Blogroll. These are the websites whose RSS feeds I download every morning. My favorite is AlterNet -- not only do they have their own small staff of very good writers, but they also copy some of the best stuff from other websites.
SAVE YOUR SEEDS.
Mix them into your birdfeeder
especially during migration season.
If the weed takes root in enough places, the "war" against it will become too obviously futile and will have to be abandoned. Then it will no longer serve as an excuse for locking up huge numbers of antiauthoritarian people for victimless crimes. (Are you aware that the USA imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world? We're not the "land of the free.")
Music
I may burst into song (badly) at any moment, particularly during a peace rally. Taped to my shower wall is a ziplock bag containing the lyrics of whatever song I'm currently trying to learn or relearn. It's mostly old peace / progressive stuff. The pictures below are LINKS to music videos.
Slavery stitched into the fabric of my clothes // Chaos and commotion wherever I go //
Love, I try to follow — Ain't No Reason, by Brett Dennen
You who choose to lead must follow // But if you fall, you fall alone. // If you should stand then who's to guide you? // If I knew the way I would take you home. — Ripple, by the Grateful Dead
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears? — America, by Alan Ginsberg
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade; // Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid; // Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made; // But the union makes us strong. — Solidarity Forever, anthem of several labor organizations, written by Ralph Chaplin, performed here by Pete Seeger and The Weavers. (Same tune as "Battle Hymn of the Republic.")
Stand up, all victims of oppression, // For the tyrants fear your might! // Don't cling so hard to your possessions, // For you have nothing if you have no rights! — The Internationale, Billy Bragg version
And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for // don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Viet Nam — Vietnam Rag, by Country Joe and the Fish
Love is but the song we sing, // And fear's the way we die. // You can make the mountains ring, // Or make the angels cry — Get Together, performed by The Youngbloods
What will it take, to whip you into line? A broken heart? A broken head? It can be arranged. It can be arranged. — Mr. Blue, by Tom Paxton, popularized by Clear Light
He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame, // His orders come from far away no more, // They come from here and there and you and me, // And brothers can't you see, // This is not the way we put the end to war. — Universal Soldier, by Buffy Sainte-Marie, popularized by Donovan Leitch
But your flag decal won't get you into Heaven any more. // They're already overcrowded from your dirty little war. // Now Jesus don't like killin', No matter what the reason's for, // And your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more — John Prine
Screaming in language that no one understands // Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands // When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall // Of the prison they told us would outlast us all — Homage to Marat, by Peter Weiss, popularized by Judy Collins
I mean - what have you got to lose? You know, you come from nothing; you're going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing! — Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, by Eric Idle
Forecast to be falling yesterday // Only in the past is what they say — Chocolate Rain, by Tay Zonday
Blue meanies have been sighted within the vicinity of this theater. There's only one way to go out: Singing! — excerpt from Yellow Submarine, by The Beatles
Lennon
Wilburys
Dylan
The Nice
Simon & Garfunkel
Yusuf Islam
Ochs
Rovics
Cohen
K23
Costello
McMurtry
Immort.Tech.
Jynkz
Asylum St.
Russell
Williams
Pink
Wyclef Jean
Gómez
Billy Joel
Smothers Br.
9th Nov.Sisters
Esther Sparks
U2
Hair
Springsteen
Hobby
Melanie Safka
Feldman
In addition, you can find thousands more antiwar songs, and hundreds of antiwar videos, at
Movies
Documentaries.The Yes Men is fun to watch; it's about these guys pranking the corporatocracy. But it also reveals how corporatists think. Their thinking is explained in greater detail in The Corporation, a movie that is not fun, but it is well made and highly insightful, a real eye-opener. ¶ Next on my list are two anti-corporatocracy films with more specialized issues. Michael Moore's Sicko makes a very convincing case for the idea that single-payer, not-for-profit health care (i.e., socialized medicine), which is working very efficiently and effectively in Canada, most of Europe, and our own Medicare, is what we need here for the rest of the USA. Along the way he explains how the right wing demonized socialism and prohibited any rational discussion of it. See my discussion of Marx, further down this column. And Iraq for Sale reveals how the military-industrial complex functions; it shows how Halliburton and other such companies have been profiting hugely over the agression against Iraq. (Two other reasons for the Iraq invasion are the theft of Iraq's oil and intentional depletion of the US economy.) ¶ Next I've listed two films dealing with opposition to the Vietnam War. (But the occupation of Iraq is essentially a continuation of the same war, though they've changed the location and the names of the bogeymen.) Sir! No Sir! tells about the rise of the anti-war movement inside the military — i.e., how soldiers began to organize and resist. And The U.S. versus John Lennon tells how Lennon worked for peace and the FBI persecuted him. ¶ Finally, at the bottom of my list are my three favorite apocalyptic movies. The End of Suburbia explains that our way of life will have to change drastically when we run out of cheap oil, and that's going to happen soon regardless of wars — oil is made from dead dinosaurs, and no one knows how to make more of those. Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth is one of the things that woke me up politically; make sure you understand the concepts of positive feedback loops and tipping points. And Loose Change raised the gravest doubts I've had about the trustworthiness of our government. To me, the most troubling evidence about 9/11 is the non-evidence: why did the US government rush to destroy all the evidence, except for a little bit that it confiscated and has refused to release for public viewing? ¶ By the way, you can find lots of free online documentaries at
rsh and Freedocumentaries .org
and Documentaries .Ws
Fiction films. The first few stories on my list are delightful rebellions against conformity. However, reviewers have pointed out that dark-skinned people are curiously absent from the idyllic Paris of the film Amelie. ¶ The picture of Chaplin is linked to a video of his stirring speech about freedom, and about not serving nationalism blindly, in the film The Great Dictator. That speech, and other expressions of Chaplin's somewhat progressive views, earned him persecution by Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. ¶ Yellow Submarine was a surreal fantasy cartoon made by the Beatles in 1968. The authoritarian bullies that they overthrew with song were the "blue meanies." Keep singing. The animation was in a psychedelic style popular at that time and best known in the paintings of Peter Max, though he himself was not actually involved in that film. A similar style was also used in The Glass Harmonica, produced in the same year in the USSR; in that film the authoritarian bully is capitalism. ¶ The films The Matrix and V for Vendetta were both made by the Wachowski brothers, and both films have the drawback of relying on superheroes when our society really needs a mass movement, but they're still fun to watch. Personally, I interpreted The Matrix as an allegory of political awakening; taking the red pill and waking up means realizing that Fox News and the rest of the corporate news media are not being particularly truthful. But I have heard other interpretations of that film — e.g., some see it as a religious awakening. V for Vendetta leaves no such ambiguity — it is about a totalitarian government that has seized power through the use of a false flag incident. The overthrow of that government is every antiauthoritarian's wet dream.
You might also want to look at GoLeft's list of top 100 movies every progressive should see.
I must watch Dr. Zhivago again sometime soon. The only time I've ever seen it was long ago, long before my political awakening, and I understood almost none of it. It was brought to my mind recently when one of my friends commented on my blog, "Political personal," by saying
Your post reminded me of a great movie, Doctor Zhivago. During a time of unrest and high idealism or the Russian revolution, the great doctor met with his brother who was a loyal soldier for the Red guard. Although they had much love and admiration for each other, his brother questioned his choice of living the path he has chosen in the times they lived. He responded by saying something to the effect of someone has to live life while others are fighting for it.
I agree: there would be no point in all of us devoting all our time to fighting for a better life, if no one were actually living that life. But I think a great problem of our time is that far too many people are living life, and far too few fighting for it — and even fewer struggling to figure out what the battle really is. I believe this is a time when far more zealots are desperately needed (armed with words, not guns). For most people, politics is something you do on the side, peripheral to having a life, but I (Eric) am trying to transform myself, trying to make my life peripheral to my politics. And it is easier than you might think, because the joy of dedication and meaning is far greater than the fleeting pleasures that the middle class distracts itself with.
Television
How does TV affect us? Well, first of all, there is a built-in economic bias. George Gerbner wrote
For the first time in human history, most of the stories about people, life, and values are told not by parents, schools, churches, or others in the community who have something to tell, but by a group of distant conglomerates that have have to sell.
A more subtle effect — I don't know whether it is more powerful or less — is in the nature of the medium itself. Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan said that communication technologies are not neutral carriers of information — that they determine what kind of information will be conveyed, and more importantly they shape the recipients of that information. This idea was restated by the media theorist Neil Postman:
Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it simplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
Al Gore discusses this idea further in his recent book, The Assault on Reason. I would restate his ideas this way:
The act of reading a sentence in a book encourages, perhaps even forces, active and rational thinking about that sentence, because the parts of the brain that turn letters into words and then into meaning must reconstruct ideas inside the brain. Thus, reading books gets people into the habit of thinking. But
hearing that same sentence on TV encourages and perhaps forces a passive acceptance
of that sentence — perhaps agreeing with the sentence, perhaps disagreeing with it, but in any case not really
thinking about it — because of the physiologically different way that the sentence is received. Performance on TV is nearly like real life; it doesn't require reconstruction of reality. And yet it presents the cinematographer's viewpoint, which is even more filtered than if you were present on the scene yourself. Thus, quite literally,
TV trains people to not think.
The internet can be used in either fashion; I hope that it will be used more like books than like TV. McLuhan died before the internet began, but he foresaw it transforming the world into a global village. He described it acting as an external nervous system. Indeed, I see a world consciousness evolving — not mental telepathy, but conversations everywhere that are improving our shared understanding of our language and our relation to one another.
I urge you not to get all your news from the mainstream media. One bad news item after another, and no analysis at all; it's designed to make you think the world is a terrible place where bad things happen frequently and at random; that's sure to make you a pessimist. Personally, I am proud to say that I have cut down greatly on watching televison; I wonder if I should try to give it up altogether. The only programs that I still watch regularly are Stewart and Colbert:
I also sometimes watch documentaries (on televison or on the internet); and I sometimes watch BookTV. I get much of my news from Alternet, which has good progressive analysis.
