I sat in a room all day yesterday with white men in suits, and I’ll tell you, I can’t take it anymore. On my way home in the car I rolled down the windows, turned Aretha on full blast, and stopped for an Oreo ice cream bar to cleanse my soul and restore my sanity, or what’s left of it.
My poor compañera, the director of the anti-nuclear community group whose board I sit on, had to be in the same room with these white men in suits for two weeks straight while they bickered over the hazardous waste permit the state will be issuing to Los Alamos National Laboratory. How has it come to this, that these white men in suits can tell us it’s OK to burn chemical waste in the open air to rain down into our soil and water? How can they deny their fiduciary responsibility to clean up the mess they’ve made making bombs? How can they insist that their monitoring wells that have numerous structural problems can adequately tell if our aquifers are being contaminated?
Of course, I’ve also sat in many rooms with white guys in green uniforms telling me it’s OK to use herbicides on noxious weeds in the forest, that acequias need to get special permission from them—our friend the Forest Service—to work on our headgates or diversion dams even though the acequias predate them, and that ski area expansion are good because they provide jobs.
These white guys in suits and green uniforms are the professionals. Just because they’ve built enough bombs over the past 55 years to blow up the world a thousand times over and clearcut enough forests and suppressed so many forest fires that we now live in a tinder box waiting for catastrophic fire to burn us to smithereens doesn’t mean we have the right to question their authority or judgment. I can see it in the paternalistic roll of their eyes when we (brown people, women, white men in jeans) sit across the table from them, meaning, oh Christ, here we go again, what a waste of time this is when we know we’re going to go ahead as planned. They’re thinking, these people just don’t get it, they don’t live in the real world, while we’re thinking, these guys have created a world no one in their right mind would want to live in.
It’s a perpetual impasse, of course. It’s nothing new. It’s just the consequences are now so enormous and we all know they’re so enormous that apparently it renders us helpless. That’s not really a fair analysis, but that’s how it seems sometimes. Is our postmodern world so fragmented, so transient, ambiguous, and fetishized that we can’t figure out how to take unified action because we can’t figure out who the enemy is? Capitalism? Consumerism? Neo-conservatives? Religious right? (Unrepentant Marxist that I am I think it’s all about capitalism.) Arundhati Roy talks about this dilemma often in her activism—“To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible”—but hopes that we can all take on our individual, localized battles that remain connected to each other despite the power elite’s attempt to identify our common ground as the market place.
Occasionally there are signs of hope. Everyone is down in Bolivia right now at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, where President Evo Morales, who never wears a suit, said to the crowd, “Death to Capitalism!” Of course, some of his own people are concurrently demonstrating in the streets of San Cristóbal against the continued mining of silver by a Japanese corporation, the capitalist signifier of Bolivia’s colonial history, He has a tough row to hoe, figuring out how to nationalize foreign industries to benefit Bolivians while at the same time function in a global economy where capital accumulation continues to define how business is done. But apparently Bolivians have figured out who the enemy is and aren’t afraid to remind their fearless leader when they think he has forgotten. So keep wearing those brightly colored woven shirts and wool sweaters, Señor Morales, to keep our hopes close to your heart.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Self Image
I am completely schizophrenic when it comes to my self-image. I hate having my picture taken because I hate the way I look: long nose, thin mouth, chicken neck and all. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I were just a little better looking I wouldn’t have to worry so much about it and could focus on being a better person (just like Madonna and Angelina Jolie—not!).
Yet at the same time I find myself outraged that anyone would dare judge me on my looks and I plow ahead through the forcefulness of my personality to do what I want, say what I want, and expect results. I rarely let anyone get away with anything against what I think I can effect. If, as society has conditioned us to think, our physical appearance matters as much or more than our character, where does this chutzpa come from? I recently came across this passage in a Joanna Trollope book: “I do not long for beauty, she told herself resolutely in the glass in the hall coat stand, but I do require some significance. I am not in any way ready or prepared to be rubbed out. I do not agree—or submit—to being invisible merely because my outward self, lacking the required drama for contemporary life, gives no indication of what is going on inside.”
My mother always thought I was wonderful and could do no wrong, but my father, who was emotionally crippled, belittled me (and my mother and my two sisters) about my appearance and behavior but bragged about my supposed IQ. He insisted that somehow he’d gotten the results of the IQ tests they’d administered to my sisters and me at school and that they were grand. I knew I wasn’t particularly brainy, just that I had to do well in school to get my ticket out of Colorado Springs into some less provincial world where I’d be a “professional,” whatever that meant. In the meantime, I had to deal with a plain face sometimes broken out with acne that would never land me a spot on the cheerleading squad or a position in school government. Of course, I was always disdainful of these social networks and longed to be one of the jet setters, which is what we called the kids who were just beginning to become the potheads and day trippers of the late sixties and early seventies whom I would join in college.
Was this disdain sour grapes or was I somehow able, from a very young age, to see through the crap and know what to value? My parents helped me along this path by joining the Unitarian Church (she’d been raised an assimilated Jew, he a Methodist, and neither were believers) where LRY (liberal religious youth) turned me on to sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. And I didn’t have to wait too long after high school to see what happened to the cheerleaders and student council members who got married young, divorced young, and stayed, as the Dixie Chicks sing, “in the same zip codes where their parents live” (in other words, banal suburbia).
