TAPKAE at 15

I'm not sure I have an exact date for it, but it was fifteen years ago in July or so (it might be August) when I dubbed my recording project from that year "The Artist Presently Known As Ed." At the time, I still fancied myself Ed Lucas, and that was the name of the album. But, in the months that followed, the name was found to be memorable enough that I started to identify with it. Upon doing the next project, Hog Heaven, in early 1997, I released it under the new name. Read all about it.

May Gray

I find it is still hard to get back into a normal life in Sandy Eggo after time at Red Mesa. I miss the structural element of having a job, but seeing how I am trying to develop my digital media abilities in hopes of finding something that calls on more than my ability to pilot a vehicle or move boxes, I am having a harder time finding work than usual. I've had a couple interviews but really it was a step backward from my time delivering the taters and onions. Resumes sent to organizations looking for media people have gotten rejections at best, and ignorance at worst. Not working gives me time to dabble in a lot of things, and for better or for worse, I have pressed on into the world of social media options, and yep, that stuff takes time to work on. I still have my reservations about it all, though. A year ago I wanted nothing to do with it all. Now for the sake of helping JEM or Kelli with the new WomenWhoSpeakInChurch site and its Facebook version, and the stuff I do to keep amused (with Buber the Dog's FB site, and one other that shall go unnamed), I am pretty much trying my hand at the various ways these things can be made to work together.

Since Kelli's ordination I've been messing with video programs and it hasn't always been fun. The couple cameras that captured footage both had breaks in the program, both during the same song that Kay sang, but at different points. So neither camera got unbroken coverage. An audio CD did get a pretty good mix off the board. (I did all the audio at my old church.) Trying to settle on a strategy for making the experience available to those not there that day, and to make it concise enough to put on YouTube (in shorter bits) has been a challenge, and I found myself needing to push into a couple new programs to get stuff happening. The material will accumulate at the WomenWhoSpeakInChurch YouTube site.

Red Mesa has made worship in a church seem kind of bland and uninteresting on the whole. The times I have gotten to church since my return I have been as likely to sort of drift out to another room to sit and be alone, or to wander back in for the sermon. Or not. I resigned from the Christian Education commission, which I felt rather useless at. I found that the things I do in the context of the young adults bunch seems to sustain my interest more and feel more effective in real time. No procedural meetings. Just contact that gives me a chance to periodically assume my role of teacher, but otherwise as fellow student, and just trying to create community among people who, about two years ago, were strangers, or not even involved yet! So I feel that has been quite a success, and actually, the togetherness and level of participation of this group has been rather notable compared to other upstarts from the same period of about 2-3 years ago. We're planning our own end of the world party for June 11. I call it the Post Apocalyptic Regressive Communion. Maybe Kelli, now fully ordained, can bless the scavenged food elements of Tang! drink and perhaps nuclear-safe Twinkies or Wonder bread. Fun!

Maybe it is the May gray, but I do feel down. Not being active for work has left me to stay home a lot, and frankly, I put back the weight that I lost while in my bike riding heyday. And I feel it. I just don't feel that I want to ride anywhere anymore. I don't leave the house too much but to walk the dog, go to church, errands, and such. I know it is the stuff that leads to depression, but I am trying to stay productive with my digital projects which seem to blossom even as I get them done. Ongoing ones like podcasts take a few days to get right; Photo work to present my trips is an ongoing thing; I blog once in a while; learning video is a new trick; editing my whole site a few months ago was epic; getting Google Apps set up for two domains was a big deal, especially when it came to transfering three email accounts; and then there is the social media stuff. Once in a while, it's time to look at manuals or tutorials online. At any given time, I've go plenty on my plate of jobs to take on. And not working is an unmatched time to get that stuff done. I hope it pays off as I push toward positions that might be more able to call upon my actual interests and enthusiasm.

Compassion Day

To honor whatever it is that one honors on Memorial Day, I chose to watch the film Why We Fight (Wikipedia). Of course, as my earlier Memorial Day missives will reflect, I am not precious about the day and its typical rituals of nationalistic bullshit. The documentary features a multifaceted look at the military-industrial-corporate-thinktank complex and questions civilians, politicians, and military alike what motivates this nation to go to war. There is a lot of talk about how Ike predicted (rightly) the massive system which now must be fed our billions of dollars, our young men and women, and helped along by a cheerleading media. What disturbs most is that it is allowed to take over by a public that is lulled to sleep by sensational news, bullshit "reality" TV, working two jobs to get by, and the host of other distractions we face in daily life.

