Posts filed under 'GUEST AUTHOR'
July 30th, 2007
By Carolyn Baker of Speaking Truth To Power
The inexorable reality is that any community that does not process feelings and build trust by doing so…is NOT, I repeat, NOT sustainable.
A treasure trove of information pertaining to preparation for collapse can be found on the internet and in libraries throughout the world. Earlier this year I reviewed Mick Winter’s book on preparing for Peak Oil and have since posted on my site Stan Goff’s piece on “35 Ways To Prepare For Peak Oil” My own article, “What To Do, What To Do?” addresses preparation for collapse from yet another perspective. Websites such as Matt Savinar’s Life After The Oil Crash, Energy Bulletin, and Post-Carbon Institute offer ongoing suggestions for preparation as well. Yet the one topic which receives almost no attention is the notion of how individuals create community in the face of the collapse of civilization. This is curious since, in my opinion, all individuals raised in the culture of empire are deeply wounded emotionally and spiritually and have little experience of living harmoniously in community. In fact, more often than not, people who are preparing for collapse tell me that their experiences with attempting to create and maintain community have been disappointing at best and disastrous at worst, so it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why so few people address the topic.
Much talk of ecovillages and intentional communities abounds among collapse watchers, and in many of such venues that have actually been created, a significant amount of time is devoted to community building-sometimes a minimum of three hours per day. One may wonder how anything else can get done when people sit in community circles that many hours. Who plants and weeds the garden? Who cooks? Who washes dishes and empties garbage into the compost?
What many communities have discovered is that community building requires so much time that its members must have “sprung themselves” from the system to such an extent that they have the time required to devote three or four hours per day to sitting in a circle and processing feelings and making decisions about the community’s well being. What does not work well, experience tells us, is a community in which people share residence but are still chained to a system in which they must commute to exhausting jobs, return to their groovy ecovillage, and have little or no time or energy left to do the emotional work necessary to sustain it.
The reader may be bristling with skepticism about this and inwardly protesting that he/she has little interest in “touch-feely” stuff like “processing feelings.” One may just want to live comfortably in his/her head in a safe space with friends or family and detach entirely from empire doing work for the community and living sustainably. The inexorable reality, however, is that any community that does not process feelings and build trust by doing so or simply holds long meetings about “mission statements”, division of labor, community logistics, or budgets, without addressing emotional issues is NOT, I repeat, NOT sustainable. The Lone Ranger is over-so over, and cooperation and heartfelt communication will be as essential as food and water in a post-collapse world.
I recently had the opportunity in a retreat setting to sit in such a circle, not because I am a member of an ecovillage or intentional community but because I am in the process of relocating and wanted to practice community building with other folks in transition. At first I felt absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of emotional work that needs to be done in order for community members to bond and build trust with each other. At the conclusion of the retreat, however, I felt less pessimistic and realized that it is not only possible for community members to consistently do such work together, but that when they do, they successfully break through their internalized culture of empire and experience and sustain the connectedness that empire renders utterly impossible. I’m not talking about momentary feel-good experiences where everyone holds hands and dances around the world, nor am I talking about everyone agreeing about everything. I’m talking about the kind of profound, intimate joining that natural cultures of indigenous traditions were able to experience and sustain and which allowed them to survive and thrive. And while circles of community building do not guarantee survival in the face of collapse, they are remarkably effective in facilitating the navigation of collapse.
What is more, every tribe, every community must develop skills for resolving conflict. Conflict will and should arise. Its absence is, in my opinion, a frightening red flag signaling glaring dysfunction and seething cauldrons of unspoken feelings and truths that need to be told. All indigenous cultures at their highpoints skillfully navigated conflict-in fact welcomed it as a barometer of their community’s health. They also developed ever-more creative skills for addressing it compassionately and assertively.
So what actually happens in a circle? To begin answering that question it’s important to understand that a community circle must be leaderless. Individuals may take turns facilitating them, but everyone in the group must be a leader. Facilitation simply means bringing up a topic or restating one that is already on the front burner and making sure that the group adheres to already-agreed-upon groundrules. Such groundrules include a commitment to stay in the group until the issue is resolved or until the group decides to take a break or decides to adjourn until a later time. For purposes of safety, everyone needs to agree to stay in the circle and not flee so that when someone is working on an issue with the group, they are not abandoned by anyone and know that space is being held for them by other group members. At all times, the group practices deep listening and compassionate truth-telling. When one person is speaking, the rest of the group listens attentively and stays present with the speaker. Likewise, when one speaks, one does so non-judgmentally using “I” statements, speaking as much as possible from a place of feeling rather than intellect or thinking. Perhaps most importantly, each person is accountable and takes responsibility for his/her part in whatever concerns or complaints he/she verbalizes. Deep listening and processing may involve other factors, but these are some of the most fundamental.
In facing collapse it is important to develop skills that will be useful in navigating it. We hear a great deal about learning permaculture, organic gardening, woodworking, composting, catching rainwater, and utilizing alternative energy sources, but the two skills without which communities cannot be created or sustained, deep listening and compassionate truthtelling, are rarely discussed.
As I have stated repeatedly, I do not know how collapse will play out. It may culminate in instantaneous nuclear annihilation, sudden economic devastation, or some other form of civilization plunging blatantly off a cliff. It may also unfold more slowly with consequences equally as dire. Therefore, it is important not to embrace the illusion that skills provide magic bullets of survival. Who knows who if any of us will survive no matter what we know or have experienced?
With every passing day it becomes clearer to me that as civilization continues to self-destruct, I need to discern how I prefer to spend my time and energy-and with whom. What I least want to do is mimic the culture of empire by rationally focusing on logistics and losing sight of humanity. I know that I cannot survive alone, and even if I have learned no skills whatsoever, I need my fellow earthlings in order to navigate collapse. Moreover, even if I have learned every skill imaginable, if I and my companions in collapse cannot deeply listen to each other and speak our truth with compassion, none of us will survive, and even if we did, an internally vacuous emotional domain would render survival nothing less than absurd.
July 26th, 2007
By: Phil Rockstroh
In this summer of angst and grim foreboding about what further assaults against common sense and common decency the Bush Administration might inflict upon the people of the world, how many times during the day do those of us — still possessed of mind, heart and conscience — take pause, hoping we’ve seen the worst of it, then, fearing we haven’t yet, attempt to push down the dread rising within us, so that we might simply make it through the day and be able to rest at night? Accordingly, those who have been paying attention are aware that the outward mechanisms of martial law are in place. We shudder knowing that Bush has issued an executive decree that grants him dictatorial power in the event of some nebulously defined national emergency. In addition, the knowledge nettles us that a vast network of internment camps bristle across the length of the U.S., standing at wait for those who might raise objections to the fascistic fury unloosed by the American empire’s version of the Reichstag fire.
Moreover, a closer look would reveal that the inner processes by which an individual begins the act of acceptance of authoritarian excess — the mixture of chronic passivity, boredom, low grade anxiety and unfocused rage inherent in the citizens/consumers of the corporate state that primes an individual for fascism — have been in place for quite some time within the psyches of the American populace, both elites and hoi polloi alike. Although, don’t look for torch-lit processions thronging the nation’s streets and boulevards; rather, look for a Nuremberg Rally of couch-bound brownshirts. Instead of ogling the serried ranks of jut-jawed, SS soldiers, a contemporary Leni Riefenstahl would be forced to film chubby clusters of double-chinned consumers, saluting the new order with their TV remotes. In the contemporary United States, the elation induced by the immersion of one’s individual will to the mindless intoxication of the mob might only be possible, if Bush seized dictatorial control of the state while simultaneously sending out to all citizens gift certificates to Ikea.
After the catastrophes spawned by the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, a number of brilliant, original thinkers (including Hannah Arendt, Roberto Freire, Wilhelm Reich, and R. D. Laing) set out to study the phenomenon in order to learn how future calamities might be prevented. Although the methodologies and conclusions of these thinkers varied, each noted that alienation and dehumanization festered at the core of the death urge of fascism.
Nowadays, in contrast, the elites of the corporate media have proven themselves useless in this regard, believing, as they do, they constitute the thin line between the rabble at large (me and you) and the chaos begot by freedom. At present, mega-churches attract alienated suburbanites. Right wing talk show hosts misdirect their listeners alienation towards so-called illegal “aliens” and exploit their audience’s sense of powerlessness (created by the rigged system of corporate capitalism) against elitist liberals (who themselves, ironically, benefit from the present system and who only want to change it to the degree that their own privilege will not be affected. In other words, not at all).
