This particular diatribe was written in 2004.
My El Valle neighbors drive the buses that deliver Forest Service fire crews to forest fires. Which is what they’ve been doing, quite successfully, for almost 20 years. This year, however, the first thing the Forest Service supervisor’s office tells my neighbors is that they have to have a DUNS number, an official number assigned by Dun and Bradstreet, before the business can be listed in the official Forest Service file of available contractors. OK, they call the toll-free number and are assigned a DUNS number. Then the Forest Service gives them a website address where they must register their business in a centralized system (a system run by the Department of Defense) that lists every contractor in the country who does business with the government.
My neighbors do not own a computer, have never used a computer, and certainly have never registered for anything, bought anything, or browsed for anything on the Internet. So I log onto the site for them, which takes 20 minutes to access on rural phone lines that urban, broadband users wouldn’t even deign to use. I should have known immediately what was in store when one of the first instructions on the site cautions me to save data so I can come back to it later. All in all, I “come back” to the site at least ten times as my neighbors and I struggle to find the information it requests on five different required forms: General Information; Goods and Services; Corporate Information; Financial Information; and Points of Contact.
All of these categories have pages of questions that request information on a marketing contact and alternate, sales contact and alternate, accounts receivable contact and alternate; financial institution, routing number, bank account number, bank contact, and e-mail address for direct deposit of checks; type of business; name and type of prior business, ad nauseam. If you don’t fill out every single line, with every single name, address, e-mail address, phone number, and alternate, the registration is incomplete. None of these categories allow a simple “Not Applicable” answer for those of us registering sole proprietor businesses with one employee: the bus driver. There are no sales, marketing and accounts receivable positions; there is no type of prior business or auxiliary business. And there is a healthy distrust of providing the government with a bank account number when for twenty years checks have been mailed to the post office or rural mailbox that has worked just fine.
When I finally realize just how long it is going to take me to finish this registration (besides the 20 minute wait to access the site, it takes at least 10 or 15 minutes to process the information in each category) I decide to find a computer with a broadband Internet connection. On a friend’s PowerBook the site informs me that some Macintosh computers do not allow access to this Department of Defense site because of certain security set-ups. Does this mean that the DOE suspects that Macintosh users are generally not good security risks, or that Macintosh designers decided that the DOE is not user friendly?
Meanwhile, my neighbors, and many of their bus driver friends who are also bogged down in this debilitating process, decide they do not want to provide the government with their bank account numbers. When I call up the Forest Service and tell them this, the clerk says, “Then they won’t get paid.” When I ask to speak to the supervisor, he says, “Believe me, I know some people don’t want to give out this information, but our hands are tied. This is a directive from Washington and we can’t do anything about it.” When I suggest that it might behoove the Forest Service to have a workshop for contractors who might be reluctant to supply some of this information, explain the procedure, and help them through the registration process, he says, “We barely have the staff capability to do our own work, much less theirs.” I ask for his boss’s number in Albuquerque, but she’s out of town.
Two weeks later I finally finish the registration. My neighbors and their friends figure out a way to supply the government bureaucracy with the financial information it demands without completely jeopardizing their privacy. The process leaves all of us a mess: the website technology staff that listens to complaints all day long from frustrated contractors; the Forest Service staff that listens to complaints all day long from frustrated contractors; the frustrated contractors who believe the process is a total waste of time and an invasion of their privacy; and me, the friend of the frustrated contractors whose blood boiled and guts churned over the insensitivity and complicity of the bureaucrats who designed this system that demands the entire world buy into technology that makes our lives more complicated, more anxious, and less our own. Welcome to the world of techno-fascism.
Solution: Businesses will answer phones with real people, not automated systems run by computers; all new software systems will be compatible with older versions so we may avoid spending the bulk of our time dealing with technological problems instead of the problems they were supposedly invented to address; no one will be required to conduct any kind of business or communication online. Instead, if we so desire, we will conduct business and communication face-to-face, or voice-to-voice, with people, not machines.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Hitchhiking
When I was in college I hitchhiked everywhere. It was 1968 and everyone hitchhiked everywhere. A friend and I hitched from Antioch, which is in south-central Ohio, to a wedding in Kansas. I hitched to work every day on my co-op job at a private elementary school in Berkeley. Another friend and I hitched a ride to San Francisco in an 18-wheeler when our Volkswagen bug died in northern California. We hitchhiked down to New York City from another co-op job in New Hampshire with a series of truck drivers.