BookTV sometimes has some really great stuff. For instance, I don't recall for certain, but I think that may have been where I first encountered Lakoff; his book Don't Think of an Elephant! was instrumental in my "awakening." But if you watch BookTV, exercise caution in choosing what you watch; BookTV is a random assortment of authors, and over half of it is right-wing propaganda — and I think that percentage has been increasing lately. I'd recommend checking the schedule and then googling an author before you watch him or her, so you'll be aware of what that author's biases are.
Books
Before I tell you about the books I've been reading, I'll say a little about the two that I wrote. I wouldn't recommend either of them for a general audience — they're math books — but I can make a few remarks about them that might interest you.In the first one, I tried to share some of the beauty of mathematics, and some of my readers told me I succeeded. But it was intended for beginning graduate students in math. Unlike music, math requires years of study even to become a spectator.I'd like to say that my second book was about truth, but I have to say a bit less grandly that it was an introduction to mathematical logic. But it was politically radical, in a fashion that I will now explain. The conventional introduction to mathematical logic covers only the so-called "classical" logic of Frege, Tarski, et al. Most logicians view nonclassical logics as a specialized topic suitable only for advanced researchers; most mathematicians never encounter nonclassical logics at all. Thus, the conventional view is a monist view: there is only one way to determine truth, only one way to look at the world. But really, our everyday nonmathematical thoughts are a mixture of many kinds of reasoning — classical, constructive, relevant, comparative, quantitative, etc. And teaching should relate to the student's pre-classroom experience whenever possible. So I selected the best examples I could find in the research literature and wrote a book that introduces classical alongside several nonclassical logics. From the introduction:Some teachers, familiar only with classical logic, may fear that pluralism will open the floodgate of cultural relativism: If all logics are permitted, then no one of them is of any particular interest or value. But just the opposite is true. Accepting an arbitrary-seeming definition as the only correct one deprives us of any meaningful choice, whereas pluralism explores the different advantages enjoyed by different logics.Well, so much for beauty and truth. Those are worthless without love; that's what I realized in my 2006 awakening. I haven't yet seen any mathematics of love, so I've turned away from math.Most of what I've been reading lately is mentioned in my main essay in the right column of this page. I'm a slow reader; I start way more books than I finish. So instead I read articles about books, and I watch videos in which book authors talk about their books — on BookTV, ForaTV, and elsewhere. Some of the books that look really good to me are listed on this bookpage that I edit. I read lots of articles. My favorite ezine is Alternet — they've got great writers of their own, and they also copy good stuff that they find elsewhere on the internet.
I care for very few poems, but recently I read Ferlinghetti's Poetry As Insurgent Art, and I loved it. I would summarize it this way: poetry should be lived, not just written down.
I recently read David Sirota's new book, The Uprising. It's a fascinating book. Sirota sides with the people, as do I or, say, Howard Zinn; but Sirota avoids the simplicity of dividing everything into heroes and villains. With an eye that I think is very accurate, Sirota paints the rich tapestry of US politics, including the love-hate relationship between the grassroots uprising and the Democratic Party. And he includes people like Lou Dobbs, who are part progressive (attacks the corporatocracy) and part conservative (scapegoats the immigrants). The uprising is the unrest in our society, which is largely angry, and thus not so "blessed" as would be suggested by the title of Paul Hawken's book. The unrest is growing larger than the box with which the establishment tries to contain it. It will lead to some sort of change, but we don't know what kind yet; it is not self-steering. It may end up being steered by some demagogues and going in a non-progressive direcction. I think our best chance of steering it in a beneficial direction is if we understand it; and our best chance of understanding it is if we listen to what Sirota has to say, because I think he presently understands it a bit better than the rest of us. Here is a link that will take you to several videos of Sirota talking about his book, and he speaks well, but I think his writing is better. — Sirota published this book shortly before Obama defeated Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination; I think that Obama's charismatic campaign movement may have swallowed at least a portion of the uprising, for at least a while. I don't know what will come of it.
One of the books in which I currently have a bookmark is Lynn Hunt's book Inventing Human Rights; it was brought to my attention when Lakoff began mentioning it in his writing and lectures. Hunt argues that empathy is the historical basis of our democracy, and that the widespread empathy now known to us is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon. Apparently the Declaration of Independence's truths would not have been so "self-evident" a century earlier. Below is an hour-long video of Hunt talking about her research on human rights over the last few centuries. If you watch it, you can skip the first 8 1/2 minutes, which just consist of various people introducing each other and thanking each other.
Hunt says on page 39 of her book:
Normally, everyone learns empathy from an early age. Although biology provides an essential predisposition, each culture shapes the expression of empathy in its own particular fashion. Empathy only develops through social interaction; therefore, the forms of that interaction configure empathy in important ways.
I believe, and hope, that we are developing a culture that encourages empathy more.
What about fiction? Well, my favorite novel is political; it is Orwell's 1984. When I first read it around 40 years ago, I merely thought it an unreal and depressing fantasy. But when I reread it recently, I was amazed at how much of it I see coming real around me — spying, language manipulation, intimidation, etc. And Pynchon's foreword to a 2003 edition showed me tremendous hope in the book: [SPOILER ALERT]
At one point while Smith is being tortured, he proclaims his faith that humanity — not through his own person, but somehow — will eventually triumph over the totalitarian regime. And though the story ends with Smith's spirit being crushed, that is not where the book ends. Pynchon explains that Orwell was very insistent on the appendix being included, despite his publisher's objections. The appendix, a description of the procrustean language Newspeak, is written in past tense and in English — vindicating Smith's faith, and evidently Orwell's, and now mine too.
Admittedly, there are differences: our own society hypnotizes us and puts us to sleep with meaningless entertainment and consumer goods, and relies as much on willing self-deception as on outright lies. Still, there are also shocking similarities. Initially I was reluctant to accept Orwell's grisly insights, but they're the only answers I've seen to certain questions:
Q: Why do cons like torture? ..A: Well,.. it's not to extract reliable information. A torturee will say whatever he or she believes the torturers want to hear, and torturers know that. Their real purpose is to intimidate, to exercise power over the person being tortured as well as over other people who know torture is occurring — i.e., us. Orwell's villains want power, and pain is the only undeniable proof of power. Mere obedience is not proof, because subjects might sometimes obey for reasons of their own.
Q: Why do cons like long, unnecessary, unwinnable, expensive wars? ..A: They're.. not really interested in winning; in fact they prefer the war to be endless. Their real agenda is not foreign, but domestic — not to conquer a distant people but to manipulate their own. War generates fear and disorientation and uses up resources, thus making people tired and submissive while providing an excuse to cut social programs. Bush's increases to the national debt may be intentional. Stewart's program attempted to present as comedy what is actually true: the destruction Bush has wrought upon America is too consistent to be merely moronic incompetence.
Q: Why do cons hate sexuality? ..A: See.. the excerpt from the book, below.
The aim of the Party ... was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. ... The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. ... Unlike Winston, [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The way she put it was: "When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and wearing flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"
Thus, making love is not only a personal matter between yourself and your lover. It is also an affirmation of the individual, and thus an act of defiance against authoritarianism and totalitarianism. "Make love, not war" may be a funny bumper sticker, but it is also serious ideology.
Heroes
Howard Zinn (1922- ) was a professor of history, and is author of many books of history. Zinn's books are unabashedly biased; Zinn explains his bias in some of his writing. A roadmap is more useful for driving than an aerial photograph; the whole point of a roadmap is to omit irrelevant details and focus on the details that are useful to one's purpose. But omission is even more unavoidable in a history book. The analogue of the aerial photograph would be a compendium of all the millions of known facts of the era that is being described, with all the newspapers and photographs and journals and letters. In place of a single book, we would have many buildings full of books, and no one would ever have time to read the whole thing. Thus, to think of "not omitting anything" from a history book is simply nonsense. But the historian must choose what to omit and what to emphasize, and these choices are determined by the historian's bias, the historian's view of what is important and what significance the various facts have. Thus, a book of history cannot help but be biased; every history book is biased. Zinn is different in this respect: Unlike most historians, he is aware of his bias, and he does not try to hide it; he wears it proudly. It's right there in the title of some of his books — e.g., A People's History. Zinn speaks for the people, and he speaks with love, and I love him for that.
Noam Chomsky (1928- ) was a professor of political science, and is author of many books. Chomsky has inspired and radicalized more people than perhaps anyone else around today. For a good introduction to Chomsky, watch his film Manufacturing Consent (almost 3 hours), or watch this short clip on why activism matters (6 1/2 minutes.)
George Lakoff (1941- ) is a professor of linguistics and author of numerous books. I consider Lakoff to be the deepest and most important thinker of our age. Or, perhaps more accurately, I would describe myself as a Lakoffite: Lakoff has affected my worldview more than any other one writer. Once in a while I read something that is so deeply insightful to me that it shifts my universe, and I am disoriented for weeks until I adjust to my new view of everyday experiences — I have obtained such mind-blowing insights from Lerner, Waldman, Hartmann, and others. But generally it's only one or at most two worldshifts per writer. Lakoff has moved my world several times, with his explanations of
biased terminology, Orwellian language, the deeper phenomenon of frames, the dominance of values over policies, the unifying underlying principles of liberals/progressives versus those of conservatives, the structure of empathy and its importance in the progressive movement.