But I also heard a rebroadcast of an episode of Fresh Air (NPR) featuring a Marine and a journalist who have written a book about fallen soldiers and how the Marines dispatch such officers to not only break the news of a combat death, but to help look after the family for as long as it takes for grief to work itself out. The officer told gripping stories of how ritualized the whole thing is in the Corps. It was hard to not choke up and get a bit teared up at some of the things he said. The point was made at how the Corps was trained to be utmost efficient and good at being a killing machine, but this story demonstrated a great deal of mercy and steadfastness in taking care of the family, and indeed a fallen brother or sister, even past the burial. It was genuinely touching to hear. War, terrible though it is, at least doesn't eclipse all the best parts of a man, or even the potential for the human image to shine through what is inherently a dehumanizing institution—the military.

But I like to reach deeper. Jesus taught to love one's enemies. He didn't say this so that they might trample upon you time and time again as you prove your weakness and vulnerability, but that they might be rendered as non-enemies. I heard of a Hasidic tale that had two men talking about love. One said, 'do you love me?' The other said, 'sure I do.' The first asked, 'what hurts me?' to which the second said, 'I don't know what hurts you.' The first came back, saying, 'how can you say you love me if you don't know what hurts me?'

America has done a good job of wrapping itself in the flag for a good while, but none so much as since 9/11. And it all seems so packaged and contrived. It has to be. If we ever had to confront the real reasons for 9/11, our heads would explode. So the easier way is to just declare that "they hate us for our freedom" and other such nonsense. We are cavalier like this in a time when the world grows ever more complex and daunting. But just give us the snappy soundbite reasoning. What is not pleasant to remember is that the world is hurting, and that too often, it is hurting not just because nature can deal some blows—earthquakes, storms, tsunamis, etc. —but that there is plenty of shit that comes down because of man made social constructs—economics, politics, and their dirty-deed-doing comrade, war. The world is mostly hurt today by a corrupt economic model which America champions but one that ultimately is a shameful, destructive thing. So I posit that America has forgotten how to hurt in sympathy with the rest of the world, and because we have forgotten how to hurt, we can remain blind to the real suffering that exists, in part due to our success. As long as we can remain ignorant of this hurt, we can never say that we love the world enough to bring our precious democratic values, our liberty, and all that other jibberish talk.

America has not these values to offer another land because they do not exist here like we think they do. What we have is a military that will aid big business in its expansion into other territories, intruding into the political workings of other nations, and a media that will turn enough of a blind eye so that people here don't really know what is going on. In that vacuum, people feel of no consequence in relation to the system. But the rest of the world isn't so duped. So why are we so surprised that a 9/11 happens? Maybe because so many Americans are without clue as to what really is going on in the world and that contemporary events don't just happen out of the blue? Americans don't like to admit what effects our way of life has in the world. That blindness has earned us 9/11. People argue that our way of life 'must be great because people flock to it.' Shallow argument, I think. Our way of life is hitting the dead end that was inevitable. A world in uproar is part of the sign that the party is coming to an end. And what has been clearer to us that something is wrong than 9/11?

Yet here we are, throwing completely unconscionable amounts of money at the problem with nary a clue to what is really the problem.

It's the economy, stupid.

The world is not willing to be our factory forever. Or our slaves forever. Or our doormats forever. But somehow, all attempts are made to cling to the status quo of easy motoring (as Kunstler says), endless mall shopping, and all this other consumption-based activity, no matter what price the nation must really pay in money, blood, international goodwill, etc. Yet our economists talk about how the consumer activity constitutes 2/3 of our economic activity. They talk about how the consumer feels good or bad, almost as if to scare people into consuming so the economy doesn't falter. I think that is a form of mental slavery, quite unbecoming a nation that fancies itself free and democratic. It is certainly a form of manipulation.

Our economy is founded on serving the needs of others in one great economic circle jerk-slash-merry-go-round from which hardly anyone can escape. Who knows what to do to break out of that? We're trained to produce and consume so that we might be good citizens—er, consumers (the new patriotism it seems). There is a sort of fear instilled in people so that we won't try to avoid our responsibility to the system. It really is the religion of the land. But this economy is different from the one based on real self-sufficiency in an earlier America, or in many parts of the world even now, and certainly in pre-industrial societies where there was no factory to make goods for ready consumption. And, since much of the world is enjoying a growing trend toward industrialism, the social strains are there the same as they were when Britain, the US, and Europe were confronted with the stress of abandoning rural life for urban-industrial settings. America forgot, that is what it is. We were there, experiencing the dislocation from rural, isolated people who were pressed (or drawn) into the cities.

America forgot what it was to have that upheaval. Now we are on the other side of the equation, and we can't understand how the rest of the world feels. I'll bet it feels rather the same as when early industrialists started in on their radical social transformation in the name of progress. Not every farmer who was lured from the farm, or forced off the farm embraced the urban-industrial lifestyle. So it is with other peasants around the world who see change as threatening and not altogether necessary if it means their land or resources will be taken away without real compensation. This is where America has failed to understand what hurts people and nations. This is where America has failed to show compassion in the real sense of the word—suffering with. This is where America cannot say it loves other people or places enough to bring them democracy or liberty of any of that. This is also where America cannot think of itself as a Christian nation. (This is a jab at those righty evangelicals and fundamentalists who say such nonsense.) America cannot foist any more economic injustice upon the world and expect cooperation. September 11 was the wakeup call for that. This means that everything must change or it will be changed for us.

