Al Giordano wrote in the Feb. 9, 2006, Narco News:
This is not about windmills, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos thundered on Monday morning across this windswept plain. "It is about giants."
The greedy grab for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- the narrowest stretch of land in Mexico -- is a mega-project by Capital and State that does not stop at windmills. It also includes new highways and oil pipelines connecting the ports on both oceans, an expanded hydroelectric dam in Jalapa del Marques along the way, tourist Meccas to replace small fishing communities between Salina Cruz and Huatulco and a new zone for maquiladoras -- those cheap-labor mills that generate power not from wind but from human muscle and bone along the US-Mexican border -- that will exploit the poverty of the workers that the mega-developments displace from their lands and the natural resources they cultivate.
And so it is to this breezy plain that Zapatista "Delegate Zero" came on Monday morning to harness the wind that only human hands, and not machines, can tap: that of rebellion. "You are not alone," he told yet more communities of fighting (read: still human) people throughout the Isthmus. In La Venta's town square he said, "We will fight with you against these windmills."
Nancy Davies wrote on Mar. 28:
... here's the article I've been predicting: "Teachers and APPO and communal land owners announce the boycott of Venta II," accompanied in action by other organizations including The Front of the People of the Isthmus in Defense of the Land. President Felipe Calderon and Governor Ulises Ruiz are inaugurating the construction of the new wind farm to generate electricity, owned by a Spanish transnational, on Wednesday March 28 (see the video newsreel, The Windmills of Capitalism). About two hundred hectares of communal land and about nine sub-municipalities of Juchitán are in dispute. The wind farm is seen as a basic part of the development of the Plan Puebla Panama, and infringes on the autonomy of the indigenous residents of the area. The area is protected, according to Noticias, by a circle of military soldiers.
Ninety-eight wind generators already operate with a supposed capacity of 83.3 megawatts. In the second stage the transnational company, Iberdrola, has invested $100 million. The World Bank has recently loaned $20 million for the development of La Venta III, which confirms that regardless of who's protesting, the project will go ahead.
On March 3 three-hundred-and-sixty men from the Federal Preventative Police, traveling in vehicles with dark windows and carrying high power weapons, evicted the communal land owners from the neighborhood Tres de Abril located within the polygon of Venta II, because they were an "obstacle to the project." Many believe that the outcry against the wind generators has more to do with the offensively low rental and a voice for the people whose land has been "rented" for thirty years. The rental was reportedly carried out by agents who ignored the community assembly process and were in turn allegedly paid off handsomely by the government and/or Iberdrola.
And George Salzman wrote on Mar. 25:
"Harvard contributes to reconstructing Oaxaca" is the grand headline splashed across the Sunday, March 25, 2007 front page of Noticias, the major daily newspaper published in Oaxaca City. When I saw that announcement this morning I thought, "Oh, my God! (Never mind that I'm an atheist.) That's both good news and bad news."
The good news is that the popular struggle in Oaxaca is serious enough that it is being seen by those pre-eminent intellectual guardians of global capitalism as a potential threat to the status quo. The bad news is that Harvard University, always in the service of the super-rich, and therefore in step with (or ahead of) U.S. government plans and actions, is preparing to put its gloved but dirtied hands to work for the PAN/PRI government of Felipe Calderon and the local PRI governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The message is clear. It's going to take more than sheer military suppression to crush the popular revolution. But it must be crushed, in the interest of global capitalism, and therefore the 'intellectual power' of Harvard University will be brought to bear in addition to the military state of siege already put in place in the city. What we can be certain of is that Harvard's intellectual prowess will not be used to uncover the fates of the people disappeared and still unaccounted for by the Federal and State armed agents or to assist in the struggle for justice and dignity for the people of Oaxaca.
Also see the press releases posted here from the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, human rights
March 28, 2007
Are We Politicians or Citizens?
From Howard Zinn, writing in the May 2007 Progressive:
When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.
When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.
March 24, 2007
End the War by Continuing the War
Report by the World Socialist Web Site (click the title of this post for complete article):
The bill is a labored attempt by the Democratic leadership to pose as opponents of the Iraq war, while in practice ensuring its continuation. The vote to authorize war funding flies in the face of the will of the electorate, which expressed its desire to end the war and its opposition to the policies of the Bush administration in last November’s congressional elections, overturning Republican control in both houses of Congress. ...
As New York Senator Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, made clear in an interview with the New York Times last week, if elected she would keep a large force of American troops in Iraq indefinitely to secure “remaining vital national security interests” there. She elaborated on these “national security interests” by noting that Iraq is “right in the heart of the oil region.”
Similarly, the House Democrats’ bill upholds the war aims of US imperialism by listing as one of the benchmarks the passage of an oil law that will open up Iraq’s vast reserves to exploitation by US energy conglomerates. ...
