Mark and I always manage to have a Seder at Passover with whoever happens to be around and interested in attending: non-Jewish neighbors, Jewish friends from Santa Fe, family from New York, etc. One year, our friend Lisa, a Jew from Washington D.C., who was at the time living in a small Hispano village across the Rio Grande from us, decided to have a Seder and invite all her Catholic neighbors. We downloaded a liberation Haggadah from the Internet and went over to Servilleta Plaza to celebrate Passover in Lisa’s run down adobe house. Besides being the only Jews there except for Lisa and her mother, who was visiting from D.C., we were the only gringos as well. Everyone crowded into the large kitchen while we went through the ceremony and took turns reading the passages from the Haggadah before digging into a scrumptious meal of lamb, matzo ball soup, and frijoles. When it got dark we lit a bonfire outside, told stories and danced.
Mark and I also attend Catholic mass in El Valle, on Christmas and special occasions, and at funerals (or rosaries, where the penitentes sing on their knees in front of the alter). I’m not sure anyone in the village even knows we’re Jews, but they don’t care what we are as long as we come to show our neighborliness and respect for their religion and culture.
That being said, I truly hate organized religion. I hate the fact that certain friends find it necessary to “rediscover” their “spiritual” life (particularly after they become parents) that gets all tangled up in some form of religion, usually the one they grew up in, or sometimes, one they find more “liberating.” Religion is not liberating: it is suffocating. It is about taking on faith certain precepts that have nothing to do with liberation or freedom or goodness. It is about believing stories that were devised to control people by keeping them ignorant and disenfranchised. And it is about fomenting hate and intolerance. According to Voltaire: “Papist fanatics, Calvinist fanatics, all are moulded from the same sh . . . , and soaked in corrupted blood.”
This is the promo for a new video game:
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to
remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of
the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech
military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of
New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a
military mission – to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state –
especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct
physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with
extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose:
you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose
creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.
Actually, they’ve got it wrong when they target “moderate, mainstream Christians” because they’re just as insidious. This is author Sam Harris in his book The End of Religion, who is unafraid to state the obvious (although a certain political naiveté shortchanges the impact of the book):
“The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. . . . Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The test themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. . . . Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. . . . Moderates do not want to kill anybody in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about.”
My son Jakob, who worked in Evansville, Indiana as a photojournalism intern, told us about the church on every corner and even attended some of them to get a feel for what Midwest culture is really like. At the last one he went to, a middle-class mainstream Christian denomination that houses thousands of worshipers every Sunday, the minister’s sermon was singing a dirge for the church’s younger generation, who were not attending services with their parents and apparently showed little inclination in becoming members. So there is still hope, that the next generation, which already embraces a much more culturally inclusive lifestyle that bends gender and class rules, will eschew the trappings of organized religion and celebrate their spiritual lives through their acceptance and celebration of all human diversity.
Solution: Give all churches to their respective communities to be run as halfway houses, homeless shelters and training centers, domestic violence retreats, and dancehalls.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
Some Things are Relative
When George Bush became president of the United States for the second time I remember lying on the floor in front of the TV sobbing uncontrollably. The wave of despair and misery that washed over me was palpable, even though I knew my life would go on, at least externally, in pretty much the same fashion as before. I would continue to live on my 10 acres in El Valle and irrigate my garden, orchard, and fields. I would continue to publish and edit La Jicarita News with my partner Mark, where we could pretty much print anything we wanted. Our kids would continue to attend public school and the college of their choice and pretty much say anything they wanted. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran, I read a profile of a young Iranian writer who described sitting in his room in despair, holding his head in his hands. His life, already in a state of precariousness, would certainly not go on as before. If he continued to write what he wanted to write, he would probably end up in jail. If he continued to associate with those who believed in a secular, democratic Iran, he would probably end up in jail. And if his girlfriend continued to refuse to wear a jihib, she might be whipped or end up in jail.
His suffering is more profound. My suffering is complicated by my privilege. It is only because of where I live that I have the leisure and capacity to be writing this attempt to deal with what makes me suffer, the dichotomy of the tomato in the global society. While I struggle to reconcile my faith in the Marxist analysis of capitalism with a more postmodern, unhistorical exploration of how cultural conditions figure into the equation, the student in Iran is still very much aware of a systematic, historical process that controls and dominates his life, leaving not much room for worrying about how to appreciate the tomato.