Combine the above with the American character trait of being hostile towards introspection and it becomes evident that the present disaster has been building for quite a while now. And it can (and most likely will) get worse — far worse.
Most Americans alive today have been trained since birth to adapt to and serve the corrupt corporate structure by means of the shunning of critical thinking and have been conditioned to be in constant (empty) motion or in the thrall of mass media distraction. We have been taught that passivity is for losers, yet we find ourselves nearly powerless before the corporate/consumer/military/police/entertainment state. In this way, we serve our corporate masters; it serves the corpocracy that the lower orders refuse meaningful self-awareness. If one were to glimpse one’s own illusions, then it follows one might begin to question collective delusions — and this would upset the social order.
Those who have studied the dangers of authoritarian rule have advised us to be wary of people who carry an inner emptiness. Of course, these unfortunates yearn for the void to be filled. But with their hearts and minds mortared closed — what makes it through the self-constructed prison is loud, stupid, and fascistic. At present, what penetrates is: Fundamentalist Sermons on Armageddon; violent video games; the empty spectacle of steroid-induced professional sports hype; the lethal fantasies of American exceptionalism; the exercise in Rock and Roll imperialism that U.S. foreign policy has become. In short, all the banal Sturm and Drang necessary to pierce those protective walls and penetrate the pervasive inner emptiness.
When the people of a culture have been conditioned to worship power — but feel powerless — there’s trouble ahead. The elites must displace the public’s rage by a demagogic sleight-of-hand such as the demonization of marginalized groups. In the US, we’ve been inundated by years of state and commercial propaganda that has degraded and demonized the country’s permanent underclass by the labeling of them as welfare parasites and career criminals.
It has been noted that the mindset, methods, and procedures of America’s punitive, profit-driven prison-industrial complex was a prototype for the systemic cruelty of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; furthermore, it is a given that those institutional affronts to human decency will have served as prototypes for the methods and procedures that will be practiced upon those who are swept-up in the purges and detainment mania following the declaration of martial law in the United States.
We push this knowledge away from us, fearing we will be paralyzed by its crushing implications. Worse, what is nearly impossible to admit is, most likely, the system crushed us long ago. Apropos, R. D. Laing averred that being able to adapt and function within an insane, authoritarian system renders one for all practical purposes insane — only insane in a manner acceptable to a power mad ruling elite.
This is the knowledge we push down, every hour of everyday. Otherwise, we would be driven to admit outright that the system has crushed our individual hopes, aspirations and yearnings. We must, at all costs, keep these feelings concealed; otherwise, we might be compelled to contemplate what we have forsaken, what passions and truths we have traded away for the false sense of security that the corporate order offered us when we tacitly agreed to surrender what was most sacred, vital and alive within us. One psychological manifestation of this phenomenon is the incessant chanting of that mantra of the American corporate workforce: “I’m not my job. I’m not what I do all day long.”
For a moment, meditate on the calamity implicit in such a sentiment. Because If we cannot locate and engage our true selves during our waking hours — then who the hell are we anyway? This is a profoundly troubling circumstance. Moreover, if we’ve condemned our daylight selves to a void of non-being, what then remains of us?
We experience this dislocation of the life force as a sense of nebulous dread. Everything, these days, the architecture and accouterment of our lives seems so fragile and unreal; it feels as if everything could just fly apart, at any given moment. The world and our place in it seems so flimsy: an empire built of eggshells; it could all shatter in an instant.
Living on credit, the house of cards of the real estate market, jobs evaporating, most of us languishing only a couple of paychecks away from ruin: The empire is coming undone. As it is, it seems the nation is only being held together with hydrogenated fat, wheat gluten, over-extended credit and particle board. Ergo, there is one law the lawless Bush administration and their keepers from the plundering class cannot flout: the second law of thermodynamics. They won’t be able to claim executive privilege to avoid the consequences of negative entropy.
In a similar vein, we, the underlings of empire, stand helpless before the prevailing madness. Individual reason rarely acts as a countervailing force to stem a drowning tide of cultural cognitive dissonance. Because the more epic and all-compassing the mistake, the more epic and all-encompassing come the rationalizations, the scapegoating and the compulsion for do-overs. If the surge isn’t working as fantasized, then we’ll double-dog surge you and then bomb Iran. If police state tactics fail to alleviate a sense of anxiety, then we must construct more detainment camps, more maximum security prisons, enact more federal death penalty statutes. “Bring back the electric chair; being put to sleep, like stray pets, is too good for the traitors,” the mob will rage. That’s the solution, but (cognitive dissonance being what it is) we need to go bigger — we need an electric sofa — yet, bigger still — an electric dining room set! “Aahh … the smell of deep-fried dissidents in the morning.”
And over the smoking corpses, let us pray. We need to pray for … what? … more prayer. These prayers would work, the homicidally faithful will insist — if every single doubter was induced to drop to their knees and pray. Hence, we need prayer in the public schools. We need prayer on public transportation. We need prayer in public restrooms!
Animus, ignorance, and magical thinking are a tragic mix — and I’m afraid that vintage of mind is the hideous wine of our times. The social criteria that gives rise to fascism is in place in the U.S. and those in positions of power have a strong interest in seeing things remain that way. All we can do is what folks (a minority) have always done … exile or resistance.
In my opinion, both are honorable. The other options are varying degrees of “little Eichmann[ism]” — Ward Churchill’s much scorned, career purge-inducing — but never-the-less accurate phrase. If one does the “soul work,” to appropriate archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s term, it is still possible to resist complicity. Training yourself to avoid lying for provisional gain is a time honored means of prevented alliances with exploitive assholes. They will avoid you, fire you, curse your name from the darkness of their inner abyss — but this will solve the problem of dependance on them — and you’ll be forced to live by other means. Generally, one is more adaptable than one believes.
Keep yourself as healthy and as sane as possible: we’re going to need you around after the inevitable collapse of the present system. Also, beware of those reductionist demons of the mind who diminish the soul-making possibilities of “mere” words. The acts of writing and reading are seen as passive; to crackpot realists, these activities seem useless, unproductive — the feckless indulgences of a class of the thin-wristed effete.
Accordingly, Americans have all but ceased reading. Worse, they displace their feelings of self-loathing borne of their own corporately induced passivity upon writers and thinkers. If the tenets of democratic discourse are to survive, it is imperative that writers and thinkers begin to engage in a passionate defense of themselves against the kvetching armies of crackpot realists that have encircled and laid siege to our collective hearts and minds.
But don’t expect to be lauded with praise for the effort. It’s doubtful our adversaries will be moved by our entreaties: There cannot be a rapprochement with reality for those who have never had a relationship with it in the first place. Yet verbal imagery and depth-inducing insights are the DNA of compassionate engagement. It is not a coincidence that George W. Bush is an inarticulate oaf. Conversely, there are many things in this world that require being touched by words, for there are occasions when words alone can suffice to take us deep and lift us up and serve to ameliorate our alienation.
It is in this spirit that I offer the words above to you; I’m traveling light; they’re all I’m carrying with me, at this late hour, in these dark and dangerous times.
July 12th, 2007
By: Phil Rockstroh
At present, George W. Bush is unpopular with the majority of the American public not because of the murderous mayhem he has unloosed in Iraq; rather, his standing has plummeted, due to the fact, he didn’t deliver the goods. Americans are fine with fueling our republic of road rage using the blood of Iraqis (or any other distant and darker people) as long as “the mission” doesn’t drag on too long or reveal too much about ourselves.
How did we come to be a nation of vampires who live by sustaining ourselves on the blood of others? Is our mode of collective being so toxic in the United States that a writer must bandy about metaphors culled from Gothic horror fiction to describe it?
I’m afraid it’s come to that: We are a people who psyches have grown monstrously distorted from an addiction to imperial power and personal entitlement. (Imagery of Smurfs and Teletubbies won’t rise to the analogy, albeit as terrifying as those demons of hell-bound cuteness are.)
The corporate culture of exploitation has begot a hellscape of narcissists. It is an authoritarian culture riddled in kitsch and cruelty, in nationalistic hagiography and displaced rage — all the distortions of national character inherent to privileged grotesques and ordinary monsters.
A narcissist’s actions are monstrous because his only love is the image of himself wielding control and power. (Does this remind you of anyone, perhaps someone who struts about in a flightsuit — someone prone to proclaiming himself “the decider” — someone who grows intoxicated to the point becoming insensate from a whiff of his own pheromones as he swoons in macho-narcissistic self-worship?)
