Virgil Speaks

I Smell a Rat

2012-01-21T16:45:00.002-05:00

I ended my previous blog floating the possibility that Newt Gingrich had dealt a mortal blow to Mittens wihen he exposed the kinds of practices Romney was engaged in while running Bain, a venture capital firm that buys and sells businesses for investors' profit. But at that point Mittens had already won Iowa and was well on the way to winning in New Hampshire. He was also ahead by double digits in South Carolina, and it was said that if Romney wins again in South Carolina, three times lucky, he will have sewn up the nomination.

It was a bit of a shock, then, when I turned on the radio the other morning and heard that not Romney, but Rick Santorum had been declared the winner in Iowa, finishing ahead of Mittens by 34 points. O migod! I thought. ("It seems to me, I've heard this song before...") And then, big time, I smelled a rat. Barely out of the gate, Republicans had already messed with the voting results. My right-wing-coup tentacles were wriggling like there's no tomorrow. The Des Moines Register reported on that day that votes from eight precincts had gone permanently missing and would never be counted--"so the ultimate tally remains inconclusive." Mitt's rolling hoops as "the inevitable frontrunner" were no longer rolling.

The weird thing is, once the idea of "inconclusive" had been floated, nobody even flinched at the retraction. There was not a whiff of backlash, no accusations, no questions, no uproar. Not one single eyelid batted. Then, after no sign of any push-back from any direction, within two more days, Rick Santorum was simply declared the "real" winner in Iowa. Even then, not one eyebrow was lifted. Am I the only one who smells a rat and thinks what's happening is sinister? Or are my fellow Americans just too weary to care? Maybe Republican voters are so dissatisfied with their choices, they don't give a damn who wins or loses. They all suck royally, so what the hell?

Meanwhile it looks like Newt is mounting the engines in South Carolina. Instead of one frontrunner, by tomorrow we will have three--or none, depending on how you figure. Nobody gets to walk off yet with the prize though: the coveted nomination. Virgil and his airborne warriors are predicting that when Newt emerges as the victor in South Carolina, he will appear with a rooster and a small blonde, and they will all crow together. And, as someone remarked on the net about these ridiculous caucuses, it "kind of makes you reminisce about the America of our youth where the worst thing they threatened us with was global annihilation."

Pious Baloney

2012-01-15T17:13:00.002-05:00

A high water mark in last week's GOP caucus in New Hampshire had to be when anybody who was actually watching got to see the pot call the kettle black. Newt Gingrich, the pot-bellied, chunky accuser, nailed Mitt Romney as being a dark corporate raider, someone who handed out pink slips and laid off workers by the thousands at the private equity firm Bain Capital during the 1980s, but dares now to pose as the penultimate populist business man (as opposed to a "career-politician" like Newt) in possession of the sublime secret of jobs-creation. All this is happening, of course, "in the free and prosperous land of opportunity," a time before the pitiful performances of Barack Obama alledgedly spoiled everything and single-handedly took away our prosperity.

"That's just pious baloney," Newt shouted vigorously in Mitt's direction during the recent New Hampshire Republican debate, making me wish I had turned the phrase myself. It was a rare, cut-the-crap moment (coming from a Republican, no less) that has yet to stop reverberating in our pathetic political arena. And it won't. In hindsight, Newt (along with the vicious Gingrich 40-minute PAC film/ad that appeared on TV a day or two later exposing Romney's real role at Bain--who knew?) has done permanent damage to the Mitt balloon, making it possible that Romney will never get elected in today's OWS climate.

These days the public, would you believe, has finally wised up to corporate greed. And Mitt IS the oligarchy, the quintessential corporatist one percenter, born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a shining example of the pure profit motive devoid of any concern for the consequences of his actions on ordinary workers. Personally, I am eternally grateful to Newt and his hideous PAC for breaking the story about Bain. Of course, Newt is a dead man walking in the GOP at this point, given their speak-no-evil (against a fellow Republican) rule. You can't destroy a fellow Republican that way and not pay for it with your career. Nobody said it better than Maureen Dowd in Sunday's New York Times: "If Obama failed to rein in Wall Street vultures, Romney reigned among Wall Street vultures." Another reader, whose comment I saw on line, compares Obama and Romney this way: "Obama is the intelligent, enigmatic dolphin, known to rescue people in danger of drowning, while Romney is the cold-blooded shark who would opportunistically eat them." Egad!

And so it was that this week, Mitt Romney got offically Swift-Boated by the Republicans' own Swift-Boating machine. It isn't meant to happen that way, but the phrase "pious baloney" turns out not only to have legs, but also to have stuffed olives for eyes. (Check it out in the baloney sandwich above.) But dubious days at Bain may be the least of Romney's tsouris. That's Yiddish for misery.) There's the whole Mormonism thing, which is another huge slippery slope. Michael Kranish and Scott Helman recount in their newly published book, “The Real Romney,” that Mitt got a deferment to go to Paris as a Mormon missionary. Instead of fighting for his country, he went to FRANCE to proselytize for Mormonism. France! In her article, Maureen Dowd reports that some of Romney's former advisers say that bringing Mormonism into the mainstream of America is (secretly) part of why he wants to be president. But Romney tries to soothe skittish evangelicals, she says, by promising not to be “pastor-in-chief.”

Well, as it turns out, he hasn't soothed them, not at all. In a last-ditch attempt to get rid of candidate Romney, evangelicals announced yesterday that they will back Rick Santorum for next president of the United States. Make no mistake: among Republicans, this is an undeclared war. And you can thank Newt for that. The butterfly effect of his little phrase could just make its way through frozen fingertips and into the political bloodstream--in a way that proves lethal for the GOP.

2012: The Year that Perseus Finally Confronts the Medusa

2012-01-08T15:19:00.004-05:00

It's finally here--the year when we find out whether the Mayans were right about the world ending in 2012, OR NOT. Gazing at Medusa's image in his bronze shield and pretending to look one way, Perseus reaches back over his shoulder and severs Medusa's head. Having neither shield nor sword at my headquarters, I've been wearing my Frida Kahlo sox and Zulu love letter--an African beaded one-inch square attached to a large safety pin--instead, as my personal amulets against disaster. (Both were Christmas presents last month.)

One strangely ominous portent has not escaped my notice, however. This is the second year in a row that thousands of blackbirds inexplicably fell out of the sky on New Year's eve in the same small town in Arkansas. Last year, officials thought the bizarre deaths might have been caused by fireworks or a hailstorm, but this year the fireworks were outlawed, and the weather was calm. So it's pretty weird. But maybe no weirder than the poisonous lies raining down on us inexorably from the GOP presidential campaign. They, too, are a bad omen. "Barack Obama has failed America." Have you checked out the "Obama misery index" lately? Have you been to a jobs fair? "Please go," urges a Romney strategist. "If John Steinbeck were alive today, he would not be voting for Barack Obama."

Well, it just so happens I once met John Steinbeck. We were introduced by his son, whom I had encountered on board a ship when we were both crossing the Atlantic, going back to America from Europe. We saw each other several times after that in New York, and on one of those occasions, the son took me to meet his father. I think I can safely assert that, whatever view John Steinbeck might have held of Barack Obama, he would not be voting for bobble-head Mittens instead. However, Mitt Romney, and the entire GOP clown circus, represents only one of the looming disasters facing us in 2012 that make imagined prophesies of doom seem ever more potently real.

Even if you are not disposed to give credence to ancient prophesies, it is hard to ignore the severity of the crises intensifying the global stakes for cataclysm of some kind. Everything is either under siege, being protested, about to explode, or ready to systemically collapse. I don't know if it was by chance or by design that my local movie theater ushered in, during the first days of the New Year, a movie called "Melancholia," in which a rogue planet (named Melancholia), having been previously hidden by the sun, is now stalking the earth with orbits edging closer and closer, in a kind of death dance that threatens its annihilation--should there ever be a collision. Slowly but leadenly, we are left wondering whether the worst will actually happen, and the movie morphs into a study of people's different psychological responses to the threat of total destruction. "At times," wrote one critic, "the film comes close to being a tragic-comic opera about the end of the world."

As in real life, in the film most people are obliviously and blithely going on with their lives. The central characters, however--especially the lead actress, Kirsten Dunst, along with her sister, her sister's husband and their young son--are constantly tracking the planet's doom-filled progress, mostly through hidden sites on the Internet, and, in the case of Dunst, tracking with a kind of rapturous obsessiveness that for a time afflicts her with a disabling mental breakdown. (Dunst's performance won her the Best Actress Award for 2011 at the Cannes Film Festival.) When it seems like their final moments on earth are about to come, the family (minus the father, who has already committed suicide) retreats to a protective "magic cave" they have prepared on the lawn--a make-shift, Indian-style teepee composed of a few tree branches--to await their fate.

An end-times scenario even made it into Time magazine this year, with a special page entitled "The Last Party"--how to ring in Armageddon. Meant, of course, as a spoof on the Mayan calendar prediction of the world's end on December 21, 2012, it offers suggestions for both optimists (those who believe they can survive anything or that nothing will happen) and pessimists (those who believe there is no way to cheat death). Optimists may have to dole out some serious moolah if they want to upgrade their chances of survival, though. For $35,000, they can reserve a share in an Indiana "underground shelter network for long-term survival of future catastrophes; it includes a year's supply of water, food, and clothing, As for pessimists, that is, if you're not to nervous to eat that night, the suggestion is that you can dine in style at a new restaurant soon to open in Houston called "Underbelly," and eat your fill of pork belly without having to worry about clogged arteries.

Honestly, faced with these wonderful options, I might just go for the teepee, as long as somebody is there telling me pointless jokes. (Virgil?) On the other hand, maybe I'll opt for the knock-out punch, because who wants to live in a world without Starbucks java-chip frapuccinos anyway? Whatever you think this says about me, I know I don't.

Alligators Always Dress for Dinner

2011-12-28T16:37:00.004-05:00

Virgil and I, we really liftoff at Christmas. Holidays have a way of flexing your party muscles and keeping them in condition. It's the time of the year when you might just be inspired to adopt a baby, design a curriculum, or go sailing in some saltwater bay. But when the time comes to open presents, that's when when we both go a little feral, reverting to a wild state. This end-of-the-year holiday blog has been inspired by a Christmas present I got from my friend Jane.

It's a book with the title "Alligators Always Dress for Dinner: An Alphabet Book of Vintage Photographs" by Linda Donigan and Michael Horowitz, a couple who live with their dog, Benny, in the woods of southern Vermont. Combining the alphabet with an assortment of illustrative vintage photographs seems to open up unlimited, over-the-top possibilities for zaniness--none more so than the "A"-is-for-alligators" photo that appears on the cover.

Virgil immediately zeroes in on the two devilish alligators captured in this surreal diorama. While the alligators exchange knowing glances and play to the crowd, the gentleman in the business suit tries somewhat petulantly to get his bowler hat back from the snatcher. Where could this image possibly have come from?

Turns out, it's "From old friend Harvie and his pair of pet 'gators keeping warm during the winter of 1904--in Florida." The image has been cribbed from an old postcard! It seems that in the early 20th century, vacations became part of the lives of working people for the first time--and Florida was a popular destination. By now, Virgil is so excited, he is untying his moccasins and loosening the ribbons from his braids. "Relax," he tells me, "with maybe a little schnapps and a sandwich. Just stretch out while I tell you another surreal story about a man who can ride a unicycle backwards and slice apples in the air with a samurai sword."

Virgil is referring, I discover, to Ashrita Furman, a 67-year-old man and part-owner of a health-food store in Queens, who is the world's leading practitioner of something known as "Guinnessport"--undertaking challenges designed to get you into the Guinness Book of World Records. Amrita Furman, it seems, has set more world records (367) than anybody else. Unbeknownst to me, Virgil had snuck-read all about him in one of my recent New Yorker's.

So I checked out the profile by Alec Wilkenson for myself, and Virgil is absolutely right, of course--this man's exploits will certainly make you whistle over the creek and pound your bare feet on the cold terrazzo. They might even cause you to go bald overnight.

Last June, Furman climbed the mountain above Machu Picchu on peg stilts; in 2005, he covered a mile stretch of The Great Wall of China on a hop ball; and in 1993, he climbed to the snow line of Mt. Fuji on a pogo stick. Furman has also jumped underwater in the Amazon River on a pogo-stick for three hours and forty minutes--and in each case, he set the world record for fastest and longest. I didn't even know people did this kind of stuff!! Twenty-seven thousand jumping jacks done in six hours and forty-five minutes. Walking thirty-three feet in the world's heaviest shoes, which weighed three hundred and twenty-three pounds. Walking, once, in New York, nearly ninety miles with a milk bottle on his head.

But it was really one of Furman's rivals--a widely known French Guinnessport athlete, Michel Lotito--who got my attention, it being Christmas, and therefore the time for culturally ordained overeating. This man cut into pieces and then consumed eighteen bicycles, fifteen shopping carts, some televisons and chandeliers, two beds, a computer, and a single-engine Cessna. In his lifetime (he died a few years ago), he is thought to have eaten nine-hundred tons of metal. Not to be outdone, Furman once tried eating a tree in Queens, having heard that someone had eaten an eleven-foot birch. Can you top this?

Yes, according to the hosts of a new reality show in the Netherlands known as "Guinea Pigs," in which the two co-hosts agreed to indulge in a little cannibalism. They each had tiny pieces of their flesh surgically removed (one from the belly and one from the backside) and then it was sauteed and served up to be eaten. "It is weird," said one of the men, "to look into the eyes of a friend when you are chewing on his belly." You better believe it!

Maybe we all need to rethink our Christmas menus. I mean, Mama Standish's cranberry relish just doesn't play against a metal breakfast of champions, does it? Eating, it turns out, can be a really dangerous edge, if you happen to find yourself up for it. As for me, I'll stick with relish, but I won't speak for Virgil, who has been known to sometimes relish human flesh.

The Wonderbread of Civiliztion

2011-12-05T17:07:00.003-05:00

In case you've wondered where I've been these last weeks--MIA from my tiny perch in the library stacks of the vast blogosphere--the truth is I've been doing something as ancient and essential as wrapping Christmas presents, even while avoiding the national nervous breakdown known as presidential politics. (Although I confess to secretly reveling in the moral undoing of that world-class liar, Herman Cain, who I think hoped he would be the last cookie left in the jar. Not--unless, of course, he returns as Newt's running mate for VP, and if that should happen, remember you read it first here, but do not blame me.)

There have, of course, been moments of anxiety interruptus: joy at eating a braised breast of duck with a friend at The Blue Apron; excitement at seeing the new movie "Hugo" in 3D with another friend; and a surprise revisiting of the life and work of Carl Andre via Calvin Tomkins' profile of him in The New Yorker. It's been years since I pondered whether or not Carl Andre pushed his then wife, Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, out of the window of their Spring Street apartment in New York City. The doorman (Tomkins reminds us) heard a woman cry "No, no, no!" just before Mendieta's body slammed down into the street below. At Andre's request, there never was a juried trial, and eventually Andre was acquitted by a judge who claimed there wasn't enough evidence to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Andre had committed a crime.

Reading about this again recently reminded me that I once met Ana Mendieta when I visited Iowa State University to give a lecture many years ago. She was not yet famous. The professor who brought me there to speak was living with Mendieta at the time, and I was invited me to their house for dinner. Mendieta cooked us the most delicious Cuban black bean soup, and then showed me pictures of her seemingly premonitional work--imprints of her own body lying in sand, as if she somehow had intuited her terrible fate.

Seeing Martin Scorsese's film "Hugo" last week has led me intuitively to want to write a few words about my old friend, James Hillman, who sadly died in his home in Connecticut on October 27th. I think he would have loved this movie. It is based on a children's book about an orphaned boy who lives in a train station in Paris in the 1930s, snitching broken toys from the toy maker's repair shop and hot croissants from the bakery. If the movie has any message, though, it has to be this: if something in the world is broken, it behooves us to fix it. That is our human purpose, and what gives life its meaning. But it is the way the movie mixes it all up and becomes a monumental tribute to the human imagination, that reminded me so much of Hillman and his work.

Like Scorsese in "Hugo," Hillman was committed to the human imagination as the primary activity of the psyche and as the motor force of civilization. Hillman dedicated his life to the "anima mundi," to instigating a return of soul to the world. And, as his good friend Thomas Moore observes in his prologue to excerpts from Hillman's collected writings, "The Blue Fire," Hillman sought to re-vision psychology by moving it away from emotional personalism and its focus on individual suffering, towards a larger consideration of the life of external objects, and the suffering in the world and in nature--attending to which he considered the true work of the soul. As in the movie, Hillman's work often studies waterworks, streets, railroads, buildings, show business, ecology, bombs, work, education, and architecture.

Here is a wondrous example from "The Blue Fire" of Hillman's ability to "mix it all up." In this particular riff, he humorously channels Freud and Nietzsche, in an almost comic-strip parody of their ideas that quickly becomes, in Hillman's hands, a send-up of the byzantine ways of civilization itself. You really need to read the entire excerpt, but as I say, Hillman knew better than anybody else how to mix it all up:

"When Nietzsche said "God is dead," he had just been served a slice of wonderbread by his sister, and his mouth crammed with an unswallowable gulp of the stuff, she misheard what he was trying to say. Never imagining that a diseased mind like her brother's could make an intelligent comment about what he was eating, she transcribed his remark on the demise of bread as yet another of his attacks on deity. Poor Nietzsche. He was never understood."

"In the same way, some decided that my book on wonderbread ("The Future of an Illusion") was a deliberate attack on the illusion of salvation in "white Christian civilization."...But these critics, as always with my work, missed the point. I was not out to get salvation. I was only trying to save bread....The illiusion we call bread has no future. Nor does the civilization that comes wrapped with it. As long as the prayer goes forth daily to Mister Muffin Man in the Sky to give us this day our daily bread, our flour mills will go on grinding and bleaching, our loaves knowing neither ferment nor crust, and our sandwiches dwelling forever in the house of gumminess and goo...."

"I offer no recipe for bread...But advice I do have: if you would live s long as I, if you want a future that is not illusion, get a nice loaf of Jewish rye. Enjoy!" [Cookbook, 174-177]

Unmistakably, at this point in time, we are witnessing the end of the age of Wonderbread. If you ask any Wall Street Occupier, we may even be facing the end of that illusion, civilization itself. People are becoming aware that their future has been seriously foreclosed. In the current non-trickle-down economy, everyone would love to find, hidden behind that empty cookie jar, one really nice loaf of Jewish rye. True to the spirit of James Hillman, it would be a gift, not from the Muffin Man in the Sky, but from a sympathizer at the local delicatessen.

On Being the Moral Compass for a Nation

2011-11-21T16:55:00.003-05:00

All my troubles, Lord, soon be over, all my worries, Lord--about what might happen if Wall Street protesters tried to survive a bitter "Valley Forge" winter in Zuccotti Park--soon were over. Within twenty-four hours of my previous post, the whole Zuccotti encampment vanished overnight without a trace. On November 15th at one a.m., New York police, using tear gas and pepper spray to disperse the crowd, raided the park, removed all the tents and tarps, and tossed everything on the site into the maws of waiting sanitation trucks. Not even the library books were spared.

On that November morning, when the rest of the country woke up, Zuccotti Park had been restored to its former pristine state and resembled nothing so much as an old-growth forest that had been newly clear-cut. The ferocity of the Occupiers' resilience and will power would not be tested here. Sanitary conditions reigned again, the messy remnants of those who had been lamenting the disgrace of humanity's rampant greed dutifully hosed away. Gone, too, was the exemplary democratic village they had so carefully constructed as a rebuke to the crummy, second-rate world they have inherited, with its fatal indifference to those in need and to the very earth itself.

"They had to go," a friend's husband, now 92, told me the next night over dinner. "What they were doing was illegal, camping on someone else's property, and it was unsanitary." Maybe so, I said, but was it more illegal than when we went into Iraq to "shock and awe" the population? Was it more unsanitary than the mess we created there?

Previously, police had brought prisoners released from Riker's Island who had nowhere to go into the park. The homeless and the mentally ill also arrived, but the protesters did not recoil from this invasion. On the contrary, they included these people in their tiny model society, even arranging for on-site treatment by drug counselors and social workers. In one tent, you could get vaccinated against the flu. In another, you could borrow a business suit to go to the bathroom in one of the restaurants nearby without attracting undue attention.

"We decided we wouldn't marginalize these people like the rest of society does," one of the movement's most devoted organizers, Katie Davison, a film-maker in her early 30s, told Michel Greenberg, who has written about Zuccotti Park in a recent New York Review of Books. "I guess we've created our own welfare state, and I mean that in the best sense of the term." Zuccotti Park was not just a tent city. "I want us to be the country's moral touchstone, its unofficial conscience. It's a model for what is good." (I actually cried when I read that.) It was part of the movement's effort to show the world a better, more humanitarian form of democracy, a new kind of social system, not motivated by a corrosive appetite for power, influence, and control of the political system. Occupiers cherish their status as ethical defenders of the 99 %.

"At some point in time," a character muses in Haruki Murakami's latest novel, "IQ84," "the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place." Sadly, on November 15th, that analogue replacement world also vanished: it was forcibly evicted. Fortunately for us, however, the story doesn't end with eviction or pepper spray. A huge network of like-minded people has been galvanized, who will not back down in the campaign against plutocracy and greed. Exactly what direction that energy will take now that the model community in Zuccotti Park--symbolic of the movement as a whole--has been dismantled, still remains to be seen. Plans are being developed for a national occupation of the National Mall, the big park that runs between the Capitol and the Lincoln Monument. A national General Assembly is in the works for April 1, which will focus on the failure of Congress to represent the views of the majority of people, and allowing special interest groups to dominate the political process in favor of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

One Occupy member reports that a rotating team of thirty to forty volunteers, minus their sleeping bags, still patrol the park all night, drinking hot chocolate for warmth. Other Occupiers who came from out of town have found places to sleep at friendly neighborhood churches, and the kitchen still operates out of nearby Trinity Church. It is both ironic and compelling to me that humanity's fate, now playing itself out in the grimmest of ways, will depend on the fate of tandem teams of men and women standing watch and drinking cups of steaming cocoa at two in the morning in an otherwise deserted park at the bottom of Manhattan. But as their story goes, so will go ours as well. Whatever happens to them will be what happens to us. We are the 99%.

Baby, It's Cold Outside: Freezing for a Fair Deal

2011-11-13T12:51:00.003-05:00

When, much too early, winter made a sudden, unwelcome appearance in New York City, arriving in the form of a freak snow storm late in October, the impromptu OWS encampment in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park was likened by some to General George Washington's beleaguered brigades at Valley Forge. Struck by the analogy and concerned for the protesters, I checked out Valley Forge in Wikipedia, because I worry about how these (mostly) young people currently putting their lives on the line for the future of humanity will get through the freezing winter. Here is some of what I read:

"In 1777, with winter about to set in, General George Washington moved his army to Valley Forge in Pennsylvania where new grounds for brigade encampments were selected, and new defense lines were planned and begun. The troops were poorly fed, ill-equipped, weary from long marches, and plagued by critical shortages. Alternating freezing and melting of snow and ice made it impossible to keep dry or warm. Soldiers received irregular supplies of meat and bread, some getting their only nourishment from "fire cake," a tasteless mixture of flour and water. . So severe were conditions at times that Washington despaired "that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place ... this Army must inevitably ... starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can."

Shortly after that, I found this testimony on the Occupiers' chief website, NationofChange.org, which I check in with every day. It chronicles life inside the movement--people telling their stories and op-ed writing by other well-known figures who support the movement.

"I opened the tent to freezing sheets of blowing, icy rain. Within moments my hands were so frozen they were barely usable...It was my own fault, I should have put on my gloves, but I had lent them to another woman whose hands were purple. It was a trying morning for all of us." Thus writes Bre Lembitz, a 21-year-old student majoring in Economics and Political Science, who took up residence in the park on September 25th, and plans to take another semester off to s continue her organizing efforts on the medical and financial committees. Lembitz sees OWS as the most important movement of her time.

"By five PM, tempers were short," she continues. "No one was dry or warm, we were all standing around in the cold, performing our various duties, and dealing with the other symptoms of the storm. A large majority of the people who are living in the park have never camped before. There had been twenty six cases of hypothermia, and there were emergency procedures in place to take people home...Panic was every where, people were not thinking clearly, but the community came through. One woman showed up three times, once to bring blankets, once to bring shopping bags full of soup, and another time to bring hot chocolate. With tears in her eyes, she brought me the bags of soup and said, 'I wish there was more I could do. I am so proud you are all here, and I beg you not to give up.' ”

The Occupiers have declared themselves allies to "all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world." They are unwilling to leave. Polls show that a majority of Americans agree that wealth is unfairly distributed, with the after-tax income of the richest 1 percent nearly tripling since the 1980s, while everyone else's income has fallen. One of the first people to show up in Zuccotti Park and address the crowd was Naomi Klein, author of"The Shock Doctrine." She spoke about how the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control--how corporations have become more powerful than governments, selfishly trashing the natural world as well as the economy. The struggle to overcome the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet will take many years," she warned in an open-forum discussion on October 6th. "Let's treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is."

During that devastating year at Valley Forge, clothing was wholly inadequate and many soldiers, already wounded from previous battles, died from exposure. Alternating freezing and melting of snow and ice made it impossible to keep dry and allowed for diseases to fester. Although General Washington repeatedly petitioned for relief, Congress was unable to provide it, and the soldiers continued to suffer. Female relatives alleviated some of the suffering by providing valuable services, such as laundry and nursing, that the army desperately needed.

A report last week in the New York Times says that germs are spreading in Zuccotti Park, and many people are getting sick. Under these conditions, new recruits have become harder to find. Meanwhile, the response of the Congressional "Super-committee" has been to debate how much money to take out of the economy by cutting Medicare and Social Security for the elderly, along with many other essential government services--while otherwise seeking ways to lower top income and corporate tax rates. Two days ago, the following urgent request appeared on NationofChange's web newsletter:

"Freezing cold temperatures have hit the east coast and other parts of the nation. We have set out to raise $10,000 to purchase critical food and warmth supplies for protesters in New York City, Boston, Washington DC, Denver, and Chicago. We will put 100% of our goal amount raised towards the purchase of prepared food, zero-degree blankets and sleeping bags, camp cots, tarps, men’s and women’s underwear, rubber boots, wool socks and other essentials.

Help us support these heroes who are making personal sacrifices for our future. Donate generously today!"

"It's time to take sides, folks," Tom Degan writes on his blog, The Rant. "This isn't a fad. This isn't some kind of mass, childish temper tantrum that will pass the moment the weather hits the freezing mark. Wake up and face the dawn. You're either going to be on the right side of history or you're going to be left standing in the sewer. The choice has not been this stark in a century-and-a-half. We've got to put hideous bastards like the Koch Brothers on notice. We need to make all of them realize that the people are standing up and they're not going to stand down under any circumstances."

Herman Cain, who recently bragged that he is "the third brother of the Koch brothers, by another mother," is also bragging that he pulled in $9 million in campaign contributions since October 1. Now just suppose Brother Koch-Cain were to take a paltry $10,000 from that amount and give it to the OWS movement. I expect he would either laugh in my face or snore low in the weeds at such a preposterous thought. It will never happen. That is precisely the reason so many people have become explosive, forging another Valley Forge even at the risk of freezing themselves to death.

"Mink Coats Don't Trickle Down"

2011-10-23T16:19:00.003-05:00

So how to begin to describe this latest protest movement, Occupy Wall Street, anyway--is it fish, flesh, fowl, or (as my mother used to say) good red herring?

Reactions vary extremely across the board, all the way from it's "the beginnings of a possible second American Revolution" to the crude referencing of "growing mobs that are pitting Americans against Americans" by Eric Cantor. So is this really "class warfare," as the Republicans would have it, or rather "a holy space between the towers of money?" as Naomi Klein describes it? Is what we are witnessing in Zuccotti Park just a few "soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism" or is it "a wide-open place for people to find each other" during "an inevitable moment for America"?

The answer is that nobody really knows. That is why both Zuccotti Park's cheering supporters and its mocking detractors are all holding their breath in anticipation of how this will turn out. What is yet to be determined is whether we are, finally, in the past 5-6 weeks of an unforeseen occupation, witnessing a brave new world rising up out of the ashes of right-wing nihilism and corporate greed, or the beginnings of a nightmare scenario that will end in chaos and destruction--an updated version of the French Revolution where the streets were running with blood.

So where am I, in trying to assess all of this? Caught, I expect, in the crossfire of my own acute emotions, somewhere between elation and fear. There seem to be as many ways of responding to what is happening as there are protesters out there protesting. No one knows for sure whether the movement can continue (the protesters claim to be unstoppable and insist that they can and will continue indefinitely). So far, what they have accomplished is to annex a park near the New York stock Exchange, hold marches and meetings, fend off eviction, spur similar protests around the nation and even the globe, and set up a leaderless mini-society that functions, so far, in a remarkably orderly way, with working groups that run everything from meals and media technology to sanitation. They have even organized a library, as well as "family sleep-overs" so that sympathizers, who feel that their children's futures have been compromised, can bring them along and spend the night.

No one really knows, however, whether Occupy Wall Street will change anything or has a chance of succeeding, given the entrenched forces arrayed against it. One thing we do know is that when leaders pursue their own agendas and stop thinking about the interests of their people, they lose the support of their people. The movement, with its motto of “we are the 99 percent,” has been criticized by many for its lack of coherent demands, but one of the organizers, Yotam Marom, claims that's silly. "We're occupying Wall Street. It should be pretty well clear what we want changed." OWS is fighting both to strengthen democracy, and to end the domination of the big money interests which are seeking to destroy it.

"I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific demands," says George Lakoff, the world's expert on how best to frame your agenda to get the results you want. "If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed." In his essay "A Framing Memo to Occupy Wall Street" published in the Huffington Post, Lakoff proposes that the OWS movement is moral in nature, and that what the occupiers really want is for the country to change its moral focus.

"It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested," he writes. "It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands." If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected, and the policies will follow. "Without a change of moral focus," Lakoff says, "the conservative world-view that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail."

For the moment, I'm totally happy with his idea of trying to change the moral focus of our country. Let's see what happens when crosses are painted over with polka dots. If it works--if somehow, against all the odds, OWS manages to steal the right-wing Putsch--then maybe, in some better future, crosses will stand, not for the crucified Jesus, but for some new, emergent X chromosome in our species that will no longer be hellbent on its own destruction.

Herman Cain Is Not Red Riding Hood

2011-10-15T11:36:00.003-05:00

I was amused almost to the point of desperation at Deborah Ring's characterization (Oct.13th in the Roanoke Times) of Herman Cain--the former Godfather's Pizza CEO who has recently catapulted to the top of the GOP presidential race--as someone who will clean up the mess in Washington because he is a "new face," and not an insider. "He does not owe any PAC, union, or corporation anything," she writes.

Cain may not come from the ranks of professional politics, but he is absolutely marbled with the financial fat of those corporate billionaire backers of the Tea Party, the Koch brothers. This is meant to be a well-kept secret,Tea Party affiliation no longer being quite the passport into politics it was just a year ago--and so far, the connection seems to have gone unnoticed by political and talk-show pundits. It was not surprising, therefore, that on his kick-off bus tour in Tennessee the other day, Cain told the crowd he will not name his policy advisers to protect them from attacking critics. "They're my advisers, not yours," he snapped.

If you want the real scoop on exactly how lily-white the latest Republican front-runner really is, you can check out the particulars online in Scott Keyes' article about the relationship between Cain and his billionaire pals at thinkprogress.org. There you will find a spectacle with a kick: Cain's rise from niche radio host and pizza CEO to presidential front-runner appears to have been largely fueled by the Koch network.

In an article thick with well- documented links, Keyes maps out the history of this extensive connection, showing how, dating back to 2005, Cain held an official position in the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity that offered him immersive opportunities to barnstorm the country, give speeches, hold town-hall meetings, and generally spruce up his skills for an eventual presidential bid. Cain's campaign manager, Mark Block, was a former president of Americans for Prosperity's Wisconsin chapter and is credited with persuading Cain to run for president. Block also has a history, it seems, of electoral dirty tricks, and was once fined $15,000 for violating Wisconsin electoral law.

In January, Cain attended the Koch brothers private biannual meeting in Palm Springs of top right-wing corporate and political figures in order to coordinate strategy and raise money for the conservative movement. He also traveled to Wisconsin to support Governor Scott Walker's union-busting efforts, which were equally fueled by the Koch brothers, as well as to a Koch-based anti-climate rally in New York in June. If Cain's catchy "9-9-9" across-the-board tax plan were ever instigated, the Koch brothers would personally see their tax rates fall from 23 percent to around 11 percent.

In sum, we are not talking about some free-wheeling pizza populist here, with no campaign structure and very little money. Herman Cain is not quite the untainted, folksy, down-home "new face" that Ring makes him out to be. Rather, he is quite the clever teacup, whose bristling subtext is that of being front man for the most dangerous right-wing corporatists now threatening to take over our country. Cain has already named Paul Ryan and Jim deMint for unspecified slots in his administration. Does all this make your radar system flash on red alert? It does mine.

Black Marbles

2011-10-04T14:05:00.002-05:00

"I have never had so challenging an assignment as finding people who approve of Congress," Joel Stein writes in the 10/10 issue of Time. Stein has spent the last two weeks on assignment in Los Angeles, searching for people who would join him for a meal and tell him why they don't hate Congress. "It was the hardest job of my life," he says. Recent polls show a 12 percent approval for Congress, which matches the lowest rating ever recorded, and Stein considers even that has got to be over-inflated. Finally he did manage to track down five people willing to talk with him, two of whom wouldn't allow him to print their names because they didn't want anyone to know they actually think Congress is okay.

Three of the five who ended up convening with him for brunch at the Alcove Cafe were Tea Party enthusiasts, one of whom declared, "A Congress that doesn't get anything done delights me." This was a doctor who wanted to remain anonymous because he feared if his patients were to know his views, they would leave him. One of the others, a housewife with a PhD, proclaimed her nostalgia for the time Newt Gingrich succeeded in shutting the government down. When asked by Stein to name something they thought the Senate and House did well, a lawyer answered, "Give me a second. I know it's there. It'll come to me."