In the weeks leading up to Friday’s vote on the floor of the House, the White House and congressional Republicans continually called the Democrats’ bluff, exposing their antiwar pretenses by challenging them to cut off war funding. This culminated last week in the passage, with overwhelming Democratic support, of a Republican-sponsored nonbinding Senate resolution vowing to never cut funds for “troops in the field.” ...
As Pelosi and her subordinates scrambled to assemble the necessary 218 votes to secure passage, groups on the so-called liberal wing of the party declared their support, including the Congressional Black Caucus and MoveOn.org.
The critical role was played by the misnamed “Out of Iraq Caucus” of House Democrats. This group of some 70 congressmen has postured as the most militant critics of the war. Their key leaders, such as Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters, both of California, have been paraded before antiwar demonstrators by protest organizers as living proof that the Democratic Party can be pressured to end the war.
Pelosi dealt with them through a combination of threats and inducements. The house speaker reportedly warned California Rep. Barbara Lee, another leader of the Out of Iraq Caucus, that she would be stripped of her post on the powerful House Appropriations Committee if she sought to block passage of the bill.
On Thursday, Lee, Woolsey, Waters and company insured passage of the bill at a closed-door session with Pelosi. The Washington Post reported on Friday:
“As debate began on the bill yesterday, members of the antiwar caucus and party leaders held a backroom meeting in which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a final plea to the group, asking it to deliver at least four votes when the roll is called. The members promised ten.” ...
The legislative charade mounted by the Democratic Party has nothing to do with ending the war in Iraq. There are, in fact, no principled differences between the Democrats and Bush when it comes to the imperialist aims of the war. Both parties, the Democrats no less than the Republicans, serve the corporate interests—the oil conglomerates, the Wall Street banks, and the American financial oligarchy as a whole—that seek through military violence to establish US control of the resources and markets of the world.
The differences between those within the political establishment who favor continued escalation of the war and those who seek to continue the colonial occupation with reduced US troops are purely tactical. They have to do with the best means of salvaging the US debacle in Iraq by killing and brutalizing more Iraqis, in order to secure US control of the Middle East. ...
In this critical task for the American ruling elite, forces like the Out of Iraq Caucus and their “left” allies in the protest movement play a crucial role. They serve not to end the war, but to provide a right-wing, pro-war party with a left-wing, antiwar gloss, the better to block the emergence of an independent movement of working people against war, repression and social inequality.
The bill is a labored attempt by the Democratic leadership to pose as opponents of the Iraq war, while in practice ensuring its continuation. The vote to authorize war funding flies in the face of the will of the electorate, which expressed its desire to end the war and its opposition to the policies of the Bush administration in last November’s congressional elections, overturning Republican control in both houses of Congress. ...
As New York Senator Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, made clear in an interview with the New York Times last week, if elected she would keep a large force of American troops in Iraq indefinitely to secure “remaining vital national security interests” there. She elaborated on these “national security interests” by noting that Iraq is “right in the heart of the oil region.”
Similarly, the House Democrats’ bill upholds the war aims of US imperialism by listing as one of the benchmarks the passage of an oil law that will open up Iraq’s vast reserves to exploitation by US energy conglomerates. ...
In the weeks leading up to Friday’s vote on the floor of the House, the White House and congressional Republicans continually called the Democrats’ bluff, exposing their antiwar pretenses by challenging them to cut off war funding. This culminated last week in the passage, with overwhelming Democratic support, of a Republican-sponsored nonbinding Senate resolution vowing to never cut funds for “troops in the field.” ...
As Pelosi and her subordinates scrambled to assemble the necessary 218 votes to secure passage, groups on the so-called liberal wing of the party declared their support, including the Congressional Black Caucus and MoveOn.org.
The critical role was played by the misnamed “Out of Iraq Caucus” of House Democrats. This group of some 70 congressmen has postured as the most militant critics of the war. Their key leaders, such as Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters, both of California, have been paraded before antiwar demonstrators by protest organizers as living proof that the Democratic Party can be pressured to end the war.
Pelosi dealt with them through a combination of threats and inducements. The house speaker reportedly warned California Rep. Barbara Lee, another leader of the Out of Iraq Caucus, that she would be stripped of her post on the powerful House Appropriations Committee if she sought to block passage of the bill.
On Thursday, Lee, Woolsey, Waters and company insured passage of the bill at a closed-door session with Pelosi. The Washington Post reported on Friday:
“As debate began on the bill yesterday, members of the antiwar caucus and party leaders held a backroom meeting in which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a final plea to the group, asking it to deliver at least four votes when the roll is called. The members promised ten.” ...
