The Stakes

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

-- Arthur Jensen explaining the world to Howard Beale, from the film Network (1976)

For a little while, many of you are turning briefly from your everyday concerns, and thinking about some of the things I've been thinking about. You can see that things have turned sour in many respects -- Americans are losing their jobs and homes, the economy is in freefall, Iraq is still an atrocity, global warming is heating up, and nuclear nations are imploding and headed for crisis. The promises of the politicians were just so much hot air, as usual, and now, for your quatrennial moment of participation in this process that determines so much of your lives, you're going to begin choosing between the remaining list of candidates, and cast your vote on the direction you want this nation and the world to go.

If you've not been paying much attention, I can't blame you. For years, I was only able to glance from the corner of my eye as I worked 80-100 hours a week on various projects, the last my five-year contribution to Windows Vista. For nearly a year now, I've stepped back from all that, and really have paid attention to things, and have been sobered by how actually reliable my instincts have been, and yet how dulled they were by the distractions of everyday living. I need to make a choice as well, not on "Super Tuesday", but in the caucuses that will take place in the state of Washington on the 19th. I'm fortunate, I suppose, that the candidate I've been supporting is still in the mix, as I've been a Barack Obama supporter all along. Obviously, I will be supporting Obama in the caucus, unless something changes dramatically.

There were other candidates, like Dennis Kucinich, who really stated the problems more plainly, but I've been around for a while, and I know when some things just aren't going to happen. It's sort of amazing that I would assess, correctly, that the candidacy of a fellow white male from my home state of Ohio would be less viable than that of a black man born of a Kenyan father, but this is a pretty amazing time. Now it's time I tried to state some of the problems plainly, since my candidate still has to play the game and garner votes.

There are real issues at stake. This election won't necessarily be the defining moment that marks the turning point for America and the world, but then again, it might be. At the very least, it will make a critical statement about how we perceive ourselves and our current dilemma, and whether the odds for the future will have improved, or sunk to new lows. We're going to be voting for individuals, Republicans and Democrats, and you've heard a lot about the various candidates. I don't feel like speaking in specific terms today. I feel like making some generalities, working out of that instinct that has been validated and sensitized by my year of examining our current milieu.

I've mentioned elsewhere, though I don't think I've mentioned it yet in this blog, having watched a re-broadcast of a talk given by the Dalai Lama on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. I don't recall now where the talk was given, although it was out of doors, sometimes in the rain, with the Dalai Lama holding an umbrella over his head while he spoke. He talked a little about violence and discord, and he spoke about anger, even admitting that he himself gets angry sometimes. Then he made an assertion that stuck with me, claiming that when you're angry, 90% of what you feel is exaggeration. I don't know about the percentage, but I know there's more than a grain of truth in that. That's part of why I want to continue today's post more in generalities than specifically directed toward individuals, because people are more complex in many ways than even some of the most complex forces at work in our society, and people's motives on an individual basis are rarely entirely good or bad. It's probably a little more accurate to point to a direction and call it pernicious than to point to a person and do the same. I'll leave you to extrapolate conclusions on your own.

There are things going on now that reveal the most cancerous, destructive, tormented aspects of human nature imaginable. There are people who, for whatever reasons, are sowing seeds of misery throughout the world to such an extent that it beggars imagination. The word Evil is such a loaded and absolute term, but I don't think it can be avoided here. If we try to view the world as a struggle between good and evil, we become lazy, and quickly oversimplify everything in black and white. It's hard not to characterize individual actions as Evil, like the bombings in Baghdad this week, and as such, it's hard not to characterize the active promotion of conditions that engender such actions as embodying that same Evil, in all respects.

There is a possibility that you could make a choice soon to support someone who really doesn't care about you at all. Not the least little bit. The simple truth is, there is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, or whatever names those corporations operate under now, and they don't care the first thing about you. They aren't people, they're corporations. They care about, are created, charted, and under legislative dictum to care about, only the bottom line. Left to themselves, they will chew up the earth and spit it out in little pieces, strewing pieces of bone and hair through a barren landscape. They are mechanisms, soulless to their core, and they don't want democracy, they don't want you to have equality and dignity, they want profit. We are, indeed, trying to meddle with the primal forces of nature in this election, and whatever happens, we may not be able to meddle enough. But I want you to know that we really do have a lot to lose. It's more than Kucinich talked about, more than John Edwards told us, it's more along the lines of what we heard from Arthur Jensen over thirty years ago. We've allowed it to happen, and now it's reached us in every part of our lives, and we have to choose now if that's still the way that it's going to be.