For almost three years, Barack Obama tried to work with both parties in Congress "to get things done," until he finally got it that he would never get any cooperation or support from Republicans. So now, with his approval rating at an all time low, he has taken to the hills to campaign for his American Jobs Act--a mixture of tax cuts and government spending totaling $447 billion--entirely on his own, looking exhausted and demoralized, but hanging tough, like Atlas holding up the world. Republicans may never even bring the bill to the table for a vote. For them, nothing happens unless the rich get their tax cut.

"The country needs a leader," Peggy Noonan crooned on "Meet the Press," this Sunday, back to her latest refrain--Obama hasn't managed to bring the parties together, nor has he succeeded in making Republicans fear him. Meanwhile, America's politics have turned into a chicken-and-egg game over which came first: Republican obstructionism or Obama's failure to lead. Meantime, the rest of us have become like black marbles caught in a whirlpool of blame.

In The New Yorker [09/26], James Surowiecki presents reasons the GOP could actually get away with their obstructionism without being punished for it at the polls. Responsibility for the economy, he claims, now belongs to Obama and and the Dems, and since Republicans control only one house of Congress, they can more easily dodge blame because they've had little chance to enact anything on their own. According to polls, most swing voters are strongly in favor of reducing deficits, and voters in general don't expect Republicans to do much about jobs anyway, so they are not penalized as much for their inaction. (This last has got to be an argument that depends, in all good faith, on the rain.) In fact, uncooperative Republicans are really just delivering what their constituencies expect. In the run-up to last year's midterms, Republicans were explicit in their opposition to stimulus programs and to any tax-and-spend policies--and they won a landslide victory. Surowiecki concludes that Americans may want the government to get the economy moving again, but when push comes to shove, they vote for a different story. So, for now, he claims, it is not only our representatives who are to blame. It's ourselves. We are the culprits who voted them in. And, as black marbles caught up in the whirlpool of blame, which of us can honestly claim NOT to have felt all the emotions as itemized below?

To BLAME, [per Roget's Thesaurus] = to disapprove, not admire, fail to appreciate, have no praise for, not think much of, take a dim view of, censor, disfavor, lament, shout down, boo, hiss, throw mud, pour vitriol, lambast, call names, curse, vilify, reproach, denounce, stigmatize, sneer, taunt, trounce, come down on like a ton of bricks, revile, think the worst, condemn.

Who, at this point, is not in search of a wailing wall, not feeling a need to cram hair balls down somebody's else's throat? In doing so, however, we ignore at our own peril (in the words of Ray Bradbury) that "poison can destroy minds even as it can destroy flesh." "Teach me, he writes in "Zen in the Art of Writing," "how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields, and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass."

If these are really our choices--becoming black marbles or chewing sweet grass--which of them should one choose? I ask Virgil, my trusted alligator-muse, to give me his opinion. Considering the state of everything today, how can one NOT want to play the blame game? It would be like asking tribes give up their bingo rights on the reservation.

In the winking of a lighthouse, Virgil has his answer at the ready "Your country lost its legal standing when it argued and convinced the Supreme Court that corporations are people and have rights. Now, all the cases in which you are still hoping to defend your rights are prepared by skeletons in a bone court."

So what does that mean?" I ask. "Listen," says Virgil, "you people are insane, without a doubt insane. Not every donna can be prima. You're going backward into the future, where you are surely going to lose. To paraphrase from one of your most illustrious poets, you would rather be ruined than change. The national debt is rising at $46,000 per second, so I would bag the marbles and ditch the sweet grass. It is already known that resentment is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die. Personally, in a predicament like yours, I'd reach for pistachios, with maybe a dash of wild ginseng."

After dropping that bit of alligatorial advice, Virgil brushes the dust from his leather trousers and rises to go. He has new orders to fill from more than a dozen states and countries, and even though his percentage is pretty low, he still earns more than he needs to expand his empire and add to his collection of ladies' shoes. Riding waves of electrified delirium, the crafty alligator quickly disappears, sleek as a Bedouin in the night.

Look Ma! No Taxes!

2011-09-21T14:29:00.003-05:00

Anybody still wondering whether President Obama will finally acknowledge to himself that the Republicans aren't much interested in putting party politics aside and working with him for the good of the country got their answer this past week. It looks as if he has finally had enough of being shunned by members of his own party and actively abused by the not-so-loyal opposition. Obama finally seems to have found his sweet spot of anger, and he is using it to fuel an effort to attack and hopefully destroy the Republicans' oppressive credo of no taxes. He seems ready to stage a revolt against the collective values he believes are spiritually wrong.

So hold on to your hats, everyone. A war has been declared--not on Libya, Syria, Yemen, or Palestine, but on Republicans. The president has drawn that line in the sand his base has been howling for: he is now seeking to raise taxes on the rich. Of the $3 trillion-plus in deficit reductions being proposed, $1.5 trillion would be made up of tax increases--which would include letting the Bush tax cuts for people with incomes above $250,000 expire. A consistent 71 percent of voters in polls favor reducing the deficit through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. Part of the funding for Obama's jobs' plan will be the closing down of special interest tax breaks, deductions, and loopholes for corporations.

Already I hear the sound of enormous fans whirring near the door to the latrine, and the noisome stench of urine circulating. We already know the GOP would rather have O's head on a platter, the better to be able to piss on it, than pay a single cent more in taxes. So bye-bye, common ground! Let the games begin. So long, compromise, it's been good to know you! Sayonara, John Boehner, you walking-out-AGAIN piece of crapola! Cutting deals with you just didn't work out, did it? Hello to the new world of vicious tax wars--but with some fair warning: the rest of you may not like the end of this movie as much as you like the beginning. Will the political gridlock improve? Definitely not. Will things get worse? There Will Be Blood. Maybe even as far as your front door. It doesn't matter if the president is friendly or hostile or angry--the lions will not lie down with the lamb any time soon.

The right-wing spin machine has spent years persuading millions of Americans that Democrats are spendthrifts and liberals are evil, that the poor are lazy, and that government is the problem, not the solution. Government only manages to survive on the tax payers dime and is the bane of every liberty-loving individual's existence. Today, however, believe it or not, I am not here to depress you; I want to make you laugh. I wish I could claim authorship of the following vignette, but I can't. I found it in Vanity Fair, "as relayed by Henry Alford." Enjoy this hilarious vision of self-reliance in a Tea-Party world (once government has been duly shrunk and then drowned in a bathtub). Laugh, while laughing is still a possibility, laugh while your heart is breaking, laugh before everything around you crashes. I am laughing with you. Here it comes:

"TAKING AMERICA BEAA-YACK: The Campaign Journal of Krysti McCandless, Rising Tea Party Superstar"

"My hubby, Critter, keeps me afloat--he is my pool noodle. But who wouldn't love a guy who looks like Will Ferrell and speaks like Ron Paul? Dude is hot. Cable-repairman hot. And it was Critt who brilliantly realized that in our our efforts 2 dismantle the fed'l gov't, we shouldn't be fighting just for states' rights or even cities' rights. No. we gotta drill it down to fighting 4 cul-de-sac rights! Lock 'n load, people!
So how did we take control of our sac? It started, like everything gr8 does, with a trip 2 Costco. I bought rope and PVC tubing so Critt could build a crow's-nest lookout on our roof. Then he dragged the boat that's been sitting in our front yard all these years out to block the end of the sac property line! Then he told the other two families in our sac that we three families are now a mini-state under its own jurisdiction. They looked surprised, but very, very alert.
Now the mail-carrier leaves all mail at the boat and we auto-sort it ourselves. The 3 families are on the gold standard and we formed a militia. We home-school. We'll get all Willie Nelson-ish re tax-paying in April. We call ourselves "the 51st state," and on the back of the T-shirts it says, TAKE THAT, GUAM!
The Vastreps, on our left, have been totally on board: they are true Americans. But the Lancasters, on our right, have been a little weird ever since I had both their gardeners deported last summer. The Lancasters own a restaurant in Baltimore called Banc, which, hilariously, is pronounced "bonk." (Sometimes when Critt and I are walking around the house, we'll smash our bellies together like two tympany drums and cry, "I work at Banc!" Then I scream "LOL!") Anyway, the Bonkcasters needed more convincing, but I talked them off the ledge when I said "no taxes": everybody loves the kuh-ching.
All this sac stuff has been amazing, like summer camp without the bed-wetting. In my run for County Council here in Montgomery County, I've often invoked the early colonists and their bravery, but now I just talk about the sac. Because once you take your own future and your own welfare into your hands, you make an important realization: Destiny--it's not just a name for strippers anymore."

Before Virgil and I sign off, here's one more piece of information you should have: by a 53 to 28 percent margin, independents say they plan to vote against the president in November 2012. So this is some advice from my usual fav, Andrew Sullivan, with whom I am in total agreement here:

"Every time you think the ultras in the current GOP won't go there, they do. They'll sabotage economic growth for short term political advantage. They'll sabotage their own president in negotiating with allies. They're happy for the US to default if it means they can damage Obama. Their own plan for immediate, drastic austerity would be catastrophic for the global economy. Their pre-Arab Spring belligerence would shut America out of a critical opportunity to ease tensions with the growing and burgeoning Muslim world. And they have no problem treating the world economy as a partisan plaything.

If they claw their way back to power this way, our system really will be broken for a long time. And the great possibility of an adult conversation on pragmatic grounds to help the economy will be lost. And this is emphatically not Obama's fault. He tried. They threw it back in his face again and again. Which means, I believe, that we should double down in backing him, instead of the ear-splitting whine coming from the left."

Personally, I'm not sure I can survive a Rick Perry ferry. But I KNOW FOR SURE the country can't--and it won't.

Vying for the "Cojones Vote"

2011-09-15T14:29:00.003-05:00

"Let them eat cake," Marie Antoinette once famously said of the unwashed masses whose lives were less fortunate than hers. Today we have the latest incarnation of that philosophy (minus the white wig), in the persona of presidential candidate Rick Perry--said to be capturing the "cojones vote" with his more candid approach to the disempowered underclass: "Let them Die." Cake, after all, is for sissies.

Applause audibly ramps up at Republican rallies and debates when Perry boasts about his record while governor of Texas for having had 235 criminals executed, and vetoing a bill that would have exempted the mentally ill from Death Row. His audiences love it when Perry says things like "Anyone convicted of murder in the Lone Star State faces 'the ultimate justice.' " So does this guy have balls made of human molars, or what? When bulbous fingers rise up in a victory "V" around Perry, the question rolling around on other people's lips is, "What about he of the watery spine? Is Obama ballsy enough to be president?"

Last week, the consensus seemed to be, "Yes, finally!" as pundits from David Brooks to Paul Krugman to Thomas Friedman all breathed a big sigh of relief and rallied round the President. On Thursday, Obama had actually shown some fire in the belly when addressing Congress on television and presenting his new American Jobs bill. The President seemed angry enough to launch an attack on the Republican solution to the economic crisis: "The only thing we can do to restore prosperity [according to them] is just dismantle the government, refund everybody's money, and let everyone write their own rules and tell everyone they're on their own." But, Obama added, "That's not who we are. That's not the story of America."

It may not be who we have been in the past, but it is definitely who we are becoming. Obama may have shown more toughness this past week, but he still seems unwilling to acknowledge the depth of the forces aligned against him--not just an intransigeant G.O.P. (who in Maureen Dowd's words, "wants to eat him alive"), but also the relentless damage to the economy being done by a constant stream of natural disasters. Disaster relief funds will run out in two weeks, and while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to pass a $6 billion emergency disaster relief bill in the Senate, his counterpart Mitch McConnell has already announced his unwillingness to "pass this bill now," as the president exhorted Congress to do, declaring the Republicans' lack of interest in any short-term relief. "No one believes," he said, "that this package will do any kind of long-term, have any kind of long-term stimulative effect on our country."

Meanwhile many states are broke, and new statistics just released show that an additional 2.6 million people landed in poverty last year, bringing the total to 46.2 million--the highest number since the government started tracking poverty in the 1950s. FEMA estimates that states have been hit with over $36 billion in disaster damages. The Census Bureau credits Social Security with keeping nearly 14 million seniors out of poverty in 2010--which must be the reason Rick Perry describes it as a monstrous lie, a Ponzi scheme, and a failure.

I had to take a little media fast this past weekend, because I couldn't front up to reliving the 9/11 attacks all over again, but Obama, unfazed, attended all the ceremonies--hailing American resilience, claiming the ensuing decade has proven that America does not give in to fear and has emerged stronger after the attacks. Stronger? Really? Personally, I was more in agreement with Kathleen Parker, who took a different tack in her column, claiming that the real legacy of 9/11 was a sort of emotional breakdown in the sense of who we are.

"Simply put," she wrote, "[9/11] damaged our collective soul and seems to have released a free-ranging hysteria that has contaminated our interactions ever since...[and has] caused us to go temporarily insane." The moral panic she describes rings more true to me than anything the president said. However, as she also rightly points out, no president can afford publicly to speak of such things--so maybe she'll be right that journalists could actually acquire a new sense of purpose by ponying up to the job instead. But I'm not holding my breath.

It is, of course, possible to argue that there was a kind of bittersweet unity in the aftermath of the attacks, but that singular joining of hearts and minds soon dissolved over the decade into what Nancy Gibbs refers to in Time magazine as "pitiless cage fights." Yow! In his essay on 9/11 in The New Yorker, George Packer also takes a dim view of the decade that followed the attacks. For all the talk about unity and a new sense of purpose, he argues, the attacks did nothing to unify the country--which was already entrenched in two politically opposed camps with the moderates in the Republican party barely surviving. Today that division is so extremely hardened that the very possibility of a common national narrative has been destroyed. Today. we live in mutually hostile and unintelligible, red and blue, partisan universes.

With what has to be a Pulitzer prize-winning comment, I will let Thomas Friedman have the last word on this, our sorry plight: "Our cupboard is bare, and the only thing we have in surplus is political venom. Indeed, if political venom could be turned into a transportation fuel, we'd be energy independent today! Alas, it's just venom, and it's weakening us--along with everything else we've done to sap our national vitality."

Baby Palins: Feminism, Republican Style

2011-08-31T12:59:00.005-05:00

The eye-catching name of Regis Giles (see her photo above) first came to my attention via an article in Elle magazine. Called "The Best and the Rightist" by Nina Burleigh, it delineates a new, up-and-coming, voting demographic of conservative women, ages 18 to 35--in her article Burleigh refers to them as "Baby Palins"--who deride liberal-style feminism and have a real passion for guns. Regis Giles is 20 years old, owns a spear and a CZ 550 rifle, and already has acquired an impressive kill sheet: one white-tail deer, one black buck, one giant bear, one antelope, a behemoth buffalo, and the wild boar she regularly spears on the shores of Florida's Lake Okeechobee. In large part because of her extraordinary hunting prowess, Giles has emerged as the new face of conservative womanhood: "thousands of young women in cocktail dresses who profess their love for guns, low taxes, and red meat."

Many of these women were to be seen at the recent Conservative Political Action Committee Conference [CPAC], an annual gathering of 10,000 political activists, more than half of whom are college-age, and nearly all of whom are white. Giles was there and made a provocative speech in her distinctive nasal drawl. "I'm sick and tired of seeing defenseless girls being abducted in broad daylight. My company stands for those girls who've decided to arm themselves with a gun that will pump lead into an attacker at 1,200 feet per second." No kidding! Talking this way at conferences causes her audience to stomp, whistle, and cheer, and she usually, effortlessly, brings the house down.

Regis Giles claims to be at her happiest when she's hunting. "I'm driven to hunt by the love of the sport, the thrill of the kill--hunting rejuvenates my soul. It's an awesome experience," she states. But she isn't a Palin clone, having been trained since the age of 9 to hunt by her father, Doug Giles, a conservative radio talk-show host and pastor of his own "clash church," long before Palin ever emerged on the scene. And she frequently donates her kill to a local homeless shelter, where the meat is fed to the needy. This young, Republican, female political activist may look like she just stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting, but rest assured, she does not spend her time decorating with crepe paper or building miniature windmills.

"Regis' niche," according to Burleigh, "is as the ambassadress of the polished trigger finger." Her website, Girls Just Wanna Have Guns, currently offers a variety of t-shirts, buttons, and coffee mugs for sale. Next year, however, at 21, she will be eligible to get a federal license to sell guns. Thanks to the 'Palin effect,' female membership in the National Rifle Association has risen by 20 percent.

The same issue of Elle magazine also contains a contrasting article, profiling a Democratic activist named Louisa Kamps, from Wisconsin. Kamps describes her conversion into activism thusly: she was driving out of town when she heard on the radio that Wisconsin's new Republican governor, Scott Walker, had announced a surprise plan to strip unionized workers (primarily nurses and teachers) of their collective bargaining rights. Horrified and appalled, she turned the car around and came back home to join the battle lines of irate protesters converging in hordes around the capitol building. Kamps claims that although she never voted for Walker, she hadn't realized his sinister union-busting intentions, or how deeply he was in cahoots with anti-regulation conservatives like the Koch brothers, who are among his biggest financial backers. The realization changed her life dramatically; it wasn't long before she became a revolutionary.

"We have a long history," she states in Elle, "of looking out for each other here in Wisconsin, birthplace of the nation's largest public-sector union and the first state to create worker's compensation and unemployment insurance....I never dreamed a year ago I'd be where I am now....I'm up late at night writing Republicans to register how strongly I oppose cuts to services such as recycling, public transportation, and libraries....Over a brutal couple of weeks recently, the Republicans passed legislation that will make it harder for students and seniors, who typically lean Democratic, to vote, and they introduced bills to roll back child labor laws and make it simpler to carry concealed weapons." She thanks Walker for one thing, however. "He's taught me exactly what I don't want government to look like, and how fervently I must work as a citizen activist if I want to live in a place that reflects my values."

So I put these two contrasting profiles together, feeling they were significant, and wondering where I needed to take them next. What was the punch line here? Then I began reading more of James Gilligan's book, "Why Some Politicians Are Worse Than Others," [see my previous blog about how levels of violence rise significantly during Republican administrations], Chapter 6 of Gilligan's book maps out the radically different cultures between Red States and Blue States. These differences, Gilligan suggests, are not merely differences in political agendas, but reflect different personalities and attitudes in relation to core indices of violence--such as guns, militarism, torture, capital punishment--that differentiate Republican voters from Democratic ones.

Gun ownership, he asserts, is much more prevalent among Republican groups (especially social conservatives), citing a Pew Research Center study which claims that nearly 60 percent of Republican groups have guns in their homes, in contrast to 23 percent of Democratic ones. (Eighty percent of social conservatives have a favorable view of the NRA.) So, not only do Red states have statistically higher rates of violent behavior, but the gun is deployed by Republicans as a moral and culturally potent icon that serves to breed contempt for non-violence and to encourage punitiveness, like public support for lynchings, capital punishment, and the concealed carrying of weapons. It is why "civility" candidates like Jon Huntsman and Barack Obama are ultimately met with contempt by hard-core Republicans for their "stupid altruistic urges." (The phrase is Ayn Rand's.)

And then suddenly, the goose laid its golden egg: I had a positively golden insight into why Obama's presidency has not succeeded the way so many had hoped it would. (Of course there is the obvious reason, that Republicans, come hell or high water, will never let that happen.) But beyond the obvious, there is also something else, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Obama was elected in large part because he stood on tiptoe on the misty mountaintop and proclaimed there were no Red States or Blue States; there were only American states. We all hoped to god it was so, and In a note to himself, he vowed to become our first post-partisan president. Obama has failed to deliver on this, but not because of his personal inadequacies. He has failed because that core conviction has proven itself to be just plain WRONG. Not Obama, but Sarah Palin, was the one who got it right: there are really TWO Americas, and ne'er the twain shall meet. Sadly for us, the noble vibration of unity Obama so badly wanted and gallantly pursues, has not proved to be a winning hand in American politics. To believe there aren't Red States or Blue States at this point in time is a bit like driving through a plate glass window you didn't know was there--until it shatters, and there is broken glass everywhere.

Brushing My Teeth with Whiskey

2011-08-22T19:04:00.003-05:00

I kid you not--this is what my horoscope recommended I should do this month: brush my teeth with whiskey, Jack Daniels to be exact. I'm absolutely good to go. The only problem is that I'm a gin girl at heart, but never mind, I haven't let that stop me from doing what a girl's gotta do. The horoscope also suggests that at least for the next two weeks or so, it wouldn't be totally crazy to keep myself more or less permanently in a party mood. This is not a bad suggestion either, given that Texas Governor Rick Perry is now the Republican frontrunner, ahead of Romney, according to the latest Rasmussen poll, and the stock market continues to wobble dangerously.

Within hours of declaring his candidacy, Rick Perry managed to turn a sleep-inducing race into a demolition derby with a single, atomic remark. Referring to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Perry said:, "If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y'all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion." Nice going, Ricky.

So, I took me to the nearest whiskey bar, and like Greta Garbo, made that a double, and brushed furiously. (Then a friend of mine called from Arizona to say she'd been to a local gay bar for the first time, at age 75, and driven through a 100-foot dust storm, in order to get free line-dancing instruction--hoping to accelerate her exercise routine, she says. She had a blast.)

Coincidentally, or synchronistically, I happen to be reading a book by James Gilligan entited "Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others." Gilligan claims to have discovered a devastating truth that has been "hiding in plain sight" for the past century--namely, that whenever Republicans gain the presidency, rates of suicide and homicide consistently skyrocket, and inequality, unemployment, recessions, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness all balloon to epidemic proportions. They then remain at epidemic levels until the more liberal party, the Democrats, regain the White House, reducing the amount of deadly violence by diminishing the magnitude of the economic distress that has been causing it.

This pattern, the author shows, has been documented since 1900, when the U.S. government first began compiling vital statistics on a yearly basis. Not only is this not just a coincidental correlation; Gilligan statistically proves that there is a specific causal relationship between the political parties in power, their policies, and the violent death rates. Yet the conventional wisdom is that Republicans are the ones to vote for if you want economic growth, whereas Democrats stifle growth, But the facts, he claims, show otherwise.

As someone who has uncovered these patterns of statistical truth--namely, that from 1900 through 2010, the country suffered approximately three times as many months of recessions when Republicans were governing the country--the author confesses to astonishment at his own findings: "I was genuinely surprised--I would even say shocked--to discover that the reputation of the Republican party appears to be the diametric opposite of what the numbers show. I am referring to the numbers gathered and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is hardly a liberal or left-wing think tank."

Another unexpected discovery in Gilligan's book is that recessions began during Republican presidencies seventeen times, and only six times during Democratic ones (and these were mostly inherited, as in Obama's case). Republicans were four times as likely as Democrats to "bequeath" a recession that had begun during their own administration to their successors (which happened to Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, and Obama). As for the Great Depression of the 1930s, Republicans showed themselves incapable of reversing it throughout the entire forty-three months in which they were in office (19290-33). When FDR took office, he immediately reversed it and began a period of economic expansion that lasted uninterruptedly for the next fifty months.

The fact that statistics show that unemployment has increased and lasted longer during Republican administrations, with recessions occurring much more frequently and lasting longer, prompted Giiligan, a professor of psychiatry (formerly from Harvard Medical School, now teaching at NYU) to formulate the central mystery of his book, which is summarized on page 9 as follows:

"Why is the party that proclaims itself to be the party of prosperity and economic growth and of public safety and law and order, the party that mounted the 'wars' on crime and drugs, associated with higher rates of lethal violence and of poverty, unemployment, and recession? And if the party is consistently inflicting a greater degree of economic stress and distress upon the American public and achieving a lower level of prosperity and economic security than the other party is, and in that sense achieving economic failure rather than success, how could it continue to win elections and remain a viable party?"

Yo, I have only read half the book thus far, so I'm not sure how, or if, Gilligan finds answers to his own questions. But if you have any, then please send them on--you might even win a free bottle of whiskey from me. Meanwhile, if I were in charge of the universe, I'd make it a rule that EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THIS BOOK! And then, brush their teeth with whiskey.

Michele Bachmann Parts the Red Sea with a Corndog

2011-08-15T19:11:00.002-05:00

If you want to know what is really happening to this country, I've already said it many times before: the right wing of the Republican Party is staging a full-frontal government coup. It's been going on for some time now, one of the first signs of it going way back to the election of 2000, when Al Gore's Florida win was posted, and then suddenly withdrawn minutes later, from the electoral map board. Foul play then followed upon foul play and ultimately, the Supreme Court handed over the presidency to George W. Bush.

If you don't want to believe me that we are having a coup d'etat in the U.S., I recommend you watch the movie "Jesus Camp." Republican right-wingers have been training themselves and their children as Christianist warriors to take over the government for a long time. They make a big show of talking about the Constitution, but in reality, it's the Bible that is their final authority, the absolute, infallible word of God. The Bible is not just a book; it's "the total truth." If you saw snippets of Governor Rick Perry's "prayer meeting" just before he announced his campaign for the presidency, it was a scene lifted straight out of "Jesus Camp": people with their arms raised beseechingly in the air, eyes swooning upwards, tears streaming downwards. Don't think it can't happen.

"The man who laughs," Bertolt Brecht once wrote,. "just hasn't heard the terrible news." Michele Bachmann won the straw poll in Iowa. Maybe, like me, you didn't know whether to laugh or cry--and find yourself pointlessly wondering what the Beatles would make of this latest incarnation of their old fluff song "Michele"? Bachmann's current claim to fame, however, is probably fated to be a 15-minute, Andy-Warhol, ephemeral affair--ending almost as soon as it begins--now that the fiery Rick Perry, arch-conservative, big-guns governor of Texas, and Secessionist who deems social security unconstitutional, has made his grand entry into the race, upstaging her. Perry, who is definitely not Santa Claus, officially declared that he is coming to town--so you better not cry, I'm telling you why. To become a Republican president now means you have to NOT walk softly and you have to carry a Christianist big shtick. And, like it or not, Perry's shtick is definitely bigger than Michele Bachmann's. So wait for the sparks to fly.

Of course, as the cover story on her in Newsweek points out, Bachmann clearly flipped "the other middle-aged drab men running for the nomination" right off the board. So maybe she'll manage to flip Perry off as well. But meanwhile, if you want the really scary scoop on Bachmann, you need to read Ryan Lizza's profile of her in the August 15th New Yorker. He provides the context and background for Bachmann's meaty fundamentalism:

"Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns," writes Sara Diamond, the author of several books about evangelical movements in America. These movements, to whom Bachmann is now central, believe that a Biblical world view should suffuse every aspect of one's life. According to Lizza, while enrolled in 1979 at the O.W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Bachmann imbibed the fundamentalist content of essays published in the school's Law Review, and was inspired by writers like John Rushdoony, who has called for a pure Christian theocracy in which Old Testament law--execution for adulterers and homosexuals, for instance--would be instituted. (Sharia, anyone?) Lizza quotes Rushdoony condemning the secularization of public schools:

"With the coming collapse of humanistic statism, the Christian must prepare to take over, he must prepare for victory." Lizza adds that the success of Bachmann's campaign will rest partly on her ability to keep these influences, which she has talked about for years, out of the public discussion. In the end she refused, when he tried, to talk about them with him.

But since then, she was all over the talk shows on Sunday, looking beautiful and smooth as satin. True, she didn't breath a word about any of this theocratic takeover, and her answers were so practiced and predictable that, after a while, I was able to mouth them to the interviewers myself, along with Bachmann. After she won in Iowa, Steve Clemons wrote on the Huffington Post that "This straw poll result shows that a group of people are willing to place bets on people who have virtually no chance of really winning on a national ticket. My view anyway."

I wish it were mine, too, but it definitely is not. The way things are going, I think Obama has quite a decent chance of losing the election to one of these crackpots.

No More Days of Wine and Roses

2011-08-07T18:31:00.003-05:00

I got a flyer in the mail this week from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, inviting me to join writer and therapist Ginette Paris for a "heartbreak clinic," intended to "understand what happens in the brain when we are heartbroken," and to develop strategies for navigating the darkness and beginning the healing process. But it was one particular statement that really set me thinking--which was that, in the psychic realm of mourning, the brain does not distinguish among various types of loss. Whether it happens to be loss of love, professional identity, country, vocation, health, youth, or wealth, loss is loss. The unexpected insertion of the word "country" on this list is what got my attention and struck a chord. I realized that I am now grieving the loss of my country.

Truth is, over a long lifetime, I have actively experienced all the other losses on this list at one time or another. And since these days I no longer have a salary and currently survive mostly on income from investments, I am also bracing for an imminent loss of wealth. If/when the stock market crashes, my clean, well-lighted days of wine and roses will also come to an abrupt and unkindly end. I expect I will endure these losses as I have previously endured all the others, and certainly when it comes to wine and roses, I have had my fair share. (Item: I once received three dozen long stemmed red roses from the writer Michael Crichton, after he had dined at my house in London, having been invited by Jasper Johns, who was staying with me at the time. Jasper became very cross when he discovered that I had no suitable vase to put them in.)

But this time, unlike others in the past, the failure to come to an appropriate congressional agreement may just sink the global economy, which is already on life support. This time the growth economy will probably not come back. Stock portfolios will not rebound again in the foreseeable future.

That said, we really didn't have to lose our triple AAA credit rating, and along with it, the respect and trust of the world. Before the rotten deal was struck, credit agencies had warned the president exactly what was needed to avoid a downgrade: at least $4 trillion in deficit cuts, and some revenues on the table. The president knew it, and John Boehner also knew it. The deal they put together followed those guidelines. But the Teasies and their corporate backers wanted to make a stink. They wanted to show everyone who was boss. Some of them even salivated over default as a good and great thing. In the end, they would only allow passage of a smaller, weakened bill that would not fulfill the necessary parameters. It was a given that this bill would not stave off a downgrade in our credit rating.

Along with everyone else, Standard and Poor's took note of the mayhem and were duly appalled. In the end, America was downgraded, not because of the size of its debt, but because of its political brinksmanship--and a perceived inability on the part of the U.S. government to come together and rectify its problems. The political brokenness was on full view, for all the world to see, Extreme polarization had resulted in paralysis. The lack of any remaining moderates, of the sort who used to engineer compromises, was obvious to all.

On page 4 of the official Standard & Poors' report on what they did and why, published on August 5th as the explanation for why they believe Congress--and even the as yet unformed Gang of Twelve--will be unable to actually deal with the US debt crisis, states: “We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.”

The final outcome, however, now provides Republicans with the perfect opportunity for attacking Obama's leadership, To blame the Tea Party, if you are a Republican, is absolutely off limits, a recipe for sudden death, and nobody is willing to risk it.

And so, the new GOP mantra issues daily from the rancid mouth of Mrs. Electrico (and wannabe presidential candidate) Minnesota Republican Michelle Bachmann: "President Obama has destroyed the credit rating of the United States through his failed economic policies and his inability to control government spending by raising the debt ceiling. He is destroying the foundations of the U.S. government one beam at a time." You better believe it!

In an essay that appeared recently on truthout.org (which is also where I found the illo for my blog of today), Noam Chomsky has this to say: "Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.
The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may in fact bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests."

So, if the market tanks, and Michelle Bachmann becomes president of the United States, I expect I'll be jumping off my roof--that is to say, if at that point. I still have one.

Democrazy in the Scapehouse

2011-08-01T13:39:00.002-05:00

"Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship's rail....
Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up."
Ray Bradbury

I had to hang out at the ship's rail in slum paradise many times this week, not least after an encounter with that grievous article by Washington Post columnist Peggy Noonan. Entitled "They've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," Noonan confides to the world her astonishing discovery about Obama, never before seen in politics with any other president. Although he has many supporters, bundlers, contributors, and voters aplenty, she asserts, the support is "all grim." The truth is, nobody really loves him, This she knows, because of personally having talked to many people. (What ho! she hasn't talked to me.) "The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn't really very good at politics...because he doesn't really get people." Not only that, she adds, he never offers a plan.

He never offers a plan? What about that "grand bargain," the truly large budget deal he pieced together with John Boehner a few weeks ago--until Boehner had his Judas Iscariot moment and, at the midnight hour, chose to betray the president's trust in him? Was that not arguably a good-faith plan, better than the one they have now ended up with? ("I stuck my neck out a mile to try to get an agreement with the president...I tried to lead....Put something on the table, Mr. President," a red-faced Boehner howled on television after his betrayal, perhaps in some twisted bid for the Nobel Prize in hypocrisy, or maybe a write-up in the annals of American shame.)

But back to Noonan. She clinches her piece with yet another outrageous assertion: "[Obama's] not a devil, not an alien, not a socialist. He's a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser." It was a shot heard around the world.

Memo from the ship's rail to anyone who's listening: our problem is not America's lack of love for Barack Obama. Our problem is that Republicans are orchestrating calculated chaos as part of a long-term coup d'etat to change the balance of power in Washington. First they got the Supreme Court, and now they are after the Executive. In January 2010, the same folks shot down democracy in the Citizens' United case, when the Supreme Court judges, controlled by a conservative majority of one vote, awarded First Amendment rights to corporations, allowing them to have unlimited financial (and thus policy) influence on elections. I wrote at that time:

"Make no mistake, on January 21, 2010, we lost our country, A velvet coup took place in the Supreme Court....The Swiftboating of Obama by impugning his motives--implying that he is something destructive to America and opposing everything he does--is but one segment in a planned takeover of the whole political system." The next segment of this extensive co-optation--an artificially contrived debt-ceiling crisis enacted with unbelievable callousness and cunning--is happening right now. And once again, what I wrote in January 2010 could have been written today:

"We are now in a world-wide economic crisis because of excessive deregulation. Popular faith in government as playing any constructive and necessary role in constraining market excesses has collapsed. Extreme polarization renders our nation ungovernable. With ridicule and lies as the new form of social control, politics has been reduced to 'a war of nerves.' "

Mitch McConnell's slick appearance on Face the Nation yesterday was quite shocking. Suddenly the normally vicious, mean-spirited, take-no-prisoners wolf, known for his determined dedication to Obama's demise, appeared disguised in sheep's clothing and sporting a sneer of satisfaction. He was now the "go-to" guy, the primary broker of a deal, reassuring everyone that there WOULD BE A DEAL. "The country will not default on its obligations," he declared. "This is America where people like to compromise."

