emerson

Power and democracy

Picked up at Citizen:Citizen

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Blossom

Magnolias, by Muffet

By Dale Conour

We’re disappointed in our leaders is the refrain, yet again, as we endure another season of presidential campaigning.

The irony in that statement seems so strong today, walking past spring blossoms of flowering cherry, camellia, magnolia.

The results wouldn’t be nearly so impressive if only a few of those buds opened up to the sun.

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Enough about me, what about you?

By Dale Conour

emerson’s ears are burning today as Salon’s Laura Miller riffs on Philip Gura’s new book, "American Transcendentalism." At the heart of her piece is the question of individualism and its role in the pursuit of social justice.

"...Gura quietly mourns the "other half of the Transcendentalist’s dream, of a common humanity committed to social justice." Instead, he writes, "individualism" has triumphed, "in the Gilded Age and beyond." Some of us have even managed to convince ourselves that individualism is the only viable route to social justice, sharing Emerson’s faith in self-reliance as the consummate virtue. Whether they are as mistaken in that belief as George Ripley was in his, remains to be seen; here’s hoping it results in nothing worse than a bankrupt farm."

The "farm" she refers to is Ripley’s attempt at a utopian community, Brook Farm, which, like most projects which attempt to bring individuals—individualists—together didn’t pan out. Kinda like trying to form a federation of nonconformists.

It gets to the crux of our problems, really. To change the world, first change yourself. Ok, great, but what if the next guy over doesn’t want to and he’s doing things to others I think are really wrong? Do I keep my eyes on the spiritual prize, or turn activist? And by doing so, do I truly find the path I thought I was on?

You’re in the company of the New Romantics here, so look to your feelings: What do they tell you?

Links: America’s first Me Generation, George Ripley backgrounder

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Global warming and the Shock Doctrine

By Dale Conour

In a recent post, I asked a scary question:

"...are we, thanks to the success of capitalism, and because of the changing global climate, heading toward a world society not defined by the traditional national or racial boundaries, but by the claiming of favorable locations by the haves, more marginal areas by the have-a-littles, and the shitholes begrudgingly held by the have-nots?"

And then I suggested that this was territory most likely already covered in sci fi. Turns out, the same speculation is showing up in today’s non-fiction. This month’s Rolling Stone features an interview with Canadian journalist Naomi Klein about her new book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," a look at the rise of  the  military -industry-private contractor complex, which has cashed in after a series of natural disasters—and manmade ones, ala Iraq.

When asked to look into the US’s future, Klein posited:

"We could have a fully privatized response to climate change, with a small group of people buying their way out for a couple of generations. Our world could look more like Baghdad—a green zone guarded by Blackwater and everything provided by Halliburton and then just a raging red zone outside."

Links: To the victors go the spoils, NaomiKlein.org

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To the victors go the spoils

What my trip to Italy got me thinking about #2

By Dale Conour

The homogenization of the US and the world is making travel journalists’ jobs harder and harder:

What’s there to write about when every place is the same?

It’s not just the retail chains, which continue to collect communities’ souls at a very favorable exchange rate. It’s also the people, the culture. We’re highly mobile, working and living in different places, increasingly unrooted, and the traditional constructs of community are crumbling.

I know, this is not news. But I’ve started wondering if it’s necessarily a bad thing.

Umbria is Italy’s "green heart," chock full of hill towns and walled cities, very charming and picturesque, populated with locals proud of their heritage and their regionally distinct products; eateries proudly serve wine grown from surrounding vineyards, olive oil from the fruit of groves a pit’s throw away. But there’s a reason they’re situated up on hills and hunkered down behind walls, and it’s not to catch the afternoon light and present an irresistible picture opp (although it certainly does).

Like other ancient regions around the world, attacking and pillaging the next town over was a local past time; how any of these places remain standing is beyond me.

As civilization has "progressed," our constant desire for other people’s resources has grown in scale. We’ve moved from walled towns to walled cities to nations to strategic alliances among nations formed by government and business leaders. No matter who we are and what we have, someone else always has something we want that we’re willing to kill and be killed for.

And of course, the US, just for old time’s sake, is building an actual wall again, hoping to keep out all those people not paying their "fair share" of taxes while at the same time, working undesirable jobs at artificially low salaries and no benefits and preventing us from paying the true higher cost of our food and services. Ha, we’ll show them.

