Aug. 29, 2006

Web Note: The economic statistics and information about government regulation cited in this article are for the UK. Unlike Europe, the US barely regulates GM foods. In the US, GM food is NOT labeled, and only extremely minimal ‘safety’ testing – often criticized as inadequate and unscientific – is required before GM foods are introduced into the food supply.

Our thanks to UK campaigner and lecturer Luke Anderson, geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou, and Prof Joe Cummins, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Western Ontario, for helping us through the maze.

Q: What are genes?

A: Genes are the inherited blueprints for the thousands of proteins that form the building blocks of all life, from bacteria to humans. Proteins make enzymes, which carry out all the bodily processes, like digestion of food, that keep us alive.

Q: What is genetic engineering?

A: Genetic engineering involves taking genes from one species and inserting them into another. For example, genes from an arctic flounder which has “antifreeze” properties may be spliced into a tomato to prevent frost damage.

Q: Is genetic engineering precise?

A: No. It is impossible to guide the insertion of the new gene. This can lead to unpredictable effects. Also, genes do not work in isolation but in highly complex relationships which are not understood. Any change to the DNA at any point will affect it throughout its length in ways scientists cannot predict. The claim by some that they can is both arrogant and untrue.

Q: Isn’t GM just an extension of traditional breeding practices?

A: No – GM bears no resemblance to traditional breeding techniques. The government’s own Genetic Modification (Contained Use) Regulations admit this when it defines GM as “the altering of the genetic material in that organism in a way that does not occur naturally by mating or natural recombination or both”.

Traditional breeding techniques operate within established natural boundaries which allow reproduction to take place only between closely related forms. Thus tomatoes can cross-pollinate with other tomatoes but not soya beans; cows can mate only with cows and not sheep. These genes in their natural groupings have been finely tuned to work harmoniously together by millions of years of evolution. Genetic engineering crosses genes between unrelated species which would never cross-breed in nature.

Q: Could this be dangerous?

A: Potentially, yes. In one case, soya bean engineered with a gene from a brazil nut gave rise to allergic reactions in people sensitive to the nuts. Most genes being introduced into GM plants have never been part of the food supply so we can’t know if they are likely to be allergenic.

More seriously, in 1989 there was an outbreak of a new disease in the US, contracted by over 5,000 people and traced back to a batch of L-tryptophan food supplement produced with GM bacteria. Even though it contained less than 0.1 per cent of a highly toxic compound, 37 people died and 1,500 were left with permanent disabilities. More may have died, but the American Centre for Disease Control stopped counting in 1991.

The US government declared that it was not GM that was at fault but a failure in the purification process. However, the company concerned, Showa Denko, admitted that the low-level purification process had been used without ill effect in non-GM batches. Scientists at Showa Denko blame the GM process for producing traces of a potent new toxin. This new toxin had never been found in non-GM versions of the product.

Q: Former UK government Cabinet Enforcer Jack Cunningham said, “Those GM foods on the market are as safe as the equivalent [non-GM] foods.” Is he right?

A: Dr Cunningham is talking about the concept of “substantial equivalence”. Substantial equivalence is a legal concept invented by the biotech industry. The industry claims that a GM food or food supplement is “substantially equivalent” to, or the same as, the non-GM version and therefore does not require labels or extensive testing.

Regulators have blindly accepted the substantial equivalence doctrine without backing up their belief with independent scientific research.

Showa Denko was not required to test the GM version of L-tryptophan because of the assumption that it would be the same as the non-GM version.

The doctrine of substantial equivalence means that there is nothing in the regulations to prevent another tragedy like the L-tryptophan case from happening again with new GM foods.

Naturally, when it comes to patenting, the rules change. The “substantially equivalent” GM food magically becomes completely different from its non-GM equivalent. It transforms into a unique product which remains the sole property of the patent holder, and woe betide anyone who infringes the patent.

Q: Are GE foods more dangerous to allergy-prone people?

A: The problem with GM foods is their unpredictability. A person may prove unexpectedly allergic to a food he has previously eaten safely. For this reason, people who are hyperallergenic or environmentally sensitive may want to avoid GM foods.

Q: UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “There is no GM food that can be sold in this country without going through a very long regulatory process.” Does that mean there’s nothing to worry about?

A: Health-risk assessment of GM foods compares only a few known components (e.g., certain nutrients, known toxins and allergens) between GM and non-GM equivalent varieties. If things match up then all is assumed to be well. Short-term animal feeding trials are conducted in some cases. All the research is done by the biotech companies themselves. Then government approval committees judge whether they believe that the evidence of safety is convincing.

No evidence from human trials for either toxicity or allergy testing is required. No independent checks of the company’s claims are required. The fact that the L-tryptophan tragedy would repeat itself by these criteria highlights the inadequacy of the system.

Geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou says, “At the very least, long-term animal feeding trials followed by tests with human volunteers of the type required for GM drugs should be mandatory.”

Prof Joe Cummins, professor emeritus of genetics at the University of Western Ontario, believes there is a cynical agenda behind the lack of proper testing: “The failure to test may provide some protection in the courts against lawsuits by those maimed or crippled by the foods. Most ill effects from food and allergies are not easily quantified until after the disaster. At best, there may be a small but marked increase in autoimmune disease and allergy associated with the foods. At worst, major outbreaks of illness could be observed and will be difficult to trace to the unlabelled foods.”

Q: What will the impact of GM crops be on the environment?

A: Last year, 71 percent of all GM crops grown were genetically engineered to be herbicide resistant. A field can now be sprayed with chemicals and everything will die except for the resistant crop. The sales of one of the herbicides being used are predicted to rise by $200 million as a result.

Graham Wynne, Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, says: “The ability to clear fields of all weeds using powerful herbicides which can be sprayed onto GM herbicide-resistant crops will result in farmlands devoid of wildlife and will spell disaster for millions of already declining birds and plants.”

There are also GM virus-resistant crops. Prof Joe Cummins says: “Probably the greatest threat from genetically altered crops is the insertion of modified virus and insect virus genes into crops – genetic recombination will create virulent new viruses from such constructions. The widely used cauliflower mosaic virus (present in the GM soy and maize currently on supermarket shelves in the UK) is a potentially dangerous gene. It is very similar to the Hepatitis B virus and related to HIV. Modified viruses could cause famine by destroying crops or cause human and animal diseases of tremendous power.”

Q: What is genetic pollution?

A: Genes engineered into plants and animals can be transferred to other species. For example, genes from GM oilseed rape, salmon or micro-organisms may move into the gene pools of wild relatives. The introduction of GM organisms into complex ecosystems may bring knock-on effects that we are unable to control.

Q: Which foods are not GM?

A: Presently certified organic foods are the best bet for the anti-GM consumer. However, even with the best intentions, companies attempting to exclude GM ingredients from their products have found contamination from GM crops. De Rit recently had to recall a batch of organic tortilla chips after tests showed that they contained GM maize. The company believes that cross-pollination of crops was to blame. Iceland, the only supermarket chain to try to ban GM ingredients from its own-brand products, recently wrote to its suppliers acknowledging that some GM contamination is unavoidable, because of cross-pollination of crops. The Linda McCartney range of vegetarian meals has also been discovered to be contaminated with GM soya.

Meanwhile, organic farming is under threat from the biotech companies. In the U.S., lawyers from the biotech companies are trying to force the government to require that GM crops can be declared organic. Some U.S. states have succumbed to Monsanto’s pressure and banned GM-free labels on food. Monsanto has successfully sued dairy farmers who labelled dairy products as free or Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.

Due to so-called free trade agreements established by the World Trade Organisation, it may become illegal for individual countries to maintain higher organic standards than the U.S. So what happens in the U.S. has a direct knock-on effect on Europe.

Q: Why are genes being patented?

A: Patents give a huge incentive to the biotechnology industry to create new GM organisms. Since most patents last for 17-20 years, the companies are keen to recoup any investment quickly, often at the expense of safety and ethics. There are currently patents approved or pending for over 190 GM animals, including fish, cows, mice and pigs. There are also patents on varieties of seeds and plants, as well as unusual genes and cell lines from indigenous peoples. Scouts are sent around the world to discover genes that may have commercial applications. Over half the world’s plant and animal species live in the rainforests of the south and the industry has been quick to draw upon these resources.

The Neem tree, for instance, has been used for thousands of years in India for its antiseptic and insecticidal properties. Following in the well-trodden footsteps of Christopher Columbus, western corporations have filed a number of patents on these attributes.

Q: Are GM crops grown in the UK?

A: There are several hundred “deliberate release sites” in the UK where GM crops are being grown experimentally. In addition, this spring, a number of large-scale GM crop trials will be planted in order to assess their effect on wildlife. The first commercial crops could be planted within a year.

If commercial planting goes ahead, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for organic farming to stay free from contamination due to cross-pollination from GM crops.

Q: Are we eating GM food?

A: GM soya is in about 60 percent of all processed food as vegetable oil, soya flour, lecithin and soya protein. GM maize is in about 50 percent of processed foods as corn, corn starch, cornflour and corn syrup. GM tomato puree is sold in some supermarkets and GM enzymes are used throughout the food processing industry. Government regulations on labelling exclude 95-98 percent of the products containing GM ingredients because they ignore derivatives.

Q: Who is regulating the industry?

A: The lack of political will to scrutinise the industry is clear in this statement from Douglas Hogg: “Some estimates have predicted a £9 billion ($17 billion) market by the year 2000. We cannot jeopardise this by over-regulating initiative and enterprise.”

US trade representative, Charlene Barshefsky, told EU leaders to expect punitive action through the World Trade Organisation if they allow domestic concerns over biotechnology to interfere with US trade.

Most of the people sitting on supposedly independent government advisory bodies have direct links to biotech companies. Should people whose careers are tied to the development of the technology be trusted to carry out impartial risk assessments?

When she was asked whether she felt that people should be given the choice of whether they eat GM food or not, Janet Bainbridge, chair of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes, replied that we should not because “most people don’t even know what a gene is.” She added: “Sometimes my young son wants to cross the road when it’s dangerous. Sometimes you just have to tell people what’s best for them.”

The European Commission has set up the “European Federation of Biotechnology Task Group on Public Perceptions on Biotechnology” to promote the “public understanding of biotechnology”.

EuropaBio, a consortium of all the biotechnology companies with interests in Europe, was taken by surprise at the resistance in Europe and sought the advice of Burson Marsteller, past masters in crisis management. (Previous clients included Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill and Union Carbide after the explosion of their chemical plant in Bhopal.) EuropaBio was advised that “Public issues of environmental and human health risk are communications killing fields for bioindustries in Europe – all the research evidence confirms that the perception of the profit motive fatally undermines industry’s credibility on these questions . . .” Marsteller told them to refrain from participating in any public debate and leave it to “those charged with public trust, politicians and regulators, to assure the public that biotech products are safe.”

Once released, genetically engineered organisms become part of our ecosystem. Unlike some other forms of pollution which can be contained or which may decrease over time, any mistakes we make now will be passed on to all future generations of life. With governments capitulating to commercial interests, it is up to citizens to respond.

If you are still confused, here is a new book to check out:

Genetically Modified Food: A Short Guide for the Confused
Andy Rees
Published 9th October 2006

Reviews:

‘Rees unmasks the biotech industry’s horrific tactics in their race to take over our food supply and the devastation that their GM crops will inflict if we don’t act quickly.’ Jeffrey M. Smith, best-selling author Seeds of Deception

‘Gives a great boost to all public-spirited citizens who want to get their facts straight. …Highly recommended!’ Dr Arpad Pusztai, the world’s leading expert on plant lectins

Is the food on our shelves free of genetically engineered ingredients?

- In the US, although they may not know it, most people already eat genetically modified food.

- Since the introduction of GM foods seven years ago, food-derived illnesses in the US have doubled.

- In the UK foods are contaminated with GM material through the 1 million tonnes of GM maize and soy used to feed livestock.

So far the major corporations have met resistance in Europe but their worldwide influence is huge – and grows all the time. GM foods are increasingly prevalent despite NEVER having been tested on humans.

Are genetically modified crops dangerous to the environment and to our bodies? In this brilliantly readable guide Andy Rees provides the answers.

Andy Rees is the author of The Pocket Green Book: The Environmental Crisis in a Nutshell (1991) and former editor of GM Watch’s Weekly Watch.

For further information contact
Helen Griffiths on heleng@plutobooks.com

http://www.organicconsumers.org/2006/article_1860.cfm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_organisms

I don’t usually take the advice of rightwingers. But I did this time. After receiving inflamed email messages from dozens of angry rightists that I should get the hell out of the USA and go to Venezuela, I accepted their challenge and flew to Caracas.

“Would you like me to start a fund to ship your ass down there, Comrade Cohen?”

What had provoked the often-abusive emailers was my 2005 Internet column urging U.S. residents to buy their gasoline at Citgo, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company. I called for a Citgo BUY-cott, to protest Bush’s interventionist foreign policy while supporting innovative anti-poverty programs in Venezuela. (Last winter, Citgo started a program that provided discounted home-heating oil to low-income families in the U.S.)

“Hey moron, if you hate America so much and love Venezuela, why don’t you go there?”

I’m glad I listened to the conservative chorus. In late June, I headed to Venezuela with a fact-finding delegation sponsored by the respected U.S. human rights group, Witness for Peace. The grueling trip covered much ground and all sides of Venezuela’s social/political landscape. It is a complex country, headed by sometimes volatile President Hugo Chavez, a leftist and harsh Bush critic who was first elected in 1998.

As soon as I returned home, I headed to the nearest Citgo to fill up my tank — more committed than ever to send a few dollars toward Venezuela’s poor.

“You, sir, are as un-American as they come.”

For decades, Venezuela’s vast oil wealth had been squandered and hoarded by its light-skinned elite, while most Venezuelans — largely of indigenous, African and mixed descent — lived in dire poverty. Today, oil revenue from Citgo and elsewhere is funneled into social programs (called “missions”) to benefit the country’s poor majority. They’re reminiscent of FDR’s New Deal programs. . .born of our economic bust. But Venezuela’s missions are fueled by a boom — a boom in oil prices that is likely to persist for years.

“Because of Chavez, communism is thriving in South America.”

From what I could see, capitalism is thriving. Foreign oil interests continue to profit handsomely from Venezuelan petrol, but they now pay a fairer share of taxes and royalties. So do the 80 McDonald’s restaurants in Venezuela, which were briefly shut down last year over alleged tax cheating.

Multinational companies and the old elite are doing fine in today’s Venezuela. So well that some Venezuelan leftists denounce Chavez — despite his talk of building “21st century socialism” — as a tool of corporate imperialism.

Like other oil-exporting countries, Venezuela in the past allowed its domestic productive economy to atrophy. Besides oil, it produced little — with food largely imported. Today, people in poor areas are organizing themselves into productive and agricultural co-ops, supported by low-interest government loans. We visited a federal bank that underwrites women-run businesses nationwide.