And what about the everyday monsters, those who feel nothing — not outrage, not remorse, nor sorrow — by the conscience-devoid attempt made by our vampiric leaders to sustain “our way of life” on Iraqi blood? Are you not a monster as well when you feel nothing before immense human suffering? If you are impervious to, grown inured of, or have chosen to remain ignorant of the agony of the Iraqi people, then you might as well join the ranks of the undead — because the distant landscape of corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan matches your internal deathscape.
In short, our empire’s dependence on the resources (the life’s blood) of others renders us a nation of vampires. Moreover, the corporatist character (our national character) is defined by the vampire’s trait of taking, never giving. Accordingly, what do the big monsters at the top take from us, the little monsters?
To name one: our time, the precious hours of our finite lives. The corporatists are Time Vampires: For a moment, reflect on all the hours of life you’ve wasted away — in office cubicles, in commuter traffic jams, in the addictive pursuit of consumer dreck, or simply numbed-out and exhausted, rendered inert from the incessant, soul-sucking stress of the corporate state.
The corporacracy devours our time and, like the charges of a vampire, has made us dependent and slavish in return. In our bloodless enslavement, we lose the vitality borne of existing within life’s inherent mysteries and grow estranged from the deep resonances of participation mystique.
How does one begin to take back one’s soul from these elitist usurpers? Start with this: The ebullient skepticism engendered from calling out soul-numbing, self-serving authoritarian lies.
In an era as perilous as ours, it’s imperative we act with utmost urgency. Yet, tragically, the exigencies of our age are being played out against a panorama of longer, more stressful work hours, superficially ameliorated by a mass media culture comprised of ceaseless trivia and mindless distraction.
This pathology began years ago when our ancestors offered up their life’s blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age. Henry Ford was a gray ghoul who measured out our flesh with his productivity-measuring stopwatch; he was a cunning practitioner of the black art of convincing human beings they’re mere cogs in an inhuman machine. It was only a short trudge from there through history’s slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann, insulated within his vampire’s coffin of cold calculations that shielded him from the horrific implications of the system of mechanized extermination he devised.
The corporate vampire’s creed is defined by ruthless efficiency; the fear of a “loss of productivity” is the driving force of the death machine. The system is so ruthless and inhuman that it must conceal its true face, hence the rise of the telegenic undead known as the corporate media. Do not look to them to report the facts of our condition: After all, a mirror can’t reflect the image of a vampire. A vampire is empty to the core; therefore, there is nothing to reflect.
Furthermore, his emptiness is the progenitor of his destructive nature. Rather than face himself, his appetite for death will devour all in its path: rain forests, Arctic glaziers, the people of Iraq, the hours of your life, as well as your inner being.
It is the force that holds Democratic politicians in the thrall of their own fecklessness, because they answer to the same blood-sucking, corporate masters as the rest of us. Quite simply, they’re afraid of their bosses too. The Washington Beltway is a version, in miniature, of the entire soul-dead, American corporacracy. The careerist politicians within the Beltway are afflicted with the same diminution of choice — the same hyper-attenuation of the will to freedom — as the rest of us.
And what remains for us: an existence (or lack thereof) within this hierarchical hellscape of narcissists. What sort of a pathetic mode of being is this, a life shackled to the service of a monstrous system wherein one must evince the obsequies of a vampire’s bloodless lackeys?
To reverse this situation: Now is the time to drag the lies of the corporate state into the sunshine where they will writher to dust. We are not powerless: We live in a world where our collective, hidden intentions are made manifest by our outward actions. This is why Gothic — even b-movie — metaphors are not an overwrought description of our present condition. Ergo, by the vehicle of cultural collaboration, we are a nation of world-destroying, b-movie monsters — we are a hack-scripted, second-billed feature at the drive-in movie of existence — a laughed-off-the-big-screen of the cosmos, box-office poison of a people.
We are soul-sucking creatures of kitsch. Flesh-eating zombies of conformity. Road-rage werewolves. Right-wing, talk show demons whose wrathful voices rage into empty air. Hungry ghosts wandering the aisles of supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurant chains and the food courts of shopping malls. We are: The Fat, Mindless Blobs That Ate the Planet.
To survive, first, we must find the monster within, then drive a stake through its heart.
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: .
July 10th, 2007
By Carolyn Baker of Speaking Truth to Power
Every time I write an article on collapse such as my most recent one “Happy Independence Day; You Have No Government“, I am bombarded with emails asking me “what should I do?” For those who have just discovered this site, that is a legitimate question because for them, the reality of collapse may be new. Those who have been following this site for some time have heard many suggestions on what to do, but this article will offer those and other suggestions again more clearly and more adamantly than they have been offered here before. The intensity you are likely to hear in this piece is driven by the urgency which I and many of my peers are feeling at this moment. Quite frankly, it’s time to quit screwing around with talking about collapse and start acting. The Rubicon has been crossed, we’re not living in Kansas anymore, and we are living in the closest thing we’ve seen to pre-World War II Germany than anything since then. Suit up and stop theorizing and speculating. It’s showtime.
The first thing I’m not going to tell you is that collapse can be avoided or that human ingenuity and technology will come up with something to spare us from it. I’m not going to tell you that there will be some mass movement-some magic http://www.collapse.org/ that will organize progressives into a groundswell of protest, writing letters to Congress, creating blogs and websites, supporting the “right” candidate, and asking for donations. No, what I’m going to tell you is that as a nation and as a planet, we are screwed, fucked, and shit out of luck, or if you prefer Spanish, estamos jodidos.
The second thing I’m not going to tell you is what you’d like to hear-how you can just keep living the lifestyle you’re living but that somehow you can avoid collapse. I’m not going to tell you that you can keep banking with Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citibank, or any of the other satanic financial monsters and it will make no difference to you or anyone else. I’m not going to tell you that you can keep buying your food at your local supermarket or Walmart, and everything will be fine. I’m not going to tell you to go out and vote for a presidential candidate in 2008 when even if there is an election, whoever is selected by the electronic voting industrial complex, will be that complex’s man or woman-body, mind, and soul. I’m not going to tell you to get a hybrid vehicle or put solar panels on your house. In fact, before I tell you to do anything, I’m going to invite you to engage in doing nothing.
Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson, creators of the documentary “What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire“, have suggested five things you can do, and I’d like to elaborate on those.
Unlike ancient cultures, America is a society of manic doers. Before we have even understood the problem, we are frantically rushing to find a solution. So I’m going to ask you first of all to stop-dead in your tracks and do nothing. In fact, I’m going to suggest that you go out in nature, sit down on a quiet log, tree stump, rock, or on the grass, and do and say nothing. Look into a river or stream, study a blade of grass, pick up a handful of soil, focus on a colony of ants, but whatever you do-pay attention. Look, listen, smell, and above all, feel your own emotions as you: 1) “fully acknowledge and internalize that the culture of Empire is destroying the support systems on which the community of life depends, and robbing us of our essential humanity.”
Acknowledge that all of your efforts and those of everyone you know and love cannot and will not prevent collapse. In addition, feel the powerlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness that courses through your body as you do this. Feel the forever loss of the stream or grass, or soil, or animal that you might be looking at. Imagine in its place the extinction of everything you are now perceiving. All that you are now observing has been supporting you, and soon, it will be gone. How does that feel? Yes, I know. Sad, tragic, horrifying, enraging-and now you feel even more despair. It’s OK. Let yourself feel it-really, really feel it. This is sacred time. This is the moment of truth; this is your meditation on what is so, and you can’t do anything else-not really, not effectively until you feel these very feelings. In other words, surrender to the idea of collapse. Stop running from it, imagine it, feel it. The more you focus on doing, the less you’ll focus on feeling, and your doing will not work for you until you feel the feelings behind your doing.
And then, when you’ve experienced those very precious and necessary moments of sacred truth, take yourself into the company of those you love and begin talking about what is so: 2) “Talk about your concerns with everyone you know. Make peak oil, climate change, mass extinction and population overshoot household words.” There will be many people you cannot discuss these with. Find those with whom you can. This is the beginning of “finding your tribe”-finding those individuals who get it, who feel what you feel and are no longer in denial about collapse. They have probably been looking for you as much as you have been looking for them. Talk not only about the facts, the research, the events of collapse, but equally or even more importantly, about your feelings about it. This really isn’t hard to do. If you have children, think about their future. What do you feel?
Yes, I know you want to know more about what to do, but slow down. You’re moving too fast. Keep feeling. Keep talking.