Jesus of Nazareth was essentially a nobody from no place worth mentioning. But, as theologian Marcus Borg emphasizes, he was a man defined by and who defined compassion—suffering with. I think to be Christ-like is to understand suffering of another; to know what hurts a person. I will repeat again that you and me don't have enemies in Iraq or Afghanistan. But what we do have is a problem of thinking we are separated from one another—as if they haven't suffered the same (and worse) as we've suffered. I can't find it in my heart to hate another peasant in a far off land, or even in Mexico, about 20 miles from here. I've been told by my "leadership" that I have enemies out there, and that people are out to get what is mine, and I have to fight them before they attack me. That is the rhetoric these days, and it works as well as in any time and place. But who are our enemies but for other humans who hurt and feel just like you and me, and frankly, have been pushed into more desperate places in their souls than we have? If humans are our enemies, then we'd better get busy killing people, because there sure are plenty of them out there! But if they aren't, maybe killing gets us nowhere, and maybe on a day like Memorial Day we need to realize what a colossally stupid thing we do when we march off to war and engage in a fruitless pursuit that has proven itself to be that time and time again, and no amount of spending and media hype will ever prove anything to the contrary.

I frankly don't know what to think of vets now, seeing how most of them fought wars that were dubious, and a couple wars now were fought with so-called "volunteers." Part of me thinks these volunteers are blind fools, but really I just have to have pity on the poor souls who think that the military is a good place to be in this day and age. Touching as it was to hear how the Marines look after their dead, I still think that sort of ritualistic care should be put into avoiding the whole franchise of war in the first place. One day, let us hope that Memorial Day would be able to actually memorialize ALL the war dead, because there would be no more coming home draped in flags.

Recent T-Shirts And Bumper Sticker Sightings

War President, photoillustration, TAPKAE, 2004

• 1/20/09: End of an Error
• That's OK, I Wasn't Using My Civil Liberties Anyway
• Let's Fix Democracy in This Country First
• If You Want a Nation Ruled By Religion, Move to Iran
• Bush. Like a Rock. Only Dumber.
• If You Can Read This, You're Not Our President
• Of Course It Hurts: You're Getting Screwed by an Elephant
• Hey, Bush Supporters: Embarrassed Yet?
• George Bush: Creating the Terrorists Our Kids Will Have to Fight
• Impeachment: It's Not Just for Blow jobs Anymore
• America: One Nation, Under Surveillance
• They Call Him "W" So He Can Spell It
• Whose God Do You Kill For?
• Cheney/Satan '08
• Jail to the Chief
• No, Seriously, Why Did We Invade Iraq ?
• Bad President! No Banana.
• We Need a President Who's Fluent In At Least One Language
• We're Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them
• Is It Vietnam Yet?
• Bush Doesn't Care About White People, Either
• Where Are We Going? And Why Are We In This Hand basket?
• You Elected Him. You Deserve Him.
• Impeach Cheney First
• When Bush Took Office, Gas Was $1.46
• Pray For Impeachment
• The Republican Party: Our Bridge to the 11th Century
• What Part of "Bush Lied" Don't You Understand?
• One Nation Under Clod
• 2004: Embarrassed. 2005: Horrified. 2006: Terrified.
• Bush Never Exhaled
• At Least Nixon Resigned
• Are We Kinder and Gentler Yet?

Techgnophobia

I had to create a pair of new words to sum up my longer definitions of this phenomenon. I hope it makes it into Webster's. When Webster's does come calling, my last name is spelled "Lucas." Please send your money soon. I accept donations of gold.

Tech•gno•sis

1. Awareness of the hidden secrets of technology and technological societies, i.e. that it has limits due to resources, and enviro-socio-political costs that can be too great to bear upon the successful growth and application of technology. Knowledge often averted by minds that love the idea of the democratization of technological progress coupled with ideologies of perpetual economic growth.

Tech•gno•pho•bi•a (Not to be confused with "technophobia", the fear of technology.)

-gno- Gk. Gnosis, n. "secret or hidden knowledge required for salvation"-phobia- Gk. Phobos, n. "awe, reverence, fear"

1. The fear of venturing into understanding the fuller picture of technology's hidden dark side, i.e. its addictive qualities that will lead to dangerous use, even to complete failure.
2. A sentiment found in industrialized societies that cannot admit to failings of the entrenchment of their situation, even as the means of production fail, or the environment is destroyed in the process.
3. Techgnophobe, a person who subscribes to such a belief system, often foolishly, and justifies the status quo with easy answers to replace X with Y.