Of course, not many better things happened to many of the pot smoking, LSD dropping jet setters I emulated. Some over dosed, some ended up in dead end jobs, and some eventually found God. I ended up dropping out of college, never even getting a bachelor’s degree, and never becoming a “professional.”
So what did I become and how did I become so full of it? I became not so much something but an amalgam of some things: a house builder, a gardener, a writer, a partner, a mother, a community activist, a publisher, an acequia commissioner, and a buen vecino in a tiny little village in northern New Mexico. In other words, I learned how to get along with lots of kinds of people, how to sustain relationships, and how to fend for myself. It was an attempt to be whole in the postmodern world increasingly fragmented by specialized work and paying someone else to take care of your necessities. Becoming whole builds assurance, and so I acquired mine. Or at least enough to weather being relatively poor and anonymous except within a small circle of those folks I care about. I’m never going to publish a best selling novel and I’m never going to get a humanitarian award for devoting my life to a cause. But I figured out a way to live with the choices I made, which in and of themselves define my character: kind of schizophrenic, but defiantly so.
Yet at the same time I find myself outraged that anyone would dare judge me on my looks and I plow ahead through the forcefulness of my personality to do what I want, say what I want, and expect results. I rarely let anyone get away with anything against what I think I can effect. If, as society has conditioned us to think, our physical appearance matters as much or more than our character, where does this chutzpa come from? I recently came across this passage in a Joanna Trollope book: “I do not long for beauty, she told herself resolutely in the glass in the hall coat stand, but I do require some significance. I am not in any way ready or prepared to be rubbed out. I do not agree—or submit—to being invisible merely because my outward self, lacking the required drama for contemporary life, gives no indication of what is going on inside.”
My mother always thought I was wonderful and could do no wrong, but my father, who was emotionally crippled, belittled me (and my mother and my two sisters) about my appearance and behavior but bragged about my supposed IQ. He insisted that somehow he’d gotten the results of the IQ tests they’d administered to my sisters and me at school and that they were grand. I knew I wasn’t particularly brainy, just that I had to do well in school to get my ticket out of Colorado Springs into some less provincial world where I’d be a “professional,” whatever that meant. In the meantime, I had to deal with a plain face sometimes broken out with acne that would never land me a spot on the cheerleading squad or a position in school government. Of course, I was always disdainful of these social networks and longed to be one of the jet setters, which is what we called the kids who were just beginning to become the potheads and day trippers of the late sixties and early seventies whom I would join in college.
Was this disdain sour grapes or was I somehow able, from a very young age, to see through the crap and know what to value? My parents helped me along this path by joining the Unitarian Church (she’d been raised an assimilated Jew, he a Methodist, and neither were believers) where LRY (liberal religious youth) turned me on to sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. And I didn’t have to wait too long after high school to see what happened to the cheerleaders and student council members who got married young, divorced young, and stayed, as the Dixie Chicks sing, “in the same zip codes where their parents live” (in other words, banal suburbia).
Of course, not many better things happened to many of the pot smoking, LSD dropping jet setters I emulated. Some over dosed, some ended up in dead end jobs, and some eventually found God. I ended up dropping out of college, never even getting a bachelor’s degree, and never becoming a “professional.”
So what did I become and how did I become so full of it? I became not so much something but an amalgam of some things: a house builder, a gardener, a writer, a partner, a mother, a community activist, a publisher, an acequia commissioner, and a buen vecino in a tiny little village in northern New Mexico. In other words, I learned how to get along with lots of kinds of people, how to sustain relationships, and how to fend for myself. It was an attempt to be whole in the postmodern world increasingly fragmented by specialized work and paying someone else to take care of your necessities. Becoming whole builds assurance, and so I acquired mine. Or at least enough to weather being relatively poor and anonymous except within a small circle of those folks I care about. I’m never going to publish a best selling novel and I’m never going to get a humanitarian award for devoting my life to a cause. But I figured out a way to live with the choices I made, which in and of themselves define my character: kind of schizophrenic, but defiantly so.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Global Domination
The day after I posted my Electoral Politics blog the local newspaper ran a column by conservative pundit Rich Lowry, in which he tells Barack Obama he should be “insulted” by getting the Nobel Peace Prize because it means he agrees with the Nobel Committee that America needs to be put in its place as a member of the world team, not its dominating leader: “The apologies for his country, the embrace of the U.N., the ridiculous talk of global disarmament, the distance from Israel and kid gloves for Iran, the slaps at American hegemony—are all the stuff of shame-faced American weakness and retrenchment, uttered by the most powerful American on the planet.” Another conservative, this time the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said that his nomination was proof that “the Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control.”
Obama wants this? Never. The “international” and domestic leftists? Yes, yes and yes! It’s hard not to read these guys with a certain amount of incredulity — do they actually believe this stuff they write — until you remember that they rule the world. George II liked to talk about invading Iraq to spread Democracy, with a capital D, to the rest of the impoverished world. Even if pundits actually use words like “hegemony,” they still cop to Bush’s excuse for this global domination: that because we’re a so-called democracy and our standard of living is the highest in the world, it’s our moral obligation to spread this largess and allow capitalism to bring everyone into the twenty-first century.