The very first action steps really have to do with you and your inner world. You need to think and feel about who YOU want to be in the face of collapse. What kind of work do you really want to be doing? 3) “Find your work in the world to preserve life, change this culture and /or create restorative ways for individuals and communities to live in harmony with each other and the non-human world.” Does the work you’re doing help to preserve life? Do you need to relocate to another part of the country or world so that you and your loved ones can live lifestyles that prepare yourselves for collapse? What are you doing to take responsibility for your food supply? How are you preparing to live in a post-petroleum world? Can you even fathom what that means? Such dramatic change does not happen overnight; it’s a transition, but remember, you don’t have all the time in the world. Several dozen species have become extinct while you’ve been reading this article.
4) “Assess what you actually need during this transition in order to live and do your work. Only buy what you need and buy from local sources in order to support the creation of local economies.” And now comes an enormously important exercise: What do I need and what don’t I need? Preparation for collapse will change as much in your life as will collapse itself. Every step of preparation is a meditation, a paring down, and gathering together, always informed by “Who do I want to be? What’s really important? What do I really not need? What do I really need?”
I believe that one reason collapse is so unthinkable for many individuals is that they have no spiritual (I did not say religious) basis for navigating it. On the other hand, some individuals can think deeply about and realize its daunting reality, but they approach it with cynicism and bitterness. All of the above questions I have suggested entertaining are essentially spiritual questions because they are questions of the soul. 5) Therefore, “find or deepen your spiritual connection to that which is greater than you. Ask and then listen for guidance about how to live joyfully and creatively in the face of these unprecedented times.”
One of my favorite mantras is a quote from Derrick Jensen: “We’re fucked, and life is really, really good.” Amid the dismal we need fun, joy, play, lightness of heart, art, music, poetry, songs, stories, and creativity of infinite varieties. Yes, I know, it’s a tremendous challenge holding such opposite emotions in the same body, but that is our work in the face of the end of the world as we have known it. Recall the words of Morpheus in “The Matrix”: “I didn’t say it would be easy, I just said it would be the truth.”
I will be away from the computer and Truth To Power from July 14-28. Not only do I need two weeks away from the website, but I need to gather with my “tribe” as we spend days and nights in nature sharing our feelings and planning how we might create and maintain a community for navigating collapse. People often ask me what I’m doing to prepare and where I might relocate. Even if I were able to tell you, what I would tell you isn’t necessarily what you should be doing or where you should be going. Only you can discover that for yourself. My wish for you is that you will use these two weeks to contemplate your future and where you need to be and what you need to be doing.
Remember: There are no “solutions” but only options as the fascist empire concretizes around us. Part of the empire’s agenda is to keep you, like a dog chasing its tail, looking for solutions and bashing people who don’t offer them to you but tell you the truth instead-that the future of you and your loved ones is entirely in your hands and no one else’s. The sooner you let go of your illusions about avoiding collapse and someone or something being able to prevent and cure it, the more energy you will free up to act on behalf of yourself and your tribe.
OK, now I’ve told you what to do. If you don’t want to do it or refuse to do it, please don’t call me “dismal”, “negative” or a “purveyor of hopelessness.” Look in the mirror and ask yourself how it is that after all this time, despite all the information you have, you still don’t get it. Someone has said, “Deal with reality or reality will deal with you.” Do you want to deal with reality when collapse is in your face, or do you want to take action to prepare for it now? Ground yourself in your authentic feelings about your collapsing world, then join with your tribe to build lifeboats. For two weeks this website will be in “hibernation”. It could be sacred time–time to reflect, time to feel, time to act-before time runs out.
July 6th, 2007
BY Joel S. Hirschhorn author of Delusional Democracy and Friends of the Article V Convention
On the Friday before July 4 Republican Senator Arlen Specter showed his respect for the U.S. Constitution and his anger about President Bush’s repeated pissing on it by introducing the Presidential Signing Statements Act of 2007. What happens to this crucial bill will test both congressional integrity and courage.
Specter had the honesty to call President Bush’s abuse of signing statements an “unconstitutional attempt to usurp legislative authority.” “The president cannot use a signing statement to rewrite the words of a statute nor can he use a signing statement to selectively nullify those provisions he does not like,” said Specter.
“Presidential signing statements can render the legislative process a virtual nullity, making it completely unpredictable how certain laws will be enforced. This legislation reinforces the system of checks and balances and separation of powers set out in our Constitution,” said Specter.
Commenting on the legislative process, Specter noted: “This is a finely structured constitutional procedure that goes straight to the heart of our system of check and balances. Any action by the president that circumvents this finely structured procedure is an unconstitutional attempt to usurp legislative authority. If the president is permitted to rewrite the bills that Congress passes and cherry-pick which provisions he likes and does not like, he subverts the constitutional process designed by our framers.” Subversion of our Constitution - pissing on it: that’s what Bush has gotten away with. Bush-the-ruler has made a mockery of our sacred rule of law.
This bill would prevent the president from issuing a signing statement that alters a statute’s meaning by “instructing federal and state courts not to rely on presidential signing statements in interpreting a statute.”
This is Specter’s second attempt at preventing Bush and any future president from disrespecting the Constitution. His similar bill in 2006 went nowhere. But he had some support. Senator Patrick Leahy said: “I have long objected to this President’s broad use of signing statements to try to rewrite the laws crafted and passed by the Congress, because I firmly believe that this practice poses a grave threat to our constitutional system of checks and balances. … These signing statements are a diabolical device and the President will continue to use and abuse them, if Congress lets him.”
From a historical perspective, Specter noted that “while signing statements have been commonplace since our country’s founding, we must make sure that they are not being used in an unconstitutional manner; a manner that seeks to rewrite legislation, and exercise line item vetoes.” An unconstitutional manner is exactly what Bush is guilty of.
In 2006 the Congressional Research Service came up with these summary statistics on constitutional objections in signing statements: Reagan 26 percent, Bush I 68 percent, Clinton 27 percent, and George W. Bush the winner at 86 percent. But the way the current president has used signing statements to nullify laws is unique.
Many people have said that Bush’s use of signing statements allows him and federal agencies to blatantly ignore provisions of laws and congressional intent. The Government Accountability Office found in mid-June that in several cases the administration did not execute laws as Congress intended when Bush attached a signing statement to them. GAO found that the statements have the effect of nullifying the law in question in about 30 percent of cases. In July 2006, a bipartisan task force of the American Bar Association described the use of signing statements to modify the meaning of duly enacted laws as “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers.” And still Congress has not acted to stop this behavior!
The New York Times in 2006 editorialized about Bush’s use of signing statements: And none have used it so clearly to make the president the interpreter of a law’s intent, instead of Congress, and the arbiter of constitutionality, instead of the courts. Indeed, what Bush has done (and gotten away with) is unprecedented in American history.
Let’s be clear. There is no constitutional provision, federal statute, or common-law principle that explicitly permits or prohibits signing statements. But two constitutional provisions are pertinent. Article I, Section 7 (in the Presentment Clause) empowers the president to veto a law in its entirety, or to sign it. And many aspects of Bush’s signing statements amount to line item vetoes. The Supreme Court has held that line item vetoes are unconstitutional. In 1988, in Clinton v. New York, the Court said a president must veto an entire law. And Article II, Section 3 requires that the executive “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Thus, the Bush style of signing statement has no constitutional support.
Interestingly, Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, when a staff attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a 1986 memorandum making the case for “interpretive signing statements” as a tool to “increase the power of the Executive to shape the law.” Alito warned that “Congress is likely to resent the fact that the President will get in the last word on questions of interpretation.”
Here is another dimension to Bush’s scummy behavior: ”He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” noted Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio professor who studies executive power. Phillip Cooper, a leading expert on signing statements, has called Bush’s signing statements “excessive, unhelpful, and needlessly confrontational.” Legal scholar Lawrence Tribe wrote that what is objectionable is “the president’s failure to face the political music by issuing a veto and subjecting that veto to the possibility of an override in Congress.”
Famed attorney John W. Dean has added yet another reason to question Bush’s behavior: “The frequency and the audacity of Bush’s use of signing statements are troubling. Enactments by Congress are presumed to be constitutional - as the Justice Department has often reiterated. For example, take what is close to boilerplate language from a government brief (selected at random): ‘It is well-established that Congressional legislation is entitled to a strong presumption of constitutionality. See United States v. Morrison (’Every possible presumption is in favor of the validity of a statute, and this continues until the contrary is shown beyond a rational doubt.’).’” But Bush puts himself above the Constitution, Supreme Court and the law.