My guess is that if Chavez succeeds in Venezuela — a big “if” in a country of endemic corruption, poverty and crime, in the backyard of the U.S. superpower — its economic system will end up looking more like Sweden than Cuba.

What’s not debatable is that the poor have found hope in the Chavez administration — which is why he’s perhaps the most popular president in our hemisphere. So popular that Chavez critics in the U.S. government and Venezuelan opposition concede that they won’t be able to defeat him in December when he seeks reelection.

“The trouble with all you liberals is that you’re anti-American and hate democracy.”

Participation in democracy is booming in Venezuela under Chavez. That’s partly due to polarization, but also because so many poor people feel empowered enough for the first time to get active in politics. A massive 2005 Latinobarometro poll conducted in 18 Latin American countries showed that Venezuelans are among the top in preference for democracy over all other forms of government, in satisfaction with how their democracy is functioning, and in belief that their country is “totally democratic.”

“The oil money never gets to the poor. . . . You must have been paid by Chavez to write what you wrote.”

Across Venezuela, it’s hard to miss the new investment in public education. Schools are being upgraded in urban and rural areas and are required to offer free breakfasts and lunches, arts, music and after-school activities. Unlike the U.S., these are well-funded mandates. Illiteracy has been virtually wiped out, according to UNESCO, thanks to adult education that has penetrated the poorest neighborhoods.

In poor communities, federally-subsidized stores called “mercals” sell food at half the market price. In the capital of Caracas, thousands of government-funded soup kitchens offer free lunches every weekday to the indigent; our delegation was headquartered in a church that served 150 free lunches per day. Across the country, new housing is being built to replace shantytown “ranchos” that so many Venezuelans live in.

Thousands of free (“Barrio Adentro”) medical clinics have been built inside neighborhoods that never had doctors before — so many clinics that you can spot them from the highway. These are staffed largely by doctors from Cuba; in return, Cuba receives Venezuelan oil. When we asked a community leader how local residents reacted to the Cuban doctors, he explained that most Venezuelan doctors won’t serve in poor barrios: “People in our community don’t care whether the doctors are French, German, Canadian, Mexican or Cuban — as long as they’re here to help.”

“Go to Venezuela and kiss up to the anti-American dictator.”

If Venezuela is a dictatorship, it must be the first in world history in which the opposition controls most of the media. And the first in which demonstrations occur regularly outside the presidential palace (organized by various groups, especially low-income activists complaining about broken promises and government inefficiency).

Dissent is alive and well in Venezuela. Any casual viewer can see anti-Chavez criticism all over TV, the country’s dominant medium and largely in the hands of conservative business interests. The opposition used its power on TV to support a short-lived military coup in 2002 (strike 1), an employers’ oil lockout in 2002-3 (strike 2) and a failed recall election in 2004 (strike 3). Chavez won nearly 60% in the recall vote — which was monitored closely by international observers.

Efforts to bring down Chavez — through democratic and undemocratic means — have been supported by the Bush administration. Which makes it ironic that the American Family Association, a U.S. religious ultra-right group, has organized a Citgo boycott on the basis of its Internet hoax: “Venezuela Dictator Vows to Bring Down U.S. Government.” The headline tends to reverse reality; Chavez has made no such vow. But AFA true believers have targeted my email inbox for months with the hoax.

“Try Jesus. If you don’t like Him, the devil will always take you back.. . . .What terrorist group are you affiliated with?”

If you think the U.S. is politically polarized, you haven’t been to Venezuela. Clinton’s impeachment by the religious right over sex is child’s play compared to what’s gone on in Venezuela, where Chavez has survived near-death experiences at the hands of a conservative opposition that has never accepted his presidency.

Columnist Paul Krugman talks of a “New Class War” in our country. In Venezuela, it’s old-fashioned class war. Political and media confrontation between Chavez and the opposition is vicious, personal and bare-knuckled. While independent human rights monitors in Venezuela complain about isolated cases of government intimidation of opposition figures and journalists, they scoff at claims that democracy is in jeopardy or that dictatorship is coming.

Today, Chavez is popular (his approval ratings dwarf Bush’s), rambunctious in whipping up his base against both domestic opponents and Bush, and prone to hyperbole in his hours of extemporaneous speaking each day. He has waged a war of words against U.S. Empire and Bush, whom he calls “Mr. Danger.” But that’s polite in light of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld having compared Chavez to Adolph Hitler. Or Rev. Pat Robertson having called for Chavez to be assassinated.

“You can write your articles about how great he [Chavez] is, but I know, as well as other true Americans, that he is not a good man and he does need to be taken out of power as soon as possible.”

To me, the issue is less about Chavez than about the social initiatives his government has unleashed. When I first wrote about Venezuela 14 months ago, I urged a simple economic action: filling up at Citgo so that our money at the pump helps Venezuela’s poor instead of Middle East oiligarchs. That remains a good idea.

Nowadays, I also urge political action: that we contact Congress to demand that the U.S. stay out of Venezuela’s political contest. That’s up to Venezuelans to decide. Not us. The U.S. should stop its efforts to back the conservative opposition and cease all (“National Endowment for Democracy”) funding of Venezuelan groups.

And finally, I want to join my rightwing critics in one recommendation: Go to Venezuela. If you can arrange it, examine the social transformations for yourself. Study Spanish there. See the decades of poverty, neglect and corruption that led to the election of Hugo Chavez — and whether his government is improving things.

There’s an added bonus for anyone who can get down there: gasoline at 18 cents per gallon. Expect to hear Venezuelans complaining that the price is too high.

Jeff Cohen is a media critic and former TV pundit. His newest book, “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media,” can be pre-ordered at http://jeffcohen.org/.

this is the chapter of
devastation
this is our oasis
an angle where wars intersect
tyrants accumulate around our eyes
in the shackle’s verandah
there is enough space for applause
let us applaud
another evening climbs
the city’s candles
technological hoofs crush the night
a people is being slaughtered across short waves
but the radio vomits raw statements
and urges us to
applaud
with a skeleton of a burning umbrella
we receive this rain
a god sleeps on our flag
but the horizon is prophetless
maybe they will come if we
applaud
let us applaud
we will baptize our infants with smoke
plough their tongues
with flagrant war songs
or UN resolutions
teach them the bray of slogans
and leave them beside burning nipples
in an imminent wreckage
and applaud
before we weave an autumn for tyrants
we must cross this galaxy of barbed wires
and keep on repeating
HAPPY NEW WAR!

Mar. 1991, Baghdad

Sinan Antoon – About Baghdad

Seven Poems – Sinan Antoon

San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, June 21, 2006

AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.

The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service — a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers’ recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.

The company’s policy overhaul follows recent reports that AT&T was one of several leading telecom providers that allowed the National Security Agency warrantless access to its voice and data networks as part of the Bush administration’s war on terror.

“They’re obviously trying to avoid a hornet’s nest of consumer-protection lawsuits,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a San Francisco privacy consultant and former senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“They’ve written this new policy so broadly that they’ve given themselves maximum flexibility when it comes to disclosing customers’ records,” he said.

AT&T is being sued by San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation for allegedly allowing the NSA to tap into the company’s data network, providing warrantless access to customers’ e-mails and Web browsing.

AT&T is also believed to have participated in President Bush’s acknowledged domestic spying program, in which the NSA was given warrantless access to U.S. citizens’ phone calls.

AT&T said in a statement last month that it “has a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy” and that “our customers expect, deserve and receive nothing less than our fullest commitment to their privacy.”

But the company also asserted that it has “an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare, whether it be an individual or the security interests of the entire nation.”

Under its former privacy policy, introduced in September 2004, AT&T said it might use customer’s data “to respond to subpoenas, court orders or other legal process, to the extent required and/or permitted by law.”

The new version, which is specifically for Internet and video customers, is much more explicit about the company’s right to cooperate with government agencies in any security-related matters — and AT&T’s belief that customers’ data belongs to the company, not customers.

“While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T,” the new policy declares. “As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

It says the company “may disclose your information in response to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal process,” omitting the earlier language about such processes being “required and/or permitted by law.”

The new policy states that AT&T “may also use your information in order to investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud (or) situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person” — conditions that would appear to embrace any terror-related circumstance.

Ray Everett-Church, a Silicon Valley privacy consultant, said it seems clear that AT&T has substantially modified its privacy policy in light of revelations about the government’s domestic spying program.

“It’s obvious that they are trying to stretch their blanket pretty tightly to cover as many exposed bits as possible,” he said.

Gail Hillebrand, a staff attorney at Consumers Union in San Francisco, said the declaration that AT&T owns customers’ data represents the most significant departure from the company’s previous policy.

“It creates the impression that they can do whatever they want,” she said. “This is the real heart of AT&T’s new policy and is a pretty fundamental difference from how most customers probably see things.”

John Britton, an AT&T spokesman, denied that the updated privacy policy marks a shift in the company’s approach to customers’ info.

“We don’t see this as anything new,” he said. “Our goal was to make the policy easier to read and easier for customers to understand.”

He acknowledged that there was no explicit requirement in the past that customers accept the privacy policy as a condition for service. And he acknowledged that the 2004 policy said nothing about customers’ data being owned by AT&T.

But Britton insisted that these elements essentially could be found between the lines of the former policy.

“There were many things that were implied in the last policy.” He said. “We’re just clarifying the last policy.”

AT&T’s new privacy policy is the first to include the company’s video service. AT&T says it’s spending $4.6 billion to roll out TV programming to 19 million homes nationwide.

The policy refers to two AT&T video services — Homezone and U-verse. Homezone is AT&T’s satellite TV service, offered in conjunction with Dish Network, and U-verse is the new cablelike video service delivered over phone lines.

In a section on “usage information,” the privacy policy says AT&T will collect “information about viewing, game, recording and other navigation choices that you and those in your household make when using Homezone or AT&T U-verse TV Services.”

The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 stipulates that cable and satellite companies can’t collect or disclose information about customers’ viewing habits.

The law is silent on video services offered by phone companies via the Internet, basically because legislators never anticipated such technology would be available.

AT&T’s Britton said the 1984 law doesn’t apply to his company’s video service because AT&T isn’t a cable provider. “We are not building a cable TV network,” he said. “We’re building an Internet protocol television network.”

But Andrew Johnson, a spokesman for cable heavyweight Comcast, disputed this perspective.

“Video is video is video,” he said. “If you’re delivering programming over a telecommunications network to a TV set, all rules need to be the same.”

AT&T’s new and former privacy policies both state that “conducting business ethically and ensuring privacy is critical to maintaining the public’s trust and achieving success in a dynamic and competitive business climate.”

Both also state that “privacy responsibility” extends “to the privacy of conversations and to the flow of information in data form.” As such, both say that “the trust of our customers necessitates vigilant, responsible privacy protections.”

The 2004 policy, though, went one step further. It said AT&T realizes “that privacy is an important issue for our customers and members.”

The new policy makes no such acknowledgment.

David Lazarus’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Send tips or feedback to dlazarus@sfchronicle.com.

May 29, 2006

This weekend has been the most intense, most challenging of our entire time here in D.C. As we conclude our 2nd week of Mother’s Day MONTH protests, we find ourselves suddenly submerged in pro-war, testosterone-laden energy that now envelops D.C. This incredibly hostile energy is attempting to silence our voices for peace – yet we are womanaging to have our voices heard & our protests witnessed this entire weekend.

Last night at the PBS Memorial Day Concert, we stood outside the gates of the West Lawn of the Capitol and handed out hot pink paper protest slips & pins, with the number of dead U.S. soldiers starkly printed on one side, & 3 different facts of protest printed on the back. Once we were inside, scanning the crowd, we saw many, many people wearing these slips over their hearts. (See www.codepinkjournals.blogspot.org for details).

Today at the most war-glorifying, soldier-heroing ceremony ever – the ceremony that repeatedly bellowed the lies of this war of spreading freedom & democracy while protecting our freedom & democracy – we stand in the middle of the parade route and represent the voice of peace. We (including our 77 yr. old elder) are spit on, screamed at, threatened, materials snatched from our hands & ripped up, as we stand on the grounds of peace.

Up until this weekend, D.C. has been a fertile ground for growing peace, ending war. We have been reaching 10′s of 1000′s of people: sometimes 30 to 50 folk at a time, getting off buses or gathering with a tour guide; sometimes one or two individuals sightseeing. Sometimes elementary school children or entire junior high graduating classes. Sometimes tourists from the Benefit Funds Union or from Gadston, Missouri. Sometimes handfuls of visitors from Egypt, from Thailand, from Bolivia. Sometimes ‘impeccable’ white men dressed in million dollar suits that could be lobbyists, could be legislative aids, could even be congress people – definitely the ‘powerful’. Sometimes regular D.C. folks surviving in this city where predominantly white affluence & racism lords so completely over predominantly black poverty & the ravages of racism. Sometimes soldiers in full uniform or in casual everyday clothes; sometimes top brass or enlisted grunts. Sometimes soldiers recently returned from Iraq; sometimes soldiers on their way to Iraq.

Some of our deepest rewards include: the two women from Iran who silently approached us as we stood with our signs, threw their arms around us & wept with us; the first hostile Latina mother of a soldier destined to go to Iraq in a few weeks who broke down & wept with us her sorrow & fear & her truth that neither her nor her son wants (him) to go to Iraq; the young girl, standing silently listening to us reading the names of dead soldiers, who returned to her home state determined to share her experience and speak out against war; the numbers of current military enlisted women & men we handed out GI rights hotline infor to; the accolades & the complaints of legislative-types as we testify ‘illegally’ at congressional hearings, in hallowed halls, fortressed offices of the ‘leaders’ of our nation; the police taking us aside & telling us they personally support our efforts for peace; the haunted eyes of the soldier who has orders to return to Iraq who begs us to end this war, saying he’s too much of a coward to speak out; the shocked youth who hear us challenge adult authority as we say ‘don’t trust your recruiter: recruiters lie”; the proud youth who slam their fists to their chests over their hearts and then throw a side-ways peace symbol with a pompous beat in our direction.

The many, many, many people – sometimes 2 out of three – who flash the peace symbol, honk their horns, smile broadly, tear-up quickly, throw their fists in the air, thank us profusely for being here for working for standing against war, against bush, against aggression and for peace for truth for end of war.

We invite you again, come to D.C. Let us not be the silent Germans of the 30′s and 40′s’ let us not be the ones who trade our security of our not-at-risk affluence, lifestyles, daily lives, luxuries of homes, food, jobs for turning a mostly blind eye on rape, murder, depleted uranium, torture, bombing, killing, destruction.

Come to D.C. Donate so others can come and/or stay in D.C. Right now, our CodePINK East Bay Office is in jeopardy – Sam cannot cover the rent for last month nor this month. We are in danger of loosing this fabulous, visible CodePINK space on Solano Ave in Albany unless someone(s) steps forward now, before the first.