It was cynicism at its apogee, coming from the very man whose whose far-right radicalism is determined to never cut a deal with anyone. I felt I was witnessing a blatant case of identity theft; McConnell morphed into the president's doppleganger to emerge as the last man standing, the most reasonable one in the room. All the chaos he and his colleagues had orchestrated during the past month was over, the dirty work finished, at least for the time being. A knock-out blow had been delivered to the economy sufficient to keep it reeling backwards through the 2012 election. There will be impact to state and local governments from spending cuts. Many more people will lose their jobs. And then, we can wait for the next titanic struggle, when the extension of unemployment benefits runs out in December.

In a recently published novel, John Sales has one of his characters speak lines in a disturbing scene that are verbatim quotes from an actual speech by South Carolina Senator "Pitchfork" Ben Tiilman. He tells a crowd at a political rally, "We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men and we never will."

The Senate Majority Leader is from Kentucky. The day after tomorrow is Barack Obama's 50th birthday. Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times today that the president surrendered--showed himself unwilling or unable to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite. What we are witnessing here, Krugman claims, is a catastrophe on multiple levels. "This is a shameful day to be a Democrat and a shameful day to be an American," one reader responds. Another, more sympathetic, states "Unless a president has a majority of Senate and House Representatives willing to vote in support of his programs, he has NO real power."

One has to wonder what kind of birthday the president is likely have this year. The mood can't be very celebratory, but he plans to be in Chicago.

Frankenstein's Pledge Puppets

2011-07-24T09:22:00.003-05:00

Former Virginia governor (and current U.S. senator) Mark Warner describes a failure to halt a debt default as "the single most irresponsible act, almost unprecedented, in American politics." New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has stated that "The biggest threat to the United States this summer probably doesn't come from Iran or Libya but from the home-grown risk that the nation will default on its debts."

Once again Speaker Boehner has walked away from a deal with the president because of the fact that 95 percent of Republicans have previously signed a pledge put forth by the Republican strategist, Grover Norquist, to oppose any legislation that involves tax increases, including the elimination of tax loopholes. Despite Obama's having offered Republicans a deal that gives away the store from the Democrats' point of view, at the last minute Boehner defected yet again and walked away.

"I've been left at the altar a couple of times now," the president responded, rueful but distinctly peeved. And who wouldn't be?The truth is, Boehner couldn't get his Frankenstein Freshman clones, the pledge puppets, to go along with the deal, and so, rather than lose face by admitting to the real problem (which would likely cost him his job), he did what Republicans always do in the Age of Obama: raise the gun smoothly, look over to his right, and then in full view, shoot down the president.

I have to agree with Andrew Sullivan who states "The GOP believe they can destroy the U.S. and global economy and from the wreckage ensure Obama is not reelected. That is their sole guiding principle. They terrify me....What Cantor and Boehner are doing is essentially letting the world know they have an economic WMD in their possession. And it will go off if you do not give them everything they want, with no negotiation possible."

While I was writing this, NPR did a quick interview with Norquist, who stated that it had not been necessary to twist anybody's arm to get them to sign his Taxpayer Protection Pledge before the 2010 election. "They are all true believers," he said. Whenever you increase taxes, he further explained, politicians spend more--and that is not the way to shrink government. For the record, Congress first agreed to raise the debt limit in 1917 to fund World War I. Since then it has done so 102 times without ever being a partisan or a contentious issue, or being used as a tool to blackmail the president.

Norquist's influence in all of this cannot be overstated. However, when asked if he was worried that perhaps he might get the blame if the government defaults or loses its triple A credit rating, he responded, without missing a beat, "No. Obama will." Defending himself earlier in a New York Times op ed this week, Norquist wrote: "Contrary to the hopes of some that I am somehow softening the pledge, it is stronger and more important than ever: it has made it easier for members of Congress to credibly commit to voters that they will refuse to increase taxes and instead focus on reducing the cost of government."

I've asked myself several times already in these pages the question of when intractable obstructionism from Republicans that damages American interests morphs into treason. The answer, I see now, is never--or only when it will be too late, which at this point in time, could be as soon as next week. Mark Halperin of Time magazine writes: "It will probably take a market crash to get enough House Republicans willing to compromise." In Washington's current GOP, compromise is the new dirty word. "When Grover Norquist, the de facto head of the Republican Congress, has defined bipartisanship as 'date rape,' and any tax increase as heresy." a regular commenter to the New York Times' columns wrote recently online, "you can see why the GOP has boxed itself right into a corner."

Finally, allow me to indulge in the poignant words of yet another reader's comment: "If I hear Boehner or that creep Cantor moan one more time about not putting a 'tax burden' on the wealthy who create all these wonderful jobs, I'll vomit." To which I would add that maybe, when all is said and done, THIS is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a vomit.

Infusing Hope Into the Dark Night of Our Species (2): The Annunciation

2011-07-15T14:25:00.004-05:00

Following up on my previous blog referencing Andrew Harvey's book "The Hope," I want to recount the particular mystical experience that jolted Andrew's life-long journey as a spiritual seeker into a new realm of what he calls "sacred activism," and caused him to dedicate his life from then on to relieving the world's suffering. I believe it was an Annunciation of sorts that led him to his future role as a "sacred activist."

By his own account, a Divine intervention occurred in Andrew's life at the time when his father was dying in Coimbatore, India. In conversations they had at his deathbed, his father told him how he had come to see that the future of the world was in danger and that only a revolution of the heart, expressed in action, could transform the situation. "I hope to God we still have time," his father kept on saying.

While his father was dying, Andrew went to a local Catholic church nearby, on the feast day of Christ the King, where he heard the priest sermonizing about the power of the resurrected Jesus, whose fiery love no cruelty could deter or defeat. The priest informed the congregation that this was the model for what would resurrect the world from its suffering, poverty, despair, and apathy.

"After the priest finished talking and sat down," Andrew writes, "I looked up at the statue of the resurrected Christ at the end of the church. The only thing i can say about what happened next is that the statue became alive. For almost 15 minutes I saw the Christ in majestic, radiant golden light...It was both an ecstasy and an agony beyond anything I had ever known or even imagined." He goes on to describe how the fire streaming between his heart and the heart of the resurrected Christ felt like a knife plunging again and again into his heart--and that what was being revealed to him was the cosmic force of Divine Love and the potential divinity of all human beings who would allow themselves to be possessed and transformed by Divine Passion. This fire was what it will take for us to survive the coming ordeals and cataclysms, according to Andrew. "This was the fire in which a new world would be created out of the smoldering ashes of the old."

As he emerged from the church, Andrew saw an emaciated man with no arms or legs, "planted in a filthy puddle." Thinking he saw the re-embodied Christ in this figure crucified by suffering and poverty, he ran towards him to offer help. It was then that he heard a voice, which seemed to come from inside him, speak. It began by upbraiding him for his selfish spiritual ways-- exploiting mystical teachings for his own personal pleasure and career, when what he needed to be doing instead was devoting all of his actions and resources to ending the horror everywhere around him.

"The world," the voice said, "is burning to death in the fires of greed and ignorance. All of animal and human life is now threatened. This being you see before you is one of billions in anguish. See behind him and around him the burning forests, the polluted seas, the vanishing tigers and polar bears. The Divine is being crucified again and again by a humanity obsessed with its own needs and driven increasingly...to dominate and control and exploit everything."

At that point, I couldn't help thinking of the Republican blowhards sitting in the West Wing, even as I wrote this, and playing Russian roulette with the debt ceiling, their pretzel brains working overtime to corner and defeat the President politically under the camouflage of claiming to want to reduce the budget deficit. (Despite their current posturing, Republicans voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling during George W. Bush's administration, even while Bush was busy doubling the national debt.) Then, quite unexpectedly, I had my own epiphany. Teleported straight into the White House, I crashed one of these meetings, ongoing exercises in Republican futility. I looked hard at Eric Cantor, John Boehner, and Mtich McConnell--who, whenever a bipartisan agreement is within reach, turn on their heels and leave the president holding the bag--and I read out loud to them the final comments spoken to Andrew by his mystical voice:

"Everything you are and everything you do from this moment on must help human beings awaken to their inner divinity and to its responsibilities of urgent sacred action. The only questions you will be asked when you cross over the waters of death are 'What did you do while the world was burning? How did you work to heal the horror of a world on fire? What did you love enough to risk and give your life for?' Nothing else will matter. Understand this now."

The voice then advised Andrew to turn away from everything he had been and done and believed, and to dive into the furnace of a Divine Love that embraces all beings. It demanded that he give his whole life to spread and embody the message of its passion to the world. The only hope, both for him and for humanity, is to take up the challenge of the Divine and put the fire of Divine Compassion into radical action in every arena of the world."

Would it have any effect, make any difference? Probably not with these guys. By his own account, the call to action dramatized by the "voice" terrified even Andrew. "It left me nowhere to turn and no self-justification to cling to. I felt vulnerable, naked, broken, and exposed, a fraud and fool, absolutely inadequate to what was being asked of me, afraid of what the voice was revealing about the world," he writes.

I found myself wondering if anything--or anyone--could ever make men like Cantor, Boehner, or McConnell feel vulnerable, naked, broken or exposed--much less a fraud or a fool.

"If I," Andrew continues, "who had pursued spiritual truth for 20 years, could be so resistant to a vision I knew came directly from the Divine, how would others...even begin to receive the message, let alone act upon it?" The question cannot be improved upon, and it begs answering. Annunciations, it must be said, are all-encompassing. Once they strike, you cannot really avoid their imperative. You can recoil, but you cannot really refuse them.

Infusing Hope Into the Dark Night of Our Species

2011-07-06T11:15:00.003-05:00

When he was 41, Andrew Harvey met Father Bede Griffith, a renowned mystic and teacher living in India, who was 85 years old at the time. Harvey, a serious seeker, mystic, and teacher himself [check out his particulars on Amazon or at www.andrewharvey,org] spent 10 days at Griffith's ashram, taping interviews with the Master for a friend's documentary film. One of the first things Father Bede said to him was "You know, Andrew, don't you, that we are now living in the 'Hour of God'?" Andrew asked him to explain what he meant by the 'Hour of God'."

"I mean that humanity has come to the moment when it will have to choose between trying to play God, with the catastrophic results we see all around us, and trying to become what all the true mystical traditions know we can become--one with God through grace in life. This is a dangerous yet wonderful and hopeful moment because if enough of us can choose the latter, the birth of a wholly new kind of human being, and so of a new world, is possible."

This is where I always have my fatal stumble with spirituality today: its presumption of a new kind of human being and a new world that will miraculously unfold after humanity has traversed a near-deathlike dark night of the soul. Standing lonesome watch as I do when I often feel like I am live-blogging the end of the world, what I see is one unforgiving catastrophe unfolding after another. It seems relentless. (Check out the new oil spill currently polluting the Yellowstone River.) From these circumstances, the leap into envisioning "a new kind of human being and a new world" frankly eludes me. I feel only dread at what awaits the human race.

Reading Andrew's book "The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism" this summer, however, is helping me to pass, like a fitful camel, through the eye of that needle. The words he writes and the stories he tells have made me feel less alone in my heartbreak. This is because Andrew minces no words when he describes the depths of his own dread and despair, and how difficult it has been to confront them. "How could any half-conscious human being NOT feel dread at the enormous suffering that is erupting all over the world?" The extremity of it is overwhelming.

"Dread," Andrew writes, "is the most paralyzing of all human of all human emotions and the one I, and everyone else I know, will do almost anything to avoid. Facing the depth of my dread has threatened me, at times, with hopelessness. What I have found, however, is that acknowledging my dread and treating it not as a weakness to be repressed at all costs, but as an inevitable response to real circumstances, has helped me start to heal it."

Personal disclosure: I haven't read too many people willing to be that unflinchingly frank, and so I clutch onto this book as I would to a life raft. I relish the company of someone who writes the way I would like to write, who thinks the way I would like to think, and when I read him, I know myself a little better. Harvey asks questions the way no one else would: "How exactly do we acquire a 'lover's heart" [he is paraphrasing Rumi here] that stays 'a rose garden' however 'choked with thorns' our circumstances become?" I feel a little less lost in emotional Siberia when I read him.

It was Harvey's own "radical descent" into a fierce and angry disillusionment with humanity, he claims, that ultimately saved him. To experience this disillusionment, he now believes, is to face without denial the reality of the evil that we as a race have done to ourselves, to the animals, and to Nature. He catalogues the list of evils we have perpetrated thusly: brutal wars, genocides, the systematic rape of Nature, the creation of a free-for-all financial system that makes an elite few obscenely rich while billions of people live in terrible degradation--with the result that humanity is now in danger of losing its conscience and soul just when it needs them most. In the end, Harvey is convinced that only by "weathering the storms of grief and heartbreak and the hopelessness of a long, hard look at our crisis, the state of humanity, and the state of my own character" was he able to alchemically transmute the hopelessness and the heartbreak into an infusion of more illuminating energy.

For me, the lesson learned here--and there will be more of them to recount as I make my way through this remarkable book--is that hope is not some giddy, feel-good, Oprah Winfrey thing meant to spackle over your despair and keep you comfy while you go on about your daily business. Given where the planet is at this point, hope must be earned, by walking on the hot coals of a crisis-ridden world and running the gauntlet of a sickening chagrin and dismay. Only then can an authentic and embodied hope bloom into place and become a realistic possibility. Any hope, according to Andrew, that "glosses over the reality of evil or does not respect its power will not be of any use." And so, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. [To be continued.]

The illustration above was sent to me by my friend Jane Vance, who says it is the torso of a poor village Indian who saves and befriends animals, a detail from a painting-in-progress called "What Light Does to Fish."

Butterflies on Steroids

2011-06-28T15:12:00.002-05:00

I recently finished reading "A Question of Values" by Morris Berman and was stopped dead in my tracks by his statement:
"Wouldn't it make sense, at this point, for America to "resign' with dignity? To come to terms with its collapse, and just accept it?" I think about this all the time. It's been my personal Zen koan, even before reading Berman's book.

So you open your safe and find ashes. But exactly who--what publisher, what network--would even entertain such a story? Of America "resigning" and coming to terms with its collapse? Acceptance of this damning truth may be our only exit from the culture of lies and denial--from the "psychic free radicals" poisoning everyone's energy field and filling the collective atmosphere with a sense of dread--but ultimately (once you seriously think about it), would facing up to this truth help or harm? Were we fully to acknowledge our civilizational and environmental collapse, wouldn't that signal a hopeless defeatism from which there could be no possibility of recovery? But what if recovery really is not possible? Would that mean a loss of faith in life, of still having confidence in something which is broken? Can we even grasp what it would be like to live without confidence in the future?

Anyway, it won't happen. Nobody, not Obama and certainly not the Republicans, not Charlie Rose or Jon Stewart or anyone else, is going to stand up tall and officially inform the American people that it's "over" for our country. Nobody wants to tell their out-of-town friends that the houseplants have died and gone black, sitting in their pots in the bay window. Who among us is likely to admit that we really have no idea what we should do? Life seems as if it just goes on, irregardless; it goes on as before, at least for those whose houses are still standing and are not under water--whose chess pieces can still be found in their rightful positions on an end table in some well-furnished room. For those who are still that lucky, there is no shortage of good days.

In his book, Berman cites a Feb.2, 2009 essay by Benjamin Barber, published in The Nation: "It is hard to discern any movement toward a wholesale rethinking of the dominant role of the market in our society. No one is questioning the impulse to rehabilitate the consumer market as the driver of American commerce." Many weights have fallen on the heads of the American people since then, with notable frequency, but thus far, nothing has broken the powerful pattern. "Rather than being on the verge of some possible cultural renaissance," Berman comments, "or a reversal of our entire history, what we are now witnessing is the slow-motion suicide of the nation, with Mr. Obama guiding us, in a genteel and semi-conscious way, into the grave. Indeed, what more can he or anybody do at this point?" I still vividly recall Berman's comment, even before Obama became president, that whoever got elected would end up being a funeral director, rather than a president.

One of my favorite writers (whom I've also been reading of late), Caroline Myss, in her Forward to Andrew Harvey's "The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism," claims that aside from the obvious social, political, economic, and environmental challenges facing us, there are even more treacherous subtle forces at play, such as the ever-accelerating rapidity of these changes--to the point where we can't really keep up with them. Change now happens at light speed and is global in magnitude. There is hardly such a thing anymore as a "local" change, says Myss.

"The Internet and the television have brought changes of all nations into view within seconds and not only into view, but into your bank account, into your stock holdings, into your insurance policies, and into your job security. A shift in the market in Japan or China could result in the loss of your job in the morning." It sounds like the "butterfly effect," only on steroids. (The "butterfly effect" refers to the proposition that whatever happens in the world has a ripple effect that eventually affects every other thing in the world. Thus, a butterfly flapping its wings in Rio can cause an earthquake in Beijing.) The information overload of news and information, warns Myss, affects not only our exterior lives but also our emotional, psychological, and mental well-being:

"I frequently have people tell me," she writes, "that they avoid the news because it's all negative, but is avoidance really a mature response?" (To me, avoidance seems like a nickel magic trick.) If you decide to avoid the news because it's all negative, "then who should respond to those assaulting the environment?" asks Myss. "And to those committing war crimes? And to those violating our constitution? These crimes happened and will continue to happen precisely because people do not want to look at the shadow of the society we live in, much less the shadow of the global community." Don't imagine for a moment, she adds, that by not following the news you can avoid the psychic free radicals generated by the collective unconscious. They are penetrating willy-nilly into your individual psychic field whether you are paying attention or not.

Item. From my local newspaper today: "For the first time in a year, Americans have stopped spending more. Consumer spending failed to budge from April to May, evidence that high gasoline prices and unemployment are squeezing household budgets....Consumer spending is important because it accounts for 70 percent of economic activity."

Item. A friend from Roanoke, who has been driving across the country to California with her dog, sends this bulletin (along with many others): "Arkansas seems to have missed the fact that the World did not end on May 21st. I counted 12 billboards still proudly displaying the 'message.' "

Enough for now. I am ending this post with opening lines from a poem by Ray Bradbury:

"Not smash and grab, but rather find and keep;
Go panther-pawwed [sic] where all the mined truths sleep
To detonate the hidden seeds with stealth
So in your wake a weltering of wealth
Springs up unseen, ignored, and left behind
As you sneak on, pretending to be blind."

And that, folks, is my collage offering for the week. I hope to leave behind a weltering of wealth that will spring up unseen in my wake, as I myself sneak on, pretending to be blind, which of course, I'm not.

Into the Yucky Pack of Varmints, a Huntsman Comes!

2011-06-15T15:21:00.003-05:00

Here's how the New York Times characterized the GOP's first presidential debate held earlier this week: "Monday’s Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire — full of historical error, economic obfuscation, avoidance of hard truths and even outright bigotry — was a feast for connoisseurs of political dysfunction. Desperate to avoid being outflanked on the right, the seven candidates tried so hard to outdo each other in finding fault with President Obama that they seemed to forget that they are competing for the same party nomination. By evening’s end, they had melted into an indistinguishable mass of privatizing, tax-cutting opponents of Shariah law."

The following exchange is a day-glo example of what the Times editorial was referring to. It took place that night between CNN's moderator, John King, and Governor Tim Pawlenty, who predictably recommends more tax-cutting to "get the economy moving again": “If you win the nomination, you’ll have to make the choice that a nominee makes, and that is picking a running mate. Governor Pawlenty to you, look back on 2008 and the process. President Obama made a pick. Senator McCain made a pick. Who made the best choice?” Pawlenty hesitates, and then recovers. He says Vice President Joe Biden makes horrible decisions and that Palin is wonderful.

The truth is, there is one plausible Republican candidate out there--one who still bears a resemblance to the species once formerly known as "homo sapiens." But he wasn't at the debate. He has since announced, however, that he will officially declare his candidacy next Tuesday. I've been eyeballing Utah's former governor, Jon Huntsman, ever since late May when I came across an online version of a commencement address he gave at the University of South Carolina on May 27th. I've mentioned him since to several friends, who all shook their heads in foggy nonrecognition. "Never heard of him,. Don't know who he is," they all said. Except for my friend Jane's son, Emerson, a politically savvy young man whom I love to talk politics with. When I said to Emer that I thought the Republicans had one decent candidate, he immediately shook his head in agreement. I wondered if, by some miracle, we were referring to the same person. "What are his initials?" I diffidently asked, almost afraid to ask. "J.H." he replied. "Yow! I said, that's him!"

The first time I noticed Jon Huntsman was when President Obama appointed him as U.S. Ambassador to China. A few pundits whispered at the time it was partly to get Huntsman out of the country as a political rival in the 2012 election. But Huntsman resigned the post several months ago and came back to America. He's been on the GOP's list of possible candidates all along, but Republican officials have ignored him. Huntsman polls at only 1% and in a straw poll in Iowa, he got a total of one vote. The GOP would like to keep it that way, not only because he is unacceptably moderate, but because he also did the unthinkable--accepting a job in the Obama administration. Which is, after all, the equivalent of digging your own grave. Not only that, but he expressed support for Obama's 2009 stimulus package, endorsed an individual mandate for health insurance, and has been a moderate on gay marriage, supporting civil unions for same-sex couples. "This would make him an accomplished pragmatic conservative in any other Western country," writes political blogger, Nate Silver. "In America, in the GOP today, he's a commie."

But what really got my attention, as I said, was his commencement speech. It sounded just like something Obama would give. These are some excerpts:

"Your generation will have your own unique set of circumstances that make you feel like your future has somehow been derailed. Wars, economic recessions, social upheaval, revolutions around the globe...and yet, in each case, we recover, learn lessons and become ever more resilient.
I know there are many in China who think their time has come, that America's best days are over. And, there are probably some in this country who have lost confidence and think that China is the next big thing. But these people aren't seeing things from my earlier vantage point of 10,000 miles away. The way I saw it from overseas, America's passion remains as strong today as ever. Hold on to that sense of optimism. Hold on to that belief in your future. Our free and open society that can respectfully embrace debate, coupled with a free market system that rewards risk and innovation, is still the envy of the world. We are still as full of potential as ever. Just remember... When the oppressed are fighting autocratic regimes, they look to America for inspiration. When overseas entrepreneurs build companies, they still look to U.S. practices as the gold standard. When young people around the world want to attend the best colleges and universities they travel here. When playwrights, filmmakers and the creative classes abroad dream, their imaginations are fueled by America’s example.Our system needs new thinking. We need a fresh generation of innovators, leaders, risk takers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists -- That's you! Give back. As much as you’re able. Work to keep America great. Serve her, if asked. I was, by a president of a different political party. But in the end, while we might not all be of one party, we are all part of one nation, a nation that needs your generational gift of energy and confidence."

The other notable thing about Huntsman is he doesn't spend his time bashing Obama, or even take pokes at his Republican counterparts. He is, like Obama, unfailingly polite. "I think the answers are in the middle," he told a small crowd in Hancock, N.H. "There are enough wars in the world that Republicans don't have to be at war with Democrats." It's enough to stop the heart. Right now Huntsman's trailing like a vine, so we'll just have to see how it all plays out--starting next week when Huntsman's candidacy becomes official.

Walking in Water

2011-06-07T19:10:00.002-05:00

Far be it from me to deny the Prez his moment of glory over the 2009 auto bailouts, but he needs to let up on the optimism narrative re the economy and face reality. I know Time magazine's recent cover story, "The Optimism Bias," claims our brains are hardwired to see the bright side, and that this is good for human health and evolution, but there's a hideous truth stalking the rear window and tapping on the panes. The U.S. economy is no longer treading water; it is going under. And this time. bailouts won't save us.

As of a year or two ago, bailouts were an important part of humanity's rescue plan--but that was before before floods and earthquakes and tornadoes became the new normal. Now, every week, another piece of the planet sinks under water, or is completely wiped off the face of the earth by an earthquake or a tornado. It's pretty grim stuff that, so far, President Obama has been reluctant to parse into his strained equations for the "recovering" economy.

Only a couple of weeks ago, flood disasters along the Mississippi delta grabbed the headlines, and now, another wave of flooding threatens multiple cities along the Missouri River--meaning that, once again, businesses, jobs, and homes will be pummeled and thrashed out of existence. Lives and economies upended. Levees and dams are unable to hold back the deluge. In the case of the Missouri, the floods are a consequence of excessive winter snow deluging down from the Rockies as it melts. The flows at some of the dam gates are expected to be more than double any previous records. Emergency rescue operations have demanded round-the-clock help from all government agencies--the National Guard, FEMA, and the Army Corps of Engineers--even while the national debt is rising at the rate of $46,0000 PER SECOND. But these nightmare scenarios are not just happening here. They are happening everywhere.

In 2010 alone, about 92 million people were forced to flee their homes because of natural "mega-disasters" around the world, more than double the number than during the previous year, according to reports by experts at an international conference about climate change and population displacement held in Oslo, Norway, recently. The March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan left more than 10,000 people dead, some 17,500 missing, and about a half-million homeless. In China, more than 15 million people were forced to flee their homes following floods, while 11 million were displaced in Paklstan. Similar mega-flooding has also occurred in Australia, India, and most recently, the U.S. "The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events is increasing, and this trend is only set to continue...as human-induced climate change comes into full force," said Elisabeth Rasmusson, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Polls show that Americans are increasingly unhappy with Obama's handling of the economy, and growing ever more pessimistic about the slow pace of recovery. Disapproval of his economic record is at a new high--boosting Mitt Romney's chances in the 2012 election. The American electorate is just so god-damned predictable, like the stars keeping their courses. The last thing Republicans want to see is a robust economic recovery taking place just before the election. It looks now as if they may get their wish.

Discussing climate change is bad news for any politician in office, so I expect we'll just go on with the president's optimistic bluster about auto bailouts, more rejiggering of the relationship between economic growth and jobs, and more Congressional rants about the debt ceiling. As the fire balloon bringing collapse burns in the night sky, no one will ever connect the dots. The sleeping elephant in the room will shamble forth, scattering bricks and bones, and our lost and ruined world will overflow its banks until it drowns. Whoever made that haunting film "Waterworld" was clearly a visionary and ahead of his time.

Vessels of Optimism

2011-05-30T12:44:00.002-05:00

Everything about our lives is now changing so fast, many people wake up only to find that the world they went to sleep in the night before is significantly different the next day. It happened in Japan after the earthquake/tsunami and it happened again last week in Joplin, Missouri when the 200-mph tornado struck. You go to bed with your life seemingly normal and intact, and minutes later, you find yourself homeless, stripped of everything you once owned.

But this kind of extreme change can also happen in reverse. Last week, a 17-year-old high school student--who was only recently bagging groceries in Garner, N.C.--woke up on May 25th, just four days after Pastor Harold Walker had declared that the world was going to end, to find his fortunes, too, were radically changed; and that, after that night, his world would never be the same again either.

Scotty McCreery was voted (by 120 million viewers) the up-front, winner on American Idol, and so for him, life couldn't be better. See how radiant he looks, together with his equally lustrous runner-up, Lauren Alaina, age 16. They both appeared on stage at the beginning of the two-hour grand finale dressed in white, appearing for all the world like two angels writing in a book of gold. Vessels of optimism so pure as to liberate anyone's embittered self. Just the mere sight of them makes you glad to be alive, and that's before they even sing. At this point, no one knew yet who the winner was, and if, like me, you have no penchant for country music, listen to these kids perform on You-tube and become an instant convert.

The extravaganza on Fox that night, live from the Nokia Theater in L.A., was so unbelievably exhilarating, it made all the global crimes against humanity scrambling for our attention and the collective catastrophes of environmental destruction everywhere disappear, at least briefly, the way the moon will disappear for a while on a cloudy night. For a couple of hours, the world seemed whole again, and millions of viewers were lost in intense jubilation, saturated in so much talent and sweetness. It was human creativity at its zenith, enough to last for a lifetime, enclosing everyone in its wild power.

They took it all in stride, these kids, whirling happily on the globe of life without being hamstrung by their own success or ruined by self-conscious posturings. There were notable high points in the evening, such as when Lauren sang a duet with her idol, Carrie Underwood, and Jacob Lusk, a lumbering black crooner with rhythm that leaked from his very DNA, sang gospel with his idol, Gladys Knight. Most beguiling of all, however, was the 19-year-old runner-up, Haley Reinhart, paired with 84-year-old Tony Bennett, the two of them singing "Steppin' Out with My Baby" from the 1948 musical "Easter Parade" like there was no tomorrow. Check it out on Google if you want to give yourself a special treat.

The other stunner was my new passion, Jennifer Lopez, who was one of the judges, performing "Aquanile" with her sexy musician husband, Mark Anthony. The sizzle between the two of them was enough to take out the most hardened criminal on Death Row. Lopez's smoldering sexuality just knocks Lady Gaga's contrived seductions right off the board. it's no wonder she has become America's sweetheart. Lopez is heart-stopping beautiful and drop-dead talented. You might just think it is hopelessly tacky, even shameful, of me to be so in thrall to a popular reality-TV show. If you do happen to think that, it is only because you are asleep in the waves.

Discovering Evil for the First Time

2011-05-12T10:31:00.000-05:00

Time magazine recently devoted an entire issue to "The End of Osama bin Laden," his face on the cover receiving the same treatment--a red X painted across it--as Hitler's and Saddam's once did. In her weekly essay, columnist Nancy Gibbs remembers, ten years later, a conversation she overheard between her two daughters a few days after 9/11. She was driving them home from school; and they were aged 4 and 7 at the time. A program on the car radio was suddenly interrupted by a voice announcing the latest body count.

"They should have been more careful," the 4-year-old declared to her sister. "They should have watched where they were going, the men flying the planes--they shouldn't have knocked those buildings down." "My almost-7-year-old came back," Gibbs writes, "all wise and knowing. 'Galen,' she said anciently, 'that wasn't an accident. They meant to knock the buildings down.' "
"Silence. Stubborn. 'No, they didn't.'"
"'Yes. They did. They WANTED to kill those people. They were bad men.' "

Remembering that conversation prompts Gibbs to wonder when it was, somewhere along the way, that her older daughter had discovered the presence of evil in the world. It set me wondering as well: is there a moment in childhood when the hymen of innocence gets unexpectedly pierced in some raw encounter with evil? I think of this now, because I can so clearly recall the precise moment when it happened to me--although, admittedly, I couldn't have framed it in those terms at the time. Years later, I could.

It was Easter Sunday and I was maybe 10 years old. My mother had given me an (el cheapo) Easter basket with fake green grass, some fuzzy, yellow, baby chicks, and a multi-colored assortment of jelly bean eggs. I was thrilled with it. In those days, we lived in a high-rise apartment building in Manhattan, and I would play on the sidewalk in front of the building--things like handball, roller skating, jump rope. That morning I took the elevator downstairs and went outside, proudly carrying my Easter basket.

A few minutes later, the teen bully I'd seen around a few times before suddenly appeared and, with a malicious sneer, he grabbed the basket out of my hand. Before I could fathom what was happening, he smashed it into the gutter and ran off. I stared at the strewn contents and was devastated. Shrieking with terror, I ran upstairs to find my mother, By then, I was crying hysterically and could not be consoled. Once my mother finally ascertained the cause of my traumatized emotion, she dismissed the whole affair. After all, I had not been personally assaulted or suffered any physical injury. The basket wasn't really worth anything, and my mother was not exactly an intuitive scholar in matters of human evil and psychic trauma.

For years I never understood myself what upset me so much--until I finally did. That was my first encounter with gratuitous evil--with someone else's power to destroy and take pleasure in violence and aggression. It might have made more sense to me had the young man stolen my basket. But he didn't want the basket. What he took instead was my innocence, my ability to feel safe--the same thing Osama bin Laden took from the American people when he orchestrated the destruction of the Twin Towers.

I don't remember where or when I first heard the following story about a father, his small son, and the staircase, but I did know immediately that something about it was dangerous to the heart. I don't suppose it is actually a true story, but it was, and still remains, an object lesson in the breaking of trust, potent enough to leave its imprint on the recipient for life. A father decides to engage his little boy in a game, instructing him to go to the top of the stairs and jump, reassuring the child that it is safe because he will catch him at the bottom before he falls. The child jumps and the father catches him. Excitedly, they repeat the same ritual several times--the child enjoying this risky but thrilling interaction with his father. Suddenly, however, instead of catching his son, the father deliberately lets him fall. It is an initiation of sorts into the ways of the world, an inoculation against betrayal. So what do those marks on the floor tell you? "Never trust anybody," the father tells the son, and in that moment, the nectar of trust is surrendered to the bee's tongue.

When trust is shattered, it scars one's confidence in life and the possibility of trusting it. What matters is the sharpness and severity of the particular incident. Lions leaping out of walls will fill you with terror at any age--whether it is your Easter basket that is destroyed, or your tallest, most prized building. Either way, you will suffer because, at the time, you have no way of defending yourself.

Osama bin There, Done That

2011-05-03T14:10:00.002-05:00

Hey ho, the witch is dead. The wicked witch is dead. At the risk of sounding like Donald Trump and taking credit where it is not due, I have to tell you something you don't know. It wasn't the Navy Seals who just pulled off one of the most spectacular special ops in modern military history--the killing of Osama bin Laden--it was me. I did it. I shot the sheriff, in a secret compound in Pakistan.

It took many years of searching and then months of planning, but the raid itself was over in forty minutes; afterwards, we dumped the body into the sea, a watery but thoroughly Muslim grave. You know, without a trace? It's a program on TV. However, don't expect to read much about my part in this, since the operation is highly classified. Just know that I'm really proud of what I've accomplished, something no one else before me has managed to do. Unlike the Donald, I do plan on keeping quiet about what I've achieved. I won't brag about it--I know it's important to keep the exact details to myself. But I do want reveal one photo of me from the archive, practicing my aim in a friend's back yard, years before events this weekend pushed me into my big moment.