Those of us who live in privileged American society, which is responsible for much of the oppression in places like Iran, seem incapable of figuring out how to smash the power elite after losing the will of the sixties and early seventies, when the political system seemed vulnerable, at least momentarily. Michel Foucault gave up the barricades for the San Francisco bathhouses and Abbie Hoffman killed himself. A young friend of mine, who is in her late twenties and graduated from Antioch, where I also went to college, doesn’t like to hear my stories of the sixties. My best one, about the time in Berkeley the cops surrounded our house with a swat team, looking for a fellow Antioch student who was on the run after being arrested in Cambridge at an anti-war demonstration and tying up the sheriff on Telegraph Hill when he tried to arrest him, bores her silly. She bristles when we complain about the lack of young people out in the streets protesting the invasion of Iraq or the prison at Guantanamo Bay. She says demonstrations are useless, that the mainstream media subverts the intent by refusing to cover them.
But then, after a month of student and worker riots in the streets of France the government capitulates and rescinds the law that caused the riots in the first place (a labor law that would allow employers to fire workers younger than 25 without cause). It took ten years of demonstrating in the streets of the U.S. before this country pulled out of Vietnam (and it’s debatable how much of our withdrawal was due to political unrest at home, see the Civil Disobedience blog) and millions of demonstrators in the streets of all the major cities didn’t deter George Bush from invading Iraq. Why did the French government respond so quickly to its student uprising? In France labor unions remain strong and viable and a force to be reckoned with, while here in the states the unions have largely been emasculated, through a calculated campaign by the power elite and because of internecine fighting and corruption in the unions themselves. So not only are we ignored in the streets, we have no organizations with any political clout that can actually threaten the status quo of the government. Our privilege extends only as far as the marketplace: We have the power to consume but lack the power to change anything. I can write and speak out about whatever I want but my words effect nothing. Internet blogs can appear on our computer screens in a blink of an eye but we can’t stop the bombing in Iraq and we can’t make sure no person goes to bed hungry.
A lot of us spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how this has happened and what we can do about it. That doesn’t stop us from continuing our own struggles that manifest in a million different ways, but it’s obviously not enough and periodically it results in the malaise that I am now struggling with. But, as the Mexican immigrants who took to the streets during the last election to agitate for immigration reform, like to remind us, “Si se puede”—if only fleetingly, if only temporarily, if only in the alleviation of the suffering of a few at the hands of many.
Solution: Hasta siempre liberación.
His suffering is more profound. My suffering is complicated by my privilege. It is only because of where I live that I have the leisure and capacity to be writing this attempt to deal with what makes me suffer, the dichotomy of the tomato in the global society. While I struggle to reconcile my faith in the Marxist analysis of capitalism with a more postmodern, unhistorical exploration of how cultural conditions figure into the equation, the student in Iran is still very much aware of a systematic, historical process that controls and dominates his life, leaving not much room for worrying about how to appreciate the tomato.
Those of us who live in privileged American society, which is responsible for much of the oppression in places like Iran, seem incapable of figuring out how to smash the power elite after losing the will of the sixties and early seventies, when the political system seemed vulnerable, at least momentarily. Michel Foucault gave up the barricades for the San Francisco bathhouses and Abbie Hoffman killed himself. A young friend of mine, who is in her late twenties and graduated from Antioch, where I also went to college, doesn’t like to hear my stories of the sixties. My best one, about the time in Berkeley the cops surrounded our house with a swat team, looking for a fellow Antioch student who was on the run after being arrested in Cambridge at an anti-war demonstration and tying up the sheriff on Telegraph Hill when he tried to arrest him, bores her silly. She bristles when we complain about the lack of young people out in the streets protesting the invasion of Iraq or the prison at Guantanamo Bay. She says demonstrations are useless, that the mainstream media subverts the intent by refusing to cover them.
But then, after a month of student and worker riots in the streets of France the government capitulates and rescinds the law that caused the riots in the first place (a labor law that would allow employers to fire workers younger than 25 without cause). It took ten years of demonstrating in the streets of the U.S. before this country pulled out of Vietnam (and it’s debatable how much of our withdrawal was due to political unrest at home, see the Civil Disobedience blog) and millions of demonstrators in the streets of all the major cities didn’t deter George Bush from invading Iraq. Why did the French government respond so quickly to its student uprising? In France labor unions remain strong and viable and a force to be reckoned with, while here in the states the unions have largely been emasculated, through a calculated campaign by the power elite and because of internecine fighting and corruption in the unions themselves. So not only are we ignored in the streets, we have no organizations with any political clout that can actually threaten the status quo of the government. Our privilege extends only as far as the marketplace: We have the power to consume but lack the power to change anything. I can write and speak out about whatever I want but my words effect nothing. Internet blogs can appear on our computer screens in a blink of an eye but we can’t stop the bombing in Iraq and we can’t make sure no person goes to bed hungry.