Example:

"The Club of Rome's Limits To Growth and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth are examples of techgnosis; they admit that there are incredible risks associated with the "success" of the technological societies of the world. These take frank looks at the hidden dark side of technology and growth that results from being able to manipulate natural systems for human gain, oftentimes with short-term goals in mind. Global warming, air pollution and peak oil are regarded by the techgnophobes as nonsense. They don't want to hear about the costs associated with more reliance on technology. They have easy answers like, 'We'll just invent a new car or industrial process to eliminate it,' so they say, not admitting to the fact that more cars and industrial processes does nothing to change the status quo, indeed, it deepens it! Such an adherence is techgnophobia, fear of understanding the full cost of a technological addiction. A Prius car might save X amount of gallons of fuel to operate over its life, but in making it, we have used as much energy and resources as we'd have used to make a combusion-engine car. People who want to paint a rosy picture of progress toward fighting global warming, peak oil, and pollution will laud the Prius with no evaluation of whether production of that car is any more sustainable than any other sort. Their reasoning is fundamentally missing an ethic of conservation, cultural shift of habitual use of devices."

Admission

I'm too sexy for my shirt.

But I shall retain it. It's brrr-cold tonight. Definitely not a good night to bike the neighborhood naked. At least not if I want to make a good showing for the ladies!

In(ter)dependence Day

In an urban society everything connects, each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable. —Threads, 1984

Last month I read Rabbi Michael Lerner's book, The Left Hand of God. His vision for America is that we should do better than we have been doing in the current milieu of greed, fear, and inequality. He has been adamant that the bottom line thinking we now share in is morally bankrupt and needs redress. Near the end of the book, he encourages us to examine our national mythology, and the holidays we celebrate. He offers that maybe Independence Day needs to be recast as Interdependence Day so that we begin to gather around the profound understanding that we are not islands, either apart from one another nor from other events in the world or in history itself.

Long before I started taking this stuff seriously, I posited that America's love affair with independence and individualism was going to get the better of us. About six years ago, when I wrote my song Suburban Silhouette, I noticed that our housing and land development "plan" was a manifestation of our love affair with independence and solitary living, but was also a major player in our social decay. Living outside of community is not a human way of life. We will realize this soon enough, as one of those painful lessons that history periodically teaches. Community living is not a hallmark of our current mode of living. Our lives today more resemble industrial artifacts, or maybe a live-by-numbers sort of existence. It's a lie that industry and advertising would like us to swallow that we are individuals if we buy this good or that, or patronize this service or that. We fabricate our "individuality" from an established and mostly widely available collection of pre-made artifacts that are for sale to those who can afford them. The self-made citizen is no more. However, that does not lead us to community, only undue dependence on a fuel-fed industrial process for delivering goods and services. Just because we are in a web of interdependence does not mean we live in community. Sorry, but a web of franchise fast food outlets and big box retailers and mortgage lenders and Amazon.com does not constitute an organic community of people who work to share in the profits of their own work and those of the people around them.

Living face-to-face communities are not founded by land speculators and developers. They are not founded by Wal Mart in Bentonville. They are not founded by Ray Kroc. They are not founded by Ford and GM. They are not created by transportation authorities. They are not the creation of oil companies. They are not created by abstract expressionist or postmodern artists. They are not founded by investors from overseas. They are not created by defense contractors or government agencies. They are not created by eBay. They are not created by philanthropic institutions. All these institutions may be able to create infrastructure and establish some sort of networking across hitherto unbreachable boundaries, but communities do not exist solely because of these institutions and their technologies or design cleverness.

I don't know what the prospects are for real human community in America. It has been killed in large part by greed. Greed has been a wolf in sheep's clothing. It has been smuggled into our land like a Trojan horse that was presented to us as a gift from industry and capitalist corporations. The old rhetoric of "what's good for corporations is good for America" is bankrupt. What is good for a corporation is good only for a corporation—to a point. It's bad for the nation, it's bad for the world, and ultimately, it's bad for the corporation in the long run. What will these hallowed corporations and industries have to provide us when the resource base is depleted? Or when we are all put out of work that would allow us to even buy things? Or when the population crashes due to overshoot/famine/disease/war?

A century of indulgence is a hard addiction to break. Addiction to leisure, individualism, and selfishness is not particularly a natural thing. Advertising-propaganda was designed to help deconstruct conventions of human life that leaned toward community welfare (not an entitlement program, you know). After all, a company with a good to sell can only sell so many of those widgets to a family if four or six people are using one widget. The way to sell a few more widgets is to condition people to own their own. What was once the "family TV" is now "one TV in each room and a DVD player in the Suburban." Same with cars themselves. By intentionally cultivating a culture that does not need to share, we not only lose the virtue of sharing, but we lose the benefits too. Sharing something like a TV, or a car, or other things that many people can use at once also kept people in proximity to each other which is conducive to talking and maintaining a life together. A TV show or movie, no matter how bad, is at least a shared experience to enter dialog that one hopes could lead to some understanding among the parties involved, and some exposures to other world views. With a shared car, people who need to cooperate to get places also need to cooperate more to be home together. More shared home time is the wellspring from which community comes in other areas of life. Relating to one's own kin is the cornerstone of society, and unfortunately, a lot of what passes for life now is geared toward diminishing or demolishing that web of relationships. We are at the third generation or so that is being raised in a world like this; those born today, the sons and daughters of people who themselves were born to the Baby Boomers who were the first generation born into a world of consumerism, are going to be that much more removed from the central familial relations that foster community. My dad's generation was the first to really grow up in a world of great material excess and unbridled consumptive habits and the distancing from community richness that seems to go hand in hand with that access to goods. I was born just as that way of life was coming of age, and it's all I have lived. People around my age who have children are giving another generation to this way of life. Who or what will keep a community ethic alive in their lives?