It's incredible they would actually give us the chance to choose, isn't it? If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. What we can really do is mostly push back just a little, hold it off while we marshal our forces and add reinforcements, and keep hanging on. Maybe there is no America and no democracy, but there's still just enough an appearance of it that we can find a reason for hope, and a way to move forward. As we applaud ourselves for all this, millions more will die without hope, ExxonMobil will gouge out more wounds in the earth, and more profits will go to the few while the many are starving. All this will happen almost unaffected by even the most optimistic outcome of this year's selection process. If you think we will find a hero, please think again. This is just about a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a difference, but even then, in the whole scheme of things, it's a drop in a storm.

Many of you are afraid to take any sort of a chance. Let someone make you a soothing promise, and you're all ears. Daddy would never hurt you, would he? I hate to break it to you. There are an awful lot of bad daddies in the world, and there's been an awful lot of hurt. I wish I could take what's inside me right now and transmit it directly. Once it's put into words, it's all relative and subject to doubts. I'll tell you what I know with the only tools I have. Over the years, we've made a lot of bad choices. We've allowed ourselves to be fooled so many times by all the ways that have been devised to manage the outcome, by propaganda -- don't kid yourself -- that's reached a level of efficiency with the modern media so overwhelming that it's amazing we can have any sense of the truth at all.

We've had no shortage of courageous examples who tell us about how things really are. We've had our Orwells, our Chayevskys, our Zinns and Chomskys. Now we can take just a moment and think if they might not be right, if we might not be sliding in our meek passivity right down the cosmic drain and into oblivion. We have to consider if we, in the long run, are being controlled. I'm asking you now, can you really imagine we aren't? Do you really think that wealth and power are benign? Do you really imagine that their continually redefined definition of our security is any security at all, instead of a dreamy opiate of lies? You think you can keep your nose clean and retire, and the truth is you'll end up working until you die. In one future, the elderly have no recourse and are left to wither, the sick and infirm are discarded, the weak are crushed. The profits are all that will matter, and they will grow, and among the few there will be the opulent trappings of kings. Keep on voting as you have been, my friends. We'll be there soon.

I recorded the film Network and watched it the other night. I'd forgotten that one of my old friends was in it. Her name is Conchata Ferrell (Chatti to us). She and I were part of a circle of friends that saw the protests, and the Manhattan theater scene, in the sixties and seventies. We were part of a very close-knit group that grew apart. Chatti was a close friend of my first, perhaps only, Great Love, and was witness to all my passionate suffering for that girl's affection, and much more over the years. I was always shy, and much of what Chatti knew of me was of someone so twisted up in his emotions he was barely sane, but I know those years meant just as much to her as me, and I bet I still cross her mind in some way when she thinks of that time. If I think of you now as I watched your wonderful movie, Chatti, it's not for the fame you've enjoyed; I've had my successes as well. It's for that time when we all lived with complete intensity, truly candles that burned completely in each instant of time. I hope you're well. You were great in Network. You're better now than you were even then, because you were perfect.

Democracy

I've been meaning to come back to this blog. It's still useful as a journal, but I'm not sure I would have known what to write these last few weeks. I've needed to allow some things to redefine themselves. A lot of this was prompted by the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, as I've written about before dropping out of sight. But, honestly, I've also been quite ill. I've been started on a new treatment, and though it seems to be working less well today, on Sunday and Monday I started feeling much improved, so I'll give it time. I'd love to feel like I could get out and do more things. I certainly have a wish to be more active. The spirit is willing. We'll see.

So much has happened in the last few weeks that I couldn't review it all here even if I wanted to. There's more torture in the headlines, of course. That stuff just never seems to go away once it gets started, does it? Part of my paranoid brain wonders if the "torture tape" revelations weren't as much a distraction from the NIE scandal as anything else, although the administration is still doing a dance around that issue. In any event, as usual, when things come out, there's almost too much to process, and practically none of it is dealt with in any depth. Meantime, we're still spilling oil, killing monks, and raping young women in Baghdad, with no end anywhere in sight.

So, how've you been?

