Essays / Nonfiction
I’ll Shut Up...
Right After This
Wise, Incisive Insights on Our Culture
With Some Inconoclastic Rubbish
John E. Darling
Vol. 4 of
A Gathering of Voices
To my children
Heather, Hannah and Colin
I sing you good heart
John E. Darling
Jdarling@jeffnet.org
Ashland, OR
c. 2011 by John Darling. All essays appeared in periodicals 1997-2011
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher, except for quotations in critical articles or reviews.
Published by Oregon Darlings Press, Ashland. Printed in USA
Darling, John
A Gathering of Voices: Essays from Ecotopia
Politican commentary ... Cultural Analysis ... Rhetorical Rubbish
About the Author . . .
John Darling, M.S. is a writer, journalist, teacher and counselor in Ashland, Ore. He has been published in Gnosis, CoinAge, Living Simply (Australia), Pacific Northwest, Oregon Magazine, The Celator (Ancient Art and Artifacts) and others. John writes documentary shows on history, the arts and nature for public television and wrote “Crater Lake: Mirror of Heaven,” shown on PBS.
He has been a daily journalist on the staff of The Portland Oregonian, Medford Mail Tribune, Ashland Daily Tidings, United Press International in Salem, Ore. and was news director/anchor for KOBI-TV News in Medford, Ore.
He was executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. He was U.S. Marine Corps journalist and editor of Pilot Rock (alternative magazine of Southern Oregon) and People Newsmagazine of the Ore. Dept. of Human Resources.
He has been a counselor since 1976 and led seminars in men’s consciousness, loving relationships, rebirthing, shamanism, prosperity and hypnosis. He also writes and performs weddings.
He has a B.A. in history from Michigan State University and M.A. in counseling from Southern Oregon University. John is a fourth generation journalist and was born and raised in Lansing, Mich. He has three children, Heather, Hannah and Colin.
Contents
A Call for the Repleasuring of Life
Politics - It’s Like Frying a Small Fish
The Century We Reclaimed Our Power
The Grass, the Stars and a Tin Can in the Gutter
Who We Are When We’re Walking is Who We Are
The ‘Genio Pop’ of the Place We Love
From Success to Excess
Most Dubious Ideas Awards
Doing the Right Things Without Making Someone Wrong
Devour Nice Towns Early and Prosper
Motion Detectoirs in the Mountains
A Field of Burning SUVs
I Admit It: I’m Afraid
Who We Are At Burning Man Is Who We Are
The Species That Ate Itself
Seeing the World as Food
A Woodpecker Forecasts the Nation’s Fate
Global Warming: It’s Like High-Fiber Cereal
Ashland - the Town That Always Says Yes
It’s a New Kind of Xmas - and I Really Mean that X
The Wealth That Steals the Soul
The Rogue - You Can Enjoy Her But Never Own Her
All About Our Bumpers
Crazy In Love With You, America
The Afro-Terrans and Their Creed Wars
A Thrilling, Scary New Deity in the World
Outliving Our Brains
When Society Has a Broken Heart
I Fear, Therefore I Shop
The Trade Towers Without Tears
War, Minus the Heady Glory
The Bubba-fication of America
When Society is an Addict
The Sad, Slow Muffling of Dissent, Post 9/11
A Day with Draft Resisters; A Day With Wounded Soldiers
A Drunken Donkey in Recovery
How to Tell the Aliens Among Us
How King John Got Afoul of Robin Hood
What Would Jefferson Do?
Quiet as a Skunk in the Moonlight
Screwed the Pooch Six Ways from Tuesday
Candidate Without a Chance
Hunkering Down With the Gray Lady
What If We Ran the World Like a Day Care Center?
We’ve Got the Best Imaginary Friend
Why We Need the Greek Language in Schools
No Patient Left Behind
Holding Society in the Age of Angry Nature
Welcome to the New Revival Tent
Into the Great Uncovering
The Good News Behind the News
Dying Slowly in a Cheap Suit
Global Survival: With a Little Help From My Friends
Why Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny
Are We Fat Enough Yet?
Here’s That Rainy Day
The Boat is For Everyone
Obama: You Can’t Take Yourself Seriously
There’s Enough. Isn’t There?
Praying for Nature to Behave Better
A Nervous Candidate for a Nervous Electorate
Is Hope an Emotion? Obama on the Verge
In Search of the Perfect Movie
I Like Your American Freestyle
A Call for the Repleasuring of Life
In the warmer months, as each Saturday morning nears, I feel a lifting of the spirits because of one simple event: cruising the streets of Ashland with the children and going to yard sales. I used to think it was the lure of bargains or rare artifacts, a nearly archaeological sense of anticipation and discovery, but that’s not the heart of it. It’s compelling because it’s about sheer pleasure. I dally and invite myself.
The yardsale, the potluck and the espresso shop are three of the best inventions of our generation, because they are about pleasure, done just for themselves in the moment and free of any big goal. They have in common that they are rather nonproductive and they bring people together, kind of like the old village well, to stand about telling stories, sharing plans and cracking jokes. And of course, for an hour, no one can get to you on the phone, voicemail, email, or any other mail.
While stress now soars to new highs, we’re beginning to recover some of our natural love of the pleasures of life which I strongly sense were at the heart of things before we got so civilized, so in touch and so damn busy. However, we have a persisting problem, which I will call Creeping Puritanism. This country was founded in large part by Puritans who hoped to cleanse life of all the pesky lures of the flesh, taste buds and brain biochemicals, which they saw as The Problem – dangerous, seductive and evil. To the good, however, this country was also founded in greater part by second and third sons who, because of primogeniture, were inheriting no real estate and faced either the factories of Europe or the vast freedoms, risks and opportunities of the New World. They yearned to embrace not only the liberty, but the pleasures (rewards) that came with it. These two forces war in the American psyche to this day.
We see it in the nearly schizoid response of Americans to the dalliances of the prez – many of us, certainly all the official politico-religious-media establishments, wanting him put in stocks but most of us wanting to let him, and ourselves, have a life and live it as we see fit as long as we don’t kill, steal, slander or in general hurt others or the environment. It’s a new level of freedom being embraced just in this last generation and for most of us, it’s a pleasure. We’re learning to handle pleasure quite well.
Maybe our hangups go back even further than Puritanism, maybe to the savannas of Africa, where, without fang or claw of our own, we were imprinted with a sense of our vulnerability. We were surrounded by things which clearly could kill us. From this, we seem to retain the instinct to see danger all around us – in our food, in tv programming, in the atmosphere, in our sedentary routines, in sex, of course, and in our very thought patterns. We worry and struggle mightily to shore up these leaky defenses, yet oddly, we secretly love all these dangers.
Everyday on the streets of our valley, I see the bumpersticker “Kill your television.” O, most unkind creeping puritanism! TV as enemy, as danger. Let us do stress out. Are we so frail? I must respond that the thing, with all its lurid violence and carnality, cannot hurt you. Let it live. It’s us in the box. Have you let yourself love Ally McBeal, whose intricacies, imagination and ribald humor match anything Shakespeare did? Have you overcome your dread of Bart Simpson, who, with his dufus dad, unabashedly plays out all our repressed follies? Have you longed for the energy, purpose and courage of our friends on ER? Have you embraced the one tool we’ve invented which truly allows us to still the baying hounds of worry, self-regulation and stress for one blessed hour? Even the commercials have made the leap into art, as they track all our buried desires, humor and vision.
But food strikes closest to home, as it is perhaps our dearest pleasure. When we have an ailment, even a cold, what is the first thing we do? We blame what we ate or drank, starting with the most pleasurable stuff first. At a recent potluck, a friend with migraines said he was given a list of foods to avoid. “I bet I know what’s on the list,” I said. “Chocolate, first of all, then wine, coffee, sweets, beer, cheese, olives, salt, peanut butter and anything else that’s fun to put in your mouth.” That’s right, he said. How did you know? “It’s Creeping Puritanism. We think the Supreme guy dislikes our pleasures, even though he gave us all the pleasure receptors to experience them and long for them.” Now, says I, have the migraines stopped? No, he said. But it’s a big stress to cut out those pleasures, right? Of course it is. And stress, as we have come to know, is a seedbed of countless ailments. It’s enough to give you a migraine.
Is there any food pleasure higher than wine, which, as Ben Franklin said, was “proof the gods love us and want us to be happy?” Yet, even though it has been now proven wine is a supreme health food which cleanses the heart, there are whole Ashland potlucks without a drop of it or anything but fruit juices. Sometimes, I will go right out and buy a bottle for the party. It is quickly gulped by secretly thankful guests.
My dad smoked and drank a lot, hungrily and selfishly followed his scholarly passions, never exercised a step if he could avoid it, never regretted or feared anything that I could tell and died at 86. At the same time, Linda McCartney and others I know lived a clean, active, vegetarian life, feeling they were surrounded by dangers which could kill them, worried a lot about this, spent much time and effort defending themselves against such evils and died an early and painful death. Lesson? 1) The causal link either way is weak; stuff happens. 2) Maybe life doesn’t want to come fully under our control. 3) Relax, we’re not here long, nor should we try so hard to be. 4) Which is worse, a hormone-filled steak or a worry-filled day? 5) It’s not us who are surrounded by menacing dangers; it’s all the other living things, and their danger is us. But let’s not worry about that. ~
Politics – It's Like Frying a Small Fish
Recently, before I realized I can't really do politics anymore (except as a writer, maybe), a candidate for public office in Southern Oregon and I had a long talk about issues on a long drive back from some campaign school. I was going to write some "talking points." Those are little nuggets of thought which usually get a rise of agreement from people, seem to take a strong position on something, resonate with the icons of family, community and hard work, but really propose to do almost nothing. They're just attitudes. They're kind of like presenting your body for a sniff test. Is he one of us?
We had in hand a poll done for a political organization which outlined what voters are ready and willing to hear this year. I'll be vague about who these groups are. They told us not to tell others what they learned in their polling and what voters will tolerate hearing. Otherwise the other side will just anticipate what they will be uttering this year and do a preemptive utterance.
We were driving down that long, lonely freeway in the gathering dusk, keying off the poll, talking about crime (anti-gang, anti-drug programs, lock up the real bad ones forever) , the economy (a living wage, health care, child care), better schools (smaller class size, accountability from all the usual suspects), government waste and inefficiency (oversight committees and audits, return surpluses). Don't mention the environment, it said, or risk becoming irrelevant. Ditto social issues (abortion, gay marriage, suicide), unless they shove it in your face, then there was the comeback about government interfering in people's lives. Never, ever mention new taxes, of course. Oh, and this year's words are: common sense, responsible, restrict (not ban), fairness, lend a helping hand, safeguard, stewardship, community, etc. You'll be hearing a lot of those. So, we were passing the miles making up phrases that would fit the candidate and the electorate. Pretty cynical stuff, really.
I was getting tired. I noticed I was getting sad, too. Feelings. Not a good sign for a politician. I didn't want to be in the car. I wanted to stop and drink a pitcher and watch NFL reruns on ESPN and listen to people banter. They would not be talking talking points. They would just be talking. I longed for that. I looked out the window, recalling how the campaign manual told us, under the heading of opposition research, to find the goods about “unusual marital, porno possession, video rental, s&m, leather, drag, unusual apparel, PO box, large phone sex bills” on and on, causing a lobbyist speaker to tell the gathering he would never be able to run for office in this climate, as “the sixties were very good to me.” All laughed. Then there was the blonde Southern Oregon mayor summing up her campaign school talk with a big smile and the words, "Remember, it's all style and no substance." I think it was a joke, but she didn’t say that. I realized again, for the millionth time that except for some rare moments, most of them in the company of the late Rep. Nancy Peterson of Ashland that I had no stomach for politics.
Then the candidate surprised me, asking, "What do you think is really important as far as what should be done in our society?" I nearly dropped my clipboard on the floor. I put my pen away.
"Oh, you mean REALLY?? – what should be really done?" The candidate, I quickly realized was asking me to make a distinction between what wins elections, what the voters will tolerate hearing etc., on one hand and what really needs to be done, on the other hand. These moments don't come often for pols.
God, I thought, maybe the candidate is thinking about running and just telling the truth about things. Nah. They can't do that and they know it. The candidate just wants to get real for a minute, as a counterpoint to the whole process. You know, to see what I'm really made of. If I weren't in the campaign and stuff. If I were just a real person.
"Ok, I'll tell you." I decided I was just going to blurt. Not think anything over. The candidate might think less of me (a pro would brush off the question and stick to strategy), but it's too tempting. "Well, people are most scared about crime. But crime is not the issue. It's racism and lack of hope that makes people most prone to crime. And the rest is domestic abuse. I think people are getting better about racism. It's really turned a corner. But at home, there's too much anger and hitting and there's nothing the government can do about it. That lack of love causes teen pregnancies, gangs, drugs, rapes, young boys who want wars to fight in, all the big social problems."
The candidate agreed, saying it felt even the domestic violence had come a long way in a generation. Yes, it has, I said. The other biggie, I offered, was the environment. We may not be that scared about it now, but it's going to get us. Just like a credit card binge. Then we'll act. Until then, no pol can look good doing anything serious about it. It's just all about how we're doing this year. Nothing is getting us this year. So it's ok. That's crazy. That's what I told the candidate.
Too many people, really, I said. That's the big problem. No one ever talks about it. But we won't learn the hard lessons until we push growth to the limit. We have to be made to learn the hard lessons. And overpopulation will do that. Then I heard myself. God, what an ass I sound like. All these radical solutions. The stuff of Democratic platforms of 20 years ago. Of course, now the Demo planks all sound like some long distance telephone ad on tv – we respect the rights of families to reach out to each other.
I leaned back. I thought of my old Tao book. How it had stood with me over the years. How I wish it were on my lap and that I could read a page at random. Maybe to the candidate! Nah. But I can recall it to myself: Ah yes, "Governing a country is like frying a small fish." Hah! Of course! You pay a lot of attention and don't attempt anything grandiose. Then you savor. And then comes this one: "Thorn bushes spring up wherever the army has passed. Just do what needs to be done. Never take advantage of power. Achieve results, but never glory in them."
That was it, maybe. America was learning the Tao. With our political system at a standoff, the public had achieved peace. Both sides have bombast, but neither side gets its way. Thus, the people get to live their lives. Plates are filled. People are content. Maybe that's what the prez is up to. He never tries much, but the people are happy. They're getting what they want. The small fish is being well fried. This has got to be the most sophisticated electorate in the history of the world. We're not indifferent; we've just learned how to play the game. We are bringing the prez along. He tried a lot in the beginning, but we said, just settle down there now. Ah. The sage does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone. So says the Tao.
It was dark now and the white lines are flipping by. Well, I tell the candidate, wake me if you want me to drive. ~
The Century We Reclaimed Our Power
Everyone’s busy summing up the 20th century and it’s easy to diss it for its outrageous excesses: World Wars, Depression, Communism, Cold War, Nuclear Arms Race, assassinations, Nazis, Holocaust, Hiroshima, Jim Crow, Vietnam, Prohibition, Nixon, cults, the sitcom, poodle skirts and Pat Boone.
Yuk! All that’s history now, mostly. More important is that we have steadily and subtly – no headlines -- become pretty amazing in about the last third of this century. It’s not considered fashionable or even intelligent to say it in the media, but some major positive shifts are happening now for the first time in all history and they’re a lot bigger than the bummers:
--War is now considered in very bad taste. It’s ghastly and unfortunate, like miscarriage or suicide. With nukes, we realized we’ve gone way too far. Gone is talk of glory and heroism. Gone are those constant big wars, where people actually hate each other and believe the killing is justified. Now we hate war and deeply suspect anyone doing it.
--We’re all connected by trade groups, EU, the net, cable and easy travel and shipping anywhere. That’s part of why war’s out; you blow up your own markets. Personally, we get constant images of the beauty and goodness of other ethnicities. We imagine what it would be like to know, love, marry, parent with them. Gone is saying anything against it.
--The economy is working good longer than ever and we might be finally learning to maintain a stable supply, jobs, profits, etc. forever without basing it on someone losing the game. When you think about it, why shouldn’t we?
--Money and work are personal now. Everyone has $$ power via the credit card and net. Like fire, easy money can fuel or burn, but we’re learning to use it. Downsizing and telecommuting are good. Gone is the idea of boss, corporation and job as lasting, important things. We’re The Man now.
--Science finally and really works. What people knew in 1900 was mostly fairy tale compared to what we know now: continents drift, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, we descended from Lucy, what atoms are made of, what our planets and moons are like, that emotions govern health, how to switch organs, how to fly, how to store the world’s knowledge in the palm of your hand. It’s as amazing as any religion and it deftly undermines the confabulations of religions that cow and control through ignorance, hatred and fear. Fundamentalism, which once ruled the world, exists now only in pockets.
--Food and drink. Yes! We’re all learning to cook! Sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, coconut milk, bring it all on. Enough with damnable meat loaf! Food as pleasure, not fuel. Espresso and micro-beer are from the gods. And yes, cheeseburgers are still amazing and the world knows it.
--We’ve got feelings and we know how to use them. We say and hear I love you all the time. Enough of us have been through therapy or watched Oprah that we know how to say what we want and don’t want. We put it in policy in schools and workplaces. It’s a Self Esteem Revolution.
--We love our bodies and running shoes and bikes and being out there free and breathing and eating good stuff and being done with the cigarettes and whisky and it’s wonderfully totemic of all the power we feel inside us.
--Most of us realize most news is irrelevant and stupid and we’ve tuned it out. Ditto politics. News is about what’s not working. Actually, most of life IS working and we want to keep it that way. The power has shifted to the personal. We got the power!
--We realize the big problem we face is overpopulation and the destruction of the world by urbanization, pollution and extinctions. We know politicians would rather talk about flag-burning, school prayer and abortion, because they don’t have the power to change it. But we do and we are.
--We are coming to realize drugs will never go away. We are smart enough to realize there are three kinds: 1) pharmaceuticals, which all of us use, like antibiotics, Viagra and Prozac, 2) recreationals, like pot, wine, ecstasy and acid, which are not addictive and which most of us use at some points in our lives and 3) narcotics, like meth, crack, coke, cigarettes and heroin, which few of us use, which signal emotional-spiritual crises and which are what we mean when we say “drug problem.” As we did with demon rum, we’re now in transition to trusting ourselves, not the state, to make decisions about all this. Like it or not, we own our own heads and we’re learning how to use them.
--More people are having more fun with sex than ever in history. AIDS didn’t work. We’re listening to our inner voices about this, not to the immense and age-old fears around this most immense and transcendental joy, this gateway of the soul, which we alone, of all the animals, do just because we love it. Our ownership of this is central to our ownership of our lives and we’re blowing off religions that beat up on it.
--Love is being redefined to mean loving oneself first and always, as a selfish and exciting adventure. Only from here we can love another with energy, truth and pleasure.
All these changes have in common that they are very personal and off-the-matrix of socio-political-religious power structures which have dominated society for five millennia. In earlier revolutions, it was about winning power from the state, church, baron or society. Now it’s about me winning power from internal social conditioning.
Yes, sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll were the camel’s nose in the tent, but now the changes are being perpetrated by something soulful and passionate in all of us. We’re re-programming ourselves with good, powerful and personal stuff. We’re learning we really do create our own reality and that a world of people doing that is a good world. It’s never happened before and it’s the biggest revolution. ~
The Grass, the Stars and
a Tin Can in the Gutter
After baking you for weeks, that day comes when the first edge of fall slips into the valley, scaring you with the menace of winter, thrilling you with the promise of that sharp, rich, sad energy of things dying – and the summer dying.
We take the Lithia Park tour, which is equivalent to a New Yorker taking the Statue of Liberty tour – so familiar, but if you don’t get a guide to tell you about all the trees, floods, statues, history, how the Tree of Heaven got there (Chinese cook for Abel Helman brought it from homeland), then you’ll just never know.
The Lithia water, f’rinstance, piped in 80 years ago from four miles south of town, to fountains in the Plaza and park gazebo – tour guide Dan Kraft yarns at length: hey, it may taste like the sulfurs of hell, but he’s got friends who swear it got rid of liver, stomach and throat problems, migraine, even arthritis and depression. But do you know anyone who bothers to fill a jug and keep it in the fridge?
Up the Greensprings on a story at Tub Springs, another place to fill many jugs of water, we sit at the picnic tables, under the old growth fir and watch car after car pull up and leave with what’s reputed to be the purest natural water in Oregon, gushing out of three stone tubs. We pause to drink this fluid so loved by the Applegate Trail pioneers who slogged through here. It practically tastes like wine. You realize you’ve never tasted water with nothing in it but the taste of water.
At the Grower’s Market, my assignment is to find out what are the real power vegetables. They all say the same thing: kale. All veggies are good, but kale and the other dark, leafy greens have the juju’s these human bodies evolved on – iron, scads of minerals, omega-3 fatty acids, all the goodies that prevent cancer, make hearts healthy and enable optimal brain chemistry. I call Christy, my dietitian informer in Medford, for the science.
Think hunter-gatherer, she says. That’s what we were for 99 percent of our existence on earth. We ate a range of 200 veggies, most of them closely resembling kale. When we ate meat, it was from animals who were breast-fed and ate grasses and kale-like veggies, just like we did. We and all the animals were packed full of omega-3 acids. We don’t have that now. We avoid sharp-tasting veggies like kale. Animals aren’t breast feed. They live in feed lots the last three months of their lives, eating grains, not greens, so their omegas are depleted. Is there lots of cancer, inexplicably happening among all ages? Yes. Cause-effect relationship? You decide.
Ah, nature. I’m up in Eric Alan’s backyard on Strawberry Hill and he’s telling me about nature-as-sacred, something we’ve all heard about, but Eric, after a life-menacing bout of cancer a dozen years ago (mid-thirties), got a chance to recuperate at his mom’s beside a big woods, so he got to really get it and wrote a book about it – “Sacred Grace.”
You’d expect him to say nature is a religious experience and man-made cities and stuff are not, but Eric’s gone beyond that and in his seminars and talks, he says, hey, there is no man-made stuff. It’s all nature and it’s all sacred. I say what about a vast interstate cloverleaf in LA, where you grew up? He won’t use the word God – “it’s got too much baggage” -- but whatever people mean by that word, it’s there too.
He’s becoming kind of a guru of this, an unwilling guru, as he won’t take that title and mantle. He wants people to wake up and smell the beauty on their own. We all have this and are this and are immersed in this sacredness, which you can see if you study the square foot of dirt and grass in front of you or the stars or a tin can in the gutter.
Yeah, but…but…we sip our mango-ginger tea and watch the sun kiss its way over the Griz foothills…what is God, where do we go when we die, why are we here??? Eric won’t touch those questions. I don’t know. What we have is right here, right now. It’s big, it’s got endless layers of mystery for you to learn from and wherever you’re going, if you give yourself half a chance, you might realize you’re already there.
He hugs me bye. I crunch down his gravel driveway. All the streets on this hill used to be gravel, nice to walk on. Now it’s all pretty curb-and-gutter. Homes here used to be $25,000. Nothing under $800,000 now. That’s sacred too, isn’t it? Well, said Eric, a lot of species play rough, like what locusts do to a field. Maybe not the prettiest thing you ever saw, but if they get too dominant, nature prunes ‘em back. Gonna happen to us? Oh ya, says Eric. Nature bats last? Eric chuckles. Nature owns the whole stadium and invented the game. ~
Who We Are When We’re
Walking is Who We Are
Ever notice how many people are out walking? I don’t mean walking to get anywhere-- just walking. They’re not doing it just for the exercise, either, although they get that. It’s bigger.
I remember when all this started. First it was jogging, somewhere in the mid-seventies. All the special running shoes came out to obsolesce our old Converse and Topsider tennies. Next decade, a lot of people realized running was a lot of work and you could hurt yourself. The body spoke: ain’t natural for everyone to run that much. On the way to that realization, people found walking. It was so easy, even fun. It didn’t have the pain you buy the gain with.
They realized it was fascinating just being out there away from everything in the open air, watching all the birds, the light patterns on the hills, the trees, the interesting houses and things in people’s yards, hearing a new spectrum of sounds, saying hi and most of all, just being there, here, in the present.
Back when I thought walking was only exercise, I thought walkers must be stress sufferers and walking helped, which is true. Or they were trying to cut cholesterol and add a ninth or tenth decade to their lives, which gods know, we all need really bad. But, walking seemed so low-impact and innocuous. Where was the struggle? And it took a lot of time. I was missing the point.
Walking is big enough to go on the cover of Time, where all burgeoning phenomena achieve legitimacy and reality, but it probably won’t. It’s too subtle and personal and there’s nothing to buy and not much to discuss. Yet there it is, undeniably pulling more and more people out onto the streets, so as to saunter about right there in public, ignoring their voicemail, pagers, email, TVs, letting the whole thing cut into their meal preparation time, their touching of bases, their keeping up with current events and their laying out clothes for tomorrow.
Walkers are peopling the park paths, sidewalks and the forest roads in the watershed above town. You’re never really alone anymore. They’re up walking before light and they’re taking back the night. They’re going on walking dates, which are inexpensive and comfortable, because you’re not sitting there watching each other chew and you can have long silences because you’re appreciating nature and sharing myriad unspoken things about its wonder. Walkers are doing it no matter if it’s rain or fog. They’re not out to enjoy the weather. Bad weather is part of the thing, the milieu.
You can tell all these people are walkers because they’re never headed anywhere to get anything and they return empty-handed. And even though they generally eschew destinations, they walk with seeming purposefulness. You kind of wish they would all walk on treadmills and light the city, but then they wouldn’t get what they’re getting out of it, which is that they are creating kind of a parallel universe in which there is time.
This universe we’ve been living in for a couple million years – it has lately broken loose from the laws of physics and run out of time. Time’s getting very hard to find and so, like real estate, which we’re also running out of, time seems, in our minds, very expensive. We’re getting nutty from lack of time. Even more than from lack of space.
The people who are replenishing this alternate universe with time are brave pioneers, because, in taking time to do this seemingly innocuous and nonproductive thing of walking, they are drawing the line, standing in front of the column of tanks and committing the highly political, even magical act of defying the present universe and just taking time where there is none. And, in their walking, they are actually claiming all the space there is.
When you’re walking, it seems like you own the whole valley and the skies so that, instead of paying $340,000 for spectacular views which you usually bust your hump to pay for and which you look at only for about 10 minutes a day and which seem kind of like inert wallpaper, you internalize the views. You are out there actually IN that landscape which is constantly moving for an hour or so and which costs nothing, as it should.
But above all, there’s the personal thing. Until this century, we did walking all the time. It was the only way to get anywhere. The Oregon Trail pioneers, for instance, didn’t ride out here in their wagons; they hauled their stuff in the wagons while they walked. Our bodies were evolved to satisfy this one function more than any other. Walking is the reason we decided to become upright and bipedal, so as to free our hands for all sorts of industry and mischief, which required our brain to get bigger, which is good, right? Thus it follows that to restore our bodies to proper sanity and to throw off the trammeling wires of anxiety which embrace us ever more tightly, all we have to do it walk it off. We become grounded by moving across the ground.
Walking is emblematic of many activities people are now finding, whose purpose is to carve out a realm in which the personal soul is sovereign and does not answer to the barking of society and all its helpful little beeping, flashing buttons and recordings. In walking, the soul commits the radical act of reclaiming awareness, choice and presence. It breathes and moves into the world. It achieves personhood and reality. It rolls back our pressures like the Red Sea, until time stands wreathed in the present moment, abundant and newborn like some Venus in the waves.
This is the destination of walkers. The soul becomes who it really is. It emerges as a thing light and sweet. It takes over the feet, which suddenly know where to go without our thinking about it (ah, instinct!). It slips easily back into the flesh and returns us to our true self, which is found to be daring, intuitive, sane, friendly, enchanting and secretly free. Isn’t that life’s big lesson: finally we don’t long to be someone different or great, but only who we really are. And who we are when we’re walking is who we are. ~
The ‘Genio Pop’ of the Place We Love
Once I saw an old Roman coin with the inscription Genio Populi Romani, which means the Genius of the Roman People. They were so cheeky to say that, to congratulate themselves, but it was true.
Genius meant their energy, spirit and generative power, not their IQ, and they used this power to spread their will and vision over a vast area from Iraq to Britain and their Genio held it in place so what they had was a space where for a good five centuries mostly peace would happen and people would be free to farm, trade, goof off, copy and expand from Greek sculpture and drama, say whatever they wanted and pursue any religious thing they felt like, with the exception of a religion which wanted to wipe out the others and eventually did. Yes, the Romans did it by conquest, slavery and other incorrect means, but that’s they way things were done until very recently.
You can be reading about the Pax Romana and practically feel it hanging in the air of their times, a consciousness informing the vision and movement of just about everything. It was a balance of state and individual, with the state wielding power for its own ends, but also drawing forth tremendous energies of individuals.
We have that now, too, in the Genio Populi Jeffersonia – the spirit of the people of Jefferson State, which has come to be recognized and defined. It is a distinct energy, attititude, mystique and way of carrying oneself which, when we go to LA or Vegas or even the Willamette Valley, we tangibly recognize as missing. I once thought about moving to Appleton, Wisconsin, which is as sweet as it sounds and has big, solid houses under $100,000 (which would get you a tidy little shack here), but finally the Genio thing stopped it. We had become part of the Jeffersonia Genio. It’s kind of a tacit thing we all do in agreement and here, IMHO, are some of its parts:
Tolerance. We let others (and ourselves) be as weird, strange and eccentric as they please, so long as they don’t get in our face, which would be very un-Jeffersonian. Survivalists, pot-farmers, nose-ringers, real estate agents, hey, go for it. As long as we see those things around us, we live less in fear of the knock in the night.
We got this fuzzy deistic reverence. I perform weddings and always ask if people want any religious element. Most say the same thing. “Well, we have a lot of spiritual feeling ‘n stuff, but it’s not in any book or building. It’s just, I don’t know, the hills and trees, y’know.” Yes, I know. It’s all right here, quite gloriously the Genio of place. And it underlies what we mean by environmentalism. These aren’t trees – they’re, you know, spirit.
We long ago stopped saying, hey don’t bother dressing up. It’s assumed you won’t dress up for the party today, tomorrow or ever. We didn’t invent grunge, but we did make it de rigueur. It’s part of honoring our Oregon Trail ancestors, who were way grunge. Hey, nice brown tones in your flannel shirt, there. Cool sneakers. We do bathe, however.
We kind of, like, live in the present more than anyone else. Doesn’t it smack you between the eyes when you go to NY or LA and they’re all talking about their next project or their last one? They are what they did. We just are who we are. Not that there’s anything wrong with visions and action, hell no, and we actually do a lot of stuff, but we got soul in the present. Genio Pop fer sure.
We’re all kind of philosophers and, as we swim in this broad and vibrant Genio Pop, we over the years develop our vision and understanding of life and we talk it over often with many others. We go through our stages and passages and that Genio contributes to it in generous interplay and even protects and loves us in the hard parts. If we were in Gary, Indiana would this be unfolding as it has? I don’t think so.
Kids rule. Kids have it better here than anywhere in the world, as we recognize they are the main thing, the creatures most full of energy and happiness and we learn or unlearn from that, helping us shed a lot of the Genio of those other places we came from whose Genio is nowhere near as good as the Genio of this one.
We used to love travel. That’s what got us here. But now we seem strangely happy to take intra-Jeffersonia pilgrimages to very cool spots, like Crater Lake and Mt. Shasta, which, truth be told are the very best and most beautiful lake and mountain in at least America and here they are twin icons right in our backyard. When we are there, we look down the spine of the Cascades at all those blue-tinted Buddha volcanoes and we just say, gosh, I am touching the chakras of the earth or at least of Jeffersonia and there is no place better to be.
We know we will die here, have our ashes scattered at our favorite spot (don’t want to clutter up the environment with our stone) and before we die, will look back at the immense succession of rich, cool and fun moments and say, “I did it. I won. I got all the juice out of the fruit. Can’t think of anything I’d change.” That’s the prize. We lived with Genio and helped make that Genio. The Genio is immortal, by the way.
We vote for the coolest stuff and sooner than others. Ocean beach access, initiative petitions, presidential primary, bottle bill, billboard ban, decriminalized pot, legislatively re-criminalized pot, popularly re-decriminalized pot (hey, what part of ‘no’ didn’t you understand?), assisted suicide, term limits. First governor in jeans. Get it? Enlightened freedom. West Coast populism. California and Washington can’t touch us.
We of Jeffersonia are the heart of ecotopia, the place furthest from big cities of almost any place that is green and nice. Whatever mischief is afoot out there in the world, it will get here last and meet the most disinterest, even mockery. Our capital is Medford and, though it is growing at a near-cancerous rate, it’s sort of ok if they keep it all kind of crammed in one place. You will do that, right? ~
From Success to Excess
I think I could turn and live with the animals,
they are so placid and self-contained
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins…
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things…
Not one respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
--Walt Whitman
The other day in the wooded foothills above Ashland, they blew away a tired, sick, no doubt scared cougar who’d been living on small, probably bad-tasting puppies and, by the simple act of being alive, was scaring people who are building new homes ever deeper into the wilderness.
Every week the police log tells of citizens reporting cougars. For what? For being there, where they and their ancestors have been for millions of years and where they lived peaceably with native humans for probably 30,000 years until we, the other humans got here 150 years ago.
If cougars could read and write and had driver’s licenses and social security numbers and paid their property taxes, they would have “standing” to sue everyone who keeps taking away their habitat and prey, and you can bet they’d use it, but, alas, they’re not sapient primates, so they just watch it happen, as it happened to the former residents of our hills, the Indians and wolves and grizzlies, whom we name our teams after.
Who will stop us? When will a politician dare utter the dread word population? That theme has no constituency, unless cougars get the vote. It’s a hard word for anyone to say. Loving our children and helping them survive is an instinct deeper than self-preservation. But denial’s an ugly thing and the paper says 300,000 more people will live in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion (Roseburg to Redding) in the next generation.
We must and will come to grips with those three words – too many people. Even thinking those three words sounds mean and ugly. Yet, almost every human problem – crime, poverty, land use, global warming, war, pollution, housing costs, parking, traffic, drugs, on and on, can be viewed as an effect of those three words.
How far is too far? How much success is too much? It’s the nature of humans to find out by going too far and then thinking up strategies to maintain that excess and defending it as if the Creator, who looks and acts sort of like a big human, wants it that way. And yet, nature loves balance and has an answer for any species that is too successful: when you stand too tall, you tip over.
While we diminish nature, we bend our minds and our millions to inventing ever more complex and expensive medical delivery systems to extend human lives. The average human lifespan will soon be 100, we hear, although the last several of those decades will surely be a shadow of vitality, wolfing handfuls of pills, stuffed with new organs and hunched over a 200-channel remote. We love what is moral. Can this be moral?
We say we cherish life, but we use religion to define life as human life only and to mandate unbridled reproduction. We hound pregnant women who choose not to bring more humans into the world, but say little or nothing of developers (a code word for all of us) as they (we) pave over all other life forms. We say our economy’s healthy only if it’s growing, if more of everything is being built and we’re all good consumers, filled with the mania of owning more.
We think there will always be more frontiers, more space, more chances, more starting over, as there always was until the 20th century. We talk more and more now, like some addict’s fantasy, of colonizing airless, treeless, creatureless Mars or Jupiter’s moon Europa. What will we do there in that cold half-light? Be old. Be very old. And alone.
By the time we were painting the caves 20,000 years ago, we’d developed such wile and weaponry that no animal could hurt us. Now we struggle to eliminate the last threat to our complete supremacy: the germ and virus. We ignore the majesty with which death supplies meaning to life. The soul, uninformed, shrinks. Far from honoring or understanding death, we quail before it, while we casually inflict it on all nature. Only we, of all species view death upside-down, as unnatural and tragic. We push it further from our door, knowing someday we can solve the problem of death and make it go away forever. Then truly, we will be as gods, although we might then live in a Blade Runner world with no other creatures but us.
A friend once said to me that the whole meaning of her youthful 60s consciousness-raising experiences came to her in one lucid moment, when, look at a common house plant, she knew in her heart that plant was, in every way, her equal and that its right to be here was equal to hers.
I once was puzzled by people who seemed to love animals more than humans and who would flood the tv station with calls when we ran a story about an abused kitten. I was raised white, urban, mental, anxious, disconnected from nature, accepting the cultural assumption of human primacy. I’ve worked a long time to find some sense of my place in nature and to hear its many voices, although I know I understand only a fraction of what humans did 10,000 years ago, before the first brick was laid.
When we lived in caves, we painted them, not with images of ourselves or deities fashioned after ourselves, but with animals, thousands of them: bison, antelope, mammoth, and you had to know back then we saw something in these creatures we can’t begin to know or remember now and whatever we think of now as god, that’s what they saw when they saw animals move and mate and fight – holy, wise, terrible beauty, unfathomable mystery, energy and meaning.
Heather and Martine go to that place. They touch and talk to their animals and I know they, my daughter and my beloved friend are halfway to the frontier of the nonhuman, realigning themselves to it, going back to that place of origins with it, meeting the dogs and cats, who are halfway into our world. I watch them like an anthropologist studying some natural tribefolk. I let it sink in and reschool me.
It’s all transitional, the way we’re all living – it cannot stand. We’re on our way to a very different understanding of ourselves and nature, one we can’t glimpse now. I can feel it. Very likely nature (or God) will take us to the woodshed, whip our heads around and ‘splain a few things to us. Won’t it be a shock when God finally reveals himself and we look up and realize God isn’t humanoid at all, doesn’t even speak English. In fact, gee, she looks like something walking on four legs, furry and with fangs. And she’s in a bad mood. ~
Most Dubious Ideas Awards
Before we had personal freedom thought for ourselves, our honchos – priests, kings, generals – made up ideas which they would just pop in our heads like diskettes and we would download and run them without much question. We knew what to do. If we didn’t, well, we were just offed.