Will Specter’s second attempt succeed in a Democrat controlled Congress? And if so, will Bush sign it into law - without using a signing statement to refute its meaning and intent? Though it should be a no-brainer for every American that respects our Constitution, I bet that neither Congress nor Bush will come through and quickly make Specter’s bill law of the land.
If it does not become law, common sense says it should be considered as a possible constitutional amendment. In fact, it is a perfect illustration of why more politically engaged Americans should support the national campaign to obtain the nation’s first Article V convention for proposing amendments. When good and necessary laws cannot be obtained through the normal but untrustworthy legislative process, then lawmaking through constitutional amendments is absolutely necessary and appropriate. Our Framers knew what they doing when they created the Article V convention option. Learn more about it at www.foavc.org.
June 26th, 2007
By Jason Miller
“Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.” –Sigmund Freud
Frightening as it may be, the Earth’s fate rests in the hands of children. With incredibly formidable military firepower at its disposal, the United States could catalyze Armageddon at any time. And while they may be adults chronologically, our sociopolitical structure is dominated by emotional infants.
Nietzsche once pronounced God dead. In the United States, we have a more readily demonstrable (and perhaps related) problem. Our collective id has rendered its governing superego impotent, and perhaps dead. Our prevailing moral standards, as inconsequential as they have become, are of the Jerry Falwell variety. They are mean-spirited, self-serving, judgmental, narrow-minded, selfish, and belligerent. As far as US Americans are concerned, Christ may as well have preached the Sermon on the Mount from the lowest recesses of Death Valley.
Recall that our basic drives such as libido, hunger, and aggression flow from the infantile dimension of our psyche known as the id. In terms of psychodynamics, the superego’s role is to counter-balance the irresponsible, amoral, and essentially sociopathic nature of the id with a healthy degree of conscience and guilt. Yet in the United States, we are inculcated with a deep sense of our exceptionalism and entitlement from the moment we emerge from the birth canal, thus crippling our ability to empathize and seriously impeding the development of our superego.
Consequently, conscience, guilt, personal discipline, and delaying gratification are barely extant in the toxic cesspool of our sociocultural environment.
Let’s examine some of the spiritually corrosive social forces which have molded our malleable natures in such a way that our behavior as a nation closely resembles that of a depraved miscreant:
While counseling and therapy are essential tools to heal from psychic wounds, emotional disorders, and mental illnesses, many mental health professionals offer their patients palliative “ego strokes” rather than the remedial brutal honesty and tough love they truly need. Instead of giving their clients the tools they need to heal themselves, they enable their ids to continue running rampant, unfettered by that “nasty old superego” and its “toxic guilt.”
Even those who don’t seek professional help are absolved of the pangs of conscience by the high priests and priestesses of the corporate media. Prostitutes to the establishment like Oprah pat them on the head, reassure them that their pathological self-absorption is wonderful, and tell them to further immerse their minds in pernicious idiocy by reading instruction manuals on narcissism like The Secret.
Commit a crime? No problem. We have a legal system, not a justice system. If you have money enough to hire a shrewd attorney, you are unlikely to face the consequences you deserve, regardless of the egregiousness of your crime. Unfortunately, if you don’t have money, you will face the equivalent of electrocution for stealing a loaf of bread, which means several brutal, dehumanizing years in the most populous prison industrial complex in the world for “crimes” like self-medicating to escape your already miserable circumstances.
Lack the cash to buy the $2,000.00 flat screen you “have to have” to watch the obscenely commercialized and over-hyped Super Bowl? No problem. In the advanced stages of our savage economic system, finance capital reigns supreme. There are untold thousands of lenders prepared to let you use their money, provided you agree to pay their usurious interest rates.
Want it yesterday? Not to worry. We have fast food, one hour photo, instant credit approval, movies on demand, pills to chase the blues and blue pills to give you an erection, instant coffee, microwave meals, zero down loans, and a host of other means to satisfy the relentlessly impatient demands of our ids.
Feeling bored, lonely, or depressed? Turn on the television. Fill your mind with inanity, brain candy, infotainment, and potent affirmations that your tenacious adherence to the reprehensible “American Way” is justified, patriotic, and admirable.
Need a career, training, money for college, the indoctrinated belief that you are risking your life for a noble cause, and the false security that your government will support you once they are done with you? “Join the people who have joined the Army” (or Marines, Navy, or Air Force). Our moneyed elite (desperately) need willing pawns to wage their wholesale terror operations in Iraq and elsewhere.
While it may sound a bit conspiratorial, before we go dismissing the notion that the erosion of our moral restraint (superego) has been intentionally engineered and orchestrated, let’s consider the question, “Cui bono?”
Having stunted, retarded, corralled, or in some cases, disabled the superegos of the “unwashed masses,” there is almost no end to the malevolence our sociopathic plutocracy, upper level military careerists, “religious” leaders, AIPAC, and reactionaries can commit in our names (with our overt or tacit approval) to further enrich and empower themselves.
Consider but a few examples of abominations for which we, as a nation, are responsible:
We have committed war crimes analogous to those of Nazi Germany through our pre-emptive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. How many hundred thousand or million civilians must die before we realize that “collateral damage” is an Orwellian euphemism for mass murder?
We have long been complicit in the brutal oppression of the Palestinians. When the final Palestinian is imprisoned, obliterated, or driven out of Gaza and the West Bank will we then recognize that we facilitated an ethnic cleansing?
We employ economic tyranny and manipulation to make de facto colonies of developing nations, harvesting and consuming 25% of the world’s resources to “sustain” 5% of the world’s population. Isn’t gluttony one of the Seven Deadly Sins?
We listened to the likes of Ronald Reagan (a reactionary who never met a socially redeeming policy, law or public initiative he didn’t want to eliminate) when he moronically asserted that enacting universal health care would undoubtedly lead to “Godless Communism.” So we continue embracing a system enabling cynical wealthy elites and amoral corporations to generate outrageous profits derived from the administration of health care. As a result, there are 50 million uninsured US Americans, we have the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world, we are 37th in the world in health care quality, HMO’s and managed care entities often refuse to provide necessary medical procedures, insurance companies routinely deny claims based on technicalities, and hospitals dump indigent patients on Skid Row rather than treating them.
On the subject of indigents, how is it that a nation awash in prosperity has over a million homeless human beings on any given night? Or that cities like Orlando and Las Vegas have made homelessness a crime? How can a significant percentage of those condemned to sleep under bridges and eat from dumpsters be veterans who fought for our country? Could it be that chicken hawk ruling elites like Dick Cheney used them as cannon fodder in their wars necessitated by capitalism’s endless demand for new markets, cheaper labor, and more resources, and then disposed of them like so much rubbish when they came home?
We strong-arm developing countries into implementing neoliberal economic policies and free trade, deepening the impoverishment of their citizens to further enrich ourselves. This leaves them little choice but to migrate here, where virtually all of the money and resources are flowing. Now that 12 million “illegals” have established residence in the US, we are arrogantly preparing to perpetuate their employers’ capacity to exploit them or to implement a draconian plan to rip their families and lives apart, imprison them, and eventually send them back to the abject poverty we created.
Climate Change? We simply deny we bear an ounce of responsibility and rev up our gas-guzzling SUVs, pick-ups, and Hummers.
Yes, in spite of the extreme moral poverty reflected in the myriad wounds we continue to inflict upon the Earth and its sentient inhabitants, we have the audacity to call ourselves a Christian nation. Whether it is conscious or not, we organize our existences around the abhorrent beliefs that “it’s all about me,” “get them before they get me,” “he who dies with the most toys wins,” and “blessed are the rich, the joyous, the well-fed, the aggressive, the merciless, the heartless, and the warmongers,” thus manifesting the virtual antithesis of Christ’s teachings.
But what can you expect from a nation of unsupervised ids?
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor ( https://bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s. You can reach him at
June 25th, 2007
By John Chuckman
This is an excerpt from “What’s It All About? The Decline of the American Empire by John Chuckman published by Constable & Robinson Ltd, London. Available from Indigo Books, Canada.
In military matters, China has taken America by surprise a number of times recently, and surprises of this nature are not things with which Americans deal well, some portion of America’s political establishment becoming irritable and uncomfortable. It is not clear how much of this is based on genuine analysis and how much on the kind of paranoid reaction which characterizes America’s attitude towards Arabs since 9/11. There is also the distinct possibility of traces of anti-Asian prejudice which has a long history in America and in its policies. America’s paranoid reaction to a number of events in the past - the rise of Japan, Communism, Islamic fundamentalism - reflect an arrogant imperial attitude of expected easy superiority which does not welcome any clouds on the horizon.