I am proud to have done what I did for the president, who has discussed a crucial thematic connection with his aides in the West Wing, explaining that the death of bin Laden signals something far greater than a national-security accomplishment. “He views this as a demonstration of this country’s capacity to overcome skeptics and do things that people had decided were no longer doable,” White House press secretary, Jay Carney, elaborated in an interview on Monday afternoon. “There is sort of a grit and resolve. And not in a John Wayne way, but in a commitment and focus.”

I confess I did mention something to my hairdresser about it all this morning--I asked her what she thought about the Osama events--but honestly, she didn't have a clue what I was talking about. She doesn't follow the news. I had to apologize profusely after my jaw spontaneously dropped several inches, while she kept on nonchalantly blow-drying my hair. So, no responses to share from there. Instead, I am appending a few assessments culled from Andrew Sullivan's blog the next morning. He was live-blogging the event for half the night, while I was sleeping in ignorance:

"And, yes, I am happy to use the word 'victory'. Not a final victory against Jihadist terrorists. But a victory against this one, the man who set off a decade of war and chaos, the symbol of them all. We need apologize not a wit for the joy we feel. Not joy at vengeance; nor joy at death. Just joy at justice. Immense and profound joy....And [Obama's] steadiness under pressure, well, let's just say: The cat is cool. The poker face of the man has for the last few weeks been pretty damn impressive. Just because he's calm doesn't mean he isn't lethal. And imagine what must have been going through his mind as he was getting closer and closer to this just as Donald Trump was doing performance art with a birth certificate...This has the feel of the kind of operation John Kennedy would have loved to have pulled off - and had a martini after. Here's hoping the president enjoys at least one Martini and one cigarette. 12.08 am. Can I say how deeply moving it is that a man named Barack Hussein Obama gave the order for the operation that killed Osama bin Laden?"

Virgil suggests that we not take these inner ruins to Rome. It is wise to stay at home, he says, and ask yourself, "What do you really think of the world, what do you love, fear, hate?" Eventually your thoughts and your writing will clarify.

Sorting through the Rubble

2011-04-30T15:57:00.002-05:00

Shuttle launches and royal weddings notwithstanding (oh, those English hats!), it feels like the world around me is being blown to pieces. "Never been so scared before," says Philip Lockhart, the owner of a pizzeria in Smithville, Miss., a town oi 900 and just one of many recently wiped off the map by tornadoes. City Hall is gone. The police department, obliterated. All across the south, grocery stores, funeral homes, scores of houses, trees, power lines, airports, schools--totally flattened. Entire towns turned to rubble. Death toll: at last count, 341 across seven states just from Wednesday's storms alone.

Last year at this time, we were worried about oil gushing into the Gulf; we fretted over a possible invasion by armies of bedbugs. (They're really hard to get rid of, everyone said.) This year, things are much worse. Trails of destruction left behind by hundreds of supercell tornadoes that touched down in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and Kentucky last week, with even more watches issued for the entire East Coast as the storm system moved to new ground.

It feels like nature is waging the equivalent of nuclear war on humanity, as it obliterates neighborhoods and entire towns. "Sick is what I feel," said one man in a small town outside of Birmingham, whose neighborhood somehow survived the onslaught of wind, thunder, and lightning as they built a crescendo, and then suddenly stopped. Some of the tornadoes have been as big as a mile wide, with wind speeds of more than 200 mph, and raged along the ground for miles. "Prior to 2008, the possibility of tornadoes in Roanoke was laughable," stated one city emergency management coordinator. That was then, but this is now. "We're moving quickly from a world where we push nature around to a world where nature pushes back--and with far more power," Bill McKibben writes in "Eaarth." "Now we must try to figure out how to survive what's coming at us."

It's not hard to know what's coming at us. Just watch the videos on TV: ripped-off roofs, twisted telephone poles, cars flying through the air, water tanks, washing machines--all the remnants and husks of lives totally destroyed. A man tells Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell about how he and his girlfriend spent the night in their mobile home as it was being destroyed by the tornado. "We don't have anywhere to live. We don't have any jobs. We don't have anything." This could be you or me. These days it's hard to be sure where you leave off and I begin.

Viscerally, it is disturbing to watch a neighborhood, not that far from your own, in the flick of an eyelash turn into rubble--as if nature itself were undergoing some chromosomal change, becoming like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, devouring itself, eating the world with its own teeth. And then vomiting out rubble. The tornado hits for a few seconds, and suddenly you look around. You see that you are still alive, but your life is no longer there. Instead, you are dancing around in your bones in a graveyard, doomed to come back and haunt the scene. You can still hear your own heart, and suddenly remember how happy you were while hunting Easter eggs before it all happened.

You stare into the awful darkness and you flinch, realizing it isn't easy to start life all over again. You can't tell when you might ever want to be a pedestrian again, or keep bees, carve out a headstone, roll a hoop, or just plain shut the blinds against a monstrous June bug thumping insistently at the window, as though it wanted admittance. It may be a very long time before you wonder casually, what shall I do this morning?

Salon Goes Public

2011-04-14T06:37:00.002-05:00

A recent biography of Helena Rubinstein by Ruth Brandon reveals that her beauty salons in London, Paris, and New York--subsquently expanded to nearly every other major city in the world--made her one of the richest women in the world. Her beauty products consisted of sixty-two creams, seventy-eight powders, forty-six perfumes, colognes and eaux de toilette, sixty-nine lotions, a hundred and fifteen lipsticks, plus soaps, rouges, and eyeshadows. That's an awful lot of chips off an old block, especially for a lady who was only four feet ten inches tall.

Helena Rubinstein's life was dedicated to beauty, bizazz, and making money. Rubinstein, it seems, bought art by the truckload, and in a single room, she had seven Renoirs hung above the fireplace. Her living room, according to Brandon, sported an acid-green carpet designed by Miro (which makes me positively acid-green with envy), twenty Victorian carved chairs covered in purple and magenta velvets, Chinese pearl-inlaid coffee tables, gold Turkish floor lamps, life-sized Easter Island sculptures, six-foot tall blue opaline vases, African masks, and paintings covering every inch of wall space.

Truly a girl after my own heart. I cite this eccentric description of Rubinstein's digs because, synchronistically, it coincides with a reimagined version of my own living room, currently installed as the center piece of an exhibition entitled, "Conversation: Salon Style," that opened this week in an art gallery on the campus of Virginia Tech.

The situation is replete with irony, since for years, my writing has been dedicated to the proposition that there is a life for art beyond the legitimizing walls of museums and galleries. Instead of the idea of art as monologue and self-expression, I have long championed a more decentralized kind of creativity that is dialogic, interactive, and participatory. I even wrote a book in the form of dialogue called "Conversations before the End of Time," that consisted of a series of conversations in which many voices and opinions were present, not just mine.

So I shouldn't have been that surprised when one day, a woman called me up out of the blue, asking if she could attend one of my conversational "salons.” In fact, I didn’t have a salon, as I explained, adding however that I'd always wanted one. She offered to bring a few other people along, and from that first serendipitous conversation and encounter, our once-a-month Saturday salon was born, about four years ago. On the third Saturday of every month, some ten people gather at my house for food and drink, followed by a more formal hour or two of what we consider to be “enlightened conversation.”

It is this salon that is now both the subject and the object of a mixed-media exhibition curated by Mary Tartaro, director of the Perspective Gallery; the art has been specially created by the salon members themselves. When the idea of creating a show around the theme of the salon was first presented to me, I confess I thought it was one of the worst ideas I ever heard. I couldn't picture how it could possibly work. My bad. Luckily this week I got to eat crow. I always love it when I find out how dead wrong I can be! The show is original, witty, gorgeous--and truly in the spirit of dialogue. If you want a tasty appetizer, treat yourself to this link: a five-minute film by Simone Paterson, created in my living room: http://www.vimeo.com/22213765

At salon, there is never a subject planned in advance; we view ourselves a bit like jazz musicians improvising music—except that the music, in this case, is conversation. Our free-floating talk over the years has ranged from Benazir Bhutto's assassination to the pros and cons of one-stop Wal-Mart shopping, from life after death to surviving in a political culture of lies, the Sarah Palin effect, synchronicity, optimism, despair, Barack Obama’s presidency, and the sometimes ludicrous prose of Camille Paglia. Shards of recorded conversation and laughter float through the room as you enter the gallery.

Artful conversation is ecologically sound: it doesn’t use up valuable resources or pollute or contribute to the consumer trance. It doesn't cost anything. When unexpected jets of laughter fall like loose change on my living-room floor, it seems to restore the distorted nervous system of the world to normal functioning. We are at a point where the line between our personal lives and the world has become so permeable and nerve-wracking, it helps to have a special time and space in which to clarify thoughts, share anxieties, talk things over.

In his book “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art,” Stephen Miller laments the decline of conversational art in America, defined as “a discussion of great and small topics by people who practice mutual tolerance for opposing viewpoints.” The best conversations, he claims, are playful. Quite often people don’t discuss anything because they’re afraid of offending—or "if they do discuss something, they’re screaming." At salon, we do have rules of the road. People listen respectfully. There is no cross talk, no showboating, no bristling. Just the exhilaration of a wide range of opinions generously offered and gratefully received.

“We are facing our final evolutionary exam,” Buckminster Fuller warned many years ago. Will humanity survive its test? I am the worrywart in the group, who wonders if any new paradigm can save us anymore. The moral of this entire story? Art, like love, is where you find it—insistently offbeat and unpredictable--as when God says "Tell me your plans."

Also synchronistically, in tandem with our invitation months ago to do the show, lethal gunshots rang out at a political rally in Tucson. Unchecked verbal venom had become a bomb with the fuse lit, and the demand for civility in public discourse suddenly became a focus for the whole country. A lack of civility did not cause this tragedy, President Obama assured us, but only a more civil and honest public discourse would permit the nation to face up to its challenges. To sharpen our instincts for empathy, we would need to listen to each other more carefully and exchange ideas without rancor. Salon, we realized, was slightly ahead of the curve: we had already created a template for what the president was proposing.

The exhibition, located on the second floor of Squires Student Center, closes on May 12th.

Virgil Goes to New York

2011-04-02T13:32:00.002-05:00

There is nothing in the world Virgil loves as much as hanging out with fake alligators: it makes him feel very superior. So he was excited about the second launch in New York City of "Swamp People"--a TV series which chronicles a group of southern Louisiana residents, some of whom are alligator hunters--on the History channel. The network's marketing people had placed very realistic-looking model alligators crawling out of the city's manholes.

Before I knew what was happening, Virgil had packed his old blue sweater and taken the underground sewer route to Manhattan, where he emerged happy to have some time off from countries that are being ransacked, deserts being drenched with blood, and nuclear plants leaking plutonium into the sea. "That's definitely Virgil," wrote my friend Jane, as soon as she saw his picture above. "Not some acrylic alligator. I'd know him anywhere." I agreed.

"I was surprised," Virgil texted from New York, "that in my careful crouch I couldn't see any turtles sliding off sunny logs, no birch bark canoes coasting along, no mosquitoes or dachshunds. I haven't even seen a snake yet, much less forces loyal to Col. Qaddafi. Actually, the only thing besides tire treads I could see from my strategic position half under the lid were two patent leather shoes waiting on the curb. I believe they were attached to that man I remembered, from a poem by Frederick Seidel:

MIDWINTER

Midwinter murder is in my heart
As I stand there on the curb in my opera pumps,
Waiting for the car to come and the opera to start.
Amid the Broadway homeless frozen clumps.

Patent leather makes my shoes
Easter eggs by Faberge
The shoes say New York is still run by the Jews,
Who glitter when they walk, and aren't going away.

The morning after the Mozart, when I take my morning stroll, I feel
Removed all over again from the freezing suffering I see.
Someone has designed a beautiful, fully automatic, stainless steel,
Recoilless assault shotgun down in Tennessee.

The dogs tied up outside the Broadway stores
In the cold look with such touching expectancy inside.
A dog needs to adore. A dog adores.
A dog waiting for an owner is hot with identity and pride.

I'd like to meet the genius in Tennessee, or at least speak
To the gun on the phone.
I'd like to be both the dog owner and the dog. I'd leak
Love after I'd shot myself to shit. I'd write myself a bone.

"I absolutely love that poem," says Virgil. "You have to admire someone who wants to talk to a gun on the phone. He's, like, tapping into a huge grassroots movement, don't you think? Shine on, you crazy diamond!"

"The thing to remember about dogs," he adds, "is that dogs can chase cars but they can't drive them. As for those phony publicity alligators, they look like they're thinking, sure, very impressive--but they don't have the affect, the style, you know, the vibe of real intelligence. It's just zombie stuff. They're not really talking creatures, like me. And they don't glitter when they walk. I bet they can't even talk on the phone to a gun. Honestly, in my opinion, those alligators are no better than fridge magnets."

And with that short but pungent burst, Virgil takes a swig of tea from his syringe and wanders away, emitting a hollow, bellowing noise.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

2011-03-27T19:17:00.004-05:00

These days, I often get the blues. I get out of sorts, more than I'd like. So I try to hold back, in conversation and in print, wanting not to be a BBC prophet of doom, determined not to puncture all those protective bubbles of well-being that keep others afloat in their personal worlds. Maybe, as in the Psyche myth, it might be better not to shine that bright light on Eros--because once you shine the light and get a really good look, your golden world may fall apart. Knowledge comes at a price.

With respect to Libya, Tom Friedman warns that we need to be cautious about intervening in places that could fall apart in our hands. But isn't everything already falling apart? Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, concedes that there are no predictable outcomes in Libya. Nobody knows what will happen. Hillary insists there were no desirable options, and Obama himself, off camera, has described the decision to intervene in Libya as a turd sandwich. Dennis Kucinich, Congressional Democrat, wants to impeach him for eating turds without first consulting Congress.

All this hasn't stopped everyone else from having an opinion about what to do. Everyone has his or her own distinctive wiggle on the subject, say, of Libyan intervention. (Devil you do, devil you don't.) I say we should do this, and you say I would rather not have done that. What if Qaddafi doesn't leave? What if he does? Why take action in Libya and not in Syria, or Yemen? Why not somewhere/anywhere else? How on earth will we ever know it when we're done? Why are we even doing this, anyway?

"Obama acts as if leading the free world is an inconvenience" Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham stated recently, as if he would do a much better job of eating turds than the president. ("You try it!" exclaimed my friend Hakuin, when I told her about his comment. "It's the title of the book a teacher-friend of mine is writing," she went on to explain. "An exasperated version of you should try walking a mile in my shoes,)

Obama doesn't want to put America in the driver's seat, or be the ringmaster running the show. He doesn't want to be seen as the enemy of Arabs around the world--an attitude often criticized as if this were a weakness, or a bad thing. Obama's Bad: let's be blunt, he hates the whole idea of American Exceptionalism. (Perhaps the time has come, said the Walrus.) How easy is it, when there are no easy answers, to persist in asking futile questions? How easy is it to insist on knowing a future nobody can predict? More pertinently, in a world where it's become impossible to know anything for sure, why not dip into how much you know better? Rip the confusion. Be "outspoken."

On the bright side, at least Halliburton won't be moving in any time soon to rebuild what we've just destroyed. As for me, I'm ready with one suave stroke to bury the whole musculature of everybody's opinions in the Virginia hills. That includes my own. Here's the simple truth: we rushed to the side of Libyan rebels and in all likelihood prevented a massacre. It's not really a war; it's more like when Eddie Fisher rushed to the side of Elizabeth Taylor, after her husband, Mike Todd, was killed in an accident. "He rushed to her side to comfort her," Taylor's daughter writes in Vanity Fair, "but eventually he made his way around to her front." Maybe we'll get that lucky, too.

I read In the same issue that Truman Capote once owned a mynah bird, which he carried on his shoulder wherever he went. He taught it to squawk "Fuck you!" at frequent intervals, and that sent him into gales of laughter every single time. Maybe we should consider trading in our opinions for mynah birds? As in: put on your pearls, girls, we're about to go bird shopping.

Survivor Guilt

2011-03-19T15:37:00.003-05:00

Last spring, it was the unbearable lightness of being induced by watching thousands of gallons of oil gush into the Gulf of Mexico every day. That nightmare scenario dragged on for months, without anyone knowing the end of the story. Would the well ever get capped, and if not, would we all be swept away in a tsunami of oil? That had to have been the most ghastly scenario I had ever experienced in my lifetime. Those deadly weeks of anxious waiting while engineers and scientists applied heat, applied cold, applied anything they could think of, to stop the bleeding.

It seemed to me then that some safety lock had been taken off the world--and that a face-off was occurring between the forces of man-destroying-nature and the forces of nature-destroying-man, destined somehow to end badly for both. A gaping wound had opened in the world, with sirens of alarm sounding that would never go away. Eventually the well got capped, and the pain dissipated--only to return again in other forms.

In rapid succession, floods of biblical dimensions inundated parts of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Australia; an earthquake struck a major city in New Zealand; maniacal blizzards pounded the US all winter long. Pandora, her hair on fire, leapt out of the box in the Middle East. And then the triple whammy of a monster earthquake in northern Japan, followed by a killer tsunami, and now, radiation leaks from the Kukushima nuclear plant, which grow grow greater every day. And once again, more deadly weeks of anxious waiting. Will they be able to prevent a nuclear meltdown? What will mad Qaddafi do hext? What will Obama do?

"The only thing President Obama seems decisive about is his indecision," declared an editorial in London's Sunday Express this week. Discussions of ineffectual leadership were once again buzzing through the internet. "What should the US do about Libya? What should the US do about the Middle East in general? What about the country's crippling debts? What is the US going to do about Afghanistan, about Iran?" Yeah, what? What, as a matter of fact, would YOU do? When in doubt, bash Obama. That usually works.

Personally I'm finding it a bit difficult to go on about my normal business as if none of this were happening. I continue to stand my lonesome watch as the guilty survivor, trying to process my part of the global pain, fear, and suffering.

"You don't want to become like that woman who has no future because she won't wear perfume," Virgil taunts, having appeared suddenly, like a Bedouin in the night. Today he is offering himself as my guide through hell--he wants, he says, to read me his favorite quote:

"...And when they ran out of rats, they chewed the bark off the mainmast." "Our wound," he continues, "is a genuine quantum phenomenon. Will it destroy us or wake us up? Is it a wave or a particle? I have three jokes for you."

"This is no time for jokes, Virgil. I can't laugh anymore. Or even try to laugh. About anything. Just stick me with a fork. I'm done."

Breaking News: US has launched military strikes inside Libya. Radiation found in Japanese milk, spinach.

It's all going to be A-okay, you just wait and see.

Oyster Mania

2011-03-10T20:26:00.002-05:00

Ever since a restaurant called "Lucky" opened up in Roanoke, I find myself having a love affair--with oysters. Flown in fresh from the Rappahannock River a couple of times a week, the oysters get shucked by a bald-headed special-hire, who looks like a kung-fu master, and then immediately brought to the table by an enthusiastic waitress. Eating oysters at Lucky's is like inhaling helium. Maybe it's the high zinc content, in combination with all the other minerals like calcium, iodine, iron, potassium, copper, sodium, phosphorus, manganese, and sulphur, but a good helping of oysters makes the whole world, which these days can seem pretty bleak, look and feel better again. Apres les huitres and a good glass of chilled white wine, my mind stops acting like an engine ready for takeoff.

This past week I have been able to indulge my new passion several times. With the result that I am worrying slightly less about Libyan youths--armed with rocket-propelled grenades they don't know how to use--being mowed down from the air by Quaddafi's mercenaries. An editorial, written by a novelist recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize whose father is a "disappeared" political dissident in Libya, and published in the New York Times today, describes the fighting witnessed firsthand by one of his relatives on the ground there:

" 'Treachery, cousin, treachery,' he said when I asked what he had seen. 'Qaddafi’s army forced the women and children out into the streets and placed snipers on the rooftops. Whenever we tried to approach, they shot at the civilians.'
He went on to describe the horror of seeing a child shot in the head with a 14.5-millimeter round: 'The skull exploded like a pomegranate.' "

Libya may seem far away to us, but a dangerous civil unrest is escalating right here, courtesy of Scott Walker, the Gadaffi-like Republican governor of Wisconsin, who is engaged in dismantling labor unions and stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights. As of this writing, the originally peaceful protests in Madison have begun to go rogue across the nation and turn violent.

At night, in my dreams, I find myself navigating with difficulty through excited crowds, trying to get across check points in an unidentified place. The last time I was at Lucky's, the oysters had not arrived, but they did serve this special drink with a mystique: key lime martinis. I'd hardly drunk half of it when I happened to look out (through the plate glass windows) and saw a girl dressed in black, bobbing along on stilts. A minute later she was followed by another one, and no, I was not hallucinating. Right after that, a young woman in a white gauze tutu with flashing red lights underneath it, came inside to greet my friends, whom, it turned out, she knew. She turned out to be a performance artist named Beth Deel, and explained that the folks on stilts were practicing for the St. Patrick's Day parade next week.

Oysters can be expensive in places other than where they are harvested. A single oyster at Lucky's now costs $2.25, which is 25 cents more than the $2.00 a day I read is the daily wage that 40% of Egyptians live on. (It's a statistic that causes me to wonder if I should tie my tongue in a bow.) The price doesn't include that requisite glass of French muscadet (Coing de Sevre 2008), a crucial element in the equation of making me feel like a guest at Gatsby's house in late winter.

That night we ended up going for coffee at the girl in the gauzy tutu's cafe, two doors down from Lucky. It's a tiny, raffish place, pertly called "Get" in honor of its special affinity with the restaurant (as in, just add the two together and Get Lucky!). Going to the bathroom, I had to pass through a mini-boutique of vintage clothing (getfreckles.com) while Beth Deel made me a hot chocolate. There were books scattered around the cafe area for casual reading, but no chairs. Just a few stools, and a monograph on Julie Taymor (think "Spiderman," NYC) on one of the narrow counters. With Beth's permission, I made off with one of her books "Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age," a compendium of essays edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan. In return, I promised to bring her a copy of "Living the Magical Life, on the occasion of my next oyster binge, this coming Saturday.

All in all, it was a super happy evening.

"I don't believe the purpose of life is to just be happy," Andrew Cohen emails in his quote for this week."Why would God take fourteen billion years to produce highly evolved sentient life-forms that would ultimately develop the extraordinary capacity for self-reflective awareness, simply in order for them to be able to experience happiness? It's my conviction that we are here for a reason, that there is a grand and great purpose to our presence in this universe, and that none of us are going to truly find what we are looking for unless we get over our misguided pursuit of personal happiness and connect with that greater sense of purpose—that ultimate reason for being."

Hidden somewhere between skulls exploding like a pomegranates in Libya and me eating oysters in Roanoke sluiced with lime martinis, there must be, as Andrew suggests above, some "grand and great purpose to our presence in this universe." There must be some reasonable explanation for why they are there (in Libya) being shot, and I am here (in Virginia) enjoying myself. I intend to continue looking, with the same passion contenders on "Survivor" search for the hidden immunity idol, until I find it. And. if ever I do find it--that grand and great purpose--I promise you will be the first to know.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to join me, I am quite willing to share some oysters, just as long as we get there on the right night.

Unfit to Rule: After Me the Deluge

2011-03-01T15:33:00.004-05:00

The phrase (attributed to Louis XVth and refering to a flood, storm, or political disorder) is usually interpreted to mean "If you think I was bad, wait until you see what is coming." Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, known more for bluster and buffoonery than for memorable contributions to society, has definitely been channeling his inner Louis XVth of late.

In the multiple populist uprisings currently ricocheting across the Middle East and North Africa, Libya's scenario has got to be the worst, and the most grotesque. With his universe of ineffable gaudiness now under siege and blood everywhere in the streets, Moammar Qadaffi has offered the Libyan people a deathlike embrace: "I am a warrior. I am not going to leave this land, and I will die here as a martyr."

This is a man who travels everywhere with a luxury tent (which he once pitched on the White House lawn), and whose bodyguards are all women. His normally constant companion and confidante, a Ukranian nurse, has recently fled his side for the safety of her home town, Kiev. In Qaddafi, according to Bobby Ghosh in Time magazine, "the Arab youth revolution faces a foe unafraid to push back brutally--and the watching world sees a ruler immune to reproach or reason." Today Qaddafi is a caged tiger trapped in his own palace, issuing orders to paid militias to shoot at random into protesting crowds, and making incoherent speeches about how much his people love him.

Years ago when I still lived in London, I was friends with the painter Francis Bacon, a man who championed colorful eccentricity and outrageousness. Asked once by an interviewer who, among the world's most famous people, he would choose to spend a night with if he could, Bacon sent shock waves across Britain when he unhesitatingly replied, "Muammar Qaddafi." Remembering this story now, I can only wonder, if Bacon were alive today, whether he would still give the same answer.

Each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, says Steve Coll (paraphrasing Tolstoy), but surely having a national leader whose long-term derangement has escalated up the ladder to delusional insanity beyond reclaim, must be a source of monstrous horror for the Libyan people. Commentators on the scene have described being reminded of the last mad days of Hitler, hiding out in his bunker. "Can't repeat the past!" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" History has an inbuilt preposterousness and its own self-reflexive arc.

Meanwhile pundits around the world are on edge, chewing over the question of whether or not the Arab world is ready for freedom, concerned that revolutions can result in worse tyrannies than the ones they overthrow. A scarcity of democratic institutions in that part of the world--especially in the case of Libya--and the potential for protracted violence, has elicited fear, skepticism, and exhilaration in equal measure, depending on where you look or who you are listening to. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (who spent weeks live-blogging from Tahrir Square) tackled the issue head-on in his regular column on Sunday. "Are Arabs too politically immature to handle democracy?" he asked. And then, holding the victory banner high, he gave his answer:

"The common thread of this year's democracy movement from Tunisia to Iran, from Yemen to Libya, has been undaunted courage....I've been humbled by the lionhearted men and women I've seen--defying tear gas or bullets for freedom that we take for granted. How can we say that these people are unready for a democracy that they are prepared to die for?...The record is that after some missteps, countries usually pull through...I'm awed by the courage I see, and it's condescending and foolish to suggest that people dying for democracy aren't ready for it."

Kristof claims that he is feeling more hopeful about the world than at any time since 2001. And he credits "Obamaism"--i.e. its themes of nonviolence, youth-driven social media as engines of change and limiters of autocratic brutality, and the universality of rights as listed in his post-presidential speech in Cairo--for having planted fertile seeds that took root in what is happening now. In June 2009, Obama declared in Cairo: “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from people; the freedom to live as you choose.”

I've got both fingers and toes crossed that Nik Kristof is right: that young people in the Middle East are going to succeed at overthrowing decades of oppressive autocracy. I'm on an email list that sends inspirational quotes by Andrew Cohen once a week, and this week's quote seems synchronistically relevant:

Breaking through Gravity:
"A human being trying to catalyze the emergence of a higher level of consciousness is like a rocket ship trying to break through the gravity of the Earth's atmosphere. The gravity that we are endeavoring to release ourselves from is the historical weight of our conditioning, both personal and cultural. If we can generate enough vertical momentum to propel us beyond the boundaries of who we have been, we will find ourselves in uncharted territory."

Let's all hope the rocket ship of revolution makes it through the gravity of oppression and fulfills its mission of liberation. A lot is hanging on the outcome.

Twittering Tunisia, Cloning Cairo

2011-02-21T17:48:00.002-05:00

I don't think the world has ever seen anything quite like this: whole populations massing and simultaneously rising up against their governments. It seems like every day there's a new "Facebook" revolution somewhere, with chain-reactions that resemble nothing less than the flocking behavior in birds or the schooling behavior in fish. First Tunisia, then Egypt... Bahrain... Iran... Yemen... Sudan... Jordan... Morocco...and now Libya (where, it seems, the regime will do anything to stay in power, including shooting people in cold blood with heavy-caliber weapons). All of it happening at lightning speed--faster than human brains can comfortably process. Nobody can say for sure who is in charge of the program.

Who would have thought that revolutions could self-replicate like computer viruses, leaping from mind to mind, country to country, propagating out of control? Everything now is so hyped up, it's as if the whole world is in an altered state, while long-term systems suddenly diverge into unpredictable thrashing, or simply collapse because they can no longer support themselves.

Is this what the first stage of the "Singularity" looks like, I wonder? The Singularity, by definition, is that moment "when technological change becomes so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."

I am quoting here from an article by Lev Grossman in the Feb. 21 issue of Time magazine, describing the potential transformation of our species into something no longer recognizable, which supposedly will happen when computers become much more intelligent than humans. (IBM supercomputer "Watson" already proved its superiority by winning the million-dollar prize on the nightly game-show quiz "Jeopardy" last week.) At some future point, according to Ray Kurzweil, a primary guru of the superhuman "intelligence explosion," organic intelligence will have merged with artificial intelligence in ways that usurp what was once the exclusive realm of human creativity. Kurzweil predicts the culmination of civilization as we know it by 2045, 35 years from now.

So how prepared are you to mutate? (I'm not.) The key idea here seems to reside in the fact that human brains are hardwired for linear progress, whereas technology progresses exponentially, which means that as computers increase in speed and power, they will take over their own development and become more autonomous. By contrast, humans will become ever more dependent, unable to function without their symbiotic connection to technology. Not a good equation, when you really think about it.

Eventually, says Kurzweil, we will do really delicious things like scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software. Things that were once fantasized as science fiction (like the possibility that computers may turn on society and annihilate us) will become absolutely real. "Nae. nae," pleaded the antropologists. "Yeah, yeah," shouted the blonde.

By 2045, Kurzweil estimates that the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of human intelligence that exists today--to the point where Singulatarians "cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything."

Meanwhile, in case you're worrying about those Facebook and Twitter revolutions convulsing the Middle East, wondering how it will all end, you might want to consider a stint at the three-year-old Singulatarian University, co-founded by Kurzweil and sponsored by NASA and Google, where interdisciplinary courses for graduate students and executives teach you to evaluate the power and speed of computers, and to track the pace of technological progress in the future.

To grasp the way technology affects our perception of reality and even how we think, Joseph Weizenbaum (in his 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason") suggests how technologies from the past, like the map and the clock, became part of "the very stuff out of which man builds his world." Once adopted, he argues, technologies tend to become so indispensably integrated with, and mirrored by, neural structures that they can not be abandoned without fatally impairing the whole system, and plunging society into "great confusion and possibly utter chaos."

Blurring the boundary between brains and machines is an "irreversible commitment." Do you know what that means? Once the double doors screech open and cybernetic blurring renders human brains and computers inseparable, we will no longer know for sure who (or what) is doing the programming. By then, however, there will be no going back. The simply and straightforwardly human will have been lost in the confusion. I can only imagine that some people find the prospect of Kurzweil's 2045 a lot more palatable than I do. Luckily, I will be under the sod by then.

The Winged Victory of Cairo

2011-02-15T12:14:00.002-05:00

Hosni Mubarak is gone. The citizens of Egypt rose up, rallied, and successfully ousted their dictator. And as at other times in history, it was the moral force of non-violence--not terrorism or mindless killing--that bent the arc of history.

In the end, how will it all turn out? Will the Egyptian people be able to continue what they started and find their way to a fledgling democracy? Will they be able to sustain and build, brick by brick, the necessary institutions for legitimate elections, legislatures, and courts? At this point, nobody knows, not even the Sphinx.

"Perhaps the transformation taking place isn't only for Egypt," writes columnist Kathleen Parker, "but for all mankind. Perhaps we are not doomed after all." I couldn't help but think how recent events in Egypt are a huge vote of confidence for the Desmond Tutu philosophy I struggled with way back in November. "...There is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail...[and that] the perpetrators of injustice or oppression...will bite the dust," Tutu has stated this unequivocally, and he truly believes it, so it was thrilling to watch an ideational comment seemingly spring to life, right in front of our eyes.

For Parker, hope presented itself in the form of a single vignette: when unarmed protesters, reacting to Mubarak's refusal speech, raced to his palace and stood in front of the tanks. "It was a stark image of the prolonged battle between good and evil that humans apparently have been fated to fight," she writes. This time, evil did not win.

For me, the iconic moment of hope and victory over evil came later, when fleets of ordinary citizens could be seen, via TV cameras, cleaning up the debris in Tahrir Square after eighteen days of harrowing demonstrations. Men, women, and children were all hard at work sweeping the Square with brooms, hauling bulging black garbage bags, and lovingly repaving the bricks and stones that had been dug up earlier to use as weapons against the police. Most especially for me, the sight of some dozen people carrying aloft the carcass of a burned vehicle with their bare hands had to count as an exemplar of the triumphal human spirit worthy of the Louvre's "Winged Victory," Nike of Samothrace, redrawn for modern times.

My fellow blogger, Andrew Sullivan, who was too ill to man his blog, The Daily Dish, during the past month but is now back at his post, says he can't believe he missed out on a whole revolution. "What I will say," he writes, "is that, as I watched these miracles on television, I found my love of freedom and joy for the people of Egypt and Tunisia (as for the people of Iran) overwhelmed for a few days by my worries about such events spiraling out of control. But revolutions differ in their trajectories. Burke famously opposed the French one and backed the American one. What will make the difference is the character of the people, and the prudence of the statesmen and women who emerge in both countries. And others. In the end, we live in an era where hope is battling fear. Suddenly, hope is winning again. Let us not lose our skepticism. But let us not be intimidated by it either."

At the same time, we have the tide of history interpreted in gibberish by right-wing pundit, Ann Coulter. Like an ill-trained Labrador retriever, she yanks us headlong into traffic: "The way things are going, Obama may want to look into becoming the president of Egypt. Nobody would complain about him being a Muslim then," she said to cheers at the recent Republican CPAC meeting.

Good Lord, what would we do without these succulent Republicans mass-marketing insanity? They continue to illuminate a wider area than that which their maker ever intended. It is sad to think that while Egyptians attempt to establish a viable democracy, our own country is in the mind-boggling, self-destructive process of withdrawing vital government services, encouraging increased pollution, permitting its infrastructure to further decay, fomenting a class warfare not unlike Egypt's, and, bit by bit, letting a real democracy slip away.