I also picked up hitchhikers. I drove with one of my workmates at the New Hampshire job to Antioch one weekend to visit our friends there and we got the last tank of gas paid for by the student hitchhiker we picked up on the interstate. I picked up hippies with dogs, Okies, drunks, students, people with broken down cars, dueling couples, just about anybody. There were a few rules I tried to follow, both as a hitchhiker and a giver of rides. If I was driving by myself I always gave rides to women, almost always to male-female couples, and cautiously to single men or groups of men. I accepted rides from women, mixed gender groups, and tried to avoid single men. Sometimes, however, you couldn’t tell who was driving until they slowed down or stopped, and it was always a leap of faith to take the ride. You thought you could appraise the driver with a quick once over—older than a certain age, dressed beyond a certain style, and with a certain ambiguous look—were usually good indicators that you let this one drive by. But you never knew, really. The truck driver who picked us up in northern California had needle marks up and down his arms but insisted on taking us over the Golden Gate Bridge, down Van Ness to Market and then to the corner of 19th Street where our friends lived. “I wouldn’t want my kids stuck out on the highway.”
Now, everybody’s afraid to hitchhike and nobody wants to pick one up. The descent into this condition was gradual. After college I moved to a New Mexico village named Placitas and the hitchhiking culture was still viable there, for a time. But as the nature of the community changed from local Hispano land grant peppered with back to the land immigrants, to commuter suburb of Albuquerque, hitchhiking became reduced to picking up only those on the highway from the freeway to the village—still assuming no one who had business in Placitas could be bad, and finally, to only those you knew, who were few and far between because we’d all given it up.
Why did it become unsafe to hitchhike in Placitas? As a microcosm of society in general, one would think that the gentrification of the community would translate to the gentrification of hitchhiking. People with more money and better cars could pick up the less fortunate with impunity and deliver them with grace. Those of us still out on the road could trust those behind the wheel to provide a ride in style. Alas, it doesn’t work that way, of course. As we become more comfortable we become more afraid of those who don’t share our comfort. Those who are still not comfortable aren’t benign college students anymore (college students don’t hitchhike to demonstrations in Washington D.C.; the few who go fly) but those perceived to be the losers who haven’t bought into consumer culture to the extent necessary to avoid any kind of disruption or break down that necessitates hitchhiking. It’s a vicious cycle: the perception becomes reality as those of us who still haven’t completely bought in rarely have to look for a ride, and when we occasionally do, don’t bother hitchhiking because we know they aren’t going to pick us up. So the ones left out there on the highways are what Hank Williams called them, the ones from Life’s Other Side.
I recently picked up a hitchhiker, however, from Picuris Pueblo, hitching a ride from one small village to the next, and I was very glad I did. He asked me if I was coming to the buffalo dance at the pueblo the next day, and then he told me that he had danced in the previous day’s deer dance. He said it was such an overwhelming experience that he couldn’t remember much about it except who was dancing on his left and who was dancing on his right. He didn’t know if there were people watching, he didn’t know how long he danced, he only knew that he danced as a deer would dance and then he ran for his life as the hunters came after him for the kill. He had a big grin on his face throughout this whole story and I then I dropped him off at the post office, where he met another friend and got in his car for the next leg of his journey. The commuters rushing down the highway missed a great story, and missed the opportunity to remember that theirs is not the only way to live.
Solution: Car companies will discontinue the manufacture of any car that doesn’t run on four cylinders and the government will run van taxis, like they do in third world countries that stop and pick up all the people on the street who need a ride, for a minimal fee. They will also run the taxis out on the highways between cities and so there are no more hitchhikers, only passengers.
I also picked up hitchhikers. I drove with one of my workmates at the New Hampshire job to Antioch one weekend to visit our friends there and we got the last tank of gas paid for by the student hitchhiker we picked up on the interstate. I picked up hippies with dogs, Okies, drunks, students, people with broken down cars, dueling couples, just about anybody. There were a few rules I tried to follow, both as a hitchhiker and a giver of rides. If I was driving by myself I always gave rides to women, almost always to male-female couples, and cautiously to single men or groups of men. I accepted rides from women, mixed gender groups, and tried to avoid single men. Sometimes, however, you couldn’t tell who was driving until they slowed down or stopped, and it was always a leap of faith to take the ride. You thought you could appraise the driver with a quick once over—older than a certain age, dressed beyond a certain style, and with a certain ambiguous look—were usually good indicators that you let this one drive by. But you never knew, really. The truck driver who picked us up in northern California had needle marks up and down his arms but insisted on taking us over the Golden Gate Bridge, down Van Ness to Market and then to the corner of 19th Street where our friends lived. “I wouldn’t want my kids stuck out on the highway.”