A lot of us spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how this has happened and what we can do about it. That doesn’t stop us from continuing our own struggles that manifest in a million different ways, but it’s obviously not enough and periodically it results in the malaise that I am now struggling with. But, as the Mexican immigrants who took to the streets during the last election to agitate for immigration reform, like to remind us, “Si se puede”—if only fleetingly, if only temporarily, if only in the alleviation of the suffering of a few at the hands of many.
Solution: Hasta siempre liberación.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Higher Education
When my younger son called to tell me he’d just found out, via the Internet, of course, that he’d been rejected by Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford, was on the waiting list at Columbia and Brown, and was accepted at Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, my immediate reaction was, “What does it take to get into these fucking schools?”
Silly question, really. It obviously doesn’t take overachieving by a white kid who attends a public high school in Santa Fe: a 4.60 GPA, between 750 and 800 on all his SATs, captain of his chess and tennis teams, an internship with the ACLU, a stint with Amigos de las Americas, fluency in Spanish, a writer for the teen section of the city newspaper, and on and on and on.
Neither does it take that special something that makes him stand out from other overachieving white kids. He was raised in El Valle, an Hispano village of 20 families in northern New Mexico by a couple of parents who dropped out of mainstream culture a long time ago to try to get real. He lived on 10 acres with a horse, burro, chickens, cats and dogs, vegetable garden, orchard, and hay fields. His neighbors were descendents of settlers from Mexico and indigenous Pueblo Indians. He helped clean the acequias—irrigation ditches—every spring and gathered wood in the fall.
That wasn’t the path he wanted, however. By ninth grade he’d rejected everything rural, had picked one of the few sports that required proximity to concrete—tennis—and made it clear that if he wasn’t more challenged in school he was going to quit and do it on his own.
Se we moved him to the big (1,800 students) public high school in Santa Fe. For the first two years he lived with his dad’s parents, who we’d just moved out from Buffalo. When that became untenable because of his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s and his grandmother’s inability to deal with a teenager, his dad (Mark) and I rented a house in Tesuque, a Santa Fe suburb (we totally lucked out through a friend of a friend with a cheap rent), and took turns living with him: we split the week between Tesuque and El Valle, where one of us had to be to take care of the animals.
Mark and I, of course, never wanted him to go to Harvard or Yale. We don’t want him going to school with elitist rich kids—or what he aspires to be. Are there so many of these kids applying to these schools that there’s no room at the inn? What about all the public school kids like our son who are their class valedictorians and captains of their cross-country and swim teams who deserve to go to these schools if that’s what they want? And why are they convinced that they have to go to Cornell or Princeton to get a good education? Why are their parents spending thousands of dollars to hire tutors to raise their SAT scores to 800? Why are these kids applying to 10 or 14 schools, screwing up the admissions process and driving their parents crazy with admission and financial aid forms?
Seems like a vicious cycle to me. The Ivy League schools reflect the increasing disparity in our society between the haves and have-nots: prep school kids with money and connections and minority kids enrolled to fill quotas. The two kids from our son’s high school who were accepted at Harvard are an Hispana and the daughter of an alumnus. The co-valedictorian, who got accepted at MIT, is Asian. For the prep school kids, it will be a validation of their privilege. For the minority kids, it will be a struggle, and many of them won’t make it.
Our son will go to U Penn or New York University (where he got accepted in the Scholar’s Program) or Oberlin or somewhere perfectly reasonable and he will have to figure out what to do with his life, just like the rest of us. This was his first real taste of how badly the system sucks; I hope that helps him make a life-affirming choice rather than a cynical one.
Solution: Make all higher education free, which will quickly pay for itself.
Silly question, really. It obviously doesn’t take overachieving by a white kid who attends a public high school in Santa Fe: a 4.60 GPA, between 750 and 800 on all his SATs, captain of his chess and tennis teams, an internship with the ACLU, a stint with Amigos de las Americas, fluency in Spanish, a writer for the teen section of the city newspaper, and on and on and on.
Neither does it take that special something that makes him stand out from other overachieving white kids. He was raised in El Valle, an Hispano village of 20 families in northern New Mexico by a couple of parents who dropped out of mainstream culture a long time ago to try to get real. He lived on 10 acres with a horse, burro, chickens, cats and dogs, vegetable garden, orchard, and hay fields. His neighbors were descendents of settlers from Mexico and indigenous Pueblo Indians. He helped clean the acequias—irrigation ditches—every spring and gathered wood in the fall.