We know many of you have contributed so much & we are all so grateful. And we are asking for more if at all possible. The times are demanding more, from all of us. We need to double, to triple, to 10 times 10 increase our activism & our commitment to ending this war – or yet another year, another 100′s of thousands of human lives will be taken in our name and the blood on our hands will be the blood on our elbows, our feet, our hearts.

We have room in D.C. – mostly futon & pad space – in Hillary’s House at $10 per night. Get on the plane, the bus, the bike – just come.

In pink peace, power, protest, participation,
The dwindling but powerful BASTA! team!

(for details of our actions, go to www.womensayenough.org)

1) Include over 500 artificial (synthetic) substances in organic processed foods without prior review fy the National Organic Standards Board?

2) Allow chain stores (Kraft, Wal-Mart, Dean Foods) and the bio-chemical corporation, Monsanto to lobby congress dilute the meaning and integrity of the Organic label?

3) Allow a very small group of Republicans to attach a last minute Rider to the 2006 Agriculture Appropriations Bill at the last minute, ignoring over 350,000 letters from the Organic Consumer’s Association and the Organic community at large?

Why isn’t this a no-brainer? Why is the hard fought, 35 years of work by the alternative organic community at risk?

Because the organic market is now a 15 billion dollar (and grows by 20 percent each year) industry and is kicking agribusiness’ butt!

Given what we know about pesticides and what we don’t know about Genetically Modified food, it is criminal to allow our food sources to be poisoned industrial agriculture.

Please take action here

http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.cfm

Thursday, April 13th, 2006
The End of the Internet? Net Neutrality Threatened by Cable, Telecom Interests

The vital concept of net neutrality – universal and non-discriminatory to the Internet – is at risk. Phone and cable companies are lobbying Congress for legislation that would permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. We speak with Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. He wrote an article in the Nation Magazine titled “The End of the Internet?”

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined in Washington by Jeff Chester, who’s Executive Director of Center for Digital Democracy, wrote a piece in The Nation magazine called “The End of the Internet,” and we want to talk about that. But before we do, Jeff, you’ve just heard a portion of a discussion we’ve been having about what’s happening to the Village Voice and Jim Ridgeway, who was in the studio seat right before you were. Can you comment on this?

JEFF CHESTER: Well, you know, the question that I’m going to discuss soon, about so-called network neutrality, the future of the internet, is directly related. I’m not so sure, frankly, that the changes underway being pushed by the nation’s largest cable and telephone companies to change the way that the internet operates, I’m not so sure journalism, whether it’s alternative journalism or new forms of so-called mainstream journalism or even dissent, I’m not so sure how viable those forms will be in the emerging online world. That’s why we have to make sure that as these decisions are being made now, you know, in state capitals and in Washington, we keep today’s open internet at the core of these dramatic changes in our media system.

Let’s say Jim Ridgeway and his colleagues wanted to create an alternative, and let’s say the phone and cable companies were able to do what they intend to do. Well, Ridgeway’s video or Democracy Now!’s video could be slowed down while the FOX programming goes into computers and into television sets and into mobile devices super fast. Let’s say, if the phone and cable companies have their way, they hand Jim Ridgeway or they hand Democracy Now! a rate card. You want to have mainstream quality? Here’s what you have to pay! And if you can’t afford it, well, you’re just going to have to go on the old dirt road. So, the future of journalism, and in many ways the future of our democracy, I think, is tied up in this issue of: What is going to happen to the internet if the phone and cable lobby gets their way here in Washington, D.C.?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Jeff, one of the things that’s happening obviously is that this kind of debate is going on right now in the House of Representatives — I saw a little bit of the subcommittee hearings about a week or so ago — but all the national attention, obviously, is on the immigration issue while this is quietly going on under the radar, the huge debate going on in the House of Representatives in the subcommittees now. Could you tell us what is net neutrality precisely and that particular portion of the legislative battle going on right now?

JEFF CHESTER: Well, it’s important for your listeners and viewers to realize that the phone and cable lobbies have deliberately gone to the F.C.C. to remove the fundamental regulations, which were the foundation of the internet. The internet was required to operate as a nondiscriminatory medium. The internet, as we knew it, grew up over telephone lines. Those lines were regulated by the F.C.C. Phone companies had to treat all content equitably. That’s why you could have start-ups like Google or Amazon. Anybody could create a website, create a service, put their content out there. The fact that you would have to treat all content equitably was a serious threat to the plans of cable and telephone companies, because their business is based on a monopoly. I control the wire and I control the content, whether it’s television content for cable or voice content for the phone company. So they went to the Bush F.C.C., first under Michael Powell, now under current chair Kevin Martin, and they eliminated the prohibition against nondiscrimination so they can discriminate.

Now, what advocates, such as Free Press and Common Cause, Consumers’ Union, and even giants like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! are saying is that: Whoa, we need to put some of that nondiscrimination back into the statutes that govern the internet. And it’s being called network neutrality. And it simply means that the people that bring you the internet aren’t allowed to discriminate against competing and alternative content. They could not, if network neutrality legislation goes through, slow down a transmission from Democracy Now! They could not speed up their content or the content that, for example, FOX pays them and not offer similar services elsewhere. So network neutrality would in part maintain this kind of open network.

Now the phone and cable lobby are spending literally tens of millions of dollars trying to buy and, likely have bought, Washington, D.C. They are working together, and they’re opposed to any national policy that would ensure the internet remain an open space. And if we don’t have it, if we don’t have it, we’re going to see slowly over time fundamental changes occur in our digital media culture. Everyone recognizes — and this is why this is all going on — is that our media system is changing.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But, Jeff, I’d just like to — just to clarify on this issue of net neutrality. You already have a certain segmentation of the audience between those who are still on old phone lines versus broadband. Are you saying that even within broadband service that they would then create tiers of operation? And how would it work? Would it be for the user or would it be for companies?

JEFF CHESTER: Right now, you know, there are millions of Americans who don’t have access to the internet at all, and clearly that has to be part of this legislation. And it’s not. But, ultimately, everyone is going to be on some form of high-speed access. What we call broadband will be the dominant medium in the United States. And for a certain class of young people, you see it most clearly, where they’re instant-messaging, they’re on their mobile phone, they’re downloading high-speed videos onto their computers. So, eventually it will all be broadband, and what the phone and cable companies want to do is create a pay-as-you-go toll road for those broadband networks.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff, we have to leave it there. But we’re going to bring our listeners and viewers part two of this discussion tomorrow. I want to thank you for being with us right now. Again, tune in for part two tomorrow. Jeffrey Chester is Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Friday, April 14th, 2006
Part II: The End of the Internet? Net Neutrality Threatened by Cable, Telecom Interests

Both Congress and the FCC are currently considering a number of proposals that will have far-reaching implications on the way the Internet works and the vital concept of net neutrality – universal and non-discriminatory to the Internet – is at risk. We speak with Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. [includes rush transcript]

We continue with Part II of our look at the future of the Internet. Both Congress and the FCC are currently considering a number of proposals that will have far-reaching implications on the way the Internet works.

The vital issue at stake is something called “net neutrality” – it is the concept that that everyone, everywhere, should have free, universal and non-discriminatory access to all the Internet has to offer.

But last week the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications rejected an amendment to a telecommunications overhaul bill that would have strengthened provisions for net neutrality. The amendment was defeated by a vote of 28 to 8. The six Democrats who voted against it were Eliot Engel, Bart Stupak, Ed Towns, Al Wynn, Charlie Gonzales and Bobby Rush.

The principle of net neutrality has come under attack from cable and telephone companies which provide over 90 percent of all high-speed Internet service in the United States.

Phone and cable lobbyists are calling on the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. They have poured millions of dollars into ad campaigns to promote their cause. Here’s one example:

Advertisement by the United States Telecom Association.

With these so-called “updated” laws, broadband providers are looking to use new networking technologies to charge fees for almost every online transaction. Some companies have already announced plans to to impose fees on a sliding scale. For example, America Online is adopting a new system called “CertifiedEmail,” where giant emailers could pay AOL a fee for preferential service, effectively creating a two-tiered Internet . This so-called “email-tax” would guarantee that messages from affluent customers would bypass spam filters and go directly to AOL members” inboxes. Those who did not pay the fee could increasingly be left behind with unreliable service.

The effects of preferential control over the Internet may already be coming to bear. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, America Online has blocked delivery to its customers of all emails that include a link to a website called DearAOL.com, which is critical of its CertifiedEmail system.

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. He wrote an article in the Nation Magazine titled “The End of the Internet?”

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: Phone and cable lobbyists are calling on the federal government to permit them to operate internet and other digital communication services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. They’ve poured millions of dollars into ad campaigns to promote their cause. Here’s one example:

ACTOR 1: Squire, deliver this urgent message to the queen.

ACTOR 2: Doesn’t he know it’s 2005?

ACTOR 1: Yes!

ACTOR 3: My lord?

NARRATOR: Why are telecom laws still stuck in the past? The old ways are gone. So it’s time Congress updated the laws to give consumers new choices for entertainment and information.

ACTOR 1: Where is that young man?

ACTOR 4: Wanna text him?

NARRATOR: Updated telecom laws.

ACTOR 5: Yeah, it’s hoof-to-hoof out here.

NARRATOR: Now, that’s the future, faster.

AMY GOODMAN: An ad from U.S. Telecom. With these so-called updated laws, broadband providers are looking to use new networking technologies to charge fees for almost every online transaction. Some companies have already announced plans to impose fees on a sliding scale. For example, America Online’s adopting a new system called “CertifiedEmail” where giant emailers could pay A.O.L. a fee for preferential service, effectively creating a two-tier internet. This so-called “email tax” would guarantee messages from affluent customers, would bypass spam filters and go directly to A.O.L. members’ inboxes. Those who did not pay the fee could increasingly be left behind with unreliable service.

The effects of preferential control over the internet may already be coming to bear. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, America Online has blocked delivery to its customers of all emails that include a link to a website called “DearAOL.com”, which is critical of its CertifiedEmail system. For more on the latest, we turn to Part Two of our conversation with Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy. Co-host Juan Gonzalez and I asked Jeff Chester yesterday about the issue of net neutrality.

JEFFREY CHESTER: Well, if we had network neutrality safeguards, then there would be a right for other content providers, such as Democracy Now! or other alternative providers, to be treated in the same way that the phone and cable companies treat their own content or the content coming from deep-pocketed media companies. Network neutrality would prohibit the phone and cable companies, which are now providing more than 90% of the U.S. public with broadband and will continue to be the principal providers. A network neutrality safeguard simply would not allow the phone and cable companies to discriminate against competing content, and in that sense it would create a more level playing field.

The phone and cable companies want to impose a kind of pay-as-you-go toll-road on the whole digital distribution system. I mean, the system is likely to be highly commercialized, regardless of whether we have network neutrality. But unless we have safeguards that ensure that competing alternative content has a chance to reach viewers and listeners in a fair way, then those voices, including, for example, the programming you produce, could be pushed further to the margins.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, for instance, are you talking about how the airlines run their operations with first class, business class and coach?

JEFFREY CHESTER: That’s a great analogy, Juan, because the way the broadband internet is going to work is this: the phone and cable companies now have the technology to know exactly what’s coming into your P.C., to your personal computer, or eventually your interactive television or your mobile device. They know what kind of content, what you’re getting. And they can make decisions to slow certain content up, and speed certain content — speed or slow certain content up. And that will depend ultimately on whether or not you pay them, unless we have these network neutrality safeguards. So they can do all kinds of things to, as they term it, “monetize” the internet unless we have some rules that keep the pipeline as open and fair as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Chester, can you talk about who’s making these decisions in Congress, and one of the chief decision makers, Congressmember Joe Barton of Texas, and where their money is coming from?

JEFFREY CHESTER: Well, the phone and cable industry have given, you know, millions of dollars, and are spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying. What’s happening now, many of your listeners and viewers know that in 1996, Congress passed the infamous Telecommunications Act that was a huge giveaway back then. Well, the same —

AMY GOODMAN: And this was under Clinton and Gore.

JEFFREY CHESTER: It was under Clinton and Gore, and ultimately they supported that legislation. It’s happening again. Each industry is jockeying for favorable position, and they’re spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby the U.S. Congress, because at stake — and why we, the public, and your listeners and viewers in particular really have to speak out now, because decisions made today will affect the future of television and the internet, our entire digital landscape in the United States.

I mean, we have a chance now with the internet to have a more open, diverse system, to redress what we don’t have with today’s media, such as more news programs like Democracy Now! and investigative programs, more content owned by persons of color and women. If we don’t have some rules put in place now, some safeguards, we’re likely to see the people in charge of today’s media system in the United States be in charge of tomorrow’s system, with the phone and cable companies being everyone’s not-so-silent partner.

So they’ve given a lot of money. They’ve given about $3 million dollars, the phone and cable industry, to members of the Senate and House Commerce Committee over the last two or three years, although that’s a drop in the bucket. They have the Republicans on their side. Unfortunately, they have many Democrats. A majority of the Democrats in the House Telecommunications Subcommittee last week voted against network neutrality safeguards. So the phone and cable lobby is very formidable. They’re spending a lot of money. They have the backing of the Bush administration and the G.O.P. congressional leadership, and it’s likely this legislation will go through the House and the Senate without any kind of safeguards for the future of the internet.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the coverage of this issue by the mainstream media or the corporate media? Is it a replay of the battle over the F.C.C.’s ownership changes?

JEFFREY CHESTER: I think, well, it’s a little bit different. You know, media that don’t have direct internet interests such as — even though –that’s not true. The New York Times has internet interest, but the New York Times has editorialized recently, as the Los Angeles Times has, and that’s owned by Tribune and they also have internet interests, they’ve editorialized for network neutrality, and NBC Evening News did some coverage.

But, by and large, there’s not this kind of coverage. They claim it’s because it’s a technical issue, but, in fact, all the big media companies are involved one way or another in this decision. And companies like Disney, ABC and CBS, for example, are negotiating with the phone and cable industry. They have a stake, in a sense, in a closed internet, because their content will be placed in a preferential manner. So it’s not getting the kind of coverage it deserves.

And right now, I understand, Congress is not hearing from the public that they are concerned about open internet, which we have to use the term network neutrality for now. So I hope that your listeners and viewers will call their members of Congress and say, “We want legislation on network neutrality.” Look, it’s not going to be the answer for all the problems we’re going to have, but at least it will prevent for now the phone and cable companies from having a tight grip over the way the broadband digital media evolves in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy.

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Democracy Now!

Back in 1998 California Proposition 227 essentially banned bilingual education in schools throughout California. This amounted to a vicious assault, primarily against Spanish speaking immigrants, spearheaded by then Republican governor Pete Wilson who played on a cynical racist xenophobia and a lot of Republican money. There were so many things wrong with this proposition, but astoundingly it passed by 61%.

Not only does bilingual education lead to quicker fluency in English, it allows kids to take other subjects like math and science and social studies in their own language while gaining English proficiency. It is painfully obvious this proposition (Authored by a guy named Ron Unz, who incidentally never stepped foot into a bilingual classroom before writing 227) was a twisted ideological ploy intended to harm immigrants.

