Survivors

John Stewart was a popular musician when I was in my teens and twenties. He wrote lines like this one from his song Kansas Rain -

"Standing in line at the Bank of America - nobody spoke they were in the house of God..."

He also wrote in his song July Your a Woman about a time when driving with a six pack of Coors beside you and picking up hitchhikers was considered cool. In that song, the driver who has just picked up the good-looking hitchhiker in California says, "well hell I was just going to the store for cigarettes but I'll go to Seattle with ya." Something a bit wilder about those times or maybe it's just me getting old.

Anyway I was glad to see this John Stewart song re-purposed for use in our times.

SNAFU or Utopia?

We show up in this place and this time

Born never asked.

As long as we are here

Might as well

Enjoy the ride

Enjoy the struggle

Be in the fight

Things change

Humankind not so much

Read read read

Work work work

Play play play

Things ebb and flow

Humans remain human

It's all so beautiful and

Ugly and

Sad and

Maddening and

When we are lucky

Transcendent

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I was reading the essay What Makes Life Significant  by William James written in the early part of the last century. He's writing about visiting a utopian community called Chautauqua where everything is "perfect". After returning to everyday civilization he realizes how boring utopia is and decides he'd much rather live in the real world than a world where everyone is reduced to some sort of mediocrity for the sake of communal living.

After returning to the real world he writes -

So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,—the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger. What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still-this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field.

If you aren't familiar with the acronym snafu it comes from the soldiers in WW-II and was one way they (and the people back home) dealt with the nature of the world and the people in it during those particular trying times. Private Snafu cartoons were released for soldiers and civilians viewing pleasure.

The main point being that struggle, trouble and fuckedupitness are not abnormal in the human experience - they are the human experience. Whatever you do; whether it be to enjoy that absurdity, let it beat you down, or cause you to thrive - is your choice.

Teddy Roosevelt touches on this idea in his Citizenship in a Republic speech -

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

A New Ernest Hemingway Story

Hemingway speaks to a more primitive time in our country...or maybe it was more civilized..I don't know, suffice it to say - different.

If you like fishing, hunting, fighting, drinking or at least reading about that sort of thing - he's a good choice.

There's a new Ernest Hemingway story in the New Yorker called Pursuit as Happiness that is about fishing and policeman and sun and struggle and water and stuff...

It's a nice change of pace from the day to day.

ps. If you like fishing, or reading about fishing, Roderick Haig-Brown wrote some marvelous stuff.

Do Identity Politics Work?

Imagine you live in a zip code lacking good jobs, with failing schools, sub-standard housing, gang violence, poor or no health care, limited access to healthy food and no clear path out. Imagine you are young and the best job available is joining a gang, occasionally killing other gang members and participating in various petty and not so petty crimes. Now imagine you are a policeman in that zip code.

Try to imagine being a young white non-college educated person living in an area where the industrial jobs are gone, small farms are gone, small businesses, and the community leaders that used to work in those small businesses are gone. Your schools are failing, you may live in a food desert and you can't afford prescription drugs, dental or medical care. A disproportionate number in your community suffer from drug addiction, poor health and or mental illness. If TV, radio, the web, Mom, Dad, your minister have taught you that your difficult situation is somehow the fault of some segment of your fellow citizens you will be angry at those "others" rather than the system of unfettered capitalism, political leaders and judges that failed the American people and allowed the hollowing out of America over the last 40 years.

Do you change that type of scenario from the top down by addressing each individual and individual problem (war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, urban renewal, public housing, gay rights, women's rights, black rights..etc.) or do you make relatively simple changes to the economic structure of society that will accomplish what you want - faster and cheaper than all those failed programs of the past?

If you are curious about some of the American history behind this intra-class warfare Nancy Isenberg's book White Trash - The 400-Year Untold History of Class in American is informative.

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Political change requires political power. Political power comes from having a broad enough coalition of voters to form a majority.

In a society with endless divisions based on individual identities how do we form that broad coalition?

A Google search for ending identity politics results in an interesting array of hits from across the political spectrum  - from the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution to The Guardian.

Who cares?

People who want to make changes through political means - citizens who want to win elections and control governments.

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James Carville had a point when he said, "it's the economy stupid". It's not that the capitalist free market economy is "it". The truth in his statement is that the underlying economic structure controls society, culture and politics or to put it simply - the world we live in.