That wasn’t the path he wanted, however. By ninth grade he’d rejected everything rural, had picked one of the few sports that required proximity to concrete—tennis—and made it clear that if he wasn’t more challenged in school he was going to quit and do it on his own.
Se we moved him to the big (1,800 students) public high school in Santa Fe. For the first two years he lived with his dad’s parents, who we’d just moved out from Buffalo. When that became untenable because of his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s and his grandmother’s inability to deal with a teenager, his dad (Mark) and I rented a house in Tesuque, a Santa Fe suburb (we totally lucked out through a friend of a friend with a cheap rent), and took turns living with him: we split the week between Tesuque and El Valle, where one of us had to be to take care of the animals.
Mark and I, of course, never wanted him to go to Harvard or Yale. We don’t want him going to school with elitist rich kids—or what he aspires to be. Are there so many of these kids applying to these schools that there’s no room at the inn? What about all the public school kids like our son who are their class valedictorians and captains of their cross-country and swim teams who deserve to go to these schools if that’s what they want? And why are they convinced that they have to go to Cornell or Princeton to get a good education? Why are their parents spending thousands of dollars to hire tutors to raise their SAT scores to 800? Why are these kids applying to 10 or 14 schools, screwing up the admissions process and driving their parents crazy with admission and financial aid forms?
Seems like a vicious cycle to me. The Ivy League schools reflect the increasing disparity in our society between the haves and have-nots: prep school kids with money and connections and minority kids enrolled to fill quotas. The two kids from our son’s high school who were accepted at Harvard are an Hispana and the daughter of an alumnus. The co-valedictorian, who got accepted at MIT, is Asian. For the prep school kids, it will be a validation of their privilege. For the minority kids, it will be a struggle, and many of them won’t make it.
Our son will go to U Penn or New York University (where he got accepted in the Scholar’s Program) or Oberlin or somewhere perfectly reasonable and he will have to figure out what to do with his life, just like the rest of us. This was his first real taste of how badly the system sucks; I hope that helps him make a life-affirming choice rather than a cynical one.
Solution: Make all higher education free, which will quickly pay for itself.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Civil Disobedience
“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when tyranny or inefficiency are great and unendurable . . . In other words when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”
Henry David Thoreau was of course referring to the Mexican American War, but his words hold true for any number of our military incursions, either overt or covert, via the CIA, into the Philippines, Yugoslavia, Panama, Cuba, Chile, Sudan, and today, Iraq.
What form could Thoreau’s exhortation to commit civil disobedience take today to actually be effective? The way I see it, every American soldier would have to refuse to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. Bush and the neocons went to war despite the millions worldwide who took to the streets to express their vehement opposition to the invasion. They’re certainly not going to end the war even if people are enraged enough to continue to stay in the streets or smash windows like they did in Seattle. During the Vietnam War we managed to stay in the streets, largely, I guess, because of a sustained youth movement fomenting on college campuses, the emerging of identity politics with Black Power and the Brown Berets, and the thousands of body bags that were brought home that touched thousands of other lives.
But what really ended the Vietnam War was when the soldiers there started to mutiny, refusing to fight the people the U.S. government told them were the enemy, and deciding the real enemies were their commanding officers. And oftentimes they were, literally as well as figuratively. For the past few years I’ve arranged for a group of Veterans for Peace from Santa Fe to come to the high school in Peñasco to make a presentation on Full Disclosure Recruiting. The Vets, who served in Korea, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War, try to provide the kids the kinds of information they need to make an informed choice, when deciding to join the military. It’s always disheartening when the first thing they ask is how many of the students have family or friends who are currently serving in the military, and 75 percent of them raise their hands. Military recruitment in northern New Mexico is extensive, and many of the kids have a long family history of military service.
One of the Vets who came was a woman named Joan Guffy. She served as an Air Force nurse in the Vietnam War, where she was exposed to Agent Orange and was twice raped by American military officers. She suffered from ovarian cancer and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: “The military is a macho system where women are demeaned. I had to be afraid of my own soldiers.” Joan died in 2007.
The soldiers who served in Vietnam were drafted, of course, and were there by default: their families weren’t rich enough and they weren’t educated enough or life-experienced enough (most of them were taken right out of high school) to be able to avoid the draft. The dehumanizing conditions fueled already existing feelings of futility and hopelessness, and their training to be killing machines backfired: there are stories of soldiers throwing grenades into their commanding officers tents and mutinying in the middle of battles, leaving the officers to make it on their own. Today, the men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are military volunteers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t from the same families and communities that supplied the Vietnam War. What will it take to raise their consciousness as to the futility of both their personal and societal positions, to “rebel and revolutionize” against their commanders and refuse to fight?
Maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back will be the gut wrenching returns to duty of those who thought they were only signing on for one tour—or the older, National Guard men and women who have families, jobs, and lives that are devastated by two or three tours. There just aren’t enough of these volunteers, or guardsmen, to maintain a force that even the Bush administration begrudgingly admitted wasn’t enough to “liberate” Iraq. There’s even a movie about it playing right now, called Stop-loss, which all the critics say no one is going to go to because no one wants the war to be any closer than reading another article on the inside pages of the local newspaper.
In an interview we did with Ike DeVargas for La Jicarita News in the late 1990s, he told us how he had come to his activism. “Most of us went there [Vietnam] believing what the government told us, that what they were doing over there was good and necessary, and most of us came back knowing that if they were lying to us over there they were lying to us here, too.” It took Ike only one tour to make the connection, and it led to a lifetime of civil disobedience. If only all the other soldiers would refuse to take up their weapons, just one time, all together, we could end these obscene wars.
Henry David Thoreau was of course referring to the Mexican American War, but his words hold true for any number of our military incursions, either overt or covert, via the CIA, into the Philippines, Yugoslavia, Panama, Cuba, Chile, Sudan, and today, Iraq.
What form could Thoreau’s exhortation to commit civil disobedience take today to actually be effective? The way I see it, every American soldier would have to refuse to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. Bush and the neocons went to war despite the millions worldwide who took to the streets to express their vehement opposition to the invasion. They’re certainly not going to end the war even if people are enraged enough to continue to stay in the streets or smash windows like they did in Seattle. During the Vietnam War we managed to stay in the streets, largely, I guess, because of a sustained youth movement fomenting on college campuses, the emerging of identity politics with Black Power and the Brown Berets, and the thousands of body bags that were brought home that touched thousands of other lives.
But what really ended the Vietnam War was when the soldiers there started to mutiny, refusing to fight the people the U.S. government told them were the enemy, and deciding the real enemies were their commanding officers. And oftentimes they were, literally as well as figuratively. For the past few years I’ve arranged for a group of Veterans for Peace from Santa Fe to come to the high school in Peñasco to make a presentation on Full Disclosure Recruiting. The Vets, who served in Korea, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War, try to provide the kids the kinds of information they need to make an informed choice, when deciding to join the military. It’s always disheartening when the first thing they ask is how many of the students have family or friends who are currently serving in the military, and 75 percent of them raise their hands. Military recruitment in northern New Mexico is extensive, and many of the kids have a long family history of military service.
One of the Vets who came was a woman named Joan Guffy. She served as an Air Force nurse in the Vietnam War, where she was exposed to Agent Orange and was twice raped by American military officers. She suffered from ovarian cancer and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: “The military is a macho system where women are demeaned. I had to be afraid of my own soldiers.” Joan died in 2007.
The soldiers who served in Vietnam were drafted, of course, and were there by default: their families weren’t rich enough and they weren’t educated enough or life-experienced enough (most of them were taken right out of high school) to be able to avoid the draft. The dehumanizing conditions fueled already existing feelings of futility and hopelessness, and their training to be killing machines backfired: there are stories of soldiers throwing grenades into their commanding officers tents and mutinying in the middle of battles, leaving the officers to make it on their own. Today, the men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are military volunteers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t from the same families and communities that supplied the Vietnam War. What will it take to raise their consciousness as to the futility of both their personal and societal positions, to “rebel and revolutionize” against their commanders and refuse to fight?
Maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back will be the gut wrenching returns to duty of those who thought they were only signing on for one tour—or the older, National Guard men and women who have families, jobs, and lives that are devastated by two or three tours. There just aren’t enough of these volunteers, or guardsmen, to maintain a force that even the Bush administration begrudgingly admitted wasn’t enough to “liberate” Iraq. There’s even a movie about it playing right now, called Stop-loss, which all the critics say no one is going to go to because no one wants the war to be any closer than reading another article on the inside pages of the local newspaper.
In an interview we did with Ike DeVargas for La Jicarita News in the late 1990s, he told us how he had come to his activism. “Most of us went there [Vietnam] believing what the government told us, that what they were doing over there was good and necessary, and most of us came back knowing that if they were lying to us over there they were lying to us here, too.” It took Ike only one tour to make the connection, and it led to a lifetime of civil disobedience. If only all the other soldiers would refuse to take up their weapons, just one time, all together, we could end these obscene wars.
Monday, June 29, 2009
The Scourge of Computers
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.
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.
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.
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