(And there's probably more — I haven't read everything that he's ever written.) I do not assert that these ideas originated with Lakoff — indeed, nearly every philosophical idea under the sun is a reformulation of earlier ideas that can be traced in some form back to antiquity. But Lakoff's reformulations work for me. That may be as much a description of me as it is of him: evidently my past experiences prepared me to appreciate his writing. ¶ So, in my view, Lakoff is the greatest thinker. I will postpone judgment on whether Lakoff is also the greatest writer. Much of his writing is hard to read, but perhaps his ideas are inherently difficult. Or perhaps he has been making his ideas available to us while they are still raw and unrefined; perhaps he and/or other writers eventually will make his ideas more accessible. A growing army of readers, including myself, are trying to live with his ideas and make them part of our perception of the world. Actually, I think that Lakoff's writing has been growing more accessible with each successive book, as he has shifted his attention from academia to a more general audience. His most recent books – Whose Freedom, Thinking Points, and The Political Mind – are probably his most readable. By the way, Thinking Points is available for free download (but you can also purchase it in bookstores, if you don't like reading books on your computer). ¶ Even if he had never gotten involved with politics, I would still admire what Lakoff has written about linguistics. He has made clear, in a way that I never understood before, that our perception of reality is filtered through our language. Even concrete objects are perceived subjectively. For instance, what is a "chair"? It is not defined by how many legs it has, or whether it has a back; in some sense a beanbag chair is a chair; in some sense a desk becomes a chair when you sit on it. The persistant theme in all these "chairs" is the human use: a chair is something that humans sit on. "Man is the measure of all things," said Protagoras (Greece, 490 – 420 BC). If even a concrete object such as a chair is a subjective concept, think how much more subjective are abstract concepts such as "freedom." There is no objective reality. In the 20th century, physicists claimed to have the best understanding of what the word "reality" meant; but in the 21st century I think they will have to surrender that ownership to linguists. ¶ That our thoughts are confined to our language is not a new idea. Susan Griffin, paraphrasing Wittenstein, said "if you don't have the word for a sunset, you don't see a sunset." But Lakoff has developed this idea further, and brought it up to date. ¶ What makes Lakoff truly important to me is his writing about politics. I found the rhetoric of politics utterly confusing and bewildering until I started reading Lakoff. Not only did I find Lakoff understandable (with some difficulty), but reading him made other political writers understandable to me as well. I compare Lakoff to Freud, who uncovered some of our unconscious sexual motivations. Freud got some of it right and some of it wrong, but he greatly increased our conscious awareness of a big part of our lives. Similarly, Lakoff is bringing many political ideas to the surface.
¶ Lakoff might be called the "father of progressive framing" — he brought framing to the attention of progressives, he has written about it extensively, and he has inspired other progressives to take an interest in it and begin writing about it. A frame is an entire system of related assumptions about economics and human nature. By building these assumptions implicitly into their repeated phrases, conservative pundits drill the conservative worldview into the minds of the public. Progressives have been largely unaware of this subtle but effective propaganda system, but we're starting to catch on, partly due to Lakoff's writings. He said:
When the facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts are ignored. — It is a common folk theory of progressives that "the facts will set you free." If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don't work that way. Framing matters. Frames, once entrenched, are hard to dispel.
One of his later lectures clarifies:
It's not saying "facts don't matter." It's saying the facts, unframed, will not make people leap to the right conclusion.
Lakoff says "respond by reframing" — don't accept your opposition's formulation of a problem. These ideas are echoed in Paul Waldman's book, Being Right is Not Enough. (Contrast that title with my earlier discussion of math, in the right column of this page.) A fact that disagrees with someone's assumptions will be rejected, or perhaps not even heard, by that person; it will simply bounce off that person's head. To argue persuasively, we must be aware of what are the assumptions already carried by our audience. Those assumptions might be unexpected and surprising, if they are different from our own. ¶ Lakoff was a student of Chomsky — in linguistics, and I would guess in politics too — but his approach to both is different. Where Chomsky's linguistics is separate from his politics, Lakoff's political theory grows from his linguistics. Lakoff says that our language grows through metaphors. In one of his earliest political books (Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 1996), Lakoff analyzed the metaphors used by liberals and conservatives in their language, in order to reveal their underlying core concepts. I've summarized that book in one of my blogs. Lakoff's contrast between liberals and conservatives is the most rational and insightful I've ever seen, and it is a basis of much of Lakoff's subsequent political writing. He is careful to point out that his ideas on this subject — including the parental metaphor for politics — are a discovery, not an invention, not simply a pattern imposed by his own imagination; he says the scientific evidence, inherent in common language use, is quite strong.
Fictional Heroes
Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. The photo is taken from the movie (2001-2003), which I thought was excellent, but I liked the book even better. I love the moral concept developed in this novel. The good guys win in the end, not through superior strength nor through luck, but on account of a weakness inherent in the evil of their opponent. Power tends to corrupt, and those who are corrupted by it have difficulty imagining anyone resisting its lure. Thus, Sauron could not conceive of anyone acquiring the Ruling Ring of Power and abstaining from its use. His blindness to that possibility was a key factor in his defeat.
Historic Heroes
Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama, approx. 563-483 BC) taught universal love. I think he was way ahead of his time in his discovery of the joy of empathy. Buddha also taught that happiness does not come from material possessions — but the only poverty that he himself ever knew was voluntary; I wonder if he understood that poverty is harder to embrace when it is involuntary. He taught that personal salvation comes not from dependence on an external god, but from discovering one's own nature: "The way is not in the sky; the way is in the heart." I don't think he would have cared for the way that his sayings have been ritualized and his name and image worshiped, for he was an antiauthoritarian; he said "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
Jesus of Nazareth (approx. 2 BC to 31 AD). Progressives claim the gentle Jesus of the Gospels as their own; conservatives claim the vindictive Jesus of Revelations as solely their own. Quite honestly, my main reason for including Jesus in this list is to contradict the latter claim. It is also to contradict the conservatives' statement that all Marxists are atheists and therefore evil. That is false in two ways: (i) Atheism is not evil, in the progressive view of things. (ii) Marx himself criticized religion, but that was not crucial to his main ideas; some Marxists are atheists and some are not. Marxism has been widely misrepresented by by right wingers; please don't skip my description of Marx, two heroes down from here.
The founding fathers — really two groups, only the first of which was heroic. ¶ The US Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 by several people, especially Thomas Jefferson. Thom Hartmann has high praise (sorry, no longer available free online) for its authors and signers. They betrayed their own economic class, in order to give greater freedom to more people. They wrote, "we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor," and they weren't just kidding around. Signing that document, they became signatories to treason against the crown, punishable by hanging. And though though their revolution did succeed, it ruined many of them financially. ¶ Those who were ruined could not afford the time a decade later to participate in the writing and signing of the US Constitution. Michael Parenti has some mixed, and mostly harsh, things to say about the authors of that document· They were a wealthy few who owned and controlled nearly the entire economy, and they wanted to keep it that way. Madison wrote that it was important "to keep the spirit and form of popular government with only a minimum of the substance." They intentionally placed many obstacles in the way of participation by the common people. The USA has never yet been, a true democracy; it has always been ruled by the rich. ¶ In his campaign to become president, Barack Obama accomplished the amazing feat of sincerely praising a nation that enslaved his predecessors, in his More Perfect Union speech. He did that by praising the promise rather than the practice. The USA was the first nation to present the ideal of freedom and democracy. Regardless of whether their rhetoric was sincere, through it the founders pointed a way toward justice and freedom. Their language delegitimized their own oligarchy. Let us praise them for what they could see, and forgive them for what they could not. People gradually become whatever they pretend to be, and so the sham democracy of the U.S. constitution is gradually being transformed toward a true democracy, through painful struggle over centuries, struggle that has not yet ended. An oligarchy still rules, but only covertly; it can no longer claim a right to rule, and someday its rule will end.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a progressive in some ways and not others. At the time when Marx wrote his political essays, capitalism was showing its worst excesses: sweatshops were commonplace even in the best of countries. The devices of production and distribution (farms, factories, railroads, etc.) had just a few "owners," who claimed a right to dictate the conditions under which workers could use those devices. The owners exploited the desperation of the poor, and made their lives wretched. Marx had the radical idea that it was unnecessary for so many people's lives to be controlled and abused by so few; and to that extent progressives agree with Marx. But we disagree with his tactics. We favor peace and democracy, but Marx could see no route out of the sweatshops except through violent revolution followed by temporary dictatorship. ¶ Unfortunately, both the USSR and China followed Marx's tactics of violence and dictatorship, and ended up not with Marx's utopia but with totalitarianism. Conservatives point to that evil system and quite correctly demonize it, but then they call it socialism or communism and thus they quash any discussion of basic economics. ¶ Here in the USA, the brutality of capitalism's excesses were reduced for a while by labor unions and FDR's trust-busting, but the demonizing of labor returned with Reagan's union-busting and deregulation; he somehow convinced the public that ordinary working people were a "special interest." Today's concentration of "ownership" in the hands of a few not only abuses the workers, but all of us who must consume dangerous products and biased news, and depend on a dying ecosystem. The terms "socialism" and "Marxism" and even "class conflict" have been so demonized in the USA that no rational and open discussion of them is currently possible, nor can the word "capitalism" even be mentioned — like fish are unaware of water, so USers are unaware of capitalism. And even now, when capitalism is falling apart at the seams, we still have to watch our words. ¶ I will take this opportunity to give my own explanation of one of the most basic concepts of socialism or communism: the significance of property. In our society, typically we own televisions and cars and some of us even own a house, and so we are accustomed to the idea that it is natural and right to own property. But we do not see the distinction between that kind of property and another kind, the means of production. It has come to pass that most factories, farms, and other means of production are the "property" of a very small class of people, and so the rest of us are dependent upon those few people for our very livelihoods. Those few people are thus able to dictate the level of our wages, and so our living conditions; they can make us miserable in order to satisfy their own whims; they can take for themselves the largest share of the fruits of our labor, and thus perpetuate the inequality. As they control our lives, we are in effect their slaves, though we seldom notice that because we are too busy competing against each other for the few crumbs they allow us. The system continues because it is "legal." But, in truth, the laws are made by the people, and we can change the laws if we ever get organized. Can't we find a better way to live? Individually we are weak, and individual organizers can be beaten down by management's thugs; but together we are strong — the factory cannot function without its laborers. By the way, just in case you haven't noticed, I'm something of a socialist, but I'm still new at this so I am not yet sure what kind of socialist I am.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Walter Isaacson's recent biography explains that Einstein's genius came not from depth so much as from rebelliousness: He sidestepped the unwitting assumptions that were implicit in the thinking of his contemporaries and the language of his culture. By the way, Einstein was an advocate for socialism, but the corporate media doesn't really want you to know about that. Also, Einstein said "Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding." ... My (Eric's) personal life matches Einstein's, in this statement of is:: "Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated."