Assume you are part of a group that is oppressed in some way  - wage earner, person of color, woman, LGBQT, poor person, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Wiccan, Atheist, elderly, young, homemaker, business woman, educated, uneducated, city dweller, country dweller, married, single, divorced, someone with children, childless, pro-life, pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-gun control...etc ad infinitum.

How do you form a broad coalition to use the political system to reduce your oppression?

By finding common interests.

People with these various identities have one thing in common - the economic structure of the society they live in.

Any group trying to instigate real and lasting political change has to focus on the economic structure. To accomplish this focus, a language is needed that hasn't been co-opted by the powerful to divide the powerless. That is a language that uses the good ideas from Marx, socialism, democratic socialism, capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, pragmatism and other isms that prove useful - but can't be easily turned into a scary cartoon for corporate media or a string of scary boogey-words for right wing hate radio to use to keep the wealthy wealthy, the powerful powerful and the poor* fighting each other.

*In this instance I've defined "poor" as being someone earning less than $500,000 a year since that seems to be the cut-off point for where the GOP starts to want to use the government to help you. If this sounds like an erroneous statement or confuses you - look at the charts for who benefits from the midnight Tax act of 2017 passed in secret by the GOP.

I'm not sure what could make this more clear than when the current leader of the GOP and occupant of the White House spilled the beans by saying the quiet part out loud and claimed during the debates that, "not paying taxes makes me smart." The fact that shortly after saying this he denied having said it only adds to the stink of a decayed party and it's leader.

The skeptical side of me thinks whatever Joe Biden and the corporate-captured democrats come up with will be almost as bad in pandering to the ultra-rich and corporations...but not as blatant. In 2003 Susan Sontag said during a C-Span interview, that when considering what happened to the Democratic party during the Bill Clinton/Newt Gingrich era, "Sometimes I think we only have one party, the Republican Party, and it has a branch called the Democratic Party." Contrary to what you may have heard on TV or radio, or read on the interwebs - there is no left or liberal party in the United States. Barack Obama is considered a conservative by U.K. political standards. I really hope young people start taking over by getting informed, voting and being involved in politics soon.

It's a simple deal, not scary and not new - fair progressive taxation, reduction of government waste, respect for the dignity and diversity of humans, support for organized labor, recognition of and planning for the climate crisis, labor involvement in corporate decision making, excellent - public education, health care and social safety nets. It can be called the "simple deal" or "fair deal" because it is simple, fair, and has been done in various countries.

Keeping it simple will allow people to build up an immunity to the rhetorical rock throwers who have all sorts of focus-tested words to frighten and alienate voters into supporting the status-quo which serves the ultra-wealthy and powerful while those voters live their lives of quiet desperation wondering if they can keep their job, pay their bills, provide for their children, afford to see a doctor (without going bankrupt) when they need to...etc etc etc.

When this simple fair deal is implemented we'll find that many of the injustices or dissatisfactions attributed to identity disappear, or are reduced in their significance as people's basic needs are addressed, or begin to be corrected because there will be sufficient resources to devote to addressing these injustices in an economy that serves the people.

Before any of that happens the first and hardest thing to do is to get people to recognize what they have in common while they are being bombarded with messages from those with power intended to keep them divided and weak.

The Century of the Self

The Century of the Self is a four part BBC documentary by filmmaker Adam Curtis that was released in 2002.

You'll learn how we went from being people who bought what we needed to being people who buy (or want to buy) what we have been manipulated into desiring.

We were sold among other things; the myth of unlimited consumption, endless wars, dishonest politicians, trickle-down economics, the benevolence of corporations and...whatever else the elite who shape public opinion want us to buy.

We were taught the supremacy of the individual and the glory of greed so we would compete with each other rather than listening to our natural instincts to help each other. Why?

Partly because it's good for business to have all these "individual" consumers. More broadly it's because those that have power are not giving it up without a fight. Those who benefit most from the entrenched power-structure couldn't win a fair fight because they are outnumbered 99 to 1. The powerful have to divide the majority to maintain the status-quo that they have spent decades erecting using the best propaganda, malleable politicians and corrupt judges money can buy.