Not All Revolutions Are Political

2011-02-07T16:12:00.002-05:00

During the same weeks that have borne witness to chaos in Cairo--with the shocking and convulsive events in Tahrir Square aimed at ending the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak--in New York, the fashion industry was on a roll. I should immediately point out that not all revolutions are political--and having been turned on recently to the current revolution in fashion by a new young friend, Alex Harrington, I happened to notice in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal, a front-page review on the industry's latest extravaganza: clothes made entirely of FOOD. Unhinging events might be happening in the Middle East that are draining stability right off the planet, but I am going to shock myself and everyone else by writing instead about waffle pants, octopus ski hats, and cabbage dresses.

The fact that we now live in a marketing wonderland of totally surreal objects called "clothes," is for me just another parable for life in "end times." That said, however, the kale collars and cherry necklaces featured in Barney's holiday catalogue are undoubtedly more fun to ponder than what is happening in the Middle East. Maybe it all started when MTV gave its Video Music Award to Lady Gaga, who shocked everyone by wearing a dress and shoes made from strips of flank steak. But if you want to check out this latest fashion phenomenon further, Google "Hunger Pains" on the Internet. It's the title of a photo shoot by Ted Sabarese, documenting the young avant-garde designers who make dresses from chocolate or fresh croissants, create astounding shoulder pads with loaves of challah--or, as in the photo here, invent an evening gown fabricated entirely of artichoke leaves (by Wesley Nault).

As for my new friend Alex, he is a young fashionista living in Brooklyn and working as a stylist. I met him recently at the home of his parents in Roanoke, when he was visiting them over the holidays. We bonded over the fact that I took serious note of his spirallng pants, which, it turns out, came from one of the most esoteric clothing boutiques in New York, Comme des Garcons. Alex now considers me the only person in this entire region who has ever heard of Comme des Garcons. So he then introduced me to an avant-garde English fashion magazine called I-D (as in, "what's your big I-Dea for the decade ahead?) in which his work has been featured. Quite honestly, the combination of creativity with revolutionary outrageousness just knocked me flat. I loved it.

I went through the magazine just now to pick out some examples of what I mean. The first thing you notice is that many of the models have deliberately blackened spaces between their teeth. In one case, a model is on crutches, wearing checkered bloomers and bra, with one leg encased in a plastic see-through cast. Two hydrangea blossoms cover her ears like earmuffs. Another wears an unbuttoned checkered shirt tucked in to a plaster cast (complete with scribbled get-well messages) that covers the rest of her torso. One model is stark naked except for thigh-high macho black boots and a hat. (You have to love it when a fashion magazine features models who don't wear clothes.) And one in which a strand of Mikimoto pearls spills out from a turquoise condom across two pages.

I wrote Alex to ask about the clothes in the shoot he was a part of, because the sweaters are thickly padded, and most of the models have a mysterious, stuffed object protruding from their backs. I wanted to know what on earth that was or was supposed to be (if anythng). Alex told me the styling had been "inspired by the lumps and bumps Comme collection from 1993, with a little Botero and Puritan thrown in for good measure." Everything was stuffed with pillow batting, he explained, to give it that kind of bloated proportion. A lot of stylists and fashion kids, he informs me, are doing more interesting/conceptual things and I-D caters to that audience.

Is it too far-fetched and quirky on my part to connect the interactions between reality and the imagination by making a link between a Middle Eastern political rally and a Western fashion show? Because that's what I regularly tend to do here: exercise my "smell all the flowers" attitude in unlikely ways and see what comes of it. Could there be a connection, do you suppose, between food shortages predicted to worsen in Egypt after years of long bread lines, and those croissant dresses and challah shoulder pads?

Because, if there is a connection, says Virgil, we are in dreadful trouble. But we're already in dreadful trouble, I say.

Beyond Polarities: Occupying the "Third Space"

2011-01-28T15:59:00.003-05:00

Someone sent me a thank-you note recently which contained a quote by William Hazlitt that I quite loved: "The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up." Hazlitt never knew about blogging (obviously), but the quote captures the state of me and my brain cells these days. Sometimes it is really hard to get into writing-wet-suit gear and dive in.

One thing did wind me up this week. I finally got to see "The King's Speech." and went straight to heaven. You wouldn't think the relationship between a reluctant would-be king who stammers with his speech therapist could take you there but, trust me, it does. I used to think Ralph Fiennes had the best eyes in the business, but now, he has been toppled, just like some Middle East despot. The entire center of gravity in "The King's Speech" emanates from Colin Firth's eyes. They allow you to track the agony of a suffocating affliction in a way that will haunt you forever.

As for my synchronistic hit this past week, it arrived while reading "Don't Look Back," a profile in The New Yorker (by Ryan Lizza) of the 57-year-old, six-term California Republican congressman recently elected Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell Issa. Lizza refers to Issa as "Obama's tormenter," since he is now the head of a committee which "may at any time conduct investigations of any matter." In the middle of the article there was a cartoon inserted of a homeless (or jobless) man sitting comfortably in a chair on the street, his legs crossed, and holding a saw in his hand. Nearby is a sign which says: "Tattoo Removal, $50." Synchronistically the perfect image, I thought to myself, for Republican overkill. Current Republicans have taken reductionist views to the point where if the government takes any positive action, it is considered bad. To be a Republican now means that the government only takes negative actions: cutting taxes, cutting services, cutting regulations, and the like.

Issa is the man who once described Obama as "one of the most corrupt Presidents in modern times," who believes climate change is a fraud, and who has publicly made known his intention to harass the Obama administration with endless subpoenas and investigations, as a way to distract and weaken the President before the 2012 election. Meanwhile House Republicans say they want to cut $100 billion from domestic spending this year, even if it means throwing thousands of federal and state employees out of work. One Republican Study Committee has called for the elimination of the Legal Services Corp., which provides legal help to people who can't afford a lawyer, the elimination of Amtrak, NPR, and NEA subsidies and community development grants, and slashing the federal work force by 15 percent. Darrell Issa intends to be the background music to all this, taunting the alligator and throwing up roadblocks, while Tea Party-backed candidates , in alphabetic order, have served notice that there will be no compromise in matters of federal debt reduction.

One account I read on Ben Smith's Politico blog states that it took less than three weeks for the new Republican Congressional leadership to claim credit for job growth after they had prevented tax increases for the rich. The landslide election, combined with the recent tax vote, they said, had sent a positive signal to businesses and provided the certainty they needed in order to expand.

Right after the midterm "shellacking" that gave Republicans control of the House, New Yorker columnist George Packer predicted that the level of extremism and partisanship would go way up. There would be little mercy and a great deal of rancor, he said, adding that we are facing one of the ugliest political periods in his lifetime.

And then the gun shots rang out in Tucson.

Suddenly, incentives rose for not riding the horses of invective full gallop. Unchecked venom had become a bomb with the fuse lit. I saw the faces of Congressmen on TV that day and the next, and every single one of them looked ashen. The issue of partisanship had taken on a whole new dimension: no one was exempt. Flaws in the democratic system had (once again) revealed themselves as potentially fatal. You could smell the fear in the air. Warfare politics had just produced this sickening testimonial. Yet, in some ways, it was a gift. The President got his unexpected chance, and he took it, and he ran with it.

Stepping into the breach, Barack Obama reverted to his indelible, core posture: occupying the "third space," where people can be civil, exchange ideas, and interweave competitive relationships without rancor. He soothed, he inspired, and in the aftermath, he exemplified the kinds of bridging that will be needed for all future governmental tasks. A lack of civility did not cause this tragedy, the President assured, but only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation. Instead of pointing fingers or assigning blame, he exhorted us to "use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

I pull an unread book off the shelf, "Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenges of a New Cultural Maturity" by Charles M. Johnston. Tell me something relevant to what I am writing, I ask, opening the book at random and hoping for something useful to reveal itself. Sometimes this works, sometimes not.

"In chapters ahead," it says on p.75 where my hand falls, "we will examine a wide array of major future social challenges: issues of the environment, ethics, education, labor relations, health care, and more. In every case, we will find traditionally liberal and traditionally conservative viewpoints inadequate either for providing the needed solutions or for even fully framing what needs to be asked. Decisions in times ahead will require an increasing ability to think in terms of the whole living picture."
And from the previous page: "The back-and-forth warfare of partisan politics serves increasingly only to mire our good intentions in bureaucratic gridlock. Left opposed to right is simply not big enough to hold the new questions. More and more we should see leaders setting aside party ideologies to propose programs inconceivable from either side alone and inconceivable even through compromise."

So, if the Tucson tragedy can teach us anything, it will be this germinal truth--in today's world, using a saw to cut the mustard is not going to work. Identifying with one half of a polar opposite and disowning the other is not going to work. This doesn't necessarily mean, as Johnston points out and as our President so astutely understands, being friends with everyone. But it does mean entering into a creatively potent relationship with your adversary. And this is something Our Man in the White House knows how to do better than anybody. He knows how to live in Johnston's "third space." He knows this is the place that will offer a new start for putting together a new picture. Only time will tell whether the rest of us are willing to join him there.

Tragedy in Tucson: The Fatal Convergence of Politics and Madness

2011-01-17T15:24:00.002-05:00

As a blogger who mostly stalks contrasts and synchronicities, this has been quite a week. The attempt by a lone gunman to assassinate a Democratic congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, while she was meeting with constituents in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, instantaneously unleashed predictable and bitter partisan posturing, each side menacing the other with accusations and blame. Was this terrible crime the handiwork of a single "bat-shit crazy" person, as Rush Limbaugh was quick to declare, or had it been torqued by right-wing, excessively violent, anti-government rhetoric? It wasn't long before both political parties were scrambling to control the narrative of what had happened by attributing blame to the other side.

The gunman, Jared Loughner, had already shown warning signs at Pima Community College--of paranoia, jumbled speech, scary outbursts--and believed he was a victim of government mind control, indicating possible psychotic illness. But then, paranoid speeches about government and senseless, inflammatory rhetoric punctuated by scary outbursts festoon the phrase-making of public figures like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck on a regular basis. You could say, as columnist Leonard Pitts did say, that these individuals mainstream a brand of political discourse that is "a national disgrace, hateful, poisonous and coarse," continuously stoking divisions through hatred, lies, and fear.

Palin, however, was quick to proclaim innocence, stating unequivocally that "acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own." and individuals are thus accountable for their own actions. Meanwhile, "irresponsible statements" from critics "incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn." Despite her efforts to exonerate herself, it was hard not to draw certain inferences and parallels. Palin's comments, meant to disassociate her brand from any remorse or blame, reeked anew of the the common Tea Party mantra: "Don't Tread on Me," as she ended up threatening her accusers of committing "blood libel."

Speaking, as far as I can tell, for many people, James Tarantino, a student at a local community college in Roanoke, wrote a commentary published in the Roanoke Times, in which he chastised the media for using the event to discredit Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, and to make conservatives look bad. There is no proof, he argued, that current political rhetoric fueled the young man's shooting spree. And of course, he's right: no evidence of such a link has come to light.

But the crucial point here is not whether the killer was (or was not) a proven Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck groupie. The real point is that Giffords herself felt under threat from the "crosshairs" map posted on Sarah Palin's Facebook page, that targeted a list of 20 Democrats running for re-election--with the crosshairs of a gun sight superimposed over their districts--and exhortations elsewhere to her followers to take up arms and "reload," with the suggestion that "if ballots don't work, bullets will." At least three other of the 20 members of Congress on Palin's map had also, like Giffords, been hit with vandalism and death threats.

In March 2010, Giffords openly voiced her disquiet about being "targeted" in an interview on MSNBC: "...we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, and when people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences of that action," she commented, as it has turned out, rather presciently. So, is Palin's targeting relevant to any discussion of the shootings? You betcha! given that Giffords considered the map a threat to her safety, and had expressed her fears more than once, both publicly and privately. It is hard to see as totally coincidental the fact that the same Congresswoman who had complained about the recurrent use of gun imagery was subsequently shot through the head while holding a small public rally.

Having gotten this far with my thoughts, I realized I was somehow missing the final clincher. Where, exactly, was I headed with this piece anyway? What was I really trying to say? I had not yet experienced the synchronistic buzz (that "Aha" moment) which usually makes the raison d'etre of what I am writing perfectly clear to me. In short, I still had no punch line pulling it all together.

Yesterday being Sunday, I routinely checked out Frank Rich's column in the New York Times. (A friend of mine insists that Rich and I seem to share an inside track when we analyze things, often coming from the same angle and drawing similar conclusions, completely independently.) This time she was undoubtedly right, because waiting there was the precise punch line I had been looking for. It dropped out of the sky on top of me from Rich's opening headline--the title of his article--which was:

"NO ONE LISTENED TO GABRIELLE GIFFORDS." Will they listen now, I wondered?

Schmuck of the Year

2011-01-04T19:53:00.003-05:00

Inevitably, the arrival of a new year ushers in a cover story for the winner of Time magazine's "Person of the Year." This year it is Mark Zuckerberg, the nerdy lad who invented Facebook while he was still a student at Harvard. Now, at age 26, he has become a multi-billionaire presiding over an online empire that currently boasts some 550 million members, 70% of whom live outside the U.S. This means that one out of every dozen people on the planet is a Facebook user. Personal disclosure: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but I am not among them. (I couldn't even stay the course when seeing "The Social Network.")

By wiring together one twelfth of humanity into a single network--a social entity, according to Time, almost twice as large as the U.S. itself--Mark Zuckerberg has earned the distinction of having changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale; we have entered the Facebook age, and Zuckerberg is the one who brought us here. In his profile on Zuckerberg, Lev Grossman presents a likeable-enough guy, someone who doesn't publicly preen or reveal much about himself. He may be a billionaire, but he's not particularly into material things. He drives what Grossman calls "the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt," ie, a black Acura TSX, and he's already pledged to give away at least half of his wealth over the course of his lifetime to the campaign organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

"The thing that I really care about, Zuckerberg states, "is making the world more open and connected." Facebook encourages revealing your true self, not some anonymous, invented, or disguised virtual double. When you log on to Facebook, it is to meet up with your friends: a world of people voluntarily sharing things, staying in touch, having a voice in the world. All things considered, the enterprise is pretty benign in its intention. The idea of VOLUNTARY sharing is key.

Which is possibly why Time named Zuckerberg "Person of the Year" instead of Julian Assange, the orchestrator of WikiLeaks--even though Assange was the actual front winner in their online poll. Time describes Zuckerberg and Assange as two sides of the same coin, in that both of them express a desire for openness and transparency. As far as I am concerned, the similarities end there. Assange's transparency is totally involuntary, with the goal of incriminating and disempowering big institutions and governments. In his own words, Assange is fomenting "a world-wide movement of mass leaking"--dumping secret documents into the public domain on a scale without precedent--with the intention of bringing about (again in his own words) "total annihilation of the current U.S. regime."

Friends (which includes many of mine) and supporters of Julian Assange refer to him as "a breath of fresh air," someone who is performing an act of great public service. They like seeing government and corporations take a hit, and consider these transcriptions of tapes to be like sacred oracles, giving everyone access to the truth at last. Big exhale. The truth at last! Yeah, but... what they have failed to fathom, in my humble opinion, is that in reality Julian Assange is a malevolent wizard who, much like the sorcerer's apprentice, has built a machine that no one knows how to stop--and loosed it on the world. "If something happens to us," he has baldly declared, "the key parts will be released automatically." This year's breach of containment spilled nearly half a million documents that included classified military documents from Afghanistan and Iran, and a stream of diplomatic cables. The idea of a secure secret is over. Tech-savvy insurgents have unleashed an anonymous, ruthless monster that is seemingly resistant to attack. It could be the beginning of many missteps from which it turns out, we cannot recover.

Where Zuckerberg's world is filled with "potential friends," according to Time, Assange's is filled with "real and imagined enemies." Given that Assange's operative concept consists of anarchy, I personally applaud Time's decision to go with Zuckerberg instead. What is more, for his blood-curdling vein of hostility and nihilism, I relish the chance to designate Julian Assange as my personal "Schmuck of the Year."

This is NOT meant to be construed in any way as an implicit defense, or feigned ignorance, of the multiple war crimes and deceits perpetrated by the U.S. government around the globe over decades. When former Secretary of State Colin Powell made his trumped-up yellow-cake case for going to war in Iraq, I already knew, without WikiLeaks, that it was all lies. Because I happen to think that Julian Assange is a cyber-terrorist creep does not mean I am in support of U.S. foreign policy and its imperial wars. I am not. Nor do I mean to imply that Assange is the only deserving candidate out there for the title of Schmuck of the Year that I have bestowed on him. (Pace Michael Moore, who contributed to Assange's bail and defends him vigorously. I still love you.)

Merry Everything to All!

2010-12-24T09:04:00.002-05:00

Virgil and I, who are busy all week attending (or giving) holiday parties, send you our warmest greetings of the season and wishes for a prosperous and scintillating 2011. We will be back on track soon, hopefully with some new cultural and political lunge lines. Meanwhile, do not forget, Virgil advises, that "the present is a natural reservoir where tricksters learn to dive and swim the backstroke."

The Stag Nation

2010-12-13T17:08:00.002-05:00

American politics seems to have mutated into a game of playing shit-ball, with our unfortunate President as the ball. It doesn't really matter which team you are on, both sides are going for the jugular.

I was absolutely horrified last Sunday (Dec. 4th) when Frank Rich, arguably the New York Times' best liberal commentator, wrote a column implying that Obama was now a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. WTF? I thought. Republicans were threatening to boycott not just the President's entire legislative agenda, but to hold the whole government hostage, unless the Bush-era tax cuts were extended for the top 2 percent of richest Americans--something which Obama explicitly opposes. Despite this outrageous threat, Obama seemed all too willing to negotiate a deal. Stockholm Syndrome (as defined by the FBI) is when a hostage concentrates on his captors' "good side" and tries to please them. It's a term which describes capitulation to the enemy as a form of mental illness. Obama had not yet cut any deal with Republicans at that point, but Rich was already seeing the handwriting on the wall: the President was going to surrender "his once considerable abilities to act, decide, or think" and cave in to Republican blackmail.

So distraught was I at this below-the-belt ad hominem attack on the President by a writer I mostly admire, that I immediately copied out the piece and emailed it to a few friends, asking for their response. One wrote back, "OK, so Obama is Patty Hearst and the GOP is the Symbionese Liberation Army? Hell, I don't know what to think anymore." Soon afterwards came these reassuring insights from my friend Jane Vance. They made me want to bring out the champagne.

Jane stated unequivocally that for Rich to describe Obama's diplomatic demeanor and willingness to compromise as evidence of Stockholm Syndrome was just plain weird, and stupid. "Obama doesn't act like a hostage," she said. "His policies may be hostage, but his psychology isn't. He doesn't try to collaborate because he is fearful and submissive. That's not why healthy people cooperate and compromise. Since when did the wish or the ability to harmonize become so suspect as to be associated with trauma and disease?"

The minute I read this I thought: OK girlfriend, you just hit the ball right out of the park.

"Stockholm Syndrome," Jane went on, "means that a person is so degraded that he has to invent a perverse hope. Obama isn't degraded...[he] is still a kite, and with enough give he would fly. There is no flattening him...If he has any syndrome, it is optimism, which works better than stagnation. We are that beast now, the masculine complement to the Mama Grizzlies: the Stag Nation."

More like the stagnating nation, I thought, acutely concerned about how any president could possibly bust this particular roadblock: Republicans had clearly drawn their line in the sand, stating that nothing happens unless the rich get their tax cut.

Obama, being Obama, had drawn no such line and remained coolly open to negotiation, opening himself up thereby to yet more hateful rants from the Left on the Huffington Post and elsewhere. "Obama's style," Robert Kuttner wrote on HP, "is not to draw bright lines, but to blur them. He will never beat the stuffings out of the Republicans...[so] let's stop pretending. Barack Obama is a disaster as a crisis president...the more that he is pummeled, the more he bends over."

So much for playing shit-ball with the President, Mr. Kuttner. Can I just say, right here and now, how truly repugnant I find your comments? You claim the problem is Obama's ineffectuality--a "failure to know how to fight and lead as a progressive." But did Obama ever once, in two long years of campaigning, bill himself as "a leader of progressives?" On the contrary, he has ALWAYS calibrated himself as a "postpartisan leader," representative not just of one party (or one party's agenda), but of "all of the American people." That definitely includes you, Mr. Kuttner, but it also includes people who are not you.

When Republicans obstruct Obama implacably, when Democrats such as Kuttner villify him for "caving" to Republicans, condescendingly demanding that he "grow a spine," Obama continues to do what he always said he would do: govern the country as a whole, not just represent a single component of it. Indeed, the most stalwart and admirable thing about this president is how much he remains true to his original commitment to govern in a bipartisan manner, no matter how much he is beset about this on all sides. "It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right," Paul Krugman wrote recently in the New York Times.

"I have not been able to budge them," Obama explained, after he had accomplished the impossible task of managing to cut a deal with the Republicans anyway.

"I realize It's tempting," he told everyone afterwards, in a not-so-veiled reference to Rich, "not to negotiate with hostage-takers," but then he flipped the whole argument around, redefining exactly who the hostages were: not him but the American people. "I could have picked a big fight," he said. But instead he chose to compromise, because the deal he got was the best one for the American people. "This country was founded on compromise," he somewhat caustically reminded everyone.

Democrats immediately reacted like hot-dogs sizzling and popping in the microwave. As expected and feared, their leader had predictably "caved." However, at least one Republican pundit (Charles Krauthammer) described Obama's deal as the "swindle of the year" for Republicans, because Obama had gotten so much of what he wanted--and managed to boost his re-election chances in 2012 to boot. Yesterday, on Meet the Press, Mayor Bloomberg sang Obama's praises and heartily approved his deal. "The country," he said, "needs this president to succeed. If he goes down, we all go down, so we need to pull together and get behind him." A voice of sanity in the wilderness. Someone who gets it, Mr. Kuttner. Maybe try listening to him?

"Look," says Virgil, who has suddenly loomed into view and is pointing in the direction of the White House. My alligator assistant is shirtless, his belly soft and pink, still wearing his old Dodger cap. He flips the cap around so I can better see what he's saying. "Nix on all the worry about Obama," he counsels. "The man is a blue aquarium light in the dark corridor where everyone else is stomping. He doesn't have Stockholm Syndrome. Not only is his spine more than ample, he's got a very fancy pair of antlers as well."

When Does Partisanship Morph into Treason?

2010-11-30T15:17:00.003-05:00

It may be just an amateur's opinion, but treason is when Republican Eric Cantor of Virginia meets independently with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to express his sympathies and allegiance to Israel, stating that he stands with Israel's leader against his own President--and that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the administration in defending the interests of Israel.

Treason is when Republican Senator Jon Kyle of Arizona risks the President's (and America's) international credibility by sabotaging passage of the START treaty, designed to reduce the proliferation of nuclear warheads and set up a mutual system of inspections, as a means of deliberately damaging Obama's "reset" of America's ties with Russia for crass political opportunism.

Treason is when Republican state governors band together to pass a "repeal amendment" that would allow a super-majority of state legislatures to overturn federal laws and sabotage the entire federal system of government. It's when the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Republican Darrell Issa from California, declares his intention to hold one or two hearings a day--hopefully maybe even "seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks"--to investigate Democratic policies like the stimulus, the health care bill, and the bank bailouts.

Treason is when the co-chair of the President's fiscal commission on deficit reduction, Republican Alan Simpson, gleefully predicts that the new freshman class of congressional Republicans will do their best to shut down the government, if the national debt limit is not capped. (The debt limit now is at $14.3 trillion, and it will probably be reached in early 2011, so that if Congress doesn't pass legislation to raise it, the government will no longer be able to borrow money, whether or nor not the economy is in recovery.) Simpson has called those who would force the government into default "sharp cookies," claiming that closing down the government is exactly what they came here for.

Treason is a bunch of white Republicans in Congress who have decided it is politically smart to show disrespect for the first black American president, and who treat him, in Maureen Dowd's inimitable phrase, "like a dirt sandwich." This is a dishonor to the office of the presidency in full view of the whole world. By definition, if you Google it, treason is a crime that undermines the offender's government. It is disloyalty by virtue of inviting mutiny towards one's country or sovereign, or aiding its enemies by attempting to overthrow the government through subversive behavior.

"The fact is, Paul Krugman wrote recently in the New York Times, "that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it's doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party's cooperation--cooperation that won't be forthcoming."

I think even Google would have to concur that what is happening in America today is more than just shameful and distressing. This isn't your garden-variety partisanship. By definition, it has to count as nothing less than treason.

Have a Wonderful Day, and God Bless!

2010-11-25T13:11:00.003-05:00

I've been wondering what to write about today for this holiday weekend? Maybe how North Korea is doing a scary war dance on an island military base a few miles off of South Korea? Maybe about those dastardly Republicans who refused to find time to accept an invitation to the White House this week, thereby snubbing the President? They are the same guys threatening to undermine his nuclear START treaty with Russia, a big issue for me. Meanwhile, I'm off soon to Thanksgiving dinner with my longtime "holiday family," to which I am taking my favored stringbean dish, laced with yellow peppers, gouda cheese, fresh dill and tarragon, olives, and pine nuts--added to make the humdrum beans more alluring.

But then, what actually lit up my day today was getting a personal note from the President:

Suzi --

When Michelle and I sit down with our family to give thanks today, I want you to know that we'll be especially grateful for folks like you.

Everything we have been able to accomplish in the last two years was possible because you have been willing to work for it and organize for it.

And every time we face a setback, or when progress doesn't happen as quickly as we would like, we know that you'll be right there with us, ready to fight another day.

So I want to thank you -- for everything.

I also hope you'll join me in taking a moment to remember that the freedoms and security we enjoy as Americans are protected by the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces. These patriots are willing to lay down their lives in our defense, and each of us owes them and their families a debt of gratitude.

Have a wonderful day, and God bless.

Barack

Call me a cornball, if you must, but something about this brought tears to my eyes. I think it was the Suzi/Barack thing that hit a nerve. I just couldn't think of a single other national leader who might have written me like this. I was moved enough to send a reply:

"And right back at you, Barack. Enjoy the respite of the day. You've earned it. We are so lucky to have you in our midst! Hidden among the hate-mongers are many who love your sweetness and your willingness to struggle tirelessly under the most horrible conditions on our behalf. Thanks for your wishes. Suzi"

Recently I read that Cleopatra wrote her love letters on tablets of black onyx. Getting this note on my email today was a bit like getting a love letter from Cleopatra. Despite being a mass-mailing, it felt just so tender, heartfelt, intimate. And such a wonderful way of saying a very Happy Thanksgiving to all!

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

2010-11-13T08:11:00.002-05:00

As President Obama doubles down on civility and extends post-election olive branches to the GOP, leading Republicans have sent warnings to the administration to prepare for constant investigations and ideological stand-offs. A cartoon entitled "Reaching Out" in my local paper pictures Obama, with his long arm outstretched to shake hands, standing opposite an unpleasant, big, snarling dog, whose teeth are bared. The collar around the dog's neck bears the name of Mitch McConnell.
"Welcome to the Great American Cleaving," NY Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote this week--where talking across the table has been reduced to yelling across the chasm and where, instead of moving toward the middle, we are drifting toward the extremes. Republicans are not looking for compromise. The new Republican majority comes to power with a sour intention to make no deals and take no prisoners. They are not consensus-builders, Blow says. "That ripping sound you hear is the fabric of a nation."

Welcome to the world of once overlapping bipartisanship, transformed now into the sound of one hand clapping.

What is the sound of one hand clapping anyway? It's the most famous example of a Zen koan, i.e., a kind of paradoxical riddle that resists being solved by rational thought. When meditated on, koans are meant to help the mind transcend ordinary thought patterns and arrive at a more enlightened place. But can the mind, which is always bound by dualities, ever transcend the law of opposites? Definitely not these days, it seems. The American public is hardly in a meditative frame of mind. Instead, it is bloodthirsty. And the result, according to Hendrick Hertzberg,, "is a kind of political cognitive dissonance." For Obama and for the country, he claims, the next two years look awfully bleak. There will be no more transformative legislation.

A friend sends me a quote by Epictetus. "You can be happy if you know the secret: some things are within your power to control and some things are not." Obama may be unable to control the Republicans--who may, or may not, be able to control the Tea Party (we don't know the final story on that yet). But at the deepest level, he obviously has an inner conviction that the presidency carries with it certain responsibilities and obligations with respect to the office, one of them being the supreme importance of bipartisanship. It is, after all (and always has been), the very bedrock of American constitutional democracy. Bipartisanship is an institutional fact, meaning, there is good reason to respect those powers even if we don't feel like it--and to find, as Obama so eloquently puts it himself, "the sweet spot that works for both."

But what happens to the presidential ethos when one half of the government "goes rogue?" What happens when absolutely nobody wants to buy what your selling? When even your erstwhile supporters criticize you for continuing to dance long after the music has stopped? What happens when you intend to still keep these principles in mind, even while your critics accuse you of "endless placation?"

Obama's critics feel he is sounding more and more like a broken record, given that the time when Republicans would consider compromise with a Democratic president is long gone. What the White House seems to have forgotten, according to one commentator, Trey Ellis, on the Huffington Post, is that "we elected a commander-in-chief, not [a] mediator-in-chief. A mediator rarely offers his own opinions but steers both sides toward civility." Ellis goes on to offer the telling example of Obama's response to the new Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, when Boehner declared that the recently enacted health-care bill "will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt the country." Obama's response was that "There are going to be examples where, I think, we can tweak and make improvements on the progress that we made." He meant to show his willingness to improve on the bill, but not to repeal it.

Really? Ellis is appalled. '"The president and I are both writers," he states. "He should know better. Does he really think he can battle active verbs like, 'kill,' "ruin,' and 'bankrupt' with, what, 'tweak'?"

"Therein lies the tragedy of Barack Obama," in the opinion of one of my favorite bloggers, Tom Degan. "He has tried to maintain the appearance of being 'above it all.' He has tried to be too much of an amiable gentleman--when he should have been fighting these plutocratic thugs with all the rhetorical thunder he could muster...The last thing in the world [Obama] wants to do at this stage in the game is to even think about 'working with' these reactionary assholes. As history tells us, that's impossible. He must realize this by now. Or does he?"

This is, indeed, the historic Zen koan of our day. "Mr. President," Degan further exhorts, "you cannot--you will not-- be able to 'meet them halfway.' Don't be an idiot. By now it should be obvious to you that they want to destroy you. And they will destroy you--if you allow them to."

"To fight or not to fight?" Obama must be asking himself the Hamlet question even as I write. This is a man who, when he ceremoniously took the political podium, dug in his heels as the very embodiment of a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state America. This is a man who believes, above all, in the value of finding common ground, points of agreement, and "overlap." When it doesn't work, as someone pointed out, he keeps on doing it. Meanwhile, a post-election CBS news poll determined that Americans are clamoring for compromise--more than 70% of those polled want Obama and congressional Republicans to make concessions and work together. Such is the nature of political koans at a time when many people would rather torment the president than actually accomplish the business of governing.

Last week, my friend Jane Vance sent me this detail (see above) of two overlapping goblets from one of her new paintings. It was just after I'd visited her, and she served me wine in the most extravagantly beautiful ruby-red glass I had ever seen. In truth, I couldn't get over how beautiful they were. Jane told me the glasses were a recent present from a friend. Then, on my email a few days later, this image arrived, and my first thought was, what a perfect metaphor for bipartisanship. I wrote her back, saying, "You'll just have to endure your glasses becoming politicized, because that's the lens through which I see everything these days."

Jane wrote back, "My goblets can handle politicization. The intoxication of proximity and the exhilaration of contact: these are the venerable political and personal arts we would do well, with our best goblets, to celebrate."

Ah yes, I thought, of course. If only it were, but it's so absolutely not, what is happening over there on Vinegar Hill.

The Obliterating Arc of Hope and Optimism in Suicidal Times (2)

2010-11-07T12:11:00.003-05:00

I am still very much in process with Desmond Tutu's assertion that "there is no question at all that good and laughter and justice will prevail," and that "the perpetrators of oppression or injustice will bite the dust"--trying to decide whether or not it is valid assumption to make. On the issue of how to remain optimistic when realistically everything is sliding towards collapse, hearing what my friends have to say has been both enlightening and rewarding. It's not that I don't know the reasons for optimism being the better path, I do. But I also struggle with the power of emotional truth, in terms of what I see happening wherever I look. For me, the struggle is between an optimism I mostly don't feel, and a pessimism I can't intellectually support. It's like riding a bus that is likely to leave its passengers lying dead by the side of the road, and hoping to figure out a way to be positive and philosophical about it.