China’s explosion of a thermonuclear warhead not many years ago that proved through chemical analysis of atmospheric samples to resemble America’s best at the time, the W-88 warhead, lead to a McCarthy-like campaign to track down a betrayer of American secrets. Attention focused on a Chinese-American scientist at Los Alamos Laboratories, and the New York Times, undoubtedly prompted by the FBI, conducted a terrible campaign of innuendo. The FBI charged the man with a ridiculous number of things, a favorite technique of political police trying to get a plea on something, but the lack of any evidence saw him released with his career ended and his reputation muddied. It seems never to have occurred that China’s new army of clever scientists and engineers, always seen going about with the best laptop computers in hand much the way British businessmen in London once all wore derbies and carried umbrellas, might just have developed this technology themselves, or largely so, of course benefiting from the bits and pieces garnered from others that always support new work anywhere.
China has put a number of satellites into orbit, including a manned one, and has a very ambitious space program, including plans for landing people on the moon. The American military sees near-earth space as its most important base for future “projection of power” over the planet, its militarization of space well underway, so China represents a potential challenge not yet felt from India. The huge noise made by Republicans under Clinton’s administration over the remote possibility that China may have secretly contributed to an American election gave us a heady whiff of the paranoid fears that reside in some quarters of American society.
Most recently, China launched a vehicle into space designed to destroy a satellite. An obsolete Chinese weather satellite in an orbit about 500 miles above the earth, roughly the same orbit as that occupied by many of America’s fleet of spy or global-positioning satellites, was the target for this apparently successful test. The message was clear: China is now capable of destroying the satellites which are now America’s eyes for war. The news was especially dramatic coming as it did not long after America’s admitting that a powerful Chinese laser, or other directed-energy beam on the ground, had, a while back, swept an American spy satellite over China, temporarily blinding it.
The satellite-killer led to a lot of noisy accusations about China’s aggressiveness and its militarizing space, but these claims are quite inaccurate. The United States has been militarizing space for many years, gradually and in many surreptitious ways. The space shuttle program, for example, was always a military one, the shuttles actually being very costly, inefficient vehicles for science, sometimes even leading to delays in the launch of important science projects.
America’s fleet of military and spy satellites, many of whose capabilities remain secret, is used actively today as a weapon. Nations friendly to American policy are given priceless data to support their efforts while opponents are left at a serious disadvantage. This was done, as just two examples, in supporting Iraq’s invasion of Iran and in supporting Israel’s assault on Lebanon - both examples, by any sensible reckoning, of America’s using these sophisticated machines not for defense but to support aggression it regarded as being in its own interest at the time.
Perhaps, the clearest militarization of space is America’s new anti-missile missile program, a program not just of research but of deploying actual weapons. No matter how ineffective the existing American system is - it has failed many tests, and independent scientists advise us that the computer programming for such a system is truly beyond our existing ability - America’s spending new billions on it has to make China and Russia uneasy. The same scientists and other experts warned some years back that a new American “Star Wars” program would start a new weapons race, and they were right. The Russians have already announced the development of a new warhead that spirals unpredictably when heading for its target. It also may put into service a mobile version of its highly-accurate Topple-M intercontinental missile.
China’s response includes its ability to destroy spy satellites needed as eyes for such a system plus an increase in the number and quality of its intercontinental missiles. China’s DF-31A missile is its first solid-fueled intercontinental missile, meaning it can be fired more quickly than its existing liquid-fueled ones, and it is the first Chinese intercontinental missile that can reach all parts of the United States. It could be made mobile, and a submarine-based version is under development. It should be noted that China’s nuclear deterrent until now has been extremely modest, consisting of about two dozen known missiles plus some element of uncertainty as to whether there are in fact a limited number more.
China used the anti-satellite test to get America’s attention for negotiations over the anti-missile missile system. They did get American attention, there being a very unpleasant reaction in Washington, but it is not clear that any kind of negotiations will follow. China’s immediate offer to negotiate a treaty against the militarization of space was ignored. America’s stubbornly-held view of anti-missile defense is that it is part of its overall anti-terrorist efforts, an argument which stretches credibility rather thin, especially in view of plans for basing some of these anti-missile missiles in former Soviet satellite states, plans that are highly confrontational towards Russia. There has also been talk of American anti-missile missiles being placed in Afghanistan, intended for Chinese I.C.B.M.s, again a highly provocative idea, going towards creating uncertainty in China’s sense of its nuclear deterrent.
Another recent military surprise from China was the unveiling of the new Jian-10, swept-wing fighter. The project to develop this plane apparently was a closely kept secret, hence the surprise at its appearance. It is the same general type of fighter represented by America’s F-16 or the Eurofighter Typhoon or Russia’s MIG-29, although its capabilities are not well understood. Whether or not it meets the performance standards of these other front-line, supersonic fighters, the plane represents a remarkable technical and manufacturing achievement by the Chinese, portending also the day when China learns to compete in civil aviation. China’s current military philosophy of husbanding its resources for only the kinds of projects best fitting what are deemed its greatest future needs has apparently permitted it to compete in this costly field of high-tech aviation which includes only a small number of nations.
China’s new investments in its military are, like so many things about China, heavily criticized by the American establishment. The truth is they represent a small fraction of what the U.S. spends, no matter what accounting you use. Widely accepted, published data put China’s military spending at about 10% of America’s, although some say it may be about half again more than that through hidden spending. They may be right, but they ignore the reality of a great deal of hidden spending in America, particularly when it comes to so-called black programs, and the unquestioned fact remains that America accounts for fully half of the entire planet’s military spending.
China’s new spending is to a considerable extent driven by what it sees as American imperial attitudes and behavior. Recall the incident of the American spy plane flying right up against Chinese air space early in Bush’s administration and being forced down by the Chinese. This was an extremely provocative act, somewhat resembling the flight of an American U-2 over Russia just days before a scheduled summit between Eisenhower and Khruschev. During the first hours of this recent, smaller crisis, the new Bush administration took a hard-line approach, making no apologies (a Chinese pilot had died bringing the spy plane down) and demanding the plane and its crew be returned immediately. After a while Bush relented, reportedly after his having consulted his much more knowledgeable father, and took a more accommodating approach. China then promptly allowed the crew to be flown home and returned the spy plane, after a bit of time, disassembled in a crate, mimicking a much earlier American exploit, one that undoubtedly had provided many laughs over the years at the Pentagon, when a defecting Soviet pilot landed one of the U.S.S.R.’s most advanced fighters in Japan. No one knows how successful the Chinese were in studying the spy plane’s top-secret electronic gear, but generally such machines are destroyed by explosive devices detonated by the crew when crashing or being forced to land. Things can be learned even from demolished mechanisms. Then again, those devices don’t always work.
China has not challenged American world leadership, nor has it set it as a goal to be able to do so, but this incident of the spy plane was interesting for a number of reasons, mainly in that it demonstrated China’s willingness to confront America behaving aggressively in China’s own backyard. Had it come to shooting, China could not have won, but much of the world’s public opinion was on China’s side in what clearly was reckless American behavior.
Few Americans appreciate the extent to which such high-risk behavior characterized American activity during the Cold War. Intrusive American military over-flights of the Soviet Union in the 1950s were common, indeed Krushchev was irritated and angry over the extent of these flights which Eisenhower observed once would have started a war had the Russians behaved the same way over the territory of the United States. There were also many confrontations with nuclear submarines, including a number of scrapes and collisions owing to close approaches on Soviet boats. Indeed, it has been reported, and there is some evidence from photographs for believing, that the advanced Russian submarine, Kursk, which sank during tests in 2000, sending its crew to a slow death, was the result of a torpedo fired in error by an American commander whose boat was closely observing the Kursk’s maneuvers. If so, it might help explain what many regard as a rather kid-gloves approach Bush has taken towards the Russians despite a belligerent history and many differences over policy.
June 25th, 2007
BY Joel S. Hirschhorn author of Delusional Democracy and Friends of the Article V ConventionAccording to a report not yet released, the Council on Science and Public Health of the American Medical Association has recommended that a chronic and widespread affliction of Americans be officially declared a psychiatric disorder. It has been named the Political Attention Deficit Disorder (PADD). It is recommended that the disorder be included in a widely used mental illness manual created and published by the American Psychiatric Association. The current manual was published in 1994; the next edition is to be completed in 2012. The benefit to people of an official classification is coverage by health insurance.