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There's another force at work which comes out of the radicalism of the sixties and early seventies. The people wanting change in that era realized they could not change the power structure so they retreated to self-actualization. This results in all kinds of gurus, cults, cult-like stuff, new-agey things like bio-feedback, EST, Rolfing - millions of self-improvement books, and to the delight of corporations massively increased consumption as each individual "buys" his or her individuality.

With all that going on the neo-liberals Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are elected by a weird coalition of ex-hippies, trusting individuals, and corporations and we're off to the races. Government, unions, taxes on the rich and lazy poor people are the enemies in the Reagan/Thatcher world. Forty years later finds the U.S. lagging almost every economically developed nation in serving the needs of the majority of citizens. So maybe time to try something else...

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It's super interesting (or maybe super frightening depending on your outlook) to think about how crude, but effective - public relations, propaganda, and advertising were prior to the appearance of digital devices and data mining.

The Delphic maxim Know Thyself has never been more crucial for anyone desiring freedom. It's a personal choice - either let others decide for you in an authoritarian world, assume you've made a decision using your rational will as most of us do in today's society, or take the road less traveled and dare to be free.

The Most Shocking Fact About the United States of America

This fact comes from the 2016 book “American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper” by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker.

Not to keep you in suspense any longer but the shocking fact is,

Americans are no longer the tallest people in the world.

Why?

Because the richest country in the world decided about 40 years ago that government would focus the country's wealth on further enriching the wealthy and further empowering the powerful.

Everyone was supposed to be better off according to the psuedo-science/propaganda of - the trickle down theory, voodoo economics and or the Laffer curve. That was a fantastic lie and a fantastic failure - but not so much so that people aren't convinced to keep falling for it (over and over).

The next time you hear some Republican (or Democrat) pledge not to raise taxes - understand what they really mean,

"Lets keep cutting taxes on the wealthy and raising taxes and fees for the middle class." That way the middle class will be angry because they are paying a lot in taxes and fees but not seeing any benefit because their taxes are used for corporate and other forms of rich-person welfare.

You can come up with some alternate explanation but I'd read the book by Pierson and Hacker before you spend too much time doing your own research or listening to what some talking head on TV or the radio, with a vested interest, wants you to believe.

You Gotta be in the Fight

A defect of liberalism is the belief that all disagreements among people can be worked out through increased knowledge, debate and discussion.

We teach our children this. Jesus told us to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies.

Some would postulate that this point of view is a means to keep an oppressed class of people from overthrowing their oppressors. Others would point to Jesus overthrowing the money-changers tables in the temple to show that he wasn't teaching people passive acceptance of the status-quo.

Adam Gopnik makes this statement about J.S. Mill, an important figure in the development of liberalism -

Mill’s theory of freedom does make an unwarranted assumption—that people want a rich life where knowledge increases, new discoveries are made, and new ideas found, where art flourishes and science advances. If you don’t want that kind of society, you don’t want liberty, in Mill’s sense. Part of what makes him as touching as he is great is that it scarcely occurred to him that anyone would not. 

Compare a liberal thinker like Mill with a fascist conservative thinker like Carl Schmitt and you'll begin to understand why liberalism is not in itself a vehicle for significant political change and why the far right ("conservative") ideology of fascism has resulted in drastic political change. Some "conservatives", some white-evangelical leaders, fascists, and the far-right understand that this is a battle between friends (the people on your side) and enemies (the people on the other side).

Carl Schmitt's "friend/enemy distinction" is why right-wing media, and all corporate media to some degree, is primarily interested in telling you who your enemies are.

The left has it's partisans as well but they are bounded by what their corporate sponsors will allow to be discussed or limited in their reach to niche publications, radio shows and podcasts.

Light may be seeping in through cracks in the total propaganda facade we are subject to in modern society. These cracks in the facade are a result of among other things - our current president, his party followers, the global pandemic, massive income inequality, a quickly deteriorating economy and the climate crisis.

Sometimes events overtake politics.

It's hard to blame poor people, Obama, Mexicans or black people for everything...but the propagandists will keep fiddling that tune while the nation (and the world) burns - because that's their job. When money buys power people with more money get more power (look at the criminal justice system or our tax laws for two glaring examples) until they have so much money and power that they are absolutely corrupt no matter how much their apologist ministers and talking heads on TV and radio may beg to differ

You need to figure out which side you are on but before doing that you need to know what the sides are.