"In truth, everybody’s is right and nobody knows anything. Derrick Jensen is right that we’re fucked, Tutu is right that goodness will prevail. You are right to worry. And I am right to see things in the context of very vast pictures. For instance, at this very second people are being tortured somewhere, and elsewhere people are having fantastic orgasms looking into each other's eyes...planets are being born and stars are blowing apart... some people have behaved in magnificent ways to one another, and at the same time...[others] have been cold, punitive, destructive to one another. Tears of sorrow and tears of joy flowing, flowing all of the time...This world, the big-picture world, is forever in states of flux of dark and light, forever turning itself inside out through both creation and destruction. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of the destruction: it’s in the nature of things. Why shouldn’t we? Who are we to escape that part of the universe forever? Every polarity we can think of love-hate, light-darkness, good-evil, miraculous-impossible, is always simultaneous in the whole. It’s all flickering and flowing and moving as one and we are part of that. It’s all congruent and necessary. Nobody really knows what’s what and that reality is our common ground—it crosses all lines. Here we are in the great mystery together, laugh or cry." [From my friend Jari Chevalier, who lives in New York. To read the entirety of Jari's response, visit Jari Chevalier, host: Living Hero podcast, NYC]

"I do think it’s important from a philosophical perspective to remain as compassionate as possible towards those with different beliefs or perspectives. I’ll take the two competing rallies that have occurred during this election cycle as proof. I think generally Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity had it right, and is pushing for a return to civility and open-minded discourse; I think generally Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor had it wrong, pushing for an awakening of the worst reactionary impulses in our citizenry. I certainly think that the leaders of these rallies can be categorized that easily: Stewart seems to me to be responsible and fair, whereas Beck does come across as a irrational fear monger... So while I think that a Jon Stewart or an Obama is mostly good and that a Glenn Beck or a John Boehner is mostly not good, I also think that there is a little bit more Jim Crow in some Democrats and, much more importantly, a little bit more Desmond Tutu in some Republicans than it might seem. I know from my time at Pepperdine that many people with archconservative positions on certain political issues and a very evangelical Christian perspective can be the nicest people in the world...I think that people have both Jim Crow and Desmond Tutu. Politics is an ugly business, and maybe not the best place to hope to see the better angels of our nature, though we do have people working hard in that arena to make that more the case. But I think that we see it best on a smaller scale, when organized greed and such doesn’t have the ability to put up a smokescreen. You and I can say that we prefer the Desmond Tutu part of humanity and work towards it, and I think that the vast majority of people would say the same. There is a fundamental decency in the world, and even if there are ideological or irrational barriers that prohibit that from being expressed all the time, that just makes cultivating that decency on a grassroots level all the more important." [From Emerson Siegle, my friend Jane Vance's son, now in his first year of graduate law school at UVA in Charlottesville, VA]

"I tell myself the story that what goes around, comes around...all things considered, the cosmos seeks balance. This helps me roll out of bed in the morning... Balance may really exist everywhere, even in politics and in acts of inhumane behavior, but we simply do not have the visual or mental capacity to see it at once...perhaps over time if we live long enough? Finally, I take comfort in the thought that, even in the midst of the most dire straits, our capacity to 'create' or 'imagine' (in the sense that Jacob Bronowski meant) sets us apart, not just from other species, but from our own despair." [From Mitzi Vernon, a friend living in Blacksburg]

There is an old Chinese maxim, which states that "people in the same boat help each other, sharing weal and woe." Soliciting the opinions and thoughts of my wonderful friends has certainly helped me defray some of the cynicism I feel about human nature, and it has somewhat alleviated my resentment toward the spoilers.

The lesson I take away from all this is that optimism in dark times doesn't necessarily mean not seeing what is right before your eyes. It doesn't have to mean a denial of what is going on. Keeping your inner Tinker Bell alive, even when things are as difficult and disappointing as they are now, is worthwhile if only because "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine." And that certainly beats out "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you get stabbed, poisoned, or thrown off the edge of a cliff." (This last comment is stolen from a New Yorker review by Anthony Lane, of Claude Chabrol's movies and how they instruct us.)

I could stop here, but I am going to leave the last words for my friend Elizabeth Indianos, who lives in FLA. She also sent me the photo above, which she took at Jon Stewart's rally:

"I can do more to solve the problems in the world by refusing to add low-energy thoughts of hate or disgust to the circumstances around us...In my own mind at least, good and evil are cyclical, not either/or. They compete, are fluctuating iotas, variables that ebb and flow--so do your Mother Teresa best. Pick a side. Stick to it and steer in the direction of the infinite power of the universe, no matter what."

The Obliterating Arc of Hope and Optimism in Suicidal Tiimes

2010-11-03T16:23:00.004-05:00

"Tell me about despair, yours. I will tell you about mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on." [Mary Oliver, from "Wild Geese"]

It was a strange weekend of ghoulish, pre-election mayhem, Halloween weirdness (those Tea Partiers, for instance, who seem to like wearing costumes all year round), and Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity." "We are in hard times," Stewart told the huge crowd, "not end times."

Instead of trick-or-treating with my neighbors up the road on Sunday, I stayed home and watched 60 Minutes, which turned out to be a program about American towns in which people have tragically lost businesses and jobs. It was very painful to witness. I have already seen quite a bit of this kind of media coverage across the country, where people can't stop crying, including the men. Parents, who can't afford to put food on the table or send their kids to college. So many folks in tears, while three billion dollars were being lavished, nay, squandered, on election attack ads. I found myself sitting alone and wondering, has the human race always been this way? Is this just how things are--and meanwhile the world goes on?

Thinking, too, about my last blog, I wondered if, way down deep, we are more Jim Crow than Desmond Tutu? How do Tutu and the Dalai Lama manage to chuckle over human foibles and frailty? Personally I have always shied away from eternal optimism, as if it were less a sign of enlightenment than some sort of protective sheen. It grates on me--which is why I decided to ask some friends what they thought in an email. I asked them about Desmond Tutu's statement, quoted in my last blog, that "the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail...[and that] the perpetrators of injustice or oppression... will bite the dust." I asked point-blank: Has Desmond Tutu discovered the culminating secret of the universe? Or is he just singin' in the rain? Do you think the human spirit will ultimately prevail? Or are we, as Derrick Jensen says, fucked? I definitely got answers, many more than I expected, as follows:

I like [Tutu's] frame of mind. It’s a good meme to live by. Do I think it’s true? Well, Evolution works in strange ways, so it is hard, if not impossible, to know the outcome of the Evolutionary process. But Tutu’s optimism is undoubtedly grounded in his belief in God, and a God that will ultimately prevail in seeing to it that “the meek will inherit the Earth”. I don’t believe in such a God, but I do concur, with Tutu, in that I think those that live by greed, war, etc., will self-destruct; but I also believe they will take a lot of the “innocent” with them, as they are already doing. Still, I wish to believe that living a life of compassion and wisdom will ultimately assure our survival, over the oppression/violence/exploitation option. And of course, a giant meteor hitting the Earth could make all of this irrelevant. [Kirk Ballin, a friend in Roanoke, VA]

About Tutu...today I am starting out as an optimist. In an email to some last night, I was not...I said, “Unfortunately my Halloween costume is not that of an optimist!” Today I think just maybe he could be right...and how else to make it a true prophecy than to join in as many people in such a proclamation. Seeing Dachau recently oddly filled me with a strange pairing of disbelief/horror and hope. [Hank Foreman, a friend in Boone, NC]

Hmmmm, I wonder which direction I’ll go with this. Maybe singing in the rain is the secret of the universe? Yeah, I like that. I have some issues with “faith” as I perceive it to be espoused by mainstream religions but I do have faith “that good and laughter and justice will prevail”. I have to believe this at my core because if I can’t see the world this way then it might not exist, if nobody sees the world this way then I’m sure it won’t exist. Well said Mister Tutu. [Paul Zenner, a friend in Blacksburg]

I think what Desmond Tutu means is no one gets to leave alive. We are all heading in the same direction no matter what our plans are or how we live. Does he know more of what the next chapter will be? I do not know. When you step back and see how we repeat the same patterns over and over again from the beginings of civilization to the present, it starts to make us look pretty silly: what, another war, more stealing and cheating, more bad behavior? Ego and control out of hand again. I believe that there are enough of us who are aware so that we can make a shift and change. [Fern Shaffer, a friend in Chicago]

I don't know that the human race "has always been this way." We have created violence toward each other in every century of our known history: most agree that the 20th century was the most violent! As our human population doubles and quadruples in the 21st century, as oceans rise, polar ice and glaciers melt, forests diminish, fossil fuel runs out, clean water becomes increasingly polluted, arable land is covered in highways and cities, it seems inevitable that the competition for food and shelter can only intensify. The human spirit will prevail as hope is our only option. Whether our species does is another question. I think as long as we are in the limbic ancient parts of our brain arguing about whose God is the only God; denying the science of Gaia, we are ultimately doomed. The last 60 years have been about trying to "wake up" and we are no less ignorant, perhaps more ignorant due to fear now, than we were then. [Ciel Bergman, a friend in Santa Fe]

I went to the rally in Washington. It all went well and there certainly was a good vibe. Some ladies from New York felt that it should have had more political clout and that there should have been more Sarah-bashing. I think that it did show up the liberals as not aggressive.
I do hate all the money being spent on negative campaign ads. I try not to feel too deeply about all the injustices happening in the world and set little time aside to think about it, it is selfish but that is the only way I can prevail. I try to invite as much joy into my life as I can because I have to get thru it.
I did not buy any candy this year, did not want any corn syrup candy in the house because I knew I would be tempted to eat it. As I usually get a lot of really cute trick-or-treaters here, I decided to go see The Social Network. Did not feel like hiding in my own house. So, went off to the movies by myself and ended up being the only one in the theatre. Which is ok, except that three quarters thru the movie a commotion. Some of the employees thought that somebody had put this fake person in the seat, which happened to be me, and they came to investigate and when I moved, every one got a fright. [Renet Schuld, a friend in Roanoke]

The times are uneasy and there is the stench of hunters approaching, but I will not be quiet any more than you, and perhaps, at last, the proverb about pearls before swine is a lesson not in beauty but in force. Pearls, besides being beautiful, are too small. We need big heavy insulting baseball-hard BLOWS of truth with which to wallop the brutes on the temple, to scare them away. So I propose we keep blogging, keep painting, and keep loving each other...So I say, glory in our difference from these brutes. Show no fear, sally forth with swishes and fangs, and scare the hell out of the hunters until they run back to their same old retreats. Now may not be the time for dialogue but only for some distance between the two irreconcilable species. [Jane Vance, a friend in Blacksburg]

A wise teacher once said to me “one of the secrets to a happy and good life is to ”forgive yourself and everyone else immediately.” I have kept on believing that putting out into the world visions of love and compassion is vital, and I must stay with this vision of the sacredness of all humans. Due to the suffering all around us and the inequities we see every day, keeping to Tutu’s vision is much more important now then ever before. Every act of generosity and love helps. [Beth Swartz, a friend in Scottsdale, AZ]

The history of civilization is the history of crime.—P. D. Ouspensky. Laughter makes the world bearable, so I’m with the archbishop on this point. His belief that justice triumphs after a long struggle is an assertion of faith, not fact. Gurdjieff would call this “self-calming.” Good and evil are qualities we attribute to the world based upon our entirely subjective impressions of it. The world simply is. The responsible life is in the struggle to act toward the world and toward others with charity and compassion and understanding, without the expectation of reward or of an outcome to our liking. Life is in the living and not in the goal. [Bob Walker, a friend in Blacksburg]

We're fucked. [Bill Rutherfoord, a friend in Roanoke. This comment arrived on my computer early this morning, after last night's election.]

There are more comments, which will be in the next blog. Feel free, meanwhile, if you haven't already, to send me your thoughts. The sculpture in the illustration is by Meredith Bergmann.

Waiting on the Big Flip

2010-10-30T15:14:00.002-05:00

He knows too much about too much, and he makes the rest of us look bad. On top of that, as the first black president America has ever had, he's been crippled by his own sense of decency. So brace yourself, America. Prepare for the Big Flip--and a set of drastically different, and even more unmanageable, circumstances for our country. Smarts are on the way out; mean and stupid is coming in.

Moral: don't stand out from the crowd or dare to provoke envy from the gods by being too smart or too fortunate. Instead, flaunt your stupidity, exult in your meanness, and produce Olympic levels of dick-swinging (a la Karl Rove) until you finally can smell the sweet, sweet smell of success. Just keep on bending the form to your own image until it snaps, and you win.

"Yes," Michael Moore wrote this week on Anna Wintour's blog, The Daily Beast, (referring to the recent incident when a female reporter was thrown down to the pavement by a Republican handler at a Rand Paul rally, and viciously stomped on), "one big boot is poised to stomp out whatever hopey-changey thing we might have had two years ago and secure this country in the hands of the oligarchs and the culture police....The young woman's name is Lauren Valle, but she is really all of us. For come this Tuesday, the right wing--and the wealthy who back them--plan to take their collective boot and bring it down hard on not just the head of Barack Obama but on the heads of everyone they simply don't like." If they win on Tuesday, warns Moore, they will not search for compromise, bipartisanship, nor will they look to find the middle ground. These Republicans mean business. Their boots are shined and ready.

In case you were wondering, the Senate GOP leader from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, has already made clear his own job description. The "single most important thing" Republicans want is to help Obama become a one-term president.

"Make no mistake about it," Moore writes. "A perfect storm has gathered of racists, homophobes, corporatists, and born-agains, and they are on fire. Two years of a black man who secretly holds socialist beliefs being the boss of them is more than they can stomach....They won't need a rope and a tree this time to effect the change they seek."

"I draw the line in the dust...and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," declared the firebrand North Carolina governor, George C. Wallace in his 1963 inaugural address. Plus ca change, as the Frenchies like to say, the more everything remains the same. "History doesn't repeat itself, Mark Twain wrote. "But it does rhyme." You really have to wonder about this path of so-called human evolution and enlightenment. "I know that we're in the final days of a campaign," Obama says, in his peculiar, semi-opaque way. "So it's not surprising that we're seeing this heated rhetoric. That's politics."

Really? Is that what it is?

Now 79 years old and ever cheery, another world-renowned black leader, the Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, recently told Time magazine that the chief lesson he has learned is that "the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail...In the end, the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable--there's no doubt at all that they will bite the dust." And then he roars with laughter: "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Wonderful!"

"Now there's a flip I can believe in," says Virgil, relishing the chance to butt in. "I really like this man with his ballerina costume name."

So what do you think? Has the Archbishop Tutu discovered the culminating secret of the universe, or is he just singin' in the rain? Are we Rome, or could we maybe be South Africa? I think I'll let you decide, because my horoscope today claims I have to give the impression I am on top of the world. "Everyone," it says, "wants to associate with someone who is positive and confident." Today I want to be a crowd-pleaser, so I'm giving it a shot. I won't say anything really bad. It's all in your hands.

The Collapsing Behemoth

2010-10-23T13:27:00.002-05:00

This was the week that news analyst Juan Williams was fired by his NPR employer because of an allegedly politically-incorrect comment he made (on Fox television), in which he admitted that the sight of Muslims garbed in full Muslim regalia in an airport made him feel nervous. (Who among us has honestly never had a feeling like that? And weren't we encouraged by our government to keep an eye out for any suspicious behavior?) But this was also, coincidentally, the same week that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a recent speech before the youth wing of her conservative political party, declared that multiculturalism--the idea that disparate peoples can live side by side with each other--had "utterly failed." And then, in a historical instant, one of the linchpins of democracy--the whole ornate system that has successfully ordered the lives of millions--sighed, split apart, and died.

In Germany, Merkel went on to explain, "we feel bound to the Christian image of humanity--that is what defines us. Those who do not accept this are in the wrong place here." Germany is now home to 3.5 million Muslims, and to an accompanying fear that Germany's very "German-ness" is under assault and being "overrun" by foreigners. Does anything about this sound familiar? The crisis of scrabbling to "take our country back" seems to have become pandemic, a kind of mass delerium.

An unsettling example of anti-multiculturalist fervor has even struck my favorite Indian restaurant in Blacksburg--which has been stripped, like a defrocked priest, of all its previous Indian accouterments. Only the menu still remains Indian. Everything else--the mellow yellow walls, the majestic painting of the Taj Mahal with its beautiful pools, the female hostesses in gauzy silk saris, who would float like angels from table to table: all are gone. Only one of them remains; she now wears black slacks, white shirt, and a black vest, probably procured from Wal-Mart. The once mellifluous ochre walls have been repainted shit brown, the lighting is dim to dark, and one entire wall houses a gargantuan sports bar with the requisite TVs arrayed overhead. This former oasis, where you could actually have a civilized conversation over dinner, has been occupied by new customers: barfly footballers mostly, who emit an unending stream of painfully loud guffaws and howls from their perches at the bar. Heil there, Angela! We are all taking our countries back. You betcha!

In politics, America's fledgling Tea Party Patriots are hard at work. If their congressional and gubernatorial candidates succeed in November, they will do their best to eliminate not just mosques and saris and paintings of the Taj, but also income taxes, departments of education and the environment, the minimum wage law, unemployment insurance, the new health-care reform act (substituting instead private accounts for Social Security, voucher programs for Medicare). They will do away with financial regulation of banks and corporations, and ultimately, they will try to eliminate the government itself. Nothing will interfere ever again with individual liberty, as provided for according to the U.S. Constitution. And, as the effects of financial fear, changing demographics, and ideology kick in, we will squarely face the awful fact that democracy, along with its multicultural proclivities, might not, as we all somewhat mistakenly presumed, be able to outlive both rust and larvae.

I've been reading a book about how granular effects can produce big collapses like the end of the USSR, and that historical forces do not necessarily work in ways we thought we could predict. Called "The Age of the Unthinkable," it is written by Joshua Cooper Ramo, and everyone who wants to better understand the perilous condition of our world today would do well to read this book.

The author cites a study by David Kotz and Fred Weir in their own book, "Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System," which sets out to answer the question of what brought the USSR down. "Great powers have declined in history," they write, "but never so rapidly and unexpectedly." They conclude, rather stunningly, that the USSR didn't collapse because of popular pressure upward from the grass roots of Soviet life, but because of the ruthlessness of Soviet elites--and some terrible miscalculations by Gorbachev. The "nomenklatura"--a term which refers to the elites of army officers and officials who actually ran the country but were a very small percentage of the Soviet population--decided, once Gorbachev began reforming a system that had protected their rights and privileges, that they had more to gain by letting the USSR fracture than by holding it together. The ultimate explanation for the sudden demise of the Soviet system, according to Weir and Kotz, "was that it was abandoned by most of its own elites." The similarity to what is happening in our own country today is, well, quite chilling.

Ramo comments further on the idea that the nomenklatura sold out their own system: "If you were sitting on top of the empire when it fell down, the nomenklatura logic went, you would surely be in the best place to pick up the pieces. This was a cold, selfish decision. It was also, fatally, one that Gorbachev hadn't anticipated in full."

It seems as if our own beleaguered president, Barack Obama, much like Gorbachev, also failed to anticipate the extreme depths of betrayal and viciousness that have been visited on his presidency. Republicans have deliberately broken the system, so that they will be in the best position to pick up the pieces. If Russia today seems like it has survived the ordeal of being deliberately broken, I have to wonder, at this point, if America will be so lucky.

A Tale of Two Countries

2010-10-15T07:13:00.002-05:00

Writing, for me, is always an occasion to search for hidden connections, synchronicities, and stark contrasts. The last few weeks were rich in the latter: the stunning contrast between Chile and the U.S., for instance, in their respective responses to crisis in their countries. On the one hand, human nature at its best; on the other, at its worst.

When thirty-three miners were trapped underground for sixty-nine days, the government of Chile turned crisis into opportunity, and made itself into a glorious beacon of courage, faith, and decency. Throughout the long ordeal, social bonding between the government, its people, and the miners became so inspirational that the fate of the miners set the whole world on fire. Everyone was watching, with baited breath, while the trapped men worked, sang, and prayed together in the underground darkness, while they awaited rescue for over two months.

Luis Urzua became the selfless leader who kept the men organized and motivated--insisting at the end on being the last man to leave in the specially constructed miracle capsule that ferried each miner through two thousand feet of rock, back to their waiting families. Sebastian Pinera, the President of Chile, had vowed to do everything possible to rescue the miners, no holds barred, and as each miner emerged from from the capsule, he received big bear hugs from the President.

"We aren't the same that we were before the collapse on Aug. 5th," the President said. "Today, Chile is a country much more unified, stronger, and much more respected and loved in the entire world." And he vowed that people wouldn’t be allowed to work in such unsafe and inhumane conditions again.

Not so for my country. Still reeling from the financial collapse in 2008, the U.S. is currently engaged in political flame wars propelled by brutal divisiveness, blood-curdling opportunism, and anonymous corporate donors who do not have the good of the country at heart. We look like a country contaminated by plague. The devotional frame of mind which set Chile alight is nowhere to be seen. In its place, unending tirades against everything; hatred and rage on a scale that Leonard Pitts aptly described as "end-times bacchanal."

For practices to flourish, according to philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, it is necessary that they embody the virtues. American democracy has lost the virtues. The obscene amounts of money being pumped into the political system by corporations, to be used as attack funds in their attempt to take over the government, has draped our once stellar country under a black shroud.

So what can be done about this stupefying reality? Perhaps we need to consider who is stinking up the refrigerator. We could take a lesson from the likes of Chile, instead of from the dog-eat-dog mentality of Judas-types like Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell. If they succeed, every piece of Democratic legislation that's been passed so far will be challenged as unconstitutional. Before long, we'll go back to the deregulation of everything, and our country can really walk the plank to oblivion.

Epiphany in the Library

2010-10-03T07:24:00.002-05:00

Last weekend, it was my birthday, and a friend took me to Abingdon, a two-hour drive from here. We stayed overnight at the historic Martha Washington Hotel, which dates back to the Civil War and has a reputation for being haunted.

After an oversized marguerita on the hotel verandah and a dinner of appetizers on the patio, we repaired to the library and were immediately transported to another century. The room was poorly lit: dim, low-hanging lights covered with small orange shades were suspended from the high ceiling above the tan leather sofa. A monstrously tall steel ladder leaned against rows of book shelves that stretched as high as the eye could see, and contained an interesting collection of volumes related to Southern history and literature.

My hand mysteriously gravitated towards a paperback called "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," by C. Vann Woodward. No sooner had I sat down, book in hand, next to my friend on the sofa, when a staff person appeared bearing a silver platter on which sat a bottle of port surrounded by six glasses. Yelping with excitement, we leapt up to try some, after which my friend said, "They're in here." "Who's in here?" I asked, baffled, as the library was empty, except for us. "The ghosts," she said. "They're behind the sofa, sitting in front of the fire place. I can feel them."

I'm not sure whether I even believe in ghosts, but since I was a little bit tipsy, I suggested inviting them over for a glass of port and a chat. My friend's eyes went wide. "You don't mess around with ghosts," she scolded, in her delicious Australian accent. She explained that she has been sensitive to ghostly presences ever since childhood.

"It's a man and a woman," she went on. "I'm sure of it." "Well," I giggled, "you've managed to narrow it down a lot. Good job!" Then she picked up a brochure from the low table in front of us and began reading out loud. The text turned out to describe the ghosts said to still be residing in the house--namely, a Civil War soldier who had been wounded and subsequently died there after being nursed--by a woman who also died, a short while later, of typhoid. "See," my friend said. "I told you." Once the talk of ghosts had receded (and I knew we weren't about to meet any), I opened the book on my lap and began to read a paragraph at random. That was when I had my epiphany about Barack Obama.

People who follow this blog will know that I write about Obama a lot. I study him, and the way he reacts to things. I have often wondered, for instance, how he withstands the hatred and vitriol and blatant racism that is relentlessly thrown at him every single day. Since it makes ME feel crazy, I have to wonder how, as the direct target, it makes HIM feel. Obama seems able to ignore the disrespect and endless ingratitude somehow--he just plods on irregardless, as if none of this were happening, much less to him. It's gotten to the point where people like Arianna Huffington (and some of her cohorts on Huffington Post) accuse him of being "conflict-averse." Are they right? I've sometimes wondered myself if this isn't a character flaw. But as I've said many times, Obama never takes the bait. He doesn't respond to disrespect; he doesn't get angry or attack back--causing some people to conclude that he is weak and insipid, "without a spine."

The mind, as Annie Dillard once wrote, is a marvelous monster. As I started to say, no sooner did I read the following paragraph--which I am about to share with you--from the book on my lap, my brain secreted, like goo, a profound insight that, at least for me, resolved the whole issue of Obama being conflict-averse once and for all:

"On 1 February [of 1960] four Negro college boys, freshmen at the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, asked politely for coffee at Woolworth's lunch counter and continued to sit in silent protest when refused. The 'sit-in,' nemesis of Jim, Crow [laws which mandated segregated public facilities], was born. In a week it spread to six other cities of the state, and by the end of the month to seven other Southern states. The self-discipline and fortitude of the youths, who silently bore abuse and insult, touched the white South's respect for courage." More than fifty years after that historic act, the former five-and-dime store became a Civil Rights Center and Museum.

All the major civil rights organizations were committed to the Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence, as prescribed by their leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. "We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer," King told the whites, "and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process."

What happened in the library was that I had a clear vision of Obama, sitting in solidarity with those youths at the lunch counter, calmly exercising "self-discipline and fortitude as they silently bore abuse and insult." The students didn't fight back, but it wasn't because they were "conflict-averse." In a moment of insight, I saw the lunch counter morph into the White House.

The next morning at breakfast in the hotel, while eating my sweet potato pancakes and bacon, I asked my friend if she would think I was a bad person if I went back and stole that book from the library. Not at all, she said. Before checking out, we went back into the library. I got momentarily distracted reading the op-ed pages in the Wall Street Journal, a copy of which was sitting on the table. (The bottle of port was gone.) I had already taken the book from the shelf, and it was lying next to me on the sofa.

My friend excused herself for a minute and went outside. When she came back, she was merrily waving the book at me (I hadn't even realized she'd taken it), chiming "Happy Birthday, Suzi!" She had just gone outside to negotiate its purchase with the front desk clerk. Then she said, "You were going to steal it, Suzi. I couldn't let you turn yourself into a criminal--not on your birthday anyway." It could well be the most extraordinary birthday present I ever got.

A few days later, back in Blacksburg, I found myself reading "Tea and Crackers," an article in Rolling Stone magazine about Tea Partiers, written by Matt Taibbi. The author traveled around the country interviewing random people at their rallies. At one fundraising event in northern Kentucky for Libertarian Rand Paul, Taibbi struck up a conversation with a retired judge who was introducing the candidate at the event. Taibbi asked him what he thinks about Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act. Rand Paul has called the Act unconstitutional and believes it should be repealed, because it exemplifies an unacceptable government intrusion into the private realm. "Well, hell," the judge replies, "if it's your restaurant, you're putting up the money, you should be able to do what you want. I tell you, every time he [Paul] says something like that, in Kentucky he goes up 20 points in the polls. With Kentucky voters, it's not a problem."

In Lexington, Taibbi posed the same question to a local Tea Party organizer. "You as a private-property owner have the right to refuse service for whatever reason you feel will better your business," she replies, comparing the Civil Rights Act to onerous anti-smoking laws. "If you're for small government, you're for small government."

"You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they genuinely don't see what the problem is," Taibbi writes. "It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart."

This is from an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, now available on newsstands. In the same issue, Jann S. Wenner interviews Barack Obama, asking him:

"How do you feel about the fact that day after day, there's this really destructive attack on whatever you propose? Does that bother you? Has it shocked you?"

"I don't think it's a shock.," he replies. "I had served in the United States Senate; I had seen how the filibuster had become a routine tool to slow things down, as opposed to what it used to be, which was a selective tool — although often a very destructive one, because it was typically targeted at civil rights and the aspirations of African-Americans who were trying to be freed up from Jim Crow. But I'd been in the Senate long enough to know that the machinery there was breaking down.

"What I was surprised somewhat by, and disappointed by, although I've got to give some grudging admiration for just how effective it's been, was the degree to which [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell was able to keep his caucus together on a lot of issues. Eventually, we were able to wear them down, so that we were able to finally get really important laws passed, some of which haven't gotten a lot of attention — the credit-card reform bill, or the anti-tobacco legislation, or preventing housing and mortgage fraud. We'd be able to pick off two or three Republicans who wanted to do the right thing.
"But the delays, the cloture votes, the unprecedented obstruction that has taken place in the Senate took its toll. Even if you eventually got something done, it would take so long and it would be so contentious, that it sent a message to the public that "Gosh, Obama said he was going to come in and change Washington, and it's exactly the same, it's more contentious than ever." Everything just seems to drag on — even what should be routine activities, like appointments, aren't happening. So it created an atmosphere in which a public that is already very skeptical of government, but was maybe feeling hopeful right after my election, felt deflated and sort of felt, "We're just seeing more of the same."

Readers, have no doubt: Woolworth's lunch counter is still very much alive within the confines of even the newly decorated Oval Office. If these Republican/Tea Partiers manage to win in November, they will do their best to repeal everything ever authored by Obama. And more.

You think it can't happen? I'm with Marie Burns, a reader who comments regularly on op-ed pieces in the New York Times. She recently wrote: "Just yesterday I read that 41% of Americans can't name the Vice President of the United States. But somehow a bunch of them have positive proof President Obama was born in Kenya & is plotting to impose Islamic law on the nation. I'm not laughing anymore. I'm alarmed."

"Me, too," says Virgil. "It's a humanity problem. I'm putting the date on my calendar and reserving a seat at the lunch counter in advance: my way of expressing the virtues of beauty, clarity, and strength without embellishment.

Newts & Grizzlies (2)

2010-09-21T19:46:00.002-05:00

Today, the Roanoke Times ran an editorial called "The Party of Crazy," about how the Tea Party is driving the GOP very far to the Right--and wondering if anyone is paying attention. Most people still aren't, even though we are now fully launched into a corporate right wing coup against the government. The RT editors refer back to the moment in 2008 when John McCain was campaigning in a town hall meeting, and a weird, stricken look appeared briefly on his face when a woman in the crowd shouted that Obama scared her, because he was an Arab. McCain hastened to reassure her that, no, he wasn't. (Would he even dare to do that now?)

Spreading fear about Obama's "un-Americanness" and seeking to establish his illegitimacy as president, has burgeoned from a cottage industry of "birthers" to an industrial-strength anti-Obama, anti-Muslim culture war of crisis proportions. Last week one of the most outrageous examples of Republican Swiftboating ever seen occurred when former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich creamed in his jeans over an anti-Obama essay written by Dinesh D'Souza for Forbes magazine. The article is based on D'Souza's soon-to-be published book entitled "The Roots of Obama's Rage." (Obama's rage? Did I hear that correctly? Isn't everyone always complaining about Obama's inability to express rage?)

Anyway, Dinesh D'Souza (whom Maureen Dowd has irresistibly called "Ann Coulter-in-pants") puts forward the stunning thesis that Obama's policies are an inherited, genetic carryover from his African father. D'Souza suggests that the U.S. is now being ruled "according to the dream of a Luo tribesman of the 1950's...[a] philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, [and] is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” Is this supposed to be taken seriously?

Obviously Gingrich thinks so. He has wholeheartedly endorsed D'Souza's goonish thesis, declaring it "the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama." Newt claims D'Souza shows how the Prez "is so outside our comprehension" that you can only understand him "if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." OMG. Newt is one of the crazies out there, hoping and plotting to replace Obama in 2012. UGH.

I cranked myself up and went to Wikipedia to see what I could learn about newts that might be useful. Many newts, I found out, produce toxins in their skin secretions as a defense mechanism against predators. Some newts of the Pacific Northwest produce enough tetrodotoxin to kill an adult human and poison their enemies. Should you come in contact with a newt, proper hand-washing techniques should be followed due to the toxins they produce and bacteria they carry.

As the professed author of this blog, Virgil suggests you stop reading now and go wash your hands. Just to be on the safe side, I'm going to do that, too.

Midterm Madness: Newts and Grizzlies on the Rise

2010-09-19T19:45:00.004-05:00

Virgil wants to know, how much do you really understand, or care, about what's happening politically in this country? Because once a system tumbles off a ledge and goes catastrophically bad, he says, it is very hard to return it to its earlier state. Usually it's impossible. Indeed, it may already be too late. However, my beloved alligator assistant is definitely sounding the alarm. Watch out, he says, because the newts and grizzlies are taking over. Not paying attention while this is happening is the equivalent of drinking hemlock. Metaphorically speaking, recent midterm nomination results have produced a new gusher that could well destroy the country, much as the unstoppable oil threatened to do for months in the gulf. Virgil says you can't let the bad wipe you out, but if our government snaps, which it shows every sign of doing, it will remain snapped forever.

I was glad to see that President Obama was imnmediately on to the danger. In his weekly radio address this Saturday, he also sounded the alarm--although I fear few people were paying much attention:

"Back in January, in my State of the Union Address, I warned of the danger posed by a Supreme Court ruling called Citizens United. This decision overturned decades of law and precedent. It gave the special interests the power to spend without limit – and without public disclosure – to run ads in order to influence elections. Now, as an election approaches, it's not just a theory. We can see for ourselves how destructive to our democracy this can become. We see it in the flood of deceptive attack ads sponsored by special interests using front groups with misleading names. We don't know who's behind these ads or who's paying for them. Even foreign-controlled corporations seeking to influence our democracy are able to spend freely in order to swing an election toward a candidate they prefer."

This was my first thought as well, once the election results were in. The real story playing out in front of us all in real time, is that the Tea Party, meant to be seen as an outsider and leaderless insurgency haphazardly run by "we the people," is actually being orchestrated and bankrolled by wealthy individuals, powerful lobbyists, and corporations who want nothing less than to take the government down. (So what else is new?) Only this: given that the Tea Party just ate the Republican Party for breakfast, it now has the Democratic Party on the menu for lunch. Does that worry you? Maybe not, but it definitely worries me.

For some Democrats, the election by Republicans of patently unqualified and rogue candidates like Christine O'Donnell to run against them in November was an occasion for positive rejoicing. The question being bandied around all week was whether or not this represented an "implosion, or fracturing, of the GOP (and was therefore good for Democrats), or whether something more sinister is going on-- the ascendancy, for instance, of Sarah Palin as the new leader of the Republican party and a sharp shift in its center of gravity to the Far Right. It was, after all, her endorsement of these various rogue candidates that seemed to carry them to victory.

In Senate races, Tea Party candidates were winners in Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Alaska, Kentucky, Delaware, and Florida, all of them overcoming rivals, like the moderate Republican Mike Castle in Delaware, who is well liked in the state and had the full backing of his party. Most Republicans still consider Palin unelectable, though her staffers, it seems, are working under the assumption that she's running. And make no mistake: if a nobody like Christine O'Donnell can win the Republican nomination for Joe Biden's old Senate seat in Delaware, well, nothing should be beyond our wildest imagining. (Look for more on Christine O'Donnell in the next installment of my "Newts and Grizzlies" thread.)

Time magazine's latest cover story on the Tea Party depicts a giant tea cup with a limp GOP elephant slumped inside, its trunk dangling perilously over the side. The elephant looks to be nearly drowning. (A perfect image, I thought, of co-optation.) Now that the Tea Party has taken over the GOP, its motto (as put forward by Rush Limbaugh) is: vote for the person farthest to the Right.