Nature just might be able to help, but it's the sort of help we wouldn't ask for. Eventually our energy-lavish consumption-based lifestyle will crumble a little at a time, and it will be helped along by irresponsible, self-interested politicians who believe that war and greater consumption (by those who still can do so) is the answer to our fading empire of consumption. Eventually, work and play will have to happen nearer to home. We might be confronted with the unthinkable of today: actually cooperating with people we've been told are our enemies—family, neighbors, people of color, poor people, and others. There will be holdouts of course. Some people in America just can't get out of their Antebellum mindset. But, I think for the majority of people, the trend will be clear. Either we inter-depend, or we die.

People aren't as scary up close as when they are wrapped in a ton-and-a-half of steel that goes 80 miles per hour. They're not as scary when they stand before you and aren't just objectified in the news or by other media. I keep saying it, but I don't have enemies in Iraq. Or in Afghanistan. The people I fear are not the poor people of the world outside of America who are lashing out against the injustice we bring. If anything, I am more scared of a nation of addicts in America who forgot how to share, who forgot how to be civil, who forgot how to be humble and generous, who forgot to appreciate beauty and natural complexity, who forgot how to live outside of technology. Maybe Roosevelt's statement about only having to fear is fear itself rings true. I fear Americans who fear loss. I'm more worried about people who will do anything to retain the last shards of entitlements long after they are clearly unsustainable. I fear Americans with what I call "cranial-rectal displacement disorder" (head-up-the-ass complex) in the face of global climate change, shifting alliances, fascism, and a host of other nightmares of our time. Instead of being on the same page with regards to key issues, the off-kilterness of society now will make it hard to get people to put down the pursuit of more material wealth and land and get on board with some real progress toward rebuilding shattered community life that has been replaced by computers and mass media which is essentially not able to connect with real people at the local level. There is no substitute for people in real contact.

Belated Memorial Day Missive

As a belated Memorial Day missive, indulge me. The words below are all mine, but were brought about by reading the words of Stan Goff, who to me is a great American, a man of integrity. Consider: his essay was published in late 2003, just about eight months into this war. Now that we have the Iraqi My Lai that was pretty much inevitable, Goff's early statement resounds prophetically—not just in his vision for what might happen in this terrible war, but the message to his audience—hang on to your humanity. I was inspired to write a little something to reflect on the topic of Memorial Day. I don't get rosy about it. I get riled up because to me it is disingenuous to forget what war really is, and to gloss over it. It is a sad way of answering problems. It is a way to get perfectly good people dead. It is a total squandering of life. And these days, sadly, a battlefield injury that once was fatal might be survived now, and the reduced-human (think of Joe Bonham in "Johnny Got His Gun") that survives the trauma should be a living reminder to us how horrible it is that war is allowed to serve as a part of the "civilized" world. The idea of a just war, or a "good war" of any sort is a lie. It was a lie when that reasoning was first devised, and it is more so now. So, no feel-good, nationalistic cheerleading drivel from me.

My pacifism is derived from my faith in Christ, who by my understanding, would be intolerant of any of this we now know. Based on his response to Roman empire, I extrapolate that the current worldwide empire, the United States, would be frowned upon in similar fashion, and devoted followers would be led to act in ways that don't play to that system's benefit if it comes at the expense of the marginalized and downtrodden. I see little or no attempt to seriously address the needs of the marginalized in this country (which is fast becoming everyone but for the wealthiest 10% of the nation). Ergo, I find my allegiance is not drawn toward Caesar George, but to the Christ. They are different, after all.

For what did he die, if not to convince us to live out better lives?