Now, everybody’s afraid to hitchhike and nobody wants to pick one up. The descent into this condition was gradual. After college I moved to a New Mexico village named Placitas and the hitchhiking culture was still viable there, for a time. But as the nature of the community changed from local Hispano land grant peppered with back to the land immigrants, to commuter suburb of Albuquerque, hitchhiking became reduced to picking up only those on the highway from the freeway to the village—still assuming no one who had business in Placitas could be bad, and finally, to only those you knew, who were few and far between because we’d all given it up.
Why did it become unsafe to hitchhike in Placitas? As a microcosm of society in general, one would think that the gentrification of the community would translate to the gentrification of hitchhiking. People with more money and better cars could pick up the less fortunate with impunity and deliver them with grace. Those of us still out on the road could trust those behind the wheel to provide a ride in style. Alas, it doesn’t work that way, of course. As we become more comfortable we become more afraid of those who don’t share our comfort. Those who are still not comfortable aren’t benign college students anymore (college students don’t hitchhike to demonstrations in Washington D.C.; the few who go fly) but those perceived to be the losers who haven’t bought into consumer culture to the extent necessary to avoid any kind of disruption or break down that necessitates hitchhiking. It’s a vicious cycle: the perception becomes reality as those of us who still haven’t completely bought in rarely have to look for a ride, and when we occasionally do, don’t bother hitchhiking because we know they aren’t going to pick us up. So the ones left out there on the highways are what Hank Williams called them, the ones from Life’s Other Side.
I recently picked up a hitchhiker, however, from Picuris Pueblo, hitching a ride from one small village to the next, and I was very glad I did. He asked me if I was coming to the buffalo dance at the pueblo the next day, and then he told me that he had danced in the previous day’s deer dance. He said it was such an overwhelming experience that he couldn’t remember much about it except who was dancing on his left and who was dancing on his right. He didn’t know if there were people watching, he didn’t know how long he danced, he only knew that he danced as a deer would dance and then he ran for his life as the hunters came after him for the kill. He had a big grin on his face throughout this whole story and I then I dropped him off at the post office, where he met another friend and got in his car for the next leg of his journey. The commuters rushing down the highway missed a great story, and missed the opportunity to remember that theirs is not the only way to live.
Solution: Car companies will discontinue the manufacture of any car that doesn’t run on four cylinders and the government will run van taxis, like they do in third world countries that stop and pick up all the people on the street who need a ride, for a minimal fee. They will also run the taxis out on the highways between cities and so there are no more hitchhikers, only passengers.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Capitalism
“If civilization is to go no further than this, it had better not have gone so far: if it does not aim at getting rid of this misery and giving some share in the happiness and dignity of life to all the people that it has created . . . it is simply an organized injustice, a mere instrument for oppression, so much the worse than that which has gone before it, as its pretensions are higher, its slavery subtler, its mastery harder to overthrow, because supported by such a dense mass of commonplace wellbeing and comfort.”
William Morris wrote this in 1880. It could, of course, been written by any of us today. I read this quote of Morris, a British writer and social critic, in The Essential E.P. Thompson, and I’ve also read about Morris, as well as other writers, who railed against what capitalism and the industrial revolution were doing to the people and culture of 18th and 19th century Britain, in Raymond Williams’ book The Country and the City. Historians Williams and Thompson take a look at how the notion of cultural materialism enhances—or detracts from —Marxist economic theory. This is a subject that any of us who were active in the 20th century’s sixties revolution of consciousness had to deal with, whether we were conversant with the terminology “cultural materialism” or just knew, in our guts, that while we were intent on smashing an economic system we also had to be intent on smashing racism, sexism, homophobia, and hierarchy.
Now that it’s the 21st century, it’s both helpful and painful to read the comments of Morris or Samuel Taylor Coleridge or D.H Lawrence, who lament the losses associated with capitalism—the cultivation of our humanity—and its emphasis—the “forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.” It’s helpful, of course, because it binds us to these historical figures in a way that ensures a continuum of caring and activism. It’s painful in that we’re still, 200 years later, struggling against the same system that consigned the British laborer to the stultifying slums of London, the African slave to the plantations of American, and the Mexican peasant to las maquiladoras de la frontera.