In this spirit of outright Prop 227 Repeal I offer this Poem by Martín Espada, from his book: Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands. This seems to sum it up, for me at least.

The New Bathroom Policy at English High School

The boys chatter Spanish
in the bathroom
while the principal
listens from his stall

The only word he recognizes
is his own name
and this constipates him

So he decides to
ban Spanish
in the bathrooms

Now he can relax

So then I was absolutely compelled to visit Caroline Casey’s website and discovered a link to a man by the name of John Michael Greer, who wrote a critique of a chapter from David Solnits book Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World (SF: City Lights Book, 2004). Greer’s essay seems to be the kind of fascinating discourse that people at DS and those visiting will find inspiring.

I would not have found this essay if not for the essential humor of Podcast For Peace, again demonstrating how powerful this blogging medium is in practical terms–connections abound! I’ve posted Greer’s essay here with it’s explanation. (If you are not familiar with Caroline Casey, check out her site! Listen to her speak; you are in for a treat. Humor, love, poetry, progressive politics and people abound!)

Dear Colleague,

The letter is perfectly understandable without reading either the chapter or the book, but it also frames a way to read or reread both. Enjoy! Discuss!

John Michael Greer writes:

James asked me for my thoughts on “Globalize Liberation,” and I hope neither of you will mind a lengthy, even labored, response. The book is extremely thought-provoking in its strengths and weaknesses alike, and it’s given me an opportunity to rethink many of the assumptions I’ve had about social change and the potential shape of the future. Since I come to these issues from a somewhat unusual perspective — the perspective of a practicing mage and initiate of several magical orders — I recognize that the ideas “Globalize Liberation” evoked in me are perhaps a little different from those common in the progressive community. Thus I’ve chosen to explain those ideas here at some length.

James, we’ve talked extensively about magic, but I don’t know how much of that you’ve shared with Patrick. For that reason, not to mention the off chance you might pass this around to others, I should probably take a moment to explain what I mean by magic and why it’s relevant to social change at all. Dion Fortune (Violet Firth Evans), one of the most important magical theorists of the twentieth century, defined magic as “the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will.” While magic as I understand it is more a craft than an art or a science, the basic principle holds. The medium of magic is consciousness — one’s own consciousness, that of other people, and (more controversially, at least within the worldview of modern industrial culture) that of other-than-human entities of various kinds. The tools of magic are will, imagination, and the innate structures of consciousness itself, constellated through formal patterns of symbol and ritual. The goals of magic are defined by the individual magician.

The relevance of all this to social change and society in general was pointed out powerfully by the late Ioan Culianu, one of the few significant modern scholars of magic who was also a competent mage. In his groundbreaking “Eros and Magic in the Renaissance” (1984) Culianu argued that modern advertising is a form of magic, and proposed that modern consumer societies can be seen as “magician states” in which social control is primarily maintained not by violence but by manipulation through magically charged images. It’s a crucial insight; when people treat, say, fizzy brown sugar water as a source of their identity and human value, their resemblance to fairy-tale characters under an enchantment isn’t accidental. They’re quite literally caught up in a spell.

Those who aren’t used to magic may find it easier to think of spells as stories. Quite a lot of magic, in fact, can be understood as storytelling. The mage uses symbol and ritual to tell a story, and makes it so spellbinding that the listeners come to believe that it’s real — and then make it real by their actions. Magical combat is a struggle between storytellers, in which each mage tries to define a common reality in terms of the story that best serves his or her purposes. The struggle between the global corporate system and the activist community, to build on Culianu’s insights, can be seen as a
conflict of magicians telling opposing stories.

One obvious danger in magical combat is that of falling under the spell of the other mage’s story — but there’s also the subtler danger of falling under the spell of one’s own story, losing track of the fact that it’s a story rather than the raw undefined reality of human experience out of which stories are assembled. When that happens, the self-enchanted mage may not be able to let go of the story, even when it’s no longer relevant and another story would be more useful. As the old tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice points out, if you lose control of the magical forces you summon, you’re in trouble. Something of this sort seems to have happened in large parts of the progressive community.

Reading “Globalize Liberation” highlighted for me three stories, or spells, in which many of today’s progressives seem to be caught. Let’s call them the spell of reification, the spell of corporate triumphalism, and the spell of rescue. (This last has another name that’s more revealing, but I’ll save that for a bit; I’m sure you know that mages don’t bandy about true names too freely.) I’d like to talk about those spells first, and then go on to talk about the more hopeful side of the book: some of the ways in which today’s progressive community has begun to master its own magical powers and, with them, the future of the world.

I. The Spell of Reification

To my mind, one of the most striking essays in “Globalize Liberation” is Van Jones’ piece “Behind Enemy Lines: Inside the World Economic Forum” (pp.87-96). It’s especially valuable because it brings core assumptions of the progressive community up against the very different world of industrial society’s ruling elite.

Jones was astonished to find that the vast corporate structures against which he and many other progressives had been campaigning so hard — the WTO, the World Bank, and so on — were treated, by the people who run them, as mere tools to be used or tossed aside at will. The elite see themselves personally as the holders of power, and institutions as their means and modes of power. The activists outside the police barricades, by contrast, see the institutions themselves as the problem. The scene from “The Wizard of Oz” comes forcefully to mind; Dorothy and her friends try to figure out some way to deal with the terrifying apparition of Oz, the Great and Powerful, but never notice the little man behind the curtain.

This is only one form of a pervasive problem in today’s progressive politics: the way that identification so often transforms itself into reification. In magical tradition, names are a source of power, since to name something is to give it a context and meaning of the mage’s choosing. In struggles for social change, it’s therefore crucial to name what one is fighting; that’s identification. But to go beyond this, to forget that every name is an abstraction imposed on a complex reality, and to treat the name as though it’s an independent reality lurching around all by itself causing problems — that’s reification, and it’s fatal.

The economic elite Jones encountered at the World Economic Forum use reification as a form of protective camouflage. The WTO and its like distract protest from the people and interests who shape, operate, and profit from them. The elites could discard any of them in a heartbeat without bringing the world one step closer to progressive goals. But this isn’t the only form of reification that gets in the way of effective social change.

Starhawk’s essay “A Feminist View of Global Justice” (pp. 45-50) shows another kind of reification at work. Starhawk’s a capable mage, and her essay is a good example of name magic. Responding to claims that the world’s problems are caused by corporations pursuing their own good under the banner of neoliberal ideology, she argues that corporations and neoliberalism alike are simply forms of patriarchy. By this act of renaming she subordinates anticorporate language and analyses to the feminist philosophy she’s defended so ably in her many books.

But what is this thing called “patriarchy”? As feminist philosophers have rightly pointed out, there’s nothing in American society or culture that isn’t part of the system of privilege subordinating women to men. It’s useful to glance a few pages ahead to Betita Martinez’ article on racism, which argues that the system of white supremacy (the name she places on racism, in another act of name magic) similarly embraces every institution in American society. If every part of American society is part of the system of patriarchy, and every part of American society is likewise part of the system of white supremacy, are the two systems actually different?

I’d point out that human relations and exchanges in American society (and indeed most others) suffer from systematic inequalities along lines drawn by gender, color, age, ethnicity, social status, sexual orientation, body weight, physical appearance, and many other factors. None of these divisions exist outside the whole system of privilege. It can be good strategy to use labels such as “patriarchy” to focus attention on some particular group suffering under the system, but it’s crucial not to fall into the same mistake as those who protest the WTO, and forget that patriarchy is simply one mode of privilege, a manifestation rather than a cause.

Failure to realize this burdened an earlier generation of activists with bitter, divisive, and utterly futile quarrels between men of color and white women as to whether racism or sexism was the “real problem,” when the real problem is a system of privilege that treats gender and color, among many other things, as grounds for unequal treatment. But reifying privilege as something separate from society as a whole doesn’t advance understanding either. The word “privilege” is merely a way of describing systematic patterns of inequality in the fabric of human relations and exchanges; it doesn’t exist outside that fabric, and it can only be changed by changing the fabric thread by thread, weaving it into new patterns of equality and mutual respect.

Of course systematic oppression of women on account of their gender is a reality, and something that any progressive movement worth the name needs to confront. In that Starhawk’s essay focuses attention on this, it’s performing a valuable service. But it’s crucial to remember that many women also suffer oppression and injustice for reasons unrelated to their gender — reasons such as color, ethnic background, and body weight — and that women can also be privileged by social divisions, and inflict oppression and injustice on others. Using a label such as “patriarchy” for the whole problem obscures these issues and, as I’ll show a little further on, closes off potential avenues for effective action. Beyond this, insisting that one particular mode of privilege is more important than others is itself a claim of privilege, and — as in the case of the quarrels just mentioned — commonly accompanies attempts to claim that one group’s experience of oppression and injustice deserves more attention from the activist community than others.

Reifications are problematic because they can distract progressives from points of access where their actions can make a difference. Consider George Lakey’s fascinating account of the Otpor movement against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in his article “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” (pp. 135-160). One of the tactics Otpor members used to halt police violence against them was to take photos of their wounded and make sure the family members, neighbors, and children of the police got to see them. This was a brilliant bit of magic. The individual human beings who made up that reified abstraction, “the police,” were stripped of that identity by a spell of unnaming, and turned back into neighbors, husbands, children, parents: people who were part of civil society, and subject to its standards and social pressures. That couldn’t have been achieved if Otpor had reified and protested “police brutality,” since that act would have strengthened the reification of police as something other than ordinary members of society.

The same point should be made about one of the most pervasive reifications in “Globalize Liberation,” the reification of the existing order of society itself. David Solnit’s otherwise excellent introduction (pp. xi-xxiv) falls headlong into this trap. Solnit confidently proclaims that “the system” is the cause of the world’s social and ecological problems, and then goes on to define “the system” as the sum total of those problems: war, economic exploitation, and so on. It’s a breathtaking display of circular logic, and invites the retort that “the system” is simply an abstract reification of everything about the world that the progressive community doesn’t like.

Again, Lakey’s account offers a potent alternative. Otpor strategists recognized that the Milosevic dictatorship wasn’t an independent reality imposing itself from above on a passive society. It was simply an arrangement of things within Serbian society, and could only exist with the constant cooperation of millions of ordinary Serbs. The same is true of today’s global corporate economy; it exists because people throughout the world, and especially people in America, uphold it by their actions. In effect, we are “the system.” If we recognize that fact, instead of reifying “the system” as some force alien to us, we can own and then wield our power over it.

II. The Spell of Corporate Triumphalism

The notion that “the system” is something outside the society that constitutes it goes hand in hand with the claim that the struggle against “the system” is entering its most desperate phase right now. Patrick, I’m going to pick on you here, mostly because you indicated a willingness to accept scathing criticism; plenty of other essays in the book fall into this same rhetoric. You start your thoughtful essay “Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination” (pp. 161-212) with the words: “Our planet is heading into an unprecedented global crisis. The blatancy of the corporate power grab and the accelerating ecological meltdown is evidence that we do not live in an era where we can afford the luxury of fighting merely the symptoms of the problem.” Language like “doomsday economy” and repeated insistences that we have no choice except all-out struggle feed this sense of desperation.

There’s a strong confirmatory bias at work in discussions of these topics in the activist community, which has resulted in the widespread acceptance of statements that can’t be justified by the facts. You comment, for example, that the current ecological transformation is “the sixth great extinction,” that it’s more rapid than any other, and that it threatens the survival of the Earth’s biosphere itself. This rhetoric is extremely common in activist circles these days but it’s not actually supported by scientific research into the Earth’s past extinction crises, which I’d encourage you to look into. There have been more than twenty great extinctions since the end of the Precambrian Period, not five (or six); many past extinctions were much swifter than the present example (the K-T event that wiped out the dinosaurs was almost instant, since it involved an asteroid smashing into the Earth); and the Earth’s biosphere has easily weathered crises much more drastic than anything it’s facing now. The current crisis is a reality but it doesn’t threaten the survival of life on the planet.

Does this mean that we needn’t worry about the ecological and climatic shifts now under way as a result of human blundering? Hardly. Given that global warming alone may well drown every coastal city in the world under rising oceans, wreck the global agricultural system on which six billion people depend for their daily meals, and send tropical epidemics raging through the temperate world, just in the next century, we have plenty to fret about. As James Lovelock has shown, the earth’s biosphere is an intricate, powerful system that responds homeostatically to cancel out imbalances. Our society’s inept prodding at the biosphere risks kindling a homeostatic response that could flatten the proud towers of our cities and push Homo sapiens to the brink of extinction.

This view of the situation has a solid foundation in science. As a tool for raising questions about the existing order of society and mobilizing individuals and communities, it’s likely to work at least as well as the rhetoric of desperation described above. Yet it’s received very little attention in progressive circles. Partly that’s an effect of the third spell I’ll discuss in this essay; partly, it’s a rhetorical habit, common on the American left from colonial times to the present, of using apocalyptic rhetoric to prod people into listening (though by this point people are pretty well immunized to it). Partly, though, it’s the result of another factor.

This factor is a mythology of corporate triumphalism. Today’s global corporate economy presents itself as the inevitable wave of the future, a rising power that will master the destiny of the planet sometime soon if it hasn’t done so already. Francis Fukuyama’s widely read essay “The End of History” typifies this myth: “liberal democracy” (that is, corporate socialism manipulating the republican systems of an earlier era of politics) is the most efficient and therefore the best possible form of government, and so history defined as the evolutionary clash between competing forms of government is at an end.

Fukuyama’s essay is a masterpiece of unintentional comedy, with its implied portrayal of George Herbert Walker Bush as Hegel’s “world-historical personality” — am I the only person who thinks that Bush the First talks like Hardy Har Har, the chronically depressed hyena in the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons? — but it also offers a glimpse into the workings of the myth. It starts with a clever reification, turning six thousand years of wildly diverse events into a single process called “history,” which by Hegel’s definition has one driving force (conflict between forms of government) and one goal (the triumph of the “best,” or rather, the most efficient form of government). By this act of name magic, all previous time becomes a process leading inevitably to today’s global corporate system, and the total triumph of that system becomes the natural conclusion of everything that’s come before: the end of history.

Progressive activists might be expected to challenge this forcefully, and present new ways of seeing the past that either dissolve “history” altogether or redefine it in ways that foster social change. Instead, most modern progressive thought accepts the myth of corporate triumphalism intact, merely changing the moral signs (“good” becomes “bad” and vice versa) and tacking on a final chapter in which, at the last possible minute, the good guys win out anyway. The resulting story makes for good fantasy (it’s the basic plot of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”) but bad strategy. Worse, by fitting the social change community into the dramatic role of heroic fighters for a lost cause, it subtly encourages activists to put themselves in positions where they will heroically fail to accomplish their goals, thus playing the part the story defines for them.