Goff doesn't mention peak oil (Google it!) here though he does call out this war as part of the task of securing energy resources from competitors—consistent with the goals of the Project for the New American Century, and sadly, it's consistent with the needs of the dominant culture, not just a handful of extremists who previously could not get an audience in Washington. The war seems to be solidly an act of imperial desperation which is fought to stave off oil and gas resource competition in the age of permanent decline and ultimate depletion, and to put on a show of force meant to dissuade other nations from abandoning the dollar as the world's reserve currency. A war of this sort is cowardly, not mighty. It is the act of a desperate nation on its way to the dustbin of history. Selling out its own people to conquer other lands is a sure failure, and many fallen empires can teach us this. Empires drain their homeland for the chance to subdue other nations. It's a shame that history has taken a back seat as a subject of study. Maybe it's time that we remember the fates of Rome, Britain, Spain, Germany, Japan, and the USSR. Imperial overreach and collapse. I don't suspect, given our current course in the world, that there will be many who shed tears for the USA when our time comes. And tangibly worse, there won't be a Marshall Plan for this nation when we finally lead the pack toward financial wipeout in part because of worldwide depletion of resources—a new thing in the history of the world. One of the problems of our go-it-alone approach to conducting our affairs is that when we are alone, we will be alone—a condition of our own devising.

The rhetoric is that this nation was founded as a Christian nation. Nonsense. It never was, and never will be. So let's stop worrying about it because it is just a smokescreen. However, right now, any true Christian and sober-thinking person of any persuasion among us needs to seriously question the fact that our national military budget is $450 BILLION dollars! (This, I hear, does not include the actual spending on the wars we fight.) I have to contend that spending that sort of money on tools of war and other related uses is completely at cross odds with anything Christian! The Christian thing to do, if there is any seriousness in the rhetoric, is to channel such money into our own people, institutions, and culture in ways that help us retain and delight in our humanity. Old Ike said, "Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed." Dr. King said what we need isn't a Christian nation, but a just one.

Just remember, your name and mine are on all these things that are sowing destruction in Iraq, these things that supposedly are being used to win the hearts and minds of the countries we occupy. I contend we need to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis because the people in Washington and other positions of power have lost theirs entirely. But let that be them, not you and me.

But really, anyone can blame politicians. It comes easily, doesn't it? All of us need to reflect on what it is we contribute to this mess. Have we done well enough to contemplate our energy use and consumption of all things? Have we really, as individuals and institutions, made the best decisions? Do those decisions reach beyond what is good for this fiscal quarter? Do our "leaders" act on our behalf because they assume that most of us would be unable to change our ways of life after a lucrative century of being transformed from "citizen" to "consumer"? There is more to protest than war, and unfortunately, it does require examination of our own individual motives. What I believe must be protested is the lifestyle that drives us to that sorry end (war). If the American way of life has become one of ethical slovenliness, greed, empty hedonism and forgetting our humanity while making a profit, is that one worth fighting for, at great expense in every way? Is fighting the only way we can carry on this way of life? What happened to diplomacy? Why do the social services suffer here while we can somehow afford to destroy nations on the other side of the earth? (I've lost two social service jobs in the time since this war started—the only two jobs I ever loved because they were decidedly unproductive by nature—only of service to those in need.) The average American does not want this if it were presented plainly, but the average American also, for whatever reason, turns a blind eye and makes decisions out of fear of the loss of entitlements and status that once were luxuries to earlier generations in this same country. Can it be that our love of luxury is driving our "leadership" to acts of desperation so that we can continue this way of life? If it will benefit them for one more fiscal quarter or for a lifetime, I think so.

Do any of us really stop to understand the web of influence that connects our wallets to the war? And the same web which connects the war to homeless folks on our streets or the massive failure that led to the catastrophe of New Orleans? Do we understand how our daily choices in markets send the signals that ultimately drive immigrants across "our" borders and take "our" entitlements? I find our immigration "crisis" to be not unlike the war in Iraq, fought on our borders and in our cities. The similarity resides in how we strip others of their humanity, and how we do it at tremendous expense to our own people which in turn robs us of our humanity. What does it matter whether we lob rockets and mortars at these people or take away their hopes, or both? Either way, is this something we should be proud of and hold up as our great way of life? Is that the business we are in now? Stripping people of dignity? Community? Opportunity? Health? Wealth? Again, the money we put toward defending our nation from the displaced peasants of the Latin American nations is money that maybe we could use for more productive work so we could be the America I know we all wish we were.

The Iraq war and the immigration issue are tearing this nation asunder and both are tremendous distractions from what we really need to be paying attention to. Consider it a worldwide sleight of hand. Our national treasury is being drained of funds to fight non-enemies on your dime and mine while people who wipe their asses with $100 bills are making out like the bandits they are. The more distracted you and I are from understanding peak oil, global warming, media complacency, the real cause of 9/11, terrorism, cronyism, religious fundamentalism burying science, geopolitical strife, genetically modified food/organisms, the teetering dollar, displaced peasant farmers in the first-world-created "third world," pharmaceutical industry funny business, pillage of social programs, skyrocketing debt, and a host of other issues, the easier it is for them to carry on with this sort of stuff while flying under the radar. Distractions abound. Like Dorothy was told, "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" Don't blame David Copperfield if one day the Statue of Liberty disappears. You could figure that out by establishing who needs the copper, or who wants to steal liberty. And, the sad thing is, unlike a Copperfield television extravaganza, the real disappearance of the Statue of Liberty and all it stands for will not be televised. The less you and I know, the easier it is to pull it off. All that is required is some smoke and mirrors, and a sleight of hand.