The fact remains that neither Morris’ literary assault nor the Students for a Democratic Society’s physical assault on the imperial bastions of Britain and the U.S. have done much to rein in the “organized injustice” of capitalism. Its reach is now global, and threatens the last isolated societies that have somehow managed to maintain a semblance of communal or subsistence living. The one revolutionary society we have witnessed over the course of our lives – Cuba – will inevitably transition from its relative isolation and self-determination once Castro is gone. As soon as the U.S. lifts its embargo – which has caused enormous pain and suffering in that country – the exerted economic and political pressures may be too much for Cuba to withstand. Will its fate come down to a power struggle between the U.S. and Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela? It’s hard for most of us in this country to understand what is really happening in Venezuela; all we get are sound bites from the mainstream press and the occasional alternative reports that either glorify or criticize Chavez with a cynicism born of the history of too many Latino strongmen in too many countries with too many ties to empire.
So where does this leave us? The debate between revolutionary and evolutionary change that engaged us for so many years seems largely irrelevant. In his book After Theory Terry Eagleton reminds us “it is one thing to make a revolution, and another to sustain it. “ What is it about this country, established by revolution (elitist as it was) that created the notion of the rugged individualist, the mentality of “pulling oneself up by his or her bootstraps”, so pervasive and so ungovernable? In a pithy few sentences in Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs the mother says to her son, “You don’t identify with people worse off than you are. You make your deals, if you can, with those who have more, because you hope one day to have more yourself. Understand that, she claimed, and you understand America . . . “ Max Weber’s theory, of course, is that it’s the spillover of the individualistic Puritan ethic once the religious asceticism has escaped from the cage: “In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport,” i.e., competition. In his brilliant book Diary of A Bad Year, South African writer J.M. Coetzee, who now lives in Australia, reminds us that it is not just Americans who embrace this philosophy, it’s also true of Australians, who believe they live in a “no-class” society where “energy, hard work, and a belief in one’s self” make us all equal partners in the global market. “If we don’t compete, we will perish.” Americans still set the standard, however, and even European countries that many liberals look to as better models of how to achieve prosperity and enlightened social policies were part of the “coalition of the willing.”
I still believe there is a desire in humankind to live in societies that provide for everyone equally, but our lack of altruism, on any kind of organized level, and our admiration of the accumulation of money, which translates into success and power, are unabashed.
I find myself worrying about Malthusian disasters – mass starvation due to the complete loss of topsoil or the collapse of genetic diversity; global warming that melts the icebergs and raises the sea level whereby New York City and Los Angeles drop off into the ocean ¬– that leave those of us with access to clean water and land to grow food holding the proverbial bag. And it better not be a bag full of greed and competition and built-in obsolescence and material accumulation, or the cycle repeats itself again. I don’t really know if there is such a thing as progress (an upcoming blog called Progress/Enlightenment) but there has got to be a better way to ensure that all of us have access to our material, cultural, and spiritual needs.
William Morris wrote this in 1880. It could, of course, been written by any of us today. I read this quote of Morris, a British writer and social critic, in The Essential E.P. Thompson, and I’ve also read about Morris, as well as other writers, who railed against what capitalism and the industrial revolution were doing to the people and culture of 18th and 19th century Britain, in Raymond Williams’ book The Country and the City. Historians Williams and Thompson take a look at how the notion of cultural materialism enhances—or detracts from —Marxist economic theory. This is a subject that any of us who were active in the 20th century’s sixties revolution of consciousness had to deal with, whether we were conversant with the terminology “cultural materialism” or just knew, in our guts, that while we were intent on smashing an economic system we also had to be intent on smashing racism, sexism, homophobia, and hierarchy.
Now that it’s the 21st century, it’s both helpful and painful to read the comments of Morris or Samuel Taylor Coleridge or D.H Lawrence, who lament the losses associated with capitalism—the cultivation of our humanity—and its emphasis—the “forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.” It’s helpful, of course, because it binds us to these historical figures in a way that ensures a continuum of caring and activism. It’s painful in that we’re still, 200 years later, struggling against the same system that consigned the British laborer to the stultifying slums of London, the African slave to the plantations of American, and the Mexican peasant to las maquiladoras de la frontera.