As a contrarian thought experiment, imagine that by some accident (a head-on collision between two time machines?) you find yourself holding a history of the world published in San Francisco in the year 3004. You eagerly turn to the pages about the early 21st century, hoping to find out how a triumphant, expansionistic corporate system was defeated by a heroic minority of global activists. What you find instead is something quite different…

“By the dawn of the 21st century it was clear that the ramshackle structure of economic and political compromises that followed the disastrous Great European War of 1914-1945 was falling apart, and taking Euro-American global hegemony with it. Efforts to expand that hegemony’s technological base in the late 20th century by introducing supersonic transports, large-scale nuclear power, and other dubious advances went nowhere in the face of popular resistance and economic realities, while spectacularly inept handling of currency exchange problems by would-be “global managers” among the governing elites put formidable strains on a faltering system. The triumphant imperialism of the 19th century had given way, and the global capitalism that followed it proved too weak to resist the forces of change.

“From 1970 on, elite groups knew they faced severe resource and energy shortages in the near future, and from 1990 on the catastrophic threat of global climate change could no longer be ignored (though it was publicly denied), but the system they were expected to manage lacked the flexibility and resources to respond to these hard realities. Nor could it cope with the ballooning of a fictive economy built on exotic financial instruments — essentially unpayable IOUs with nothing backing them — which emerged in response to pervasive weakness all through the productive sectors of the economy. Increasingly frantic transfers of jobs, resources and wealth across nation state borders propped up the system over the short term, but the resulting ecological and economic damage fanned the flames of popular discontent and brought the final collapse steadily closer.

“2001 marked the beginning of the end. In that year, another fiscal crisis mismanaged by the elites pushed the nation state of Argentina (now part of the Confederacion de Vecindades de America del Sur) into economic and political meltdown. Argentines responded by building new, locally based networks for decision making and exchange, and as these expanded the remnants of national government slowly flickered out. Fiscal and ecological crises elsewhere in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe in 2005, 2008, and 2010 saw more than a dozen nation states start coming apart in the same way. Even in those nation states that managed to hold together through the troubled first decade of the 21st century, economic dislocation and political failure drove the growth of new local systems on the Argentine model. As news of these spread over the Internet, it fed a growing awareness that the old order’s days were numbered.

“In the end, the breakup of the West Antarctic ice sheet in 2012 proved to be simply one crisis too many for a beleaguered, malfunctioning, and overloaded system. Faced with rising sea levels and coastal flooding worldwide, hamstrung by an unmanageable burden of unpayable debt from the fictive economy, and targeted by overwhelming popular resentment due to their failure to take preventive action against the global warming crisis, the world’s economic and political elites were left without any viable options at all. Most members of the elites were killed outright or fled into hiding. In their absence, the old society fell apart in a matter of months, leaving local networks and neighborhood councils to pick up the pieces.”

Take a moment to think of your own place today in that history of elite failure and collapse. To mimic the effects of confirmatory bias, think of everything you know that fits that vision of the future. Make an effort to experience the world around you as though today’s global corporate system isn’t a triumphant monster, but a brittle, ungainly, jerry-rigged contraption whose managers are vainly scrambling to hold it together against a rising tide of crises. See the issues that engage your activism in that light, not as though you’re desperate, but as though the system is. It’s a very different perspective from that of most activists, and reaching it even in imagination might take some work, but give it your best try.

The point I’d like to make, once you’ve tried on both stories of the future, is that both of them — the story of corporate triumph and the story of corporate failure — explain the past and present equally well. The actions of the IMF and the World Bank in the last decade or so, for example, can be explained as a power grab by a doomsday economy in the driver’s seat, but they can equally well be explained as desperation moves by a faltering elite faced with a world situation that’s more unsteady and ungovernable by the day. The same is true of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and anything else from the current-events page you wish to name.

Which of these stories is true? Wrong question. The events that define either story haven’t happened yet, and which story people believe could well determine which way the ending turns out. If people believe that the global corporate system is invulnerable, most of them will make their peace with it and come to rely on it, and their actions will give it more power. If people believe that the global corporate system is doomed, most of them will withdraw their support from it and begin seeking alternatives — and that in itself could doom it. Ask yourself, then, which of these stories fosters more hope, gives more encouragement to alternative visions of society, and more effectively cuts at the mental foundations of today’s economic and political systems.

Yet of course these aren’t the only two choices. Philosophers of science have agonized over the hard realization that any given set of facts can be explained by an infinite number of hypotheses. Mages, by contrast, revel in the freedom this implies. The freedom to reinterpret the world, to abandon a story of desperation for one of possibility and hope, is basic to the worldview of magic. It’s a freedom that today’s progressive community might find it useful to embrace as well.

III. The Spell of Rescue

But the progressive community’s embrace of the rhetoric of desperation and the mythology of corporate triumphalism have another source, as I’ve suggested above. Another spell or, to use a model that’s particularly appropriate here,another story keeps these patterns in place.

Patrick, I’m going to pick on you again, though I could as well discuss most of the essays in the book. “Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination” tells a story with three characters. One is innocent, helpless, and in need of rescue. The second is sinister, devious, and the cause of the first character’s predicament. The third is heroic, idealistic, and the first character’s only hope of rescue. The biosphere, the corporate “doomsday economy,” and the activist community are the names you give these three characters. Other essays in the book tell the same story but give the characters different names. Still, you know whose story I’m talking about. It’s the story of Dudley Do-right.

On the off chance that you somehow missed out on watching the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, where he originally appeared, I’ll summarize. Dudley Do-right was a Mountie, blond, heroic, and as thick as a brick. His girlfriend Nell Fenwick was always being tied to railroad tracks by the villainous Snidely Whiplash. Dudley rescued her time after time, to the sound of Snidely’s trademark line, “Curses, foiled again!” The next episode, though, there’s Snidely tying Nell to the tracks again as Dudley gallops to the rescue. The roles of the three characters are as predictable as a corporate press release: Snidely has the active role and gets the action going in each episode, Nell’s role is passive (getting tied up and rescued), and Dudley’s is reactive (foiling Snidely and rescuing Nell).

Map the story of Dudley Do-right onto your article and it fits down to the fine details. “The system” has the active role, and it’s always tying someone or other to the railroad tracks. The biosphere, in this case, waits passively to be rescued. The progressive community reacts by galloping to the rescue, and Whiplash Petroleum issues a press release saying “Curses, foiled again!” Dudley uses direct (re)action of various kinds — at the point of assumption (he tries to talk Snidely out of tying people to railroad tracks), destruction (he unties Nell from the tracks), production (he flags down the train), and so on. The next episode, though, there’s Snidely tying Nell to the tracks again. And again. And again…

What’s happened here is another bit of magic gone awry. The magic in question is what the system of magic I practice calls “assuming a godform.” For certain kinds of magic, mages in my tradition choose one of the gods or goddesses of ancient Egypt, based on the energy they want to bring into focus — Isis for love, Horus for power, Nephthys for wisdom, and so on — and first visualize, then actively experience themselves as that deity. In its psychological dimension (it has others) assuming a godform is a way of temporarily redefining self-concept. Who you think you are defines what you think you can do, and that sets the limits on what you can do. Assuming a godform allows the mage to step outside the limits of ordinary self-concepts by taking one aspect of human potential and raising it to the power of infinity.

People do this in a less conscious way all the time. Kids assume popular culture “godforms” right and left — look, I’m Spider-Man! Most adults do it a bit more subtly, but if you watch them and know your pop culture you can usually figure out what images they’ve assumed. You’ll also notice, though, that many of them are stuck in a single image, repeating the same role over and over, even when it’s conterproductive. I suggest that this is what’s happened to the American progressive community; it’s gotten stuck in the godform of Dudley Do-right.

No, I don’t think today’s activists literally spent too much time watching the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and got mesmerized by Canada’s least intelligent Mountie. Like any satire, Dudley Do-right pokes fun at familiar themes; we laugh at him because we all know the story he’s lampooning. The self-concept that the progressive community has embraced is the one Dudley Do-right makes fun of, the image of the heroic rescuer. Assuming that image in the first place was good strategy: an effective counter to negative images of “protesters,” not to mention a way to impose the image of Snidely Whiplash on defenders of privilege. What makes it a problem is that activists got stuck in the role and can’t step out of it. They can’t see themselves as anything but heroic rescuers. As confirmatory bias comes into play, they inevitably see the world around them in terms of Nells to rescue and Snidelys to vanquish.

The spell of Dudley Do-right has much to do with the purely reactive stance of the American activist community. When activists define their role wholly in terms of resistance and refusal, of “articulat[ing] a NO to the system” (David Solnit’s phrase, p. xv) rather than pursuing a positive ideal, they guarantee that they’ll perpetually be scrambling to counter some new assault by the system, trying to maintain an inadequate status quo against the threat of further losses, rather than making the system and its defenders scramble to counter efforts to change the status quo for the better. This reactive stance comes out of the Dudley Do-right role, since the heroic rescuer is always reactive; it’s the Snidelys of the world who get each episode moving by grabbing another Nell and tying her to the railroad tracks.

Dudley also underlies some of the less productive rhetorical habits of the activist community. Patrick, I’m going to use your sidebar “Framing the Climate Crisis” on p. 182 as an example; it’s fairly mild compared to some of what we’ve all seen, but it’ll make the point. You argue that “[i]t’s up to activists to ensure that people understand that a small cartel of energy corporations and their financial backers knowingly destabilized our planet’s climate for their own personal gain. This may turn out to be the most devastating crime ever perpetrated against humanity, the planet, and future generations.” Grand rhetoric, but I trust you’re aware that it’s a fantastic hypersimplification of a hugely complex issue. To be precise, it’s a Dudley Do-right definition, in which activists are Dudley, energy corporations are Snidely Whiplash, and “humanity, the planet, and future generations” are a collective Nell.

Is it a useful redefinition? Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. It sounds as though you hope to target the energy companies for destruction by using them as scapegoats for disasters caused by global warming. If that’s indeed your intention, it might work, but since global warming’s sources go far beyond the mere Snidelyhood of oil companies (and include the actions of the energy-squandering American middle class you skillfully dismiss as “soccer moms”), having oil company CEOs torn to pieces by howling mobs won’t actually do much for humanity, the planet, or future generations. In the meantime, the rhetoric of demonization helps guarantee that the issue of global warming will become more fiercely polarized and further from a solution than ever.

An alternative approach might be worth considering. Again, George Lakey’s discussion of the Otpor movement is relevant. The Otpor strategists deliberately avoided polarization of the sort that American progressives embrace reflexively. Instead of demonizing the police, they pursued a policy of outreach, building bridges that ultimately reached into the upper levels of the police bureaucracy. That paid off handsomely in the final crisis of the Milosevic regime, when the police stood by and did nothing as crowds seized the Serbian Parliament building. If activists in this country took an Otpor approach to people in the energy companies, instead of painting Snidely Whiplash’s long black mustache on them, they could get similar results.

Of course this would require giving up the very real emotional payoffs of the Dudley Do-right role; the rush of being a rescuing hero is a potent drug, and so is the righteous indignation of knowing your enemies are Satan (or Snidely) incarnate. Letting go of Dudleyhood can also require giving up more tangible payoffs; as Patrick points out in an excellent analysis of the professionalization of dissent (pp.193-199), significant parts of the activist community have been bought out and turned into junior partners in the corporate system. Playing Dudley Do-right is among other things an effective way to ignore one’s own complicity in arrangements of privilege and exploitation, since everything can be blamed on a Snidely Whiplash of one’s choosing (such as “the system”).

IV. Binaries, Ternaries, and Shifting Levels

I’d like to shift gears here and talk a little more directly about the magical dimension of all this. One of the interesting things about the spell of Dudley Do-right is that it’s a dysfunctional ternary. James, we’ve discussed magical number theory at quite some length, but again I don’t know how much of that you’ve shared with Patrick, and if either of you show this to anyone else the chance that they’ll have the least idea of what I’m talking about is pretty slim. So I’ll try to sum up the elements of magical philosophy in 500 words or less.

Toward the beginning of this letter I mentioned that the structures of consciousness are tools of magic. In the system of magic I practice, those structures are identified with the numbers from 1 to 10, understood not as quantities but as abstract relationships. You can experience anything through any number (though numbers above 10 denote relationships too complex for the human nervous system to handle). Each number has its strengths and its weaknesses. If you’re working deliberately with the structures of consciousness — which is to say, if you’re a mage — you choose the structure/number you use based on the effects you want to get. Most of the time, for reasons too complex to get into here, you choose one, two, or three.

Anything seen through the filter of the number one is called a unary. When you see something as a unary, you highlight qualities in it such as wholeness, indivisibility, and isolation. See it through the number two, as a binary, and you’ll highlight different qualities such as division, conflict, balance, and complementarity. See it through the number three and still different qualities such as change and complexity will be highlighted. All these have practical implications. If you want people to cooperate and build community, get them to think of themselves as part of a unary; if you want them to quarrel and resist change, convince them they’re on one side of a binary; if you want them to make change, make them think of their community and their world as a ternary.

Our society has a persistent habit of always seeing things in binaries. The binary is symbolically masculine — think of the ithyphallic straight line, defined by any two points — so this isn’t surprising! Our politics divide up into left and right, our ethics into good and evil, our most popular religions oppose one god and one devil, and so on. Campaigns for social change are no different, and plenty of activists think they can get where they want by opposing something. In a binary, though, every action is balanced by an opposite reaction, so thinking in binaries is very problematic if you want to foster change.

If you’re a mage, you respond to dysfunctions of this sort by shifting numbers. The traditional rule here is that numbers always change in a specific order: one becomes two, two becomes three, and three becomes one and shifts to another level. (The reasons for this rule, again, are too complex to go into here.) Thus if you’ve got a situation that presents itself as a binary, and you want to change it, you can’t effectively turn it back into a unary — it’ll just pop back into being a binary again — but you can turn the binary into a ternary by redefining the situation in terms of three independent factors, rather than two. This is called neutralizing a binary, and it’s a very common bit of magical strategy.

The “good cop/bad cop” routine is a move of this sort. The cops redefine the binary between policeman and suspect by having one officer act friendly, while the other comes on like Attila the Hun. The binary opposition dissolves, and fairly often the suspect talks. The American political establishment uses the same move on the progressive community every four years, with the Democrats playing good cop and the GOP playing bad cop; activists time and again get sucked into the ternary, and put their time and energy into a candidate whose only claim on their attention is that he’s not quite as bad as the other guy. It doesn’t help that the two parties switch roles and do the identical move on conservative activists too.

James, you and I have talked at quite a bit of length about ways that activists can take control of this dynamic and use ternaries for their own purposes — for example, by having “good cop” moderate progressives and “bad cop” radicals double-team a corporation or a government. But it’s a crucial mistake to oppose “good” ternaries with “bad” binaries, and thus turn the relationship between them into a binary. Every number is appropriate in some places and a waste of time in others, and the Dudley Do-right scenario is an example of a ternary that’s a waste of time. The three characters circle endlessly around one another; you’ve got action, complexity, and an addictive emotional payoff of self-regarding heroism and self-righteous indignation. What you don’t have is a resolution of the problems the progressive community thinks it’s fighting.