I still can't rekindle any enthusiasm for presidential politics, or even for Oprah, although I taped the Iowa rally on C-SPAN, and watched it afterward. I'm not sure why my disgust hadn't hit critical mass before now, but allowing Mukasey's confirmation without a fight was the last straw. I'm not ready to tear down everything, but I'm convinced there are an awful lot of seriously compromised people in government now. That's not really a big surprise, I guess, but this level of compromise, on these kinds of issues -- torture, corruption, lying, etc. -- this close to the awareness level of the general public puts things into bold new territory. If things happened as they should, an awful lot of people would go down hard. That shouldn't be a huge tragedy. We have 300 million people in this country. We can find people to take their places. I don't think most of that is going to happen, of course, barring more surprises, but just because the corruption may be around for some time to come doesn't mean I should give up. It's going to be a long struggle, and at least some of the candidates are still better than others. Just hold your nose next November, and go ahead and vote for somebody.

I've been reading plenty, and again, there's too much to review. I finally got around to reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I highly recommend. I've continued to read Noam Chomsky's books extensively, as well as watching some of the massive amounts of video featuring Chomsky on the internet. I've gotten to know his thinking much better, and Naomi Klein's work is an excellent extension of that effort. There are, and have been, so many actions that are difficult to view as anything but rapacious greed and powerlust that it does seem like a conspiracy. Fortunately, thinkers such as those mentioned here realize it's a lot more complicated than that. There are bad people, of course, and we see some of them on television every day, but there's also just the whole mechanism, larger than any one of us, driving corporations to profit or die, driving reporters to toe the line or be ignored, driving politicians to compromise or be smeared. It feeds on itself, and some of the worst offenders just want to be rescued, I think.

I'm still searching for redefinitions, and I don't know yet how regular I'll be with blog entries, but it feels like these entries are worth doing, and I'll just have to play it by ear. I've been meditating, of course, both koan and pure zazen styles of meditation. Koan meditation still presents issues for me. Perhaps there's a way to take an orderly approach to koan meditation, but I'm not so sure. Its intention, for me, is to focus so intently on the question as to force a mental crisis. I've had these crises in small ways before. They're like the Eureka! moments when we've examined a problem from all sides, and just when we're about to give up the answer pops into our heads. I've had those moments in theater after agonizing about an interpretation for my character, and many times in programming when the third rewrite of a module left me in despair before I suddenly saw the problem. That's koan meditation. But I'm having trouble taking "Mu" seriously, I'm ashamed to admit. It's a very serious question after all, because it's like asking Who am I? Perhaps because it's so serious, and not a programming problem or an alter ego on stage, that I'm still reluctant to give myself to it fully. I'm 60 years old, folks. I may have had all the mental crises I'm going to have. That's not my final word on this topic, but meantime, my pure zazen has an element that I'm tempted to call satisfying. I feel a sharpness to my attention that feels useful in helping me to collect myself, and every little bit helps.

Here are a couple of short Chomsky videos I plucked off YouTube. I may come back later and add comments for them. But Chomsky speaks very simply about politics. He leaves the linguistic scholar behind when he talks about propaganda and democracy, and he gets right to the point. The videos -- approximately 9 and 7 minutes, respectively -- present a Chomsky overview. If you want to know the gist of what Chomsky is saying, it's right here. It's very important to flesh it out with the details, as I have, but the basic message is very straightforward, and extremely thought-provoking, if you haven't heard it. In both videos, Chomsky quotes James Madison from The Federalist Papers (which I'm also reading, albeit slowly) when he says "the primary function of goverment is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority", then proceeds to explore the implications of that approach as it's filtered down to our lives today. As old as the story seems, it's still a class struggle in our society. It's a lot of other things as well, of course, but the class system is a primary obstacle to a more reasonable sharing of responsibilities, and it's a very important part of the problem.

I just finished watching an excellent video on LinkTV featuring the Dalai Lama. It was made back in 2003, but it's fascinating, as journalists, politicians, business people, and environmentalists discussed ethical issues with the Dalai Lama. It's in the spirit of people such as the Dalai Lama I would like to base my continuing quest for a positive way forward through the dilemmas we're facing. I think we're going to have to deal with some very tough things. I think I've been a little bit guilty of naivete, thinking that we might be close enough to really positive efforts that just a little push here or there might be enough to cause dramatic results. It's disheartening to think that, difficult as it already seems, it's even harder than you thought, and there aren't many real saviors on the horizon. As Gandhi once said when asked what he thought of western civilization, "I think it would be a good idea."