Even though we’re smart and free now, many of these dubious ideas persist in our minds, with new ones constantly being pumped out on tv, causing us countless inner conflicts, guilt trips, therapy sessions and rebellions against an authority which doesn’t even exist anymore. Here are some of the best:
* God has PMS and is unhappy with humans for the way we think and act, especially
about sex, money, drinking, swearing or anything fun. He’s pretty happy with all the other animals and plants, but not us, even though, ironically, we’re the only ones who look like him. He watches every action of all six billion of us, taking note when each of us steps on a crack. He doesn’t want us to judge others, but when we die, he’s very judgmental. He drops us into hellfire if we have followed all the instincts he put inside us. However, we can escape this if we’re perfect, like God. Then we can go to heaven and sit there forever.
* Sex is incredibly fun, but don’t trust it or let yourself go too far into it because it’s of the flesh and has nothing to do with spiritual stuff or God (who doesn’t have sex or even a girlfriend) and in fact can easily be used by the devil to mess you up.
* The Devil exists and enjoys helping you make the wrong choices and increase suffering and chaos in the universe, even though we can’t establish motive on this and it would be the only example of any part of the universe acting like this. You should be afraid, therefore, very afraid and be nice and listen to The Man and do as you’re told.
* The Man knows God’s thoughts and tells us what they are and also tells us what’s going to happen if we don’t do as he and God say. He’s conveying God’s wishes accurately, even though one of these main guys apologized recently for God’s wishes in the Dark Ages regarding Crusades, witch burnings, Inquisitions and such. However, God is right regarding his present wishes about abortion, gays and such, so the current persecutions are ok.
* We shouldn’t have bad thoughts, regrets, resentments or any of that stuff. We should have inner peace if we’re Eastern or prayer and forgiveness if we’re Western. But if the thoughts continue, which they will, we just need meditation if we’re Eastern or exorcism if we’re Western.
* Love is very rare, ecstatic and easily lost. If you find true love, you should be able to be with them all the time without being bored or much in conflict. If you don’t have love, you’re really not having a life at all, but keep busy and hope – maybe your turn will come. When you find love, try not to look codependent. This will make you seem more desirable. Just keep pretending you’ll do fine if love goes away and that you really love yourself and your dreams and your friends and jogging and stuff. If you lose the love of this fellow primate, who is no smarter or better than you, your heart should break, you should question your worth and feel miserable for years.
* Our parents are incredibly important regarding who we turned out to be, so if anything’s wrong with us or if something’s missing inside, it’s mainly because they didn’t give us lots of love, which they could easily have done, so we should have lots of anger around that, even though we’re smarter than they are and more able to love, which is uncanny since they didn’t teach us much about it.
* I am my car. Cars are freedom. I am free. Therefore, a bitchin’ new car is important. It also says I’m prosperous, even though I’m in debt for it.
* We should get everything done on our list of things to do today and remain available to the phone at all hours of the day and evening, plus the pager, cell phone and email and we should check the messages when we walk in the door, regardless if almost all of them are nonsense, plus save all receipts, note all deductions and always keep a raft of stuff floating in the in-basket.
* We should love everyone, because people who love people are the luckiest people in the world.
* We’re all far short of perfect, even though we were born perfect, as anyone can see by looking at a baby, but we lost that somewhere growing up, so we should work incessantly to improve our attitude, make more money, be liked by people, harden our abs and glutes and work on better orgasms. When we get there, we will like ourselves, but not now.
* We’re menaced by fat, tv, additives, sugar, alcohol, eggs, butter, second-hand smoke, internet porn, stuff in our water, R-rated movies, our kids playing doctor, on and on and we should be very afraid and vigilant about all the stuff that might get us.
* There are good drugs and bad drugs. The good drugs are the ones I use. The bad ones are used by people who scare me. If I have the power, I should illegalize the drugs of those who scare me and set up a well-funded organization to Get Them and to make them seem bad. If I’m among the less powerful group, I should hide my drugs and try to convince my children I’m still a good person if they find out.
We should try to live as long as possible and help save the maximum number of lives, by which we mean human lives and pay excessive prices for drugs and surgery to keep us going into the triple digits because, it’s just very important for as many as possible of us to be alive for a long time because human life is so precious and we’re made in the image of God. ~
Doing the Right Things
Without Making Someone Wrong
Watching this election, recount and confirmation process—and the impeachment of Clinton earlier—shows me that we’ve become a highly polarized society, which is bizarre, because, at the same time, we’re evolving into a homogenous society preoccupied with the same creature comforts.
So why do We hate Them? And how come They are always trying to stick it to Us? Can we believe this stuff? Is this real? Or just some Us/Them game that’s been going on since the beginning of history, as a way of lending meaning and direction to society and of legitimizing the use of power by those who gain it?
Us/Them has always been with us. It’s a game about power. Even tribal peoples do it: We’re the “good” people, they say, the tribe over the next hill is sort of ok and we can sometimes marry into them; the tribe over the second hill is “bad” but it’s ok to enslave them and use them to widen our gene pool; and the tribe over the third hill are cannibals who despise us and can’t wait to destroy us and everything we stand for.
Each side creates whipping boys, red herrings and straw dogs to beat up and demonize, so as to energize the base of support and legitimize its leaders. But, oddly, each tribe is living for the same comforts—hunting and gathering the same herbs and game, having babies and hoping for the best.
It’s common psychology that we all try to disown our darker impulses by projecting them on others. But, in rare moments of honesty, we know the dark impulses are inside Us and we get tired of repressing them and feeling guilty. That’s what a straw dog is for. We dump our nasties into him like a piñata, rant about how sick and depraved he is, get the masses hysterical, then vehemently whack him—and burn him for good measure—and then feel so much better!
In back-to-back elections, I supported conservative Goldwater in Orange County, Calif., then Bobby Kennedy in Oregon, so I’ve known Us/Them from both sides. The beautiful thing about these two presidential candidates is that they both had the intelligence and political will to use power while scarcely spinning and demonizing others. It was a joy to watch them “tell it like it is” and I loved them.
Since then, I’ve seen the Right’s demon-bag fill with fetus-killing feminists, gays, drug-crazed hippies, antiwar traitors, rapping crack gangs, gun control, illegal immigrants, tree hugging eco-terrorists, the decline of family and those sick, perverted Clintons.
The Left’s straw dog has filled with fundamentalist tv preachers, nuke-loving hawks, earth-raping loggers, ranchers and corporations, radio talk show demagogues, the militia, wife/child-beating crackers who love Bud and country music and those election-stealing Bushes.
Notice how you vote with your tv remote. When They come on, you surf. When We come on, you feel warm and affirmed. If the marketers ever wire our remote (they will) so they can read our surfing, they’ll know all they need to know about us.
Before the big changes of the sixties, you’ll recall the Right’s straw dogs were communists, uppity blacks, unions and FDR. And the Left’s demons were commie witchhunts, heartless Wall Street capitalists and Nixon.
The Right was inconsolable when commies went away and even more so when it became taboo to demonize blacks in any way. But the Right hardly skipped a beat. They created a new Them—dark, foreign, menacing, fearful—out of feminists, gays, immigrants, gangs and other outgroups. And, in one of the most stupefying political feats of the 20th century, Reagan and a raft of radio talk show hosts and tv preachers got the blue-collar, country-music set in bed with Wall Street and the Pentagon … with whom they have nothing in common. If only the country-music set knew that, deep down, Republicans don’t care at all about abortion or any of those explosive social issues. It’s the money, stupid!
Politics rarely is about issues or “doing the people’s business,” although that happens sometimes. It’s about power, money, fame—and belonging to and fighting in defense of the tribe—Us. All these can be drug-like. We practically have to become philosophers to avoid their spell. Like drugs, these are exhilarating at first, give pleasing flows of brain chemicals, become addictive, you need larger and larger amounts to get the same hit and end up not filling the emptiness inside.
The hate in politics can also be drug-like. We hate in shorthand now, feeling satisfying camaraderie or disdain at the Christian fish/Darwin fish on the car in front of us. Our new sniff-test. Self-righteous indignation at The Other is ever the first agenda item in what passes for political discourse.
The Right thinks it has the right to endless vengeance because lewd, smirking Clinton beat impeachment and whupped Gulf War hero George Bush; because Anita Hill trashed Clarence Thomas and de-legitimized office sex games; because Bork got Borked; because the Left finally did get rid of evil Nixon and because JFK really did steal the 1960 election.
The Left thinks it has the right to endless paybacks because well, somebody killed JFK, Bobby and Martin and the Right sure wasn’t sorry; because Nixon beat Humphrey on a promise to end Vietnam, then kept it going for five more years; because of Kent State; because Reagan stole the working man by teaching him to hate uppity women and gays; and because George W. stole the 2000 election—right on tv.
But all this is stupid. It has nothing to do with the people’s business now. It’s gone on too long and if we keep believing in all this rubbish, something really bad might happen.
The polarization and self-righteous hatred of Them is illusory, because we’re all mostly the same. We all want our TV, SUV, CD, beer and margaritas, good sex, Costco card, two or three pretty good marriages in a lifetime, kids who grow up ok, and real estate which we work for all our lives and makes us rich for nothing. We’re all conditioned aphids performing and conforming on the same matrix of rewards and punishments. We pretend to our heartfelt political views to give us the illusion of free will.
There’s been progress in one area: it’s so easy to see them lie now. Because of cable and 24-hour news, we’ve all learned how the game is played, how to spin, how to ignore questions and stay on message, how to talk slow, poignant and caring about your family, how to mouth key phrases which are focus-group tested to cause a flow of satisfying brain chemicals in targeted voters.
It was disheartening to watch my own candidates, Gore and Hillary (my bargain-basement replacements for the Kennedys and King) lie like this. George W. seemed more real (he wasn’t) so he wins.
All these office-holders are working for contributions from the wealthy, corporations and PACs, not us. The PACs—right and left—are like the new barons, the aristocracy in the Dark Ages. They pay for the candidates and spend the time with them, not us. We watch it on tv.
The new president wants to “rebuild” our sadly depleted military and deploy Star Wars, not because we’re going to have to fight anyone, but to shift income to investors. We all know that.
The 50 percent who don’t vote? They’re actually not indifferent, stupid or lazy. Most of them are repulsed by the lying and choose to focus on better things in life.
Please forgive my cynicism. The truth hurts—but only at first—then it frees. The truth is that if you believe in Us/Them, you’ve got a leg in that swamp of suffering that’s pulled down humanity through 5,000 years of civilization.
The truth is that democracy is not a simple, clean or brief process. Politics has been called “the art of making friends.” It forces you into compromises, because it forces you, after many hours and years of work, to hear Them and to move into empathy. When I work in politics, I’m constantly amazed at how I, a liberal, come to actually respect and care for conservative folk. I grow comfortable, begin to joke, breathe, listen to them. Fear leaves. They stop being “Them” and I gradually come to see how, given the same circumstances, I might easily slip into Their shoes.
Yes, Nader made George W’s presidency possible and may again. We should have a parliamentary system with third and fourth parties, who, when they get enough support, use it by forming coalitions with the big party. But we don’t. The Far Right took over the conscience function of the Republican party and the only way Greens will stop destroying the Democrats is when Greens achieve the same role in the Democratic party, with a center-left message about peace, nature, health care and education under a debt-free budget.
Don’t worry, abortion (with pill) will stay legal, we’ll run out of darker, poorer cultures to beat up on, we’ll end capital punishment, gays will become ho-hum, the family will thrive, guys will get bored with their guns, all borders will be thrown open, we’ll find a sane way to live with nature and growth (after Nature takes us through a good couple of eco-nightmares) and there’ll even be peace in the “Holy Land.”
And then … we’ll face the real challenge: can we do the right things without having to make someone wrong? ~
Devour Nice Towns Early & Prosper
They said this would happen eventually, that everyone, or at least the educated, accomplished, wealthy sort of people would find this little village and just fall in love with it and just have to own a piece of it, because, well, it’s the best place, with tons of culture, awesome views, historic plaza, great restaurants, artists, authors, plays, gobs of spiritual stuff, diversity, parks, college, swans, no ugly malls and so -- you’ll just finally be happy here.
It’s making us earlier property owners rich at the rate of about $5,000 or $10,000 a month and isn’t that special, except that something feels just plain downdeep wrong about it and something with that much rapaciousness to it just has to have a downside somewhere.
We all used to moan back in the 1970s about what a shallow economic base our little Ashland had and how tough it was to get through the winters and we really must do something or how could we remain here in paradise? Well, we did something.
The Chamber, Festival, college, business people and realtors all got together in the mid-eighties and bent their will to making our town really click, to get the word out, to send those fat packets to inquiring business people or equity gypsies from overrun, sprawled out, megapriced, megacities to the south.
The Festival got on the map with Tonys and with more edgey, biting, fleshy, relevant plays and with visiting New York critics and magazine and network tv reporters, who also did pieces on the amazing town itself. They were agog. How could a town like this exist in our banal, ticky-tacky, mall-sprawl world? They prattled on and on about it. It got play in that Roaring 2000s book which urged: Devour Nice Towns Early and Prosper! Money Magazine, Fortune and others kept putting it high on their Best Town lists and while we, the early discovers of quality-of-life were faintly proud to be all the rage now, we also knew we were about to play Drop the Soap with America.
Very quickly, you couldn’t park downtown in summer. Soon, you couldn’t do it in winter. Ghastly trophy homes with computer-generated, faux-eclectic-nada architecture and conspicuously too many bedrooms began attaching themselves to the upper periphery of Ashland like a bathtub ring. Infill devoured backyards and orchards. We saw a proliferation of usually blonde real estate ladies in white SUVs. You got neighbors who brought that curious custom so prized in California: anonymity. Not wanting to know your neighbors.
Sometimes the wrong people tried to come here, like those rowdy non-Ashlanders at the big Halloween gala, so we canceled that. And those homeless burnout pandhandler types. We passed a no-camping ordinance and used other means to let them know they weren’t included in boomtown. I mean, hey, they were dirty, menacing and didn’t even own property.
Our town became more diverse and has every skin tone and sexual orientation to prove it, but you won’t see any immigration here from the barrios or from South Central LA. It’s still a white town. It’s remarkable how we do this, because, being liberal and good people, we don’t discriminate on the basis of race. We do it subtly. We discriminate on the basis of wealth and, hey, when those folks get rich enough, they can come here. If they can stand it.
Our town is the new haven for techno-refugees who were the first to find ways to escape those noxious, pre-Information Age cities AND still get rich. We read that one such chap recently stood outside that historic mansion at Gresham and Vista and, without even going inside it, wrote a check for 800-something big ones. We all made about 20-grand that day.
We sort of owe a debt of gratitude because they made it possible for us earlier, simpler residents to also get rich in livable small towns with no big employers. We make 10k a month just riding the real estate bubble. Of course, to reap that profit we have to sell our homes and move to a non-coveted region like, say, Arkansas. We’d never have to work again! But we can’t do that. They’re not diverse there. And they don’t have views or swans or people like me.
What are we saying by spending this much on our shelter-mania? We’re saying: I’ll do anything to be here. It’s that good here. It’s almost druglike. But – here’s the downside – by saying that, we’re creating a reverse dynamic and making it less good to be here. Audrey Hepburn becomes Jayne Mansfield. The Bride Meets Dracula.
Not meaning to be snobby, but in the seventies, you had to pay a price to be here. You had to have soul. You sure as hell weren’t here for the money. You found ways to survive. You gardened a little here, taught a college class there, gave a seminar, fixed bikes, did a gig on your guitar. It didn’t matter, really. I remember thinking Ashland was like a conscious, loving spirit or demi-goddess and if she wanted you here, she would let you know. She would find a way for you to live. She would smile and share her delights with you.
Friendship felt different. You knew you had something in common with everyone you talked to. You belonged to a club of people who understood the spirit of place that was cherished here -- by the Indians, the Chautauqua ladies, Angus Bowmer, the early hippies. You sometimes worried about money, but you walked in beauty. That sort of character is being winnowed out now. They’re moving to Talent and even further. Murray, our town’s beloved, longtime bagpiper, born here, part of the soul thing of Ashland, just moved away to Medford, where the homes are maybe half the price. He didn’t want to. It anguished him.
Down deep, the thing that’s terribly wrong with boomtown is that that spirit of place, that sweet demi-goddess, is being pinned down and ravaged for what she once gave generously. And she misses the sound of bagpipes in the hills. ~
Motion Detectors in the Mountains
I never would have done this alone, this endless trekking of the hills of Jeffersonia, this loving of the long upsweeps of ranges, this frequent pausing, seemingly to catch the breath, but really to catch the moment, to hear nothing but my inhales and the crazy melody of meadowlarks, to kiss the sky, to impress on my mind the lay of the hills and to imagine what created and carved them.
I had to find someone to do this with and I did. It had to be someone who didn’t do it to stay in shape or walk the dogs, but who had to just be out here. Our first date was to hike, but wine got in the way. Soon after that, though, she showed me the many trails through the forests above Ashland and I showed her the trackless dry hills of clay and starthistle, the few scattered cows and abandoned car fenders from the 1930s, shot full of holes and the millions of river rocks rounded and deposited way up there by some long-gone river a million years ago. And the silence.
It’s not so much the sweep and quiet of the hills that’s startling, but of the mind. It seems rude, almost embarrassing to think out here or, certainly, to think the repetitive worry and regret – the voices in my head -- that pass for thought in the trance of the well-adjusted human mind.
Not long ago, I was talking to the women crew team at Immigrant Lake, itching to get into the wind and choppy water of January and two of them tell me they love it in part because they get out of that left brain, the one that plans, controls and runs everything. One says, “everything in my mind just vanishes” and you’re doing this magical motion with others whose minds are in that magical place – empty and yet full. I want to go with them and do that. It’s not exercise; it’s a near-shamanic discipline, a ritual journey to a place in the mind, one so many of us are taking now, biking, fencing, running on the treadmill at the Y – or walking the lotus-diamond, sky-kissing slopes of Grizzly Peak.
At he furthest extent of our trek, we sit in silence. Letting the mind empty is like driving out of a city, starting downtown, with brazen horns blasting, then moving through bland suburbs, then pleasant farms and on out into the great Is, the suchness of here. And, coming back into the town of the mind, I’ve dreamed up a new practice, a happiness meditation, where I think only on the beauty and pleasure I’ve known or might know and bathe myself in it. It’s quite a strange discipline, so drunk are we on anxiety, but I think I’m getting used to it.
One old trail, near the edge of town, we will walk no more. Recently, someone built a new home and put a double wire fence across it. When we approached, a motion-detector sent an alarm crying through the hills. The man came out to explain: it was because of the few, who ruin it for the many. But of course it is. The man didn’t know about us Oregonians, who’ve been using the trail for generations. He didn’t know that people who hike, if they have those thoughts at all, don’t carry them on their hike.
But let him pee his perimeters and spend a thousand or so – more than any vandal would have cost him – to secure them. It’s the city creeping higher now, the thing of boundaries, locks and lawyers and not wanting to see who’s out there on the trail and to stop and talk to them about the meadowlarks and the big fire season headed our way. I wanted to return his suspicion and resentment and did, but only in my mind. Then I got tired of it. And I realized, gee, I’m in the city and this is what it does, eventually. This is why I’m trekking further and further out, where someone comes but once a decade and kicks the old, blue ’38 Chevy fender laying by the strange pile of lava rocks. The city won’t come out here, will it? The man won’t put a motion detector on my mountain, will he?
We sit by the lava pile, eating our fruit and yogurt in the late winter sun and drawing the rocks, trees and clouds in our fat sketch book with the Celtic loops on the green leather cover. “This is livin,” she says, cracking a grin. “Shall we claim this mountain?” I say, echoing the 16th century explorers. “Why yes, let’s,” she answers. More than anyone who owns this land, we live here. We walk it for an hour or two a day. We never see anyone else here. The cows know us and don’t even look up. The landowners let us trek their land, as long as they can see our faces once and hear our names. I think they realize that, while the owner of a city lot may have the right to bogart his boundaries, the owner of mountains, plains and rivers does not. You can’t buy the world.
Our impulse, of course is to buy this land. If you love something, buy it – that’s what’s in the mind. But we could never break this land and put up foundations, framing, plumbing, wires. Then we would be here – and we, like all humans require infrastructure. I won’t do that. But in these hills, for an hour or two, we can walk lightly and in beauty. ~
A Field of Burning SUVs
Water is not falling into our world much this winter and spring. There will be fires and smoky skies, maybe all summer. Drought is leaving the Applegate River at one-fifth normal and looking like its old self, flowing in its ancient banks across the muddy bottom of dam-created Applegate Lake.
Water isn’t flowing enough in the Klamath watershed to allow both farmers and salmon to survive, so the feds chose farmers. Then a judge said, ‘scuse me, but farmers won’t die if they go broke farming, but fish without water will die, maybe forever. The enraged farmers are demonstrating with signs.
It’s getting warmer all over the world and it’s because of us. We’ve established that as fact now, but we’ve never warmed the globe before and we don’t know what it means. It’s human nature to plunge onward and find out, so we are. We understand we’re rolling the dice on our survival by continuing to drive everywhere – to pick up the kids, to go get a newspaper and coffee and, most ironically, to go exercise at the gym. I want my SUV, we whine. That vehicle is a hybrid Caddy-Jeep, a statement, a shout that, hey, I’m riding in a very large pile of metal, two feet higher than you, I’m sorta outdoorsy and – oh, I can afford 10-12 miles a gallon.
In recent months, Oregon, this cradle of Wobblies, pot-farmers and petition-pushing gay bashers again established itself at the fringe when radicals burned a car lot full of SUVs in Eugene, leaving a note explaining that Earth didn’t appreciate these resource-guzzling chariots. They, of course, know what Earth thinks, just as fundamentalists on the other end of the spectrum have always known what God thinks.
Behaving as if he were elected by a majority of Americans, George W. each week rolls back something environmental, deleting Clinton wilderness areas, blowing off arsenic restrictions in drinking water, halving the solar energy development budget, getting rid of stricter energy standards for home appliances and going after gas under the Arctic Wildlife refuge. He brings to mind that earlier Texan in the White House who also looked at decision-making as an instinctive, macho activity – hey, stand back fellas, we ain’t gonna let no dang environment push us around, we got energy to mine and profits to make, so let ‘er buck.
The other night, Discovery channel runs an innocuous-sounding show on what causes Ice Ages. We humans have lived through dozens of ice ages and, as every school child knows, we’ve been in an “interglacial period” for 10,000 years. What’s stunning to realize is that all civilization, every house, wall, bridge, town, city, library, temple, stonehenge, all of it, has been constructed during the present interglacial and, looking at it with cold logic, it will all be ground to dust, down to about the middle of the U.S. and Europe under the next mile-deep glacier.
Not troubled yet? Discovery goes on to point out that the North Atlantic current brings warm water from the tropics to polar regions, keeping ice at bay and that reversal of this current triggers ice ages. Global warming could well reverse that current and do the ice thing again. Discovery then points out that glaciers don’t happen with glacier-like slowness; they get into full bloom within a single human lifetime. But, instead of worrying about every little red flag being waved by tree-hugging nervous nellies, let’s just announce we won’t sign the Kyoto treaty rolling back greenhouse gas emissions because, hey, them dang underdeveloped countries get to spew all the gases they want and they ain’t signing diddly.
But enough of this globalness. Let us shift to thinking locally. Back in the 1930s, an Ashland pioneer named Perozzi gave 40 acres of wooded foothills to the old Normal School. They never did much with it. But when zooming real estate values made it worth almost a mil, they finally could think of something to do with it. The City tried to buy it for hikers and wildlife and to protect the watershed, from which we get all our water, but they could only come up with maybe a third of its market value. Meanwhile, a developer waved an $890,000 check under the school’s nose and by gosh, they took it.
How did the student body react to this? Activists have become feisty in recent years, protesting possible use of underpaid labor in making school sweatshirts 10,000 miles away in Asia, but they uttered not a peep about this event in the hills right there behind the school. We’ll never know, but it’s very likely that Mr. Perozzi, the man who gave Perozzi fountain to this city, willed his land to the school because he appreciated the nature up there and saw this school full of cultured people as the ones least likely to commercialize it. But times are tough and a mil is a mighty juicy chunk of change, so let ‘er sprawl.
But enough of the political. Let us shift to the personal, where my son Colin stands in the kitchen practicing his oral report on John Muir, noting that Muir once carried bushels of wildflowers from the Sierras down to San Francisco. The people dwelling in the “crowded noise and filth” of the City had never seen them and begged to touch and smell them. We clapped. I love stories like that. He said, dad, you remind me of John Muir. You even have the same name. I put his compliment in some shrine in the back of my mind and will reflect on it sometime in the last hours of my life. Yes, I’m a bit like Muir. I often write to bring “the tidings of the mountains” and also my words, my wildflowers to the city -- but mine, in 2001, do not smell as sweet. ~
I Admit It: I’m Afraid
I was doing a story on the proposed commuter rail between Ashland and Grants Pass and it started out as a story about, gee, a neat, sensible step forward in human progress and what fun it is to ride a train, but soon, as more and more people talked about it, the story shifted. It became a story about The Issue.
It became our story, everyone’s story, the number one story, the story underlying so many stories today and, to use the nice word, it’s called growth. It’s not raccoons that are growing or trees or birds or grass or ants; it’s only us – and we’re doing it furiously and heedlessly. The commuter rail is a model of The Issue. The rail will help get people out of their cars and lessen the need for more freeways, congestion and parking structures. But the train isn’t quite needed yet, because it’s not sprawled and congested enough yet, you see, but we all know it will be in five or 10 years and we’re doing nothing to stop it – only to direct it, if possible.
“The Rogue Valley is one of the fastest growing areas of the state,” said interviewee Ed Immel, ODOT rail planner in Salem. “You’re going to have a whole lot more people, cars and congestion. It’s on everyone’s minds. It’s like a big wave coming behind you.” And I thought, ok, when that comes, I’ll fly away to where this hasn’t happened yet. But then I remember, everything’s connected and it’s happening everywhere.
We don’t get it, we humans, we beings of supposedly higher intelligence. Nature governs all creatures, except us, so they don’t overrun the world with sheer numbers, causing the collapse of the environment which sustains them. Our intelligence allows us to escape this. Should we call it intelligence, then? We should probably conclude that the sort of intelligence we have, while really excellent for thinking up cool technology and reflecting on the meaning of life, is actually a liability as a survival trait.
We lack a sense of restraint and balance. We’re voracious. We sometimes tell ourselves this is a Western man thing and that tribal folk weren’t like this. They lived in harmony with nature. But now comes a University of California study showing the original Americans, on arrival here 13,000 years ago found mammoths, camels, giant armadillos, giant ground sloths, large-horned bison, oxen and many other megafauna and within 1,000 years wiped them all out. With no prey, sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves died, too.
So, it’s all of us. We’re the problem. We have to change. And any strategy that doesn’t start there, won’t work. I don’t think I’m imagining it – that in the past few years there’s been a serious uptick in the number of people feeling really apprehensive, ok, afraid about what’s going to happen to the world, to us, to our kids, to nature, to the whole thing, and we’re talking not in the next couple centuries, but in the next one generation. She who bats last has stepped up to the plate.
We watch all the pundit interruption-fests on tv and we hardly see anything about all this. Are we really supposed to believe society’s agenda should be drug abuse, missile shields and health care, the latter with a goal of helping more humans live longer while tens of thousands of species disappear annually under our footprint?
We’re in serious denial about all this. Even people who do see the whole picture don’t say that much about it. No politician ever says the word: population. It’s not cool to get wild-eyed at the office or a party and say, hey people, I’m getting really freaked out about what’s going to happen to civilization and the planet, what with global warming, not even to mention the mass extinctions going on (most in 250 million years) or the pollution or the plain old disappearance of space.
Is anyone else freaked out or is it just me? Please give me a reality check and if I’m out of line, I’ll just go crack a Bud and watch tv, that vast, peppy, colorful digital mood pill that mirrors our culture by telling me no such danger exists and I should eagerly continue my self-absorbed “good greed” and continue believing the world is mainly about sex and crime, which, respectively, should lure and terrify me. If only crime were all we had to fear. It almost makes you nostalgic.
But once in a while, like when Bill Moyers did his “Earth on the Edge,” special the other night, we get the straight story. Is the planet going down the tubes? Why yes, it is, say all the respectable scientists from the prestigious institutions. Should we wait till it gets undeniably out of control before we get organized and change our ways? No, they all said, if we wait till we have proof of our misdeeds and life is really uncomfortable, then it’ll be far too late. We can only stop it if we give it all we’ve got starting yesterday.
Moyers modeled survival scenarios now in place and working. In British Columbia, loggers, environmentalists and First Nation members give up their self-righteous battles with each other, sit down and hammer out a plan for selective logging of old growth that allows sustainable woodlands and streams. My jaw dropped. This has to happen: timber interests admit the environment exists; environmentalists admit the economy exists; both admit the existence of a people before them who lived in a sustainable world. Now let’s move forward. Please. I’m afraid. ~
Who We Are at Burning Man Is Who We Are
You have to ask yourself why anyone would pay $225 to spend a week walking around naked or in colorful costumes, suffering intense heat, dust storms and desert dryness, guzzling at free cocktail parties, getting ripped out of their gourds on psychedelics, dancing at raves all night, exploring some of the most amazing sculpture you ever saw and trying to subsist in a cashless economy with 30,000 people who are usually trying to give you things but feel insulted if you pull out money.
They come every August to Burning Man – billed as “the biggest party on Earth” – for lots of reasons but the one you hear most is to get away. You can’t get away anywhere else on the planet. No matter where you go, you’re still here, you’re dressed, you’re acting sane and grownup and you’re pulling out your credit card. In fact, if you think about it, almost everything you do away from home and friends is defined in some way by money transaction.
That – not so much the drugs, art, freedom, nudity – is what everyone’s really here for. They talk a lot about a new kind of world where we simply are not living for money and organizing our every thought, action, work, home and most relationships around money, a bigger home and our kids’ college fund. Actually, they’re not talking much about it. They’re just doing it.
The only things you can buy here are coffee and ice. Believe me, you need lots of both. The joke on Burning Man radio (yes, they have their own radio!) is that the four elements are earth, fire, air and coffee. Everything else is within the barter and gift economy. We’re sitting out under our big awning (an essential thing) sipping tequila and a bunch of people waltz by with silver platters, handing out tapas goodies. Bill Kauth, creator of the New Warriors said his favorite moment was limping across the Playa in a dust storm, when from out of nowhere comes a French maid in fishnet stockings offering a plate of snow peas and carrots.
Kauth said he’d been walking around with a grin for four days. “All I can say is it’s unbelievable, amazing and incredible. This is a serious ordeal in the desert and yet we’re surrounded in every direction by magical art. It showed me it’s possible for tens of thousands of people to come together and create community with no commerce – no buying and selling. There’s a level of freedom here not found anywhere in the world.”
Reine Mcintrye of Ashland said she goes for the art and the community of like-minded people. “I also love the burning of the Man and the temple the day after. It’s a real primal feeling of connection with the earth and the people around you. What I come away with is a hope for humanity, that people can work and live together in a place that’s not judgmental and just lets people be who they are.”
Survival, both physical and psychological, is majorly in your face every moment. You’re just not used to this. What the Burning Man people provide is the vast, baked playa – so dead there’s not a single fly, bug or sprig of any plant. And they give you clean potties with toilet paper. The rest is up to you and the generosity of strangers. Very relaxed, friendly strangers who, for one week, just want to be left alone to be who they think they really are: happy, peaceful, loving people who don’t leap out of bed each morning, frantic to make another day’s pay so they can have all their “stuff.”
“It fills a void in ways you don’t get in ordinary society,” said Greg Goebelt, Southern Oregon organizer for Burning Man. “It offers unabashed freedom to be wild, have no identity and do as you please, while harming none. The freedom makes you ask, why am I living by all these rules? It asks you to be more genuine about who you are. The survival challenge beats you down to the raw essence of who you are. And, while it’s hard, you find yourself giving more -- and the more you give, the more you get.”
There’s no running water. Anywhere. What you bring, about 1.5 gallons a day, is what you have to live on. There are no showers. But a water truck sprinkles the great, semi-circular arc of streets once a day and people, screaming with delight, rip off their clothes (or not) and run behind it, rubbing off scum, salt and sweat.
The nights are cool and amazingly starry (no big towns within hundreds of miles), but when the sun cracks over the mountains, you’ve got about an hour to hike and bike before you bake. Most people sleep in the heat of the afternoon. So they can party all night. The drums go till dawn and, after the dust, that’s the thing you remember about the place – the drumbeat. It’s a real neo-pagan community and it throbs like one.
“It’s a powerful, magical place,” said Ann Eibner of Talent, Ore. “Each person feels the unspoken energy that exists there – it’s spiritual -- and each person connects with it in their own way and wants to learn something.”
“It’s a reminder that there’s more to humanity – more ways of living, ideas, adventures -- than what society has to offer,” said John Safay of Ashland, “and we have to remember not to use the limits of society as our own limits.”
The sex and drugs are out in the open – just being the fact of life they really are. It’s like Amsterdam times 50. Less than 5 percent of Burners are naked at any given time, but it seems like a lot more than that, because, well, it quickly feels like that’s the way life should be. Who cares? Take your clothes off if you want. And drugs are kept private. Anyway, in this outlandish environment, how would you know if someone were tripping? And, again, who cares? As Goebelt mentioned, the drug-alcohol use is about the same as in any bar. It’s life. It’s not going away. Live it.
“The sex and drugs are very cathartic for a society as repressed as ours,” said John Miller of Ashland. “You get to purge a lot of repression and over-reaction that we absorb over many years.”
“It’s a big part of the freedom,” said Kauth. “You get to experiment with what’s in your Shadow. With nudity, we act out what’s dysfunctional in the repressed part of our consciousness. To me, it was all playful. I saw no acting out.”
In real or “default” society, as Eibner called it, you can’t get away from “it.” Well, you also can’t get away from this, either – this dusty, cheesy Calcutta, crammed with expensive cars, tents, campers and laced with visionary, loopy, trippy, sacred, hilarious structures, flame-belching “art cars,” domes, an altar (to what? To everything and anything – everyone leaves something) (you see people deeply moved, weeping there!), a bar inside a giant shark, a neon labyrinth, cardboard temples of stunning beauty, with minarets, a huge pirate ship on wheels, a zen altar radiating peace and everywhere at night, legions of fire dancers twirling their balls of flame.
The Burning Man, a sculpture of a standing human looking to be about eight stories high, is tricked out with blue neon and set atop an Aztec pyramid. He’s an echo of an ancient pagan ritual, the burning of the wicker man, stuffed at year’s end with sacrifices and sorrows of the past. “Burners” leave letters, pictures, objects or wishes that need letting go of.
At night on the Playa, you get a quick psychic reading from any of 16 seers perched in little gabled windows about the pyramid, then you climb to the top and gaze about this vast central area, mostly empty, except for fire dancers, fiery art cars, electronic pulses of light racing along fiber optic wires for miles. This is not my planet, you think, alternately with ok, this, finally IS my planet. In fact, when you arrive, people hug you and say, welcome home.
Hundreds of classes and events are held – body painting, speed dating, tickle healing, twister, ray gun battles, bingo, bare-breasted bicycling, s’mores under the stars, pedicure party, costume help, virgin sacrifice (?) and of course, yoga. The yoga folk gather in Center Camp each morning, doing their stretching under the open dome while hundreds scarf lattes and mochas and begin to wake up to the idea that they’ve survived another day at Burning Man.
It’s all intense. It’s going to affect you. I saw veterans of many Burning Mans struggling with it. There were times I wanted to run. More than once, I pondered ways to escape this zoo, but had to face myself and ask, ok, what exactly is it about all this that gets to me any more than, say, Christmas shopping at the mall or waiting at a Big Y traffic light?
The ego squirms and you want to pull out your credit card and purchase something, achieve something, shout out your occupation and awards, maybe show a picture of your home and kids – but no one cares. They don’t even let you bring your dog to stare into your eyes and affirm your importance. That’s all gone and life just is. I ended up going up with naked skydiving ladies, leaping out of a KingAir, which they dove wildly toward the earth and pulled up into a parabolic arc, giving us half a minute of sheer weightlessness.
There are lots of sofa-lined “chill rooms” to escape it for a while. But Burning Man offers no escape from “reality,” however you define it. It’s a journey that takes you deeper into your reality. Who are you? What would you do if you could re-make the world? Or just your world? Like you see it remade around you. All the reference points are pulled out. You try to keep to your diet but you can’t. You’re not getting enough carbs and fats, but you’re getting enough caffeine. As a sign by the road said: if you’re not living near the edge, you’re taking up too much space.
Miller said, “It challenged me on a whole bunch of levels to engage my deep-seated fears and open myself to a real sense of freedom and love – to open myself to exactly what I am and to love openly instead of live behind this citizen mask.”
If you stay with it, you start to surrender, not just to Burning Man, but to the fact that existence is huge – and we’ve chosen to live only in a comfy sliver of it, even the most liberal of us. This means I’m as free in the default society as I am here to imagine the world that wants to come. I can change the world, you start to think.
When you’ve finally got it (sort of) handled, on the last night (for the 17th year in a row), they burn the Man. I just wasn’t prepared for the impact. There’s something in the collective unconscious that responds to the intentional, ritual burning of a human shape. He’d just been built earlier in the week. We’d grown an affection for him. Now he stood in flames, then toppled over backwards as screams swept the playa and tornados of fire pirouetted about the pyramid.