The magical response to the Dudley Do-right trap is to shift from ternary to unary, which means recognizing that Dudley, Nell, and Snidely aren’t three independent factors at all, but three interdependent elements of a single structure of experience. As long as activists see themselves as heroic Dudleys, they’ll inevitably see every problem in terms of Nells to rescue and Snidelys to rescue them from. Any one role defines the other two. Leaving that behind, in turn, involves shifting to a new level of self-awareness. Many activists these days honestly believe that the three roles are out there in the world, that the biosphere really is tied helplessly to the railroad tracks and the board of directors of Whiplash Petroleum really are twiddling their black mustaches and going “nya ha ha” as the train approaches. Banishing the spell requires waking up to the fact that these roles are in the mind of the observer, and that it’s possible to define the situation in other ways.

This is one of the reasons why, earlier on, I deliberately proposed several models for the current situation that don’t fit the Dudley Do-right scenario at all. For the biosphere to be a suitable Nell for Dudley to rescue, she has to be helplessly tied to the railroad track; the fact that this particular Nell might actually be an irritated grizzly bear, fully capable of breaking the ropes and tearing Snidely (and Dudley) limb from limb, doesn’t fit the story even though it may fit the facts. In the same way, the future history that shows Snidely himself tied to the railroad track, flailing about helplessly as the train approaches, chucks the Dudley scenario out the window. Redefine one role and the entire story changes.

It may be high time for some such redefinition. I’m heartened by the words of the anonymous aboriginal woman quoted on p. 417: “If you come only to help me, you can go back home. But if you consider my struggle as part of your struggle for survival, then maybe we can work together.” In the terms I’ve used here, she’s saying that she isn’t a helpless Nell awaiting rescue, and progressives from the industrial world aren’t heroic Dudleys riding to her help. She’s cast a spell of renaming that turns the Dudley Do-right ternary into a unary of equals working together for survival. Can that same spell be extended to the entire project of social change? I believe so.

V. Learning New Magics

I’ve put quite a bit of time into critiquing aspects of the activist community in this letter, and for all I know one or both of you may see that as a frontal assault against everything you believe. That’s not my intention, though. I’ve tried, borrowing your language, to apply some direct action at the point of assumption — that is, to challenge some of the inadequately examined assumptions that are hindering a powerful global movement for positive change.

What I see in “Globalize Liberation” generally is a situation in which theory hasn’t caught up to practice. Shopworn slogans and reifications long past their pull date jostle new tactics and strategies that the old language doesn’t really describe. Patrick, I’ve lambasted your essay “Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination” several times, but it’s also in many ways the most impressive and magically sophisticated section of the book. Yes, it suffers from each of the problems I’ve noted, but it also breaks very promising ground.

I’d like to point out two things it does that put it way past many other attempts to analyse the situation and propose strategies. First, it focuses on the central place of imagination in the making and unmaking of social reality. That’s spectacularly important. The politics of reality, as Theodore Roszak pointed out in “Where the Wasteland Ends” (1972), is a politics of the imagination. It’s not just that change has to be thinkable before it’s possible, though this is true and important; it’s also that imagination can change the world by itself. The collapse of eastern Europe’s communist bloc in 1989 happened because people stopped imagining themselves and their societies in ways that made putting up with a bad system reasonable. Remember the dazed expressions on the faces of so many former communist heads of state and secret police chiefs? Their power had always been imaginary; political power always is. What happened in 1989 was that people recognized that, and imagined it out of existence.

The essay goes on to say that “[i]f we want to talk about reality in the singular…we must talk about ecological reality” (p. 200). Here you’re selling your own insights short. I grant that as mental maps go, ecology — with its keen awareness of limits and consequences — is a helluva lot more useful now than the economic models that powered industrial society through the glory days of the Age of Exuberance, but it’s still a map, not the territory it tries to describe. If it’s allowed to fossilize into a dogmatic ideology, it could become just as toxic as the mental maps it’s starting to replace.

If we want to talk about reality in the singular, we haven’t yet grasped the power of the imagination, because “reality” is always in flux, shaped by a complex dialogue between the blooming, buzzing confusion of the universe of our experience and the world-defining powers of the imagination — and the result is never quite the same for any two individuals, ever. The Zapatista quest for “a world where many worlds fit” offers more than any one vision of what’s real. That being said, I find the idea of earth-centered politics very useful, since it focuses attention on the raw experience of natural systems. If I may speak briefly from a position wholly within the magical worldview, how trees and stones imagine the world is at least as important as how human beings do so, even if the human beings are ecologically literate.

The second crucial thing “Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination” does is encourage self-awareness in the activist community. The edgy discussion of the professionalization of dissent, and the brief but lethal definition of “defector syndrome” in the appendix, challenge two of the most obvious places where activism has become its own reward rather than a means to an end. My comments about the spell of Dudley Do-right are aimed at another. When activism becomes a masturbatory act of self-gratification, as it sometimes does, it’s just another part of the existing order — a pressure valve that allows the disaffected to vent their passions harmlessly.

This is where “Globalize Liberation,” with its focus on Third World activism and experience, has the most to offer American progressives. The essays on Zapatismo and the Argentine experience are among the most promising things I’ve read in social change literature in the last two decades. They point to powerful redefinitions of activism and the transformation of society, and if activists here in America pay close attention the results could be spectacular. The principles Manuel Callahan cites in his essay “Zapatismo Beyond Chiapas” (pp. 217-228) — refusal, space, and listening — would be worth applying within the activist community, as well as in interactions with the rest of American society. Can you imagine a group of radicals from San Francisco moving to Pittsburgh, and subordinating themselves to the community in the middle of the Rust Belt? If you can’t, work on the idea until you can.

I could go on about many other strong points in the essays in “Globalize Liberation,” but this letter has already ballooned to unjustifiable size and I’ll limit myself to one: the theme of Marina Sitrin’s brilliant piece “Weaving Imagination and Creation: The Future In the Present” (pp. 263-276). The notion of prefigurative politics itself is profoundly magical. Ritual magic, after all, is prefigurative politics on the individual level; the mage works with symbols, and focuses will and imagination through that act to make the symbol prefigure the reality. To do the same thing on the scale of nations and peoples is an immense challenge, but it’s also a powerful possibility. It also points toward modes of politics — parapolitics might be a better term — that use the prefigurative power of the imagination to change the world without using anything that looks like politics in any sense we’d recognize today.

What I’m seeing most clearly in “Globalize Liberation” is a movement in transition, partly anchored in tactics and analyses from past decades, partly working with the improvisations of the present, partly reaching out to the new possibilities of the future. It’s a promising sight. As I’ve suggested in talking about the myth of corporate triumphalism, the existing order may not be nearly so solid as it tries to make itself appear. It can’t be repeated often enough that the modern industrial state isn’t the natural endpoint (or endgame) of some inevitable historical process. It’s what philosophers call a contingent reality; things happened to turn out this way, but they didn’t have to, and there are good reasons why the future probably won’t be a duplicate of the past. As we move into the twilight of the industrial age, the old bets are off.

So those are my responses. I hope some of this turns out useful. Call me or drop me an email any time if you want to talk about any of it.

With my best as always,

John Michael Greer

(added bio):
John Michael Greer is the author of eleven books and many articles on
magical philosophy and practice, including “Inside a Magical Lodge”
(Llewellyn, 1998), “The New Encyclopedia of the Occult” (Llewellyn,
2003), “A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism” (ADF, 2005),
and the forthcoming “Druidry: A Green Way of Wisdom” (Weiser, 2006). An
initiate in the Golden Dawn tradition, he has also been active in the
Druid community for many years; he currently heads the Ancient Order of
Druids in America (AODA), holds the highest level of initiation in the
Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD), and received OBOD’s Mount
Haemus award in 2003 for his research into Druid history. He lives in
Ashland, OR, with his wife Sara.

More information and a complete list of his book publications are online
at http://www.aoda.org/about/greerbio.htm

I CAN’T IMAGINE BETTER COMPANY ON THIS BEAUTIFUL SUNDAY MORNING IN ST. LOUIS. You’re church for me today, and there’s no congregation in the country where I would be more likely to find more kindred souls than are gathered here.

There are so many different vocations and callings in this room — so many different interests and aspirations of people who want to reform the media — that only a presiding bishop like Bob McChesney with his great ecumenical heart could bring us together for a weekend like this.

What joins us all under Bob’s embracing welcome is our commitment to public media. Pat Aufderheide got it right, I think, in the recent issue of In These Times when she wrote: “This is a moment when public media outlets can make a powerful case for themselves. Public radio, public TV, cable access, public DBS channels, media arts centers, youth media projects, nonprofit Internet news services … low-power radio and webcasting are all part of a nearly invisible feature of today’s media map: the public media sector. They exist not to make a profit, not to push an ideology, not to serve customers, but to create a public — a group of people who can talk productively with those who don’t share their views, and defend the interests of the people who have to live with the consequences of corporate and governmental power.”

She gives examples of the possibilities. “Look at what happened,” she said, “when thousands of people who watched Stanley Nelson’s The Murder of Emmett Till on their public television channels joined a postcard campaign that re-opened the murder case after more than half a century. Look at NPR’s courageous coverage of the Iraq war, an expensive endeavor that wins no points from this administration. Look at Chicago Access Network’s Community Forum, where nonprofits throughout the region can showcase their issues and find volunteers.”

The public media, she argues, for all our flaws, are a very important resource in a noisy and polluted information environment.

You can also take wings reading Jason Miller’s May 4 article on Z Net about the mainstream media. While it is true that much of the mainstream media is corrupted by the influence of government and corporate interests, Miller writes, there are still men and women in the mainstream who practice a high degree of journalistic integrity and who do challenge us with their stories and analysis.

But the real hope “lies within the Internet with its 2 billion or more Web sites providing a wealth of information drawn from almost unlimited resources that span the globe. … If knowledge is power, one’s capacity to increase that power increases exponentially through navigation of the Internet for news and information.”

Surely this is one issue that unites us as we leave here today. The fight to preserve the Web from corporate gatekeepers joins media, reformers, producers and educators — and it’s a fight that has only just begun.

I want to tell you about another fight we’re in today. The story I’ve come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I’ve been living it. It’s been in the news this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist — yours truly — by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As some of you know, CPB was established almost 40 years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today — led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson — is too important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous for a gathering like this not to address.

We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now, and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead.

I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some 2,000 years ago — after the Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar’s surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won’t be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s OK to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

Jonathan Mermin writes about this in a recent essay in World Policy Journal. (You’ll also want to read his book Debating War and Peace, Media Coverage of US Intervention in the Post Vietnam Era.)

Mermin quotes David Ignatius of the Washington Post on why the deep interests of the American public are so poorly served by Beltway journalism. The “rules of our game,” says Ignatius, “make it hard for us to tee up an issue … without a news peg.” He offers a case in point: the debacle of America’s occupation of Iraq. “If Senator so and so hasn’t criticized postwar planning for Iraq,” says Ignatius, “then it’s hard for a reporter to write a story about that.”

Mermin also quotes public television’s Jim Lehrer acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn’t news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? Because, says Lehrer, “the word occupation … was never mentioned in the run-up to the war.” Washington talked about the invasion as “a war of liberation, not a war of occupation, so as a consequence, “those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.”

“In other words,” says Jonathan Mermin, “if the government isn’t talking about it, we don’t report it.” He concludes: “[Lehrer’s] somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the calamitous occupation that has followed the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment ideal of a press that is independent of the government.”

Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons — before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced — was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact that “it was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source.”

Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with Beltway journalists of American officials denying that such things happened. Judith Miller of the New York Times, among others, relied on the credibility of official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

These “rules of the game” permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” In my documentaries – whether on the Watergate scandals 30 years ago or the Iran-Contra conspiracy 20 years ago or Bill Clinton’s fundraising scandals 10 years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry’s long and despicable cover-up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell’s 1984. They give us a program vowing “No Child Left Behind,” while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” that give us neither. And that’s just for starters.

In Orwell’s 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.

I learned about this the hard way. I grew up in the South, where the truth about slavery, race, and segregation had been driven from the pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the newsrooms. It took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home, and then it took another hundred years for the truth to make us free.

Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with Cold War orthodoxy and confident that “might makes right,” we circled the wagons, listened only to each other, and pursued policies the evidence couldn’t carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.

I brought all of this to the task when PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast. They wanted us to make it different from anything else on the air — commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to people who might not otherwise be heard.

That wasn’t a hard sell. I had been deeply impressed by studies published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals by a team of researchers led by Vassar College sociologist William Hoynes. Extensive research on the content of public television over a decade found that political discussions on our public affairs programs generally included a limited set of voices that offer a narrow range of perspectives on current issues and events.

Instead of far-ranging discussions and debates, the kind that might engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, this research found that public affairs programs on PBS stations were populated by the standard set of elite news sources. Whether government officials and Washington journalists (talking about political strategy) or corporate sources (talking about stock prices or the economy from the investor’s viewpoint), public television, unfortunately, all too often was offering the same kind of discussions, and a similar brand of insider discourse, that is featured regularly on commercial television.

Who didn’t appear was also revealing. Hoynes and his team found that in contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely featured the voices of anti-establishment critics, “alternative perspectives were rare on public television and were effectively drowned out by the stream of government and corporate views that represented the vast majority of sources on our broadcasts.”

The so-called experts who got most of the face time came primarily from mainstream news organizations and Washington think tanks rather than diverse interests. Economic news, for example, was almost entirely refracted through the views of business people, investors and business journalists. Voices outside the corporate/Wall Street universe — nonprofessional workers, labor representatives, consumer advocates and the general public were rarely heard. In sum, these two studies concluded, the economic coverage was so narrow that the views and the activities of most citizens became irrelevant.

All this went against the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I know. I was there. As a young policy assistant to President Johnson, I attended my first meeting to discuss the future of public broadcasting in 1964 in the office of the Commissioner of Education. I know firsthand that the Public Broadcasting Act was meant to provide an alternative to commercial television and to reflect the diversity of the American people.

This, too, was on my mind when we assembled the team for NOW. It was just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We agreed on two priorities. First, we wanted to do our part to keep the conversation of democracy going. That meant talking to a wide range of people across the spectrum — left, right and center.

It meant poets, philosophers, politicians, scientists, sages and scribblers. It meant Isabel AlIende, the novelist, and Amity Shlaes, the columnist for the Financial Times. It meant the former nun and best-selling author Karen Armstrong, and it meant the right-wing evangelical columnist Cal Thomas. It meant Arundhati Roy from India, Doris Lessing from London, David Suzuki from Canada, and Bernard Henry-Levi from Paris. It also meant two successive editors of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley and Paul Gigot, the editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel and the L.A. Weekly’s John Powers.