Former master-mind strategist for the Republican party, Karl Rove, was openly aghast when O'Donnell (who looks and sounds just like her sponsor, Sarah Palin) actually won the nomination. "She's nutty," he said, adding that she would lose the seat, and maybe even possible control of the Senate as well, for the party. Palin then took care of him sweetly, in one of her better barracuda moments, sending this sugar-coated message straight to the jugular: "Bless his heart," she declared. "We love our friends there in the machine...I say 'Buck up.'"

She's right, Karl. I think you should buck up, because things are not all that bad out there for your crowd. You've trained your minions so well that within twenty-four hours, they had all (including even you) closed ranks in support of every Tea Party candidate and their radical agenda. "Let there be no mistake," announced Senator John Cornyn, "the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and I personally as the committee's chairman, strongly stand by all of our Republican nominees." After which he promptly sent a check for $42,000 to her campaign. Meanwhile, John Boehner has already invited Tea Party activists to help "drive the debate" in Washington and help shape the legislative agenda. Inside the tea cup, Republicans are hanging on for dear life.

Karl, you and I both know there is no individual GOP candidate. There is only the lockstep party you created, committed to Obama's failure even at the expense of the country. So take heart from the words of your fellow Republican, David Brooks:

"It doesn’t matter that public approval of the G.O.P. is now at its all-time low. It doesn’t matter that the Tea Party rhetoric is sometimes extreme. The poll suggests that roughly 50 percent of Americans haven’t thought about the Tea Parties enough to form an opinion. They’re not paying attention because they don’t see it as one of the important dangers they face. Who knows? Maybe they even sort of like the fact that a ragtag band of outsiders is taking on the establishment and winning."

Enjoy your hemlock, folks. And while you're at it, don't forget to buy the tee-shirt.

It Feels Like a Real Fight to Me

2010-09-13T15:04:00.002-05:00

David Plouffe wants us [Obama supporters, that is] to "tell our communities" what it will be like if the Republicans regain control of Congress. Since my mind freezes at the mere prospect of that rancid possibility--which, according to pundits and pollsters, is a reality coming at us with the force of an avalanche--I am going to use my blogging time here to respond to that request. It's what I was planning to write about about anyway, because should things should turn out as currently predicted, I believe our country will be dead in the water. Toast. So it behooves us to start paying serious attention, unless we are willing to write our own obituaries. And I'm not.

"If this life not be a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight," wrote William James.

It feels like a real fight to me, not political theater, to the point where anybody who is not fully engaged is signing up for the biggest mistake of their lives. America is facing death by Republican kryptonite. With or without his former tan, John Boehner (otherwise known as "the orange man") is positively itching to ally himself more fully with Mitch McConnell in dismantling the U.S. government and whatever inventions and richnesses it may have accrued over the years. This is the project that excites them above all else: causing the entire structure of government to collapse and then disappear. Can it be done? I think it can. So if you are someone who is feeling acute Obama fatigue and disappointment, who thinks the Democrats deserve to lose power, you need to get over it, right now.

Because if the GOP takes over in November, we can look forward to fewer services and even fewer jobs, a platform of constant phony investigations, and repeals of every piece of legislation passed during the Obama presidency so far. Plus a possible pre-emptive strike on Iran, privatized Social Security, deregulation of corporations and of the whole financial industry. Wherever you happen to live, you will see Sarah Palin and Mama Grizzlies and Tea Partiers from your front porch.

This Sunday in the New York Times. Maureen Dowd wrote about how her sister Peggy--a Republican-leaning voter who switched her allegiance in 2008 in order to support Obama--is now disaffected and has jumped ship again and will probably vote for Mitt Romney, eek, if he runs. As is usual with Dowd, it was a fun piece to read, but it got its punch at Obama's expense. Obama-bashing, in my view, has now become a luxury this country can no longer afford. One reader of Dowd's essay commented back eloquently, saying that he, too, was disappointed in Obama's performance as president. But he added:

"I will vote for him because I am afraid. I am afraid of what the Republicans and their Blue Dog cohorts will do to this country. I ask myself: Do I want equanimity or John Boehner? Do I prefer the pretense of economic populism to an unabashed bludgeoning by water carriers for the rich and powerful? Do I want corporations to begin to fully and freely exercise their rights as citizens? Further: Have I been hankering for a repeal of health care reform or does coverage for pre-existing conditions still seem like a good thing? Am I pleased that Elizabeth Warren was at least in the game?"

"No. It's not about inspiration anymore; it's about survival. The Republicans seem to have convinced a large part of the populace that throwing water onto a drowning man is a good thing (The Hard-Hearted Hannah Policy). Well, it's not. (One could look it up if one wanted to take the time). I believe that after considering the respective merits between and among an inner tube, life jacket, beach ball, flotsam, jetsam, empty beer keg, milk carton, Chinese take-out container, and a hero sandwich, President Obama would come to a well-considered decision and he would not throw water on a drowning man." You may find this a feeble reason to support someone, but really it's not--not when you realize you are, yourself, that drowning man.

Today, Republican columnist for the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker, used her column to send a letter of apology to the Muslim world. "Dear Muslim World," she began, "I am writing you today as an American citizen who is deeply embarrassed by current events in my country." She then referred to the controversy over the Islamic Center near Ground Zero, and to the Dennis-the-Menace pastor in Florida who had threatened to burn Korans last Saturday. As it turned out, no Korans got burned, but that is no longer likely to stop the hate-America rallies unleashed by these events in Muslim countries. Nor is it likely to placate the sad American Muslim boy I saw briefly interviewed on TV, who claimed he was now being horribly taunted and harassed by his school mates.

Somewhat naively, Parker suggests to the Muslim world that it should "ignore Pastor Terry Jones, because he's nobody," and no one except his tiny congregation cares what he says. Even though many of us would like for him to crawl back under his rock and stay there, she says, "alas, our laws do not forbid stupidity." (What Parker calls stupidity, I call treason.) I can't help wondering how many of the raging Muslims I saw protesting on TV, both here and in the Middle East, will read Parker's article and be appeased. "I am sorry," she writes, "that we [in the news media] handed [Pastor Jones] a megaphone, and I apologize. Please be patient. In a few days, he will be forgotten." Sure, right. No problem.

Apologies can certainly soften enmities and take the edge off distress, but somehow, I doubt that Parker's tender talk and regrets are likely to mitigate the unwholesome rage that has been triggered everywhere. That said, I had almost forgotten to check in with the irrepressible Virgil, who has mastered the animal art of healing with his paws. Pushing his wet nose against my ear, he whispers something. I can't quite believe what I'm hearing. "It sure makes a change from schnitzels," he says, as his loose cheeks balloon into a guffaw.

Fanning the Flames of Jihad

2010-09-08T19:24:00.005-05:00

I usually check in with the opinion page of the New York Times online every day. Some of the regular columnists-- Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd and Bob Herbert, for instance--are like dark chocolate, perfect for a political chocaholic like me. Often, when I enjoy an article I've just read, I will follow up by reading some of the readers' comments that follow, to see how others have responded. One reader wrote something recently that was so intensely stark and fierce and brief, I have not been able to get it out of my mind. "What's next?" the person wrote (it was in the context of a discussion about where the country was headed.) "WW III. Obama is the last president the United States will ever have."

I prefer writing blogs when I am either fired up or wigged out--horrified or excited by something. I'm not in the business of simple reportage. I prefer digging among ashes, probing for synchronicities with blunt instruments, recognizing the kind of hidden connections you can't take your eyes off of once you've spotted them. This week, it was the sudden appearance of a semi-obscure but menacing pastor of a small church in Gainesville, Florida, Terry Jones, who proposes to "commemorate" the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by burning copies of the Koran. He has been collecting them from supporters for some time, and is planning a big bonfire on the ninth anniversary of 9/11. which is this coming Saturday, god help us all.

Not a good idea, declared General Petraeus; a provocation that could undermine the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, and seriously threaten the safety of our troops. Afghan protesters have already staged a "death to America" rally and flag-burning in Kabul in advance of the event. The photo above shows Afghans burning an effigy of Pastor Jones in a demonstration against the U.S. on Monday, September 6th. The protesters were also calling for the death of President Barack Obama.

Jones says he's praying on it, having been called on to desist by the likes of the Pope and Hillary Clinton, the White House and heads of many religious organizations, and even Mitt Romney. Public book-burning is more a Nazi than a Christian thing: it won't play well, according to everyone. Remember when a U.S. interrogator at Guantanamo Bay prison flushed a Koran down the toilet and set off a rash of riots across the Muslim world? Remember the devastating conflagrations that tore through Denmark when their national newspaper ran a cartoon about Mohammed wearing a bomb in his turban? But the Pastor, instead of being tried for treason, or viewed as a threat, is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Burning books, in this country, is not illegal.

Once again we are proving ourselves as the best recruiters for Islamic extremism around the world. Welcome to the surreal world of U.S. national security. On this evening's news, it was announced that the Pastor has decided to go through with his plan, despite the many entreaties from people begging him not to. He has been "called by God" to do this.

Something very deadly, according to my intuition, is incubating here--but I don't want to be the one who scratches in the first faint marks of the dawn of World War III.

About Things Standing and Not Standing

2010-08-31T14:13:00.004-05:00

It seems that the 150-year-old chestnut tree that once offered solace and hope to Anne Frank while she was in hiding from the Nazis, was recently toppled by wind and heavy rain. The fungus-ridden trunk was badly diseased and snapped 3 feet above the ground. Fortunately no one was injured when the tree fell, but the symbolism of the stricken tree did not escape me. I began to think about things standing and not standing.

Last winter, in the town where I live, the roof of the local high school gymnasium collapsed from the weight of a heavy snowfall. Luckily, it too hurt no one when it fell, but the accident did lead to the entire building being condemned. By some politically unfortunate algorithm, the displaced high schoolers have, this fall, been directed to occupy the site of the middle school building--thereby displacing, in a kind of domino effect, the middle schoolers--who are now having to commute to an old and abandoned campus in the next town. The main building there dates from 1905, and is considered to be haunted.

I learned this from my friend Jane Vance, who is a special aids teacher for the middle school, and is quite put out of joint about having to add half an hour (each way) to her daily commute. Meanwhile, intrigued by the weird history of the place, Jane did some research via Google. The story which she discovered involves two "Black Sisters," so-called because they always wore black, who ran a boarding school in the main building and had an infamous reputation as murderers. "Two people died in the building," she wrote me, "and a third--a child--was drowned in a well out back, which is now covered over. The deaths were all violent, and...Google will regale you with scary stories about the Sisters and the flickering lights, whispers, and weird shadows in the old main building."

In a subsequent conversation with the current building inspector, who has been inspecting the old place for thirty years, Jane learned that the Black Sisters still play their tricks with brooms. Janitors leave the brooms leaning against the wall, but when they come back, one broom is always standing, unsupported, in the middle of the room. Somewhat skeptical, Jane decided to check out the downstairs boiler room on her own, and sure enough, she found a broom standing by itself in the middle of the room. She took the photo above, and sent it to me from her iPhone. "'Haunted seems a good word for the boiler room," she wrote, "not because a broom stands there, but because the place FEELS humid with the residue of the past...or the wrong mix of carbon dioxide and oxygen. You'll absolutely notice the strange feeling when you are down there."

"In south Asia," she adds, "there is a word--geomantic--which means that some places are charged, as if ionically, with the residue of long years of what people's intentions there have been. So some shrines are believed to be potent--able to make you more serene, for example, by virtue of mere proximity to them, because of the effects of so many people who have been there before you, refining their intentions, trying to be good, in that space."

Which leads me, in a rather neat segue, to the symbology of Glenn Beck, standing geomantically on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last weekend, in the very place where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Crowning himself with the good vibes of all the people who have been there before him (including Barack Obama), Beck implored the gathered crowds to "turn back to God" and return America to the values on which it was founded.

"We are so honored to stand here today," declared his distinguished guest speaker, Sarah Palin, the self-appointed leader of the Mama Grizzlies. "We feel the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," she said--as spooky in her way as Jane's stand-alone broom.

It is claimed that in ancient times, certain trees were oracular. They could speak and deliver messages. I can't help wondering if the toppling of Anne Frank's beloved tree does not contain an oracular message for our times--signaling that a whole way of life is no longer standing, along with its heady promise of better tomorrows. Arianna Huffington wrote a blog about Beck's rally, in which she said: "What were thought by many to be the ingredients of the good life just a short time ago--a job, a home, a secure retirement, a college education for your kids, and prospects for a brighter future for them--are no longer attainable simply by hard work and playing by the rules. And it doesn't appear that this will change any time soon."

It seems like we will all need to collectively redefine what we mean by the good life in going forward. These are indeed heady days. Can we learn to navigate without the pole stars--and the bourgeois goal--of better times ahead which we have for so long set for ourselves?
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Sitting on the Fence

2010-08-22T14:58:00.006-05:00

I'm not just a fan, it's worse than that: i'm pretty much addicted to Charlie Rose. His program of masterful nightly conversations on TV--with everyone in the wide world who is, as the police like to put it, "a person of interest"--normally airs right across the midnight hour, a time when I am most definitely asleep, all being well. However, I do watch reruns from the night before at 5 o'clock on the following afternoon--that is, until they vanished quite suddenly this summer from their usual slot on the airwaves. I was distraught. Charlie Rose keeps me savvy and sane. Because of him, I always have a handle on whatever matters most, whether it is the latest state of the Middle East peace process, the cultural import of "Avatar," President Ahmadinejad's current antics, what the guys from Politico think about the Obama administration, the significance of the new iPad, the death of John Updike, or the government bailout of the auto industry. Whatever is going on, Charlie is on it, and I get educated.

With the help of a friend, I recently discovered that reruns were still being broadcast, but at a new, ungodly time: 6 a.m. Now, most mornings during the week, you can find me glued to the TV between the hours of 6 and 7. No one in their right mind watches TV at 6 a.m. But what's a besotted girl to do?

This past week Charlie had two incredible interviews, one with NBC newscaster Brian Williams, and another with Thad Allen, the administration's point man for the BP oil spill. To my astonishment in each case, I found myself thinking the same thought: I wish this guy was our president. Maybe the country would be rendered sane again, if somebody other than Obama was running it.

I just couldn't imagine either of these men being subject to the insane levels of disrespect and abuse that Obama is subject to, every single day. I've thought about this a lot. Why is he becoming ever more misunderstood and, yes, villified? Finding the answer to this has become, in a way, my private Zen koan. How much of the prejudice and confusion has been stoked by poisonous Republican lies and the disgusting misinformation campaign spread by the media, and how much has been triggered by Obama himself, through his own, sometimes odd, responses and behaviors in the public arena?

Last week Obama announced his support for the constitutional right of any American to practice their faith freely--including the construction of the "Ground Zero mosque" at the site of the old Burlington Coat factory store in lower Manhattan. The "mosque," it should be pointed out, is not actually a mosque, but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room upstairs. Nevertheless, intense feelings have been stirred up across the public and political spectrums, from hard-right Republican Newt Gingrich, who declared that building a "mosque" two blocks from Ground Zero would be like putting a swastika outside the Holocaust Museum, all the way to left-of-center Democrat Howard Dean. who considers the building of the mosque as "an affront," not to forget Rush Limbaugh, who now refers to the president as "Imam Obama." Obama, it must be said, only added to the spectacle of disarray when he backpedaled the following day, claiming, after his initial show of support, "i was not, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about." So, to be more precise, it's constitutionally legitimate to do it, but maybe, on second thought, it's not such a good idea.

For me, that was a revelatory moment. I finally understood how Obama speaks freely when in defense of the constitution, and the constitutional rights it bestows on all citizens, but he seems much more constrained when it is a matter of sharing his personal views. It's almost as if he believes his personal views don't really matter. The constitution matters, and upholding it. After many repeats of this approach, on issues like the rights of gays to serve openly in the military, or to get married, or even his view of the public option during the health-care debate, a pattern of contrived impartiality has finally emerged: in controversial matters, it would appear that Obama prefers sitting on the fence. That is why, I think, people constantly criticize him for not standing up for things--for not being clear about what he really believes, and thus, for not being a good leader.

However, as my friend Ray Kass cogently pointed out to me, when you sit on the fence, you tend to lose both sides--which is exactly what is now happening to Obama. Definition of a fence-sitter: a person who won't take sides in a controversy. One who takes a position of neutrality or indecision. Out of this confusion, Republicans make merry. One in five Americans now believes that Obama is a Muslim. And that he was born in Kenya. How can this be? "You can have an opinion on the New York mosque, for or against," as Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times last week. "But there aren't two sides to the question of whether Obama is a Muslim." Many people have a confused view of Muslims, she adds, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.

Ray says that Dems and liberals need to band together to beat the Republicans at their own game. They need to launch a counter-campaign of their own, gleefully spreading fear and disinformation about Republicans. I love the idea, for instance, of convincing 20 percent of the population that Mitch McConnell is really a closet Hindu. Or maybe a lesbian in drag. Or, dare I say it, a racist?

Please understand that I am not actually stating that the president is a fence-sitter, merely that it appears that way, in his understandable efforts to make himself less of a moving target. I believe that he does have strong convictions; but it also seems natural for him to acknowledge all sides of an issue, to give everyone an equal voice, and not to insist on only one opinion--his own--by coming down hard on one side or the other. Somehow, however, he has managed to miss the point here, which is that as the president, people expect and want to know what he thinks. Fence-sitting is ultimately working against him. Nobody much cares, for instance, what I think, except maybe a few friends. But then, I am not president of the United States--if I was, everyone would.

At this point, I think Obama needs to revisit the words of his mentor, Martin Luther King, Jr. when he spoke about his opposition to the Vietnam war and the role of moral leadership in times of controversy:

"I'm not a consensus leader... I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of my organization or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. On some positions a coward has asked the question is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right, and that is where I find myself today."

PersonaIly I believe Obama is quite capable of this. The question remains, however, as to when he will decide to get off the fence and just go for it. The crucial sentence here is that a real leader doesn't search for consensus; he molds it.

When It's Already Beyond Repair, You Wear it Broken

2010-08-13T07:11:00.007-05:00

Even as the deadly threat of oil Armageddon in the Gulf recedes, along with my own self-appointed role as its Anne Frank-style diarist, new nightmare scenarios arrive in rapid succession to take the spill's place: the hundred-mile chunk of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan, for instance, which has broken loose from the southeast side of the Petermann glacier in Greenland, that is now drifting across the Arctic Ocean. Should it collapse, it would raise global sea levels by a devastating twenty feet. Should it follow a certain trajectory, it could pose a serious threat to waters busy with shipping activities and off-shore oil rigs along the Newfoundland coast. The same waters in which, years ago, the Titanic was struck by an iceberg.

All in all, it has been the summer from hell, weather-wise, for many countries like Pakistan and China, who have been afflicted with the worst-ever floods in their history. As my local paper expressed it, the whole planet seems to be having a midsummer nervous breakdown. The worst-case scenarios, long predicted by climate-change scientists and environmental experts, are suddenly coming to pass and wreaking havoc. The Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization (WMO) compiled a list of some of these devastating weather-related events:

* The heaviest monsoon rains on record have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside in Pakistan, flooding thousands of villages, and leaving twenty million (the latest updated number) of Pakistanis homeless. There is now great concern that hunger and destitution, along with the destruction of roads and bridges, could spark political unrest on a scale that would destabilize the government and make the country even more vulnerable to a takeover by Islamic extremists allied with Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.

* Rains in northwest China have increased by up to thirty-three percent since 1961, and still more frequent flooding is predicted for this century. Similar increased precipitation is also predicted for the U.S.--except in the Southwest--with more extreme rainfalls causing flooding. As the wheels have fallen off of the world, however, the U.S. government remains the only major industrialized nation not to have legislated caps on carbon emissions.

Sometimes an artistic image can be more powerful than words. It must have been Virgil, my missing-in-action alligator muse, who prompted me to look for this painting by Vermeer on the Internet, after I'd read the following short poem in the New York Review of Books:

VERMEER

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn't earned
the world's end.

[by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from Polish]

What struck me immediately about the Vermeer painting--in contrast to our own era of traumatic disintegration and destruction--is its haunting embodiment of steadiness, containment, and stability. As the poles melt and the forests burn and crops wither and seas heave uncontrollably, we are now having to inhabit a world that, in Bill McKibben's words, is "an inhospitable place." And, we are having to contemplate, for the first time in human history, our own untimely demise in it.

The woman in this painting belonged to a world that was still a hospitable place. But during the several centuries that have passed since then, our propulsive drives toward growth and expansion, excess and destruction, greed and overreach, have destroyed the gentle balance between pitcher and bowl. Somehow we have allowed the waters to escape from their containers--and may well have succeeded, beyond our wildest imaginings, in earning the world's end for ourselves.

"When you return to something you love
it's already beyond repair.
You wear it broken."

[by James L. White, from a poem called "Lying in Sadness"]

Inspiration

2010-08-07T07:24:00.002-05:00

Perhaps I'm looking in al the wrong places, or just stranded in some indefinite shadow realm, but my life at this point seems very short on lightning strikes of insight, otherwise known as inspiration. Nothing I cross paths with seems to light up at my approach or to glow from my touch. Refreshing winds, filled with secret surprises, aren't blowing over the mountain of my heart. It's as if I am living in a space usually reserved for those exposed to holocaust, or to the death of a parent or lover or friend. However, as Robert Jay Lifton once pointed out in "The Life of the Self," such a space can also be inhabited by individuals who have permitted themselves to experience fully the "end of an era," personal or historical. God knows, I have a strong sense of that.

Even though my own front porch remains a safe haven, wherever else one looks there is so much suffering, misery, adversity. Seven million Pakistani lives destroyed by out-sized monsoon floods, with damage and despair everywhere. They can't even get in supplies of food and water. Yesterday on PBS, some of the unemployed in this country were interviewed, and believe me, it was tragic to watch. Their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits have now lapsed. There are no prospects for getting jobs and money has simply run out for many of these folks. How will they survive? They have been physically and emotionally and spiritually broken by the sickening prospect of a future that only promises not to be pretty. On the Gulf Coast, ever since the oil spill, many people have become ghosts in their own lives, wandering around in purgatory.

On the topic of wandering ghosts, I must also include our President, who has also taken to drifting around, from factory to warehouse, desperately trying to defend a stagnant economy without a single winning hand to play. Financial meltdown and personal train wreck have become America's new landscape. Still, you have to admire him for trying to hang something cheery on the wall, but more and more he looks like some wandering stick figure dressed in hospital pajamas.

In a crisis-ridden world, the Buddhists say, if you fall down seven times, you get up eight. But at what point is getting up, dusting off, and starting all over again no longer a realistic possibility? I understand, perhaps all too well, that "chagrin and dismay both siphon energy out of the mind," and so my lurching ambition these days has been to find a way to replace the sense of raw pessimism and devastating failure permeating our world with something more like propulsive inspiration, that will ripple through the larger environment. So far, however, as must be excruciatingly obvious, I am more like a fissure in a fatal crevasse, from which steam is escaping. Instead of climbing the mountain, I feel tied to its side like a flea.

The Birth of an Artist

2010-07-30T14:35:00.004-05:00

This week I read a short story in the New Yorker that I felt was perhaps the most amazing story I ever read. Since I would kill to write a story this good, I've decided to share it here by way of my own retelling. I only ever wrote a short story once, myself, about the time I bought a dog home from the pound after moving to my mountain retreat in Blacksburg. I fell in love with the dog, which I named Woogie, only to decide after three months that I lacked the necessary caretaking gene to keep it. This story, too, is about finding and then losing love. Called "La Vita Nuova" by Allegra Goodman, it can be found in the May 3rd issue of the News Yorker.

The day after Amanda's fiance ignominiously dumps her, declaring that he finds her a very dark person and feels suffocated by her, Amanda takes her vintage wedding dress to the Garden School in Cambridge where she teaches art, theater, puppets, storytelling, drumming, dance, and fabric painting to children. Carefully, she spreads the white satin gown on the floor for her students to decorate--an exercise which eventually leads to her teaching contract not being renewed. "Your personal life is not an appropriate art project for first grade," the principal tells her, letting her know that the school is moving in a different direction.

Amanda then gets a job baby-sitting Nathaniel, aged six. They spend their days going places together, and their daily outings become a form of hypnotic enchantment for the reader. They eat chocolate mice at Burdick's and then stand in front of the Harvard Coop, listening to Peruvian musicians. They explore the cemetery, where Amanda tells Nathaniel that the gravestones are dragons' teeth. They take the T train to Boston and stand in line for the swan boats in the Public Garden, which turn into real swans at night, according to Amanda. They watch Charlie Chaplin movies rented from Hollywood Express, while eating pizza and pop corn. They go canoeing on the Charles River and write a story book together about pirates. They have a conversation about donuts, and study the red ants of Buckingham Street, feeding them cake crumbs.

The only cloud over these ecstatic days is that Nathaniel's father has become sexually attracted to her and is surreptiously making unwanted overtures. Amanda finds him creepy. Meanwhile her family, especially her father, begins to wonder what she plans on doing with her life. After all, he says, "I paid for Yale."

One day, after a walk to Harvard Square to watch the street musicians, Amanda and Nathaniel share summer rolls and Thai iced tea, which Nathaniel thinks tastes like orange chalk. They end up in a store called Little Russia, where they discover lacquered babushka dolls, nested one inside the other in decreasing sizes. Inspired, Amanda orders a set of blank wooden dolls online and begins to paint them in acrylic, adding the necessary high gloss afterwards. At the beginning, the dolls represent different stages in the narrative of her life, but her repertoire then expands as she builds up a body of work. Eventually she imagines herself living in New York City, becoming an artist, and having shows.

Summer arrives, and Nathaniel is scheduled to go to the Cape with his father. Amanda declines the invitation to go with them, announcing instead that she has decided to move to New York. As a special present for Nathaniel, she has created a handmade map of all the places they had visited together, and the things they'd done there. Realizing he is losing Amanda, Nathaniel goes berserk with grief. He tears the map. No one can get him to stop sobbing. Amanda takes him in her arms and rocks him, saying quietly, "I know, I know."

A Month of Bad-Hair Days

2010-07-24T13:48:00.003-05:00

If ever a month seemed to have a hex on it, this was it for me. It all started when the space bar on my computer keyboard jammed. The Internet still functioned, but all typing, e-mail sending, and blogging ceased operations, until I could get new keyboard. I went to the VA Tech bookstore, but no luck. Try the branch on campus, the sales clerk suggested. I asked if he would telephone them first, to see if they had what I needed, or could order it. Somewhat haltingly, he pulled out a cell phone from his pocket.

Finally he got a human at the other end. It seemed that, yes, it could be ordered, but there wasn't one in stock. I asked to borrow the phone to complete the transaction. Meanwhile, the clerk whose phone I was using wandered off, and he didn't come back. Not wanting to just abandon the phone on the counter, I went looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found. I asked some girls on the other side of the store if they knew where he had gone.

"To the hospital," they said. "You're kidding," I said. "What's wrong with him?" "We have no idea," they answered. All of this happened within the frame of some five minutes. I handed over the cell phone, but was very rattled. Later that day, an email arrived from a neighbor I don't know who lives on my road, to alert people that her house had been broken into and robbed. A few other e-mails followed, with accounts from neighbors of a "dark-haired woman" who was knocking on doors, trying to sell an alarm system. The neighbors all described her as behaving oddly. I had a talk with the police, who were only mildly reassuring. The e-mails stopped coming, and after a day or two, things settled down again, but I was rattled.

Then, I turned on the computer only to find it was black. I thought it had suddenly died, until I noticed none of the lamps nor the radio in the same room were working either. An electrician had to be summoned. He solved the problem with a flick of a switch. Problem was, you had to know which switch to flick. A day or two of calm followed, until my cleaning lady announced that the basement carpet downstairs was wet. The heat pump man had to be summoned--as the air conditioning system had sprung a leak. O happy days. He soon fixed it. But after that, I had to find someone to come and vacuum up the water from the carpet. All this causing much anxiety and costing several hundreds of $.

None of this compares, I know, to the daily travails of the poor people living in the beleaguered Gulf. The gusher has been temporarily capped, so for the moment at least, the Nazi oil is being kept at bay. But a storm is on the way, and clean-up crews have had to stop working and evacuate the waters. Drilling of the relief well is on hold.

Meanwhile, Obama continues to labor on his St. Catherine's Wheel. Every piece of reform legislation the Democratic Congress manages to pass, causes his poll number to drop. Talk about Theater of the Absurd! Republicans have successfully demonized him as the devil incarnate who is destroying our country. Michelle Bachmann, one of his leading detractors, said recently, "I think all we should do [when Republicans take over the House in November] is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another and expose all the nonsense that has gone on." How are they getting away with this? It makes you scratch your head in disbelief, until you consider the statistic I discovered this week: only 40% of Americans have a college degree. Stupidity combined with political viciousness can make for a heady cocktail.

I hope your month has been better!

A Period of Calculated Waiting

2010-07-10T12:53:00.005-05:00

No two ways about it: we are definitely in a time now of what the I Ching calls a period of "calculated waiting." In my previous post I referred to the oil spill and the war in Afghanistan as "America's bleeding ulcers," but that description applies equally to the state of the economy, which is precariously poised for collapse like a house of cards--unless by some miracle it doesn't. (Just as an aside, it remains shocking to me that, in every parsing of the economic statistics for growth, unemployment, and jobs creation that is offered by pundits and the president alike, not one single person ever mentions the horrendous economic impact presented by the oil spill, which has the potential, after all, to totally derail whatever measly economic gains have been accrued so far.)

Maybe it's because everyone but me is in thrall to the philosophy that "success starts with positive thoughts," I don't know. Only time will tell how these various scenarios play themselves out in the end. Personally, I confront them all with a mind infused with a dread of what's to come--which is, of course, exactly what the I Ching advises should NOT be done during a necessary period of calculated waiting. It was for this reason that I was prompted, when the spill first happened, to read Anne Frank's Diary, which I had never read, I thought I needed some serious mentoring in how to live with dread. I wanted to see how a 13-year-old girl managed to survive being stalked by death, and to deal with her fear of the Nazis, who might, as she put it, come at any time "in the middle of the night to take us away,"

Anne Frank was only 12 years old when her family first went into hiding in 1941, in the upstairs annex at the back of an office building in Amsterdam. The family of four imprisoned themselves, eventually to be joined by four others, and remained hidden there for two years, until the morning of August 4, 1944 when the SS and members of the Security Police (who had probably been tipped off) showed up at the door and arrested them all. The beleaguered Anne ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where she died, probably of typhus, in an epidemic that had broken out in the camp, shortly before it was liberated by Bristish troops on April 12, 1945. The others had been shipped to different camps, and the only survivor was Anne's father, Otto, who, after his release, spent the next 30 years disseminating the publication of his daughter's journal.

I must say that I was totally unprepared for the majesty of Anne Frank's writing skills, the stunning maturity of her emotions, and the wisdom and courage with which she confronted her destiny. I still cannot get over how extraordinary this book is. If you only read it once when you were 12 years old in school, I cannot recommend it highly enough as an object lesson for our own terrible times--in which many people, for the first time, are unexpectedly and seriously frightened of the future. I can only imagine, for instance, through Anne Frank's eyes, what some people living on the Gulf coast must be feeling right now as they wait for the oil to invade and further upend their lives. In what follows, I want to share some of the most poignant passages from her book. They are more than worth the time it will take to read them, I promise. From Anne Frank's Diary:

"Our only diversions are reading, studying, and listening to the radio...Yesterday was my unlucky day. I pricked my right thumb with the blunt end of a big needle. As a result Margot [Anne's younger sister] had to peel potatoes for me. And writing was awkward. Then I bumped into the cupboard door so hard it nearly knocked me over, and was scolded for making such a racket. They wouldn't let me run water to bathe my forehead so now I'm walking around with a giant lump over my right eye. To make matters worse, the little toe on my right foot got stuck in the vacuum cleaner...Relationships here in the Annex are getting worse all the time.

"We don't dare open our mouths at mealtime...because no matter what we say, someone is bound to resent it or take it the wrong way...I've been taking valerian every day to fight the anxiety and depression, but it doesn't stop me from being even more miserable the next day. A good hearty laugh would help more than ten valerian drops, but we've almost forgotten how to laugh...All the bickering, tears, and nervous tension have become such a stress and strain that I fall into my bed at night crying and thanking my lucky stars that I have half an hour to myself...My nerves often get the better of me, especially on Sundays; that's when I really feel miserable. The atmosphere is stifling, sluggish, leaden. Outside, you don't hear a single bird, and a deathly, oppressive silence hangs over the house and clings to me as if it were going to drag me into the deepest regions of the underworld.

"Everyone is subject to moods and fearfulness...The war is going to go on despite our quarrels and our longing for freedom and fresh air, so we should try to make the best of our stay here...I'm preaching, but I also believe that if I live here much longer, I'll turn into a dried-up old beanstalk. And all I really want is to be an honest-to-goodness teenager!

"Just imagine how interesting iit would be if I were to publish a novel about the Secret Annex...ten years after the war people would find it very amusing to read how we lived, what we ate, and what we talked about in hiding...When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But...will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?,,,I know what I want, I have a goal, I have opinions, a religion and love. If only I can be myself, I'll be satisfied. I know that I'm a woman, a woman with inner strength and a great deal of courage! If God lets me live, I'll go out into the world and work for mankind! I know that courage and happiness are needed first!

"Vegetables are still very hard to come by. This afternoon we had rotten boiled lettuce. Ordinary lettuce, spinach and boiled lettuce, that's all there is. Add to that rotten potatoes, and you have a meal fit for a king!...I've asked myself again and again whether it wouldn't have been better if we hadn't gone into hiding, if we were dead now and didn't have to go through this misery, especially so that the others could be spared the burden [refers to the small band of helpers who brought them provisions in secret so they could stay alive]. But we all shrink from this thought. We still love life...and we keep hoping, hoping for...everything. Let something happen soon, even an air raid. Nothing can be more crushing than this anxiety. Let the end come, however, cruel; at least then we'll know whether we are to be the victors or the vanquished."