A cry escaped from me. Ok, I get it. Life flies. Give it your heart. I spoke: here, take this and burn it, too -- my fear, conformity, judgments, self-importance, my drudgery-for-money, my passing by a stranger without smiling, my wanting to be safe and not dream a newer world, my indulging in having a bad day when surrounded by such wonder and possibility. This Burning Man is a puzzle, a rubix cube, a mirror of the human heart. Burning Man is me. ~
The Species That Ate Itself
Lush, weedless, well-trimmed lawns are lovely things, right? Actually, you won’t think so if you hear Tal Blankenship, next time he lectures about the L-word (lawn) and the evils done by this flat, monochromatic monocrop, which is really an extension of man’s age-old, misguided mission to go forth, multiply and dominate nature.
Lawn is the Agricultural Revolution in miniature. As Daniel Quinn deftly points out in his novels Ishmael and The Story of B, our creation 10k years ago of “totalitarian agriculture” defines our core beliefs: 1) all food belongs to us, 2) only humans have the right, not just to compete with other species, but to eliminate them and to destroy their food supplies, 3) to the extent we can produce more food, we have the right to multiply as we wish and 4) we are made in God’s image and he created us to do this – even though simple math shows that within two generations, at most, such radical man-centric practices will eliminate all species except us, dogs, cats, chickens, cows, pigs, rats and a few dozen crops that we like. Then, without an ecosystem, that whole house of cards will fall. We’ll be extinct.
Back to lawn. Tal, the horticulturist for the City of Grants Pass, says lawns must go. They take immense labor. You have to buy special, highly-polluting machines to mow them, one per house, no sharing now. You have to haul away the clippings and the leaves you rake off them, creating big landfill demands, transportation costs and pollution. You dump petrochemicals on lawns, which run into streams, causing algal blooms and creating anaerobic ecosystems, killing fish. Worse, anyone who “lets his yard go” is a bad neighbor.
Tal shows slides of new developments, where natural ecosystems are leveled and replaced with impeccable turf and store-bought, non-native “nice” plants. The fallout is that not one bug, bee, bird, snake, toad, possum – nothing, can live here. It’s a page torn from nature. It’s a desert and an expensive one. Down deep, it’s what it was to its inventors – the English aristocracy – a display of arrogant wealth and the ability to hire servants to care for it.
Think: lawn as world. How did we get here? How do we not see the madness? Pondering 10k years ago, why would man give up the freedom of the hills (three hours work a day, max) for sweat-of-brow, 12-hour days in the barnyard -- then go on to wipe out or forcibly convert thousands of other cultures who previously lived in harmony with nature?
With unflinching ken, Quinn shrinks the culture’s head – it’s about our spiritual-emotional hangups from wayyy back, which he teases out of our creation story in Eden (aka paradise). We wanted to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and become as gods, so that we, not the gods, have the power to decide who lives and dies.
Going over nature head always brings unforseen outcomes: The surpluses of radical farming made cities possible and de-tribalized us, isolating us in expensive wooden boxes, one per family, no sharing now, cut us off from the ground of our spiritual being and opened us to crushing anxiety and depression.
The big payoff is that we think we’re exempt from that whole nasty death thing, at least until, after 85 to 95 years of life (now shooting for 100 to 120), we’ve exhausted the earth with our presence and keel over from sheer, drooling boredom.
This is not pretty stuff. We believe mankind, with its wily, seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, will keep inventing ways to save another day – just like we won the west, tamed the wilds, made the world safe for democracy, triumphed over crippling disease, on and on, thus living out another central cultural mythos – that we can and should keep reinventing ourselves to cope with each major malfunction that flows directly out of who we are in the first place: one of only two organisms on earth that grows without reason until it eventually destroys its support system. (The other one starts with a C – and guess what its favorite food is?)
We, living outside the web of life, are always just a step ahead of the devil, aren’t we? But ya gotta love our pluck. It’ll work out. It’s all for the best. The power of prayer. Count on a miracle. Keep smilin’ on! Where there’s a will, there’s a way. These folk palliatives (rationalizations) reveal that we think it’s all about mind -- our mind – and that we’re exempt from the harmony and interdependency of nature that applies to all other species.
If you’re going to complain about a problem, you should offer a solution, right? Quinn doesn’t give us much. So let’s take a go at it. Thank you for not breeding. Not much, anyway. Let’s question our mania with life extension, while we practice life contraction for all other species. It’s nice we’re eating better, exercising more and smoking less, but it’s just making us live longer. Why do we want to live to 90? Almost all the good stuff happens before three-score-and-ten, so let’s focus on quality, not quantity. Let’s burn bright while we have something to burn.
Let’s recognize the work ethic as the central, insidious component of totalitarian agriculture and the engine of our ill-advised rebellion against the gods and the balance of nature. Let’s get back to more of what we’re best at and what we did for millions of years, as we evolved into who we really are -- laying around doing fun things most of the time, like playing with the kids, telling stories, making music, feasting, having sex and sleeping.
Let’s recognize that birth and death are equally natural and beautiful and stop treating our passing back into spirit like some disease to be conquered. Let’s consider the possiblity (as proclaimed by all spiritual gurus I know of) that the spiritual world is at least as good if not better than this one and is our “true home.”
Let’s stop politely refusing to discuss population, as if it were some dread, negative topic. Let’s face the music and click on the world population clock -- www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html -- which adds about a dozen people every three seconds it takes to renew my internet window. Let’s do a meditation of clicking the renew button on the popclock and appreciate that while human babies are the most darling thing in the world, they’re actually going to destroy it. We still have a chance, but only if we cut our numbers significantly, very significantly, before nature does it for us. And don’t doubt she will. ~
Seeing the World as Food
An email from a friend the other day has this saying: “Health is just the slowest way of dying.” What’s it trying to say? That half of Americans pig out and vedge out while the other half spends tons of money on organic food, supplements and fitness centers so they can be old a lot longer.
Then I watched Black Hawk Down, a sick, violent action film which I enjoyed and which had this Somali militia officer offering a U.S. chopper pilot (a prisoner) a cigarette. The pilot refuses, even though he’s likely to die of injuries or be shot soon. The militia guy sneers – oh that’s right, you Americans want to be healthy and live really long, boring lives.
What’s this Somali guy (the American soldiers called them “skinnies”) saying? It sounds like he knew he would live to be 50 if he were lucky, not even old enough to get his AARP card, and that his years would be filled with passions, like defending his country against Americans armed 100 times better than he is. And that he knew he was a man and was going to enjoy a good smoke in the meanwhile.
At the same time this month, National Geographic does a cover story asking: Why Are We So Fat? The cover pic is an aerial photo <g> of the billowing love handles of a typical American, not unlike that often seen pushing overflowing cart at Costco. The story shows a pie chart of how we eat a lot more than a generation ago. Why? Why do we watch a lot more tv, work a lot more, take a lot more meds for depression and sex, drive a lot bigger cars (SUV as totem of body image) and get in a lot more wars?
But then I do a story on Ayurvedic cooking with Kumud Gokani of Ashland, who says this 5,000 year old tradition is about eating ordinary, good food, stuff like rice pilaf, and it’s built around basics like whole milk, yogurt, ghee (clarified butter), honey and crystallized sugar. She makes lunch for me and, augmented with a “jewel box” of spices, I find it amazingly delicious. My body all but yells thank you, thank you!
This way of eating, which allows no supplements, will clear up all our Western ills – diabetes, lupus, asthma – restore natural health in a few weeks and give you back the slim body you were born with, she says.
My body says I should believe her. This wisdom, she adds, does not come from the study of cell metabolism, hormones, carbs, amino acids and all that science, but rather from the deep meditations of Vedic sages 5,000 years ago in India. Again, I not only believe it – I can feel it.
Last year I got in a men’s group, comprised mostly of guys becoming single again after many years. Most of us report that, left to own devices, we’ve reverted to something like a state of nature – something akin to hunting and gathering -- eating yogurt, fruit, salads, pita with hummus, sprouts, carrots, pots of rice-beans-veggies, a lot less meat, if any, rarely any prepared foods, little desire for the full Monte restaurant fare and, yes, the occasional cigarette.
What to make of this? We’re eating a lot less, maybe a third or half as much. That alone seems to have balanced our health. We’re sick a lot less, if ever. We watch less tv, take longer walks, read more, are able to just “be” without cravings. What this sounds like is breaking a culture-wide cycle of addictions that seems based around food – whether fatty-unhealthy-foolish on one extreme or organic-expensive-wise on the other.
We’re not stuffing our tubes or anything else. We no longer believe we have to study and manage our diets and eat three squares. It just comes naturally, in foraging and listening to what our bodies really want. And a junk food meal once a week satisfies the devil.
This shift – and it’s happening with a lot of people – is a shift away from what Daniel Quinn nailed in his Ishmael books, that we’re now evolving up out of our 10,000 year episode of “Totalitarian Agriculture,” in which we viewed all food as our food and granted ourselves the right to deny any and all other species their food, a process that allowed us, in a mad, addictive spree, to overrun the world.
It also forced us to get a wee tad pudgy and work 40-60 hours a week, about four times what we worked when we lived in harmony with nature, before we viewed it as just resources and food. ~
A Woodpecker Forecasts the Nation’s Fate
After a long, sunny autumn, the winter rains are back, settling the dust and decomposed granite pebbles of the trails that lace the hills around the Loop Road. So many people say they love the return of the rains and love to hike in the mist and drizzle. It’s a taste, a subtle one, that grows more delicious with the years.
I never knew or cared about the trails, most of them named after Alice in Wonderland characters, until someone turned me onto them five years ago. Why did she love them and walk them every day? Sanity, she said. I must agree. They enforce that.
I plan my day around the moment when I can best escape to the top of Park, Mountain, Morton, Terrace or Granite and set my sneakers on those paths, dropping into a meditation where I alternately watch my thoughts with bemused detachment or encourage them to passionate expression.
The best trails don’t even have names, but seem like overgrown little raccoon trails slipping off the sides of the Loop Road or White Rabbit. Take them. They give you the best workout and you won’t get lost. They all go somewhere. With time, a map of the whole system forms in your head.
That one trail between the Loop and Waterline, about three-fourths of the way up, has a huge boulder, flat on top, just perfect for a warm summer afternoon’s repast or, as Omar Khayyam would put it: “Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough, a flask of wine, a book of verse and thou, beside me singing in the wilderness – and wilderness is paradise enow (enough).”
The city made signs and maps of these trails, but the nice thing is – the city didn’t make these trails. In Angus Bowmer’s book, he hiked them in the 1930s and you have to suspect they were there long before, made by the natives – human and animal, meaning most of them go back thousands of years.
In several spots, large boulders form curious arrangements one can only take as sacred spots that invite one to pause and take in their glad tidings, as John Muir would put it. On the trails, you rarely get a glimpse of the city, though you’re right next to it. Dogs I’ve had grow to love the trails, whimpering with delight the moment the car begins to angle up toward the hills.
You get to know each bend of the trail and the large or strange or lovely trees. In the winter, you become familiar with the gang of turkey vultures that haunt the Loop ridge, standing on top branches, looking like sacred denizens of some parallel dimension with huge wings outspread, drying off the dew in the rising sun.
The city and Forest Service manage the trails now, sometimes closing off a favorite one and piling gobs of manzanitas on its entrance – such as the wonderful trail dropping down to the reservoir from Four Corners (intersection of Loop and Toothpick). You can still hike it, though. Another trail from Four Corners goes to a big cave. Go the other way up from Four Corners and, atop a small hill, you find a stone medicine wheel and a great view of Mt. Pitt volcano to the east.
Landowners sometimes assert their right to close trails, such as the one along the ditch above Granite (installed a motion detector and alarm, they did, after building their trophy home) or the end of Waterline at Clay Creek, where the owners put up all sorts of metallic obstacles and smeared them with lube grease, so you’d get all messy if you tried to get through. An alternate route was carved out, though, reaching the lovely little creek, which invites you, especially in summer, to waste many an hour with the verse, wine, thou.
It’s almost instinctive to invite a friend or date on the trails. As in poker, you really get to know someone watching them hike. Some find the steepness daunting. Or the darkness. There’s not a lot of sky there. Some are bothered by the aimlessness of the whole practice and, feeling the pull of voicemail, email and lists of “things to do today,” will actually look at their watch, wondering when they might get back to it.
It snows up there. That’s real nice. You stop and listen to the noiseless noise of hundreds of little fluffs of it falling from branches. I’ve noticed too that the woods are interactive. If you have a question on your mind, just ask for a sign. You’ll get one. The other day I stopped at what I consider a sacred arrangement of huge stones, with one standing stone, obviously placed there by a human (me) and asked for a sign IF the better candidate for president were going to win, i.e., the one least likely to get us into wars, deficits and ravaging of lovely glades like this one.
I walked on. I knew a sign would come. A sign is not a siren or someone passing me on the trail, unless they say something to a friend and it had a meaning appropriate to my question. A sign has to be vivid, unusual. It can be a sudden gust of wind when there has been no wind. Hawks and vultures qualify, depending on the circles they make and the direction they go to. In answer to this question, a woodpecker vigorously laced into a branch just over my head, as I passed under it. I took that as a yes. ~
Global Warming: It’s Like High-Fiber Cereal
A three-day blow has set in, long enough for people to wonder and comment on how unusual it is. Fires are set in the fireplace, music put on, mulled wine quaffed, this after the daily hike up the Loop and down the ridge, stopping to sit on our little stumps overlooking the watershed. The falling water sounds to the ear as it looks to the eye, a rustling gray curtain. We sit there till we lose all our judgments about it – nasty day, foul weather, hope it ends soon.
But it’s not ending. And one is put in mind of the comments of Angus Duncan, chief of Bonneville Environmental Foundation, at one of the university’s fascinating series on the environment, sustainability, global warming and the impact on society. It’s going to get a lot wetter, with a lot more falling as rain, not snow, so there won’t be as much water from snowpack in summer and farmers will be competing even more with salmon, who need it to spawn at that time.
He apologizes for standing up there delivering “a list of dismal trends” whose solutions are like forcing down high-fiber cereal that’s good for you but so boring you soon give it up. Everyone laughs. They used to be in the future, all these dismal trends, but now they’re starting to be in our face, like Katrina.
Ah, but she’s in the Gulf, not here. That’s another piece of human nature, he says, the belief that the bad stuff happens somewhere else, to poorer people, like in Pakistan with 73,000 dead, the equivalent of 24 Trade Tower attacks, or the tsunami with a quarter million killed, which is like 9/11 times 250.
With global warming, Duncan says, there’ll be bigger Pacific storms with surges going into our coastal cities, right here in Oregon. In fact, he adds, “global warming will overwhelm every problem we have and threaten the livability of the planet.”
This Duncan is not the bearded guy from your local environmental group with a forest name, like River, who blocks bulldozers in wilderness areas. This is the suit-wearing man from Bonneville, you know, the power people, the ones who dammed the Columbia and make our lights turn on in Ashland.
So I ask him, look, I’m tired of listening to excitable, angry local Chicken Littles who guarantee me the sky is falling and we’re running out of oil and will be out there like Scarlett O’Harra digging that last miserable carrot out of the ground and swearing, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!”
So, Angus, will we go hungry? Is the oil running out? Yes, but what no one wants to hear is that we have immense gobs of easily gasified or liquefied coal, you know, that dirty black stuff you get by strip-mining and which spews sulphur dioxide in the air, causing acid rain, birth defects and dead rivers. Well, we wouldn’t use that, would we?
Yes, he says, it’d be a lot more expensive than oil, but we will use it. Within days, I see full page magazine ads of lovely meadows dappled by a setting sun, suggesting coal is the energy of the future. Well, gee, as long as it comes with nice sunsets and you cover the strip mining with wildflowers.
But at least we don’t have that dirty, carbon-based stuff here in the Northwest, do we? We run on clean hydro, right? Well, we used to, a half century ago. Now, he says, Medford runs 85 percent on coal. You have got to be kidding. Where are the smokestacks? In Montana. They just send the energy here, on wires.
But enough of this high-fiber list of things that will overwhelm the world. We stroll First Friday artwalk, this huge cocktail party without cocktails, schmoozing old friends, tippling red in paper cups, enjoying the dusk over this perpetual Best Place (CNN, Money Magazine, again), stopping to see Craig Honeycutt’s amazing pencil art of our town, done Medieval style.
It’s still the place where dreams come true – and a lot faster than you may want them to, so be careful what you dream for. I mean really, here’s Neale Donald Walsch, now having a feature movie made of himself as he was years ago, homeless, with a broken neck, cadging a meal and writing the first lines of his “Conversations With God.” How many homeless people end up eating popcorn in a theater watching a handsome Hollywood leading man play themselves in our onetime poverty and despair? Does it only happen here?
Every movie has to have a message, or at least they used to. I find myself asking Walsch, ok what’s the message of your movie? Samuel Goldwyn used to say if you want a message, go to Western Union. That was a telegraph company. Telegrams were like the first emails and you’d send one on very important occasions, for a lot of money.
Anyway, the message, says Walsch, is that God is saying to us, hey, you have no idea who you are. I pause. Ok, who are we? “One with everything” – and no, that’s not what you say when you order at Burger King. It’s us – we are one with everything, and once we start applying that to everything, he says, the world will take care of every problem we have. Better see the movie. The book’s probably better. You have longer to think, so you participate.
So, she’s raining a big one, starting to snow. I check the downtown webcam. There’s a parking spot in front of Bloomsbury’s Cafe. Hope it’s still there when I come for my latte. ~
Ashland – the Town that Always Says Yes
Be careful what you dream for, especially in Ashland. It’s often called a vortex, which means a powerfully turning spiral, sucking everything to its center. It does that. I don’t know why. Things manifest here. They do it in ways you don’t get to control. In the big cities, you control it, not here, not all the time.
The vortex says yes. That’s why everyone wants to be here. It also spirals out people who don’t want to have their thoughts and visions empowered in unpredictable ways. Not wanting that is actually a thought and vision. Ashland says yes. They move to Seattle and Portland. For the coffee and happenins’. And the control. Or the illusion of it. They say Ashland is too weird, too alternative, too white, too rich, but really, if people get blown out of here and end up in Talent and Medford, you’ll notice they’ve been dissing Ashland, especially around housing costs. So Ashland said yes. Yes, you can leave and go where it’s affordable, if that’s what’s up in your consciousness.
This place is a pressure cooker, a crucible, a front burner, especially around advancing your inner, spiritual life, your emotional evolution, your understand of the promise you made yourself before you were born. It’s great for lending energy to whatever belief system you want to set up. For now. But it won’t let you keep it for very long - a few years, maybe. You’ll notice the very energy of the vortex makes that system of yours evolve and change and soon it’s not working that great for you. The vortex makes you let go of it. What’s next? I don’t know. You walk, you hike the trails, you talk with your widening circle of friends. Soon it starts becoming more clear, the next arm of the spiral dance.
So what about all these people with money, who move here and drive up home prices, supposedly driving out all the regular folks, artists, seekers, writers? Well, they’re people too. They were called here. I came here in ’71 with about $28, got rich, got poor, got rich again. I’ll take rich. It was all air-money anyway, the kind you get with equity from the amazing accomplishment of buying instead of renting. The renters, I mean really, let’s hear the end of the bitching. You are where you need and want to be and, since the earth is running out of space for us all, we are being called on to invent new ways of living together, like we used to before the first couple said, “hey, I don’t want to live in the big, tribal house. I want my own space.” We’re retribalizing. We have to. And, truth be told, we want to.
I did a couple stories with Randy, the editor of this mag and every time I talk with him and the other homeless folk – well, gad, they’re not homeless, that’s such an epithet. They claim the town, the whole vortex as their home, actually the whole earth and when I talk to them, I am always amazed how de-stressed I feel. Really, these maximal vortex-dwellers ought to charge stressed-out real estate owners for consulting with them about the big picture, how they dwell in an energy pattern and have surrendered to it and have no bills at all and have found happiness on the minus-assets scale, so each year they can say, yup, now I’m worth minus $450,000, expanding by 25 percent a year, sure is a secure feeling to know that air-money is there for me when I want it.
We go to this prosperity seminar being shot at RVTV by a money guru and he asks, ok, what do you fear if you live your dreams and use money to subsidize them? Well, we could lose the money. What would happen then, he says. Well, you’d be out on the street. What would happen then? You would starve. What then? Well, you would die, of course. So fear of death underlies it all. But you won’t die. Randy and his clan are living as lilies of the field, yknow, the ones that don’t spin and reap, and he says he’s never skipped a meal and there’s so much food around and people always are sticking a ten or twenty in his pocket. And when I hear this I just relax. I breathe. I smile. I ask myself, who’s having more fun, Randy or me? I don’t know. I think Randy might be. ~
It’s a New Kind of Xmas
And I Really Mean that X
Arriving in the email was a “Happy Holidays” with a long consumer warning that this greeting should not be construed as referring to any particular holiday and the sender assumes no responsibility for matters that do not lend themselves to happy holidays, including, but not limited to, going within a mile of any shopping mall or using credit cards with interest rates in exelceis deo.
So the “Merry Christmas” greeting has left polite society, as have greeting cards or expecting teens to show up at most nuclear family events. They’re on the internet, watching DVDs or boarding on the mountain. The old question – what do you want for Christmas – is met with a request for your credit card number. They can surf a present and have it here tomorrow or the next day and you won’t have to fight the mall traffic and mania, which actually sounds like a good deal.
They’re not even that excited about getting the presents, since they already have everything and they raise good money buying and selling on eBay. I’m not complaining. All this is taking the materialism out of Yule times. You email beloved friends and call them. You have Yule time parties, like the Solstice parties, getting more and more popular as the time decreed by nature for the darkness and the old year to let go and the days to get longer.
A plainly pagan event, the Solstice offers itself as a time for buffet dinner and mulled wine, the exchanging of enchanting presents, cherished and already in one’s home. It’s the night for the walking of a circle, honoring the four directions and elements, air, fire, water, earth, then walking to the center for the fifth element, spirit – and speaking our thanks for what we’ve learned in the past year and our longing and vision for what’s to come, as the days now grow longer, fuller and brighter, along with our wishes.
It’s kind of like group therapy, looking back on what we’ve been through – and so much of it with the people in this room. We get to be honest. This was hard, we say, and that was amazing and good and we’re better people for it. I hope I can say this again next year. I hope we’ll all be alive to say it next year – and to sip this warm red wine, spiced with nutmeg, cinnamon, lemons, tea, anise, ginger, honey, you name it. It’s the drink of the year’s longest night.
After Solstice, the days immediately seem to grow longer and warmer, seeming, if fact like spring. If this global warming keeps up, we’ll be having our Solstice parties at the lake, with water skiing. Another early Yule present arrives – the defeat of Alaska Sen. Stevens, stuffing the military spending bill with his ANWR drilling bill. Can you imagine an Oregon senator daring such a shameless tactic to get this state exploited for oil?
We drive up to Grants Pass to see their array, up and down the main drag, of these fiber-optic Christmas carol greeting cards, each ten feet high and singing a charming carol from the mid-20th century. They’re nostalgic and corny, but driving back, we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to singing the old medieval carols – funny how we can remember each lilt of the melody and most of the words – all of them celebrating, not the doctrines, hellfire or almighty this and that, but the sweet birth of a baby full of wisdom and love. We try to remember all the items gifted in the Twelve Days of Christmas song and have ourselves nigh in hysterics trying, as the list grows longer, to sing them.
We sometimes go over each line, marveling, like, “God, rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay.” Wow, don’t let anything get you depressed, because this holy child is sent “…to save us all from Satan’s power, when we were gone astray.” Nice tidings of comfort and joy. It really is all very sweet and personal in its origins and meanings and we wish it for the new year, somehow, though this leadership, with only 37 percent support remains bent on its dubious and violent course. It’s funny how we pray, not so much for peace as for the people to be enlightened enough to vote in people who genuinely have a vision of peace on earth. ~
The Wealth that Steals the Soul
It’s Sunday afternoon and an unusual hubbub signals something strange in these backyards five blocks above the library. A bear is walking along, nibbling trees, ambling across a tennis court, finally ending up in its favorite cherry tree, where, as a dozen neighbors gather only 20 feet away to snap future screensavers, it nibbles, scarce casting a glance at us.
A week later, about midnight, same area, I see what looks like litter and my car passes over it, but at the last second I see it’s an owl. I stop and walk back. The small bird is laying on its side in the road. Another car is coming, so I take owl up in my hands and move to the side of the road. It soon stands up, taking hold of a finger, and checks out its world. It seems like an adolescent, eight inches tall. In time, it flies up on a big limb ten feet from me and sits there for an hour, longer.
We “talk,” which means we hang out in the same space and I listen and keep looking at its beauty and my little world is full of importance, but I don’t think this creature has much to say about it. But he and the bear are definitely saying, folks, you’re in our environment and you leave a big footprint.
As the cougar has many times, the bear makes the news, but for what? The news is that the bear has been living, mating and dying in these hills for tens of thousands of years, like all the other animals. Bear goes in park, so shouts the news. Well, folks, she got there first, by many millennia. The real news is: humans get here, wipe out buffalo, wolf, grizzly, Indians, build urban thing, put up fences, force animals to cut new trails, put lots of yummy garbage by the curb every seven days.
A study of the cave art that went on in Europe for 20,000 years shows our distant ancestors painted animals almost exclusively – few representations of humans and none of gods. Talking about this, we wonder if humans saw that all possible attributes of the sacred – fast, fierce, graceful, determined, wise, loyal – were covered by all the animals. Whatever quality you could learn about or offer devotion to, there it was, galloping, flapping, swimming, crawling before your eyes in plentiful nature, in numbers vastly larger than human numbers. God R us, they said.
That’s reversed now and vast numbers of humans, living in an animal-phobic world, demonstrate the qualities – speed, power, wealth, importance, abundance, implacability, supposed wisdom, even global warming, if you want to stretch it – that we devote ourselves to in our gods.
Jenny, the cousin of an old friend, comes to erect her dome in my big backyard. She bicycles here, often towing her tiny daughter behind her in a two-wheeled cart. I once offered her a ride back up the hill. No, she says, “I’m strong.” She wants to leave the smallest carbon footprint possible.
At the Co-op juice bar, another woman says she’s looking for a place to put up her tipi and live. This is how most of us are going to be living in half a century, I can feel it. It’s how I started here three decades ago, in a tipi I made. But then came the lure of millions to be made in real estate and my whole generation bought it. But I’m tired with even the paperwork of it, which feels evil and is. I’m tired of this wealth that steals your soul. I loved waking up in that tipi to stir the embers and put twigs on the day’s new fire as the winter sun burst over the Siskiyous. I’m going back there. It’s not only good for the animals, it’s good for everything. ~
The Rogue – You Can Enjoy Her
But Never Own Her
If the Rogue were a symphony, she would start out as a playful flute, exploring the moss and fallen snags at Boundary Springs just west of Crater Lake Park, then thundering like trumpets down the narrow and violent Rogue Gorge, expanding like grand lord on his bassoon out into the broad Rogue Valley itself, then winding with violins and cellos through the wilds of Blossom Bar and the coast range, before bowing to and joining – soft kettle drums? – the vast Pacific.
You never tire of the Rogue. She could never belong to a big city – dirty, slow and submissive to garbage scows. She had to be here in Southwest Oregon, a minimum of 300 miles from those troubles. She had to have rafts, Tahitis and drift boats playing on her sleek back and fishermen snagging happy, proud steelhead out of her secret places.
And she had to be called the Rouge – a name given derisively to Indians (how dare they be willful, savage and free?) who wouldn’t come along quietly with the white man’s wishes.
So it is with the Rogue. They dammed her at Lost Creek, the Army did, creating a vast lake of the same name, where motorboats putter and salmon are farmed, where nature’s willful cycle of flooding is (fingers crossed) tamed to suit the white man – and they dammed her at the mostly gentle Applegate, but that Rogue willfulness arose in a new kind of settler who took the side of the fish, got the courts to agree and put a stop to the last dam, at Elk Creek. The dam near Grants Pass will fall soon, too and Savage Rapids will once again be that – savage.
The Rogue disdains contact with the “commercial center of the region,” as it’s always called (Medford), only sweeping by to the north at graceful Tou Velle Park. She holds her nose as fetid Bear Creek, bearing the wastes of said commercial center, dump into her -- and she’s ok with Grants Pass, permitting the crazy, loopy jet boats to do their power spins on her, but barring them further advance at Hellgate, a name to send shivers down spines and make neck hairs stand up tall.
Here, you enter into Zane Grey country, the spots where he fished, trekked with mules, built his cabin (still standing) and for years, drew inspiration for his million-selling Western novels. Above, the Rogue River trail winds among steep canyon walls, home to osprey, bald eagle, chinkapin oaks and hikers that stop at cheeky, brisk waterfalls to wonder if they can figure out a way never to go back to their desks.
Wide and exhausted by the downriver jetboats of Gold Beach, the Rogue empties out to the primal sea, like all life itself, to become one with the forces of renewal, which will evaporate her, make her snow on the great Cascade range, melt, and, once again, become that flute-like rivulet, tickling the canyon bottoms and joyfully and eternally being reborn as the Rogue – the river that lets man admire and enjoy her, but never takes him too seriously. ~
All About Our Bumpers
To you folks of the future, on the eve of the 22d century, as you go through our landfills trying to understand what all that stuff is, especially those stickers on the bumpers of all those cars we put there after the fossil fuels ran out. Let me explain:
“My Kid was Honor Student (at Wherever School) – This was just blatant, tasteless hogging of glory by parental gene pool members, which led to many a kid’s request to be dropped off a block from school so as to avoid a beating by non-honor students. It was appropriately countered with the bumper “My Kid Gave a Wedgie to Your Honor Student.”
“Nature Bats Last” – Well, nature probably has already batted by now. This meant we humans were screwing up the environment so bad that nature will probably get us back with global warming, a new plague or just sheer inability to feed us all. Right now, most everyone thinks that no matter what happens, we get more turns at bat. Did we?
“Marijuana – At Least It’s Not Crack!” -- Pot used to be illegal, even though just about everyone used it at some time. This slogan was a way of trying to make a distinction between really bad drugs like crack and more garden variety euphoriants like pot. I’m assuming the war on drugs is over? Oh, that war was about conservatives whipping up fear in voters about drugs (most drug users were Democrats) and putting lots of people in jail for using drugs, so that conservatives could stay in power and get big budgets for the war on drugs and keep drinking gin.
The Fish with letters inside it – That was the symbol of Christians, who were never shy about promoting their faith and thought everyone ought to have a chance to think like they do.
“I’m OK – You’re OK” – This was one of the great discoveries of the 1970 psychology boom, drawing on this new concept that people can be different and still be valid. It was the beginning of the end of the idea that there was some right, best or only way to be or look or think.
“The Truth is Out There” – This meant aliens from other worlds did, in fact, exist and we should probably get to know them, sit down with them, maybe crack a beer with them, but the government wouldn’t let us. Again, just more stuff about accepting differentness in others and aggravation about being controlled by authority.
“I’m Pro-choice and I Vote” – This, believe it or not, was one of the great battles of the late 20th century. Choice meant you don’t have to be a mom and spend 20 years and several hundred thousand dollars raising a kid you didn’t want just because you had sex and forgot your contraception. Like drugs, it was mostly a way for conservatives to demonize liberals, whip up fear and hatred and raise money for TV ads so as to stay in political office. Conservatives rightly surmised that liberals have more sex and thus more out-of-wedlock babies. But seriously, conservatives were never really pro-life or they would have joined the anti-war and environmental movements, which opposed all sorts of killing.
“I Do What the Voices in My Head Tell Me To Do” – Haha, very cryptic, dark humor here. This is a famous line from mass-murderers of our century. I mean, after all what kind of nut would do what “voices in his head” told him to do? Well, actually, we all do that, don't we? We used to do what voices in the White House or pulpit or newspaper editorial box told us and then we sort of grew up and learned to listen to ourselves.
“Guns Don’t Kill People; People Kill People” – Translation: let’s keep all our guns around, because people will always find something else to kill you with anyway, like a bat or their pantyhose or tossing a cuisinart into your bath. Ignored the fact that people are basically lazy and won’t kill you unless they can do it with one finger and you can’t fight back.
“I Want to Be the Person My Dog Thinks I Am” – A real thigh-slapper here, but also, like all great humor, so ironically true. Dogs give us this unconditional Christlike love. People? Welllll, they’re a piece of work, aren’t we? People are more like cats.
“Skateboarding is Not a Crime” – Mostly teenage boys were riding on these 4-wheel boards and doing tricks and dressing differently and not getting an extra job to save up for a car, which was bringing down the economy, so it was ok to arrest them.
“Love Makes a Family” – Sounds like a bland nostrum. Wasn’t. It posed the idea that being a hetero nuclear family didn’t guarantee mentally healthy, shiny-bright kids and that love, not gender was the important thing, so that gay people were as likely to be good parents as non-gays.
“America’s Health Plan – Don’t Get Sick!” – Well, you see, all modern nations guaranteed health care as a foundation of the nation’s health. Obvious and common sense, right? But in America, conservatives and the medical-industrial complex fought against it because HMOs, drug companies and doc-conglomerates feared reduced profits. They called it freedom. It was kind of like the military-industrial complex and their nukes: not good for most people, but too many powerful interests were profiting to change it. ~
Crazy In Love With You, America
It’s the 4th of July and America’s growing up ain’t she? Like all young adults, she’s accepting some sobering truths about herself, life and democracy, such as:
--Both candidates for president seem to be Southerners but actually are Ivy League preppies who live in Dixie because you have to be a Southerner to get elected. And, obviously, you have to be a guy still.
--We don’t much care who’s president, because either way the power is really held by the same large corporations and political action committees and what they want from the politicians is basically to get out of their way and to tax the middle class, not them.
--We vote so as to keep either party from controlling both White House and Congress because both D’s and R’s have historically gone to wretched excesses to buy their constituencies at the expense of common good.
--D’s spend too much on social stuff to buy the votes of labor and minorities, although Reagan and Gingrich showed ‘em this was all over, so Clinton apologized by getting rid of welfare and the deficit.
–R’s spend too much on weapons to get the votes and cash of the corporate world, for which the R’s reward them with the amazingly expensive Star Wars laser shield to protect us from, let’s see, Libya? North Korea? Iran? And these little nations actually want the bother of running the whole world after they nuke us?
--The first goal of the party not in the White House is to make the president seem loathsome to the public, to express outrage and to appoint a special prosecutor to dog him the whole of his term. Each party’s second goal is to do the country’s business, which means the business of those who brung ‘em to the dance.
--Only in America, the most free and informed nation in the history of the world, do we focus our national debate on divisive, emotionally-loaded bombshells like school prayer, assisted suicide, flag burning, abortion, gay rights and drugs. We demonize the other side and arouse fear and anger so they’ll give us money so we can get in power.
--Politics is about tv. It’s about whether candidates are a) seemingly relaxed, warm and caring on tv and b) can afford to get on tv, which takes tons of cash, which is the way we now vote in America. Through our PACs and corporations, we give you enough money to get on tv and echo our thoughts, which you find out from polling.
--We voters think we have free choice. However, we watch so much tv that our minds are actually wired into the system which makes the economy go and we can’t seriously claim not to be conditioned by all the endless messages. We’re not thinking much. We want our car and tv and latte and good sex and recession-proof economy and not to live in Iran. Are we free? We think so.
--Instead of a parliamentary system, which encourages coalition-building, we have this two-party system which rules out new ideas until they reach the mainstream and become safe and comfy for the majority. Ideas like being gay, smoking pot, getting an abortion are your own personal business in most of the world. In our country, which is the most free, we persecute this stuff.
--We don’t care that we don’t care about voting. It’s a good thing. It’s because we’re getting lives. We don’t need much from the government, except roads and putting national parks off limits to developers. We don’t need no bosses and heroes. With the net, we don’t even need the postman anymore. Power has shifted to the individual and to personal, not national life.
--America is the most free nation and we should give ourselves a big backpat for it. We all got on the same side to end slavery, get religion out of government, reject colonialism, give women the vote, beat Hitler, end Jim Crow, begin the environmental revolution, walk away from a cruel, pointless war and open our minds to the endless melting pot of other cultures, colors and sexual orientations. It’s been hard. It’s still hard.
America keeps holding our feet to the fire and making us look our demons in the face. We’re the craziest nation, but we’re also the best one. It’s because we won’t shut up. We always look at the next searing issue and the next one and, despite all the demagoguery from politicians and insufferable talk show hosts, we finally long to tell the truth, to think for ourselves and to take a chance on the new step. We’re on a hero’s journey. We amaze the world. They always end up following us on the new ground we’ve broken.
I’ve stood there in Athens, the birthplace of democracy and actually felt sick to my stomach from the absence of freedom I’m used to in America. The face of Lady Liberty makes my hair stand up. I’ve wanted to confess that several times, I’ve wept when I’ve voted, not over the choice of candidates, but over the fact there was a choice.
America is violent and full of gangs, crackers, faddists, religious nuts and sprawl. But I love this crazy place, always churning with freedom, empowering the next group, inventing light bulbs, telephones and flight, birthing movies, Elvis, jazz and Route 66. We’re bad and beautiful and godlike. We’re the nervous system of the world. We’ll never be the tidy Belgium or the rigid Singapore some want us to be.
We’re free and we’ve always made everyone here fight for their freedom. It’s a harsh, ritual passage. The Founding Fathers freed only themselves -- the Anglo, male, Protestant landowners. From there, the Irish, Italians, Jews, women, blacks, Indians, on and on, all had to fight to sit at the table. And in doing so, they found out who they were and what they were fighting for. ~
The Afro-Terrans and Their Creed Wars
On all our coins, you’ll notice two phrases, both required by law and both eternally at odds with each other: Liberty and In God We Trust.
Few other nations have the liberties we have, yet, ironically, few other nations are as obsessed with trying to make government do the work of saving souls which, if we were better people, we could and should resolve in our temples and homes and in the individual conscience.