The legislative charade mounted by the Democratic Party has nothing to do with ending the war in Iraq. There are, in fact, no principled differences between the Democrats and Bush when it comes to the imperialist aims of the war. Both parties, the Democrats no less than the Republicans, serve the corporate interests—the oil conglomerates, the Wall Street banks, and the American financial oligarchy as a whole—that seek through military violence to establish US control of the resources and markets of the world.
The differences between those within the political establishment who favor continued escalation of the war and those who seek to continue the colonial occupation with reduced US troops are purely tactical. They have to do with the best means of salvaging the US debacle in Iraq by killing and brutalizing more Iraqis, in order to secure US control of the Middle East. ...
In this critical task for the American ruling elite, forces like the Out of Iraq Caucus and their “left” allies in the protest movement play a crucial role. They serve not to end the war, but to provide a right-wing, pro-war party with a left-wing, antiwar gloss, the better to block the emergence of an independent movement of working people against war, repression and social inequality.
March 23, 2007
Wind on grid does not displace other sources
Back to the fraud of industrial wind, a correspondent writes:
In most cases, when the wind energy is a small fraction (less than 5%) of the load, the grid probably does not throttle back other power sources, letting the line voltage go up within safe bounds. This means that when windmills suddenly drop off the grid like dominoes, which they are wont to do, the grid will not have to scramble to avoid a brownout.
In this case, there is no fuel saved, more power is used by customers due to the higher voltage, and the utility happily charges the customers. Since many electrical devices simply waste the extra energy, that energy is wasted to a great extent.
If a large fraction of the grid power is from wind, the situation is very unstable, so unless there is adequate water power to react quickly, it is necessary to have fossil fuel generation "spinning" in reserve to compensate for the sudden domino failure characteristics of windmills. Naturally this wastes considerable energy, so the wind energy never really displaces fossil fuel consumption in an adequate manner to be justified.
Finally it should be noted that all fossil fuel generation equipment has an optimal range of operating efficiency, usually near full load. If they have to reduce output, this generally means more coal, gas, or oil per kWh is consumed, thus there is no one-to-one relationship with any savings of fossil fuel from the use of windmills. ...
The bottom line is, attaching windmills to the grid is simply foolish. If you were an Inuit living in a remote part of Alaska, not connected to the grid, and you are used to being frequently without power, perhaps they would make sense to you . . . if they were subsidized.
In most cases, when the wind energy is a small fraction (less than 5%) of the load, the grid probably does not throttle back other power sources, letting the line voltage go up within safe bounds. This means that when windmills suddenly drop off the grid like dominoes, which they are wont to do, the grid will not have to scramble to avoid a brownout.
In this case, there is no fuel saved, more power is used by customers due to the higher voltage, and the utility happily charges the customers. Since many electrical devices simply waste the extra energy, that energy is wasted to a great extent.
If a large fraction of the grid power is from wind, the situation is very unstable, so unless there is adequate water power to react quickly, it is necessary to have fossil fuel generation "spinning" in reserve to compensate for the sudden domino failure characteristics of windmills. Naturally this wastes considerable energy, so the wind energy never really displaces fossil fuel consumption in an adequate manner to be justified.
Finally it should be noted that all fossil fuel generation equipment has an optimal range of operating efficiency, usually near full load. If they have to reduce output, this generally means more coal, gas, or oil per kWh is consumed, thus there is no one-to-one relationship with any savings of fossil fuel from the use of windmills. ...
The bottom line is, attaching windmills to the grid is simply foolish. If you were an Inuit living in a remote part of Alaska, not connected to the grid, and you are used to being frequently without power, perhaps they would make sense to you . . . if they were subsidized.
War Is Peace
Ron Paul, Libertarian Republican from Texas, puts the Democrats to shame in explaining his intention to vote against the bill to "end the war by fully funding it for another year":
Note, the Senate version of this war bill does not have the sham "end date," only a nonbinding recommendation. Have Pelosi and Reid orchestrated all this so that reconciliation will fail and the Democrats will then propose a true bill to end the funding? They could point to the fact that Republicans didn't support the "compromise," which she ensured by loading the bill with so much pork to give Republicans a principled reason to oppose it. A stupid game, and an unlikely scenario. As Sharon Smith concludes in Counterpunch:
Only with the complicity of Congress have we become a nation of pre-emptive war, secret military tribunals, torture, rejection of habeas corpus, warrantless searches, undue government secrecy, extraordinary renditions, and uncontrollable spying on the American people. The greatest danger we face is ourselves: what we are doing in the name of providing security for a people made fearful by distortions of facts. Fighting over there has nothing to do with preserving freedoms here at home. More likely the opposite is true.Meanwhile, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, and other Democrats who intend to vote against the bill are -- bizarrely -- working to help pass it. And Democrat Jim McGovern is typical, saying, "I want this war ended today. If I thought it would help this war ending sooner by voting against the bill, I would vote against it in a heartbeat." But voting for the bill is to vote for the war's continuation, you jerk. The Democrats, elected to power because their nation -- not to mention Iraq -- is sick and tired of the lies and futility of this escapade, should heed the words of John Lewis (thanks to Vermont Snarky Boy for the quote):
Tonight, I must make it plain and clear, that as a human being, as a citizen of the world, as a citizen of America, as a member of Congress, and as an individual committed to a world at peace with itself, I will not and cannot vote for another dollar or another dime to support this war.Vermonters: our own Peter Welch, after campaigning with a strong anti-war platform -- the only thing that distinguished him from his Republican opponent -- will be voting "aye" along with his leaders. Tell him how sorry you are that he won't be re-elected in 2008.
