilling to take
responsibility for their lives?
If the polls are any indication, the result of that referendum will be a clear
reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection of politicians
who want to return us to the Gilded Age. But here’s the question: Will that
election result be honored?
I ask that question because we already know what Mr. Obama will face if
re-elected: a clamor from Beltway insiders demanding that he immediately return
to his failed political strategy of 2011, in which he made a Grand Bargain over
the budget deficit his overriding priority. Now is the time, he’ll be told, to
fix America’s entitlement problem once and for all. There will be calls — as
there were at the time of the Democratic National Convention — for him to
officially endorse Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the
co-chairmen of his deficit commission (although never accepted by the
commission as a whole).
And Mr. Obama should just say no, for three reasons.
First, despite years of dire warnings from people like, well, Alan Simpson and Erskine
Bowles, we are not facing any kind of fiscal crisis. Indeed, U.S. borrowing
costs are at historic lows, with investors actually willing to pay the
government for the privilege of owning inflation-protected bonds. So reducing
the budget deficit just isn’t the top priority for America at the moment;
creating jobs is. For now, the administration’s political capital should be
devoted to passing something like last year’s American Jobs Act and providing
effective mortgage debt relief.
Second, contrary to Beltway conventional wisdom, America does not have an “entitlements
problem.” Mainly, it has a health cost problem, private as well as public,
which must be addressed (and which the Affordable Care Act at least starts to
address). It’s true that there’s also, even aside from health care, a gap
between the services we’re promising and the taxes we’re collecting — but to
call that gap an “entitlements” issue is already to accept the very right-wing
frame that voters appear to be in the process of rejecting.
Finally, despite the bizarre reverence it inspires in Beltway insiders — the same
people, by the way, who assured us that Paul Ryan was a brave truth-teller —
the fact is that Simpson-Bowles is a really bad plan, one that would undermine
some key pieces of our safety net. And if a re-elected president were to
endorse it, he would be betraying the trust of the voters who returned him to
office.
Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age,
supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves
— but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising
inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration.
For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined
to the relatively well-off and well-educated — the very people who need Social
Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a
substantial part of the nation.
Now, there’s no mystery about why Simpson-Bowles looks the way it does. It was put
together in a political environment in which progressives, and even supporters
of the safety net as we know it, were very much on the defensive — an
environment in which conservatives were presumed to be in the ascendant, and in
which bipartisanship was effectively defined as the effort to broker deals
between the center-right and the hard right.
Barring an upset, however, that environment will come to an end on Nov. 6. This
election is, as I said, shaping up as a referendum on our social insurance
system, and it looks as if Mr. Obama will emerge with a clear mandate for
preserving and extending that system. It would be a terrible mistake, both
politically and for the nation’s future, for him to let himself be talked into
snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.