Why do we do this? Why is America the perpetual threshing floor where humanity flails and agonizes, trying to save the good wheat from the evil chaff? We pour our souls into this work. Only we Americans, of all the peoples of the world, had a war to end the age-old practice of one human owning another. We stopped it, not just for ourselves, but for the whole planet. Churchill called it the most necessary war ever fought, and it was.
But ending slavery didn’t end the ability of one group of people to dominate and shunt another group into a lower canto of society, where they’re branded as obnoxious, offensive, wrong -- and inimical and threatening to all that is worthy, right and good, which is represented by the good people, us. To do this thing, which is called discrimination, we must discriminate. We must find things that make us different from them. We must fear those differences and then transform that fear into feeling we’re better than them, which is known as contempt. Then we must act to lessen or even subjugate them by custom and law, which institutionalizes our hatred. Carried further, there’s always violence.
This practice, this mental illness of “them-ism” has always been with us. It’s our major flaw and challenge as humans. It’s what they’re trying to draw a circle around and teach us about when they give out the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s why they made a national holiday out of Martin Luthur King’s birthday. It’s why we fought the Civil War, World War II and waged the struggles for suffrage and civil rights.
Through all history until the 20th century, we’ve just gone after what we wanted through violence. If we hated ‘em, we killed ‘em. If they stood in the way of our freedoms, we had a revolution and gave the guillotine a workout. But killing them never really made them go away and it also trashed any moral authority we had. For all our noble talk about being the land of the free and the shining city on the Christian hill, America was born in the blood of revolution, slavery and genocide against native inhabitants. And here lie the roots of our schizophrenia, our supposed love of liberty and yet, our misguided longing to perfect humanity by getting rid of, or at least subjugating them.
The use of force to get rid of them came to its awful peak in the mid-20th century with Hitler’s Holocaust. Oddly, millions of us Americans died trying to stop him while continuing at home to practice Jim Crow segregation, lynching with impunity and discrimination in jobs, housing and public accomodations. We fought to liberate subjugated peoples with an army segregated, really, on the basis of prior subjugation.
From this global agony and the deaths of 50 million people, we did not learn to stop hating. But it was a start. Suffragettes and Gandhi had showed us a new way, later perfected by Martin Luther King and now accepted worldwide as the main way to effect change: eschew violence, stay on message, demonstrate, exploit all the means of publicity, form lobby groups, elect like-minded people, get laws changed and, above all, change consciousness.
King targeted Jim Crow racism, which ran an ongoing terrorist campaign during the century after the Civil War ended slavery. This pogrom was based on defining them as a different race. What we’re finding out now is there are no races -- only racism. There are tendencies toward shades of skin and facial features, but humans over so many millennia have so moved about and interbred – and increasingly continue to do so – that there are only shades of tan-to-brown. However, people may choose to become racists by trying to hack out groups from this spectrum, fabricating characteristics of each group and -- the essential element -- assigning value judgments to the groups. Oddly, persons practicing racism invariably assign good values to their own group and bad to the other. However, it’s time we put this nonsense to bed once and for all: races are not real. Ethic heritage and regional origins and customs are real, but races are not. And ultimately, we all evolved in and migrated out of Africa, so we’re all Afro-Terrans.
Because of the Hitler apocalypse and the Civil Rights Campaigns, it’s no longer acceptable to them-ize “black” people or Jews. We can’t attack race and religion. That’s so medieval. Only Aryan extremists do it. However, them-ification continues with vigor in America. Pat Buchanan stood up in front of the 1992 Republican convention and helped blow the election for Bush the Elder by calling it a cultural war against them dang secular humanists. Not far off, Pat. But it’s not war; it’s the new strategies of ostensibly peaceful activism, publicity, lobbying, internet organizing, electing a like-minded Congress and, above all, defining and changing the consciousness.
The conservative movement started in 1964 by Barry Goldwater prized individual liberty and embraced the time-honored dictum, “that government is best which governs least.” They still embrace that when it helps roll back regulation around such things as pollution and guns, however the right wing, taking its cue from the immense success of the civil rights, antiwar and feminist movements, now feels fine about using excessive government to get them. It’s also fine because paybacks is yummy.
With the decline of the old racial and religious hatreds, we now wage cultural war obliquely against behavior, based on seemingly self-chosen membership in groups -- being gay, a pothead, pro-choice or sometimes, merely an environmentalist. When you get these folks, it’s like using a bomb that only kills the bad guys. You can be sure you’re not getting Republicans or Christians. You’re getting them.
Although huge sums are raised to battle against the rights and goals of gays, feminists and environmentalists, and to paint them as obnoxious, offensive and wrong – oh, and inimical to all that is worthy, right and good – it’s still not illegal to belong to any of these groups.
Pot, however, is another story. Pot is a crime. Classical conservatives, at least before the big opium scare at the start of the 20th century (fueled by racism against Chinese) would find abhorrent the notion that you could tell a free individual what they could or couldn’t own or put in their bodies. They simply could not over come the explicit command of the Fourth Amendment, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” Just like guns, it was the ago-old right of free individuals to have or use whatever they want, as long as they don’t hurt anyone.
In the recently aired Frontline documentary on the war on pot, we learn that zillions are being spent hunting for grow-light heat signatures from helicopters, battering down peoples’ doors and screaming at them in their homes and, using the new mandatory minimum laws, sending tens of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Americans to prison for long sentences, often decades, and regardless of separation from dependent children or lack of any previous criminal record. And never mind the wholesale seizure of assets without convictions.
America, the brave, free and beautiful has gone off the track many times in our colorful, noble and often violent history – and we’re off the track here. The war on pot is not about drugs. It’s about creed. That word has fallen into disuse. Creed used to mean what you believed in, namely religion, and its context was usually as a warning that you shouldn’t hate people because of their creed. Creed is still a good word for what we believe in and, well, these are creed wars. The present persecutions are not about protecting marriage (from gays), or protecting the unborn (from choice) or protecting society and youth (from pot). These creed wars are about demonizing, disenfranchising and if possible jailing them. It’s sweet revenge and also, felons can’t vote.
It’s fine if conservatives view pot as abhorrent, but abhorrent and illegal don’t necessarily live in the same universe. The Constitution gives us the right to abhorrent behavior, such as flag-burning, refusing to fight in seemingly noble wars or piercing our nipples and festooning them with upside-down crucifixes. These harm no one. However, crossing that line and making innocuous-but-abhorrent behavior illegal is stepping onto the slippery slope to fascism. It does not make it ok, just because public opinion has been organized behind it. Remember, lynching of African-Americans was once acceptable, non-abhorrent behavior in America and, so powerful was its constituency, that even the wise, good and popular FDR refused to sign a bill against it.
As we all know by now, pot is a euphoric, aphrodisiac and mind-altering drug, rarely addictive, that, unlike alcohol, doesn’t make you want to beat up others or drive maniacally and fill the world with more paraplegics. If we’re really pro-life and want to make society safer, getting rid of pot won’t do it. Getting rid of guns might. So would getting rid of private transportation. We know sure as sunrise that personal transportation will kill 42,000 Americans every 12 months – that’s our Vietnam war toll every 16 months -- and we decide that’s an acceptable amount of death and agony for this marvelous convenience. A huge portion of these deaths are made possible by combining personal transportation with our legal, all-time favorite drug – alcohol -- and we proceed knowing that will happen.
In a perfect world, we would, I suppose, all find our high in prayer and not pot (or alcohol). But we’re not perfect or even close. Our visions of perfection on earth have more often led to places like Jonestown and the Children’s Crusade than to paradise. “What fools we mortals be,” said Puck. Keep that in mind. Fallible. We’re all little druggies, seeking out the brain chemical rushes we get from wine, pot, ciggies, tv, sex, the mall, the new Lexus, a big killing on NASDAQ, our ego trips, gossip, being right and whatever religious incantation we love. It’s all brain chemicals. The battle is over whose. ~
A Thrilling, Scary New Deity in the World
I know. You watched the sickening events of 9/11 with disbelief and horror. So did I. You’re deeply, savagely pissed and want the terrorists dead, very dead. So do I. Some of you hate feeling that way, some not, some of you feel both ways. You want them killed – preferably slowly and on tv (“Take THIS to paradise!) -- then you hope there’ll be no bad feelings and we’ll somehow go on and create a better world. I hope that too. And I realize it’s an almost childish hope.
You’re secretly glad you live in the outback state of Jefferson, which the crazies probably won’t bother with. So am I. Yet you feel this is happening to us all and you can’t step back from it, as you’ve stepped back from so much nasty world news. Same here. Sometimes, I go for hours not turning on CNN and Fox to check the “crawl” news and so it seems like it’s not there. But it is. Tourism here is down and people aren’t flying. I realize I may never see Europe again because it takes planes. People I know have gone on mood meds since 9/11.
So, yes, Osama, you’re getting to us in a personal way, which is how terrorism works. You’re saying what my kids said when they were toddlers and screamed, “YOU WANNA KNOW HOW THAT FEELS?!!” (Whack!) To them, it wasn’t an attack, it was a response and a just one. So, everything starts somewhere with a nonviolent act of perceived disrespect. Or in a judgment or fear of others and a wish that they weren’t free to think/speak/act as they do. As it crosses the line into violence, it already has a life. And it always draws retaliation. Lesson: what I do to others, I do to me. The Golden Rule isn’t something we choose or not; it’s always operating.
When I wrote for theater, I learned there are no villains. All “villains” have their motives and my job as a critic was to move off my comfortable contempt, engage the story and suffer all the sufferings of all characters until I ended up exactly where they – and the villain -- did. The best learning came from understanding the “villain’s” journey into his personal grief.
I see Osama’s face in Newsweek and marvel with incomprehension. The eyes, the mind behind the eyes. The smile that must have been on this face as he watched CNN on 9/11. I go into that mind. I must. This is the liberal me. Other times, I look at the man and his brother warriors and see only a despicable enemy who must be slain. Now, I’m conservative. Most of us are doing both. I see letters to the editor, some celebrating the return to values of patriotism and unity of national purpose which we lost somewhere back in the 1960s. Others, fewer, urge empathy, understanding (no matter how painful) and critical thought.
You have new respect for President Bush. Me too. Yet, sometimes he sounds like the yahoo on the barstool next to me, yelping that he’s going to “smoke out the Evil One” and that’ll be the end of it, by crackie! For a second, I believe it. Then reality knocks and I know that civilization on this tiny blue marble has quite suddenly hit its mid-life crisis. This ain’t going away and it ain’t just about a cult of fundamentalist crazies. We’re in this for the long haul. We’ve reached a critical mass on this planet. Our stuff is up and we’re going into long-term therapy where the shrink is going to pound it into our heads: everyone has rights and free will and if everyone doesn’t win, no one wins.
Why do they hate us – so blares Newsweek as I stand in line at Safeway. Yes, there’s always our support for Israel. We thought it might be ok for Israel to win without Palestinians winning. We were wrong. But it goes way beyond that. It’s because the bad guys know that someday the whole world will end up like America – free, lurid, materialistic, sensual, self-centered, with cell phones jammed in our ears – and, no matter how offensive it is to Allah, it’s humanity growing up and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.
We’re all merging. The age of them-us is winding down. It’s getting harder to energize the faithful by demonizing the foe (Commies! Infidels! Gays! Them!). The world has grown tired of the bloodbaths of all the great empires and religions. Why? Because we got a brand new thing and it’s just a hell of a lot more fun. It’s called freedom. It’s flashing across the world and it’s not that old institutionalized freedom – to vote, worship, have safe boundaries, become president someday, etc. It’s a very personal freedom and it says, hey, I got me, babe, I got my own thoughts, thank you very much and my own life and my rhythm and my MTV and cable and internet and I might marry someone from Iceland or Java or Africa and have kids with them and my country is not ‘tis of thee America but this whole dear world and my religion ain’t found in them ancient good-evil dualities and enmities but in all the beauty around me and in those I love -- and right here in my heart.
And in my heart I am free.
When ancient Greeks beheld any magical power afoot in the world, they reckoned it as a living, moving, creative intelligence, a deity. Love was a goddess, Aphrodite. War was a god, Ares. Wine was a god, Dionysos, and so on. They would have reckoned Freedom as a goddess. She is. And when those fundamentalist crazies flew those sleek, pretty airplanes into those beautiful buildings, that’s what they tried to kill. We need to appreciate why they hate this new deity, Liberty. And we also need to understand that, like all deities, she’s been born, she’s thrilling and scary, she has a life and purpose of her own and she can never die. ~
Outliving Our Brains
Of all the stories I reported in the past year, nothing bowled me over quite like the one I did with the people who take care of the rapidly growing numbers of older folks who are settling in the temperate, lovely, affordable and safe Rogue Valley.
The story seemed simple at first: Southern Oregon has become a retirement mecca and this is creating a huge, stable, nonpolluting economic base, dovetailing nicely with Medford’s two huge regional medical centers. The hospitals’ visiting nurse staff makes house calls to many of these seniors to head off ER visits and admissions. Neat.
But now the story thickens. The mission of the medical industry is no longer just to save human life, but, with hugely expensive artificial parts, transplants, gene therapy, bypasses, valve replacements, amazing new meds, advanced cancer wizardry and technologies unimaginable by scifi writers a generation ago, to extend life well into the eighties and nineties – even 100s. Because of this, seniors have become the fastest growing part of our population. Cool. I want to live a real long time. It’s all good, still.
But every silver lining has a cloud. We seem to have hit a wall. In our unquestioning quest to push life extension on an unwilling nature, we haven’t figured out a way to make our wits last. It’s called dementia and – guess what? – it’s not something that some people “catch” and others don’t. If we live long enough, we all get it. As my jaw slowly dropped open, Stephen Brummer, the gerontologist at Rogue Valley Medical Center spelled it out: at 65, about 6 percent of us have dementia, at 85, about a third of us and at 100, virtually all of us.
Putting a fine point on it, Cindy Hussey, RVMC’s home care nurse manager, said, “We’re doing such a great job medically that our bodies are outliving our brains. While we can make our bodies live longer, we can’t make our brains function longer.” Bottom line – people retiring at 65 are now looking at a 25-year retirement and society is looking at an enormous crisis in caregiving. Who’s going to take care of all these hyper-seniors -- and do I want to be one?
The doctor brought up another scary dimension: money to live on. He joked (I think) that his accountant told him he’d be broke by about age 87. My jaw hit the floor. What’s the point? Why, as a society, I ask, are we doing this? That, they told me, is for the philosophers to figure out.
On the drive home, our valley looked different, surreal. This has changed everything. Do I really want to be helped to live into my nineties, when in all likelihood, I could well be starting to leave the stove on, display hostility to strangers and wander the neighborhood in various states of dress? There’s no question in my mind. I wouldn’t do it to my dog. It’s unthinkable. More is not better.
But more importantly, society has not thought this out. We’ve just plunged ahead, operating on the myths that whatever our burgeoning technology wants to do is ok and that human life is sacred, so whatever we do so Save Lives (humans only, please) and prolong them is ok. Can you imagine a politician, priest or pundit (the collective wisdom of our video oracle) having the guts to say, hey, this is not just nutty, it’s Orwellian. We don’t have the money (life as managed care!), the sprawl-space or the legions of caretakers and besides, it’s ain’t right.
Have you noticed I’ve gotten this far without even mentioning the D-word? That’s what’s really running this madness -- America’s oft-snickered about fear of death, which really only exploded on the cultural stage after World War II. We’d just stomped out Nazism, Japanese imperialism and the Depression. We stomped out polio and smallpox. We were stomping out Communism like crazy. Let’s face it, we became stompers of all things bad, mean, indecent and even uncomfortable and we started thinking that should include death.
Let me shout it: DEATH! There, I feel much better. Death is ok. Death is good. Death is beautiful. Death is all the things we say about human life, including death is sacred. Death was put here by whatever god you credit with putting life here, and for very good reasons. So get a death! I don’t say that sarcastically, but rather in the sense that we might want to leave off with this notion of hyper-preciousness around human existence and establish a positive, friendly relationship with our personal death. We might want to do this early on and not just when the nice hospice people start visiting – teaching us for the first time that death is ok and possibly is the door to maybe someplace even better than here!
America is the only culture in the world that looks on death as a vague kind of affront to our right to be here, have it all, sprawl all over it and do it with 200 channels and an SUV. Death has a menacing, almost unAmerican ring to it and all our resources should be marshaled, as in the Manhattan Project, against it. Vast Institutes of Health with zillion dollar budgets patrol our epidermal and cellular shores, poised for total war on each new bug, a mentality that psychicly replicates our illusory, half-century prophylaxis with Norad, Dewline and now Star Wars.
Our obsession and arrogance in trying to cheat death’s honesty (Dylan) has made us childish and skewed our instincts. One old instinct, fast disappearing, is that nature doesn’t let you get away with anything but, for every action, offers an equal and opposite reaction. Nature pushes back. It’s known as karma or natural balance. We’ve upset that. We wonder why there’s so much depression and prozac. We’ve not even begun to question the consequences of de-fanging death. In our drive for hypersafe, hyperimmune and hyperextended human life, we’ve had to rob from our spiritual treasure, leaving us open to cultish doctrines and vague memories of something sacred in forests, mountains and seas. Dementia fairly screams in our face that life wasn’t meant to be long -- interesting, painful, passionate, risky, loving, unpredictable, fun, yes – but not long. ~
When Society Has a Broken Heart
It’s getting harder and harder to write just about this region of Jeffersonia, as my editor wishes, because, with the internet, global youth culture and world events, we’re blending into a planet community and I know people right here in our town who look at the world and their lives differently, because of what a handful of people in the Washington area – from presidents to snipers – have been doing.
As we grow closer, it seems politics isn’t really about politics anymore, like it was a half century ago. It’s about life. Hardly anyone I know wants to actually get involved in politics, as it’s awash in lies and bad money, but they do live lives and they want them good and that means they think they have a right to a few basics – a health care system that works for everyone, affordable quality education, a fairly stable economy, a decent environment and peace (unless there’s a very damn good reason for it to be otherwise).
For a long time, we took most of these for granted here in Jeffersonia, but in our radically shrinking geo-village, when the prez sneezes, we get the flu. I hear a price tag of $200 billion to do the Iraq war and that, of course means that much less for the basics. It’s not ok. That’s what we’re saying. No one gets to do that anymore. What isn’t worked out together by all of us, doesn’t work.
Bringing it all back home, someone I love freaked out over several weeks or, as it used to be called, had a nervous breakdown, but since nerves don’t break down, what we really mean is she went to her cellar and did battle with a lifetime of her “stuff,” which sent most of her friends packing, shaking their heads, some saying (and wishing) she’d get over it (almost a certainty) but a few drew closer – the ones who’d been there – to hold her during this sacred inner war.
She didn’t know what was happening, which seems to be a key element of a healing crisis. You don’t say, oh, I’m revisioning and re-inventing myself and challenging my demons and I’m courageous to be doing it. You say, God, I hate this world and all the cruel, phony people and crap in it and I can’t go on. Or something like that.
Part of it, I know, was the news – the preparations to make war to get rid of one sadistic, power-tripping thug (not unlike the scores of thugs we support in the third world) while our economy melts slowly down, our schools cut back and cut back, medical care soars out of reach, retirement savings evaporate and environmental rules are systematically done away with.
“How could they do this?” she cried. It’s personal. It’s her money, her world, but no one is listening. “The children…” Her voice trails off. Two weeks later, she did come back. She said she knew she wasn’t crazy, but she’s definitely not so sure about the world.
It’s Catch-22, she said – if you’re in a crazy society and you act “normal,” then aren’t you crazy? The alternative is to feel your anger and isolation. And that can make you crazy too.
So, I do my bit to hold Jeffersonia close in this most long and beautiful autumn I’ve ever seen. I hike the hills with my buoyant new Pomeranian friend Sami, watching the turkey vultures sitting on snags, drying their outspread wings in the rising sun.
I pull the tv cable and after a week of complaining, the kids get used to having conversations, listening to music and reading books. I scan AP online, but otherwise deny the news – am practically giddy about the loss of the CNN and Fox anchors with important knitted brow, looking us dead in the eye with their “breaking news” logo flashing.
And my daughter gives up on life in L.A. and comes home to this beauty. But she’s young and, like so many, can’t afford to be here. They’ll look for some undiscovered neo-Jeffersonia out Idaho way. She talks of love relationships – how she and all her friends see love as scary because they’re pretty sure it will go away and, down deep there’s that nagging question of deserving love. Everyone’s that way, she says.
Why, we ask. Sure, it’s us, but, increasingly, there’s a sense it’s the world, too. Humanity has a broken heart. Our web is shattered. She says it – we used to have a tribe and could never be left and lonely. Now, anything can happen.
And, I say, don’t forget the archaic sacred context in animals, plants, spirits and the cycle of the day and year -- so much meaning that has slipped away. All we have left of it is personal thread of being in love, sex and babies, all miracles, yes, but they’re being asked to hold the web of meaning for all life and they can’t do it. Disappointed, we dream of the right person, but there is no right person, because it’s a longing for the context we evolved in, the place where we were in love not with a person, but with all of it.
We need to find our way back that lost divine presence, the one inherent in inner aliveness, learning and nature, which today we institutionalize as health, education and environment. And now we have two giant global enclaves at each others’ throats, both run by testy male Gods who don’t have girlfriends or sex and don’t live in this world. They too have broken hearts. No wonder they’re testy. ~
I Fear, Therefore I Shop
In this winter of ire, hundreds pack meetings about peace (both the inner and outer kind), about our culture of violence and consumerism and about civil rights. We haven’t seen this spirit here since 1969.
At the solstice, the moment of the birth of the light for the new year, we see the spectacle of Native American sacred dance in the Jewish Havurah Shir Hadash, followed by Rabbi David standing up with Islamic peace activist Pete Seda and saying: it’s not hard for me to make peace with Pete – he’s a good man and I love him. The hard thing is to make peace with those we judge harshly.
They showed video of Sulcha, an extraordinary new, but amazingly simple process where the Jews and Palestinians get together and pray, sing and dance till they not only don’t hate each other, but see each other as humans-like-me.
“Politics, so far, has led mostly to more fighting,” said Zaslow. “But in prayer, they’ve been able to lubricate the wheels and open their hearts. They find they’re praying to the same God and celebrating the same values of love of family, home and land. They find God has a purpose to them and it’s the same purpose.”
It was to be a “town meeting” but it became a town soul-baring, a mass stepping across that line that keeps us isolated and suspicious of those who seem “unlike ourselves.” Zaslow and Seda gave solstice celebrants a sentence completion chore – stand up and begin your statement with, “I need to make peace with…”
The ritual took hours. A woman said she would call her mom the next day and make peace after ten years. A man will call his brother tomorrow and do the same. A friend I’ve wronged, Christianity, George Bush, polluters, the list went on and on. One’s “foes” began to shape-shift into, my gosh, real people like me, people with hopes, dreams, fears, families, people who’ve mostly tried, like me, to do right in this life.
After the ritual people hugged and congratulated each other for “getting over it.” How amazingly comfortable it is, people remarked over and over, to feel one is right and on the “good” side. But peace can’t be made that way. And how amazingly different it feels to break out of that imprisoning ego-shell in which only oneself (and those like me) make sense and are of good heart.
It’s been a magical time, this year three of the millennium. Labyrinths spring up all over during Yule and New Years. Rev. Alicia Wolski makes one of electrical tape on the linoleum floor in Medford’s First Christian Church, saying, “You come with an intention, a question or a prayer or maybe a request for help with a problem or a project. As you walk, the Spirit leads you where it wants to lead you.”
Three Rivers Hospital in Grants Pass builds a permanent labyrinth of granite. Its facilitator, Chaplain Martha Shonkwiler, says, “It’s part of a spiritual revolution in the world in which religions are coming to see how much they have in common, including meditation as a path to finding God. That’s what’s going to help with peace in the world.”
I take my children, now a cynical 14 and 12, to the fourth annual labyrinth at Ashland’s Unitarian-Universalist Church. Wary of anything uncool, they sit in chairs waiting for me while I walk it. What is it about the labyrinth, which people have walked for at least 4,000 years now? It takes you the longest possible route from the outside to the center – and at the center, you find nothing, just a space. Ah, that’s the soul, isn’t it? The space at the center, empty, waiting to be filled by you after your long journey on a path you might resist at first, as you marvel at how tortuous it is, how filled with seemingly meaningless backtracking – like life. You’re supposed to carry a thought, a hope, a question, a prayer. So I do. I’m tired of asking for things all my life. I realize, as I walk that I not only don’t know what I should ask for, but if I get it, it’s as likely to be the wrong thing, but since there is no wrong thing and they’re all growth experiences and all want to be embraced unconditionally, as if the Universe knows what it’s doing…oh, I get it…the labyrinth has already answered my question. And opened my heart. At that moment, I see my kids abandon their cool and start walking the labyrinth, winding their way round the chaotic spaghetti till finally I meet my boy coming at me laughing and saying, “I may be lost!” Children speak the truth so simply. We finish and sit listening to the space of the soul. They will always remember this. So will I.
Right after New Years, Ashland townfolk throw a big meeting to talk about the Culture of Fear we Americans live in – this in response to Michael Moore’s film, “Bowling for Columbine.” It was only going to be 40 or 50, tops, but 250 cram the hall, all spilling over with eager stories – yes, Moore nailed it! We’re different here in America. There’s no one like us. We kill each other at the rate of 11,000 a year, Moore documents, but just across the Detroit River in Canada, where they have the same amount of guns, see the same violent movies and video games, have 13 percent minorities (not unlike us) and have twice the unemployment, they do not kill each other. Maybe a murder in the big town of Windsor every decade or so. They leave their doors unlocked, even in downtown Toronto. We wouldn’t dream of doing that. They tried to track the reason – maybe it was the news. Ours is lurid, dripping with mayhem and gore, home invasions, carjackings. We’re a cruel people, pictures at 11. Or maybe it’s our long, survival-of-the-fittest history, fraught with slavery, Indian wars, race riots. But most countries have had that and don’t have the murders we do.
Moore finally pointed out a demon, maybe the demon: we’re an ambitious, profit-mad, bottom-line people who brand it bad (“recession!”) if we don’t consume more than the quarter before. It’s like this: I fear, therefore I shop. We live in fear, we acquire, we feel better, therefore buying is culturewide addictive behavior. We slather ads (all tv, really) with sex, too, so you’ve got that pleasure wired in with consuming and, as you have more and better stuff, you just feel better all over.
"My sense is that there's a real connection between a widespread sense of anxiety in our culture and commercials that offer a product that can help," said Carl Griesser, regional director of the ManKind Project, a men's service group. "We've decided fear and danger sell and we absorb it more because watch a lot more tv and internet than other cultures."
"Fear is pushed in our society so we go eat, shop and buy - or get security systems and guns -- so we can feel better, said Ashland counselor Bill McMillan said.. “It fits the description of an addiction in that it's out of control, detrimental to self and others, you do it whether you're aware of it or not and you live in denial that it's going on." A prime example, he said, is Americans' increasing desire for large vehicles in the face of evidence that this increases greenhouse gases and causes more dependence on foreign oil, thus contributing to the cause of war.
As if in agreement, headlines that week told of two elementary kids nabbed with a loaded pistol in a Medford school. But, hey, we need these guns because this country is full of people with guns and you just never know. And, in the end, the president himself models problem solving with weapons and force, which, as one participant said, is central to the American myth. Strong, brave, free Americans (often acting alone, as Bush is) finally have to settle things with force, whether at a frontier watering hole or on the global stage. And, by the way, the myth also says the lone cowboy is always right and always wins.
Within days, other riled locals gathered again in Ashland to craft a city law barring police from helping feds conduct secret surveillance, wiretapping, internet snooping, unwarranted searches and detentions without due process, as allowed by the USA-PATRIOT Act.
“We’re all justifiably scared about domestic terrorism, but we don’t feel that gives the federal government the right to overturn traditional freedoms of expression and dissent,” said Patriot organizer Paul Copeland. “We expect and demand unanimous passage of these protections by the council.”
Calling themselves (with a nice touch of irony) the Ashland Patriots, the group asks the city council to pass a law that will bar police from:
--Handing over prisoners to feds without written assurances they won’t jail anyone without counsel.
--Spying and gathering info on political, religious or social views associations of people without suspecting they’re involved in an actual crime.
--Investigating based on profiling as to race, religion, ethnicity or national origin.
--Secret searches. Must notify suspect before search.
--Helping with dossier-building (ala TIPS – Ashcroft’s Terrorism Information & Prevention System) or encouraging Ashlanders to spy on their neighbors.
Mayor Alan DeBoer argues that the anti-patriot act will split the city, embroil citizens in a long, harsh debate and take time and energy away from important stuff like affordable housing, which seems about as likely to happen as a townful of men in black. G-men, of course would be more than willing to sign stuff from small town officials that limits their power and, having signed it, can be counted on to be the guys-of-their-word they’ve always been. All they have to do to build a dossier on you anymore is to Google you. And it’s a snap to download your hard drive without actually going to your house. We might as well email them our hard drives and save all this wasted tax money. So really, it’s pretty symbolic. No one can stop the G-men and no one can stop a citizenry that decides to wake up, read and learn and above all, vote and run for office, so the right-wingers will stop packing our legislatures and Congress and passing crap like the Patriot Act. Oh, and crippling our schools.
In other words, be like senior Ashland council member Don Laws, a retired political science professor who’s been on the council for decades, understands civil rights and has stopped many a scoundrel in his tracks. He calls the Patriot Act “abominable, ignorant, and probably unconstitutional” and says, hey, if you want to stop it, use the process. If you’re not going to become a precinct committee person and do voter registration and GOTV (get out the vote) and make trips to Salem to testify on bills, at least write and call your Congress folk. But this sitting around in circles of people who think just like us, righteously spiting the feds, creating another despised Them – that’s subtle violence. It’s more evidence of why the words “irrelevant” and “liberal” are often used in the same breath. ~
The Trade Towers Without Tears
We’ve buried the dead, talked 9/11 to death, liberated Afghanistan with only one combat death and almost certainly will blow UbL away soon (he appeared to be reaching for a weapon during capture). CNN/Fox are starting to run news on other extraneous, tedious topics, like education, the environment and health care. It’s ok to say bad things about Bush again.
It’s also time to remember who we are. We are not the people described in those bumper stickers: “United We Stand, God Bless America.” Yes, we are overwhelmingly behind the mission of defending ourselves against terrorist attacks and always will be. Sept. 11 assured that. We’ve also rolled back civil liberties a good bit and, for now, no one seems to mind much. But, about that bumper sticker, it’s time to come back to reality. We do not stand united about much of anything and never will. That’s what we’re all about. It’s a good thing and it’s called diversity, which is the right to think, speak and live differently than some imagined healthy, moral, ideal norm which should really oughta fit everyone. Diversity: it‘s kind of a new way of saying freedom.
And, excuse me, but God does not bless America any more than she blesses Upper Volta (or Iraq) and, in fact, the odds are probably better than even she’s not even aware of national boundaries. Just as probably, she’s giving extra blessings right now to one seriously wayward, needy soul hunkered down in a freezing cave somewhere near Tora Bora and starting to have some teensy second thoughts about his jihad.
As part of getting back to reality, this feels like a good time to stop thinking of the Trade Towers Attack as the most amazing and awful thing that ever happened to anyone. The Day that Changed Everything, we mutter, watching them drape more coffins as they scrape through the wreckage that took 2,900 lives. But it’s not the worst thing and doesn’t even make the top 100 in the cavalcade of disasters. In reality, this sort of thing has been happening to people on a much bigger scale in almost all countries for a very long time – Dresden, Masada, Hiroshima, Cortez, on and on. It just hadn’t happened to us yet on our home soil – well, not since the British torching Washington, Sherman’s march and the Sand Creek massacre. We’ve come to think of ourselves as special. All those wars, plagues, bloody revolutions, tsunamis ‘n stuff happen to those more poor, ignorant and heathen countries, but God kinda likes us best. We’re the City on the Hill (Reagan).
Where we do we top the list is that we’ve made 9/11 the all-time most talked about, most broadcast, most analyzed, most trumpeted, most propagandized, most wept about event by far in the history of the world or at least since the Crucifixion. It’s the worst evil done by the baddest people against the goodest and most innocent people since the dawn of meanness. Bush summed it up with breathtaking simplicity: this is a battle of good vs. evil. Falling a good bit short of the philosophical grasp of Wilson, FDR and Kennedy, Bush has summoned the archetype of the Lord in combat with Lucifer. This is the sort of dualistic, fundamentalist thinking underlying jihad.
It can easily be argued that 9/11 has had such an impact because of advances in communications technology. Who’s ever seen 2,900 people vanish in an awesome, terrifying blip, while we sat sipping coffee in our living rooms? No one. It’s a first. And it caused the outrage it should have. If we’d had CNN/Fox, global communications satellites and the internet throughout all history, it would have changed everything. If CNN’s legions had been there with talk shows, polls and breaking news video about the first slave auction – the tears, the sound of the whip, the child ripped out of it’s mother’s arms – there would never have been slavery.
What’s new and positive here is that it’s ALL on tv now – and tv news people can take their place as heroes alongside the fire fighters and police in this story. On a community scale, a generation ago domestic violence, child molesting and drunk driving were accepted as your personal business.
The shift couldn’t have happened without the likes of CNN and Oprah. On a global scale, a generation ago, tyrants, ethnic purges and apartheid “happened.” Today, we give them ruthless publicity, resulting in jail for Milosovic and the Nobel Prize for Arafat and de Clerk. Someday, the same publicity will force the U.S. to abandon capital punishment, Star Wars and, as resources and biodiversity dwindle, its manic consumerism.
Meanwhile, it’s time to get out of our denial about this freedom thing. Our governments are gnawing away at civil liberties in the name of the war on terrorism. Restricted freedoms are part of war and that’s fine. But this one is different: the enemy can be anyone – a nation, a cult, the person on the bus next to you. It could be you. And it will never really be over and done. As long as there are any terrorists left (there always will be), then the war, and the justification for loss of civil liberties, is open-ended. It goes on forever. Along with this comes the perpetual excuse for Cold War-style military and intelligence projects and spending on just about any scale. If the public wavers, they only have to run clips of 9/11, the faces of the fire fighters and police, the flag gently rippling in the CNN logo – and we’re there. United We Stand and of course, God blesses it. This is the dark side of CNN. We haven’t seen an awful lot of critical thinking yet from our cable journalists. Even the perspicacious Judy Woodruff, giving the death toll at WTC, added, “…and that doesn’t include the terrorists, of course.”
However, more than three months after the attack, cable did finally show our first domestic detainee, held in U.S. jails without charges, evidence or probable cause, except possession of Arabic name and facial features. He’s been working in the U.S. for a decade, has a legal visa, is awaiting citizenship hearings, owns a home, has a job and family and pays taxes. There are hundreds more in the can. This violates several clauses of the Bill of Rights, but who cares? If we can get truthful about this, down deep we’ll find a lot of anger at all Islam wrapped around plain vanilla racism – hey, let ‘em rot.
Embarrassed by the most colossal intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, security folk lurch forward, often blundering over that fuzzy, invisible line into repression. A majority of us in recent polls, feel fine about requiring a national ID card and number. “Your papers are not in order! Step this way please!” A generation from now, this will not be ID papers, but an implanted ID chip. Do we want this? Big Brother will always answer: if you have nothing to hide, you won’t mind if we search.
In a case soon to be heard in the Supreme Court, the U.S. government is seeking broadened authority for police “to approach and search passengers” on public transportation and to do it without first informing people of their rights. Arguing the case for the Bush administration is Solicitor General Ted Olson, whose wife was on the plane that flew into the Pentagon.
Daily we get emails and links from friends of friends with new tales of repression. The Green Party woman denied a flight in Maine. Later emails say she willfully antagonized security people. The Secret Service at the door of a college freshman in North Carolina, asking to search her apartment for “un-American” literature (a poster mocking Bush for 152 executions on his Texas watch). Author Starhawk is detained trying to enter Canada to protest IMF meetings, her computer seized and read, her companion jailed. With the accumulation of data on all our histories, any security agent can use the internet to instantly call up practically anything about us – arrests at protests, credit record, published writings. It’s only a small step until the internet, once envisioned as a tool against repression, becomes the tool of dossier-building.
Let’s not go there. Let’s remember we’re coping with a lot of stress from a tv-driven blowout that has trashed our unwarranted sense of invulnerability. It’s like how you feel when you walk into your house and find it burglarized -- not so much the loss of stuff as the sense of being deeply offended, invaded and disrespected. Well, welcome to the real world. We stuck our nose into the hornet’s nest of the Mideast by helping disenfranchise Palestine. The bees came out and stung us.
A recent letter signed by 100 Nobel laureates helps put things in perspective. Far from howling at the outrageous attack against the City of the Hill, they said the most profound danger to world peace is that the world’s poor, most of them in equatorial nations, will have their environments trashed by global warming and they’re not going take it laying down. They write, “If we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor.” This sounds like WTC times 1,000.
They go on, “The only hope for the future lies in co-operative international action, legitimized by democracy. It is time to turn our backs on the unilateral search for security (read Star Wars), in which we seek to shelter behind walls. Instead, we must persist in the quest for united action to counter both global warming and a weaponized world. To survive in the world we have transformed, we must learn to think in a new way. As never before, the future of each depends on the good of all.” ~
War – Minus the Heady Glory
“The continual excuse for gathering and maintenance of armies…has no basis in reason and all these threats of attack are only the invention of those to whom armies are necessary for their own purpose of maintaining power…Never was the deceit so evident by which some people compel others to prepare for war, burdensome, unnecessary and abhorrent to all.” --Leo Tolstoy, 1897
It is a time of deep anxiety, even pain. You talk to people and they shake their heads. The economy is going down and there is no vision to stop it, only more talk of schools cutting back and tax cuts for the rich. People paint their car windows with poster paint, displaying signs like “Save our children’s future; attack Iraq!” But America has never attacked first. This has never happened before. This was our honor: we’ve only stopped aggressors, never been one.