“The symptoms of PADD are all around us and treating it professionally can do more for our country than any election,” said Dr. Mable Wank in the report’s introduction; she is chairwoman of the Council and a professor at UCLA.
Here are the Council’s main findings on PADD:
Nearly 80 percent of adult American citizens are unable to pay sustained attention to issues and problems associated with their government. They are unable to accept their responsibility as citizens, including their obligation to vote, read in-depth articles and books on political issues, become active members of politically oriented groups, and initiate discussions on current events with friends and family. “The decades-old decline in voter turnout is a direct result of a national epidemic of PADD,” said the report.
The chief cause of PADD is the desire to avoid the very real pain of cognitive dissonance, the difference between what Americans want to believe about the greatness of their country and the disturbing reality that their government and country are in terrible shape, which is a constant reminder when there is normal, healthy political attention. Such pain suppression, however, is counterproductive and was found through careful studies at several universities, including the Harvard Medical College, to correlate with depression and anxiety disorders, as well as a heightened level of cynicism and despair. According to the report, many suicides and possibly many criminal acts result from PADD.
Another consequence of PADD is that people devote more of their time, energy and money to pleasure-seeking distractions. PADD is correlated with profound statistical significance to clinical symptoms such as obesity, alcoholism, drug addiction, video game addiction, Internet addiction, sexual promiscuity, excessive shopping, gambling addiction, and other harmful behaviors.
The report profiles a person severely afflicted by PADD. The psychiatrists unanimously concluded that George W. Bush is a PADD victim. Symptoms include no desire to pursue major and contentious policy issues through in-depth reading, discussion and analysis; a clear dependence on others for policy decisions, particularly Vice President Cheney; an inability to maintain sustained focus on diverse policy issues simultaneously; and an inability to articulate policy. The widespread public perception that Bush is unintelligent, uninformed and dogmatic stems from his PADD, concluded the Council. “He needs immediate, emergency therapy for his PADD; that might help get us out of Iraq,” said Dr. Wank.
Reached by phone, Dr. Aaron Gestaltstein, a Council member and psychiatrist with the Michigan Institute for the Study of Individual and Societal Health, said the AMA proposal will help raise awareness and called it “the right thing to do if the United States is ever to regain effective government and equitable public policies.” “Sick Americans deserve compassionate treatment if our country is to survive - PADD is no joke,” he added.
“I saw a college-educated man last month who was so depressed about the Bush Administration - yet he could no longer read newspapers, watch cable news shows or visit news and commentary websites. He was spending virtually all of his non-work time visiting pornography websites and eating at Chinese buffets,” Gestaltstein said. “He is a terrible mess and swears he will never vote again.”
The challenge for psychiatrists treating PADD patients, as noted in the Council’s report, is to help Americans fully integrate political attention into their lives. Their discomfort and hopelessness must be changed into positive behaviors. Friends and relatives of PADD victims are urged to get them to join public interest groups working for the betterment of American government and society, such as Friends of the Article V Convention at www.foavc.org..
June 22nd, 2007
BY Joel S. Hirschhorn author of Delusional Democracy and Friends of the Article V Convention
The frog-in-boiling water model helps us understand political upheavals: how citizens wake up early enough (or too late) to respond to social and economic oppression. Sometimes the greed and arrogance of Ruling Classes makes them careless and social waters heat too quickly. Sensing doom, alert citizen-frogs escape or revolt. Or they stay complacent and boil. The Bush Administration has turned the heat up on us, explaining why nearly 75 percent of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track and 70 percent think the economy is worsening.
Mexico is the richest Latin American country but has extreme economic inequality, which measures social temperature. Mexicans are jumping out of oppressive waters en masse, right into the U.S., exacerbating our rising inequality. The Chinese have learned to offset oppressive communist forces with materialistic capitalism - like our affordable materialism keeps Americans distracted and docile (with help from Chinese imports). In colonial America the greedy British motivated our Revolutionary War, but with oppression now coming from within, will Americans wait too long?
Some Americans keep warning us - people like Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Aaron Russo, Dennis Kucinich, Lou Dobbs, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Bill Moyers, Jon Stewart, and Keith Olbermann. They entertain complacent “frogs” and preach to the choir of alert “frogs” that also know the temperature is rising dangerously. Many of the former keep hoping that putting better Democrats or Republicans in office will get us back on the right track. Many of the latter are ready to jump to what our Constitution offers us: an Article V convention.
And once you know that plutocratic elites from both major parties have for decades opposed the Article V convention to propose constitutional amendments, YOU should favor what THEY oppose.
We frequently see a knee-jerk fear reaction to an Article V convention. Such fear is misplaced and baseless. Only the rich and powerful elites running and ruining our nation should fear a convention.
It is fatalistic to fear that a convention could make things worse by removing valued parts of the Constitution or adding terrible things. Naturally, no one knows with certainty what a convention might propose. But we do know with certainty that whatever a convention proposes must satisfy the Constitution’s rigorous ratification requirement. That two step process is part of the genius of the Constitution. Recall that a convention is the alternative to Congress proposing amendments. And what do Americans think of Congress?
A measly 23 percent view Congress positively. Expecting Congress to enact really good laws, spend our taxes wisely, and keep the president and executive branch agencies from abusing us is like a joke on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It is laugh-at-loud funny to put trust and faith in Congress. It matters not whether Democrats or Republicans control Congress. Nearly all members are under the thrall of moneyed interests. Congress is a national embarrassment. Our misrepresentatives are partners in corruption, dishonesty and oppression. Over decades they have allowed the presidency to accumulate imperial powers. Do you really believe they are worth $165,200 a year, with generous health and pension benefits?
Still, we live in a great nation. But great nations rise and fall.
America is no longer close to what it should be - or once was. It no longer fairly serves and protects all Americans. Too many Americans are working poor, hungry, homeless, poorly educated, imprisoned, debt-ridden, crime victims, facing economic insecurity, nonvoters, and lacking health care.
What we have is a plutocracy run by and for the Upper Class that sucks up a huge fraction of the nation’s wealth. Lobbyists ensure that public policy increases economic inequality and rewards corporate interests, even if it requires preemptive wars like the Iraq fiasco, sanctions massive illegal immigration, and sends good jobs overseas. That so many people escaping other nations (with hot or boiling water) want to come to the USA should not blind us to the creeping decline of our democracy and the heating of our social waters.
How much worse does American democracy have to get before public outrage demands what the Constitution’s Framers gave us in case citizens lost confidence in the federal government? Haven’t Americans lost enough trust to use what elites have fought and feared? Can’t we trust ourselves to have a peaceful populist rebellion through an Article V convention before we boil?
If America’s distracted citizen-frogs stay glued to their large plasma TVs, SUVs, electronic devices, and obese-friendly foods they may find themselves boiled. Our constitutionally protected freedoms will be gone. George W. Bush has shown how easily that is done. Our middle class will be gone. Our national sovereignty will be gone - sold out through globalization chicanery. For all but the rich, our quality of life and standard of living will be gone. The Upper Class will be richer and happier in their opulent gated McMansions and private entertainment and vacation spots, protected and pampered by their private police and servants.
If Congress finally obeys the Constitution some fear that convention delegates will be corrupted through special interest money just like current politicians. That is highly unlikely.
First, many Americans will actively watch and influence how state legislatures select one-time delegates. Second, the incredible novelty of the nation’s first Article V convention will ensure intense coverage by domestic, foreign and Internet media. Third, that novelty will also engage enormous numbers of Americans - especially school and college students - now rightfully turned off by our political system, ensuring citizen oversight of delegates and the convention. Fourth, the only group working for the first convention - Friends of the Article V Convention - has committed itself to creating and ensuring strong oversight of the convention process.
Imagine our first Article V convention under intense scrutiny in today’s techno-media world. It will be the ultimate reality show, enticing Americans to use their brains over shopping and mindless entertainment. Conversations about possible amendments will flourish. Surveys and polls will constantly determine what Americans support and oppose. The convention will remind Americans that citizenship requires civic engagement. Convention delegates will know that they are being scrutinized. They will know that their proposals must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. They will be listening to US. In sum, we have more than enough safety nets to prevent the convention harming our Constitution.