Maybe men of war and outlandish profit need to be let down. Maybe we need to make them wrong about it all. Maybe our national actions, now predicated on the expectation that Americans are mindless consuming drones who gave up principled life for convenience and security, are predicated on a faulty premise that one day will hold no merit. The cost of their being right is too great. Maybe it is time that we all do assess our addictions to goods and services. Maybe it's time we assess our Frankenstein's Monster that we have created by habit formed one purchase at a time. One car trip at a time. One choice at a time. The empire they control was put together one purchase at a time. With concentrated will, it can be deconstructed the same way, or it can all run itself aground like most large man-made social experiments do after they exhaust their own lifeblood. A great man I know has repeatedly said, "a culture of success will collapse of its own weight." Forget about a top-down solution to problems of this sort. The "top" is the problem that got us here. Media, advertising, industry, politicians all want to help us forget how to live like humans. They need us to be at war with one another so they may thrive. But, to borrow Stan Goff's words, hold on to your humanity.

Stan Goff Says Hold On To Your Humanity

These are the words of Stan Goff, a great American. I want to reprint it here so I can pair it with my posters that came about a couple years ago. The original post is here.

I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you—some more extreme than others—are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed. In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies, shit about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all.

The essence of all this shit was that we had to "stay the course in Vietnam," and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.

When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.

When that bullshit story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote.

What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and commiting rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the difference between me—just in country—and the people who had done those things to them.

What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children.

My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.

So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight.

And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of the Vietcong.

But there we were, ordered into someone else's country, playing the role of occupier when we didn't know the people, their language, or their culture, with our head full of bullshit our so-called leaders had told us during training and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate, but any one of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we stated to ask is who put us in this position?

In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other on the back in Washington DC with their fat fucking asses stuffed full of cordon blue and caviar.

They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.

That's you now. Just fewer trees and less water.

We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all might be stuck there for a little longer. So I want to tell you the rest of the story.

I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes either. I started getting pulled into something—something that craved other peole's pain. Just to make sure I wasn't regarded as a "fucking missionary" or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that was untouchable, people too crazy to fuck with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting someone's house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly a second thought. People who had the power of life and death—because they could.

The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you can't trust because of your circumstances, and to rage about what you've seen, what has happened to you, and what you have done and can't take back.

It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn't name, and the reason I know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced to "niggers" here before they could be lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive, even when that wasn't true, but something inside us told us that so long as they were human beings, with the same intrinsic value we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes even kill them. So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery fire onto the cries of a baby.

Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the important thing to understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's the thing you might not get until it's too late. When you take away the humantiy of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul because it is standing in the way.

So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that even though we function, we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more, and maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics—drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt others, esepcially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration statistic or a mental patient.

You can ever escape that you became a racist because you made the excuse that you needed that to survive, that you took things away from people that you can never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never get back.

Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough to emotionally resuscitate us and bring us back to life. Many do not.

I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no one else sees it. You might hear it in my words. I hate being chumped.

So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, however you define survival, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching fucking military careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.

The big bosses are trying to gain control of the world's energy supplies to twist the arms of future economic competitors. That's what's going on, and you need to understand it, then do what you need to do to hold on to your humanity. The system does that; tells you you are some kind of hero action figures, but uses you as gunmen. They chump you.

Your so-called civilian leadership sees you as an expendable commodity. They don't care about your nightmares, about the DU that you are breathing, about the lonliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how you humanity is stripped away a piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your illnesses, and hide your wounded and dead from the public. They already are.

They don't care. So you have to. And to preserve your own humanity, you must recognize the humanity of the people whose nation you now occupy and know that both you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are calling the shots.

They are your enemies—The Suits—and they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are Black families, or immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and they say they will "never run" in Iraq, but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they fucking aren't there. You are

They'll skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you, and throw you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask the vets who are having their benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and their cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious illnesses.

So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible for your being there, and responsible for keeping you there. I can't tell you to disobey. That would probably run me afoul of the law. That will be a decision you will have to take when and if the circumstances and your own conscience dictate. But it perfeclty legal for you to refuse illegal orders, and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal. Ordering you to keep silent about these crimes is also illegal.

I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never under any obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth to yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.

Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and who have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to look us in the face. Don't leave your souls in the dust there like another corpse.

Hold on to your humanity.

Stan Goff

US Army (Ret.)

What A Difference A Decade And A Half Makes

Fascistfest!

An event that used to be the high point of my year in the mid-late 80s is now seen by the present me to be a fascist freeforall. I'm a little surprised and maybe saddened for it to taken me this long to figure it out. Sometimes I'm a little slow.