The fact remains that neither Morris’ literary assault nor the Students for a Democratic Society’s physical assault on the imperial bastions of Britain and the U.S. have done much to rein in the “organized injustice” of capitalism. Its reach is now global, and threatens the last isolated societies that have somehow managed to maintain a semblance of communal or subsistence living. The one revolutionary society we have witnessed over the course of our lives – Cuba – will inevitably transition from its relative isolation and self-determination once Castro is gone. As soon as the U.S. lifts its embargo – which has caused enormous pain and suffering in that country – the exerted economic and political pressures may be too much for Cuba to withstand. Will its fate come down to a power struggle between the U.S. and Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela? It’s hard for most of us in this country to understand what is really happening in Venezuela; all we get are sound bites from the mainstream press and the occasional alternative reports that either glorify or criticize Chavez with a cynicism born of the history of too many Latino strongmen in too many countries with too many ties to empire.
So where does this leave us? The debate between revolutionary and evolutionary change that engaged us for so many years seems largely irrelevant. In his book After Theory Terry Eagleton reminds us “it is one thing to make a revolution, and another to sustain it. “ What is it about this country, established by revolution (elitist as it was) that created the notion of the rugged individualist, the mentality of “pulling oneself up by his or her bootstraps”, so pervasive and so ungovernable? In a pithy few sentences in Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs the mother says to her son, “You don’t identify with people worse off than you are. You make your deals, if you can, with those who have more, because you hope one day to have more yourself. Understand that, she claimed, and you understand America . . . “ Max Weber’s theory, of course, is that it’s the spillover of the individualistic Puritan ethic once the religious asceticism has escaped from the cage: “In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport,” i.e., competition. In his brilliant book Diary of A Bad Year, South African writer J.M. Coetzee, who now lives in Australia, reminds us that it is not just Americans who embrace this philosophy, it’s also true of Australians, who believe they live in a “no-class” society where “energy, hard work, and a belief in one’s self” make us all equal partners in the global market. “If we don’t compete, we will perish.” Americans still set the standard, however, and even European countries that many liberals look to as better models of how to achieve prosperity and enlightened social policies were part of the “coalition of the willing.”
I still believe there is a desire in humankind to live in societies that provide for everyone equally, but our lack of altruism, on any kind of organized level, and our admiration of the accumulation of money, which translates into success and power, are unabashed.
I find myself worrying about Malthusian disasters – mass starvation due to the complete loss of topsoil or the collapse of genetic diversity; global warming that melts the icebergs and raises the sea level whereby New York City and Los Angeles drop off into the ocean ¬– that leave those of us with access to clean water and land to grow food holding the proverbial bag. And it better not be a bag full of greed and competition and built-in obsolescence and material accumulation, or the cycle repeats itself again. I don’t really know if there is such a thing as progress (an upcoming blog called Progress/Enlightenment) but there has got to be a better way to ensure that all of us have access to our material, cultural, and spiritual needs.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Developers and Designers
When Santa Fe homeboy Tom Ford decided to build a monster house on top of a hill in Santa Fe, a hill that had already caused a ruckus between the city and the previous owners when they tried to build a different monster house, the powers that be rolled over and died. I guess Tom’s rationale, that he had to have a house big enough for his whole family to stay over, pulled at the heartstrings of the city councilors. They asked him to nip and tuck a little, here and there, which he graciously did, being the consummate designer that he is.
Tom Ford is the embodiment of two of the world’s worst professions: developers and fashion designers. Technically, he’s not a developer, he only hires them. His wealth underwrites their mad desires to build 15,000 square-foot what—mansions? manors? monstrosities? —you can’t really call them houses, that are the repositories of conspicuous consumption, from their Jacuzzis and indoor swimming pools to their stainless steel refrigerators and Wolf stoves. The ones who build mansions for clients like Tom Ford probably think they’re creating works of art. The ones who buy up vacant land and then subdivide it into gated communities so they can build many mansions at one time probably think they’re the engines that drive the economic machine. The Santa Fe city fathers (city fathers everywhere, actually) certainly think they are. The bottom line is always that without the construction industry the economy of the city will crash: not only will the workers be laid off, but all the lumber stores, the paint stores, the hardware stores, the glass stores, the plumbing supply stores, the electrical supply stores, the fixture stores, the appliance stores, ad nauseam, will go bankrupt. It’s as if nobody else already lives in the city and hires workers to restore, upgrade, and add onto houses already here and buys all the necessary stuff to do so at the lumber store, the paint store, hardware store, etc. There is no understanding that there is a difference between economic development and economic growth, that development means continued urban sprawl and expanded markets that eventually degrade the quality of city life. Managed growth is finding ways to enhance the opportunities for workers who want to increase their skill levels or find new jobs that contribute to the well-being of the communities. Sustainability is finding ways to create neighborhoods that allow people to work and shop near home and be less reliant on their cars, roads, and strip malls.