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is remembered among mathematicians mainly for Russell's paradox and for his coauthorship of Principia Mathematica. But after PM, Russell turned away from math, to peace activism. In that respect, my life story is like his, albeit a bit smaller. He could stand as the archetype for Mathematicians for Peace.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) is, in my view, the greatest person in American history. The movement led by this courageous man did more to reshape and improve our notion of love and humanity, our notion of who we are and who we can be, than anything else in centuries. But King's life has been obscured by what some call its "Santa Claus-ification." That has several meanings. It means that we remember King's name and face, and we begin to forget his words. King was a brilliant writer, and when I have time I want to read more of him. It means that we forget his issues — for instance, we all know that he and his movement reduced racism, but how many remember his antiwar efforts? (He tied those to his efforts against racism, pointing out that war is expensive and takes away money from social programs that our society needs; the people hurt the most by war are the poor.) And it means that we forget his life, and the fact that he was a human being who devoted his life to the great cause, and we begin to think of him as a magical being; as Stephen Colbert explained, at that point we come to see him as someone to admire but not to emulate. Instead of Santafying him, let us try to follow King. What life could be more satisfying than one given to love? ¶ King usually was careful with his words about economics, lest he be demonized by propagandists for the plutocracy (see my discussion of Marx, above), but in private he leaned leftward. Here is one great quote:
You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.
¶ I think that humanity is progressing in the right direction, and King believed so too. He said "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Perhaps the most conspicuous evidence of progress is in King's own results in his lifetime; but we can see greater progress when we look at the civil rights, labor, and feminist movements over a longer time span. It's two steps forward and one step back, and it's slow, but we're further along than we were a century ago, and that was further than a century before. And I think I can see an explanation for the progress: On the one hand, yes, it's true that people rarely change; people rarely learn any of the really important truths; people rarely gain an improved understanding of human nature. But we unlearn such things even more rarely, so the progress must be primarily in one direction, toward global enlightenment (which includes peace, love, and all the other good stuff). Perhaps the most important example is the learning of empathy, which I discussed a few paragraphs ago. That is my "logical justification for hope." (Although, strictly speaking, hope can be generated internally by the human spirit; it does not actually require external events.) ¶ In the progressive movement, hope is crucial, but faith is optional. I agree with Dennis Kucinich on many things, but not on his statement that "peace is inevitable." I envy his certainty; in its place I have only hope. Martin Luther King said "human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable." A trend in the right direction is visible ("bends toward justice," etc.), but we can't take that trend for granted. That progress only continues as long as we keep pushing, and pushing hard. ¶ The progress is excruciatingly slow. I don't know whether it's too slow. I don't know whether we'll get there (wherever "there" is) soon enough to prevent the bad guys from destroying the world. The growing enlightenment of humanity is racing against the development of destructive technology and the consolidation of ancient greed. I don't think it's predetermined which side will win — we may end up with utopia, or a slow sizzle, or kaboom. That's why the efforts of each and every one of us may be needed, and none of us can afford to just sit back and watch. ¶ Each of us knows only part of the song. Keep singing, fighting, questioning, loving, hoping. Hand in hand, we may heal this world yet.
The Worldwide Progressive Movement has no official manifesto, no unifying organization. This essay is merely the personal view of one disorganized zealot and self-appointed spokesperson (hello, I'm Eric). Nevertheless, we are a movement:Blessed Unrest reports a hundred thousand grassroots organizations starting up independently all over the world.
WHY IDEOLOGY MATTERS
Because the world is a mess, and because we can do something about it, though success is not guaranteed. Mostly, we need to get ourselves organized. The first step is just to start talking with people. That might not sound like much, but actually it has a huge impact. Discuss not just facts, but also attitudes; those determine whether people will listen to facts, and how they will react to them.Sure, we're facing war, ecocide, poverty, loneliness, a hundred kinds of bullying, and a thousand other ills. But these diverse problems have a common root: Bullies, liars, thieves, and murderers — in market, government, or elsewhere — believe we're all separate, motivated only by self-interest, greed, fear. They want us to share that belief. They use it to justify themselves and to manipulate us. But they're mistaken about our motives: you and I have found love inside ourselves and our friends. It must be in everyone — even the tank drivers and bomber pilots — if we can just wake them, for we're all one flesh and blood. Let's spread that vision, for until we do our other advances will be minor and temporary. This ideological struggle is shaping the world, and its outcome is not yet written, so no one can afford to be just a spectator. If you haven't already, join the global conversation in whatever way feels right for you. Talk about what we all can become. We must change not just the politicians, but human nature itself — by changing culture, by seeing more clearly, by changing ourselves.
This page, merging two revolutions, invites our opponents too:
This page is more adversarial than most promotions of empathy. Yes, love all people, but not all ideas; don't confuse love with sleep. Some devotees of harmony will say "this divisive essay, attacking the cons, is not helpful; it would be better if pros and cons could just live together in peace." But cons will not permit peace. I'm not attacking the cons personally, but attempting to understand and counter their ideology, whose assumptions have wormed their way into our culture and language.
This page is more reflective and spiritual than many would expect in a struggle for justice and freedom. The oligarchy is perpetuated less by cabals than by ideological propaganda. We must understand our revolution, or it will merely replace one oligarchy with another. A temporary coalition to defeat a common adversary and protect the separate material interests of every individual is not enough; we must build a community on our sharing of vision, lives, love.
This page is also addressed to our foes: the religious right, corporatists, conservatives in general. Yes, you and I have traded angry words, but lately I've realized that you're not evil or crazy or stupid, and I hope you'll soon see that about me too. We have very different worldviews, but please don't think that mine makes less sense than yours. The survival of our species depends on our understanding each other better.
Global warming is more urgent than many people realize, because they have not understood feedback loops and tipping points. Still, this essay doesn't say much about sustainability, because I don't see that as controversial. Sure, we must care for our environment, but that should be obvious to anyone who is sane. What is not obvious, and what I try to address in this essay, is why our society is insane.Yes we can end poverty, halt global warming, etc. — we walked on the f*cking moon, for crisakes! — technologically we're very clever. We just need to become wise.
THE DISAGREEMENT, IN BRIEF
Pros and cons have different meanings for the same words, so they often don't realize how poorly they understand each other. But their views are so vastly different that each may see the other side as raving madmen or satanic beasts. They may think they are debating rationally when in fact they are arguing from the gut. Logic reveals the consequences of one's assumptions, but it cannot enlighten us about the assumptions themselves.
quote/paraphrase from? of?
conservative view (right wing)
progressive view (leftist, liberal)
Waldman
You're on your own.
We're all in this together.
Soros
The answers are absolutes, soothingly dogmatic. Yearn nostalgically for a simpler, more genteel, unchanging past (that never actually existed).
Uncertainty and change are inevitable, so accept them and try to make them positive; ride life like a surfboard.
Altemeyer
Truth comes from authority. Attack anyone who questions authority. Your pastor's interpretation of the bible should guide every aspect of your life. We need someone to be in charge.
Authority should come from truth. Question authority, to reveal truth. Buddha said, "Believe nothing, no matter who said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own common sense."
Lakoff
Discipline, don't coddle; give your children "tough love." The poor are just lazy; punish them until they take personal responsibility. Suck it in.
Nurture with empathy; don't bully. Poverty stems from a systemic lack of opportunity; society shares responsibility for fixing the system.
Gandhi
The ends justify the means.
The means are the ends in the making.
Illich
Administer more tests, to control teachers more tightly and to teach students conformity and obedience.
The world is a school. Plutarch said "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited."
Hartmann
Pessimism about human nature. Change means anything is possible: chaos, calamity, destruction everywhere; how can we avert it? Build more prisons, to maintain order. (By the way, the USA leads the world in incarceration; we're not the "land of the free.")
Optimism about human nature. Change means anything is possible: imagination, creativity, and flowers everywhere; how can we encourage it? Build more schools, to empower people.
These views of human nature are self-fulfilling. Thus our task is not just to describe the world we see, but to choose the world we want.One-dimensional terms such as "right-wing" are misleading, but we have no better words. Here in the USA, my opponents call themselves "conservative," and I'll follow that terminology even though they don't actually conserve anything. Admittedly, most people who call themselves "conservative" fit only parts of this page's description, but they are enablers for the extremists. And they would give you different definitions; but as Orwell and Lakoff point out, words are not neutral carriers of information; whoever controls our vocabulary, controls the world.The pro/con split only partly matches the division between political parties. Indeed, here in the USA, our two major parties are conservative (Democrats) and very conservative (Republicans). In both speech and action, the Pubs have consistently promoted fear and the interests of the corporatocracy. The Dems have been less consistent: they speak for the interests of working people, but their actions have served sometimes those interests and sometimes the corporatocracy. Thus, the Dems are the lesser of two evils, and preferable until we can manage something better. Both major parties have both been complicit in imperialistic wars, excessive authoritarianism, and other crimes against the people. Making the Democratic Party more progressive or making the Green or Socialist Party stronger ultimately require the same tactic: we must push the progressive message.