Why not dream about a restorative convention with hundreds of smart, patriotic Americans as delegates? We have enormous numbers of brilliant, wise and honest Americans - just not in politics anymore. If we can trust the lives of people to juries, we can trust carefully selected convention delegates to find intelligent ways to improve our government and political system through amendments. In the last part of the process, we can tell our state legislators whether we want them to ratify specific proposed amendments.
Will the first convention be mesmerizing and entertaining? Will it help educate and inform Americans about our Constitution and government? Will it put Ruling Class elites on notice that we the people are seriously pursuing governance we can trust? Yes, yes and yes.
Should we wait until 95 percent of Americans think the nation is on the wrong track? Until just 5 percent approve of Congress? Until we belatedly find ourselves boiled? No, no and no.
Support the effort to get the nation’s first Article V convention, especially if you sense our societal waters becoming hotter - sometimes faster, as under Bush. Sign up at www.foavc.org. Don’t let self-delusion and false hope in Republicans or Democrats blind you. Let freedom ring. Make Thomas Jefferson proud.
June 21st, 2007
By: Phil Rockstroh
Why did the Democratic Congress betray the voting public?
Betrayal is often a consequence of wishful thinking. It’s the world’s way of delivering the life lesson that it’s time to shed the vanity of one’s innocence and grow-the-hell-up. Apropos, here’s lesson number one for political innocents: Power serves the perpetuation of power. In an era of runaway corporate capitalism, the political elite exist to serve the corporate elite. It’s that simple.
Why do the elites lie so brazenly? Ironically, because they believe they’re entitled to, by virtue of their superior sense of morality. How did they come to this arrogant conclusion? Because they think they’re better than us. If they believe in anything at all, it is this: They view us as a reeking collection of wretched, baseborn rabble, who are, on an individual level, a few billion neurons short of being governable by honest means.
Yes, you read that correctly: They believe they’re better than you. When they lie and flout the rules and assert that the rule of law doesn’t apply to them or refuse to impeach fellow members of their political and social class who break the law — it is because they have convinced themselves it is best for society as a whole.
How did they come by such self-serving convictions? The massive extent of their privilege has convinced them that they’re the quintessence of human virtue, that they’re the most gifted of all golden children ever kissed by the radiant light of the sun. In other words, they’re the worst sort of emotionally arrested brats — spoiled children inhabiting adult bodies who mistake their feelings of infantile omnipotence for the benediction of superior ability: “I’m so special that what’s good for me is good for the world,” amounts to the sum total of their childish creed. In the case of narcissists such as these, over time, self-interest and systems of belief grow intertwined. Hence, within their warped, self-justifying belief systems, their actions, however mercenary, become acts of altruism.
The elites don’t exactly believe their own lies; rather, they proceed from the neo-con guru, Leo Strauss’ dictum (the modus operandi of the ruling classes) that it is necessary to promulgate “noble lies” to society’s lower orders. This sort of virtuous mendacity must be practiced, because those varieties of upright apes (you and I) must be spared the complexities of the truth; otherwise, it will cause us to grow dangerously agitated — will cause us to rattle the bars of our cages and fling poop at our betters. They believe it’s better to ply us with lies because it’s less trouble then having to hose us down in our filthy cages. In this way, they believe, all naked apes will have a more agreeable existence within the hierarchy-bound monkeyhouse of capitalism.
This may help to better understand the Washington establishment and its courtesan punditry who serve to reinforce their ceaseless narrative of exceptionalism. This is why they’ve disingenuously covered up the infantilism of George W. Bush for so long: Little Dubya is the id of the ruling class made manifest — he’s their troubled child, who, by his destructive actions, cracks the deceptively normal veneer of a miserable family and reveals the rot within. At a certain level, it’s damn entertaining: his instability so shakes the foundation of the house that it causes the skeletons in its closets to dance.
By engaging in a mode of being so careless it amounts to public immolation, these corrupt elitists are bringing the empire down. There is nothing new in this: Such recklessness is the method by which cunning strivers commit suicide.
Those who take the trouble to look will apprehend the disastrous results of the ruling elites’ pathology: wars of choice sold to a credulous citizenry by public relations confidence artists; a predatory economy that benefits one percent of the population; a demoralized, deeply ignorant populace who are either unaware of or indifferent to the difference between the virtues and vicissitudes of the electoral processes of a democratic republic, in contrast to the schlock circus, financed by big money corporatist, being inflicted upon us, at present.
Moreover, the elitist’s barriers of isolation and exclusion play out among the classes below as an idiot’s mimicry of soulless gated “communities” and the pernicious craving for a vast border wall — all an imitation of the ruling classes’ paranoia-driven compulsion for isolation and their narcissistic obsession with exclusivity.
Perhaps, we should cover the country in an enormous sheet of cellophane and place a zip-lock seal at its southern border, or, better yet — in the interest of being more metaphorically accurate — let’s simply zip the entire land mass of the U.S. into a body bag and be done with it.
What will be at the root of the empire’s demise? It seems the elite of the nation will succumb to “Small World Syndrome” — that malady borne of incurable careerism, a form of self-induced cretinism that reduces the vast and intricate world to only those things that advance the goals of its egoist sufferers. It is an degenerative disease that winnows down the consciousness of those afflicted to a banal nub of awareness, engendering the shallowness of character on display in the corporate media and the arrogance and cluelessness of the empire’s business and political classes. It possesses a love of little but mammon; it is the myth of Midas, manifested in the hoarding of hedge funds; it is the tale of an idiot gibbering over his collection of used string.
What can be done? In these dangerous times, credulousness to party dogma is as dangerous as a fundamentalist Christian’s literal interpretation of The Bible: There is no need to squander the hours searching for an “intelligent design” within the architecture of denial and duplicity built into this claptrap system — a system that we have collaborated in constructing by our loyalty to political parties that are, in return, neither loyal to us nor any idea, policy nor principle that doesn’t maintain the corporate status quo.
Accordingly, we must make the elites of the Democratic Party accountable for their betrayal — or we ourselves will become complicit. The faith of Democratic partisans in their degraded party is analogous to Bush and his loyalist still believing they can achieve victory in Iraq and the delusion-based wing of the Republican Party who, a few years ago, clung to the belief, regardless of facts, that Terri Schiavo’s brain was not irreparably damaged and she would someday rise from her hospital bed and bless the heavens for them and their unwavering devotion to her cause.
Faith-based Democrats are equally as delusional. Only their fantasies don’t flow from the belief in a mythical father figure, existing somewhere in the boundless sky, who scripture proclaims has a deep concern for the fate of all things, from fallen sparrows to medically manipulated stem cells; rather, their beliefs are based on the bughouse crazy notion that the elites of the Democratic Party could give a fallen sparrow’s ass about the circumstances of their lives.
In the same manner, I could never reconcile myself with the Judea/Christian/Islamic conception of god — some strange, invisible, “who’s-your-daddy-in-the-sky,” sadist — who wants me on my knees (as if I’m a performer in some kind of cosmic porno movie) to show my belief in and devotion to him — I can’t delude myself into feeling any sense of devotion to the present day Democratic Party.
Long ago, reason and common sense caused me to renounce the toxic tenets of organized religion. At present, I feel compelled to apply the same principles to the Democratic Party, leading me to conclude, as did Voltaire regarding the unchecked power of The Church in his day, that we must, “crush the infamous thing.”
Freedom begins when we free ourselves from as many illusions as possible — including dogma, clichés, cant, magical thinking, as well as blind devotion to a corrupt political class.
I wrote the following, before the 2006 mid-term election: “[…] I believe, at this late hour, the second best thing that could come to pass in our crumbling republic is for the total destruction of the Democratic Party — and then from its ashes to rise a party of true progressives.
“[…] I believe the best thing that could happen for our country would be for the leaders of The Republican Party — out of a deep sense of shame (as if they even possessed the capacity for such a thing) regarding the manner they have disgrace their country and themselves — to commit seppuku (the act of ritual suicide practiced by disgraced leaders in feudalist Japan) on national television.
“Because there’s no chance of that event coming to pass, I believe the dismantling of the Democratic Party, as we know it, is in order. It is our moribund republic’s last, best hope — if any is still possible.”
I received quite a bit of flack from party loyalist and netroots activists that my pronouncement was premature and we should wait and see.
We’ve waited and we’ve seen. Consequently, since the Republican leadership have not taken ceremonial swords in hand and disemboweled themselves on nationwide TV, it’s time we pulled the plug on the Democratic Party, an entity that has only been kept alive by a corporately inserted food-tube. In my opinion, this remains the last, best hope for the living ideals of progressive governance to become part of the body politic.
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at:
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