But who cares about all that? Certainly not Tom Ford. He only lives here part of the year anyway, and other than attending a city council meeting to defend his property wouldn’t be caught dead at a community meeting to discuss why the State Engineer’s Office is allowing the county to transfer almost 2,000 acre feet of water rights from Taos County to underwrite develop in the Pojoaque Valley (but that’s another story, saved for later). He’s too busy designing the clothes for all the other Santa Fe second home owners who only fly in to attend the opera or chamber music series and then jet back to their penthouses (those monstrosities actually have a designated name) on Fifth Avenue. Have you ever watched a New York or Paris fashion show on TV and seen what these guys like Tom Ford think women should wear? It’s enough to make you anorexic from throwing up. Not only would the majority of women in this country not be caught dead in these get-ups, I can’t imagine where the Fifth Avenue matrons actually wear this stuff. Actually, they don’t even wear it to the Santa Fe Opera, where the favorite mode of attire is tight-fitting jeans and sequined tank tops. Do they wear it to the grocery store to buy foi gras? Do they wear it to their toddlers’ $60,000 a year pre-schools when they go to pick them up (or do only chauffeurs do that?) Do they wear it to cocktail parties where they talk about bond trading and learning Spanish so they can communicate with their Salvadoran maid? I guess they must wear it to MOMA for openings. After all, it’s art too, que no? Jackson Pollack must be rolling over in his grave.
Solution: Turn Tom Ford’s business into a co-op, where the people who want to wear his clothes have to work in his sweatshops making them.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Every time our (former) illustrious senator Pete Domenici is quoted in the newspaper or appears on TV I am reminded of his legacy: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were developed and which today continues to poison our land, water, bodies and minds. Everyone knows this, including Domenici, but believes that our economy is so entrenched in LANL that any cutbacks or movement away from arms production would result in statewide economic collapse. (He finally decided not to run for re-election in 2008 because of a brain disease.)
What they fail to acknowledge, however, is that our economy is already collapsed for everyone except the few hundred LANL scientists who live on “the hill” and get paid big bucks to pollute our lives and endanger the world. The rest of New Mexico – particularly northern New Mexico – continues to garner all kinds of claim to fame: highest teen age pregnancy rates; highest per capita heroin overdoses; highest per capita alcohol related deaths; highest poverty rates; worst paid teachers; etc., etc. An announcement by the Lab, after it renewed its management contract with the University of California and Bechtel, is illustrative of the disparity it helps engender. Of the new 20 division managers named under a new administrator, not one has a Spanish surname. The Hispano people of northern New Mexico, who are the majority population, are LANL lackeys: they are the technicians, if they’re lucky, and the grunt workers, if they’re not. Two of my neighbors in the tiny village of El Valle get up every morning at five o’clock to drive the hour and a half to the lab where they are outside maintenance workers, freezing their butts off in the winter and sweating in the overgrown forests they thin all summer.
The rest of us live with the consequences. What those consequences are became abundantly clear during the Cerro Grande fire in 2000. What started as a forest fire in the neighboring Bandelier National Monument (actually a prescribed burn that got out of control), the fire ignited the tinder dry, overgrown ponderosa pine forests that surround the town of Los Alamos, home to the Lab. The Los Alamos site, formally Hispano land grant settlements and Native American hunting grounds on the Pajarito Plateau in the Jemez Mountains, was requisitioned by the federal government during World War II to develop the bomb in relative obscurity. During the cold war, the town of Los Alamos grew up to support the burgeoning bomb machine that ultimately became Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hastily constructed barracks provided instant housing for the scientists and their support crew (although most of the workers continue to live in the valleys surrounding the Lab in their traditional communities). Over the years, more suburban style housing became available, but was primarily frame and flimsy. When the Cerro Grande fire roared through town, it destroyed over 400 of these houses and apartments and then began burning lab facilities, storage pits, and contaminated canyons. Directly downwind, in El Valle and neighboring villages, the sky darkened and irradiated ash fell on our houses and fields. Those who could afford to leave fled: Mark took our son to Colorado to stay at my sister’s while I remained at home to take care of the animals, closing myself into the house as much as possible. Communities like Chimayo suffered under a constant cloud of smoke and many folks had to leave for weeks in order to breathe.