THE PROGRESSIVE VISION
Cons love to march in lockstep, and are united by a few basic talking points. In contrast, uniting us progressives is like herding cats. We fragment into special issue liberal organizations (silos) competing against one another for volunteers and funding. But facts alone won't wake people, and policies can't inspire and motivate; only values do that. Waldman offered this unifying motto:
we're in this together,
where "we" means all people. That is, we care about one another, and our fortunes are bound together. I want my neighbor's kid to get a good education, for both altruistic reasons (I want the kid to have a good life) and selfish ones (it will make the kid more likely to pay taxes and less likely to steal my car). Contrast that with the cons' "you're on your own," discussed later.Messaging about messaging. "We're in it together" is not a specialized message, like "replace incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones." It is framing at the deepest level; its consequences include all our views. Indeed, once we've agreed on this fundamental value, we can eventually work out our lesser differences on specialized issues (e.g., which fluorescent bulbs are best? and how soon will mercury-free LED's be cheaper?). So "we're in it together" is the meme I most want to promote; it's what I'm putting in bumper stickers and web pages and conversations every chance I get.
Some people prefer a list of tenets; here is Don Hazen's: "fairness and equality; human dignity and the ability to earn a living and support a family, no matter if it is gay or straight, married or not; corporate responsibility and an end to the rampant political corruption and corporate cronyism that so dominates the Republican party; affordable healthcare for all; green economic development; cutting back a bloated military budget and investing in infrastructure and education, and real security without fear-mongering." To those, I would add greater transparency in government and wider involvement by citizens; the last few decades have proven that secret democracy and spectator/consumer democracy don't work.
Progressive ideas of economics, such as parecon (²) and prout, are being developed, something like socialism mixed with heavily regulated capitalism, all with greater local control. The overall goal is to make the world a better place for everyone. Socialism has been misrepresented by cons here in the USA; see my discussions of Sicko and Marx in the left column of this web page.It's not that conservatives are devoid of altruism. In fact, they give more to charity than we progressives do. But cons don't want to make goverment an instrument of their altruism, and we pros see that as a mistake. Charity is merely a palliative — it makes the dysfunctional system more bearable but does not repair the system. And charity is too unsystematic: it falls short of giving its recipients the dignity of control over their own lives. A pact of mutual empowerment can only be made systematic through government.Smooth-tongued Reagan didn't want ordinary working people to unite, so he lied that government (along with labor unions) is the enemy. But, in fact, government can and should be a force for good in our lives. As the US constitution says, government should be WE THE PEOPLE banding together to
ensure mutual aid in the case of illnesses and other disasters, and
protect ourselves against bullies, both domestic (e.g., abusive corporations) and foreign.Cons sabotage government and then say "see, it doesn't work, let's kill it." Bush reduced maintenance work on the levees, and New Orleans drowned — a blatant example that smaller government is not the answer.
The corporate media equate "anarchy" with chaos and violence, and thus deny the vision of the loving, cooperative people who call themselves anarchists. Those people simply want government by consensus — i.e., voluntary organization from the bottom upward; that's a lot like what I would call a "democratic republic." It will take us a while to get there.Libertarians expect rule of law to protect minority rights from majority abuse. But laws can be bad (consider slavery or the so-called "Patriot" Act) or misinterpreted (Bush claimed he was acting legally). To make and enforce good laws requires not just mind, but heart. That can't be imposed, but we can try to inspire it.
Is violence necessary? Some progressives think so. Jefferson said "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Mao said "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." The Internationale ends "change will not come from above."Other progressives believe violence may be unnecessary, useless, or even detrimental. Buddha said "you will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger." Gandhi said "Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary." Lennon's Imagine ends "I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one."Would Gandhi's tactics have prevailed against Hitler? I don't know. But I'm currently leaning toward nonviolence for our own situation in the USA. A rush of adrenaline may help in the face of physical danger, but it is irrelevant against propaganda. And the day may have passed when armed insurrection could be feasible. It will avail us nought to swarm the corporatists' castle with pitchforks and torches; they would mow us down with tanks. We will win only when our ideas have converted the tank drivers. The bureaucracy of brutality is dependent upon its middle-class employees; if we can wake them, it will fall without a shot. But the oligarchy knows that, and so they struggle to control the infosphere; perhaps one day we will find it necessary to forcibly seize the television stations. If, in the end, finally we must fight, let us remember our love, and not become the mirror of our enemy.At any rate, whether our way be violent or peaceful, it begins by reading and talking. History has shown that even a seemingly successful overthrow of tyranny will simply lead to new tyranny if the revolutionaries are not sufficiently enlightened and organized.Is adversarial conflict called for? Personally, I'm undecided. Winston Churchill said "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." A feeling of self-righteousness is satisfying, and inspired some of this web page. But there are two kinds of people in this world — those who see two kinds of people, and those who don't — and I'm definitely of the latter sort, though I haven't yet understood what that means. There is a growing movement to build bridges instead of walls.
Most of us use the terms "liberal" and "progressive" interchangeably, but Michael Lerner makes this distinction: Both groups are motivated by empathy, to make the world a better place for everyone, but liberals have bungled it by not understanding psychology. They have compromised with incrementalism, and thus lost the vision. They have overemphasized individual rights, and have been oblivious to the hunger we all have for community, belonging, connection, and meaning in our lives. The religious right grew because it addressed that hunger, however meanly. Labor organizing has fallen off, partly because of Reaganite assaults, but also because unions have forgotten the cry for solidarity, and devolved to a mere wage-raising device. People want to see themselves, not as meat robots chasing a buck in an indifferent universe, but as purposeful players in a drama bigger than their own lives.Our society has lost its heart; we need to find it. Alienation, apathy, and consumerism distance us from one another; "oh, I'm not a joiner" is a common response to recruitment efforts. Some debate about where we came from, but the more important question is where we are going — i.e., how we humans can live together here on earth. We must replace the vengefulness of Revelations with the empathy of the Gospels. But it won't be easy: The cons, projecting their own motives onto others, will assume that anyone espousing altruism is lying.We need more citizens to get involved in government. We need to connect to each other, not just to our politicians.This troubled world needs not just your vote, but your active involvement. Go to rallies (fun!) and meetings (tedious but necessary). Put peace signs on your clothing, on coins, and on the sidewalk. Participate in listserves and blogs, write letters to school boards and to newspaper editors, sign petitions. Talk in your workplace, church, bowling club, wherever it feels right. Talk about peace, truth, this essay, whatever matters to you. Make your own essay, song, garden, community. We must all learn from one another. Wake up, stand up, stand together!
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WHAT WOKE ME PERSONALLY
Before 2006 I was among the sleepers, unconcerned, leaving matters to the "experts." Much of political rhetoric is intended to confuse and thereby immobilize; certainly it had that effect on me. Politicians who opposed each other sounded equally logical; how could I know which was right? (Later I came to understand that they start their logic from different assumptions.)Part of what attracted me to mathematics as a career, decades earlier, was its clear, objective procedure for determining truth: In math you don't have to be persuasive; you just have to be right. (Contrast that with framing, discussed in the left column of this page.) But, late in life, finally I saw that the most important questions in our lives are not mathematical ones. Understanding begins when we replace precision with overlapping simplifications that omit irrelevant distractions — e.g., when we replace an aerial photograph of our route with a roadmap and a list of landmarks.It took a perfect storm of nearly simultaneous life-changing events to shake me and wake me (and probably most people are no easier to awaken). My parents dying of old age, my children growing old enough to move out, the end of a 23-year marriage and a 7-year textbook project, all gave me more time to think. And I found Alternet on my cellphone and Lakoff on my cable tv. And I learned of the White House's lies about Iraq and global warming. War is a terrible thing that we should never enter without a clear reason, and science is the closest thing to objective truth that humans can get; to lie about either is monstrous. This page is dedicated to the thousands of brave soldiers maimed or killed for the lies of their own government, and to the millions of harmless civilians whose lives they've destroyed.After joining rallies, meetings, internet, etc., I no longer feel isolated and powerless. My voice and vote are no longer alone. Now I am part of a community, and part of the discussion steering that community.This page is part of the effort — not just mine, but many people's — to rouse sleepers, unify activists, provoke discussion, clarify vision. I think the ideas I've been reading (Lakoff, Lerner, etc.) are important for other people to see, and so I've spent many hours sending "friend requests" to anyone who might be receptive. Admittedly, this puts me in an asymmetric position — I have far more "friends" than most of my "friends" do — and I hope I'm not abusing that relation; I hope I'm not spamming. By the way, only a few of my myriad friends send me email, so please feel free to write to me.