My boy brings home a lesson on medieval times defining feudalism as a system under which peasants exchanged their labor for protection within the lord’s walls – safe from attacks by other lords. My, I think, that’s pretty much what Tolstoy was saying – and it’s still going on. The warlord needs lots of our money to protect us from the other warlords who are saying the same thing to their serfs. And today, with no other superpower, no other big warlord, the racket needed some kind of global foe to keep going. Now it has one.
In two short years, suddenly, we’re living in interesting times, which may sound good until you reflect that in almost all interesting times you’ll find danger and turbulence and the endless struggle between those who seek war and have the means to do it – and those much larger numbers who would rather do what they do in their families, neighborhoods and communities: talk things over, listen, build relationships, work things out.
But that’s not happening. The world is turned upside down. It’s not surprising to hear average people say they’re scared. The economy sickens while many tens of billions are shoveled into war, the tax burden of the rich is eased and corporate greed-is-good fraud trashes market confidence.
Schools flounder, lay off teachers and shorten school years. Oregon GOP legislators, in control for many years and boosted by religious right money and votes (raised to fight abortion, flag burning, gay rights and such social “outrage issues”), brazenly say in the Voter’s Pamphlet they will get rid of everything in government not necessary for protection of life, liberty and property. That clearly doesn’t include schools.
Homeless people and their advocates protest general assistance cuts, warning that the situation is going to get lots bigger. Seniors flail when state general assistance for meds is cut following the disgraceful vote against Measure 28. I interview an old woman in Phoenix. She says she’ll die without her meds, so she will get an old car to live in with her dog, skip the rent and pay the druggist.
Peace marches trudge down 99 from Ashland to Medford, joining tens of millions worldwide. One hothead burns a flag. All disown him, but the page one picture fires endless letters to the editor, some saying he’s a traitor, others saying it’s our hard-won freedoms that made it possible for him to be this free. The marches change nothing. The rhetoric of conquest blares hot and loud from the White House. Nelson Mandela calls our leader a “malevolent fool.”
After the flick, “Bowling for Columbine,” hundreds of Ashland citizens hold spontaneous meetings in church halls to talk – no, rant, rather frantically – that we live in a “culture of fear,” locking our doors, sucking up sick cable tv violence and consuming mindlessly to assure ourselves we can buy our safety – which is what we’re doing in Iraq.
The Ashland Patriots get their ordinance passed, so no city cops can help the feds comb through internet files and emails or run surveillance on local people, without ok from city mothers and fathers, public notice, advance warning of searches. The vote is unanimous. Ashland joins dozens of other “liberal bastions.” We do what we can. We can say no.
This column is called an almanac. I want to record this moment in time. I’ve never felt like this. Even in the crazy sixties, with Vietnam and black riots heedlessly raging, we knew cooler, wiser heads would prevail and soon war and racism would be seen for the shameful madness they are. We were right. But this is different. How? I don’t know.
I get an email from Michael, a friend of 35 years and Portland activist for the disabled, and for peace. He’s wise, gentle, good and one of the best-read people in Oregon. He writes, “My historian self believes that unless some pretty fundamental change happens, we are in for some hard times. Harder than we had imagined.” Just a line in the middle of a long email, but it chills me deep. He’s talking about – what? – some kind of collapse of the world economy, ecology or peace?
I must ask him. Then he mentions – he’s written to his beloved – that, if it happened, he would be with her to die “on some staircase or highway.” I gasp. This is one of the calmest, sanest people I know. Yet he’s thought about this. I reflect: this is what’s different now. In the sixties, even those at the top of the government and corporate worlds had a sense of shame. Of limits and of “reasoning together.” Of participation in the human network. They were part of life and our world. What happened to us, happened to them. That’s gone now.
As the rich and poor have pulled apart into their bipolar worlds, those on top actually believe they have enough distance, power, money, whatever, that they can – and have a right to -- exempt themselves from our world – and from the paybacks an attack on Iraq will create over many generations. ~
The Bubba-fication of America
At the Molly Ivins talk in Medford, they opened the doors an hour and a half early. It’s not hard to see why. Hundreds of people – liberal minded people – stroll around hugging and rapping (60s word, from “rapport”) with friends of many decades.
I hug scads of people. Such soulful stepping out. (“I am larger, better than I thought. I never knew I had such goodness in me!” –Whitman) We joke – if they nuked this place, they’d wipe out every liberal in Southern Oregon. There aren’t that many. Except for the Ashland (Oh, shining bastion on the hill! Any price to be here!) house district, no Democrat has been elected south of Eugene since Jimmy Carter’s days.
But, a century ago, there were “liberal societies,” where daring people would get together and talk about mind-stretching ideas, like the women’s vote, racial equality and creating a middle-class with leisure time (remember that?).
We’re all so busy now, so serious -- my workout, my health plan (sickness plan, really), my psychology, my mission statement! A substantial number of people I know believe the world is going to do its best to come to an end in their lifetimes – from an environmental collapse, terrorists triggering nuclear holocaust, the economy just giving it up, people living together, God getting pissed, something.
These are not mind-opening thoughts. Whatever your agenda, these thoughts feed the fear and righteousness in that agenda. (“The world owes it to me to end as a show of support for my belief system.”) This is not liberal. It’s not even conservative. And it’s definitely not fun.
Liberal used to be a good word, coming as it does from “liberty” and “library,” meaning one who reads, learns, changes, opens to new ideas, opens the heart to going beyond its safe place, learning to understand and accept where anyone, everyone is coming from, what they’re going through.
But to the majority now, liberal is dark and bad, as it opens the mind and heart to dangers, like drugs, abortion, gay bishops, immigrants, divorce, kicking God out of school, creating too many wilderness areas for Spotted Owls. Let’s keep high boundaries. Look what happened in the sixties.
But here are all these liberals, mostly from Ashland (they did a show of hands). My, it’s fun to be surrounded by people who think like I do. The questioners ask Molly who can beat Bush, not whether he should be beat. She names the top five and says she didn’t think last spring it could be done, but now she does. Bubba’s no liberal but he’s not happy, either. Some 2.7 million jobs gone in 2.7 years (that’s 3,000 a day) and they’re not coming back.
Dire stuff. But her best line of the evening was that California’s new governor looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts. Laugh - thought we’d die.
Then she told the story of accidentally sliding down a snowy hill into a taped-off crime scene, ending with her feet resting against a horribly mutilated murder victim. She was a young journalist in Minneapolis and what the hell does this have to do with the landscape of modern liberalism in these horrid times of terror, war and an economy in tatters?
Well, (still on the snowy hill now) she looks up into the face of the stern, mean police chief and he says (she was new on the job), “Just who the eff are you?” and she replies, “Do we have to use that kind of language?”
Oh, I get it – she’s having fun! We’re all screaming with laughter. She is teaching us, not to think like her, but to freaking well have fun like her! She won’t let up. She’s jiving our asses and trying to remind us of the meaning of life.
Then she spells it out, read my lips, she begs -- yes, make a change, but HAVE FUN. Please?
But it’s not something we can just go and do, now can we? It requires a fundamental shift of consciousness, as they say on New Dimensions radio. And we’ve fundamentally shifted into forgetting how to have fun. We used to have fun. We pranked, even. And fun, believe it or not, was originally (remember the Roaring 20s?) a counter-Victorian medicine and (remember Kesey?) a core liberal message.
I look at myself. Am I any damn fun anymore? Nah. I’ll get to that when I’m done with all this serious stuff. After I’m emotionally honest, intellectually rich, spiritually enlightened, personally correct, and healthy enough to live past 100. Enough!
I’m on a story in White City – let’s not even go there with what Ashlanders think of White City. In thrall to that class prejudice, moi not wanting even to talk to these guys who made some new truck gadget that's selling like crazy. But I sit in there with two Bubbas eating M&Ms, cracking jokes and finally just wanting to do a pitcher with them. I go get in my car, grinning like a pig. Grounded, as they say in Ashland. I realize, I don’t know squat, now do I? Who’s the real Bubba here?
Funny how one little line can stick with you all your life. One of mine is from Louis Auchincloss’s “The Rector of Justin.” He wrote (of WWII), “Ego, burning like an ember beneath the conflagration of the world.” Wow, my young college-age mind thought. What the hell IS ego? Later psychology studies reveal it: the sense of self, formed of a lifetime of repetitive, self-justifying thinking, with very little new information getting in – certainly not a lot of info that threatens the ego with change (my, it hates that).
Which brings us back to fun. What the hell is fun? It’s that which dissolves the dread boundaries of ego, rather like water tossed on the Wicked Witch of the West. We let go. We give up ourselves and our personal correctness. We give Bubba a break. We bubba-fy. Like Molly. And that’s why Molly spoke to a sold out crowd. She’s one of the best informed columnists alive, but she won’t do it unless it’s fun – and unless Bubba comes to the party. ~
When Society is an Addict
Ann, another soccer mom, and I are watching our kids’ team getting beat (still having fun, though), and when I say to her, what do you think’s going to happen in the election, she puts her head on my shoulder in mock weeping and says she’s going to work to register voters.
A few days later, the same soccer mom says an email is circulating about the draft coming back next year. We all have 8th grade boys. This news hits in the gut a lot more than the election, what with two long, bloody, costly wars in one presidential term and saber-rattling about Iran and North Korea.
Friends forward an email from Michael Moore, who says don’t give up because the polls are wrong – they poll by landline phone and a whole younger generation doesn’t use landlines. They’re on cells and internet – or nothing. And they’re not happy. They’re voting.
This isn’t about beating Republicans. Another president, a Democrat, in the mid-sixties made us a rogue nation, doing the same thing, and millions of people acted against him – worked to get McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy to lead a popular intervention, which almost worked.
Intervention is a good word for it. An intervention is a group effort to confront a person or system that has descended into addiction and brought a lot of damage to self and others. That’s what’s happening now. We have a society doing that. You can tell addiction by the signature behavior of denial. And, as with substance addiction, one denial begets another, bigger one. Another sign of denial is that you say your addiction isn’t really that harmful but lots of others say it is. This is known as lying to yourself.
The main denial going on is that we went into a big war, justifying it by saying they had weapons of mass destruction and that they were in deep with al Queda – but when these reasons proved to be untrue, it hardly affected the approval rating for either war or president.
However, the rest of the world clearly was appalled and reacted by reversing its post-9/11 support and sympathy for America and, as seen in a recent McLoughlin Group (the feistiest and most radically honest of pundit shows), our president couldn’t get elected to anything anywhere in the world except here. This is like your friends telling you that you need help, you need to listen to your friends and you should get into recovery.
At a potluck of a friend for her two Japanese exchange students, they were asked how people thought of Bush and the war back home. They shook their heads vigorously and negatively, pumping thumbs downward. “Terrible, awful!” they said. These guys are not Democrats. And these kind of comments don’t just come out of nowhere.
Politics has a lot of lies. We know this. How can you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. We’re used to “regular” political lies and can ignore them. But this is different. Did we ravage Iraq and spend a couple hundred billion, with 1,000 deaths to us and 20,000 to them with just cause or not? Did the tax cuts favor the rich? Did the president use influence to evade Vietnam, then go AWOL? Did his party then spend millions to say an opponent fraudulently won the Silver Star in Vietnam? Did Bush really “inherit” this recession? Is an unthinkable deficit ok? Did Florida fall in the Gore column? The ill-gain of Florida seems where this round of denial got its start.
Another danger signal of addiction is black-white, us-them thinking, rather than seeking constructive solutions. After 9/11, with the support of the world, we could have sought out the reasons why al Queda and much of the Arab world is upset with us enough to commit constant suicide attacks in the Mideast and here.
Is it because they’re “evildoers” and “hate us for our freedom?” This kind of thinking demonizes “them,” discredits any motives or visions they might have and leaves war as the only option. In fact, there are reasons why they hate us, but we’re not interested in learning what they are and determining if their reasons are valid. No one does evil because they’re evildoers. Everyone has reasons. Just like half our nation has reasons for not being upset that the justifications for invading Iraq have proved insubstantial.
The reasons they attacked us have to do with the Palestinians and our heavy-handed (to put it nicely) dependence on the oil of the region. John F. Kennedy said, “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” He was one of the few presidents secure enough and wise enough to avoid global thermonuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Can you imagine what the reaction would be today? And if Kennedy had faced 9/11, can you imagine him not doing the obvious – calling a global forum bent on resolving hatreds between the Arab world and the West (including Israel)?
At the soccer field, the soccer mom and I let it out -- somehow, this nation has never seemed in such danger, we say, not during the whole Vietnam War, maybe not even during the Civil War. It’s not about parties. Lots of Republicans – Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ike, Goldwater, McCain, Reagan – have been good leaders. It’s about truth.
Sometimes intervention works. More often, what works is hitting bottom, as it’s called in the addiction treatment business. We don’t want that, say the soccer mom and I, watching our boys. We don’t want to be wearing yellow ribbons for them, with the slogan, “support our troops,” which in the language of denial, really means, support our war. ~
The Sad, Slow Muffling of Dissent, Post 9/11
Just as people used to do through all history until the invention of the telephone, he walks over to my house and knocks on the door, then asks if I want to hang. People actually used to do this – no appointment necessary. That’s also why people had front porches, to walk around till someone invited you onto their porch, at least in summer.
He has a good bottle of merlot in his hand, which he displays with a smile. I’m completely and happily surprised. We uncork it and sit on the couch, pleased with the prospect of two or three hours of amicable, engaging repartee on the personal and human condition.
The state of the country in the season of election and terrorism, is one of fear, we agree, of watching what you say and especially what you write. He wants to write and we often talk about it, but tonight, his shyness about writing is not because of style or skill, as he often mentions, but because he has a career – he’s a minister – and a family and doesn’t want to…to what?
There it is on the table before us. Something could happen, couldn’t it? As a minister, he wants to speak out about the morality of our society waging war without seeming reason, now that the justifications – Iraq WMDs and ties to al Qaeda – have proven unfounded. But he isn’t speaking out.
He walked to my house in the dark and mentioned he saw, in house after house, people sitting inert, being showered with photons crammed with information that also wasn’t speaking out about diddly, except giggly, vapid sitcom nonsense and commercials encouraging you to buy more stuff you don’t need. They’re just pouring it on, he says, and people are just lapping it up.
I say, ok, why aren’t you speaking out? I mean, there are several hundred ministers in this valley and if one of them has spoken up about this war, the climate of fear and the waste of the national treasure for it, I must have missed it. I mean, if they’re going to build camps for dissenters and others who “give aid and comfort to the enemy,” as Daniel Ellsberg suggested here the other day, they’ll certainly have a bunk ready for this columnist.
I tell him, hey, I was trying to interview people after that Daniel Ellsberg talk the other night and I have never been met with such hostility, as a journalist, in my life. Some wanted to see my credentials. Some asked “Why do you want to know?” Some walked away. Are they afraid to be in print too? Or are they just mad at the press for passing along the pap given them by the powers that be – and they don’t want to be called unpatriotic for questioning it.
From this, life, as it is wont to do, randomly segues into the next adventure, that makes our country’s fate seem very small to me indeed. Hannah wakes up with a very sore throat that rapidly becomes ulcerated, bleeding, infected tonsils and a night in the hospital.
What does a dad do while his daughter’s fate might maybe hangs in balance, waiting for the diagnosis? I work, writing. I do the dishes, finding myself muttering words under my breath. What are they? They are prayers, of course. They are to a female being, one who knows what it is to raise children. Do I call anyone for “support?” No. What would I say or do? What would they say or do? It would feed it.
I sit and watch my heart. I go to the hospital and rub her feet and watch the lovely curves of her face, which I have admired and loved for 16 years. I eat their amazingly horrid, pasty, sterile, dead food, designed, it seems, to kill you if you stay there long enough. We watch a video, “Hook,” so appropriately the story of Peter Pan, now a pot-bellied, stressed-out lawyer, being dragged back to Neverland to save his kids, taken by Cap’n Hook – and, to pull off the feat, having to rediscover and reclaim the lost gift of flying.
That’s it! I am stunned watching this tale. We’ve got the power, right here inside us. We’ve always had it. Now I know she will be ok. We go home. The next night, another friend, Michael, comes over with Bordeaux. We sit in the living room bitching about the election, when he finally says, hey, this is ridiculous, the whole country whining about Bush winning. It’s not about that. I’m sick of hearing how the world turns on the election. It’s not out there. Every person has the power inside. I lift my glass to him, remembering why I pick my friends so carefully. ~
A Day with Draft Resisters
A Day with Wounded Soldiers
I’m interviewing this doctor and she’s helping teens, nudging them to build conscientious objector files. We finish our interview and she starts telling me tales about her draft resistance work back east in the early seventies, painting guys’ bodies with crazy designs in India ink and building a big nutcase file by going for months to a shrink and telling demented stories.
She tells me about talking with a Christian woman in Medford whose brother was wounded in Iraq and how the women believes Bush is ordained by God to do what he’s doing and how the churches, the more conservative ones are “pounding it into them” and she told the woman that, terrorism notwithstanding, the U.S. is not obligated to set the Islamic world straight.
“I feel pretty helpless,” the doctor said. “It’s so enormous. I just try to educate people to get in the highest place but people don’t understand the ability of humans in the political world to create horrific situations like the Holocaust. And today, we’ve created these people in the Mideast who, from out point of view, aren’t human.”
She sees it here at home in little things, like honking at someone who doesn’t immediately move at a green light. “The level of how people care for each other has really degenerated. I’m really freaked out by this.”
After the draft resistance story, I get more emails than I’ve ever gotten on a story – and from all over the country, almost all scared, wanting to talk to the local people organizing the resistance here. Despite the sudden, huge House vote against it (intended to zap it as a campaign issue), they say, the draft can be used at any time.
Listening to John Edwards in Medford, I realize this guy will very likely be the next Democrat nominated for president. He doesn’t talk much about Iraq. He wants to keep it about domestic stuff, especially health care, which could be funded for the next couple centuries out of what we’ve spent in Iraq in 18 months.
Pressing the flesh after his talk, you realize, hey, he’s receiving acclaim you rarely see for a candidate. He walks by me, stopping dead in front of me and looks into my eyes, as he does with everyone. He’s presenting himself to listen to anything I might want to say. I so don’t expect this. I smile and say good luck, Senator. He nods and moves on.
The soccer moms and I hang and watch the debates, sipping wine, nibbling pizza while our teen sons run around the house. How can we not glance over at their lovely smiles and mad, zany energy and not imagine them being sent to war? Bush is asked what mistakes he’s made as president. He skips the question, using it to say why the Iraq War is not a mistake.
Next day, half a dozen Oregon guardsmen, wounded in Iraq, fly here to pick up care packages put together by volunteers. I’ve never talked to young men with fresh wounds. They speak their gratitude for the caring of people who did these packages. It’s the love, not the stuff, that counts, they say.
One says he would turn around and go back to Iraq if he could, but his wounds prevent it. Others agree. Why, I finally ask, would you want to go back there?
My pals, he says. He mentions the “mission,” but it’s his comrades that he cares about. It’s my job, my duty, my friends, he says. He even made friends among the Iraqi people and misses them, it’s clear.
At the end of the interview, they show some of their wounds to each other and me. One is a foot long gash on the arm of this man from Corvallis, from a stray bullet. It’s healing nicely, he says.
Another shows what looks like recent claw marks from a large cat – shrapnel. Almost all of them were blown up in Humvees as they ran over IED, which means improvised explosive devices – bombs rigged inside big shell casings, with a car alarm for a trigger.
Another wounded man says he’s got a wife and kids – and feels bad for wanting to go back but, at the same time, bad for wanting to stay here. When he was blown up, a pal was killed, a guy he knew back home. He visits the man’s mother every day. It was her only child, so she said she’d adopt him in her son’s stead. He was good with that.
I talk to Anne, an old colleague from 70s Medford tv news, who says she’s become captivated by helping the Iraq War wounded because no one wants to forget them, like we did the soldiers from Nam, so many of whom went onto depression, alcoholism and feeling they’d done something wrong.
I finish my interview and look at these guys, the same kind of tough, happy warriors I served with in the Marines (peacetime) and I so know their loyalty. I put my hand on a shoulder or two and say, hey guys, thank you for going over there and fighting and suffering for us and carrying wounds you’ll have all your life, including the wound that won’t go away – seeing friends die.
We see the soldiers onto their jet-prop National Guard plane. Anne and I talk. She’s been working hard on the Kerry campaign. Never seen one like this, she says. Me neither, I note. Even during the Vietnam War, there was a sense that the rubber duck would right itself in the bathtub, but that’s gone now. These are no ordinary times – the country vehemently split in two and backed by deeply-seated, almost ancient emotions that portray the other side not as just misguided, but bordering on evil itself.
Even if one’s own side wins, will it stop? No, it won’t. There’s a lot of work to do and it doesn’t end if one’s candidate wins. It’s about loyalty, not to one’s side, but to the country as a whole – to all of us. That’s what these soldiers showed us. ~
A Drunken Donkey in Recovery
It’s nice that the Democrats had enough brains and hard work to recapture the Oregon legislature from the school-starving, government-hating religious right, to sweep all statewide offices and to vigorously veer the Ashland city council away from the development-minded business community, but on seeing the exit polls Tuesday, that the issue important to most voters was not the economy or war – but moral values – you knew John Kerry was toast.
Not that he lacks morality. But rather, you knew for sure now that the Neocons had succeeded in defining our political process as a battle between forces of light and darkness (with them in the light) – and that it came this year mainly from gay marriage.
Driving to Roseburg the week before the election with Greg, my public tv producer, he says watch these semi’s – they’ll flip us off (for having the Kerry and gay rights stickers on his car). They do. Greg says it’s awful, but D’s really have to wake up, start wearing suits and drop the wedge social issues – gay rights, medical pot, choice – that affect only a sliver of the population, but hand R’s and their talk-radio and radical church minions the hammers to destroy the center-left.
“They’re just stupid,” he says of his party. “They have to grow up, run the party like a business and market the message – that it’s about education, environment and health care. What else is there, really? That’s real life for the vast majority of people and R’s don’t give a warm turd for those issues. Yet the middle keeps voting for them.”
He’s right, I sigh. Steadily pursuing those vast, mainstream issues is not very exciting and means hard work and long, boring meetings with average people – few headlines, no demonizing the fascists, but it’s where the D’s have to go, back to the middle, if they want to start talking reality to the middle class – and to govern.
It’s not even about the war. The war is wrong and completely unnecessary, but it will go away in time. It, our political life, is about seniors who can’t afford meds and 50 million people who can’t afford either health insurance or health care. It’s about how our schools suck and few young people can afford college. It’s about job loss and unthinkable housing prices and all the sprawl and tightly packed, pricey developments that go with it.
What I remember from the campaign is precious little discussion of any of these real issues, ills and needs of our country – but rather the keenest of hatred for the other side, its war, its greed, its Patriot Act, its exploitation of fear and its general rotten meanness.
This is what Obi-Wan of Star Wars would call giving into the Dark Side. When you do that, you lose. As it has so many times in the past when it lost its soul, the Democrats deserved to be spurned.
The Republican party is about business, profit and money, with the understanding these make jobs (not happening now), a healthy society and everyone wins. The Democratic party is (was) about networking with the middle and working class at the grass roots to actually funnel energy and public money into making a difference in real lives, which shows up in stuff like school lunches, Head Start, child tax credit, good minimum wage, workplace day care, ways to buy a starter home – you get the idea.
The R’s have not forgotten their mission and their base and have greatly broadened it by so exacerbating the fears of the middle and working classes about gays, abortion, medical pot and such dreadful issues that they will regularly do the unthinkable – vote against their own economic interests, not caring that they’re making the rich richer in the process.
The D’s, on the other hand, have all but forgotten their base, which, if you look at the electoral map, shows the entire rural and Southern population in Wall Street’s pocket, while the D’s hold the urban yuppie and ethnic belt of the Northeast, upper Midwest and Pacific coast.
The soul of the Democratic Party, created by FDR and carried on by Truman, JFK, Johnson, Humphrey and Carter, was surrendered to Reagan in 1980. Clinton, an exception, was elected on his own charisma and genius -- without which we would have an unbroken three-decade reign of R’s.
When “out amongst ‘em,” reporting both sides during this campaign, what I heard from the D’s was a lot self-righteous contempt and spite for the fear-mongering fascists. What I saw was D’s doing nada community action but surfing the internet for millions that would go to tv ads. What I didn’t hear was any talk, let alone action, on what used to be called paycheck issues aka helping the poor, elderly, children, single moms. You hear “think locally” but you don’t see much of it.
FDR cast the die, a grass roots (perfect term for it) system that loves and takes care of the working and middle class, their children, their elderly, holds town meetings with potlucks, apple pie and square dances, finds out what’s needed in our society and comes up with real ideas for a better life.
This is gone. D’s only talk to each other now – and that on the internet and at wine tastings. Meanwhile, the working and middle classes are talking to each other in rapidly growing congregations of increasingly politicized, polarized churches who look at D’s as part of the problem.
Mythically, D’s are marooned on Homer’s Calypso or (Star Wars) in that swamp where Luke’s rocket fighter was submerged, while he resisted learning the ways of the Force from Yoda – finally seeing that, in his hatred and anger, he was killing only himself.
It’s clear now that we live in a center-right country, where an attack three years ago by a few hundred Islamic Weathermen not only failed to teach us the intended lesson – to operate with even-handed justice in the Mideast – but supplied a foe to replace Communism and energize a swaggering, corporate-military presence abroad and a moralizing church-state presence at home.
That’s what happens when D’s stray from their working-middle class base and try to make it with politically correct intellectuals, pacificists, radical environmentalists, New Age seekers, drug-users, gays, pissed-off feminists, 2012 nihilists and too many other special agenda splinter groups. They’re wonderful, interesting people, their causes are noble and they’re “right” but they will never form a majority and govern.
The R’s have not just won an election. They’ve taken over the soul of the working and middle classes. To do this, the R’s have successfully baited the D’s on an array of social wedge issues.
D’s, Like drunks in recovery, might want to ask themselves some hard questions: 1) Who needs gay marriage? Even straights can’t make it work. 2) Who needs abortion? If you don’t know how to use contraception, go back to high school sex ed. 3) Who really cares if there’s a law against flag-burning? 4) Who needs more medical pot laws? It’s everywhere now and if you’re discreet, no one bothers you. You get the idea: get a life and get involved outside your own clique.
In other words, you once-charming, imaginative Democrats, get back into being the hard-working donkey, rather than the precious, spoiled, self-obsessed ass. ~
How to Tell the Aliens Among Us
Once, in the seventies, a letter came to me, I swear, with a stamp showing the Pilgrims getting out of the boat on Plymouth Rock – and the cancellation mark read, “Illegal Aliens Must Register.” Is that the story of America or what? The rules – and the freedom to decide your own rules, if you dare.
We Anglos dared. And today, Latinos dare. The most emails I ever got after writing a story came recently in reporting how hundreds of Mexicans are getting a Matricula card – a simple bar-code ID card that states name, address and the fact they were born in Mexico. It serves as proof to help open bank accounts, get a driver’s license and rent a home, as well as to help the Mexican consul locate them if there’s trouble back home.
For weeks, emails come, all of them disparaging the card, the story, the “invasion” of Mexicans, as one writer put it – with frequent use of the word “collapse.”
Carl in Washington state writes -- “If America collapses, or comes to the brink of collapse, it will be over the illegal alien issue. You have now done your part in that regard. That may be pleasing to you, however, I hope that you survive the conflict so as to reconsider your stance.”
“S.” writes -- “Only in Oregon! If you had but a shimmering clue how much illegal aliens' camp followers are costing Oregon taxpayers, you'd be out waving a 'Wetback Go Home' banner. Spend a week in L.A. - 1.5 million illegals causing a collapse in education, trauma centers and ERs, causing a third of the crime, 100,000 gang members, 17 car-to-car freeway shootings last week, 1500 inner-city homicides last year. Oregon is committing suicide.”
James of Hillsboro writes -- “Lovely article, it brought me to tears! And do you know what the tears were for? They were for the damage being done to our social structure, institutions and economy, by millions of law-breaking ILLEGAL aliens flooding our country. We DO have immigration laws, or is that not important anymore, in this brave new LIBERAL touchy-feely world? These illegal Mexican law-breakers are taking jobs from American citizens, trying to feed their families. Hospitals and social service agencies are expending BILLIONS providing medical and social services to these law-breakers. And don't you DARE accuse me of racism! You clowns make me sick!”
Rick of Salem writes “Yes, Oregon is becoming bi-cultural, Millions of Legal Immigrants from all over the World and millions of illegal Mexicans who love people like you, that don't tell the truth, and dance happy about our State employees helping them to hide from the law. With over 120,000 Oregonians on unemployment for a long time, how can you be so happy about our state helping illegal immigrants look for work? These Terrorist's, Murder's, Drug Dealer's, Child Molesters, etc. appreciate your support. Law abiding Americans DO NOT! Maybe when your teen age daughter is raped by an illegal or your son is hooked on Meth, brought in by an illegal alien, then, maybe, you will understand. Until then we all suffer. You are a Traitor, Shame on you!”
Ok, end letters. You get the picture. Like it or not, this is a huge issue with a lot of people in our region. I was stunned by the reaction.
I don’t usually answer quarrelsome letters, but I couldn’t resist. I wrote “S” above, “Oh, so it would be like what the Indians went through when we arrived?” S. was furious, lauding the nobility of the Great Western Migration. I didn’t reply or ask what’s different about the Great Northward Migration from Latin America, except that, obviously, Manifest Destiny means Anglos, with their superior Christianity and Protestant Work Ethic had the final and God-given right to be here.
When I walked in that big room at Our Lady of the Mountain Catholic Church in Ashland, carrying my clipboard and a pen, 200 Latino faces turned to me. Pen. Clipboard. Tall, white man. Not one of us. Not good news for us. Surrounding the room were tables from many state and local agencies – employment, DMV, economic development – and they were there not to arrest illegal immigrants, but to say, hey, you’re here, you’re not going back, here’s how to get into the system, so you don’t end up going off into the weeds: poverty, despair, drugs, crime.
The Mexican consul from Portland got up and told them who I was. After that, they relaxed and I interviewed them through an interpreter from Rogue Community College. I heard their stories about travails trying to get a driver’s license, being sent away time after time for different kinds of proof that you are – what? An American. I mean, that’s what we did, we Anglos. For centuries, we stepped off the boat and said, hi, I’m here, guess I’ll settle in, where’s the maize? ID? We don’t need no stinkin’ ID?
So, how do you become as American? You decide you are an American, that’s how. And I’m in a roomful of people who decided that and voted with their feet, by walking north and essentially saying, hey, rules are fine, but we know your ancestors got here the same way we are, by choosing it, then dealing with Whatever It Takes.
I decide I have to read what it says on the Statue of Liberty. Ready? It says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores; send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
It doesn’t say, “Give me your strong, your rich, your high-asset masses yearning to be richer and whiter, the well-dressed middle class of your teeming malls; send these, the homeowner, the skilled, to me. I lift my Platinum Visa authorization beside the golden door.”
Surfing the NY Times, I find Hollanders feeling their country and culture is overrun by Muslims -- and Brits by citizens of their former, multi-hued empire. So, have-nots come to live with haves, right? They fight, they meld culture boundaries, then they make love.
Surfing PBS, I amazingly find that science now believes half the original Native Americans came from Asia and a lot came from…ready? France! This was 15,000 or 20,000 years ago. How do they know this? Those long, fluted Clovis spear points found all over America? Asians never made them. Only the Cro-Magnon, modern humans of Western Europe did. Mitochondrial gene sampling confirmed it. Of course, I’m sure that after killing each other for a while – and barking about the collapse of civilization -- these two very diverse ethnic groups pursued the second favorite human passion and got in bed, becoming what we know as Indians.
So Columbus and Leif Erickson didn’t discover diddly. They just repeated a deeply-seated human instinct, to go where the space and food is – or the means to create or earn it. And when I walked in that room full of Mexicans and me in the one percent Anglo, I have to tell you, I felt weirdly comfortable, fascinated, excited. Wow, a whole new tribe, with whole new ways of talking, cooking, praying, all that. And I pretty much bet you that after 50 years of mixing, you won’t be able to tell who the aliens are. ~
How King John Got Afoul of Robin Hood
They don’t have the charisma and fame of their martyred fathers, but Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Martin Luther King III are deeper, more wounded by what’s happening to the world – and more measured, wise and candid in speaking out against it. After all, they don’t hold political office (they could easily be senators) and that independence gives them the platform to say what’s real.
We live in upside-down times, Kennedy says, when lies parade as truth – there is no global warming, we’ll always have oil, Saddam had WMD and al Queda ties, tax cuts help everyone, evolution is just a theory, rolling back eco-laws is ok – and the supposed antidote and guardian, our press, has self-pityingly taken a step backward, sighed and resigned its role, saying the public doesn’t want to hear it.
I’ve heard plenty of editors whine about that over the last quarter-century. Well, duh, start publishing what’s real and maybe people will start buying papers. Stop sleeping with power – and, in Kennedy’s words, start speaking truth to power.
A light drizzle is falling. Kennedy speaks rapid-fire, attack-dog style, no notes, barely pausing to take a breath, barely indulging in the gestures and accent of his assassinated dad and uncle. I say to the World Wellness Weekend organizer, hey, if he cleaned it up for prime time, he could be president -- and he whispers back, well, he wants to live.
It sounds like it’s about acid rain, mercury in the water, coal-fired plants being set free from environmental restrictions, but as Kennedy talks, you realize it’s about telling the truth and, as in the days of King John, it’s about a small band of rich thieves looting the commons – air, water, forests, wildlife – that aren’t the property of anyone, but are supposed to be used and stewarded by all.
What we see now with the president and his corporate cronies? “That’s how King John got in trouble with Robin Hood.” It was RFK’s best line. And who’s the hero in the Robin Hood story? It’s not King John, who said only the aristocracy can hunt deer and who was finally forced to sign the Magna Charta, laying the foundation for democracy and common rights.
The hero of the story is the anarchist, dressed in forest green cammies, armed, living with a small band of ruffians, farmhands, ale-guzzlers and busy moms and hewing to a moral law that’s grounded in nature and common sense – and a respect for the common good. It became the model for the American Revolution and all revolutions since. When any of the four medieval estates – nobility, clergy, middle class and press – get too much power and wealth and fail in their duty to protect the common good, the others arise against it or a fifth, revolutionary, estate arises to shift everything.
Today, the four estates seem comfortable in their oil-driven wealth and partnership, although the middle class is rapidly losing the ability to pay for health care and housing and finding itself more and more sounding like the Merry Men of Robin’s gang.
But Kennedy’s message is not so much about distribution of wealth and power, but about the failure of virtually all media (80 percent of newspapers are now owned by six corporations) to be able to create and pursue an agenda that embraces the real problems and wrongdoings of our society. In other words, in an age of fully-wired, full-saturation media, control of “what’s real” is the real power.
That’s why so many people didn’t just object but became outraged about the Tidings front-paging of body piercing suspension. Putting it in the mainstream media makes it real. Before that, it was like UFOs, chemtrails and – until USA Today finally put it on the front page as “real” – global warming.
A prestigious environmental lawyer, Kennedy speaks to a lot of groups, including the more conservative, moneyed groups. He does it without rhetoric, just laying down what’s “real,” as if what’s real is not a matter of opinion or cultural persuasion. It’s just real. Either acid rain and mercury come from coal-fired plants or they don’t. Either they poison mother’s milk and damage brains or they don’t. Science says they do. It’s “real.” But the press, when they notice it at all, put it on page 16 and just report the mouthings of the polluters, leaving it to the public to draw their own conclusions that it may be “real” or maybe not.
When Kennedy gets down with your average red-state Republicans and tells them how the environment is being trashed and looted by King John’s nobility, they say, how come I’ve never heard about this? Where, asks Kennedy, do you get your news? From Fox and Rush Limbaugh, they say.
But even if you get it from the New York Times and Washington Post, you have to heavily augment from the blogosphere and seemingly wild-eyed Robin Hood-type websites, then average out the information.
The once-heroic networks, founded on Edward R. Murrow’s documentaries (exposing migrant worker exploitation and destroying McCarthyism), have dumped all investigative reporters and 80 percent of foreign correspondents, Kennedy says. The time-honored fairness doctrine, requiring that both sides actually be told in the news, was dumped by Reagan’s FCC, allowing the rise of telebigots like Limbaugh. Network news is “no longer functioning” but is only a corporate profit center, he says, entertaining the reptile brain’s need for sex and violence with unrealities like Michael Jackson and depriving us of the information we need to live in a democracy.
What’s real is that there’s really no split between those who support the environment and those who want the economy. No one wants to see the natural world looted for the profit of the few. What’s real, says Kennedy, is that we’re a society in thrall to the Big Lie technique, created by Nazi propagandist Goebbels, but turned into a globally encompassing political way of life. Orwell saw it 80 years ago in “1984,” but he probably didn’t see it becoming a form of entertainment that, far from having to be forced on a tyrannized people, would actually be embraced by them. ~
What Would Jefferson Do?
Seen it 35 times now, that 4th of July spectacle, can’t stop traipsing down there – what is it, so irresistible about it, this crazy marriage of Halloween, militarism, political protest, beer blast, pyromania, this pilgrimage of silliness, eroticism and above all, this freedom to publicly flaunt views for which millions have been tossed in dungeons and lynched.