So what I’m wondering is, and please, tell me what you think: Is a singular, global community such a bad thing? If we’re all in bed together economically and socially, perhaps sacrificing some local pride (tribalism?) along the way, and nobody’s killing anybody, isn’t that better?

Or are we, thanks to the success of capitalism, and because of the changing global climate, heading toward a world society not defined by the traditional national or racial boundaries, but by the claiming of favorable locations by the haves, more marginal areas by the have-a-littles, and the shitholes begrudgingly held by the have-nots?

At this point, someone will no doubt turn me onto a list of sci-fi novels that detailed this very thing decades ago.

But at least I’m caught up now(?)

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Gingrich on environmental elitism

By Dale Conour

Reading Salon’s interview with Newt Gingrich, on the publicity trail for his new book, "A Contract with the Earth," and there are plenty of ideas he’s passing along that sound worth pursuing (and plenty I’d take issue with). But right now I’m interested in his notion that environmentalism is for the rich, something I’ve heard voiced before:

You talked about how wealthier societies are more concerned about environmental issues. Citizens call for clean air and clean water when, as you say, they have enough to eat. But one of the side effects of wealth is, it seems, more carbon emissions.

If you had a hydrogen car and the French level of nuclear power production for electricity, you’d have a very high quality of life, great mobility, lots of electricity, and virtually no carbon-loading. You can create very advanced technological solutions that dramatically improve life in a way that’s better. The quality of air in California is better than it was 30 years ago. The quality of water in the country is better than it was 30 years ago. We have more species who have come back from the edge of extinction in the U.S. because of the wealth and the capacity to nurture that sort of effort.

Granted, I am a white yuppie (or as I’ve noted recently, smuppie (smug urban professional), since my wife and I own a Prius, but I’m going to put myself in the shoes, or sandals, or hell, maybe just bare feet, of someone living in a less privileged society (by our myopic standards). Maybe some native Brazilian living in the Amazon rainforest, but please, pick your own favorite "poor"  people and play along.

Ok, now it’s time for dinner. Me? I’m heading to Whole Foods, get me some of that good organic chicken, maybe, and mmmm, some organic, buttery-tasting Yukon Gold potatoes, some Blue Lake green beans. When I need water, where do I get it? Lucky me: right out of the tap, and it’s pretty darned clean, my tax dollars at work.

Our "poor" indigenous person? More likely to be living off the land, no? Growing his/her food right there in the soil. Maybe getting his/her food and water from a creek, maybe the river? Think it matters to him/her how healthy, fertile, nonpolluted, the local environs are?

Sure, Newt’s right: environmentalism is important only to the wealthy, and it’s a deft play by him to define it as a byproduct of unfettered capitalism. It is the environment, of course, that is the most important thing to everyone, particularly those closest to it.

But here’s the irony: Even if technology, employed as a tool of capitalism, did indeed bring us a healthier planet, would sitting in traffic in a hydrogen car make you feel any more fulfilled?

You tell me.

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Link:
Salon interview

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Walking the Via Flaminia

...What a visit to Italy got me thinking about #1

By Dale Conour

It’s hard to walk the Via Flaminia now. We made acquaintance with a bumpy, ankle-biting remnant of one of the Roman Empire’s major routes through Umbria, built more than 2,000 years ago. Its cobblestones rutted from the once steady passage of chariots, the stretch of Via Flaminia runs through a former thriving city now archaeological park, Carsulae. Founded in 220 BC, it’s now in ruins, surrendering to entropy as it inevitably loses its battle with nature.

I am trying to stay positive

(I am on vacation after all)

so this road’s enough of a metaphor for me,

with the American empire, the world’s great experiment (dalliance? shhhhh) in democracy, struggling along on its own great road.

Does it have to be the last days of fall, too, dead leaves littering the surrounding woods? And late afternoon, the sun abandoning the valley far below? And sure, why not:

a necropolis rising where the Via Flaminia departs the city’s boundary?

I am trying to stay positive, but I have to wonder: Did the Romans know they were experiencing the peak? Did they know, with Rome in all its glory, that the empire would one day be consigned to history,

beginning and end dates neatly logged, scripts written, roles assigned?

Did they realize, when they were trying to ward off the Goths, the Vandals,

who their real enemy was, and that time’s always on his side? If they did, would the same damned things still seem the most important?

(Even much of that great art was a byproduct of vanity and power—shhhhh.)