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(T)ERRORS OF CONSERVATISM
As a mathematician I know better than most people how seductive abstract ideas are. But anyone who can take his head out of his theory books long enough to look at the evidence will see that conservatism hasn't worked. Cons of both parties have been in power for several decades, and the result is a wrecked economy, increasing violence, and an ecosystem on the verge of collapse.
greedism
Cons tout "taking person responsibility," which really means "you're on your own" or "every man for himself" (and they might not mention women). They want to privatize everything — toll roads and pay toilets! — and to hell with our shared infrastructure; they ignore Katrina's lesson. Cons think only the wealthy have "earned" good education and health care, though they'd save money by simply giving those basics to everyone.Cons claim greed is good. They mistakenly believe that the unregulated market rewards the industrious and innovative and punishes the lazy, and that it increases wealth and efficiency. That myth has persisted because it does contain a small particle of truth: the market does indeed increase the measured wealth of a few people, those who control the market. But those people are becoming fewer, everyone else is getting crushed, and our shared and unmeasured wealth — e.g., our roads and bridges and the sustainability of the ecosystem — is getting trashed; the gilt veneer cannot hide the rot for much longer. The unregulated market perpetuates the enormous inefficiencies of war and poverty. Manipulative advertising coaxes us to buy and then bury mountains of cheap plastic toxic crap. And in any abruptly altered environment, the first innovations to evolve are hellish parasites.A misguided 1886 Supreme Court decision gave corporations the rights of people but not the vulnerabilities or responsibilities (you'll never see a corporation sleeping under a bridge or executed for murder). By both competition and its legal charter, any business is compelled to maximize profit for its stockholders by any means available. The corporation becomes a mindless plunderer, though its public relations department may smile prettily. As much as it can, any large corporation inevitably will seek to externalize (i.e., get someone else to pay for) as many of its costs and risks as possible, and to disregard or even cover up disastrous side effects on its workers, neighbors, consumers, the economy, and the biosphere. Thus, market prices do not reflect true costs. A few CEOs share our concerns, but they are trapped in the system; they too will be fired if they try to change it. Attempts to harness greed are Faustian, and doomed to fail; an ocean of greed erodes loopholes in the dikes of regulation. Some small businesses are honest, despite capitalism, but that puts them at a competitive disadvantage, so that eventually they are crushed by the law of the jungle. Thus our real enemies are not the individual businesspeople, but the institutions of laissez faire and corporatocracy.Corporate donations to political campaigns pay for expensive television ads, which determine the winners of elections; the corporations are repaid a hundredfold in tax loopholes and lax regulations.Competing against one another, corporations race to the bottom of the wage scale, exploiting the desperation of the poor. Cons view the market as an unquestionable axiom, and so the market's perpetuation of poverty is viewed by cons, not as proof that the market is dysfunctional, but rather as proof that poverty belongs in this world. They urge the poor to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even while the cons are privatizing the bootstraps. Their mythical "self-made man" is a lie: successful businessmen have all relied heavily on public infrastructure.The rich say it's okay for them to take the largest slice of pie, because everyone's slice is getting bigger (through improved technology). But that's wrong because (i) it's unfair: Why do they deserve the biggest piece? (ii) The rich have become more proficient at both stealing pie and intentionally destroying pie; thus the slices of the poor actually shrink. (iii) The pie can't get much bigger, because the earth can't get bigger, and thus "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron. Nevertheless, cons see growth as an end, not a means — but that is precisely the definition of cancer. Cons point to the rising stock market as vindication of their claims, but it is a misleading indicator — it says nothing of the lives of ordinary people. The new money all goes into the pockets of a few people who already have more than they know what to do with. "Trickle-down" economics would be unjust and callous even if it worked, but it doesn't: the market, gaining in "efficiency," permits ever fewer crumbs to fall. In the short run, the wealthy make a quick buck; but in the long run, they will suffer too, when no one can afford to buy their products.The rich will never be satisfied by their enormous consumption — as The Greedy told Raggedy Ann, "without a sweetheart, I never get enough." Their gated neighborhood can never be as comfortable and secure as a caring community. Besieged by enemies of their own making, it becomes a spiritual prison. And if they continue externalizing costs to the ecosystem, it will collapse, and they will starve alongside the rest of us.
Liberty is not libertarian. Ron Paul has many followers on MySpace, but I am not among them. I agree with their calls for peace and civil liberties and the nationalizing of the Federal Reserve, but not their calls for deregulation. Haven't the events of the last few decades, and especially the collapse of Wall Street, proved how much we need regulation? Libertarians naively dream of an honorable capitalism, blinding themselves to the fact that deceit is a thriving service industry in the unregulated market. Hoping to encourage small business through deregulation, libertarians would inadvertently give carte blanche to huge corporations, which then trample small businesses and everyone else. -- Moreover, the libertarian overemphasis on "self-reliance" would isolate and weaken us, leaving us prey to bullies. The French revolutionary battlecry was "liberty, equality, fraternity"; those first two can't last long without the third.
Corporatists praise unregulated competition, but it is unstable. It quickly degenerates through mergers, until — if unregulated — all wealth and power ends up in the hands of the few greedy psychopaths who truly lust for it. Those few will exercise their power with the goal of preserving and extending that power, by any means they can find, including poverty and war for the rest of us. They've profited from frequent war,
(essay continues after illustration)
but they prefer the stability of the newer business model of endless war. The USA was founded on genocidal theft, and has become the world's greatest imperialist, terrorist state, crushing and looting other nations with impunity. Wars will continue as long as a few profit from them.International economics. National boundaries have no real use except as an excuse for war. Really, you and I have more in common with the working people of other countries than with our own politicians. We're all the same flesh and blood, all one family, and someday we should be one nation — provided the people are in control. But beware of plans like NAFTA or SPP to unite us under corporate control.Our mainstream mythology pretends that the central struggle of labor is the wage negotiation between labor and management, at the bargaining table. But in truth, there is a much bigger struggle over labor's right to form unions at all. Historically, management's thugs have assaulted or even killed labor organizers. More recently, when that has become difficult to do in the USA, management has exported jobs to nations where such intimidation is still feasible, thereby bringing down wages on both sides of the border. This is the result of so-called "free trade" deals, which frees only management, not labor, to seek better deals.The corporate news media would rather you don't look closely at one of their favorite vague phrases, "protecting national interests." If you do, you'll discover that they're not referring to the interests of the public, but rather the interests of the politicians' richest friends. In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, economist John Perkins discusses the work he did for those "national interests" during the 1970's. His job was to cook the books, to convince foreign nations to accept huge loans, to hire U.S. companies to build dams, airports, and other infrastructure that those nations really could not afford, and trap them into paying interest forever. When the government defaulted on the loan, the USA or IMF or World Bank would step in to run the country. If a government was uncooperative about accepting such loans, assassins were sent in to change the situation.
bullying
Conservatives believe in bullying, which they call "disciplining." They see it as a virtue, not a vice; they believe its omission causes slovenliness and unproductiveness. They apply it everywhere:
foreign policy: the Iraq occupation, where they are creating new enemies faster than they can kill them
domestic policy: the so-called "Patriot Act"
in the streets: police brutality, which they call "law and order"
George Lakoff explains that we see much of politics metaphorically in terms of parent-child relations, because that is the first power relationship we experience in our lives. He contrasts nurturing and authoritarian styles of child-rearing. Researchers in child development and education have concluded that nurturing produces healthier, happier, more productive people. Nevertheless James Dobson and the religious right — with no credentials or expertise except their own mean-spirited interpretation of the bible — have been promoting authoritarianism. It is a bizarre system, but I think I've begun to understand it:
A society without a leader would be like a ship with no one at the steering wheel; calamity would ensue. Thus, we need to have someone in charge. You must trust and obey Father and never question him. That's because Father is wise, Father knows best, Father knows things that we can't possibly know and don't need to know. Checks and balances slow Father down, so they should be discarded. Father may sometimes hide things from us, lie to us, or hurt us, but that's okay — he must have good reasons, even if they are beyond our understanding; the end justifies the means. People are basically bad; their fear of Father's punishment is the only thing that maintains order and protects us.
Can ends justify means? Can a war be justified by its goals? But the results of a war are unpredictable; only its methods are certain: a land littered with corpses, and a few arms dealers made wealthy.I would find authoritarianism completely incomprehensible, were it not that years ago I was a fan of the TV series Star Trek. That program depicted militaristic hierarchy in an idealized form, as militarists see it: a safe and certain means to utopian ends. Captain Picard, ever wise and never selfish, won my loyalty. Like any of his crew, without hesitation or question I would have marched into the very jaws of hell if he had so ordered, because I trusted and believed in him. The fallacy I couldn't see years ago is that no leader can be wise and trustworthy enough not to need checks and balances.Hartmann's Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class explains authoritarianism further. He says that though cons pay lip service to democracy, many of them do not really believe in it. They see the public as too stupid and evil to rule themselves, and so rule must be entrusted to a wise and benevolent elite.Lovers of liberty know that their first duty always is to question their own government. But psychologist Bob Altemeyer says a quarter of our citizens are authoritarians: they will not question authority, and they will attack anyone who does. Thus Bush could never fall below his 25% approval no matter what he did. Authoritarians are also prone to an us-versus-them view — racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, etc. Altemeyer describes the symbiosis between the voters who want someone to be "in charge" and the politicians who want to be in control. But conservative voters may withhold that allegiance from an elected liberal. Perhaps the cons see that liberal as not "tough" enough to properly "take charge" of things.Lakoff writes that obeying authority is only the second highest moral duty perceived by authoritarians; they attach even higher priority to preserving the hierarchy of authority. This is because they believe morality is based only on respect for the rules, not on empathy or good will, and so utter chaos would ensue if respect for the rules ever broke down. That explains why cons are more concerned with praising the bible than with reading it.
lies
As I explained above, the "Father Knows Best" philosophy justifies lying. Consequently, most of what you've been told all your life is false. But the truth is unpleasant, and discovering it before our friends do makes us schizophrenic. Thus we tend to denial; that is the liars' biggest aid.The biggest lie is that there is no class war. Actually, the class conflict is all around us, but we are as unaware of it as fish are unaware of water. And the mainstream media never breathe a word about capitalism, class conflict, imperialism, corporatocracy, etc.Nearly as big is the lie that the media are fair (or that the media have a liberal bias). Indeed, the terms "left" and "right" suggest symmetry, and our news media depict the debate between pros and cons like baseball, an even-handed and honest contest whose outcome doesn't really matter. But the debate has not been even-handed. The plutocracy owns most of the think tanks and news media, and controls how ideas are developed and presented, conveniently promoting economic and social policies that preserve and extend their own power. This is no mere accident; it has been a conscious plan at least since the Powell Memorandum of 1971. And what they cannot subtly twist and spin in their own favor, they simply omit; sometimes the omissions are huge.The think tanks generate phrases for the news media to repeat. "Rendition" and "surge" are euphemisms for kidnapping and escalation, and "war on terror" meant whatever Bush wanted it to mean. The "Clear Skies Act" and "Healthy Forests Initiative" were the opposite of what they sounded like. And then there are just plain old lies: "liberal news media," "the surge is working," etc. Repeated phrases are chosen to instill conservative frames (see discussion in left column of this page). Lakoff has explained:
When the language is repeated and the words become just "the normal way you express the idea," then even the best people in the media get sucked in. Journalists have to use words people understand, and they have to use the words most people normally use to express the ideas they are writing about. As a result, they often have no idea that they are using conservative language, which activates a conservative view of the world as well as the conservative perspective on the given issue. They are rarely aware that in doing so, they are helping conservatives by strengthening the conservative worldview in the public's mind.