While the Cerro Grande fire brought the dangers of the lab literally into our homes and yards, we’ve all known for years that the Department of Energy has never enforced adequate protections. Radioactive waste has been dumped into canyons, contaminating groundwater and vegetation. Open incinerators have sent radioactivity into the air for us to breathe. For the past several years the Lab has been constantly in the news, as workers have been accused of security lapses, secret files have disappeared, funds have been misappropriated, worker morale has sunk to a new low, and the disparity of pay has been exposed. To address all these concerns, the Department of Energy renewed the lab’s management contract with the University of California, in partnership with the private weapons manufacturer Bechtel to make sure that these problems will continue to be swept under the carpet with corporate efficiency. Under this management, the Lab has been given the go ahead to start producing plutonium triggers (although it remains to be seen how many will be built) for nuclear bombs, work formerly done at Rocky Flats in Colorado, which was shut down and declared a Superfund site because of the contamination this work produced.
I often think that all of us who are activists involved in the many struggles we deal with in New Mexico—poverty, immigrant rights, resource protection, land grants, acequia advocacy—should probably all refocus our energies to shut-down the Lab. It is our most fundamental problem and the source of worldwide grief and suffering. It is an abomination.
Solution: Prohibit any weapons research and development and dedicate the Lab to environmental remediation and alternative energy development.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
About This Blog
It was November 17, 2005 and I sat watching the news about the debate in the U.S. Congress over torture in a state of shock. I always knew the American government trained others to torture at the School of the Americas, and that the CIA had secret prisons all over the world. I knew, as Naomi Klein says in her book, The Shock Doctrine, “Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain ‘indicator species’ of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.” But the fact that there was a public discussion on national network news about whether the CIA should be exempt from the Geneva Convention rules of prohibition was more than I could process.
After I cried awhile, I went over to lower the curtains and discovered, on our tomato plant sunning in the south window, a perfect tomato: round, bright red, barely soft to the touch, the repository of everything we deem beautiful and “good” in our universe. The dialectic of this tomato’s relationship to torture expresses the dilemma of our daily lives. How does one live in the world we have created that embodies water boarding and the wonder and potential of a perfect tomato?
Suddenly, at 55, I found myself unable to navigate this terrain. While I am, by nature (the nature/nurture argument will be explored in due time), endowed with a personality that has kept me relatively calm and grounded over the course of my life—a life, like that of anyone else, filled with doses of success, disappointment, struggle, and happiness—I have previously suffered depression. In my early-twenties, after dropping out of college and moving to a funky airstream trailer in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was ready to admit defeat and buy a ticket to oblivion. I gained weight, I drank too much beer and tequila, and I brought home strangers from Okies, Albuquerque’s hippie/student bar, to try to assuage my loneliness. I wasn’t on the course I’d set for myself as a believer in achievement, both personal and political, and therefore I, and the sixties revolution of consciousness, had no future.
Over the course of the next 30 years I of course learned that there is no penultimate achievement where we do or we don’t arrive, personally or politically. But there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. Personally, I built an entire house from scratch and made another livable. I bore two children who gave me enormous pleasure and a modicum of pain. I sustained a relationship with a life partner for 30 years, also with enormous pleasure and, I have to admit, more than a modicum of pain. Politically, I have been as true as I know how to be in disengaging from consumer culture and engaging in community efforts to smash the power elite. We knew the elite were vulnerable when the Cuban revolutionaries threw out Batista and embarked on a journey that revealed its own fits and starts, successes and failures.
But now, try as I might to not measure, I continually lose ground and I lose faith. The enormity of what is wrong in the world becomes the enormity of my daily life. Because I’m a writer, I find myself making copious lists of everything that has brought me to this impasse, with the idea of dissecting it, revealing it, indicting it, for some undefined audience that might actually listen and ultimately be moved by me. What that possibly can do to help me lift the daily burden is beside the point. Like the thousands of bloggers who have found voice on the Internet, I need the process of venting and the real or imaginary solidarity it elicits.