I’m interviewing Eli, new to Ashland. He says he cried for half an hour, beholding this wholesome, messy, glorious surging forth of expression. Of freedom, really. We’re free, we really are, even if we go in long, dark cycles of giving it up, as we are now. We’re sleepwalking and have lost our democracy, says Eli, an author-lecturer, a veteran of the sixties anti-war movement and civil rights protests in the South in 1965, where you could get lynched quick by the racist majority.
Eli Jaxon-Bear was just in Washington, on a speaking tour and, while visiting the Jefferson Memorial, saw the third president’s engraved words – that as we become more enlightened and discover new truths, so our institutions must advance, thus we escape “the regimen of our barbarous ancestors.”
We’re being called upon in these difficult times, not to become better at the barbarous practices of making war, consuming and mastering the environment – but rather at being enlightened, says Eli, which means just what it says, enlightened, like Jefferson, Gandhi and King were, able to develop intellectually and spiritually, to think, see and live beyond the dogma and self-interest of party, commerce and religion.
Pointing to the many “disappointments of democracy” – the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Vietnam, Watergate, the failure of Carter and Clinton to change much, the stealing of the 2000 election, the falsity of the premises for the Iraq War – many, like activist-author Bill Kauth, are moving ahead with new social forms, beyond the democracy Jefferson gave us.
In the first meeting of his “Sacred Lifeboats,” July 5th at Ashland’s Peace House, Kauth passes out workbooks to two dozen attendees, stating as premises that we’ve lost our democracy, electronic voting machines are “corporate controlled,” the “corporate media” no longer give us the real news, those in power today behave as predators, without conscience – and “the Singularity,” is happening, meaning all manner of systems, the economy, environment, energy, socio-political conditions, are changing and coming to a head so fast that a lot of scared people are making “lifeboats.”
I’m sitting in the circle with a lot of people I know or recognize and I’m hearing a lot of conspiracy talk around 9/11, fixed voting and going to war for oil. I hear stuff like, “if the Evil Empire takes away the internet” and “big changes are coming” and “part of me is looking forward to it,” meaning the decline and fall of society as we know it and a return to a simpler, more agrarian, community style of living.
My stomach does a slow roll listening to all the things wrong with our society and democracy and how it’s natural to want to be in denial about it – but that facing reality and planning for survival will make you feel strong and enable survival. What to do? Educate yourselves, Kauth says, (like with the book “What Would Jefferson Do?”) and form “relentless optimist” groups to help each other create new ways of living, such as co-housing, alternative money, alternate energies, local organic gardens.
Kauth points out that everyone he knows has an “exit strategy,” that is, if it comes down to it, they’re already thought about running away, like to Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, but for now, despite the many disappointments of democracy, we’ll just keep hoping it can come back to center. I say that I have to believe, somehow, in the democracy given to us by Jefferson and other giants in The Age of Enlightenment. That’s nice. Hope is good. But hope can mask denial – and foster the passivity we see in our populace.
We’re listening to Martin Luther King III at the college stadium. He says the FBI’s surveillance done illegally on his martyred father can now be done legally to anyone, that the “quagmire” war in Iraq is unjust and illegal, that the dollar and the economy are in big trouble and that “corporate interests seem to be running everything.” Americans, he adds, badly need to educate themselves about all this.
Meanwhile, the most vigorous example of public debate seen in our town in years is about how graphic pictures of fleshly piercing and suspension on the Tidings’ front page have outraged the sensibilities of Ashlanders, whose considerable assets have allowed them to create a lifeboat safe from the diverse and scary writhings of the outside world. As one writer wittily pointed out, a whole religion was built on such piercing – and the spiritual transcendence achieved by it – and that image is pushed in our face everywhere, including in a recent boffo movie.
Of less concern among our populace was the story that a citizen of this valley has just been convicted of sitting down on the sidewalk, this in an exercise of free speech and public assembly in Jacksonville last fall, when Bush came to dinner. They called it “interfering with a government administration,” which sounds bad on its face, like he sent anthrax letters. But, folks, this is a litmus test to determine if you understand the First Amendment – is protest against a public official “interference” or is it “free speech?” Is the quashing of dissent “homeland security” or is it tyranny? Do we care? ~
Quiet as a Skunk in the Moonlight
We’re out at Lava Beds, south of Klamath, in the moon light, checking out the long ridge of moon craters and mountains through the telescope. Two striped chipmunks dart around near us, doing their mating dance among the rare Mariposa lilies. We’ve just been to the little cracker bar outside the National Monument boundaries for a delicious, dust-cutting pale ale. It’s so silent – “quiet as a skunk in the moonlight,” as the cowboy saying goes. The sky is so vast, the sage and juniper so still. And so are we.
The ranger says we have to be out by Friday because the Modocs are coming home from Oklahoma and will need the whole campground. They used to live here, before the Army forced them out. The Modocs wouldn’t go. They holed up in these lava caves through the winter of 1872-73, with their families. At peace talks, they took out General Canby and some others and hung for it. Now you can go on a self-guided tour of the natives’ fortifications. At the end of it, tourists have spontaneously erected a shrine to the Indians, with all kinds of sticks, buttons, feathers, stones, coins, notes. As Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows that the war is over; everybody knows that the good guys lost.”
It’s good to drive back into Ashland, where the battle over another good guy, Chief Mike still rages and posters are hung, protesting that the hard-line cops want him out because he’s “too soft.” I remember him in the eighties as a young cop, one who would always greet you with a smile and nod, one who would stop and talk to you. He was the one you’d remember because he was the only one you met, not in your rear view mirror with lights flashing, but out of his car, standing there with you, one of us. My daughter Heather, then in high school in the eighties, would comment, oh ya, he’s the cop who comes up to kids smoking pot in the park and, instead of putting the cuffs on them, stops and asks them how their lives are. And listens.
It seems that every few months in Medford, some guy gets drunk, waves a gun around and the cops rush out and – hey, he’s got a gun, end of story – pump the poor bastard full of lead, then ask questions. I mean, hello, we do have rubber bullets, tear gas, tazers, all kinds of non-lethal means to get him alive and into drug treatment and counseling. But when it happened in Ashland a few months ago, Mike wouldn’t let his people fill the air with bullets. Does this put them in danger? It takes a lot more guts and brains to do it peacefully. That’s what we pay cops for. I think if the city got rid of Mike, there would be a local revolution.
We pick up the paper, alas, to read that via Measure 37 claims, developers want to virtually ring sweet Ashland with golf courses, three more of them. I know that hitting this little white ball around is for many people, a ritual filled with deep passion and reverence, but surely they could wait their turn at one or at most two golf courses? Or perhaps find stress relief by taking up yoga and meditation in one of our town’s dozen yoga parlors? Sprawl on, developers. Sometimes, it takes a bumper sticker to succinctly sum it all up. One I just saw reads, “Visualize taking your yuppie ass back to California.”
Meanwhile, other cities, like Sorsogon in the Philippines, are dealing with very different visions. I’m interviewing Sally Lee, its mayor, at the annual Social Artistry retreat put on at SOU by author-philosopher Jean Houston of Ashland. Lee is basing her budget on UN Millennial Development goals – environment, gender equality, children’s safety, health and education, getting rid of AIDS and global partnering.
Never heard of it? Neither had I. But 192 nations, including the U.S., agreed to it in the final year of the Clinton administration. We’d never agree to it now. Sally, the quintessential “just a housewife,” suddenly found herself running a city of 140,000 and using these goals to make the world work, not for developers and the military, but for women and children first. After all, if the world works for women and children, the world is going to work for everyone.
Such is not the case in our nation’s agenda – local, state or national, but suddenly Jean says Hillary Clinton is going to be our next president. Really? How do you know that? She’s an old friend of Hillary’s and has always seen it in her bearing and vision and the people she has around her. It’s her destiny. It’s time for a woman’s hand on the tiller, isn’t it? Hope she wouldn’t be a Jimmy Carter – nice but neutralized. No, says Jean, she’s tough and knows what she’s doing.
The good guys keep tinkering, trying to make it better – like Ely Schless, building silent, non-polluting electric motorcycles in his warehouse out by the Ashland airport, year after year, getting ready for the time, not too far off, when, instead of spending $200 billion and 1800 American lives (plus 20,000 Iraqi lives) going off in search of oil, we’ll spend half an hour charging our bike, going off in search of groceries. ~
Screwed the Pooch Six Ways From Tuesday
What with the tsunami, Katrina and the 7,000-bolt lightning storm here, people are saying Mother Nature is not happy with us – but in the gas prices, she found a way to say it much more directly, a way that has people dusting off their bicycles and thinking about battery-powered vehicles.
The daily jump in gas prices, driven by an unsuccessful Mideast war and a battered Gulf Coast is somehow more scary than a hurricane because it’s probably not going to go away – and it threatens to undermine the foundations of society, not just how we get around but how everything, especially food, gets around.
I think our generation put the pedal to the metal and hasn’t left you a lot of oil to drive around with, I tell my teen daughter. I think that could be good, she replies. Walking, bikes, gardens, more community, saying hi to more people. Sounds fun.
The Metaphysical Library on A Street is getting more and more itinerant, paradigm-shift gurus coming through. The latest, author Ronald Logan of Eugene told a packed house on a hot night that we’ve screwed the pooch six ways from Tuesday and are looking at global debt collapse, erosion of purchasing power, monopolization of media, loss of trust in elections, a fear-based response of religions to life’s stresses, a merging of corporate and governmental agendas, all building toward some kind of perfect storm.
Heard it all before, but what’s interesting is the packed house – and the comments of people on the break. How much of this do we believe? Logan disparages the individual, survivalist approach and says we must have the vision, as we pass the limits of growth and move out of the profit-driven, material growth economy, to face change as a community with a common sense of humanity and cooperation.
You look at New Orleans, all those people knee deep in it, reeling, starving, thirsty, homeless, looting mostly to survive (who needs a big tv in a flood?), trying to just find a place to recharge their cell phone and get a glass of water – and you think of the $200B we just blew trying to rejigger a far-off desert nation we thought had lots of oil for us.
And you pull up to the gas pump and realize that to fill this tank for two weeks of driving around the valley is going to cost what it used to cost to fly to San Francisco. And you realize it’s possible we’re going back to about 1900, when people had buckboards, horses, bikes – and walking. No, wait a minute, I’m getting carried away here, listening to these Gloomy Gus guys and their dang new paradigms. We’ll figure a way out of this. Like the prez said, the American Way of Life is not negotiable. Whew.
The prez, I think, was referring to material things – the big homes, cars, vacations and “stuff” we’ve come to focus on over the last 25 years. And the oil. But that’s not the American Way of Life. Pardon my corn, but it’s about what used to be called Yankee Ingenuity and the magical, almost mystical way we have of overcoming differences in class, faith, ethnicity and pulling together.
As Logan put it, hey, “when reality impinges on people’s psyches,” it opens us to new ideas, allowing us to raise our focus from my home, my family, my car and start thinking about us, our community and society, our food chain, our common destiny that works for all of us.
Before it opens minds and hearts, though, it freaks people out. We’re going through big changes in our society, running out of land and affordable homes, coping with jihadism (on both sides), watching the nation’s fuel gauge nudge empty, facing unaffordable college, constantly seeing friends who can’t afford health insurance – and now suddenly looking at six-figure tabs for some unforeseen illness.
Reality is impinging, raising the feeling of powerlessness, regardless of income level, leading people to a readiness to bark and bite, such as we’ve seen in our community, reacting to the violent deaths this year of several people too young and too good to die. Tired of the barking and biting he got for it, Scot, our editor of this paper shut down his column, when, really, his kind of sane, good-natured, neighborly observances are the best and natural antidote to our toxic, polarized national and local debate.
I did another story on our Latino community, about the need for bilingual workers. One interviewee told me that, in addition to being bilingual, it’s necessary to be bicultural, that is, you understand Latino values and customs, like how they are always surrounded by family and community, having parties and barbeques, touching, talking. They’re rarely alone. Hm, says I, sounds nice. We Anglos don’t have that as a primary value. Maybe that’s part of the feeling of isolation, the lashing out. From my story, again came the venomous emails. One said, “If you want to speak Spanish and crap on our culture and not assimilate, then go back to that craphole you came from. Wake up you insane sick n the head liberal so-called journalists.”
Someone even put a sign in their car window impugning not just my column, but my parentage, with the wish that I would, as my column title suggests, just shut up. Journalists get such “feedback” regularly. Does it hurt or do we make it bounce off with the savvy, cynical demeanor of a 40’s movie reporter? Well, it hurts. At first. We thicken our skin and we start to see everyone as approaching us with bias and agenda – not a real story. We get support and perspective from our peers and partners. We peel off our armor when we get home. Hopefully. Thanks for reading. ~
Candidate Without a Chance
Peter Buckley is an oddity – so odd, in fact, that when I pitched the story about his David vs. Goliath race for Congress to my New York Times editor, he immediately saw the novelty in it. What’s odd about Buckley is that he stumps around his huge 2d district doing something quite almost unique among politicians and quite embarrassing in this cynical era – he tells the truth.
People kept telling me I gotta go hear this guy. His campaign manager, Ashley Henry, emailed me and said he’s got to get some national media, but that’s practically impossible. Why, I ask. Because all the politicians say the same stuff and if you have a different voice or vision, well, you’re fringe, you’re out of step, you’re naïve or stupid, you’re not savvy and shooting for the great middle of the bell curve and you won’t get any campaign money, so you’ll die.
Well, you need a peg, a hook, I say, something different to make this a Story. Ashley says, the catch is that he tells the truth to people he’s almost sure don’t want to hear it – ranchers, farmers, cowboys, the great middle-class -- but strangely, they’re sitting still for it and listening and sometimes nodding.
I go hear the guy. He’s speaking at a Solstice Indian pow-wow, a place all Republicans and most savvy Democrats avoid. (Fringe!) And right out of his mouth pops, “America is moving in exactly the wrong direction.” I gasp. My god, he’s not sucking up! There’s no spin. I haven’t heard anything like this since I covered the slash-and-burn Oregon primary race between Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in ’68. “The spending priorities of the federal government need to change drastically,” he says. But he’s smiling. He’s not angry. He’s charismatic and has a boyish, winning grin. He’s likeable. Hell, he’s an actor -- and a good one.
My first thought – everyone’s first thought is, dang, this guy is good on the stump and obviously is smart and seems to love campaigning (a must), but what the hell is he doing running in a district that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress since they carved Salem (heavily Democrat with state workers) out in 1970 and tossed out our powerful Ways and Means chair Al Ullman? This guy has virtually NO chance of winning.
I ask him, hey man, why you running here? You could move to Portland or Eugene or back in the Bay Area where you came from and get elected just like that. Why you trying to swing these cowboys? Man, they hate government, period, and here you are telling em they ought to pay for universal health care, federal support for all education through college and repeal the Bush tax cut. You’re lucky they don’t take you out back of the tavern and whup your butt.
Well, he says, he did have this one roughneck at the county fair in Bend who wagged his finger under his (Buckley’s) nose and said the lowest thing he could think of: “You love the pansies and anyone who loves the pansies can’t be trusted with national security.” Now, in large sections of Eastern and Central Oregon, that passes for common sense, if not revealed wisdom. But Buckley deftly pulls out his two favorite tools, his smile and reason. As if to say – hey, I’m going to get you on my wavelength and it’s going to be an enjoyable experience. We’re going to have fun! That’s the part of him that’s Clintonesque – persistence, grasp of the information and an inclusive goodwill.
“We should be an inspiration and a light in the world,” he says, “not an instrument of brute force.” There it is again. It sounds vaguely unpatriotic, but, even if you lean right, you still see the truth in it. And you see the guts it takes to say it. In public. While running for office. He goes on, “The national defense budget has so much waste – hugely expensive weapons systems that have nothing to do with fighting terror. They’re for defense contractors who contributed money to Bush.”
When he says this stuff in Eastern Oregon, (registration 55 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic) they don’t stand up and throw garbage at him, Buckley reports. Yes, they vote for Bush and Rep. Greg Walden (the incumbent Republican that Buckley’s running against). But then, they’ve also heard about the thousand-dollar toilet seats. We all know how the game is played.
“The Nuclear Missile Defense Shield,” he exhorts, “is the most expensive possible reaction to the least likely danger our nation faces. I mean, which country is really going to develop a nuclear missile system against us? China and Russia want to be our economic partners. North Korea is impoverished. Bush stopped those negotiations between North and South Korea so he could make North Korea an enemy, to justify creation of his weapons systems.”
Bush is working hard to favor the top 2 percent of rich people, he says, instead of helping people with their lives, communities and schools. Y’know, someday, maybe even this year, this obvious truth about our oligarchy just might be getting through to the common folk – as it did for decades back in FDR-Truman-JFK times.
Do they listen to this stuff in the Oregon outback, I ask him, sitting in his kitchen with one of his three young sons running around and Buddha and St. Francis statues staring at me from his garden. “Yes, actually, they do,” he says. “I ask for a show of hands everywhere I go. I say, is there one person here who does not think every politician is bought and paid for by the highest bidder before they even get in office? I’ve never seen one person raise a hand.”
At the top, he says, it’s a growing cult of greed over citizenship and Jefferson County (Madras), ranchers and farmers were furious about manipulation of energy markets, the secret Cheney energy committee meetings and corporate fraud – one even branding Lay as “Kenny Boy,” said Buckley.
So, they all know it’s rigged and they hate being made fools of so why don’t they do something beside sit back and buy that tired crap of hating the government that Reagan sold them a generation ago?
People today recoil from politics, he says. There’s so much pain in it for them, starting back in the sixties. We’ve exhausted our faith that politics can lead to any positive change. We think it can bring only trouble.
“One of my earliest memories is my dad coming in my bedroom and weeping when Bobby Kennedy was shot,” Buckley says. “something went out of our collective heart with that and the killings of John Kennedy and Martin Luthur King. We staggered through Vietnam and Watergate and now we don’t have the will to fulfill our potential. There’s an America in each of our hearts and we can’t let it out. We pull back and are afraid to dream and to stand up for our ideals.”
God, he’s right, I realize. It’s like an anesthetic that creeps into your previously vital nerve and muscle and numbs a few cells every day until you don’t see any way to make a difference. I was young in the sixties and had hope. I don’t have that anymore. When did it stop? Buckley is getting to me. He’s teaching me what has happened to our country. He makes it clear that that is more important than him getting elected to office and being somebody. He’s doing a Paul Revere thing – waking up the townfolk to the arrival of the enemy: indifference. It’s about the death of democracy, he says and he assures me he’s not kidding.
I want to deny it. But I know he’s right and if I know that, then it forces an immediate choice, doesn’t it? I can sit here and enjoy the cynicism I share with the nation and resign myself to the monoculture we’re creating (watched CNN lately?) and keep my tattered ideals to myself. Or I can make a fool of myself like Peter Buckley and stand up and speak the truth. With a smile, preferably. I mean, that’s what hope IS all about, right?
It was the 2000 presidential election, especially the Florida debacle, that brought Buckley into doing public radio commentaries, then declaring for Congress. “I was horrified at what happened,” he said. The money that went into Bush, more than any race in history. The media coverage – “abysmal” with no focus on issues. The passionate movement not to count votes. The Supreme Court stopping the count with one vote. “They threw out every principle of democracy because the acquisition of power was more important than democracy.”
9/11 has just made things worse, he says, giving more pretext for limiting 1st amendment rights to free speech and press. Buckley picketed Bush when he flew into the Rogue Valley in August. Fenced in away from press and public in his tiny compound for dissenters, Buckley waved a sign that said, “Justice for Ken Lay: a minimum wage job and no health coverage.” If he’d strayed from his compound, he’d have been quickly arrested.
Buckley doesn’t look like a Kennedy, but he gets called “Kennedyesque” a lot. They mean Bobby Kennedy, the Kennedy that went into the South and, when they complained of joblessness, he cheekily told them, hey why don’t you start by making a job of cleaning up all the car bodies and old washing machines all over the place down here?
“I was inspired by Kennedy when I was a kid,” said Buckley, who cut his political teeth at age 14, canvassing door-to-door, defending rebel Pete McCloskey, the Congressman who took on fellow Republican Richard Nixon in ’72. “These people set a path in front of me that said this country was about opportunity and freedom -- and that expanded and expanded because we have a creed of energy that we can accomplish anything, solve any problem. We’ve lost that. The message of greed has been pounded in our heads for so long. They’ve developed a credo that sacrifice, democracy, being a good citizen is for the sucker. The smart guys can rig the system and make it work for them. It’s extremely appalling in today’s culture.”
I never hear Buckley attack his opponent or even mention him. He mostly confronts the process – and us, the people who’ve let it happen. So I ask him about Walden. “He’s a dedicated man,” Buckley shrugs. “Just a very different point of view. His voting record is the DeLay-Armey direction – not corrupt, just extraordinarily destructive for our country. He’s like most Republicans who’ve painted themselves into an ideological box by screaming how awful government is and we must deregulate and un-tax and now they’re not capable of a conversation about anything. They can’t move the country forward.”
Knowing it’s virtually impossible to defeat an entrenched, deep-pocketed conservative Republican in a rural district – why does Buckley run? “It’s a very long shot. I have no illusions about it, but I’m doing it for my children, so they don’t inherit the world I see coming. It’s important to do the work, to get people in the habit of political discourse and participation in the democratic process.”
Now, if that sounds naïve (and Buckley knows it does) then that’s the problem. But there’s a more strategic dimension to it. Buckley intends to run next time, too, and to use the race for building a base of active, aware voters who could swing Oregon in the next presidential race (it was close last time) -- and in 2004, head off another default election of Bush.
It’s not a range fire yet, but Buckley thinks he’s getting the hang of it. “Even people who disagree with me appreciate my energy and passion. They tell me I’m obviously sincere. And some,” he laughs, “just shake their heads and walk away.”
Buckley points to a book, Matthew Fox’s “Creation Spirituality.” It’s been a big influence on him, he notes. “It’s about merging the spiritual path with the day-to-day world. And that we’re here to participate at the highest level as human beings. We’re here to accomplish something.” ~
Hunkering Down with the Gray Lady
She reads the New York Times every morning at the Beanery. It’s a hard read, but it’s all there, if you have the courage to read it – and my old friend Ellae does. Then she wants to talk about it. We talk. The young woman journalist from Michigan kidnapped in Iraq and put under death threat. Not much chance for her, we agree. Our side won’t release prisoners to free her. We’d look weak and it would encourage them. Her face on the video, so young. Your eyes stray to the neck, so vulnerable. How can these journalists do this, walk around Baghdad, knowing what can happen to them? But what a great shot at a Pulitzer and in your twenties.
So strange, it’s happening by the Euphrates, where the first story, Gilgamesh, was written 4,200 years ago on cuneiform tablets. I’m reading Stephen Mitchell’s new translation of it. Here it is, the same old story, the strong man risen up and made crazy with power, abusing and killing his own people – and how a preemptive attack is thought the wisest course.
We talk long of “Brokeback Mountain,” or “the gay cowboy movie,” as people call it. Everyone we know is talking about it. We don’t know much about that kind of hatred, for gays, here in Ashland, Oregon, but when we see its grisly, savage face on the screen, it’s familiar and we have to put in on the table. Where does this come from? Well, we all need love, she says, and these guys love each other – and they grew up without much love, in hard, cold, unpainted homes on the windy plains, with parents who barely spoke to each other.
It’s hard to imagine this rage for gays in other countries, we say. Is it something about Christianity? Well, it’s our Protestant culture, with English Puritan roots, meshed in with the sins of slavery and the genocide against natives here – the guilt and denial propping up the American masculinity culture and projected on anyone seeming too weak or different. Whatever is scary about being gay, that whole thing is a lot scarier – and we agree that gay tolerance, for us, is the canary in the mine, the test of whether a community or nation is safe for any kind of dissent.
We scan the Times. Hm. Intelligent design trashed by a Pennsylvania judge, nice. Maryland’s gay marriage ban tossed out, cool. Oregon’s death with dignity law upheld against the assault by Bush, who wanted to throw some red meat to the religious right, neat.
So, really, how does natural selection create something as complex and miraculous as the eye, not to mention the toe and pancreas and the blood sugar system, which Americans are rampantly violating, sending one in eight New Yorkers to the diabetic ward to get toes amputated, so says the Times.
Obviously, natural selection and mutation are not going to create the eye. The eye and all the rest of it were created in part by selection – you don’t survive with nonadaptive features – but they’re mostly created as a joint project of divine intelligence and our own creative urge, right here inside us. We got tired of bumping into things. We wanted eyes. We made ourselves see. We were both creative and created. God is inside us and is outside us, too. It’s both/and, not either/or, ok? But let’s not push that on the kids. Let’s have them study all the creation stories, then look in their own hearts and write a project: how did you get here? Write your own creation story. That’s what we, your ancestors, did. Promoting a powerful God outside us has only one purpose – to allow for creation of a powerful priesthood and political-military machine, posing as his agents so they can use fear and ignorance to dominate the regular folks.
I hang with Sen. Wyden all afternoon at his town hall meeting with 100 of the citizenry. They’re not too happy. It’s different than the old days, when people would rail on this and that bill about Social Security and other helpful legislation that had some chance of passing. There are no helpful bills with some chance of passing now and the folks know it. Still, Wyden is a good man and he talks about bills that would be good, if there were a strong, brave, free citizenry to support and demand them – like his flat tax, which would scotch Bush’s giveaway to the rich or a bill to stop torture and wiretapping of Americans (isn’t that already against the law?) or a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, but tied to a well-trained Iraq military, which means no timetable will work, but it sounds good. And he freaks the folks, insinuating maybe he could vote for Judge Alito.
What the town hall folks are ranting about now are not bills, but the whole ship of state -- the lobby corruption, church-state separation, voting fraud, concentration of media power, a bought Congress, the war, you know, the one whose justifications were proved false, but it still goes on and a couple hundred billion have been wasted, cash that could have funded national health care, at least for the middle class and working poor.
Afterward, I talk with a guy who’s on the country Demo executive committee and he wants to say nice things about Wyden and does, but shakes his head and says who can get anything done, really, in such a culture of corruption in DC? It’s gone round the bend, folks, and our senator knows it and we know it.
But, ah, here it is, this just in from the Gray Lady – that’s the Times. Wyden will vote against Alito, whom, he nods, is a “seemingly moderate and amiable jurist” but stood with the corporate polluters and doesn’t get it about separation of powers. Nice shot, Ron. ~
What If We Ran the World
Like a Day Care Center?
Leslie is giving me my Gatsby haircut and I’m reading Esquire and here’s Bill Clinton on the cover, being called the most influential person in the world, with another story saying nuclear power is inevitable because we don’t have the resources to use either fossil or renewable sources and also ask the environment to absorb the impact and we can, will and must resolve the safety and waste disposal issues.
And, wow, it’s one of those eye-opening moments and you ask, ok, why is Clinton respected and embraced all over the world and why is Esquire (the savvy, realistic men’s mag) embracing nuclear power and the answer is because they are smart and tired of the dogmas of either side and want a pragmatic world that works.
Clinton is the man of the 21st century, the post-modern guy who cheerfully did what worked for the most people, like the big trade agreements, earned income credit and diminishing the “great leader” icon, by playing the sax, eating at MacDonald’s and being imperfect in his marriage, like the rest of us.
The postmodern vision for the 21st century, after we finish this present chest-beating period with the last fundamentalist, imperial president, is that we’re just sick of all the wars, profiteering rich corporate types, and beating up on politicians who are trying to do sensible, pragmatic things, like set up national health care and let it be ok that gays serve in the military or anywhere else.
The age of patriarchy is over. We pay a lot of taxes and they should go for useful things, like national health care, good schools and an environment that works for everyone including Bambi and is sustainable. These are the basic responsibilities of modern, sensible people and we’ve got to stop electing people who exploit our fear so they can get more wealthy with private health care, private schools and by keeping forests, oceans, mines and air for private use.
That time is over. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of people on earth now and we’re getting low on space, resources and clean water. This is not, repeat not, about Democrats and Republicans and it’s certainly not about Judeo-Christians vs. Islam. It’s about what works – and we’re sick of what doesn’t work.
Patriarchy is dying and that’s why it’s fighting so hard for its survival, moving wealth from the middle and working class to the investor class – and telling us it’s for our own good, so we can be victorious against evildoers who hate our freedom. I mean, hey, hello? If you ever told FDR that 50 years after his death, the rich would have the working class voting the straight Wall St. ticket, he would have gagged. But they did it by making the average guy afraid of hippies, lesbians, tree-huggers, pagans, Muslims, abortion, gangs (read blacks, Latinos) and all kinds of things that don’t affect the average person that much, but do make them cling to the comfortable illusion of supremacy we had in 1950, after defeating Hitler, but before rock and roll, Rosa Parks and gay cowboys.
And it’s important to remember that Al Gore, a sensible, pragmatic guy who wrote a sensible book, with a sensible title (“Earth in the Balance”) about a sensible, balanced vision of the future, actually was elected by us in 2000 – and someone pragmatic and sensible, the kind of person that if you lived in a cohousing project, you would want to be chair of it, will be elected president by us in two years – if the god of elections give us what we need, instead of what we deserve.
We’re tired of being unhappy and anxious because a small portion of the human race wants to stay rich and powerful by keeping the world dangerous, which they do by refusing to accept that we’re all in this together and this country and the world have to work for everyone.
You have to look at the world like it’s a day care center or community health clinic or food co-op or community college and ask yourself, would I want the board of directors to have people on it who say we live in a dangerous place and only the rich and powerful are entitled to its benefits?
The answer is no. We want people on the board, like ourselves, who are rational, pragmatic and cheerful people of good will, who know how to listen, discuss, come up with ideas and join with others in creating positive solutions that work for everyone.
It’s called community. And though we use the word constantly, we are just barely beginning to understand it and do it. A “community” hospital that charges you $3,000 for one night on an antibiotic drip – sorry, is not a community hospital. A college that charges you $600 for one class (times 120 for a degree) is not a “community” college and is not dedicated to higher learning.
A nation that invades another nation for no reason other than that they are the same religion as some terrorists that flew planes into buildings here, has zero interest in recognizing that the world is made of millions of communities and the communities in that nation we invaded were sick of the monster they had running their country, as well as the one who invaded it.
We stand at the point in history where we could be a failed species if we keep making the same mistakes, beating our breasts about the superiority of our country, religion or way of life, excluding others from the fruits of life and hurting them. But we won’t fail. We are not going to fail our promise, which is the promise that we are creatures who evolved out of instinctual life in nature and developed reason, communication and the ability to learn, grow, change and adapt – and to do what works, which happens to be the compassionate and caring thing, which coincidentally happens to be the thing that ensures our survival.
Scandinavia has moved toward a world like this – and some tribes in the Amazon and New Guinea still live this way, but Americans believe in enlightened self-interest and rugged individualism – Me! My mission/vision in life. My family! The kids with my genes are a hell of a lot more important than the kids with your genes! And certainly my country is! -- that is the gift of the Founding Fathers and it’s what freedom meant to them, but, going against them, they were coming out of centuries of exploitation of common folk by barons, lords and bishops.
So, instead of the collective solution, they applied that of individual opportunity of the individuals to find happiness any way they want this side of armed robbery. Well, guess what? We’re reached the end of that cycle – and unlimited individual freedom has shrunk till it only takes in the top one percent of the rich. And now that threatens not just civilization, but nature itself. It’s like Lord of the Flies on steroids. And if you don’t think we need nature, you’ve got a nasty shock coming, one that, after a lot of random meltdown of the structures of civilization, will have you thinking, ok, maybe we should study the values, dynamics and goals of the board of directors of the local day care and see if it works as a model for society. ~
We’ve Got the Best Imaginary Friend
Hiking up White Rabbit trail with my daughter, who at 18 finally likes to hike, and I stop to catch my breath with a guy who just moved to Ashland from New York. He says he made the decision by reading the bumper stickers here – and there were lots trashing the prez and his war, so he felt at home here.
Interviewing former Ashland Mayor Cathy Shaw, she says Democrats live in Ashland way out of proportion to the rest of the region, and it’s sad that people are actually moving to places where they can be comfortably polarized among “our kind” of people.
On this same story, about the passing of conservative, white, elder, ex-Mayor Gordon Medaris, I’m talking to Pat Acklin who in those long-gone days of the eighties, was a very left-leaning, earth-friendly young councilwoman and she says, hey, Gordon and I got along great and could work on a common vision and that’s not here today. Even within Ashland, it’s polarized.
Reviewing books for Sentient Times, I’m reading “Crashing the Gates,” by Armstrong and Zuniga, which is a vision calling for Democrats to break their addiction to a set of polarizing issues, like gay rights, environment, choice – and get back in the mainstream where we were, geez, when was the last time? Must be early sixties with JFK. But even with critical issues, where you’d think we’d all have a lot in common – education, health care – it’s viciously polarized.
We really shouldn’t call them left and right wing anymore, but north and south pole.
I seek refuge in the Bean with an Americano, but someone left the Chronicle op-ed page and here’s someone as conservative as Pat Buchanan lashing Bush for his seemingly certain war plans against Iran, using the same bogus pretext he used in Iraq, about WMDs – and how he defies the Constitution by both declaring war and waging it. The House, you’ll recall, has the war powers.
But no one cares about that outrage or any other -- that’s what James Spader pleads to the jury on ABC’s Boston Legal, defending a young woman who withheld taxes to protest the war. Ok, well, actually a lot of people care. If you surf pollingreport.com, which shows all the polls, you see 55 percent say Iraq wasn’t worth it and 35 percent say it was. But it’s not registering on the R-controlled Congress or White House.
You also see that for the next president, 70 percent of people want policies different from the present one. You note that Hillary, though more people dislike her than any candidate, is way ahead of any Democrat – and that the R’s love center-right Giuliani and McCain for prez. And the Republican would beat Hillary.
What does all this say? Methinks that Americans are conservative but are tired of polarities – and we long for the center-left vision of schools, health care and environment that work for everyone, as well as a stop of the upward drain of wealth to the wealthy. While we’re at it, let’s break the stranglehold of corporate America on Congress and federal agencies. I mean, they’ve had their orgy of profits in the last six years.
Meanwhile gas prices go to new highs, but polls show people unable to muster much outrage about it – only 23 percent say it’s a severe hardship. Huge numbers, in the 75-80 range, however, support alternate vehicle fuels, wind and solar, stricter greenhouse gas and emissions standards. And more of us say the environment should be given priority than those who say energy production should. But what will they say when gas doubles?
So, this young woman with small child – the cousin of an old friend – asks about putting up her dome on my back 40. But what about energy, says I. She has a solar panel that runs her lights – and she uses an ice chest and a bike. And lots of quilts.
I ask if she wants a ride (uphill) with her bike on my rack. Nah, she says, I’m strong. I can see she is. Her cheeks are rosy and eyes clear – and, I say to myself, this is the woman of the future, living lightly on land no one’s using, capturing sun no one’s using, vegetarian, not asking the Amazon Basin to support millions of cows for our dinner table. She’s free. She certainly never sat down with a table full of mortgage and property tax forms and never will. She clearly does it, not to save energy or lessen pollution, but because she’s more alive in this balance and using her body instead of $75 a barrel oil from those places we’re going to attack because they might make weapons to defend themselves against people who want their soon-to-be exhausted fossil fuels.
Her lifestyle has a lot in common with that of pioneers, whose old homes I love doing stories on. Doing the Giles Wells house across from the golf course in Ashland, I get to touch the old stones laid down for a foundation 145 years ago and, digging in the archival material, learn the sad story of their grandson, only 12, who got tossed from his horse into the mud and died there. His grave is across the highway, behind the fourth green. In the 1850s, a guy showed up at their house, then a cabin, mauled horribly by a grizzly. They didn’t fly him to the Health Sciences University in Portland. He lay there getting fed oatmeal and tea and having his wounds cleaned, then in six weeks hobbled away to get on with life.
Then I catch “United 93,” the movie, whose ending everyone sadly knows, of the 9/11 jet that didn’t hit its target and how passengers rushed the fanatic hijackers who were shouting and praying to their god while the passengers were doing the same to a slightly different one for the opposite reasons -- and I’m put in mind of that quote from Palestinian Liberation chief Arafat, (better not say where it’s posted cuz it’s a tax-supported public school classroom) – “You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.”
In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersch writes that our “decider” (the prez actually called himself that recently, in case you’ve lost you capacity for dumbfounderment), plans to leave an Iran victory as his legacy. Like the high school teacher in Ferris Bueller, speaking to his zonked out students, I rise to say, Why is this a bad idea? Anyone want to comment? Anyone? ~
Why We Need η ελληνική γλώσσα*
In the spring of their 18th year, an otherwise glorious time of expansion and potential happiness, several high school seniors I know are suffering an exquisite psychic torture known as Algebra. It’s part of the math required to get into any college. They have to pass it to graduate and leave childhood behind. Which they sorely desire to do.
But, oddly, the vast majority will never use Algebra, unless they take up bridge building. After years of it, I finally failed it in the spring of my senior year and, amid much humiliation, graduated only after doing summer school. Several decades later, however, it paid off. In building a chicken coop, I had to figure a hypotenuse and, lo, I could do it.
As I am in thrall of how we can spend half a trillion on Iraq and go without public health care, I am amazed at the requirement of Algebra, this while we cut music, theater and art (frills) and go without Greek, Latin or mythology, which would open countless doors to Western wisdom – what’s left of it.
Watching “Clash of the Titans,” – pity it was made just before computer art – you get how Greek myth is the sand in the foundation of the Western mind. I raised my kids on this film. It was their catechism, watching the feminine rage of snake-haired Medusa, the glorious flights of white-winged Pegasus, the deepest dread of the Kraken rising up from the depths.
It prompts debate with my movie mate. Would you rather live then or now? Back then, I say. For better or worse – and there was plenty of both – they legitimized and considered sacred the full range of feeling, thought, speech, action and did not, as Whitman wrote, “sweat and whine about their condition (or) lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.”