"It's easy to be discouraged by how much more funding the right wing think tanks have. But ... they need that money, because they have a really tough intellectual job: Their job is to convince people that [altruism is bad and selfishness is good]. Crazy talk. Very expensive to convince people of something so deeply counterintuitive. It is much cheaper to convince people that to do good is good; bad, bad." So said Naomi Klein while talking about her recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The book quotes Milton Friedman, professor of greed, saying that the only way one can impose an unpopular economic system is by stealth and force, during moments of crisis. One of Klein's numerous examples is New Orleans, now being privatized in large bites. Klein says "These tactics work ... for the same reason it works to pick someone's pocket at a car accident." More recently they've used shock to rob trillions of dollars worth of oil profits from Iraq.
malice
Most people become more sheeplike — obedient and unthinking — in times of crisis. For instance, right after the 9/11 attacks people were more willing to blindly follow Bush. Martha Stout, author of The Paranoia Switch, says that this change in behavior actually reflects a chemical change in the brain. Traumatic experiences get stuck in the limbic system (irrational), and never reach the cerebral cortex (rational). It cannot be accidental that Bush scored 10 out of 10 on Stout's checklist of fearmongering; evidently he engaged in limbic warfare — i.e., the intentional use of fearmongering in order to weaken our society's resistance to manipulation.The "father knows best" philosophy (described earlier) suggests benevolent dictators. But, as Edward R. Murrow said, "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." Altemeyer refers to these wolves as "dominators"; his research shows that they have no concern about being benevolent. Some may justify themselves with Calvinism (God has chosen them to rule) or social Darwinism (the stronger are more deserving).The villains in Orwell's novel 1984 are not concerned about justifications at all. They unabashedly love power and want to dominate others. And logically, it makes sense: Unless gentle people unite and take precautions, power will end up in the hands of the few who truly lust for it. I am amazed at how much of Orwell's fable I have seen coming true around us; that's discussed further in the "books" section in the left column of this web page.Yes, I do suspect 9/11 was an inside job. Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel; a building collapses at free fall speed only if it is unimpeded; and the traces of nanothermite, the unvailability of the Air Force, and the previous day's preculiar stock market activity were all unbelievable coincidences. But I feel this controversy is less important than other issues that do not involve cabals: A widespread lack of empathy is perpetuating poverty, war, and ecocide; we must bring light to the world.
Who I'd like to meet: Anyone wants to help make the world a better place for everyone, and who does not believe the end justifies the means. What do you believe in, and what are you doing about it? I like people who are involved in service (pulling people out of the river), but right now we have a greater need for activism (going upstream to stop the S.O.B. who has been pushing them in). There are 7 billion people in my family, and someday I hope to have dinner with them all.On MySpace — I now accept as a "friend" anyone who requests it, because I've tired of judging people. But I prefer those who try to be progressive activists in their lives and in their web pages. As Howard Zinn said, you can't be neutral on a moving train. Silence perpetuates the status quo, so speak up!♥ On the personal level — once again I'm alone, seeking another zealot to share with me the light from the unreachable star, someone to carry her protest sign beside mine, someone to argue poetry and social theory with me late into the night and conspire (breathe together) with me. As ever, I'm guided by St Exupery: love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. Must love cats. Beard negotiable after third date.
Worldwide Progressive Movement's Friend Space (Top 39)
PLEASE JOIN US, SISTERS AND BROTHERS, IN CONTACTING YOUR CONGRESS-FOLK AND OUR PRESIDENT, TO REMIND THEM WE VOTED THEM IN TO OFFICE WITH A CLEAR MANDATE TO END THESE FUTILE, ENDLESS, IMMORAL WARS. WE ENTRUST THEM TO REPEAL FISA/PAT ACT, RESTORE OUR BILL OF RIGHTS, CONSTITUTION, AND THE GENEVEA CONVENTIONS, STOP TORTURE, AND WARRANTLESS WIRETAP SPYING ON AMERICANS, AND END THESE UNJUST OCCUPATIONS NOW! Peace! www.aclu.org/fusion www.bradblog.com www.antiwar.com www.thenation.com
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havent heard from u in a while, i hope things are well with u .
My weekend is starting now. I am off tomorrow, so its peaceful vibes, good music and awesome margaritas this evening for me. I wish u a WONDERFUL weekend. Hugz~! Linda
"If we as a nation are ever going to achieve that status of true greatness, then we must be courageous enough to deal with matters pertaining to race and racism, without seeking the artificial cloak of denial as some sort of safe haven."
eric i tried doin it on my own once i got medals of honour and nominations from the federal governement then directly after i achieved so much helping abuse survivors get out of hell i got taken down by the feds all my house wveryting was gone within 24 hours as easy as that
Thanks for the Friendship
The Wolves, Whales and Wild Ones Sing for You
Listen ~ Open Your Heart
We are All connected!
Hark The Lighter Half of this Year is Done ~ Darkness now Descends! All Hallows Eve the Veil doth Thin - the time of The Betweens All Saints and Souls between Two Worlds now roam with True Abandon. Mortals Wise now summon Fire to safely light the Way On this Night of Halloween, Bright Blessings sent to Thee In the Light of the One True Way Bless and Blessed Be - Christine
Hey! Just wanted to let you and your friends know that we are going to be playing @ B.B. Kings in Nashville, TN... FRIDAY, November 6th. Please come out. We will be there from 5:30-9PM. Please tell all of your friends! Thank You! This is the best place in Nashville for Live Music... Come and we will prove it to you!
Mathematicians for Peace
Waking From the Consensus Trance
A Lonely Old Socialist in Nashville
If the weed takes root in enough places, the "war" against it will become too obviously futile and will have to be abandoned. Then it will no longer serve as an excuse for locking up huge numbers of antiauthoritarian people for victimless crimes. (Are you aware that the USA imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world? We're not the "land of the free.")
I recently read David Sirota's new book, The Uprising. It's a fascinating book. Sirota sides with the people, as do I or, say, Howard Zinn; but Sirota avoids the simplicity of dividing everything into heroes and villains. With an eye that I think is very accurate, Sirota paints the rich tapestry of US politics, including the love-hate relationship between the grassroots uprising and the Democratic Party. And he includes people like Lou Dobbs, who are part progressive (attacks the corporatocracy) and part conservative (scapegoats the immigrants). The uprising is the unrest in our society, which is largely angry, and thus not so "blessed" as would be suggested by the title of Paul Hawken's book. The unrest is growing larger than the box with which the establishment tries to contain it. It will lead to some sort of change, but we don't know what kind yet; it is not self-steering. It may end up being steered by some demagogues and going in a non-progressive direcction. I think our best chance of steering it in a beneficial direction is if we understand it; and our best chance of understanding it is if we listen to what Sirota has to say, because I think he presently understands it a bit better than the rest of us. Here is a 
Their real purpose is to intimidate, to exercise power over the person being tortured as well as over other people who know torture is occurring — i.e., us. Orwell's villains want power, and pain is the only undeniable proof of power. Mere obedience is not proof, because subjects might sometimes obey for reasons of their own.
Noam Chomsky (1928- ) was a professor of political science, and is author of many books. Chomsky has inspired and radicalized more people than perhaps anyone else around today. For a good introduction to Chomsky, watch his film 
George Lakoff (1941- ) is a professor of linguistics and author of 
Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. The photo is taken from the movie (2001-2003), which I thought was excellent, but I liked the book even better. I love the moral concept developed in this novel. The good guys win in the end, not through superior strength nor through luck, but on account of a weakness inherent in the evil of their opponent. Power tends to corrupt, and those who are corrupted by it have difficulty imagining anyone resisting its lure. Thus, Sauron could not conceive of anyone acquiring the Ruling Ring of Power and abstaining from its use. His blindness to that possibility was a key factor in his defeat.
Jesus of Nazareth (approx. 2 BC to 31 AD). Progressives claim the gentle Jesus of the Gospels as their own; conservatives claim the vindictive Jesus of Revelations as solely their own. Quite honestly, my main reason for including Jesus in this list is to contradict the latter claim. It is also to contradict the conservatives' statement that all Marxists are atheists and therefore evil. That is false in two ways: (i) Atheism is not evil, in the progressive view of things. (ii) Marx himself criticized religion, but that was not crucial to his main ideas; some Marxists are atheists and some are not. Marxism has been widely misrepresented by by right wingers; please don't skip my description of Marx, two heroes down from here.
The founding fathers — really two groups, only the first of which was heroic. ¶ The US Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 by several people, especially Thomas Jefferson. Thom Hartmann has high praise (sorry, no longer available free online) for its authors and signers. They betrayed their own economic class, in order to give greater freedom to more people. They wrote, "we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor," and they weren't just kidding around. Signing that document, they became signatories to treason against the crown, punishable by hanging. And though though their revolution did succeed, it ruined many of them financially. ¶ Those who were ruined could not afford the time a decade later to participate in the writing and signing of the US Constitution. 