And so, in our own lingering, unfinished stories of calculated waiting--the oil spill, an unwinnable war, the threat of financial collapse--we, too, are haunted by precisely the same question: are we to be the victors or the vanquished? Will we succeed in overcoming these formidable obtacles or will they destroy us? Right now all we do know is that we are having to live under a cloud of sickening uncertainty.

The Salty Smell Has Disappeared

2010-07-02T13:41:00.002-05:00

I've been noticing how, when visceral realization of the full scope of the oil-spill disaster finally strikes among my friends, it arrives, not in slow, incremental thrusts but as a full-spectrum nuclear blast on the entire nervous system. And one becomes like a turtle thrown on its back, helplessly pawing the air. It happened this week to my friend Elizabeth Indianos, the one person I know who actually lives in the Gulf, in a small, spectacularly lovely, fishing town called Tarpon Springs, an hour away from Tampa.

I've been waiting for months for the spill to really impact her, worried to death, but Liz has ben sublimely preoccupied, indeed all but consumed, by a public art commission she's been working on for weeks and weeks: the construction of a giant Sundial she designed for the Northwest Florida State College campus in Niceville, FLA. It has meant long hours of work, and commuting back and forth to another town every day. As a result, our phone calls have flagged.

At one point I had meekly asked her, "Liz, things are really gonna get bad. Do you have a Plan B?" She replied that she'd been too busy to really think about it, or even watch the news. She seemed happy inside her bubble. Besides, Florida was still okay. I could tell she just wasn't "there" yet, and I had already determined it was not my place to blow up her world. It would happen in its own way and in its own time. Let her have peace for as long as possible. She is, after all, one of the smartest-in-the-world people I know, so I was all too aware that, once she really confronted this head-on, it would be absolutely devastating for her. No point in rushing the awful process.

This week, however, it happened. The art project finally done, Liz went to the Alabama coast for a little holiday with her husband, to visit his parents who have a house with a direct view of the beach. Just as I knew she would be, my poor darling friend, whom I dearly love, suddenly looked the Medusa in the face, and has gone belly up with the sheer horror of what she has seen. Here, in her own words, is what she writes about her experience there:

Elizabeth Indianos – 6/30/2010- Writing from Gulf zero- on the porch balcony of a lovely beach house overlooking Gulf Shores, Alabama -- and the worst nightmare. I'm freaking out around the clock, off center like a listing ship. It's hard to witness this up close and personally. I’m just another mortally wounded, oil coated, squawking bird, hopelessly ducking into my room when I tear up, blasting off a torpedo of poetry between sobs. I don't know what else to do while my world self-destructs.

It's all too much.
Have to snap out of it.
Can't just hide in my room.
Going to wipe my face and go out.
Pretend. Drink margueritas with the family and hope I don' t implode.
It’s tough being an artist canary.
I down my margeurita, spiff up with my lipstick, dab some erase under my eyes.
I don't have my usual coping skills. I'm not tip-top.

Alone, I go out on the toxic dunes, interview the workers, and shake hands. What do they think? Most are young, healthy, strong workingmen and women, adhering to a militaristic protocol and cleanup regime. It has to be that way. There’s a lot to consider.

They are happy to see me; a person from the outside who asks how they’re doing and what they’re doing. No one joins me. I gather that it’s not that civilians don’t care, but I keep hearing derisive comments about workers being lazy, doing things stupidly, happy to make money on this cleanup. Everywhere, there is misplaced, political blame-calling and scape-goating. The cleanup crews are on par with the poisonous, garbage rolling up to their feet.

Young man Aaron wears gadgets that monitor the air, sun and humidity. He’s in charge of checking his workers at regular intervals, making sure for health reasons that they stop, hydrate and comply with Osha and other regulations. Though the crews wear special boots, gloves, hats and suits, Aaron is nervous. Arsenic and toxins are in the water I had my toes in earlier. Fumes are in the air. He nods towards the Gulf and says, “ Don’t go in there. I’m worried about the effect this is going to have on my workers. Everyone on the Alaskan spill came down with cancer.” When I ask, he explains some of their clean-up methods. All along the shore are balls that look like grassy, college football pompoms put into the water to soak up oil. Long booms resembling cotton tubes soak up oil when it hits the shore. Both methods are changed out 3 and 4 times a day, like huge Band-Aids absorbing blood at the aortal artery. He agrees with me that the task is daunting. Neither of us say hopeless but we think it. Aaron describes finding a big, black, tar rectangle at low tide…He thought it was a car. He tells me he told officials that cosmetically plowing the beach, tilling the oil under the sand at the end of each day with bulldozers is not an answer, but rather a problem. No one will listen.

Another worker, Lucas, says that the boats peppering the horizon do a good job, endlessly sucking, absorbing and corralling oil with rotating skimmers. The boats move and change their locations following where the oil plumes go. Sensing that they could talk to me for hours, I thank them for their hard work and leave, carefully dodging tiny, dime sized tar balls as I trudge up the dunes to hang with the family watching me from the two-story veranda.

We cook a big dinner; carnitas with slow roasted pork, salsa, and blueberry cobbler, our Margaritaville Eucharist. Everyone keeps drinking. We are in lock down, embedded in a Jimmy Buffet song where he sings- "There's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that the world is coming to an end. The good news is that there's gonna be a party- SO DON"T BE LATE!"

Immersed in our desperate reverie, conditions worsen by the minute. Elongated, chocolate ribbons stripe the water and move in, rolling closer into shore. Clean up crews are gathering. I sense panic and run down the dunes to hear, “This is what we’ve been waiting for!” The crews kick in and fight the noxious, endless sludge into the night; soaking up oil, dispensing it in bags, removing it against a backdrop of hovering coastguard boats. How can it ever stop? Will it ever stop? It stings our eyes and through a blur of tears I remember the last line of the Great Gatsby – “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I’m devastated all night. My son-in-law attorney in NY lets me know that his uncle in Florida thinks the government is covering up the toxic effects and that the entire state of Florida is going to be evacuated. My friend and creative collaborator Mike, a composer and GREEN activist nails the irony in an email:

“It’s a fucking nightmare…Almost 3 months and it’s just like they said it would be, still spewing our precious, liquefied dinosaur bones into the water. Isn’t it totally absurd, by the way, that we power our our cars from the bones of T-rex? ”

Last night on the news, Liz reports, they said that fines up to $40,000 would be given if pics are taken. Too bad. I took mine before the warning so the hell with them.

Liz's POEM:

Gulf Tears- June, 27th 2010- Elizabeth Indianos

Family vacation.

Brown rivulets surround

my feet in the water.

Strange bubbles

Sting my feet.

I have toxic toes now

on a spongy chemical sand.

No salty smell, where is the nectar,

the fish?

Only, sharks, those oily buzzards,

come in to eat the dead ones.

I spot a brave sandcastle

breaking out like beach graffiti.

Defiantly, I eat with the locals,

shrimp and oysters twice today

and shake hands with those doomed miners;

crews in makeshift work camps,

who bulldoze and patrol shores

-intent on cosmetic cleanup.

A full moon sparkles white velvet on waves

but, the night has company.

A hive of boats twinkle like stars,

working overtime, to

clean up the horizon.

Is this real Science Fiction?

I’m standing at the wake of

my Mother Ocean,

Detached.

Distant.

Removed, looking into the casket,

determined not to love her anymore,

because she’s gone.

I haven’t cried yet and

try to take pictures,

but even my camera shuts down.

It can’t bare witness either.

I’m a sorry daughter, wishing she had done more

while her parent was alive.

I should have loved you better.

You’ve known me all my life.

Finally, with this oil and ocean,

the body and blood of my hemorrhaging planet,

chemically camouflaged to disperse its salty tears,

I cry a requiem.

America's Bleeding Ulcers

2010-06-26T07:10:00.002-05:00

That's how Stanley McChrystal described the aftermath of his recent campaign in Marjah: a "bleeding ulcer." Even the General himself does not count Marjah as a win for our side. So our country now has two open sores, both potentially lethal, to contend with: the war in Afghanistan, which after ten years of bleeding men and resources, we are STILL losing, and the oil spill, which continues to make its suffocating assault on the Gulf.

This week, however, the story of the wrenching separation of Stan McChyrstal from his job as commander-in-chief of the war in Afghanistan managed to temporarily upstage the news from the hemorrhaging Gulf. The question on everybody's mind was, what on earth prompted McChyrstal, who is no dummy and certainly knows the unbending rules of military protocol, to diss his civilian counterparts in Washington and to allow his aides to make mocking comments about them to a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine? Didn't he realize that the sarcastic little caper might just cost him his job? Well, it seems that McChrystal and his aides and the reporter were all stranded for a week in Paris because of volcanic ash, and they ended up carousing together, while waiting for a plane to get them to Berlin, en route back to Afghanistan. Paris is not exactly a beloved haven for military jocks. And make no mistake, unlike David Petraeus, McChrystal IS a jock. Petraeus, by contrast, is much more politically refined and savvy. Both are good at what they do.

So, was this a deliberate and calculated insubordination by McChrystal and his gang, or was it merely (as David Brooks suggested in one of his recent columns), the sort of barracks-style "kvetching" that soldiers routinely engage in, admittedly usualy below anyone else's radar? Brooks feels that we just lost a good man because of our "culture of exposure," which has become more obsessed with inner soap operas than with job performance. The media circus has compromised our privacy, he claims, chased good people from public life, and most of all, it has elevated the trivial over the important.

Is that the simple explanation for what happened? if McChrystal is right about Afghanistan really being a bleeding ulcer, then perhaps he did not want to be officer-in-chief of a doomed enterprise. This was always supposed to be "our last. best shot," according to Obama, when he sent McChrystal in to take charge of the COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy, and so far at least, it isn't working. You may have noticed, if you follow these things, that the big summer offensive in Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, has been "postponed" until Fall. We'll have to see if it happens then, or not.

Generals don't like to lose wars. It is not far-fetched to think that perhaps at some level. McChrystal wanted to be relieved of responsibility, so as not to be blamed for the inevitable defeat. I've always thought he seemed like a neat guy, so I'm sorry to see him go--though obviously, we should all be going along with him. Maybe he can take up knitting for a while--nothing permanent, you understand.

As for the other, ever-advancing, bleeding ulcer in the Gulf, on June 25th the US government doubled its official estimate of the amount of oil spewing to 2.5 million gallons/day, or the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez spill every four days. Five thousand feet beneath the surface of sea a bizarre scenario continues to play out. Fourteen submersible robots work day and night to help contain the leak. The video cameras of the gushing hole are attached to them. They are pilot-operated by men in special recliners sitting on land and using eleven monitors, DVD video recorders, a sonar screen, and joysticks they can move around. The robots help to hook up fluid connectiors, hoses and plumbing, install new oil recovery systems, and build the relief wells. All fodder for the next James Cameron film or video game producer. The robots also collect data and monitor the scene, but they cannot work in hurricanes. According to a super user on Huffington Post, once the borehole collapses--which every expert says is what is actually happening--it won't matter how many robots you have or whether relief wells are drilled or not.

On a more jolly note, I went to see The Karate Kid last week. It's really good, and the scenes in the middle of the movie where Jackie Chan takes the kid to a Buddhist temple high up on a mountain in China are truly extraordinary. As a former tai chi practitioner (for ten years, I was mesmerized by the woman standing in one-legged crane pose on the claw of a stone dragon located at the edge of a cliff--while simultaneously hyponotizing a live cobra. Any mistake or startle, and she would either be bitten by the cobra, or fall a million miles down the mountain. That scene alone was worth the whole movie. It should become the inspirational logo for our terrible times.

My friend Bill Rutherfoord writes in response: "Well, I think it's clear that neither Obama nor anyone else can convincingly pretend the damage in the Gulf region is reversible, and I agree with you that ...in the near term I expect to see conditions dramatically worsen, and like it or not, for some, crane pose on a precipice may be the best available prescription for concentrating the mind in our present eco-apocalyptic game of Stare Down the Cobra."

Artists Boycott BP Support of Tate Gallery in UK

2010-06-24T15:14:00.009-05:00

I've been asked by my friend in England, James Marriott of PLATFORM, a collaborative Arts Organization that has worked for many years on projects to stop harmful extraction practices by BP and Shell Oil in the Niger Delta and the Canadian tar sands, to inform my artist friends and blog followers of their current protest action. It is directed towards halting cultural institutions like the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery from accepting corporate support from these companies in the future. If you are interested in participating, you can check out their website info@platformlondon.org for more info. PLATFORM will be publishing a letter in The Guardian, which you are invited by James to sign. If you would like to sign on to this letter, to be published on June 28th, please email Kevin@platformlondon.org.

PLATFORM action
END BP'S SPONSORSHIP OF THE TATE

Dear Suzi,

Next Monday, the Tate will celebrate 20 years of BP sponsorship at an exclusive summer party, The Guardian reports today. BP executives will enjoy cocktails with curators and artists at the Tate Britain, even as crude oil continues to wreak havoc on the Gulf of Mexico.

Today, Platform launches ‘licence to spill’, a new publication that explains why we think cultural sponsorship by oil companies like BP and Shell is unacceptable.

Faced with the devastating impacts of oil extraction on rights, the environment and climate change, the Tate and other major cultural players are turning a blind eye.

TAKE ACTION:
This summer, the Tate has the chance to re-consider their deal with BP – details of which have been kept a secret. Public scrutiny and pressure will be a decisive factor in their decisions. You can email your opposition to BP's sponsorship of the Tate to:

Nicholas Serota (Head of Tate) nicholas.serota@tate.org.uk
Penelope Curtis (Head of Tate Britain) penelope.curtis@tate.org.uk
Judith Nesbitt (Chief Curator at Tate Britain) judith.nesbitt@tate.org.uk
Rebecca Williams (Head of Department - Tate) rebecca.williams@tate.org.uk

Please copy in info@platformlondon.org on any correspondence.

How to Make an Orange Alligator Smile

2010-06-15T20:14:00.006-05:00

A few things nudged my ailing, embattled, Gulf-oil-syndrome soul towards good cheer this past week. One was hearing my favorite song in the world on a homemade CD that John, visiting me on Sunday from Boone, brought with him as a present: For some reason, the lyrics and melody of "Lady in Red" light up my heart like no other--and I had not heard it in a very long time. Now I own it, and could easily play it for you right now, if you were here. [Illustration: "Lady in Red," painting by VJ Helm]

The second bright moment was seeing the new film "Babies," directed by Chris de Burgh. For immediate raising up from the dead, I recommend this hilarious movie. Enjoy the African baby, Ponijao from Namibia, who happily drinks from a mud puddle, while Hattie, the baby from San Francisco, participates in her mother's yoga class, and the Mongolian baby, Bayarjargal, drags his prone but patient cat on a string across the floor of the family yurt. The film follows four babies around the world from their birth through their first year. There is no dialogue, but it's an opportunity for unremitting laughter, and I frequently howled. This was a welcome change from weeping.

Then came my chance discovery during the week of a poem in the New Yorker, which spoke directly to my emotional state when I found it:

A MAXIM

To live each day as if it might be the last
Is an injunction that Marcus Aurelius
Inscribes in his journal to remind himself
That he, too, however privileged, is mortal,
That whatever bounty is destined to reach him
Has reach him already, many times.
But if you take his maxim too literally
And devote your mornings to tinkering with your will,
Your afternoons and evenings to saying farewell
To friends and family, you'll come to regret it.
Soon your lawyer won't fit you into his schedule.
Soon your dear ones will hide in a closet
When they hear your heavy step on the porch.
And then your house will slide into disrepair.
If this is my last day, you'll say to yourself,
Why waste time sealing drafts in the window frames
Or cleaning gutters or patching the driveway?
If you don't want your heirs to curse the day
You first opened Marcus's journals,
Take him simply to mean you should find an hour
Each day to pay a debt or forgive one,
Or write a letter of thanks or apology.
No shame in leaving behind some evidence
You were hoping to live beyond the moment.
No shame in a ticket to a concert seven months off,
Or, better yet, two tickets, as if you were hoping
To meet by then someone who would love to join you,
Two seats near the front so you can catch each note.
--By Carl Dennis

In my local paper, an essay by a writer, Linda Hopkins, who lives in the Appalachian mountains of Stuart, VA, expresses exactly what I am feeling:

"...I wake up to this darkness every day--I feel it coming closer and closer...as though the oil were flowing into my back yard. There are times it overpowers all my thoughts...Now when I look at any unsullied seashore, I see those grim images [in the news] and can no longer view it without a vision of the oil hell of the Gulf of Mexico...People tell me to turn away from the news when I tell them how it upsets me. But I must watch, I am part of this tragedy being played out. Because I drive a car, use gas and oil in myriad ways. I have been complicit in the making of this undersea monster. To look away would be the act of a coward."

It's hard to look, and very hard not to look. Meanwhile today, U.S. scientists have significantly boosted their estimate of how much oil is leaking into the Gulf. I just listened to President Obama's crisis speech delivered at 8pm from the Oval office. It lasted exactly twenty minutes. Not one word said about plugging the well or stopping the spill. They were the words of a man who still has not yet looked the Medusa in the face. It's as if. after your favorite Grandma has died, the doc were to try to reassure you by saying, "We are doing everything we can to bring her back from the dead, and we won't stop until we succeed."
Would you believe him?

The Orange Alligator and the Black Tide: Day Fifty

2010-06-10T06:49:00.005-05:00

A fisherman from Louisiana breaks down and weeps on TV, as he tries to talk about the devastation in the Gulf. BP's Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles repeatedly insists that no massive underwater oil plumes in "large concentrations" have been detected. But a report on Greenwire states that researchers aboard the F.G. Walton Smith vessel on a two-week cruise traced an underwater oil plume 15 miles wide, 3 miles long and about 600 feet thick. The plume's core is 1,100 to 1,300 meters below the surface, they said.

A professor of English at a college in W. Va., just back from a trip to visit his daughter, who is a student of Marine Hydrography at the University of Southern Mississippi, writes an essay about his visit there, published in my local paper. He begins his article with this paragraph: "In one climactic scene in the disaster film "2012," thousands stand numb, disbelieving and helpless in a collective embrace, as a giant, crushing tsunami approaches. On a visceral level, that's the impression I have of the northern Gulf Coast region." Talking later with a group of researchers from USM, he finds all of their comments to be remarkably consistent: once the oil hits the unprotected and vulnerable marshes, bayous, and estuaries, the obliteration of the eco-systems will be irreversible.

In a neighboring column on the same page, that oft-ridiculous syndicated columnist and right-winger, Cal Thomas, produces yet another rant declaring that the evidence for the "myth of global warming," or climate change, is "sinking with a greater force than melting icebergs, if they were melting, which many believe they are not." Thomas considers the idea of human activity warming the planet has never had a real consensus anyway. To quote his precise opinion on the matter: "Most of us may not have gotten an 'A' in science, but we can sense when we are being bamboozled." For this unadulterated claptrap, Thomas actually receives a salary.

Meanwhile, as I catch momentary glimpses of the underwater BP videocam on TV, it is obvious to me that the flow of oil has doubled since a twisted riser was cut off last week to provide better access to the pipe. It becomes harder and harder to comprehend what conditions will be like by the end of the summer.

The photo shown above is of an AP photographer journalist, Rick Matthews, as he jumps into the Gulf for a few minutes some forty miles off-shore, in order to take photos. Within five seconds he was unable to see anything. "The only thing I see is oil," he reported. "The oil is so thick and sticky almost like cake batter. It does not wipe off...I think to myself: no fish, no bird, no turtle would ever be able to clean this off themselves."

Think of this as an oil tsunami, in slow motion. that seems to be dividing the world up between people who are feeling like they've been blowtorched, and people who are going about their business as usual and still enjoying life.

"I've been reading your blog." writes an artist friend in New York, Angela Manno. "I completely resonate with your fears and woes, however I am incapable of putting a lid on it. It seems everyone I speak to is pissed off, frightened and aware of the severity of the situation. And if not, they are willing to listen. I suppose I'm lucky in this regard. But then, I'm living in NYC and hang out with Quakers. I'm sure this will change when I go to Colorado in another month. They live in a bubble and don't want it to burst. They are a lot happier, though. . . "

Her email continues: "I spent the afternoon yesterday writing about the hemorrhage in the Gulf and crying to the point where I had to do something to take the edge off -- I had no pain killers in the apartment so I went out for a drink. What's more, I too wrote a review of Bill McKibbin's Eaarth, for the Quaker environmental Journal, "Befriending Creation," that I write for on occasion. There's some kind of alchemy that has gone on between reading it, the gusher in the Gulf and my psyche. I feel the need to do something and at the same time feel helpless. I thought about going down to help and then thought of the toxic situation and what will happen when a hurricane brings all that poison inland and destroys people's drinking water and turns everything black...I have so much to say about this. I am trying to create a blog and to submit my thoughts to other venues. I don't know how it can help, but perhaps it will help this headache."

I'm more than willing to share my blog, if it is useful to folks like Angela.

"One thing [more] I'd like to comment on," Angela writes, "is the discussion of 2012 and how this event relates: We know everything in nature has a function -- we breathe out CO2 and plants breathe it in. One creature's waste is another's food. What is the function of the oil reserves where they are, undisturbed? Amazingly, no ecologist can say. To my mind, the enormous pressure these veins of oil are under might maintain a kind of balance with all the mass (and all its pressure) that is above them. Empty them out and could we be looking at a massive collapse of the land masses? Did that sink hole in Ecuador have anything to do with the Deepwater Horizon incident?"

"The Hopi," she goes on, "have prophesied that as we near the Day of Purification, 'You will hear of the sea turning black, and many living things dying because of it.' Can there be any doubt that this is what sensitive people feel deep in their guts, that we are approaching the time when a critical mass of offenses against the Earth will manifest and, in an instant. wipe us off the planet?...Perhaps the most disturbing thing that I read in Eaarth was getting clear about the missed opportunity we had 40 years ago to pre-empt what has befallen this beautiful Earth. That the Club of Rome and E.F. Schumacher and Carter and the majority of Americans agreed with limiting growth. And then the Powell Memo changed it all. And the lies kept on coming and they have changed policy and Congress and public opinion and the courts and the schools and the media and our very synaptic connections. Right up to the present where Larry Summers, Obama’s chief economic advisor can state: 'There are no limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn’t a risk of apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.' "

So that's who's running the show, according to Angela. And that's why we cower in an attic waiting, waiting. "I suppose I should find the right fiddle. Or become a combatant in what Quakers call 'the Lamb's War.' ”

It seems that the border between normality and hysteresis is invisible until you find yourself on the wrong side of it.

A New Virgil Arrives on a Beam of Venusian Light

2010-06-04T06:24:00.003-05:00

It is now six weeks since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The combined "top kill" and "junk shot" operations have both officially failed, and BP itself seems about to go down as well. Who will pay for and carry on the clean-up if that happens? The U.S. Justice Department has announced the launch of a criminal investigation into the cause(s) if the spill, having discovered that BP alone is responsible for 97% of safety violations in the industry. (Exxon for instance, has only one.) BP has now lost $75 billion in market value, and oil has begun to reach the shores of Mississippi and Alabama, and is currently edging into the Florida Panhandle. The nightmare continues.

I had another flash-fractal moment on Saturday night as I was dining out in a Japanese restaurant with my friends Roger and his lady, Barbara. Roger is an extremely jolly, convivial member of my salon, who loves to eat and drink and laugh. He proceeded to order two "Blue Lagoon" cocktails in a row. They were very blue, and I could not stop my mind from musing that this had to be the most ironic drink of the century--soon to be the only blue lagoon (nicely decorated in this case with slices of green lime and orange) left to us after everything else has been permeated with oil.

"Cut and Cap," the latest strategy to saw off a portion of the leaking pipe, install a new cap, and then pump some of the oil onto a ship, has run into a glitch: the diamond-edged saw being used for the sawing got stuck in the pipe. A pair of giant shears have been comandeered to replace it. "There may be trouble ahead," as Fred Astaire sang to Ginger Rogers during the 1930s Depression, so "let's face the music and dance." My job, it seems, is to lighten up. If this weren't so menacing, so appallingly tragic, it would make for some wonderful slapstick comedy, with BP playing Charlie Chaplin's part, or maybe the Marx Brothers.

Saturday also brought the arrival by post of a newly published book by my old friend, Stephanie Mills, an environmental writer: "On Gandhi's Path: Bob Swann's Work for Peace and Community Economics." It was accompanied by a 3-page letter. Stephanie, it seems, is as distressed by the dramaturgy of the Gulf as I am. "Today," she wrote, "in anticipation of writing you, I caught up with Virgil a little bit, and much appreciated your weighing the pros and cons of disregarding the awful news. Little Miss Eco-Bummer here hasn't been winning any popularity contests with talk of the Gulf oil spill...Indeed I kind of threw myself out of a tea party this afternoon when my girlfriends kept trying to forestall my lamentations...with encomia about how shifting focus and positive attitudes worked wonders for their bad moods. I should quit trying to inflict my dire prognosis on innocent supper companions and let them get on with enjoying their lives. Even though I'm drawn to the worst news like a moth to a flame, it is not a kindness--nor even constructive--to pass it along." It was great to reconnect and resonate with an old friend and colleague who is as distressed as I am.

On Sunday, my friend Jane arrived for a visit with her son. Emerson, bringing with her a gift of the most take-one's-breath-away, stylish, cute, kissable, resplendent alligator addition to the Virgil family (see photo above). Readers will be familiar with my reliance on synchronicity as a trigger for what I need to write about next. Its spectacular contrast to Orange Alligator-- burning out his circuits over the oil spill's cascading effects now permanently disturbing the relations between earth, water, plants, animals, and people--heralded the need for a change of mood. I understood the theme of needing to lighten up even before I found myself inexplicably reading an essay by Lucien Steil (in American Arts Quarterly) about the metaphysical archeology of LIGHTHOUSES.

According to this stunning writer, lighthouses can be seen as potential guardian angels watching over the coordination of the poles and nodes of the world. Lighthouses are markers of resistance and faith against the forces of darkness and dissolution, vitaI lamps of beauty, reason, harmony, wisdom, strength, safeguarding us in a world of dangerous chaos. While civilization is being critically threatened, Steil proposes, lighthouses can inspire us to encompass beauty and harmony in our actions and our works.

As "axis mundi," a monumental magic candle stretching between the volcanic fires of earth and the incandescent light of the sky, lighthouses serve in balancing and controlling the integrity and constancy of telluric fields and geodesic centers of land, sea, and sky. Steil even likens them to compassionate hermits who, by the power of their prayers and thoughts, attract beauty and love and are expressive of cosmic coordination.

"Their express purpose is to carry light in the most remarkable and visible manner, so that even distant ships can be warned or guided. Even through the darkest nights, through the most opaque and starless universe, heavy storms and fogs, the lighthouse's warm and familiar signals can be perceived," the author writes.

Something about this essay seems to conjure an atmosphere of the world as a benevolent place--offering the lighthouse as a symbol of sanctuary and shelter against the deep malaise that is now threatening our collective well-being. While it's signal light is both warning and distress call, it also marks a place of refuge, safety, and sanctuary. Perhaps in dark times what all this means is that we must somehow find our inner lighthouse.

The Orange Alligator (5)

2010-05-28T06:58:00.003-05:00

My dear hairdresser, Marsha, is headed for a cruise in the Bahamas. She had luscious streaks of pink layered into to her auburn-hennaed hair. She smiled when I complimented her. I have to be careful in swimming pools, she said. The dye can leak into the water and make pink streaks.

Fractal flash: a sort of "Perils of Pauline" theme-and-variation of the psychedelic orange-brown sludge now swirling across a hundred miles of the Louisiana coastline. A couple of days ago, NBC news commentator Brian Williams--yes, the gorgeous Brian, never an alarmist--declared that there is enough oil in this particular reserve to continue gushing throughout our lifetimes. A chilling thought. Sludge now penetrating the marshes is coating everything. Pelicans in Barataria Bay are hobbling around unable to fly. Six months ago, these pelicans had been taken off the endangered species list.

Right now all eyes are glued on operation "Top Kill," in which specially prepared mud is being force-fed into the well to push back on the oil. It can succeed only if the strong pressure of the oil spewing out of the opening can be overwhelmed by an even greater counter-pressure of mud that is being pushed in to clog up the pipe--without busting the broken pipe any more, which of course would make everything much worse. Then the opening must be capped with cement. The technique has been used on land as a plugging technique, but never tried miles beneath the sea.

Twice in the same day this week I got the I Ching hecagram of Calculated Waiting (5). "You may be facing some kind of threat...that could greatly affect you. If you worry about it...you will waste valuable energy through agitation. Do not become agitated by your sense of an impending problem...Destiny is at work here, so nourish one another with cheerfulness and reassurance instead."

It's easier said than done. I want to inhabit this reassuring and cheerful place, but the truth is, a lot of the time I'm freaked. My state is closer to the Two of Swords Tarot card I just pulled a few minutes ago: "Fear and uncertainty about the future add to the sensation of imbalance and insecurity. Blocked emotions are causing you to feel tense and out of sorts."

How long can the "clean-up" work go on, especially with the oil overwhelming the water non-stop? Unrefined crude oil, it turns out, contains high levels of lead, benzene, mercury, and cadmium, all highly toxic substances. Toxic fumes will soon spread for hundreds of miles and make people sick, which has already started to happen. Ultimately nobody will be able to live or work near this. The whole Gulf coast could soon become a dead zone if the oil can't be contained soon. "Did they manage to plug up the hole yet, daddy?" Malia asked her father this morning, while he was in the bathroom shaving.

BP had been warned about the risks of deep-water drilling in the Gulf, in a May 2000 environmental analysis, according to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. The report advised that "a deep-water blowout of this magnitude in the US Gulf of Mexico could easily turn out to be a potential show stopper." It seems, however, that the Department of Minerals Management Service (MMS) removed those caveats in the final report, just as they also deemed a remote-controlled shut-off switch an unnecessary expense for drilling companies several years ago.

They knew the risks, and they ignored them. Out there in the oil-free blogosphere, some people are calling for freezing the assets and jailing some of the top corporate officials involved in the spill. One reader suggested that BP execs should be forced to assist in the clean-up without safety protection (along with the fisherman) and to live on the Louisiana coast for the duration of the clean-up.

Meanwhile, BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, told reporters after walking along the oil-soaked Fourchon Beach that he had underestimated the possible environmental effects. "I'm as devastated as you are by what I've seen here today," he said. "We are going to do everything in our power to prevent any more oil from coming ashore, and we will clean every last drop up and we will remediate all of the environmental damage." Sounds like a plan.

"We used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, or mother earth getting older, living and dying," Martin Amis wrote in "London Fields." "We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact."

"As you know, Suzi," my friend Bill Rutherfoord writes, "I suspect that stanching the planet's oily wound is beyond anyone's capability. We've always...had the capacity to kill the earth, and now it seems we've harpooned it once too often. To me, all the dead planets orbiting the sun along with the living earth, have strongly suggested a potential fate for our anomalous planet, Perhaps we'll soon join the celestial majority of spinning, rust-colored purgatories, enveloped in turbulent, gaseous firmaments. I'm ashamed." Bill

These days we will most certainly need guides through hell, as we try our best to navigate updated versions of Dante's "Inferno."

The Orange Alligator (4)

2010-05-23T19:15:00.002-05:00

The reddish chunks are showing up everywhere. Seeing the images of coastal desecration, a word, suddenly remembered from childhood, pops into my head: it's DISGUSTIPATING. Disgusting and nauseating and constipating to have to look at this. Voices speaking on TV: This could do us in. The President needs to step up. If BP can't fix this, they need to get out of the way. Obama is dragging his feet, rags Sarah Palin, while brainiac Michael Steele is complaining that government should have stepped in immediately, even though that is exactly what they did. The air is thick with burning oil and lawsuits. James Carville and Chris Matthews -- two reliable Obama defenders -- have issued withering critiques of the administration's "lackadaisical" response, complaining that they seem to be inconvenienced by it all, and demanding a Plan B, given that BP's efforts are not succeeding.

The criticisms can't be contained any better than the shit-color oil. It's all pollution. Bobby Jindall screaming from his helicopter, the government needs to do something, while some 22,000 people are out there, working on it, 24/7. But trying to lock the barn door after the horse has run away isn't working. Even the robots are finding it too hard. We have run out of meaningful solutions, because there never were any. If there is something more the government could possibly do, it would already have been done. Nobody wants to stare into the true shit face of the Medusa. Instead we get pyrotechnic displays of outrage. Minute by minute, day by day, each bit of the world we lose becomes a chip off the old sublime. Don't bother to cry, mate, because it won't help.

I sent an email to Bill McKibben, hoping to elicit a response:

Dear Bill, I recently read your new book and found it remarkable, for the reasons described below. I am taking the liberty of sending you a group of 4 blogs I have written incorporating my responses to the book, and to the oil spill, which occurred just as I was finishing reading it. I am wondering how you feel about what is happening now, and if you would consider responding to these blogs in some way--I would definitely want to use any of your thoughts in another post. Please don't feel any pressure if you are too busy, or whatever. But if this grabs you, I would love to engage. Thanks for your excellent work. Most sincerely, Suzi Gablik

On May 20, 2010, at 3:32 AM, Bill Mckibben wrote:
Gretings from inner Mongolia

These are very good meditations especially after two days when I saw the worlds largest coal mine and the largest solar hot water heat plant. Im glad i have my work at 350.org to keep me busy!

Sent from my iPad

I wrote back. Thanks so much for responding. I definitely understand your feeling about how actively doing something constructive is the only antidote to massive feelings of helplessness and despair. By the way, FYI, Resurgence has just accepted a shorter version of my review of "Eaarth" for publication. Happy times in Mongolia!

“You can’t sleep no more; that’s how bad it is,” said John Blanchard, an oyster fisherman whose life has been upended by the monstrous oil spill fouling an enormous swath of the Gulf of Mexico. He shook his head. He was speaking to Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist. “My wife and I have got two kids, 2 and 7. We could lose everything we’ve been working all of our lives for.”

"No one knows how much of BP’s runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast’s marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families," writes Herbert. "What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can’t be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach."

Even the Nazis couldn't accomplish that, opines Anne Frank.