I’m trying to stay positive, but it’s hard not to think about the US as a country where the names of poets are never shouted out in the streets,

where friggin’ people crowd the luggage carousel at the airport,

and people fill the back windows of their cars with stuffed animal toys

(Sorry, I just hate that).

I’m trying to stay positive, because I’m thinking of the children, of the next generation. We need to turn things around for them. We need them to learn from us, to be different than us (Yeah right—shhhhh.)

I’m trying to stay positive, but even though the Via Flaminia is hard to walk,

it’s not hard to follow.

Link:
Carsulae information

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Principles: a child’s primer

By Dale Conour

Sometimes you might hear adults talk about principles. What are principles? Principles are ideas we have about what are right things to do and what are wrong things to do. Having principles makes us feel like we’re different, better even, than animals, who don’t think about how they live, they just want to live.

Where do we keep principles? Sometimes they live in our brains in our heads, helping us decide if what we’re doing or not doing, or someone else is doing or not doing, is right or wrong, but they’re too heavy to carry around all the time, so we keep them in different places.

We put principles in religious figures such as Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad, who are so big that there’s plenty of room for all of us to store whatever principles we want to have in them.

We put principles in historical figures like Paul Revere, and Ben Franklin, and John F. Kennedy Jr., who are dead, so it’s easy to use them however we want.

And we entrust them to our young people in the Armed Services, who sometimes die trying to carry those principles while fighting with people who we think don’t have the same principles as us. And sometimes these young people come back thinking they must have lost the principles somewhere along the way.

Principles are very important to us, but they are not the most important thing. People often think that money is more important than principles, for example, although different people have different ideas about how much money is more important. (Some people like to say that it’s not really a principle of yours until it costs you money to keep it.)

Sometimes when we’re scared, like right now in our country, feeling safe is more important than principles, so we let our leaders hide our country’s principles away somewhere

and, some day,
we think,
they’ll bring them back out.

And then we’ll be better than the animals again.

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Crossing the aisle

By Dale Conour

As an exasperated independent, I’d like to occasionally help build a bridge across the political aisle so we can start accomplishing some things. So every once in awhile I’d like to pass along any modest insights I may experience.

• Liberals, where you see conspiracies, conservatives see networking.
• US Evangelicals, the basic problem the rest of us have with you is that you seem to be taking advantage of democracy in order to undermine it. Have you considered just starting your own country, maybe just buying a chunk of the Great Basin? Oh, but I guess you may not need it for a long time anyway, so maybe you’ll want to consider something more short term, like leasing?
• Those in favor of going to war should go to war, and those who aren’t in favor get to stay home.
• If forming into a nation isn’t about helping each other out, then what’s the point?

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God in the mirror

By Dale Conour

The God-No God debate seems to be heating up, no? Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, pitchforks and torches in hand, are storming the holy gates. PBS is showing Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief, a BBC documentary on atheism shown in England several years ago.

(For Bay Arean's here's the July TV listings: Download jul07-tvlistings.pdf)

I came across a BBC interview with the director of "Disbelief," Richard Denton, from a few years ago in which he envokes Darwin:

"...When Darwin comes along I think he wrecks the case for religion because his theory undermines the most convincing reason for believing in God - God as the master-designer. Once you have realised that all living things can have the illusion of design without there being a designer then there's no reason for God."

It made me think of another quote of Darwin's I'd come across, in Wes Nisker's "Buddha's Nature":

"Why is thought—being a secretion of the brain—more wonderful than gravity [as] a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves."

And I've realized that awe of nature isn't the source of our need for "God" anyway; it's, like our evaluation of everything in the universe, rooted in our egos.

There is an incredible, ominscient, omnipotent, creator of this lovely sunset before me, the maker of all that we know...and he/she/whatever floats your boat loves me, he/she/whatever floats your boat  listens to me, he/she/whatever floats your boat dotes on me, he/she/whatever floats your boat  thinks I'm really something very special, and made all of life just for me.

But that's not all; no what's the most amazing thing, the most precious and wonderful thing about this super-cool being, the thing that makes me just love he/she/whatever floats your boat like crazy is:

He/she/whatever floats your boat is so much like me! My God believes what I believe, never contradicts me, lays out a way of life that's exactly the way I would do it. We watch the same television shows, read the same books.

God loves who I love, hates who I hate.

We could so pick out curtains together without any arguments at all!

...And to think that some religions look down on masturbation.

"The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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