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a progressive in some ways and not others. At the time when Marx wrote his political essays, capitalism was showing its worst excesses: sweatshops were commonplace even in the best of countries. The devices of production and distribution (farms, factories, railroads, etc.) had just a few "owners," who claimed a right to dictate the conditions under which workers could use those devices. The owners exploited the desperation of the poor, and made their lives wretched. Marx had the radical idea that it was unnecessary for so many people's lives to be controlled and abused by so few; and to that extent progressives agree with Marx. But we disagree with his tactics. We favor peace and democracy, but Marx could see no route out of the sweatshops except through violent revolution followed by temporary dictatorship. ¶ Unfortunately, both the USSR and China followed Marx's tactics of violence and dictatorship, and ended up not with Marx's utopia but with totalitarianism. Conservatives point to that evil system and quite correctly demonize it, but then they call it socialism or communism and thus they quash any discussion of basic economics. ¶ Here in the USA, the brutality of capitalism's excesses were reduced for a while by labor unions and FDR's trust-busting, but the demonizing of labor returned with Reagan's union-busting and deregulation; he somehow convinced the public that ordinary working people were a "special interest." Today's concentration of "ownership" in the hands of a few not only abuses the workers, but all of us who must consume dangerous products and biased news, and depend on a dying ecosystem. The terms "socialism" and "Marxism" and even "class conflict" have been so demonized in the USA that 
Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Walter Isaacson's recent biography explains that Einstein's genius came not from depth so much as from rebelliousness: He sidestepped the unwitting assumptions that were implicit in the thinking of his contemporaries and the language of his culture. By the way, Einstein was an advocate for socialism, but the corporate media 
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is remembered among mathematicians mainly for Russell's paradox and for his coauthorship of Principia Mathematica. But after PM, Russell turned away from math, to 
¶ I think that humanity is progressing in the right direction, and King believed so too. He said "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Perhaps the most conspicuous evidence of progress is in King's own results in his lifetime; but we can see greater progress when we look at the civil rights, labor, and feminist movements over a longer time span. It's two steps forward and one step back, and it's slow, but we're further along than we were a century ago, and that was further than a century before. And I think I can see an explanation for the progress: On the one hand, yes, it's true that people rarely change; people rarely learn any of the really important truths; people rarely gain an improved understanding of human nature. But we unlearn such things even more rarely, so the progress must be primarily in one direction, toward global enlightenment (which includes peace, love, and all the other good stuff). Perhaps the most important example is the learning of empathy, which I discussed a few paragraphs ago. That is my "logical justification for hope." (Although, strictly speaking, hope can be generated internally by the human spirit; it does not actually require external events.) ¶ In the progressive movement, hope is crucial, but faith is optional. I agree with Dennis Kucinich on many things, but not on his statement that "peace is inevitable." I envy his certainty; in its place I have only hope. Martin Luther King said "human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable." A trend in the right direction is visible ("bends toward justice," etc.), but we can't take that trend for granted. That progress only continues as long as we keep pushing, and pushing hard. ¶ The progress is excruciatingly slow. I don't know whether it's too slow. I don't know whether we'll get there (wherever "there" is) soon enough to prevent the bad guys from destroying the world. The growing enlightenment of humanity is racing against the development of destructive technology and the consolidation of ancient greed. I don't think it's predetermined which side will win — we may end up with utopia, or a slow sizzle, or kaboom. That's why the efforts of each and every one of us may be needed, and none of us can afford to just sit back and watch. ¶ Each of us knows only part of the song. Keep singing, fighting, questioning, loving, hoping. Hand in hand, we may heal this world yet.
This page is more adversarial than most promotions of empathy. Yes, love all people, but not all ideas; don't confuse love with sleep. Some devotees of harmony will say "this divisive essay, attacking the cons, is not helpful; it would be better if pros and cons could just live together in peace." But cons 
This page is more reflective and spiritual than many would expect in a struggle for justice and freedom. The oligarchy is perpetuated less by cabals than by 
This page is also addressed to our foes: the religious right, corporatists, conservatives in general. Yes, you and I have traded angry words, but lately I've realized that you're not evil or crazy or stupid, and I hope you'll soon see that about me too. We have very different worldviews, but please don't think that mine makes less sense than yours. The survival of our species depends on our understanding each other better.
conservative view (right wing)
progressive view (leftist, liberal)
It's not that conservatives are devoid of altruism. In fact, they give more to charity than we progressives do. But cons don't want to make goverment an instrument of their altruism, and we pros see that as a mistake. Charity is merely a palliative — it makes the dysfunctional system more bearable but does not repair the system. And charity is too unsystematic: it falls short of giving its recipients the dignity of control over their own lives. A pact of mutual empowerment can only be made systematic through government.
Smooth-tongued Reagan didn't want ordinary working people to unite, so he lied that government (along with labor unions) is the enemy. But, in fact, government can and should be a force for good in our lives. As the US constitution says, government should be WE THE PEOPLE banding together to
The corporate media equate "anarchy" with chaos and violence, and thus deny the vision of the loving, 
Other progressives believe violence may be unnecessary, useless, or even 
Our society has lost its heart; we need to find it. Alienation, apathy, and consumerism distance us from one another; "oh, I'm not a joiner" is a common response to recruitment efforts. Some debate about where we came from, but the more important question is where we are going — i.e., how we humans can live together here on earth. We must replace the vengefulness of Revelations with the empathy of the Gospels. But it won't be easy: The cons, projecting their own motives onto others, will assume that anyone espousing altruism is lying.
We need more citizens to get involved in government. We need to connect to each other, not just to our politicians.This troubled world needs not just your vote, but your active involvement. 
Go to rallies (fun!) and meetings (tedious but necessary). Put peace signs on 
Before 2006 I was among the sleepers, unconcerned, leaving matters to the "experts." Much of political rhetoric is intended to confuse and thereby immobilize; certainly it had that effect on me. Politicians who opposed each other sounded equally logical; how could I know which was right? (Later I came to understand that they start their logic from different assumptions.)Part of what attracted me to 
After joining rallies, meetings, internet, etc., I no longer feel isolated and powerless. My voice and vote are no longer alone. Now I am part of a community, and part of the discussion steering that community.This page is part of the effort — not just mine, but many people's — to rouse sleepers, unify activists, provoke discussion, clarify vision. I think the ideas I've been reading (Lakoff, Lerner, etc.) are important for other people to see, and so I've spent many hours sending "friend requests" to anyone who might be receptive. Admittedly, this puts me in an asymmetric position — I have far more "friends" than most of my "friends" do — and I hope I'm not abusing that relation; I hope I'm not spamming. By the way, only a few of my myriad friends send me email, so please feel free to write to me.
Cons claim 
Cons point to the rising stock market as vindication of their claims, but it is a misleading indicator — it says nothing of the lives of ordinary people. The new money all goes into the pockets of a few people who already have more than they know what to do with. "Trickle-down" economics would be unjust and callous even if it worked, but it doesn't: the market, gaining in "efficiency," permits ever fewer crumbs to fall. In the short run, the wealthy make a quick buck; but in the long run, they will suffer too, when no one can afford to buy their products.
Liberty is not libertarian. Ron Paul has many followers on MySpace, but I am not among them. I agree with their calls for peace and civil liberties and the nationalizing of the Federal Reserve, but not their calls for deregulation. Haven't the events of the last few decades, and especially the collapse of Wall Street, proved how much we need regulation? Libertarians naively dream of an honorable capitalism, blinding themselves to the fact that deceit is a thriving service industry in the unregulated market. Hoping to encourage small business through deregulation, libertarians would inadvertently give carte blanche to huge corporations, which then trample small businesses and everyone else. -- Moreover, the libertarian overemphasis on "self-reliance" would isolate and weaken us, leaving us prey to bullies. The French revolutionary battlecry was "liberty, equality, fraternity"; those first two can't last long without the third.
Corporatists praise unregulated competition, but it is unstable. It quickly degenerates through mergers, until — if unregulated — all wealth and power ends up in the hands of the few greedy psychopaths who truly lust for it. Those few will exercise their power with the goal of preserving and extending that power, by any means they can find, including poverty and 
Our mainstream mythology pretends that the central struggle of labor is the wage negotiation between labor and management, at the bargaining table. But in truth, there is a much bigger struggle over labor's right to form unions at all. Historically, management's thugs have assaulted or even killed labor organizers. More recently, when that has become difficult to do in the USA, management has exported jobs to nations where such intimidation is still feasible, thereby bringing down wages on both sides of the border. This is the result of so-called "free trade" deals, which frees only management, not labor, to seek better deals.
A society without a leader would be like a ship with no one at the steering wheel; calamity would ensue. Thus, we need to have someone in charge. You must trust and obey Father and never question him. That's because Father is wise, Father knows best, Father knows things that we can't possibly know and don't need to know. Checks and balances slow Father down, so they should be discarded. Father may sometimes hide things from us, 
I would find authoritarianism completely incomprehensible, were it not that years ago I was a fan of the TV series Star Trek. That program depicted 
The think tanks generate phrases for the news media to repeat. "Rendition" and "surge" are euphemisms for kidnapping and escalation, and "war on terror" meant whatever Bush wanted it to mean. The "Clear Skies Act" and "Healthy Forests Initiative" were the opposite of what they sounded like. And then there are just plain old lies: "liberal news media," "the surge is working," etc. Repeated phrases are chosen to instill conservative frames (see 
Most people become more sheeplike — obedient and unthinking — in times of crisis.
For instance, right after the 9/11 attacks people were more willing to blindly follow Bush. Martha Stout, author of The Paranoia Switch, says that this change in behavior actually reflects a chemical change in the brain. Traumatic experiences get stuck in the limbic system (irrational), and never reach the cerebral cortex (rational). It cannot be accidental that Bush scored 10 out of 10 on Stout's 
Yes, I do suspect 9/11 was an inside job. Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel; a building collapses at free fall speed only if it is unimpeded; and the traces of nanothermite, the unvailability of the Air Force, and the previous day's preculiar stock market activity were all unbelievable coincidences. But I feel this 
♥ On the personal level — once again I'm alone, seeking 