The list (begun in 2005 and continuing today) is in no particular order other than the assault of a particular day. It is sometimes local in specificity but always global in application. It comes via all my senses: my eyes that read it on the computer screen or see it on TV; my ears that hear it on the radio and in many conversations I have with friends and acquaintances; and my gut, where everything gets churned up and viscerally spit out. It is all within the framework that Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, sees as “the process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of never-ending accumulation of capital.” I started this list before I read J. M. Coetzee’s book, Diary of a Bad Year, but when I saw the explanation he gives for writing his great complaint, I knew I had mine: “An opportunity to grumble in public, an opportunity to take magic revenge on the world for declining to conform to my fantasies: how could I refuse?”
My younger son told me no one would read this book (or whatever it is), with its list of depressing evils, unless I offer some sort of solution (he calls me a hopeless communist). Of course, there is no fundamental solution other than smashing the system – and by system I mean the economic, political, and cultural one that denies our humanity – but I have added as a last sentence to some of the blogs, something that might be done to perhaps move us along towards that goal. The rest of them just have to remain as is.
After I cried awhile, I went over to lower the curtains and discovered, on our tomato plant sunning in the south window, a perfect tomato: round, bright red, barely soft to the touch, the repository of everything we deem beautiful and “good” in our universe. The dialectic of this tomato’s relationship to torture expresses the dilemma of our daily lives. How does one live in the world we have created that embodies water boarding and the wonder and potential of a perfect tomato?
Suddenly, at 55, I found myself unable to navigate this terrain. While I am, by nature (the nature/nurture argument will be explored in due time), endowed with a personality that has kept me relatively calm and grounded over the course of my life—a life, like that of anyone else, filled with doses of success, disappointment, struggle, and happiness—I have previously suffered depression. In my early-twenties, after dropping out of college and moving to a funky airstream trailer in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was ready to admit defeat and buy a ticket to oblivion. I gained weight, I drank too much beer and tequila, and I brought home strangers from Okies, Albuquerque’s hippie/student bar, to try to assuage my loneliness. I wasn’t on the course I’d set for myself as a believer in achievement, both personal and political, and therefore I, and the sixties revolution of consciousness, had no future.
Over the course of the next 30 years I of course learned that there is no penultimate achievement where we do or we don’t arrive, personally or politically. But there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. Personally, I built an entire house from scratch and made another livable. I bore two children who gave me enormous pleasure and a modicum of pain. I sustained a relationship with a life partner for 30 years, also with enormous pleasure and, I have to admit, more than a modicum of pain. Politically, I have been as true as I know how to be in disengaging from consumer culture and engaging in community efforts to smash the power elite. We knew the elite were vulnerable when the Cuban revolutionaries threw out Batista and embarked on a journey that revealed its own fits and starts, successes and failures.
But now, try as I might to not measure, I continually lose ground and I lose faith. The enormity of what is wrong in the world becomes the enormity of my daily life. Because I’m a writer, I find myself making copious lists of everything that has brought me to this impasse, with the idea of dissecting it, revealing it, indicting it, for some undefined audience that might actually listen and ultimately be moved by me. What that possibly can do to help me lift the daily burden is beside the point. Like the thousands of bloggers who have found voice on the Internet, I need the process of venting and the real or imaginary solidarity it elicits.
The list (begun in 2005 and continuing today) is in no particular order other than the assault of a particular day. It is sometimes local in specificity but always global in application. It comes via all my senses: my eyes that read it on the computer screen or see it on TV; my ears that hear it on the radio and in many conversations I have with friends and acquaintances; and my gut, where everything gets churned up and viscerally spit out. It is all within the framework that Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, sees as “the process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of never-ending accumulation of capital.” I started this list before I read J. M. Coetzee’s book, Diary of a Bad Year, but when I saw the explanation he gives for writing his great complaint, I knew I had mine: “An opportunity to grumble in public, an opportunity to take magic revenge on the world for declining to conform to my fantasies: how could I refuse?”
My younger son told me no one would read this book (or whatever it is), with its list of depressing evils, unless I offer some sort of solution (he calls me a hopeless communist). Of course, there is no fundamental solution other than smashing the system – and by system I mean the economic, political, and cultural one that denies our humanity – but I have added as a last sentence to some of the blogs, something that might be done to perhaps move us along towards that goal. The rest of them just have to remain as is.
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