Hannah Arendt, in Imperialism, explains perfectly the real reason for our push for global domination:
"Since power is essentially only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete security reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through process of power accumulation can it remain stable. Hobbes’s Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with new props from outside; otherwise it would collapse overnight into the aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang. , , , [The] ever-present possibility of war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power at the expense of other states."
Globalization is changing the face of imperialism but not its basic function, the spread of capitalist accumulation. In his book, The New Imperialism, David Harvey talks about how imperialism has changed from nationalistic control over foreign territory (Britain in India, France in Algeria, etc.) to an economic imperialism based on production and finance (oil and Wall Street). The success of the U.S. in this new age of imperialism is what Lowry and his ilk are defending, of course. As Harvey explains it, “From the late nineteenth century onwards, the US gradually learned to mask the explicitness of territorial gains and occupations under the mask of a spaceless universalization of its own values, buried within a rhetoric that was ultimately to culminate . . . in what came to be known as ‘globalization.” Therefore, Wall Street/Treasury/IMF, all one thing, can do no wrong in opening up capital globalization, by whatever means necessary, because it is simply spreading our democratic values and standard of living to all those poor countries who resources would just be sitting there without benefit to anyone without our intervention.
What the U.S. failed to anticipate is that if financialization is the key to accumulating more power, as Arendt talks about, and if our internal and external deficits, largely held in Asia, continue to skyrocket, then we may just find our hegemony “slapped upside the head” by China. To come back to Lowry’s complaint, it makes perfect sense for us to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, to threaten to invade Iran, to refuse to reduce our nuclear arsenal, and to arm Israel to the teeth when that may be all we’ve got left: our military prowess, our “exploitative domination,” as Harvey calls it. So in our fight to the finish with China to maintain global domination we’ll just keep sending those soldiers to protect the world from “terrorism” and bring those infidels into the twenty-first century. It’s reminiscent of Marie Antoinette: let our schools continue to fail our students, let our transportation systems crumble, let the global corporations drill for oil on all those offshore shelves, and let the insurance companies make a profit from our ill health. In other words, let civil society be damned as long as those in power can continue to acquire more power.
Solution: Off with their heads!
Obama wants this? Never. The “international” and domestic leftists? Yes, yes and yes! It’s hard not to read these guys with a certain amount of incredulity — do they actually believe this stuff they write — until you remember that they rule the world. George II liked to talk about invading Iraq to spread Democracy, with a capital D, to the rest of the impoverished world. Even if pundits actually use words like “hegemony,” they still cop to Bush’s excuse for this global domination: that because we’re a so-called democracy and our standard of living is the highest in the world, it’s our moral obligation to spread this largess and allow capitalism to bring everyone into the twenty-first century.
Hannah Arendt, in Imperialism, explains perfectly the real reason for our push for global domination:
"Since power is essentially only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete security reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through process of power accumulation can it remain stable. Hobbes’s Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with new props from outside; otherwise it would collapse overnight into the aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang. , , , [The] ever-present possibility of war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power at the expense of other states."
Globalization is changing the face of imperialism but not its basic function, the spread of capitalist accumulation. In his book, The New Imperialism, David Harvey talks about how imperialism has changed from nationalistic control over foreign territory (Britain in India, France in Algeria, etc.) to an economic imperialism based on production and finance (oil and Wall Street). The success of the U.S. in this new age of imperialism is what Lowry and his ilk are defending, of course. As Harvey explains it, “From the late nineteenth century onwards, the US gradually learned to mask the explicitness of territorial gains and occupations under the mask of a spaceless universalization of its own values, buried within a rhetoric that was ultimately to culminate . . . in what came to be known as ‘globalization.” Therefore, Wall Street/Treasury/IMF, all one thing, can do no wrong in opening up capital globalization, by whatever means necessary, because it is simply spreading our democratic values and standard of living to all those poor countries who resources would just be sitting there without benefit to anyone without our intervention.
What the U.S. failed to anticipate is that if financialization is the key to accumulating more power, as Arendt talks about, and if our internal and external deficits, largely held in Asia, continue to skyrocket, then we may just find our hegemony “slapped upside the head” by China. To come back to Lowry’s complaint, it makes perfect sense for us to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, to threaten to invade Iran, to refuse to reduce our nuclear arsenal, and to arm Israel to the teeth when that may be all we’ve got left: our military prowess, our “exploitative domination,” as Harvey calls it. So in our fight to the finish with China to maintain global domination we’ll just keep sending those soldiers to protect the world from “terrorism” and bring those infidels into the twenty-first century. It’s reminiscent of Marie Antoinette: let our schools continue to fail our students, let our transportation systems crumble, let the global corporations drill for oil on all those offshore shelves, and let the insurance companies make a profit from our ill health. In other words, let civil society be damned as long as those in power can continue to acquire more power.
Solution: Off with their heads!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