As can be seen in classical writings, the ancients didn’t do a lot of sweating and whining in the dark. The ethic was to fix your sights on the greatest glory in a short life and go for it with everything you had. Then the gods would help you. Or not. You never knew. But whining, no, they would never help with that.
In the 17 centuries since then, humanity has decided instead to explore salvation, the idea of being “saved,” for all time, on a personal basis, or not, which sets up an inordinate, perpetual fear of that final moment when the yes-no verdict falls on our necks, kind of like the Algebra final in your senior year. So, we do a lot of drinking, praying and pushing the whole game aside with antidepressants.
But the fact is, we’re now a civilization conditioned to fear as part of our daily inner life and we’re told that if we feared [insert your deity here] enough, we would not be afraid. But the reality is, fear has been necessary to the management of an urbanized, desexualized, patriarchal society for a couple millennia now. It’s not really a substantial part of the human psyche. Fear evolved, not as an “emotion,” but as a trigger to alert us to action. It was not meant to be an enduring facet of our personality, isolating us and used by church and king to enforce obedience.
Which brings us to today’s Googled news, with this president saying he’ll attack the nation’s number one problem, gay marriage, with an amendment to the Constitution, which, if you Google any newspaper outside the U.S., you will learn on page one that this is the desperate act of a vicious, failed moron, with 30 percent approval, to save his Congressional majority for the last quarter of his miserable term.
That’s why teens need to study Greek language, drama, philosophy and mythology. It’s all there. Fools like this dot every story and are the object lessons of how not to live or govern. But we don’t know that. We’re studying Algebra.
the Greek language ~
No Patient Left Behind
At this yard sale, a woman has her furniture, books, kitchenware spread out on the driveway and freely explains, yeah, it’s to pay $6,000 of doctor bills. Not an hour later, in front of Shop n’ Kart, teens run a table to raise money, as they have for years, to help with cancer treatment for Whitney Chatfield, just graduated from high school.
Earlier, I’m at Craig Honeycutt’s studio, and he’s showing me these huge “narrative” canvasses, oil paintings with seeming mythical-unconscious scenes of Ashland life, people naked in their thoughts, fears, longings, as well as their bodies, not unlike Hieronymous Bosch’s visions. A year ago, he too, had something go horribly wrong inside his body, to which the healing profession responded by making something go horribly wrong in the rest of his life, to the tune of $85,000.
His art is stunning. You’re not going to see it much, if at all, in our dozens of local galleries, as it’s not tourist-friendly. It’s wild. It’s confrontive. You stare at one small section of it for long minutes, then the eye is led on to the next part of the winding story of life that Craig has known in his decades here.
“You’re not only a great artist,” I say, “but you’re a freakin’ genius. You should be famous, very famous.” But these aren’t the pleasing themes and tones that go with the drapes or looks good in a dentist’s waiting room, are they? We joke, well, if poor van Gogh had only the commission on one of his paintings at today’s prices, he might not have killed himself, right?
How much for this big one, the most disturbing one, the most mind-blowing one? He says, realistically, at least 60 thou. It would almost pay all the doctor bills, right? We laugh.
Next day, I’m interviewing former Gov. Kitzhaber in his jeans and boots with a roadshow on health care reform that would assure it for everyone in Oregon by having our members of Congress get waivers so we can use Medicare and Medicaid money on basic care for the great middle who can’t afford insurance but have too much income for Oregon Health Plan or have exhausted Medicare.
He’s smart and funny, charming, listens well. He’s among that tiny fraction of no-bs politicians Oregon has produced over the decades, such as Tom McCall, Wayne Morse, Nancy Peterson, Debs Potts, Ron Wyden, who actually look for the good they can do, if you can imagine that in today’s climate. Any one of them would have been a great president.
The next week, I’m talking to Wyden about a plan to stick a thumb in the dike of catastrophic health care for small business and medium-income folk – and he says, by the end of the year, he’s going to introduce the big one, universal coverage, the U.S. joining all other modern Western nations in considering health care a civil right, like education.
Meanwhile, Bush said the s-word. A microphone was on and he didn’t know it. He said it to Tony Blair, about how Lebanon should make Hezbollah “stop doing this s---.” Now there’s a steel-trap strategy, like “bring it on,” or “they hate our freedom” or “he tried to kill my dad.” But we haven’t heard “no patient left behind” yet.
I have a friend paying $1,200 a month health care premiums, so I says to him, hey, how about if I invest in your health? You pay me your premiums and I’ll pay your health care bills, but I get to control your diet and exercise (heck, I’ll even pay for it) – lots of hiking and yoga, scads of leafy green veggies and I bet I make enough money (about a quarter mil over 20 years) to, well, pay for the college of all our kids. Deal? ~
Holding Society in the Age of Angry Nature
These long fall days that leave the breath so bated, one must agree the warming of the globe is underrated. Joke! But let’s enjoy it while we can.
It keeps coming up more and more in the Google news roundup and today, on the front page on the New York Times – like a big tidal wave far over the curve of the horizon, one that British economist and former World Bank official Nicholas Stern reports will bring us a “bleak future gripped by violent storms, rising sea levels, crippling droughts and economic chaos, including hundreds of millions of refugees.”
What a indulgence this war on terrorism will seem to our grandchildren – this trashing of a few airplanes and buildings, this ranting over who’s god is greater, when the real WMD is the one we create every day by starting our cars. And we give such an innocuous name to it – “climate change.” That’s like saying cancer is a cell change. This is the Population Bomb that Paul Ehrlich warned against, but he was saying it would be problems with food, water and space, not the man-caused destruction of the climate, so we thought we could use technology to save us somehow.
“It threatens the basic elements of life for people around the world – access to water, food production, health and use of land and the environment,” says Stern. Then astrophysicist Stephen Hawking writes that we need to colonize other worlds, not for adventure and new frontiers but to ensure human survival in a world ruined by global warming and nuclear weapons.
It’s really quite touching, seeing how hard most ordinary people work on their personal lives, attitudes and habits, trying to be positive, loving – and good friends, partners and parents, yet to have the wealthy and powerful 2 percent lead us further down this blind alley, from which there may be no return, for personal gain and aggrandizement. The lesson being slowly learned by ordinary people is that it’s hard to overcome your personal anxiety and isolation in a world where you have little power or sense that you live in a functioning world community.
It’s also touching watching the Republicans go through slo-mo deconstruction, as they are revealed to have little mission beyond exploiting divisive social issues to gain power, enrich corporations by militarization and enforce supply-side economics to make the wealthy more so – and damn the environment, full speed ahead.
But someone stop me before I rant. “It is only through a change in consciousness…” So, for years, went the opening of New Dimensions radio, affirming that, as John Lennon echoed – so you want to change the world? Better change yourself instead. And I get this book promo email for Adyashanti, author of True Meditation, where he says, even in seeking inner peace, we have to stop manipulating and “trying” to meditate. We have to allow things to be as they are.
“Your home,” he says, “is awareness itself.”
Then I’m sitting, sipping in Bloomsbury Café, reading one of the most human, get-down funny columnists of many decades, Art Buchwald, supposedly dying of kidney failure, but he finally tells the docs to take a hike and take their dialysis machine with them. And, lo, he does fine. He’s being interviewed by Time Magazine and, asked who is God, he says, well, there for sure is a God, but it ain’t the one in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the one who “causes all the problems in the world.”
You just have to laugh down in your all-too-human guts. This man, this ex-Marine, high school dropout, Pulitzer Prize winner really gets it – and gives flesh to that homily that the meek shall inherit the earth. Meek don’t mean weak. It means the get-down ordinary people, the ones who hold community and its real rituals, which are based around feasting, drink, relatives and friends over for Thanksgiving, being there in times of grief and trouble.
These, not the scientists or politicians, are the ones who will reorganize society in the coming age of angry nature, when the ordinary Muslims break bread with the ordinary Christians and Jews and the ordinary gay is drinking pints with the ordinary evangelical and the ordinary Republican, one hopes, is filling sandbags, shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone on our three flooded coasts. ~
Welcome to the New Revival Tent
There’s a couple hundred of us faithful packing the hall, like a New Age tent revival, eagerly reaffirming our belief set, listening to another wise author paint the big picture of inevitable environmental and economic collapse and how we must learn community, sustainable energy and local agriculture, but then, like the Norse gadfly Loki, Dot Fisher-Smith asks, ok, how many walked or biked here? Two hands go up.
Need we say more? Sayin ain’t doin. Talkin ain’t walkin. If the sky ever does fall – and clearly 99.9 percent of us don’t believe it will (or else we’re determined to enjoy the party while it lasts) – it’s going to be awful hard learning to walk and bike in the rain, car pool, ride the horse-drawn mass transit, put in our hours at the community garden, stuff that was everyday life to our great-grandparents.
But listening to David Korten (“The Great Turning”) lights up my favorite neural pathways, the ones that make me feel right and righteous, I mean if someone stood up and said I love Bush, I don’t think he could make it to the door, well, not without a lot of hugs and offers of free therapies and massages to straighten him out. Unanimity feels great, but it gums up the thought process.
The progressive earth gospel goes like this: 5,000 years ago our ancestors made a tragic turn by creating civilization. We turned away from the feminine deities to male ones. Men took over to rule by the sword. Conquest, not humanity, became the measure of human greatness. Slavery became the foundation of all empires, including ours. Racism, sexism and environmental destruction became woven into all cultures.
This probably could go on forever, except for one thing – we’re reached the limits of growth and are in a time of collapse, that our descendants, if we have any, will call the Great Unraveling or, if we change our ways and survive, they will call it the Great Turning.
Korten, who lives in Washington state and is chair of Positive Futures Network, publisher of Yes! Magazine, earlier wrote the book “When Corporations Rule the World.” He says corporations are now the real nations and empires and “nations” help them, while employees service them, rather like aphids, and are subject to arbitrary dismissal if they don’t meet the corporations’ needs, which come down to one thing – lots of money for a small number of investors and CEOs, regardless of how it screws the earth and the poor.
He says, to much applause, that corporations behave like sociopaths on the world stage and are bereft of values that favor community or support of life on the planet – and all this is hitting the wall because oil production peaked in 2005 and must decline indefinitely, triggering the mania to produce oil so we can make war to get oil.
Other end-time endgames, he says, include inability to ship stuff around, people stuck in suburbs and cities without basic resources, temperature increases of two to 4.5 degrees in this century, big weather disasters increasing tenfold – and the rest of the world getting tired of us living on credit, so they cut us off, creating “the perfect storm, economically.”
I’ve been to a lot of religious services, doing stories, and have learned the patter and structure, starting with a litany of sins and sinners, the doom that awaits us – but wait, now comes a vision of hope, the way to be saved and move on to glory, right living and heaven. It’s a lot like that. It doesn’t mean the information is wrong – and we’ll know in a decade or two, maybe sooner. The math says he’s right.
But meanwhile, we, the responsible, the informed, the aware are the “organizer cells” that act like the cells in a chrysalis, reshaping the fat, ever-munching, ever-greedy caterpillar into the lightly living and beautiful butterfly, says Korten, noting that the immune cells of the old, dying organism resist this with all their might – and that’s what’s happening now.
“We are the new supermajority,” he says. “This is humanity’s final exam” to see if we can learn, evolve and survive – which we’ve done in major past shifts, like ending slavery, enfranchising women, forming the United Nations, passing the Civil Rights Act.
To get there, we have to get over that nasty patriarchal conditioning that we’re fallen sinners who need saving – and that we’re competitive not cooperative. But in all this, we have shown the capacity to choose and that’s our real, defining nature – like how, using the newly invented internet, average people communicated (without leaders or war chests) to fill the streets of the world with 10 million people protesting U.S. entry into Iraq.
The collapse is already happening, he implores, so, break the silence, speak with confidence, enjoy the challenge of changing the story – and that will change the world. And meanwhile, hooray for our side. ~
Into the Great Uncovering
It’s peculiar how deeply we identified with the man lost in the Rogue River forests. We were hanging on the internet news, waiting for word, feeling the oncoming darkness and cold every dusk and know how, if alive, he must be feeling it.
I was mentally screaming at him, if you’ve got a lighter in your pocket (he did), then dig under logs and find dry tinder, build a big fire, so they’ll see the smoke, then pile logs up to break the wind – or please get back on the road and follow it downward. But then, Wednesday, they found his body in the creek.
In the same time period, thousands of us were put in the hospital because of car wrecks and are teetering on the edge of death, but these don’t make the news. We wanted this guy, Jim Kim, to win, as if he held the hopes of all Americans to battle and win against the wilderness and reunite with his little girls and wife. It was like the tot down the well, the trapped miners or the astronauts struggling home in crippled Apollo 13.
These scenic back roads are there because of logging and – mostly lacking signs, they’re an invitation to disorientation and death. Even crossing from Mt. Ashland to the Applegate, I’ve come to unmarked forks, found myself low on gas and wondered how many dead ends I could check out before I was on foot at night. It’s scary.
Nature continues to do its thing, doesn’t it? Looking way down the news menu, one finds that one big insurance company, because of global warming, will no longer underwrite Mid-Atlantic coastal properties. And there will be no north polar cap in summer in 35 years.
Lecturing here last Friday, mythologist-author Michael Meade says we’re reeling, personally and societally (if unconsciously) from the twin menaces of global warming and global terrorism – and to achieve some kind of balance and hope (and inform the youngest generation), we need the vision and guidance of our wise elders, the same ones who went through “the Sixties.”
But what’s happening is we’re getting a population of “olders,” not elders and the institutions of the past that we used to count on – the church, the White House – are part of “apocalypse,” a Greek word meaning “to uncover.” So, he says, it’s like the curtain is being lifted and we’re seeing the emperors have no clothes and, well, the change we seek is up to us.
Meade, a wise, loud, rough man is on the front line, working with gang kids in LA, kids without the anchor of an older generation, but he says, as soon as you remove them from the gang environment and give them responsibilities and possibilities, they become altruistic to their fellow human within hours. That potential and goodness is always there inside us – and it’s a metaphor of society, so…let’s get started.
About this time, the Iraq commission, without using the exact words, says we can’t win there, in other words, we’ve lost the war and it will never get better so we have to somehow (how do I put this gently?) leave. And preferably before the new Republican nominee has to defend the pointless war in two short years. Also facing reelection in two short years, and after a whuppin of Republicans at the polls, our Republican senator Smith suddenly finds the war absurd, even criminal.
No sooner is the ink dry on the election results than Obama surges up behind Hillary, showing rock-star appeal after two short years in the Senate and we have to ask why. It’s because he clearly is not part of the problem and seems to know that things must change. With care and kindness – and gradually – but they must change and we must find ways to stop greenhouse gases and make peace among all parties in the Mideast. Or else. ~
The Good News Behind the News
Especially in Ashland, I hear people say, almost as if it’s a badge of higher consciousness, that they don’t read the news. The news is almost all bad news, they say, and who needs that negativity?
But journalists feel honor bound to tell the whole story of what happens every day, whether it’s considered good or bad. So I, a journalist, will now write a story with just good news, but still interesting.
Our mythology says we humans are the final and best outcome of creation, whether you side with evolution or creation. So, everything that happened before us, got us here, therefore, all the past has to be considered good – even the asteroid slamming into the earth, wiping out most species, not once but several times.
Our myth also says we modern humans are much more evolved than previous civilizations, so all the wars, plagues and dark ages that countless times wiped out earlier civilizations got us here and have to be considered good.
Therefore, all the bad news in the paper is really good news. We’re evolving – and even though we have a vision that we’ll someday live in sweetness, reason and light, so far we can’t get there without conflict and this recurrent process of wiping almost everything off the board and starting a new cycle. Nature does it. We do it. It’s called evolution and, it’s not a gentle, loving, skillfully guided process directed by a wise, patient divinity, but rather a bumpy, up-down, messy ride -- like childbirth, arguably the most painful, dangerous thing you can do but it results in the most beautiful, hopeful creature, a baby – and the next generation.
Amid all the bad headlines of terror, war, global warming, accidents, obesity, embezzlements and trusted people brought low by human foibles, you will not see headlines about the big evolutionary jumps, but they’re there in the curious, smaller stories on page 37D
On a very personal, up-close level, we’ve seen the evolution in recent decades of microbrew beer, fresh-ground espresso drinks, wonderful local wines and mineral-crammed, bubbly spring water in bottles. Good news. No headlines.
These four lovely fluids have become a big part of our reward system – and in fact illustrate how we’ve taken control of our reward system, not looking to The System to reward us, and have become the first (nearly) self-rewarding animal on earth.
We now carry or can access an infinite number of songs, tv shows, speeches in a little box smaller than a deck of cards and can access and read millions of books from something smaller than the size of one book, which taps into an infinite network of information – more than the Smithsonian has and far more than you could learn in any college degree.
It’s outside your skull, not inside it, and it’s just a question of time before that problem is solved. You’ll “know” it, just like in the old days when people could afford to go to college and for years would pack their memory cells and synapses with all they could hold. Now, Instead of plopping the infosphere into our minds, we plop our minds into the infosphere.
We don’t need to ship info anymore, but just email or Google it. We don’t need to fly for business meetings (and with all that airport miasma, who would want to?) but can easily teleconference online with webcams. As archaic, noxious fossil fuels run out and limit travel, that will multiply greatly.
A lot of people bemoan our loose morality and the gross exploitation of sex on tv – but, looking at it as a rough step up the evolutionary ladder, the good news is we seem to be trying to take the negative charge out of sex, so we’re not afraid of it, not controlled by it, not do-or-die over it and realize that if there are a billion consenting adults on the planet, then there are a billion ways to do it and we can stop intertwining it with religion, so that we end up killing people or trying to wedge them into hell for doing it the wrong way.
We hear a lot of bad news around drugs, a trend that exploded out of the sixties counterculture, but by all evidence it’s spread to the mainstream, where every manner of mood and mind altering drugs, sex-enhancing drugs, feel-good drugs, shyness drugs, you name it, are legal and covered by insurance. These drugs are expensive and have lots of side-effects, which sound horrible as they recite them on tv, but it would appear this foreshadows a bumpy evolutionary lurch toward full self-gratification, perhaps breaching the bio-digital barrier, integrating the iPod with digital infusions into the biochemistry of the brain to achieve these same results without side effects.
The good news about the November election was not who won, but that the People exercised their function as the source of all power, forcing the president to abandon his woeful misadventure, with face or without, and shifting power to another branch of government, Congress. It was a wonder and it was all done without the blood and violence – that stuff we hate to read in the paper. ~
Dying Slowly in a Cheap Suit
We’re sitting in the Grizzly Peak Roasting Co. listening to tales of the homeless, who want a permanent camp in Ashland, so they can have a place to conduct their subversive activities, like doing laundry, making dinner and sleeping.
It’s sure to set the landed, the great washed masses, a-howl, reports the mayor.
I’ve done stories on this before. Most of the presentation is about what it’s like to be homeless, which always puts my guts in a slow roll. I do stories on cancer and much worse things, but this homelessness story always gets to me. Why, I wonder. I realize that, well, if you get cancer, there’s no shame. It can befall anyone. You battle it and heal or you die.
But, if the right series of nasty things happen, like being sued, robbed, hit with health problems (without insurance, like so many of us), then you could be out there, living in your car or camping in the watershed. In that situation, you not only would be coping with poverty, hunger and the elements – but also with unspeakable shame.
Everyone you pass on the street would recognize you as homeless. You would not have that determined pace of someone on his way to the market, bank or video store. You are here, being you, in this moment, on the street. Also, your clothes look different. They’re built for temperature extremes and show a bit of the earth you sleep so near to.
Unlike being black, Mexican, Jewish, gay, female or any of the other previous outgroups, it’s clearly understood by mainstream people (the ones looking the other way as they pass you) that you are a voluntary subgroup – and you can and should change and be like them, getting educated and working to pay for house, car, furniture and the kids’ college all your days.
These homeless, they talk too long – so I think. Then I realize they talk too long because no one’s listening. We don’t want to listen. We have our minds made up. There are jobs. They can work. End of story. The police should increase their harassment so the homeless leave our nice, white, unaffordable town, whose prices are supposed to keep out all the outgroups, so we can be safe and happy, smiling, talking with and hugging people like us.
Finally, this one homeless guy talks sooo long and I get so tired of listening to him that I finally start hearing him. He tells the mayor that he could easily get a job and be dying slowly in a cheap suit, selling widgets to yahoos at the strip mall in Medford but that, guess what, even though he’s homeless, he’s got a mind, soul, visions and “I’ll do hard work occasionally, but I want to fulfill my potential and express myself, not be stuck in some slave job!”
Ok, I’m semi-enlightened but I’m conditioned to a lot of prejudices and unexamined assumptions, like everyone else and this guy’s statement brings them up bigtime. What right has this homeless guy to expect and demand self-fulfillment and self-expression, when he (now the conditioned Babbitt in me is near-apoplectic) HASN’T EARNED IT!
Ah, here we are at ground zero. So, he can have life and liberty (lite version), but what right has he to claim pursuit of happiness? He’s homeless! But, in testimony a few days later with the Ashland Housing Commission, 30 of these homeless people start spelling it out.
Randy, Ashland’s most visible and verbal homeless guy, tells them, hey, a great case can be made that society isn’t responsible for its poor, that you shouldn’t reward laziness, that it will be the ruin of our nation’s moral fiber, that the individual’s fate is in his/her hands, but the reality is that it’s in everyone’s best interest for the homeless to have a safe and legal place in our community to make the transition, not to careers and home ownership but – ready? Now listen to this – to less desperate and more productive lives AS WHO THEY ARE.
They don’t want to change. They’re just like us. We don’t want to change. They have become a “tribe,” as one woman, Montana, termed them. The American Dream, for them, is not a good dream, but a boring, empty servitude to huge, lifelong mortgage, insurance and tax payments (add college tuition now).
As it was at one time criminalized to be gay or black, it’s criminalized to be homeless and by the way, I think it’s time for a different term for that, rather than describing them by what they don’t have – and we think they should have. How about post-tribal? How about the Lightly Living? How about Extreme Voluntary Simplicity?
With repeated listening to their stories, what I come away with is a picture, I’m sure some of it projections, of a people who are deeply feeling, very present, living in the now, able to speak feelings clearly, passionate, funny, sincere, connected with one another in a seeming tribal way, engaged in policing one another’s behavior, desiring to live lightly with as few possessions (and bills) as possible, keenly aware and appreciative of nature and the fate of the earth, deeply troubled by and apart from our consumerist system and wanting a lite, low-impact village that (to me, as a student of prehistory) seems about like a Neolithic or Native American village (plus electricity and composting toilets).
Also, I think they’re a lot more fun and interesting to be around than any 30 people, say, in a Medford apartment complex.
Randy’s right. The “homeless problem” is not going to go away. What it’s going to do is stop being a problem, because we, as a society, will start accepting that these Neo-Tribal folk not only have every right to be here, but have every right to be who they are and reject this consumerist system that is clearly endangering, nay, destroying our planet.
After hearing their plans for a community garden, interdependent, self-policing living, toilets that don’t send waste to creeks and other sustainable community ideas that we’re not doing, city housing commission member Alice Hardesty told them, hey, you never know when bad times might befall our nation or city and we might need to know these things.
Yes, Alice, we just might. In fact, truth be told, we all know we definitely will need to know these things – especially living together interdependently, lightly and in harmony with nature. We all know it’s coming. Our world-gobbling expansion is drawing to a close. And it’s time to stop blaming the ones bringing the message to us. ~
Global Survival: With a
Little Help from My Friends
They’re in the park bandshell, singing Joe Cocker-style, “I get by with a little help from my friends, I get high with a little help from my friends.” These graduating seniors are all grinning. “What do you see when you turn out the light? I’m not certain but I know it’s mine.” And, man, they do know it’s theirs. And little do any of us know we’re sharing the last hour of senior Leah Castillo’s life with her.
The kids – kids no more – give these speeches so true, wise, witty, gritty, so cynical-brave, about leaving the faux haven of this sweet little town they’ve grown up in and going now out into a world being skimmed and scammed and warred on for oil, but they’re going to go out and have fun tonight at the all-night party at the college, all but Leah, who will never get there. The sirens, lots of them, pass us going the other way right after graduation and it’s not hard for us to guess what happened.
We trade dark looks. Ann says “golden light on them,” as she always does. But it’s too late for golden light, as Leah bleeds out her life in her little Nissan on North Main. Again, it’s a speeding teener, cop following – and, with three dead from it here this year, that whole issue must again be visited. Teens under the influence will run the cops for thrills and bragging rights. Cops face an awful choice – hot pursuit or not pursuit?
Hannah shows me the new yearbook, where Leah, with full-ride scholarship to Arizona State, wrote, “Future plans: To find happiness, love and beauty wherever I am.”
Steve tells his teen son he’s not getting a car at 16, when he gets his license. Steve just lost two friends last week, on their way to a seminar in Chico. A teen boy was up all night playing video games and fell asleep at the wheel while on the way home next morning, crossing the center line of Hwy. 99 and slamming into the first car of a six-car caravan.
At the Charter School graduation, two days later, the kids joke about how Charter, with their hikes, circles, hugs, listening to each other’s problems, reading Kerouac, Millman and Castaneda, are thought of as hippies! They are laughingly appalled, each saying they entered, suspicious and distancing, vowing not to become a hippie but now, well, as one girl put it, “I’m in love with each and every one of you and this is my family forever.” Most said the same thing.
It’s the kind of life originally envisioned by ill-fated Romantics, Transcendentalists, Socialists and Communists, where people actually do get back into tribe and care deeply for each other and still have their individual lives and destinies.
On Saturday, the soccer moms decide to surprise me for my birthday, showing up with weed-eaters, rakes and mowers – and a tray of flowers -- to do the whole yard. We put on Joe Cocker and sip Fat Tire ale as the weeds and tall grass disappear – a job that would have taken me weeks. We’d done another person’s yard the week before and painted a kitchenette before that.
Hey, we say, this is socialistic! It ain’t right! If we keep this up, we’ll only need one lawnmower, not six. If this catches on, the economy will crash. If this catches on, maybe humans can even live together. After all, does the world, now at 6.5 billion people, really have room for a home or apartment for each family at it grows to 10 billion by mid-century?
Not likely, especially without oil, says public activist Michael Ruppert, lecturing that evening at the University. Oil will be majorly disappearing in 2007 and the big nations are already fighting over what’s left and that’s the only reason we’re in Iraq, says Ruppert, author of “Crossing the Rubicon; the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.”
Oil is food, he stresses. Oil energy is critical to every phase -- plowing, planting, fertilizing, irrigating, harvesting, transporting, distributing. The earth’s carrying capacity is only 2 billion people – what we had just 78 years ago. Only one thing – oil -- made it possible to explode to three times that. Without oil, two-thirds of us are likely going to be getting off the bus.
I squirm listening to this dark, depressing stuff, which rarely comes to pass, but maybe this time there’s something to it. I remember writing in 1974, during Oregon’s Bend in the River statewide citizen conferences, that experts believe we had 30 years of oil left. Well, that was 31 years ago. The economy will begin imploding this year, Ruppert notes, with nationwide “demand destruction,” which means we Americans will have so much debt and so little income that we won’t be able to buy anything, leading to massive foreclosures and accelerated movement of assets up the ladder to the rich.
The good news is that areas like this one, with abundant water, good soil, lots of timber, low population and conscious, informed people who can work together will not just survive but thrive. These people tend to eat organically, which takes no oil. So, keep filling that compost bin and start talking to your friends about how it can’t be all that bad to put up with the idiosyncrasies of fellow tribe members, especially if the alternative is as grisly as Ruppert says. If teens in Charter School can do it, maybe we can too. ~
Why Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny
It’s Saturday night and we’ve just been to another seminar painting its visions for spiritual realization, higher awareness, an enhanced sense of control, meaning and direction in our lives and --that sweet, flowing word, that much sought-after vision – community.
Community is a word that shrugs off its associations with the words “communist” and “commune” and is worked into the names of hospitals, food stores and other organizations, hoping to imply that we’re all in this together, beyond and bigger than our shifting connections to a circle of friends, partner and children who are chosen or shaped in large part for how they share our values.
Tonight, it’s a potluck in Phoenix where, to our surprise, it’s almost all Japanese exchange students. Paula, who is trained in games, takes us all out into the dusk where we form a big circle, joining hands with anyone but just not the person next to us – so that we’re all tangled up and trying for 45 minutes, without letting go of hands, to get untangled.
It violates our rational, linear sense of organization and some of the Anglo types duck out for beer, but I stick with this messy, tangly, pointless game. I mean, there must be a point. What if I miss it? The point turns out to be that, in the midst of this long, aggravating tangle of people I barely know, we’re all a perfect circle and that’s what comes out in the end, but meanwhile, we’re all shouting in the dark in different languages at each other – no, climb over that person, that’s right, twist around now, left, not right! And finally, it comes down to all of us helping the last person get with it, because if every single one of us doesn’t get with it, there ain’t no circle and we’re not done.
We shout for joy. We did it. Now let’s go inside and pump up the rock ‘n roll, which the Japanese college kids barely know how to do, so we gently, funningly get their defenses down amid much laughter, pulling them into the circle, one-by-one, to perform some new dance move. It’s too fun. They take a million digital pics of it. No one’s going to believe this back home. They may never dance like this again, methinks. Or they may turn their whole generation onto it.
It takes a week to finally realize the purpose of the twisty circle game. Oh, I get it, it’s a metaphor of the human condition. We’re all really holding hands in a perfect circle. We’ll get there someday but right now we can’t see the circle and we’re all stumbling all over each other and barking in strange tongues. But I can feel us all holding hands. I’m not alone. I’m connected. This is that elusive word and vision – community. Got it.
Later, we’re moving a lot of furniture and tearing up tons of carpet so Ann’s house can have “staging” (depersonalizing a house so it’s clean and neutral for buyers) done to it and the 15-year old boys are helping us. Funny how when you’re doing hard work beside someone for hours, you really hear their inner voice, the aura, the soul, the innocence of them -- and we do. You often hear parents say their teen boys seem from another planet or species, making odd sounds and squeals at odd hours, inventing bizarre polyglot vocabularies, taking unpredictable risks they think are the coolest thing ever. Well, they are like that, but when you work beside them, which is rare, because they find work puzzling and meaningless, you do get to hear that innocence and you realize they are from our species and you find yourself appreciating that they are acting out that phenomenon that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, so if you want to know how we adults behaved in the stone age, before we evolved into rational adult humans, just stop trying to change these kids and let their amazing energy, instinct and genius get through your judgments and wash over you and free you, just for a moment.
That’s community, too. I mean, it’s easier to understand the Japanese kids, most of whom don’t speak English very well, than our own mumbling, blurting, profane teen boys. I realize finally that the boys don’t mean to be disrespectful. They are just coming from, nay, exploding from this nova of constantly unfolding understanding, as they peel off each layer in their emerging bodies and minds. It’s spring break and I want to send them on a vacation but I realize they’re already on more of a vacation than any adult could ever send them on, anywhere.
We’re in this long, consciousness-raising seminar, sitting in our hard, metal chairs for hours on end, something teen boys would never choose (but which we ask them to put up with in school) – and we learn another vision about another, better place we can get to if we act different and put on another, better mindset, which is what almost all religious and spiritual paths do, and I think about it and know I won’t put on that mindset because I already have one -- but there is one time in the workshop when the guy says, ok, all the problems and miseries of humans go back to this primodial moment of separation from the One, kind of like a personal Big Bang moment, but no one knows when or why it happened and who separated from what.
Here again the ontogeny – the creation story – repeating itself in our sense that this world, this mindset, this community is not the real one, not quite good enough – “there’s a better home a-waitin’ in the sky, Lord, in the sky” -- but we can get over the grief if we evolve and become different and better people. Well, I wonder, why not right now and right here? If it can’t be done here, it can’t be done. We have all the goods for it. I want it now. And I realize that all it takes is to say ok and step over that line and let it be now. It’s not later in heaven or the next universe. In paradise, they don’t have food, wine, trees, rain, pain, gain, loss, seasons, children, feasting, sex, dance and circle games. Whatever paradise is – and community – we already acquired that wisdom, that need and, even as the circle untangles, it’s always here. ~
Are We Fat Enough Yet?
They say if you want to know what’s going on in your mind, look at your garage. The garage is the mind. Or at least the unconscious mind, which, like an iceberg, keeps 90 percent of its mass out of sight.
Putting off the inevitable cleanup can take months, years – and makes you open the garage door with increasing dread and disgust for oneself as a person. How can I be a loveable person with a garage like this? So, I have to wait till the gf is out of town and I have a cold and am good for nothing else, then I turn off that part of the mind that dreads this loathsome Stygian task.
It takes two days. It’s filthy. But the surrender is good. You have to anesthetize the ego (I’m above this! This can’t be MY garage!) and most of the conscious mind. To accompany the labor, I put on a CD someone gave me three years ago and I’ve been putting off listening to that, too. It’s edgey Lou Reed, his “Magic and Loss,” which I also presumed was Stygian (meaning, from the river Styx, meaning hellish).
“I want some magic to sweep me away,” he sings. “I'm sick of looking at me.
I hate this painful body that disease has slowly worn away.” I realize he’s singing about cancer. “Somebody please hear me, my fingers can’t hold a coffee cup…Inside, I’m young and pretty, too many things unfinished.”
Wow. I put down the broom. You don’t hear many people sing about this. And the next song, “The Sword of Damocles,” is about how “radiation kills both bad and good.” Then “Dreamin’,” where he closes his eyes and can still see his friend, in the red chair, making jokes, in the final days.
He’s cleaning out his “garage.” Deep cleaning. After two friends die of cancer. He’s not making nice about it. His songs, a journey, are subtitled, ashes, escape, regret, revenge, loss, magic.
I know someone now on that journey. Most of us do. I decided to make a list of all the people I knew well who had died before old age and it was 10 of cancer, seven of vehicle accidents, six of suicide, six of other illness, three of murder, three of drug-alcohol, two of random accidents not in a vehicle – and most were residents of this valley.
A consciousness teacher once told me all death is suicide, which you can sorta understand, like saying all giving is selfish. There’s a certain intention to staying alive and a huge amount of intention to really living.
We Americans devote all our might, will and money to preventing terrorists from killing 3,000 of us again, but we intend, because we love our private transportation, to kill 42,000 of us a year, which is the annual traffic toll, a number that has remained at least this high for decades. That’s 14 World Trade Centers every 12 months. That’s a lot of family members sitting at home crying and trying to put lives back together for months, years.
The there’s French fries, pizza, burgers and tv, which are emerging as the number one killer, not just in the U.S. but across the planet. I’m at the Y doing a story on their very cool Fit Trail, and exercise director John Sousa drags me inside to look at the CDC maps of the U.S. showing numbers of people x percent over normal weight, year by year.
Talk about all death being suicide, man, it starts out 20 years ago with only people 5 and 10 percent overweight, but after a few years, they have to add colors for 15 percent, then 20, then 25 percent over and it spreads, well, like some cancer, which it is. Along with diabetes and heart disease. It’s heaviest in the Midwest and South, btw, but Oregon has now firmly weighed in.
“It’s natural selection, don’t you think?” John turned around, his eyebrows up. You could say that, he laughs. It’s self-selection.
I surf a lot of internet news and one day, there’s this story about how obesity, at present rates, will overwhelm the health care systems of, not just rich, chow-down U.S., but Africa, Latin America, Asia, all of it. This younger generation, it says, will be the first to be outlived by its parents.
Later, I read New York City is getting ready to outlaw the serving of trans-fat crap, like donuts and French fries. We’re going to see the day, can you believe it, when the boys in blue will be out there cuffing people in possession of trans-fat goodies.
It IS overwhelming the health care system now, not soon, and you only have to look at the bills from hospitals, docs and insurers to know it. These costs get spread around the same as the costs from not wearing seatbelts or drunk driving– and we cracked down on those.
I recently took a look up and down the aisles at Costco, the bastion of bulk and counted them, some 60 percent clearly overweight and a fourth morbidly so. Morbid means disease-causing. And the day will come when other people in line will speak up, “Scuse me! What do you think you’re doing with that 40-pound bag of Oreos, chubby??”
Of course, if you go in the Ashland Food Coop, you may see 1 percent of people obese. They don’t sell much, if any trans-fat junk there. You also have a hard time getting a parking space there, any time of day.
So, what’s happening here, folks? When a species gets the upper hand and has an oversupply of food, it will overeat, become sedentary, forget how to hunt or forage, become more vulnerable to disease and lose the survival traits which made it the best adapted to its ecological niche. It will have a die-back. Always happens. If the species is really smart, (like us?) it will postpone that date, but the date will eventually come.
So, think about that as we Americans this week pass the 300 million mark (twice our numbers half a century ago) and let’s welcome and support the first politician who dares to say the sentence, “I know we all love babies, but there are too many of us and we need to do something about it.” You’ll notice no one running for office says that. Ever. But the day is coming when we will ask them to say it. ~
Here’s That Rainy Day
It’s been 40 years since first crossing the Siskiyou Pass one lovely fall evening and admiring the lights of little Ashland stretched out along the valley wall. Had just got hired out of college to cover the legislature in Salem for a wire service and didn’t know a soul in the state. But it sounded exciting – politics, journalism, Oregon. That was the place where the tv weatherman always drew cross-hatch marks with his chalk, indicating rain.
Should be fun, I thought, and I’ll blow outta here in a couple years to bigger jobs in bigger places. Didn’t count on falling in love with Oregon, though. Didn’t know you could love a place. Didn’t know a place could have a spirit, a soul, like a living thing, but it does and it gradually showed it all – the show-dusted deserts around Bend, the crazy lava peaks of the Cascades, the misty, murky, moody coast, the descendents of pioneers from the Oregon Trail, polite, quiet, smart, curiously bemused how no one knew or cared about their paradise, where homes went for $15k and beauty lay in every direction.