It means liberals like Frank Wu, Ossie Davis and Gregory Nava, and conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Grover Norquist, and Richard Viguerie. It meant Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Wilton Gregory of the Catholic Bishops conference in this country. It meant the conservative Christian activist and lobbyist, Ralph Reed, and the dissident Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. We threw the conversation of democracy open to all comers.

Most of those who came responded the same way that Ron Paul, the Republican and Libertarian congressman from Texas, did when he wrote me after his appearance, “I have received hundreds of positive e-mails from your viewers. I appreciate the format of your program, which allows time for a full discussion of ideas. … I’m tired of political shows featuring two guests shouting over each other and offering the same arguments. … NOW was truly refreshing.”

Hold your applause because that’s not the point of the story. We had a second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn’t like.

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play who said, “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse when everyone is kept in the dark.”

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian Richard Reeves answered a student who asked him to define real news. “Real news,” Reeves responded, “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”

For these reasons and in that spirit, we went about reporting on Washington as no one else in broadcasting — except occasionally 60 Minutes — was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice Department’s power of surveillance. We reported on the escalating Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn’t work. We reported on how campaign contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew resources to the comfortable and well-connected while our troops were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armor. We reported on how the Bush administration was shredding the Freedom of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how closed-door, backroom deals in Washington were costing ordinary workers and tax payers their livelihood and security. We reported on offshore tax havens that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.

And always — because what people know depends on who owns the press — we kept coming back to the media business itself, to how mega media corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the hierarchy of values, how giant radio cartels were silencing critics while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the mega media companies were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever more powerful.

The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a spell when we were the only public affairs broadcast on PBS whose audience was going up instead of down.

Our journalistic peers took notice. The Los Angeles Times said, “NOW’s team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame, pursuing stories few others bother to touch.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer said our segments on the sciences, the arts, politics and the economy were “provocative public television at its best.”

The Austin American-Statesman called NOW, “the perfect antidote to today’s high pitched decibel level, a smart, calm, timely news program.”

Frazier Moore of the Associated Press said we were hard-edged when appropriate but never Hardball. “Don’t expect combat. Civility reigns.”

And the Baton Rouge Advocate said, “NOW invites viewers to consider the deeper implication of the daily headlines,” drawing on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

Let me repeat that: NOW draws on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 had been prophetic. Open public television to the American people — offer diverse interests, ideas and voices … be fearless in your belief in democracy — and they will come.

Hold your applause — that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is something only a handful of our team, including my wife and partner Judith Davidson Moyers, and I knew at the time — that the success of NOW’s journalism was creating a backlash in Washington.

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid.

Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on NOW: Gigot, Viguerie, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Stephen Moore, then with the Club for Growth, and others. No, our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. The problem was that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told … we were getting it right, not right-wing.

I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.

My occasional commentaries got to them as well. Although apparently he never watched the broadcast (I guess he couldn’t take the diversity), Sen. Trent Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when after the midterm elections in 2002 I described what was likely to happen now that all three branches of government were about to be controlled by one party dominated by the religious, corporate and political right.

Instead of congratulating the winners for their election victory as some network broadcasters had done — or celebrating their victory as Fox, the Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, talk radio and other partisan Republican journalists had done — I provided a little independent analysis of what the victory meant. And I did it the old-fashioned way: I looked at the record, took the winners at their word, and drew the logical conclusion that they would use power as they always said they would. And I set forth this conclusion in my usual modest Texas way.

Events since then have confirmed the accuracy of what I said, but, to repeat, being right is exactly what the right doesn’t want journalists to be.

Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off “unless Moyers is dealt with.” The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated. Apparently there was apoplexy in the right-wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American flag in my lapel and said – well, here’s exactly what I said:

“I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

“Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart’s affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

“So what’s this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s little red book on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

“But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

“So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.”

That did it. That — and our continuing reporting on overpricing at Haliburton, chicanery on K Street, and the heavy, if divinely guided hand, of Tom DeLay.

When Senator Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers,” a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halperin, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the CPB board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation.

After all, I’d been there at the time of Richard Nixon’s attempted coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and independent, and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had actually been cancelled. The White House had been so outraged over a documentary called the “Banks and the Poor” that PBS was driven to adopt new guidelines. That didn’t satisfy Nixon, and when public television hired two NBC reporters — Robert McNeil and Sander Vanoucur to co-anchor some new broadcasts, it was, for Nixon, the last straw. According to White House memos at the time, he was determined to “get the left-wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once — indeed, yesterday if possible.”

Sound familiar?

Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick Pat Buchanan, who in a private memo had castigated Vanocur, MacNeil, Washington Week in Review, Black Journal and Bill Moyers as “unbalanced against the administration.”

It does sound familiar.

I always knew Nixon would be back. I just didn’t know this time he would be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming except for Black Journal. They knocked out multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.

But in those days — and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson and his colleagues on the CPB board — there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it.

The chairman of CPB was former Republican Congressman Thomas Curtis, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would soon face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust, not just public broadcasting.

Paradoxically, the very National Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill — NPACT — put PBS on the map by rebroadcasting in primetime each day’s Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing.

That was 33 years ago. I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was na’ve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done.

On Fox News this week he denied that he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But the New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that “on the recommendation of administration officials” Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB’s new ombudsman’s office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of whom once worked for … you guessed it … Kenneth Tomlinson.

I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t. According to a book written about the Reader’s Digest when he was its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other right-wingers — a pattern he’s now following at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. For acting president, he hired Ken Ferree from the FCC, who was Michael Powell’s enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferree’s jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to media monopolies. And, according to Eric Alterman, Ferree was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. Alterman identifies Ferree as the FCC staffer who decided to issue a “protective order” designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

It’s not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public television producer is going to say, “Hey, let’s do something on how big media is affecting democracy.”

Call it preventive capitulation.

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson also put up a considerable sum of money, reportedly over $5 million, for a new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor, and a fine fellow. I had him on NOW several times and even proposed that he become a regular contributor. The conversation of democracy — remember? All stripes.

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of $400 million. I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, the Wall Street Journal has no op-ed page where different opinions can compete with its right-wing editorials. The Journal’s PBS broadcast is just as homogenous –- right- wingers talking to each other. Why not $5 million to put the editors of The Nation on PBS? Or Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! You balance right-wing talk with left-wing talk.

There’s more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 percent.

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam, your favorite. Or you could have gone online where the listings are posted. Hell, you could have called me — collect — and I would have told you.

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s “Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay.” Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He’s apparently decided not to share the results with his staff, or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it — but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10 op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution that he did not want to “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned only this week, that’s not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As reported by Jeff Chester’s Center for Digital Democracy (of which I am a supporter), there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but not released to the media — not even to PBS and NPR. According to a source who talked to Salon.com, “The first results were too good and [Tomlinson] didn’t believe them. After the Iraq War, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they’d get worse results.”

But they didn’t. The data revealed that, in reality, public broadcasting has an 80 percent favorable rating and that “the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased.” In fact, more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy news and information than the networks and 55 percent said PBS was “fair and balanced.”

Tomlinson is the man, by the way, who was running The Voice of America back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What’s more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist, more than 700 documents had been shredded. Among those on the blacklists of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left-wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradlee, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

The person who took the fall for the blacklist was another right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike people’s names. Let me be clear about this: There is no record, apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don’t know whether he supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals. Or what he thinks of it now.

But I had hoped Bill O’Reilly would have asked him about it when he appeared on The O’Reilly Factor this week. He didn’t. Instead, Tomlinson went on attacking me with O’Reilly egging him on, and he went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate despite published reports to the contrary. The only time you could be sure he was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to O’Reilly, “We love your show.”

We love your show.

I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson on Friday and asked him to sit down with me for one hour on PBS and talk about all this. I suggested that he choose the moderator and the guidelines.

There is one other thing in particular I would like to ask him about. In his op-ed essay this week in Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: “The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from a woman in New York, five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that “after the worst sneak attack in our history, there’s not been a moment to reflect, a moment to let the horror resonate, a moment to feel the pain and regroup as humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family’s world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day.”

She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. “He was home with me having coffee. My daughter and grandson, living only five blocks from the Towers, had to be evacuated with masks — terror all around. … My other daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge … my son in high school. But my Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. ‘Bring my gear to the plaza,’ he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower. … He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved.”

In the FDNY, she said, chain-of- command rules extend to every captain of every fire house in the city. If anything happens in the firehouse — at any time — even if the captain isn’t on duty or on vacation — that captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7.”

So she asked: “Why is this administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership. … Watch everyone pass the blame again in this recent torture case [Abu Ghraib] of Iraqi prisons …”

And then she wrote: “We need more programs like yours to wake America up. … Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name-calling that divide America now. … Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda.”

Enclosed with the letter was a check made out to “Channel 13 — NOW” for $500. I keep a copy of that check above my desk to remind me of what journalism is about. Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors. I’ll take the widow’s mite any day.

Someone has said recently that the great raucous mob that is democracy is rarely heard and that it’s not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and the capital. There’s too great a chasm between those of us in this business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much as an audience and not enough as citizens. They’re invited to look through the window but too infrequently to come through the door and to participate, to make public broadcasting truly public.”

To that end, five public interest groups including Common Cause and Consumers Union will be holding informational sessions around the country to “take public broadcasting back” — to take it back from threats, from interference, from those who would tell us we can only think what they command us to think.

It’s a worthy goal.

We’re big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it’s political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent and sometimes violent confusion. “There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by,” John Steinbeck wrote. “It was called the people.”

I was just thinking about Andrei’s latest blog Taking a Vow of Connectedness and how many of us share love for the various creatures that inhabit this existence with us. I received this image of my Cat Irie today, taken by my friend Jane Pereda. I offer this image as a simple example of our connectedness. How many people across cultures, religons, dogmas, ‘across the madness of division’, you name it, have an animal companion they love? This may be a simple example of connectedness, but sometimes the simplest ideas can communicate directly to the heart. (Thanks Andrei, for ever trying to reach through ‘…the storm of ideas and systems that divide us.’ ) Irie (her name means happiness in Jamaican) loves Opera. In particular, she curls up next to the speaker when Maria Callas is singing. On this Saturday morning in June, she had her nose in the reddish pollen of a pinkish Stargazer flower that was on the kitchen table.

i rise in the morning
with angel samba sunbathing in my tears
i shed my dream garment of spirit paintings
i lift my voice on sails of prayer ships
and chisel at the face of the day
sculpture of love, dance of the deep place fire shining
i want to know the surrender of the pure singer
the glistening of the platinum gut
i want to melt in babies’ laughter and cleansing herbs
polished in the hands of story

poems tattooed on the eardrums of unborn hummingbirds
i offer this as truth of magic
as humble worship, as naked wisdom
breath of incense, burning steel of will

i rise in the morning
with angel samba sunbathing in my tears
i swim these rivers of asphalt
light for the mind of the slave
change bringer, chime maker, invisible circus chanter
in pain the fruit of the heart is squeezed
the nectar, sweet, silk sheet of the wind kiss my face
dry the salt of this day’s madness
slay me with beauty
resurrect me with duty
mighty is the ocean in my eyes
i rise in the morning with angel samba sunbathing in my tears
wrap me in rainbows untie me with song.

Kamau Daáood

From his book of poetry: The Language of Saxophones: Collected Works

Published by City Lights Bookstore/Foundation, April 2005

A River Runs Through It

Why Alexander Gorlov’s helical turbine should help speed the demolition of Dams

Hydroelectric Dams kill fish, destabilize ecosystems, and make it hard for river-dependent Native American tribes to get three squares a day. Concerned activists, stymied by an unsympathetic Bush administration, are swimming upstream just to get more “ladders” to help fish navigate the locks. But according to OnEarth (Spring 2005) a mechanical engineering professor at Northeastern University in Boston has successfully tested a turbine so in efficient in generating energy that it could one day eliminate the need these environmental hazards.

OnEarth reports that professor Alexander Gorlov’s helical turbine, a device that’s 100 inches long and resembles “an oversize beater from an old handheld mixer,” can harness kinetic energy from any body of water, including canals, open oceans, and rivers. So-called free flow hydropower costs about $1500 per kilowatt, roughly the same as wind power, and the whirling turbines can harness up to 3,000 gigawatts of power, which is 97 percent more efficient than any other current power source. Preliminary tests also indicate that, given space, fish will swim around the whirling turbines.

The Republic of South Korea installed a Gorlov turbine and plans to order thousands more from a manufacturer in New Jersey, but the U.S. government has not shown much enthusiasm for the invention, save for a research and development grant in 1990. That’s a shame, since there are many places in the United States where an alternative way to generate hydroelectric power could be beneficial. One is the Pacific Norwest’s Klamath Trinity Watershed, where, EcoNews (April 2005) reports, there has been a drastic decline in the number of endangered wild salmon due to dam-related disease and low water flows.

Though the outlook for the Klamath Rive is grim (this year could be one of the driest in the basin since 1961), there are plenty of forward-thinkers who, like Gorlov, are working to make a difference. Nature Concervancy (Spring 2005) reports that for the first time in in 180 years, the Neversink River in the Catskill Mountains is flowing freely. That’s because last October scientists and activists braved floodwaters to help dismantle the Cuddebackville Dam, causing brook trout and American shad to quickly swim some 40 miles away from where they had been trapped.

There’s also a push under way to remove unused or crumbling dams. The Washington, D.C.-based non-profit American Rivers says that 60 dams were removed in the United States in 2004, which is double the number demolished in 2003. Most municipalities, understanding dams often cost more to repair than to destroy, have been eager to see them go. When the Embrey Dam on the Rappahannock River was demolished in February 2004, onlookers cheered wildly. It’s a good guess that the newly freed fish were pleased as well.

For more info on Alexander Gorlov’s helical turbine at the NRDC click here

Fascism Anyone?

Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles” on the inside cover of the magazine. [See Below] To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.

We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist1 regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later protofascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.

Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.

For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.

Note

1. Defined as a “political movement or regime tending toward or imitating Fascism”—Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.

References

Andrews, Kevin. Greece in the Dark. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1980.
Chabod, Frederico. A History of Italian Fascism. London: Weidenfeld, 1963.
Cooper, Marc. Pinochet and Me. New York: Verso, 2001.
Cornwell, John. Hitler as Pope. New York: Viking, 1999.
de Figuerio, Antonio. Portugal—Fifty Years of Dictatorship. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976.
Eatwell, Roger. Fascism, A History. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Fest, Joachim C. The Face of the Third Reich. New York: Pantheon, 1970.
Gallo, Max. Mussolini’s Italy. New York: MacMillan, 1973.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler (two volumes). New York: Norton, 1999.
Laqueur, Walter. Fascism, Past, Present, and Future. New York: Oxford, 1996.
Papandreau, Andreas. Democracy at Gunpoint. New York: Penguin Books, 1971.
Phillips, Peter. Censored 2001: 25 Years of Censored News. New York: Seven Stories. 2001.
Sharp, M.E. Indonesia Beyond Suharto. Armonk, 1999.
Verdugo, Patricia. Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death. Coral Gables, Florida: North-South Center Press, 2001.
Yglesias, Jose. The Franco Years. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977.