Ah, Miramar Air Show! There are big billboards along the freeways that surround Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. They offer businesses the chance to watch their business "take off" if these businesses want to get a booth at the show right in the midst of the F-18s, C-130s and whatever helicopters they have up there right now. Finally, this week, it hit me! Duh! Fascism is the mingling of state and corporate power. Duh. And here it was right in front of all our eyes!

When I was a kid, I idolized the Blue Angels. As a display of flying prowess, they are still at the top of their league, and taken solely as a superhuman feat of coordination and technology, I still get shivers watching them from my dad's rooftop. (He is within a few miles of regular ops at Miramar, but gets some good flyovers during airshow season.) But I've come to assess airshows differently than when I was 12. Especially now that we are at and about to pass peak oil. One has to wonder, while the rest of us are paying unheard of prices to get to work and the grocery store, the government can still fly a half dozen F-18s for show??? While our government can't be bothered to help people in New Orleans, it can afford to not only fly these jets to the show, do three or four shows in a weekend (one strictly for press and VIPs), but it can also get all the other planes and hardware to the same show—all from scattered bases in the region, across the 5 services. Multiply times the number of shows of this sort, all for show!

No redeeming value except to give companies a place to advertise, and to glorify the machines and methods of war. And it's a good thing, because you know, Americans are getting a little fed up with this war business, so it's time to kick the PR machine into overdrive. Americans are forgetting how to love war, so the air shows are here to remind them of what a great thing we've got going.

Just think—in one weekend, Americans will have these things happen so cleverly to them that they might never know it.

First, they will be oooohing and aaaaahhhhing over machines they paid for which are used to kill people with utmost efficiency. Somehow the speed, turning radius, paintjobs, and other distinguishing features will help people forget their government really is out to suck the money from their pockets while taking their liberties and getting other nations to submit or die. Or, as Ray Charles would have said, the government is "pissing in their face and calling it spring rain." They will also forget that every gallon of fuel used to fly all those planes and copters, and to move the armored vehicles and tanks is another gallon of petrofuel that won't be coming back. It won't be available for their ride to work, or to take their children to school, hospital, or on vacation to New York. Or, every gallon of fuel used for tha air show is one less gallon that can be used to save a victim of a Gulf Coast hurricane. Gone. And the government positively doesn't give a flying fuck because they decided they needed this air show more than any one of us need to live our lives. Let's not forget the amazing waste of fuel it is for all those people to drive their SUVs and trucks to the show, often in stop and go traffic, with the line going for a mile or more out to and sometimes well beyond the front gates of the base.

From the Blue Angels FAQ page:

How far can the F/A-18 fly on a full load of fuel or with external fuel tanks?

The F/A-18 can travel approximately 1,000 miles on a full load of fuel without external tanks. Adding the external tanks extends the range to approximately 1,200 miles.

How much fuel does an F/A-18 Hornet use in a show?

On the average, one F/A-18 uses approximately 8,000 pounds or 1,300 gallons of JP-5 jet fuel at a cost of roughly $1,378.

How much fuel is used over the course of a year, including transportation, training, etc.?

Over a one-year period, the squadron, including Fat Albert, burns approximately 3.1 million gallons of fuel.

Do we have that kind of fuel to just chuck away on this shit?

Second, they will be advertised to while more or less captive. As if Clear Channel did not have enough advertising under its control, their radio stations will be out in force along the tarmac, vying for listeners with their gimmicky prize giveaways. Banners for home improvement, banks, cycles, cars, mortgages, and who knows, maybe even Viagra! Like we need to go to a fucking air show to be exposed to this? Well, what could be better? You make the public flock to a closed perimeter military base and while they are getting the sunburn of their lives, you pummel them with the same garbage that already adorns the sides of buses, billboards, magazine ads, and is plastered all over parts of the internet! Ah, the genius of advertising.

Third, the young men and women will be approached by recruiters. For recruiters, it's like shooting fish in a barrel! Hell, I've been to airshows before. It's all PR. That much I understood years ago, but I didn't understand the layers of what was behind the appeal. Once upon a time I wanted nothing more than to be an F-14 pilot. Good thing I have poor vision and a bad attitude which pretty much blew my qualifications by the end of ninth grade. (Now I get to serve my country by being a polemical watchdog.) But another generation of young men are turning up for the war machine, their options limited by their ethnicity, geography, income (or lack of). They will certainly be oooohed and ahhhhed by the gear on display. Too many (even if it's only one) will be in the recruiters office by Monday to give their lives over to the world's most dangerous job. Sad.

Well, so much for government regulating business. Hell, now it's in the business of helping business. Just think, the businesses get consumer dollars when they get back to the shop, and later on they get a nice break from the government too. The airshow is one big circus to extract money from the unsuspecting public so that government and business can get in the back room and suck each other off and then trade hi fives with cigars in their mouths.