Population was only 2 million then. Now it’s over 3. So, the world found out about Oregon and came. Cheap homes and land are a memory.
But one thing sticks out from covering the Tom McCall years in the late sixties and early seventies and that’s that Oregonians were conscious about the special place they lived and had already saved the beaches from development, invented the presidential primary and initiative process, then brought in land use planning, mandatory bottle deposits and an end to draconian punishments for choice and pot.
And all the legislators, regardless of party, got along and did dinner together, even went on fishing trips and vacations together. Since it was my first job out of college, I didn’t know any better and thought all politicians got along. Imagine the shock as the right and left began their nasty, take-no-prisoners warfare as the rule of the day. It’s not fun to report that stuff, where anyone can say and do anything. And does. Winning, not the common good, became all.
Perhaps the most striking thing in those early days was something McCall did in his second term – started something called the Energetics Office, a gaggle of long-haired, pointy-headed guys who basically predicted the future, not just of Oregon, but the world, saying we need to start thinking in terms of “net energy,” which, they had to explain at length, was not just the energy required to build something, but the total energy required from the birth to the death of that idea or thing, including the energy it took to mine the steel for the car, the energy to build the steam shovel to dig the ore out of the ground, the energy to transport it, all the energy to drive it for x years and the energy to drag it off and bury it out of sight, there being no recycling then.
McCall was one of the few people who understood the concept and he paid these guys to try and educate the legislature and the public that there’s something coming called “limits of growth” because (another new motto of the time) “everything has to go somewhere” and (we were just barely beginning to understand this one) everything we do or make or use produces carbon, which builds up in the atmosphere and…well, it was just a concept in a few think tanks back then, but that carbon-rich atmosphere, only as thick as the distance you can walk in an afternoon, about 20 miles, then gets hotter, with consequences we could only imagine, but likely included melting of polar ice, inundation of coastal cities by the ocean and loss of species. Including maybe us.
McCall was gone by ‘75 and so were his Energetics friends, but their predictions, centered mainly around the scarcity of cheap energy, have proven out and will almost certainly intensify. Meanwhile, an amazing amount of stories I’m working on now have to do with how to be “green,” that is walking with a small carbon footprint and doing all you can in your home, car and business to shrink use of energy, not because it’s more costly now but because it’s trashing the atmosphere, which could also be called the biosphere, that is, the place where everything in the known universe lives.
So, if there’s anything that stands out about witnessing and living these four decades in this paradise, it’s that it’s been a wonderful time, I now know thousands of souls here and what I thought I left behind in California (only lived there a few years, being from Michigan) has spread north – and the housing prices are only a minor concern set beside what our increasing numbers are doing to the biosphere, life and the planet.
A safe prediction is that within our lifetimes this will move from being a political issue – where some say they’re for it and some against it – to being just the issue and what are you going to do about it, personally, that is? It’s heartening to see the government and utility programs and the reluctantly imposed higher mileage standards, but clearly it’s the small steps made by individuals that are going to make the difference. And that’s what I fell in love with about Oregon 40 years ago. ~
The Boat is For Everyone
On Tuesday morning, Election Day, I wake up not knowing two things – that today I will see a black man elected president and I will weep…and that I will, on a rainy, wind-swept hill, bury an old friend, toss dirt on his pine casket -- and I will weep.
Such things come to us now digitally, watching the states on the CNN map fill up with red or blue, really waiting for only three, Ohio, Virginia and Florida, but then, at 8 our time, the clock ticks down to poll closing and some 400 Democrats partying at the Ashland Armory began uncorking their champagne and waiting for Wolf Blitzer to look that the camera and, after weighty pause, form a sentence for the ages: “With California, Oregon and Washington, CNN now projects that Barack Obama is the next president of the United States.”
My gf Ann has tears running down her face. She’s not the only one. She turns to me and says, “Is it real? Can they take it away from us, like before?” I grandly say, as if I could assure it, no, no one can take this away. This is a moment for the ages. If they took it away, there would be a revolution.
The other news, the death of my tall, gawky friend, Steve Traisman, the tireless worker for peace, the producer of many Peace and Prayer Days, the lover of Native American sweats and rituals, the one who always says hi and knows the name of just about every person on the street – that would come (the first hint of something wrong) by a casual email announcing his funeral.
I begin interviewing for a newspaper story on his life, talk to his three grown daughters and his rabbi. His friends are incredibly candid about how Steve could get in your face, speak his mind, display inordinate impatience with our imperfect world, but carried high ideals of peace and a different kind of life, a kind not unlike what Obama talks about, but Steve wouldn’t live to see that day.
He went up on the Mt. Ashland Ski Access Road on the night bridging Halloween and the Day of the Dead and took an overdose of pills. It emerges from his family and friends that he struggled with the black demon, depression, for the last six months and he told them, finally, that he just wanted peace.
I had no idea. As is so common when this happens, and it seems to happen every year or two in this community, we all mention we’d just said hi to him a few days or weeks ago and if we’d known, we would have, could have, should have…done something. But then everyone says, there’s nothing you can do.
Steve and I had a lot of good times hanging at Evo’s Coffee House, chatting it up with his many friends, going down to sweats at Stewart Mineral Springs, partying, having long talks about the meaning of it all. He was large in his stature and his impact, his energy – and he knew how the world should really be and wasn’t going to be happy until it was that way, but it never would be.
As the rabbi starts to read scripture, it begins to rain. Such a sign, tears from heaven – and the rabbi mentions it. We lower his pine box into the freshly dug earth. His daughters shovel the earth in, such an immediate, tactile participation! It makes you get it in your every cell: he is dead! He will lay here forever. His spot is on the slopes of Grizzly Peak, majestically towering over us. As we finish, the sun blasts out of the overcast.
Ah, I will come here in spring, on his birthday and sit on this nice little stone bench and drink red wine, as we used to do, and pour a little on his grave and will talk to him, tell him how the town is, what’s new, how Obama is doing. You always hear how souls of such people, who have taken their own lives, are in darkness and need prayers to…to what? I whisper to Steve, hey, I know you’re ok. The Universe or Eternal One handles all that and chances are very good that it handles it the same for everyone.
I hug people, his daughters, friends and go straight to election returns, so wrenching, after two years of the polls, debates, attacks, ads, lies, visions, hopes. I have shaken Obama’s hand when he was here. I have heard how literally cool he is, “serene” as one reporter, who traveled with him, termed it.
Ann and I talk about how this is so beyond parties, programs, politics. We just want someone with a heart, who takes responsibility, who wakes up every day, thinking about working for the common good, who inspires people to hope and participate, rather than just take care of their own lives. She believes he is a new kind of person, one integrating “races” (thankfully, that word is passing) in his very body and able to stay on task for the good of the whole, without giving into passions and personal desires or hatreds.
The world will never be the same, I say, as we let ourselves drowse off, unable to watch another second of CNN. This changes everything. This is what hope feels like. It’s a radical increase in possibility and you’re free to use that possibility but the possibility has to include everyone. That’s what’s different now. The boat isn’t just for the ones who made it to the top; the boat is for everyone. ~
Obama: You Can’t Take Yourself Seriously
History seems to move by inches, building up its energy behind some invisible dam, then moves by larger leaps and suddenly we find ourselves with three finalists for the next presidency – and (who’d have believed it, only a decade ago?) only one is from that group of white males we’ve gotten to choose from for the last several centuries.
And even though we thought Oregon – though it invented the primary election 98 years ago – wouldn’t have much of a voice in the selection, now it seems we will and the choice in our May primary is between a woman and an African-American. But, as so many people have commented, we don’t care what gender or ethnicity (or party) they happen to have. What we really care about (sounds dopey, but we mean it) is finding someone with the vision and humanity to help unite us in a common purpose. We want someone to help focus us on what really matters to most of us as we search for ways to stabilize an economy that can work for and is fair to everyone.
It’s a palpable hunger among the electorate to drop the divisive stuff and return to a sensible vision. This hunger shows itself in masses of people standing for hours in a line labeled “people without tickets” waiting to see Barack Obama at a modest-sized gym in Medford’s poorest neighborhood, where scalpers are asking (and getting) real money to get inside and see him, as if he were a rock star.
He’s only in his 40s and has only been in Washington a couple of years but they’re standing and shouting, even swooning for him, scrambling to touch him, shake his hand and, if the Secret Service will let them, hug him. It’s electric when he enters the arena and I tell a fellow reporter, y’know, in four decades of journalism, I’ve never heard of people paying to see a politician. Really, what is happening here?
When he talks, well, it’s disarming. He’s talking about real issues that matter to people, mainly around the outrages of escalating college, housing and medical costs and the incalculable disasters happening now to our planet. He doesn’t bait people with sure applause lines but outlines goals and says what most people think – why are we arguing about gay marriage when the nation’s wealth and blood is being consumed in a “dumb war” and the most real and important threat we face is climate change?
Again, to underline it, this is not about parties. It’s about anxiety. Fear. A longing for the country to get on the right track and actually function well for everyone. For a generation, we’ve been told greed is good and will make a great nation of winners. But, finally, with the subprime crash, it’s clear that greed is not good, not even for the investor class – and now we’re more scared about the economy than we’ve ever been about Islamic terrorists.
And here’s a guy coming to a scruffy gym in Medford, Oregon, with latecomers paying major money to hear him, saying something I’ve not heard since Bobby Kennedy ran here in 1968, that the people have the wisdom, as corny as that may sound – and it’s not what we’ve been practicing for this past generation.
Listening to this African-American man with the very African-sounding name, it’s eerie how much he sounds like RFK – the gentle, abashed humor, the roots in an outcast ethnic group, the love of his children, the mark of suffering on him, the weighing of his words to get at what’s not just popular, but true.
The killing of Bobby (let’s not even mention his brother) was like Nation, Interrupted – and we just woke up the next day, numbed, and went about our business and said well, maybe things will work out, but they didn’t. And though they’re all politicians and will say what it takes to gain power, you have the sense this guy, like Bobby, is saying things that need to be said, even if they would get most politicians run out of office.
I sensed his best comment would come in the Town Hall segment, where anyone can ask a question – and finally, here it is, something about: how do you do this, how do you take the pressure and he said, I don’t take myself too seriously. I take the work seriously and if you feel it’s about you, you’re missing it. I’ll make mistakes, he says, and learn from them and I’ll have to dig deep and refocus, he says. How many politicians say that? Few. None.
As a nation, say the polls, two-thirds of us think the country is on the wrong track and the war was a mistake. I haven’t felt anything like this since the dissension and divisions of the twin tragedies of Vietnam and Watergate, but back then, there was such passion, you knew it would take us somewhere positive. Now, the longing for fundamental change (not to over-use the favorite Obama word) is real. It’s like, hey, we, the people, together, have the wisdom and a huge majority of us want a nation that works for peace, heroically counters the destruction of nature and provides the basics that the profit-motivated private sector had promised it would take care of but didn’t. We don’t care who does it, but it’s become clear no one at the top is going to take care of us – and we have to find leaders who will actually represent the good will, common sense and longing for a functioning society that we all have.
After it’s over, I shake his hand, as I did with John and Bobby Kennedy. It’s a kind of completing of the circle, isn’t it? I wedge in and stand on a chair to reach him. Obama is laughing and seeming kind of shy, no bravado, letting the human wave sweep over him. I find myself involuntarily thinking, it’s too good, too simple, isn’t it? He’s too nice and he’s making too much sense, just speaking the will of the average middle class person tired of reading about (and experiencing) all the miseries, so close to home now. As he moves down the line, I put white light around him, for protection, something I’ve always done with my children and other people I care about. ~
There’s Enough. Isn’t There?
A lot of indexes indicate the recession is over. The economy is sorta growing again. At the same time, many voices from the green/sustainable realm say, s’cuse me but if it all keeps growing, it ain’t sustainable, therefore what’s good for growth is bad for the planet and our sustained survival, at least with our customary comforts.
As I scan the morning paper at Noble Coffee in Ashland, I snigger at a political cartoon, showing a limo pulling up beside a panhandler. The occupant, obviously from Wall Street or a bailed-out corporate boardroom says, “Hey, haven’t you heard? The recession’s over – for me!”
A few pages later, you hit the classified ads, where job listings have grown lean and – the real barometer of the Great Recession – the long, sad foreclosure listings expand like a depressing fog.
On PBS, Frontline does a show on the Great Depression, showing how literally everyone was investing all they had in stocks, knowing they were making profit, not on anything real being done or produced, but only on faith in the increasing value of shares. This is what we did a few years ago, but with our homes -- which were supposed to be the last bastion of security or “real” estate.
But no one is alive now who remembers the Depression, so we had to absorb the lesson all over again. The lesson is that “get rich quick” is one of our favorite myths and it’s fun on the way up and living hell on the way down. But you only really know something if you experience it, especially the suffering part, right?
For the first time, this xmas I’m pretty sure I gave more gifts that I found around the house, instead of a store or website. And after the holiday lights dim, you read in the paper the litany of restaurants and stores closing for good.
No one can say this wretched economy is arbitrary and unfortunate because I think it’s a good dictum that “we get the economy we deserve” or at least the one we can and should live with. Our flush attitude of the last 30 years was founded on the idea that “greed is good,” if you recall the entrepreneurial optimism and the decline of government regulation after the 1982 recession.
We all assume (because it’s always happened) that things will get back on track and we will (and should) grow and prosper again and the individual may indulge his precious “liberty” to get rich by whatever means possible. And if that if it doesn’t happen? Well, we weren’t going to get over the Great Depression till World War II came along and made it happen. Now, the limits to growth imposed by the heated air above us and the limited earth (living space) and water under us are telling us we can’t go back to the endless expansion of the late 20th century.
I recall doing my first stories (in 1974) with dark warnings about the price of endless growth. Scientists working for Oregon Gov. Tom McCall, spoke esoteric theories about how oil would run out in 35 years (which is right now) and we would have to adopt what they called a “steady state” economy. Geez, they were right.
Bumper stickers and t-shirts have a way of saying it. One notes “There’s Enough.” Another says “It’s Simple.” Makes you think. They’re saying, hey, you’ve got what you need already. It’s time, as another bumper sticker reads, to live more simply that others may simply live. “Others” means, not just other people, but all the other living creatures who die for our SUVs.
Gradually, a lot of people are making a lot of little changes in their lives – putting in Compact Fluorescent Lights, using cloth market bags, trading embarrassingly huge vehicles for little ones, buying local produce, car pooling. It’s quite impressive; never seen anything like it. It kind of resembles the personal changes in consciousness of past decades, where people, seemingly of their own free will, began moving in droves away from smoking, racism, sexism, high cholesterol diets, domestic violence – and we start recycling, a huge shift.
Of course, all these sustainability shifts amount to very little against one day’s belching of carbons and toxins from the tailpipes, chimneys and jet exhausts of the rest of the nation and world. But they’re a start. They’re the trim tab on the rudder of the Titanic, turning it ever so slightly away from the iceberg – and another piece of the new ethos is how much of this change, in the past decade or two, is being envisioned and carried out by women.
I’ve always felt it would be women who’d save the world and start doing the right things that make it possible, not just for us humans to live here, but for all life to live here in an integrated, sustainable, even magical way, like in the amazing movie “Avatar.” Women are the ones packing the workshops and seminars and building the action networks for change of both consciousness and planet – and they should be the ones. They get it on a cellular level. They’re the ones who generate and preserve life, as well as community. It’s their time. ~
Praying for Nature to Behave Better
The column is called the Jefferson Almanac and oddly, there is no state of Jefferson and no one knows where the word almanac came from, though it was first used in England 800 years ago for a document foretelling weather, seasons, tides, moons, sunrises and sunsets, so as to help farmers, hunters and fishermen do their work.
I don’t think they forecast this would be the year it hardly ever stopped raining, though I do remember climatologists saying that an increase in greehouse gases would make it a lot wetter and bring extremes of weather disasters, such as hurricanes, fires and tornados -- and that seems to be the case. Over 300 twisters in three days in the South? That never happened before.
An email circulates asking everyone to pray that the record fires in Arizona will go out. Partner Ann promptly forwards it and asks me to also. I say no, I don’t ask others to pray to change nature and I don’t pray for God to fix a problem caused by human activity, overpopulation, overproduction, driving big cars and such.
She is miffed, noting that we do create our own reality and that thoughts and prayers have power and humans are becoming more adept at using this power, so use it! I respond that I do pray and do believe “thought is creative,” so I pray that I am guided by the wisdom and love of divine forces, so that I may walk in balance with nature -- not call in God to fix our messes because if our messes get magically fixed, guess what? We’ll keep making messes.
Maybe this is one of those guy/gal differences. She is actually getting mad, even disgusted with me refusing to use my supposed mind power to put out the big brush fire, as if I’m contributing to human suffering by smugly withholding said power. I tell her I believe prayer should be used on cause, not effect -- and that, since the fire is caused by heedless human ignorance and selfishness, we should pray to become smarter and act in ways that support all life, not just human life, then the fires won’t happen.
But why should God come down and douse the blaze? What would be his motive? If we are to learn to live in balance with nature, well, we must suffer the consequences of our misdeeds, right? We don’t react to supposed dangers till they happen. That’s human nature. Like the killer bees that are always supposed to be moving north, intending great harm. They’ve been saying that for decades, but I don’t see them and I don’t want to pay for any preventative program to wipe them out.
By the same token, 41 percent of people feel global warming fears are exaggerated and they aren’t going to pay for programs or drive an electic car to cure warming. Let’s face it - 300 tornados, record heat and Hurricane Katrina are not enough to rock the average voter’s world. So it’s warmer. That’s better than freezing winters, right?
In the middle of all this, nature gets a lot more personal with a text from a dear friend of ours who went in to see about some symptoms and have a mass removed and it’s turned out to be stage 4 ovarian cancer, so she just got a hysterectomy and, at 50, is facing (according to several websites), about a 10 percent chance of living beyond a few years.
We both immediately text that we are praying for her and putting white light around her and are here to do anything she needs help with -- and I do use the power of love and mind and ask the divine powers to join in. So much for my smug refusal to put out the fire.
Curious why some people get cancer and others don’t (even if they have unhealthy lifestyles), I find a study that searched for a “cancer personality.” One sampling finds that “saintly” people who are sweet, thoughtful, generous and conflict-avoiding do tend to get it in larger numbers and that doctors sense this anecdotally, one even predicting a patient was “too mean to get cancer” -- and the biopsy proved him right. Our friend, no saint, doesn’t fit the cancer profile.
I can see Ann is shaken by our friend’s bad turn, as am I. It can, and does, happen to anyone. One day I am talking and joking with lifelong marathoner and healthy eater Ric Sayre, 57, as he checks me out at the Ashland Food Co-op and the next day I am reading of his sudden death from heart failure after a morning run.
In Noble Coffee, with the headlines about Ric laying on the table in front of us, friend Julie and I shake our heads in wonder. What do we learn from this, we ask. “That we only have today,” I say. She responds, “We only have this moment.”
In his enigmatic way, Bob Dylan summed it up, singing, “For them who think death's honesty won't fall upon them naturally, life sometimes must get lonely.” Think that one over. ~
A Nervous Candidate
for a Nervous Electorate
Two very different political scenes went down here late last week, reflecting the passions and hopes of a divided country
At a convention party Thursday, there were a few huzzahs about women’s rights and universal health care but the 15 Ashland residents mostly listened in rapt stillness, trying to absorb what this man John Kerry was saying in his acceptance speech, as we were allowed for the first time by the tv media to finally view him for longer than 15 seconds.
He’s as nervous as we are. It’s was like a blind date. He talks too fast, sweats and doesn’t listen for a reaction, not unlike a blind date. Afterward, the wine-sipping, hot dog-munching clatch of Democrats has nothing much good to say about him, much like the girl on the blind date.
The Democrats here are not inspired. No one says, wow, I think he can do it. Shaking his head, one man says it’s disappointing and without passion, but then people always say that about a presidential candidate trying to establish himself as a centrist, while pleasing his base on the left or right.
It takes the insights of a European-born woman to bring it into perspective, telling us we Americans have become hated in the world – that Europeans think we had a coup in 2000 and are afraid we’ll have another one this November.
Look at you pout, she infers, because Kerry didn’t act like the great, white father who savages the foe from the extreme left and who’s going to take care of everything. Kerry IS representative of Democrats – hurt, introspective, confused, afraid, desperately trying to walk the center-left road in a chaotic world. All this while Ralph Nader spitefully sucks the critical 4 percent from the base.
So stop whining, she says. Kerry touched all the bases that needed to be touched – health care, environment, education, balanced budget, affordable meds for seniors and, of course, not ever using force where not needed to be used – and single-handedly alienating the world in the process.
Hanging next day with Bush-Cheney backers couldn’t be more different – a scene of such unity that when one stray peacenik starts yelling “Lies! Lies! Lies!” they pounced on her like she was a black ant in a red anthill and drag her out of there while bellowing “four more years!”
She was presumably the only Democrat in the Expo hall, as they gave tickets just to registered Republicans. Things are smoother when you’re preaching to the choir.
Having been screened and scrutinized, we journalists are behaving ourselves in a roped off area far from the candidate. Another journalist says he used to like these things, but now they’re so scripted, the fun’s gone. Without the fortress mentality, the general population would have attended and the protestor would have peaceably waved her sign. But no “bad” signs were permitted – only ones with the right message.
And Cheney gives it. To thunderous applause, the vice president says the enemy (terrorists) is intent on destroying us and forcing their way of life on us, doing away with our democracy and ending the rights of women. They want to conquer and rule the US? This is new information, as terrorists are generally seen as using violence to change policies and force withdrawal of colonial or imperial powers. But the crowd is energized and that’s a lot more than Kerry does.
Also under attack, Cheney said, is traditional marriage. That will be defended. Kerry avoids that hot potato. The economy was “sliding into recession” as Bush took office, Cheney intones, but, with the big tax cuts it’s becoming strong again.
Although the cuts went mostly to upper brackets, this working-class crowd heartily cheers. Kerry, on the other hand, doesn’t say he will tax us, but plain old math dictates you can’t cut taxes while spending $126 billion on war.
Leaving, one sees a handful of protesters, allowed no closer than half a mile. Black-suited cops are arrayed in force, with assault weapons. Yes, it used to be a lot more fun. Both sides respected and needed each other to energize the dialog, then to get legislation passed. Now it’s red ants and black ants and take no prisoners. ~
Is Hope an Emotion? Obama on the Verge
History seems to move by inches, building up its energy behind some invisible dam, then moves by larger leaps and suddenly we find ourselves with three finalists for the next presidency – and (who’d have believed it, only a decade ago?) only is from that group of white males we’ve gotten to choose from for the last several centuries.
And even though we thought Oregon – though it invented the primary election 98 years ago – wouldn’t have much of a voice in the selection, now it seems we will and the choice in our May primary is between a woman and an African-American. But, as so many people have commented, we don’t care what gender or ethnicity (or party) they happen to have. What we really care about (sounds dopey, but we mean it) is finding someone with the vision and humanity to help unite us in a common purpose. We want someone to help focus us on what really matters to most of us as we search for ways to stabilize an economy that can work for and is fair to everyone.
It’s a palpable hunger among the electorate to drop the divisive stuff and return to a sensible vision. This hunger shows itself in masses of people standing for hours in a line labeled “people without tickets” waiting to see Barack Obama at a modest-sized gym in Medford’s poorest neighborhood, where scalpers are asking (and getting) real money to get inside and see him, as if he were a rock star.
He’s only in his 40s and has only been in Washington a couple of years but they’re standing and shouting, even swooning for him, scrambling to touch him, shake his hand and, if the Secret Service will let them, hug him. It’s electric when he enters the arena and I tell a fellow reporter, y’know, in four decades of journalism, I’ve never heard of people paying to see a politician. Really, what is happening here?
When he talks, well, it’s disarming. He’s talking about real issues that matter to people, mainly around the outrages of escalating college, housing and medical costs and the incalculable disasters happening now to our planet. He doesn’t bait people with sure applause lines but outlines goals and says what most people think – why are we arguing about gay marriage when the nation’s wealth and blood is being consumed in a “dumb war” and the most real and important threat we face is climate change?
Again, to underline it, this is not about parties. It’s about anxiety. Fear. A longing for the country to get on the right track and actually function well for everyone. For a generation, we’ve been told greed is good and will make a great nation of winners. But, finally, with the subprime crash, it’s clear that greed is not good, not even for the investor class – and now we’re more scared about the economy than we’ve ever been about Islamic terrorists.
And here’s a guy coming to a scruffy gym in Medford, Oregon, with latecomers paying major money to hear him, saying something I’ve not heard since Bobby Kennedy ran here in 1968, that the people have the wisdom, as corny as that may sound – and it’s not what we’ve been practicing for this past generation.
Listening to this African-American man with the very African-sounding name, it’s eerie how much he sounds like RFK – the gentle, abashed humor, the roots in an outcast ethnic group, the love of his children, the mark of suffering on him, the weighing of his words to get at what’s not just popular, but true.
The killing of Bobby (let’s not even mention his brother) was like Nation, Interrupted – and we just woke up the next day, numbed, and went about our business and said well, maybe things will work out, but they didn’t. And though they’re all politicians and will say what it takes to gain power, you have the sense this guy, like Bobby, is saying things that need to be said, even if they would get most politicians run out of office.
I sensed his best comment would come in the Town Hall segment, where anyone can ask a question – and finally, here it is, something about: how do you do this, how do you take the pressure and he said, I don’t take myself too seriously. I take the work seriously and if you feel it’s about you, you’re missing it. I’ll make mistakes, he says, and learn from them and I’ll have to dig deep and refocus, he says. How many politicians say that? Few. None.
As a nation, say the polls, two-thirds of us think the country is on the wrong track and the war was a mistake. I haven’t felt anything like this since the dissension and divisions of the twin tragedies of Vietnam and Watergate, but back then, there was such passion, you knew it would take us somewhere positive. Now, the longing for fundamental change (not to over-use the favorite Obama word) is real. It’s like, hey, we, the people, together, have the wisdom and a huge majority of us want a nation that works for peace, heroically counters the destruction of nature and provides the basics that the profit-motivated private sector had promised it would take care of but didn’t. We don’t care who does it, but it’s become clear no one at the top is going to take care of us – and we have to find leaders who will actually represent the good will, common sense and longing for a functioning society that we all have.
After it’s over, I shake his hand, as I did with John and Bobby Kennedy. It’s a kind of completing of the circle, isn’t it? I wedge in and stand on a chair to reach him. Obama is laughing and seeming kind of shy, no bravado, letting the human wave sweep over him. I find myself involuntarily thinking, it’s too good, too simple, isn’t it? He’s too nice and he’s making too much sense, just speaking the will of the average middle class person tired of reading about (and experiencing) all the miseries, so close to home now. As he moves down the line, I put white light around him, for protection, something I’ve always done with my children and other people I care about. ~
In Search of the Perfect Movie
For the tenth time, at least, the kids and I have just finished watching “Stand By Me” and we walk away from it with this amazing, satisfying feeling, every nerve used, every vision understood, every risk taken, as if we have had an adventure with a great friend we’ve loved through all the highs and lows and know that we still love that friend.
But what is this attraction, this bond, this refusal to be tired of this film?
“It’s a perfect movie,” I say. They agree – and over the years, we’ve identified, re-played and loved about a dozen Perfect Movies. It’s a ritual we share. They’re like perfect songs you have on your short playlist and go back to hear over and over. They’re like the place where you can get a perfect cappuccino from that one barrista who really knows how to make them.
And what is a perfect movie? We haven’t really defined that yet, but here goes. It’s certainly not the one with the most action, horror, sensuality or the one where the hero gets the girl and everything else, but that helps.
In “Stand by Me,” (from the book by Stephen King), it’s the experience of being completely pulled into their world and subjected, for a couple hours, to its laws, dangers and potential losses, including your life, but, more importantly, the loss of your mission in life – the thing you were born to do and here, at the movie’s crucial moment, you have to leap into the unknown, summon resources you’re not sure you have and become that person or lose the chance forever.
As the protagonist faces that chasm, you have to face it with him and force yourself to make the same choices in a standoff with the sadistic high school bully and his gang, out in the back country and they’re five years older than you and your pals, a lot bigger and very mean.
Gordie, age 12, has a .45 in his pack. He points it at the bully, Ace, who says “What are you going to do, shoot us all?” And Gordie calmly replies, “No, Ace…just you.”
To be a Perfect Movie, it can’t make it easy on the protagonist. It can’t be predictable. The film can’t hand success to him/her. And the hero’s success must come, not from sheer victory by force or luck, but by leaving who they used to be and becoming the new person, with the new understandings, visions and powers.
It also must be entertaining. That’s an absolute. And each scene must be shot as a perfect jewel, with nothing extra.
Film, over the last century, has become in our society the artistic vehicle for these shared visions and lessons. It’s how we convey, in art, the meaning of life. And these jewels are the Perfect Movies we’ve found:
Gladiator – You’re a great general in the wars against the German tribes, but the new Roman emperor is jealous of your fame and wipes out your family. You escape his murder plans. You start again at the bottom, as a gladiator. How do you find purpose in life, or at least sweet revenge?
Independence Day – Aliens come to wipe us out. All the military hardware doesn’t slow them down. Can a computer geek find a way? And also get the girl?
The Year of Living Dangerously – You’re a cool, handsome journalist in the midst of crushing poverty, dictatorship, revolution in Indonesia. Can you get the story AND the girl? But first you must find self and soul. And identify with the masses.
The Shawshank Redemption – You’re in the pen. You didn’t do the murder. Like so many things in life, it presents you with a journey or transformation (or else you can curl up and die). How do you use your gifts, talents and supreme patience to find your way out of the maze? And how do you find a comrade to help you with devotion and wisdom?
The Sting – It’s the Depression. A crime lord oppresses you and your friends, family. He’s a killer, but you don’t want to invite gang war by simply killing him. You want to wipe him out and make a fool of him in the crime world, without him even knowing who did it or if it even happened. In doing it, instead of becoming killers, you have the time of your life and create a legend that will be told down the generations.
The Matrix – You live in a world you suspect is not real, one in which you are being used like an aphid, for your obedience and energy. Bit by bit, you find out it’s true, that machines have taken over the real world and are playing a digital fake world that only takes place in your mind. You want out. You get out. But it’s not pretty. The machines are after you. You could have an OK life outside the Matrix, running from them. Or you could face them in the Matrix, something no one’s ever done. And lived. But, says protagonist Neo, “that’s why it’s going to work.”
The Graduate – You’ve just gotten out of college. You grew up in a plastic LA suburb. You don’t know what you’re going to do with your life or anything else. Mrs. Robinson, a close friend of your parents, offers you a modern “initiation” into random sex. Your parents’ pals offer you career opportunites in “plastics.” Along comes Elaine (your age). She’s the first real thing you’ve ever seen. She’s about to marry a dope from the frat house. Suddenly, everything calls on you to…what? Do you fight for the girl? Do you break all the rules? Will that set the path for a life of doing what’s in your heart?
Bagdad Café – It’s a greasy spoon out in the middle of nowhere (Nevada), peopled by lost souls. You’re an overweight, broke, middle-aged lady with nowhere to go. You’re not even American. Might as well start a life. Your potential love interest (Jack Palance) is an eccentric artist who wants to paint you. The boss is nasty. It’s a situation anyone would run from. Can you make this seedy dive a paradise? Not likely. But what if, having given up on everything, these people have nothing to lose but their souls? And like all Perfect Movies, they do it with what they already have, but didn’t know about – and that’s the soul stuff.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – Two couples, in exotic, Medieval China, are all masters of martial arts, but not of their pent-up passions and love. The older couple must face down an evil witch, also a master of combat. At the same time, they hold their love in the ethers of spirit, not flesh, but why? Among the younger couple, love has tamed the man’s heart, but how can he tame the raging heart of his lover? Mystery lies upon mystery, infusing it with magic, amazing fight scenes and rapt romance of the sort we can’t imagine in the West. It’s a jewel that can’t be fathomed.
Last of the Mohicans – There was a time when America was peopled by Neolithic tribes, tyrants in red coats and the first generations of a passionate people who would seed the nation we now call America. It’s a romance novel, where the protagonist must face the reality of rising up against his people’s British masters, this while trying to get the girl (and keep her alive amid zesty, believable combat).
Blade Runner – Can you fall in love with a robot? We’re talking real love here, with sex, bonding, trust, devotion. You can’t? What if technology advances to the point that you can’t tell a droid from a human, unless it’s your job, which, for our hero, it is. His job is killing them, if they’re on earth where they’re not supposed to be. But what if, when you kill your last droid, he, in the process, saves you from falling to your death from a high building – and you realize, hey, the robot has more compassion that me or any human I know? Can you go against everything you are, quit your job, run off with the girl and give her all the love she tearfully longs for?
All these have in common, what? They are great stories, and what makes a great story is mastery of that elusive magic of the soul, that they contain the soul’s deepest wishes and most primal fears -- so deep that we can scarce articulate them, but the story stirs and lifts them to sensibility, nobility, immense risk and final birth into this real world. ~
I Like Your American Freestyle
Having Japanese students stay with you for three weeks is like, well, a box of chocolates. You don’t know what you’re going to get but you know that it will be good.
They will be the soul of politeness – never moody -- will help you clean up after dinner and will always be glad to relax and try to talk in English, which is what they’re here at the university for – to learn how Americans really talk, beyond the English they learn in classrooms, although that serves them well and they’re able to communicate everything they want to.
They’re Moto and Yuya, two guys, old enough to have a beer with me and loving the bonhomie with friends on the creekside deck of Siskiyou Pub. They soon find their way around Ashland and want to “chill” downtown after their English classes and jaunts to museums, horse-riding, rock-climbing, rafting -- and then the few miles walking home.
They love slang and soak it up, begging for more and laughing hysterically with the insights it gives them into the American mind. Like “chilling” (hanging out), “get out of my face” (said in traffic), “antsy” (eager to go on a trip) and their favorite, which they taught the dozen other Japanese students, “it blows my mind!” That was said of the redwoods they visited.
Especially tricky is learning our version of warkarimaska or “do you know what I’m saying, man”-- said in gagsta slang as “knowamsaynman?”
We say “skoshi” (a little bit) all the time. As in, “Want a beer?” “Skoshi!”
They seem unable to say an L, so chocolate is “choc-o-rate” and vanilla is “ba-nee-ra.” I tell them I am dedicating myself to their learning to say R and I drill them every day, making them put that tongue behind the front teeth. It’s comical. You can see they find it immodest, almost gross, but they dutifully do it, noting their Eng-rish (English) teacher back home didn’t address this major communication barrier.
We take them to Mexican food or pizza or burgers, hearty fare they crave, remarking how “big” and full of sensation everything is in America – even the mountains and sky, the moonrise. They never get to see the moonrise back home. Everything is built up around them so it’s all buildings and houses, they say. They are amazed.
At the high school football game, the color, noise and celebration overwhelm and delight them and they shout, “This blows my mind!!” The dazzling, red-sequined dance team crowds around them before half-time and they roll their eyes, “blown away” at these goddesses of allure and energy.
And as we walk out of the game, troops of loud middle schoolers are kicking a chair around, trying to stomp on it and break it. I ask them to put the chair back. They all deny doing anything. Adults walk by, ignoring the rowdiness. Just part of life.
Yuya asks, why doesn’t anyone stop them? Good question, says I, trying to fathom a good answer. It’s what we call personal freedom, I guess – and also minding your own business. Only the parents can discipline a kid, right? Stay out of it, might get sued, just having good clean fun, etc.
I ask Yuya, would such vandalism happen in Japan? No, he says. Later, I ask him if they have divorce back home. Very seldom, he says. They are amazed at the cacophony of my son Colin’s 18th birthday party. I ask what a party is like in Japan. They have cakes and green tea at a table, he says. It’s an orderliness and sense of respect we just don’t know about. However, he says one thing seems global, that when a woman gets unhappy and gripes at the man, the guy clams up and ignores her till it passes. We get a big laugh out of that.
I teach them garage sailing, a custom they find quite charming. Over the weeks, I buy three little laughing Buddhas at garage sales and they find a home on my dashboard. Actually, the guys inform me, one of them is Ebisu, the Japanese god of fishermen, hard work and good fortune, who is delighted to have a big fish slung over his shoulder. When they leave, I give them each one the Buddhas. I keep Ebisu on the dashboard as a reminder of the guys.
It is hard to see them go on that Monday morning at the college library. There are many tears, hugs and group photos, with the 15 Japanese students always giving the peace sign. I tell they boys what has become obvious to us all, that we love them and they are our sons, always welcome in our home.
Coming back in my house, such a feeling of emptiness. They have left letters, which they asked us to read only after they leave. Moto writes, “I like your American freestyle. To think what should I do by myself is important for us. Thank you for giving me lifetime memory.”
Yuya writes, “Thank you John to be my host father. I appreciate you in this letter. I will have never forgotten at this Ashland life. The memory of Ashland will be shining in my all life and this experience will have been fertilized in my future…Someday I got money, I’ll come back with my girl friend! I was so happy.”
Me too, I say to myself, me too. ~
The End
I'll Shut Up, Right After This
Essays about our culture, politics, gender wars, Special places with special powers. Sprawl. Wanting to flee civilization. Global warming fears. Trying to be sustainable and green. Burning Man! Loving civilization. Politics. Xmas madness. The need for repleasuring life. Politics! Polarization = stupid. Aging, dementia, trying to live real long. Materialism, shopping. Housing bubble & greed. Warmongering & patriotism. Stifling dissent. Addiction - or is it doing what you like? Rage against Latinos when I write a story on them as if they were human beings. Indians. Peak oil & denial. Running the world like a day care center. Wars for God. People who are proud of not reading the news. The homeless and why they're homeless. Raging obesity.