_____________________________________________________
[Referred to in Laurence Britt's above article]

The Affirmations of Humanism:
A Statement of Principles

We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.

We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.

We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.

We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.

We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.

We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.

We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.

We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.

We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

12/1/2004: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), led by Bush appointees, is seeking input on a new proposed study in which infants in participating low income families will be monitored for health impacts as they undergo exposure to known toxic chemicals over the course of two years. The study entitled Childrens Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS) will look at how chemicals can be ingested, inhaled or absorbed by children ranging from babies to 3 years old.

Who are all of these people going west?
None of us really seem to care
Straight ahead we stare into vanishing points a thousand miles away

How many miles do we have to go?
Two days journey over steep mountain inclines
Into the desert valley below. . .

We worship the sun and the two lanes
It has caught us burning above
Driving with our third eye now
It is numbing our brains The firery god is. . .
. . . in the canyons of my mind
I take the land in, digest, and leave the rest behind
I’d swear to you. . .
Or is it the landscape moving, not me making any progress,
merely stationary, a prop in an old western B movie?
We are but ants crawling insignificantly
almost imperceptibly on the surface of the Mojave
Crude symbols to catch the glare among the Earth sculpture

And we who sleep in the dead-end town of Barstow know that it
gleans what it can from the hiway. . .

The morning silhouettes of Joshua trees as the moon reflects
the coming rays. . .

The dark outline of the horizon is overtaken
by the sun in my rear-view mirror

Who are these people moving westward?
A lady stares at me blankly as she and her husband
glide by on super suspension, Texas.
Me, I feel every bump, though
None of use really seem to be here
Only dust spirits drifting through swirling heat over asphalt
a mirage the next mile. . .

Written 5/5/92

From a road trip taken from Albuquerque to San Francisco, August 1989

It is fitting California honors the memory and life of Cesar Chavez today: the only union leader in U.S. history to be honored with a paid state government holiday. It is not surprising George W. Bush vetoed a similar attempt to honor Cesar Chavez while governor of Texas. But many understand the quality of leadership in this country has reached an all time low. If Cesar Chavez were alive in the political climate of today, I doubt he’d blink an eye. A true hero in the pantheon of those who steadfastly worked for non-violent, community organization and social change, he founded and led the United Farm Workers Union with dignity and respect for all people–against extraordinary opposition. Let us remember what a true leader can inspire and aspire to be.

Cesar Chavez Foundation

PBS: The Fight In The Fields

United Farm Workers

How familiar would it be for dreaming ancesters to discover this ageless reverie and celebration, as we gather under celestial markers and move our souls to trance-like resonance? This reliquary copse floats above a virtual ocean of whispering city lights… The ancestors, peerng through leaves might say we are the magic illuminations of another age, exultants of rythym across traditions, continents, all time, conferring around a Techno-primordial fire to welcome seeds of ascendence, surrounded by precedent, the perennial.

We dance as the Vernal Equinox lifts the darkling cloak of winter to the season of sun.

Dawn and the roots of mountains form in my mind. Childhood with my siblings on the elevated vistas of New Mexico; fascination with the wash of time across mesas once existed below a vast tropical ocean. We ascended plateaus to sit on lofty outcrops. Mighty brown hawks gliding by at eye level on heat thermals against the endless canopy of deep blue. Ghosts of the landscape; the Navajo, Zuni, and Anasazi that walked before us, as magnificent indigo-black thunderstorms coalesced, rumbled and advanced across distant horizons. On the way home we let the awkward flight of gravity and inertia take us bounding down shale encrusted hillsides into sandy arroyos twisting through the scrub of desert. There we found ebony flint shards of arrowheads and fossilized spiral sections of tawny nautili shells impressed in stone, the cool shadows of stratified rock encased in time.

Time moves geologically across our hearts and minds, our physical existence weathering choices and experience. We rise and fall in our individual eternities. A volcanic moment changes the landscape and then rivers carve away the embedded obsidian quartz. The ancient corridors of underground rivers and streams feed our passions and deposit soil rich sediment on amber-lit shores. We emerge from darkness onto boulder-strewn escarpments, archival accent marks on sandstone elevations. Cerulean memory bound like calcite and moonlight to stone upon which we carve our history, this Earth.

The infinite known and unknown stands in relief next to the Castle Crags. Existence. It is a place that imbues my soul with the other, a consecration of impermanence, and the poetry of boundless time. When I first saw this massive tableau it appeared to me an evocative, allusive 11th century Chinese landscape painting, subtly shifting and arising out of a forest blanketed in cloud. It is now a phantom in the atmosphere of my imagination, a part of my soul. Its lingering beauty fills me with mysterious joy.

Fourteen

Look, and it can’t be seen.
Listen, and it can’t be heard.
Reach, and it can’t be grasped.

Above, it isn’t bright.
Below, it isn’t dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.

Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can’t know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.

Lao Tzu
From the Tao Te Tsing
(Translation by Stephen Mitchell)

San Francisco’s own Jazz Diva Kim Nalley is back in town after living and touring in Europe. Her newly owned (and restored) 1930′s supper club, Jazz At Pearl’s, swings with the very best of them. The intimate 135-seat North Beach venue is an elegant setting for Nalley, who is becoming internationally known for her breathtaking performances and charisma. Nalley evokes legends such as Billy Holliday, Dinah Washington, and Ella Fitzgerald with an assured vocal style wholly her own, but every bit the chanteuse of the 1930′s and 40′s.

SHE PUT A SPELL ON ME– A TRIBUTE TO NINA SIMONE was sold out February 17th 2004, with an overlflow of people out on the Broadway bustle of North Beach. Inside it was an impressive Jeff Chambers on upright bass, truly ascendant pianist Tammy Hall, Josh Workman, a virtuoso Jazz guitarist, and the emotively brilliant drummer Kent Bryson. Nalley, ablaze in a silver dress, began with a stunning Love Me Or Leave Me before pausing to confess a rare nervousness for attempting “…a tribute to one of the most distinctive voices of the last century.” She proceeded into My Baby Just Cares For Me, and I Put A Spell On You, soaring as a truly exuberant, yet humble devotee. She then took a moment to share her excitement about the history of the Jazz At Pearl’s building in North Beach. “I feel so honored to be here. This is a place that has always had Jazz in it, not to mention the great beat poets who performed in this space….” Ironically the building, which is directly across the street from historic City Lights Bookstore, was constructed in the early 1900′s when Jazz was considered by some to be the “Devil’s Music.”

Without being ostentatious, Nalley peppered and interspersed songs with compelling anecdotes. Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair highlighted Nina Simone’s ability to take an 18th century English folk song and “…make it completely her own.” Before singing Mississippi Goddamn! Nalley described how in 1963, during the first ever performance of the song, the upper class New York audience didn’t get it. They roared with laughter until it suddenly dawned that Simone was talking about the racism of the South; specifically, the recent shooting of Medgar Evers (the head of the Mississippi NAACP) and the firebomb killing of four black children attending church. She was ‘blacklisted’ on many performance circuits afterwards. Kim Nalley belted out Mississippi Goddamn! with raw, unchecked power, seemingly nullifying the murderous and mean spirited ignorance it describes. Later Nalley confessed, she thought Nina Simone was a man when she first heard her as a child, and that her favorite song at the time was Little Liza Jane, a 78 record of her Mom’s. She used to dance around the house to it with her brother; her gleeful rendition and obvious joyful remembrance electrified the room.

The haunting history of lynching in the song Strange Fruit continued the retrospective of Nina Simone’s Black Power roots, along with the politically descriptive outcry of Backlash Blues; a song made from a poem given to Simone by the great Langston Hughes. Why? (The King Of Love Is Dead) was especially touching. The song, written by Simone after Martin Luther King was assassinated, is equal parts grief and celebration. It honors Dr. King’s life in such a deep and multi-layered way. I imagine it is a difficult song for anyone to fully render outside of Nina Simone’s evocative register. Nalley’s interpretation had such emblematic grace and feeling that she was immediately given a rousing standing ovation by the full house. No one had to think about it. It was an instantaneous reaction. When one feels the painful depths of these songs, it is not hard to imagine why Nina Simone eventually became an expatriate: first going to Africa, then Switzerland and Holland, before finally settling in the south of France.

A unique highlight of the night came after Nalley sang House Of The Rising Sun. She invited Louisiana born Lady Mem’fis to the stage, a veteran San Francisco Bay Area performer. Lady Mem’fis told a captivating story about Nina Simone, beginning with a statement that she did not “believe in Voodoo” disclaimer. But she then described a captivating encounter with Simone in the 1970′s. Lady Mem’fis had a terrible rash on her hands that had gone on for many weeks. After a Simone concert, she made her way forward for an autograph. A fan had given Simone a picture of a black woman’s hands, delicately holding a rose. Lady Mem’fis remarked how beautiful the picture was before displaying the condition of her own hands. Simone immediately grabbed both of Lady Mem’fis’s palms and exclaimed, “You’re hands are absolutely beautiful!” Lady Mem’fis’s rash completely disappeared by the next morning. Lady Mem’fis then did an A Cappella, hand clapping, version of Be My Husband that sent tingles straight up the back of my neck. She later joined Nalley in the third set for a stirring version of See Line Woman.

The rest of the evenings’ songlist included Simone standards, such as Summertime, You Can Have Him, I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl, I Shall be released , and a personal favorite, the soaring ballad I Love’s You Porgy. It’s impossible to fully describe this beguiling celebration, except to say it was one of those rare moments I’ve had the realization of being in the right place, at exactly the right moment.

For those who missed this event, reprises are planned in the future, usually around the February anniversary of Nina Simone’s passing. I recommend Kim Nalley’s shows until then, not to mention the stellar Bay Area jazz performers who also headline at her club. Arrive as early as 6:30 or 7 to find bar seating available. Entry is usually ten dollars to sit at the bar, but it is essential to reserve a table if you choose to experience the extraordinary dinner menu. Unlike many dinner/show affairs, Jazz At Pearl’s offers plentiful choices for each section of the four-course meal. The menu has a delicious Spanish ouevre, mixed with flavored nuances of French and Asian Cuisine. The many appetizer choices alone are a Tapas lover’s paradise. How often can you enjoy a four-course meal for an amazing 40 dollars per person (entry included) and then see world-class music performed only steps away?! Dinner begins at 7 P.M. The show usually starts at 9 P.M.

I am galloping across grassy Siberian steppes on a bronze colored horse. Glancing backwards, alluvial plains and arid plateaus of Mongolia have receded into resonant after images and lingering sepia dust. The musical illuminations I transport are extraordinarily rare and beautiful. I carefully adjust the leather straps of my rucksack, and then tuck pearl buttons through eyelets of my sheepskin Banyan. Hunching lower, I relax into Syranth’s swift sure-footedness. Her fluid equine movements ripple below me, wild and rhythmically steady. She surges through flanking grassland and then easily over scattered rocky terrain. I feel the exhilaration of sound and space echoing through the carved landscape and inhale droughts of crisp air, infused with the scent of rain and mountain Sage. There are storms gathering on the Sayan Mountains, accented by sparingly low thunder. The arboreal paradise of the Taiga is visible now. Displacement of air, or perhaps the speed at which we travel, makes the coniferous valleys seem an undulating emerald ocean. A red eagle floats boundlessly above. I catch a glimpse of crimson as it arcs over us. Good blessings for this journey. I close my eyes and feel Syranth skirt what may be a questionable patch of tundra. We are almost in vales of Golden Eye flowers and the marshland of the mighty Yenesie River. I hear a distant droning music of polyphonic harmonic tones, sonic disturbances made smooth by the steady flow of water across ancient, sun weathered, rock. I open my eyes and fade back into my seat, slowly becoming aware of the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. The musicians of Huun-Hurr-Tu have just ended a song that has sent me to another world.

“Racism got off on his own P.R., said, I’m the star of this show, here y’ go. Nothing to say until Capitalism slipped into the frame, ‘hey baby what’s your name?’ Racism spitting game, but Capitalism was looking-she flipped in on him like he was a two-bit hooker. He took her and shook her – she looked him dead in the eye and he fell steady silent, compliant. ‘She said, ‘Look, Racism, we’re going to do it like this: first of all we are going to pretend you don’t exist…’ “

—from “Self Portrait” by Marc Bathmuthi Joseph

Now many months later, I pick up the latest issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian weekly newspaper (www.sfbg.com) and am heartened to find Marc Bathmuthi Jones on the cover of the November 12-18th issue. He is being honored with a “Goldie”. This annual award is presented by the Guardian to honor outstanding local Bay area artists. If you have a moment, check out the excellent article by Kimberly Chun, as well as the other Goldie award categories.
SFBG Spoken Word Goldie 2003

* Musician Brian Eno aptly refers to the Bush administrations’ policies as “propagenda.”

For my birthday this year I received a fine book of poetry from my good friend Joan Strader. It was just what I needed. It lightened my soul, made me chuckle and laugh out loud, often, undaunted by very serious people on San Francisco public transportation. The book is Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems By Billy Collins. (Random House 2001) Mr. Collins was our national Poet Laureate from 2001- August 2003.

I enjoy how Mr. Collins bares his soul, moving imaginatively and fancifully through time, poking fun at history, himself, the laws of allegory, gravity and metaphor along the way. He has a fine artists’ eye, buoyed by an insightful lightness, a deftness of motion and phrasing that can be suddenly somber while ridiculously funny at the same time. If you are not familiar with him, consider a few of my favorites:

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a
bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

–Billy Collins

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340’s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.

Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790’s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

–Billy Collins

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

–Billy Collins

I do not have a specific driving force as I enter into the great Blog of it all, except to say that I am honored to be invited to share my thoughts with the collective “you” who converge here. I have received many blessings from friends and family. This moment finds me fortuitously emerging from a long artistic incubation filled with the requisite self-doubt and depression(s), ghosts from the past, strange musings and gleanings from what has been a surrealistic world. This is a good time. I hopefully will not subject you to anything so embarrassingly confessional as to make you run for your life, but you might wince at times anyway. Much of it may be garden-variety ramblings and angst as it were, but so be it. What is clear is that the generous thoughts and ideas, the spirituality and sheer force that has been coalescing and emanating from Andrei’s head (such a brilliant touch Josh) have helped me find my way amidst it all. Even during this proliferation of mass Republicans, I’ve felt myself righted by Andrei’s sincere expressions of love and joy and great feeling for community. I embrace the opportunity to contribute to this life affirming spirit and feel a great hope in the power of dialogue and humor inherent in this endeavor. May we continue to share the great realm of a moment’s or a lifetime’s inspiration and pass it on with the spirit of our mentors and our personal heroes. A thank you for gifts received. May we continue to move forward and create the world we want to live in with each step.