At a gross level you can phrase the two sides in varying ways...

The haves or the have nots
Owners of capital or wage earners
Owners or workers
Powerful or powerless
1% or the 99%
Bourgeoisie or proletariat and the ever increasing precariat

If you accept that "politics" and "political movements" dirty and ugly, or fantastical and utopian, as they may be - are part of the human condition...you'll have less occasion for disappointment when you try to understand why we can't all just get along.

It's also good to know that the battle isn't between individuals but rather groups - nothing personal, just business and politics. Before you decide which side you are going to fight for it's good to know which team you belong to.

It would be good to make it clear that when I talk about battles and fights that I am speaking metaphorically and rhetorically. The people that control the police and military will win any real world battle and any unprovoked violence (or maybe even provoked violence depending on your point of view) will only aid the oppressors and harm those being oppressed.

The slickest trick in politics is to use propaganda, emotion and pervasive human ignorance to build and maintain political, economic and social structures that serve the minority at the expense of the majority.

Selling soap, snake oil, or political voodoo it's sadly much too easy to get a significant number of working class (mostly white) people to support whatever policies work for the owners and have faith (since proof is lacking) that whatever crumbs fall off the table will suffice to keep the workers from revolting (no matter how revolting you may find said workers when discussing worldly affairs at the country club).

We just want a fair deal. I'll pay my taxes you pay yours. I don't want my tax dollars used for stupid wars, a bloated military industrial complex or for other forms of corporate welfare. We want good public schools, good public medicine, and a good social safety net for those too sick, too under-educated or too old to fend for themselves. Most economically developed nations succeed at these things - the question you have to ask your self is why in the so-called richest country on earth are we doing so poorly for so many people?

Then you can decide which side your on.

They'd Seen Too Much to Believe Too Much

I've been reading Will and Ariel Durant's books on philosophy and civilization and ran across the quote, "they'd seen too much to believe too much."

The quote is referring to traders from Athens around 490-470 B.C. whose travels gave them a sense of the variability (and similarity) of humans, their beliefs and cultures. This greater sense of the world around them made these traders immune from some of the orthodoxy of various sects that eventually led to events like the inquisition.

I think the quote appeals to me because at my advanced age I also have the feeling I've seen too much to believe too much.

After the events of 2015-2016 I devoted a lot of time to trying to understand what happened in our country that led us to that place. I kept stepping further back in history until I ended up devoting more time to figuring out what happened over the last 2000 years than the last 20 years (days, minutes...).

I still haven't got "the answer" or even the question nailed down but I got a feeling.

Skepticism, compassion, as much joy as you can find, and a sense of equanimity are probably appropriate responses to a complicated world.

Oh but it's still good to dream...

Happiness - A Poem by Carl Sandburg

The Poetry Foundation website description of Carl Sandburg states,

Poet Carl Sandburg was born into a poor family in Galesburg, Illinois. In his youth, he worked many odd jobs before serving in the 6th Illinois Infantry in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. He studied at Lombard College, and then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he worked as an organizer for the Socialist Democratic Party from 1910 to 1912.

The Wikipedia article on Carl Sandburg has an expanded description of his life and works.

Many are familiar with his poem Chicago. One of my favorite Carl Sandburg poems is this possibly less familiar one...

Happiness  

I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I
was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the
Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their
women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967).
From his collection Chicago Poems 1916.

Capitalism and The American Pandemic Response

Why American Healthcare is The Worst in The Developed World

Stereotypes Make Complicated Things Simple

If you have the capability and want to live in the world as a free, thinking, individual it's useful to recognize complexity and thereby realize that whatever your "worldview" may be - it is most assuredly incomplete.

Unless you happen to be one of those mythical infallible individuals many things we think we know are just stories with varying degrees of fact mixed with fiction.

It's always tempting to stereotype people or groups of people to simplify, or eliminate, thought - but it's a dubious bargain to trade certainty, for freedom and growth as an individual and for society.

It takes a certain amount of courage and inner stability; to admit - I don't know, we don't know, to have faith that as a species we have the capacity for compassion, creativity and beauty while also recognizing the never ending human capacity for ignorance, greed, evil and violence.