Note, the Senate version of this war bill does not have the sham "end date," only a nonbinding recommendation. Have Pelosi and Reid orchestrated all this so that reconciliation will fail and the Democrats will then propose a true bill to end the funding? They could point to the fact that Republicans didn't support the "compromise," which she ensured by loading the bill with so much pork to give Republicans a principled reason to oppose it. A stupid game, and an unlikely scenario. As Sharon Smith concludes in Counterpunch:
The Democrats, like the Republicans, are biding time in Iraq, in the hopes of consolidating a long-term U.S. military presence there -- while leaving open the option of attacking Iran as a bargaining chip. Clinton stated recently, "No option can be taken off the table" against Iran's alleged nuclear threat, while presidential rivals John Edwards and Obama echoed, "All options on the table."
March 20, 2007
Hillary Clinton campaigning to out-stupid Bush
Sharon Smith reports in today's Counterpunch:
2. The U.S. does not get any oil from Iran.
3. If a country sells us their oil, they are very effectively supporting "our values," since we could not function without it.
4. Our second largest supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia, responded to the 1979 Iranian revolution by funding the extremist Sunni madrasas in Pakistan that bred the Taliban and its support of Al Qaeda. Yet by Clinton's implications, Saudi Arabia -- a backwards repressive monarchy -- supports "our values." Which must mean only that they don't care when we bomb anybody that doesn't jump when the U.S. president says "jump." Or it could be that a backwards repressive monarchy is our ideal as well -- we certainly seem to be heading down that toilet. The U.S. sells them our best bombers and keeps an aircraft carrier or two nearby to help them "support our values." (Our largest oil supplier is Canada. Third is Nigeria, where our values have supported the descent of that country from prosperity to a basket case of inequity and civil unrest.)
5. The values that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela represents are those of democracy -- speaking truth to power, daring to assert one's own voice as equal to that of the president of the United States, daring to assert the value of poor people and non-Europeans as equal to that of the self-anointed self-protective "elites." Those are values that Hilary Clinton -- along with almost everyone in the U.S. -- both lacks and fears. She may be more stupidly cravenly infantile even than George W. Bush himself.
After pledging to work toward energy independence at a March 18 mid-Manhattan fundraiser, Clinton told an audience laden with Wall St. financiers that each time she switches off a light bulb in her own home, she mutters, "'Take that, Iran,' and 'Take that, Venezuela.' We should not be sending our money to people who are not going to support our values."1. The U.S. uses almost no oil to generate electricity, and the little that is used is the sludge left over from refining.
2. The U.S. does not get any oil from Iran.
3. If a country sells us their oil, they are very effectively supporting "our values," since we could not function without it.
4. Our second largest supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia, responded to the 1979 Iranian revolution by funding the extremist Sunni madrasas in Pakistan that bred the Taliban and its support of Al Qaeda. Yet by Clinton's implications, Saudi Arabia -- a backwards repressive monarchy -- supports "our values." Which must mean only that they don't care when we bomb anybody that doesn't jump when the U.S. president says "jump." Or it could be that a backwards repressive monarchy is our ideal as well -- we certainly seem to be heading down that toilet. The U.S. sells them our best bombers and keeps an aircraft carrier or two nearby to help them "support our values." (Our largest oil supplier is Canada. Third is Nigeria, where our values have supported the descent of that country from prosperity to a basket case of inequity and civil unrest.)
5. The values that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela represents are those of democracy -- speaking truth to power, daring to assert one's own voice as equal to that of the president of the United States, daring to assert the value of poor people and non-Europeans as equal to that of the self-anointed self-protective "elites." Those are values that Hilary Clinton -- along with almost everyone in the U.S. -- both lacks and fears. She may be more stupidly cravenly infantile even than George W. Bush himself.
Myth and the Audacity of Reality
Sam Smith has written another superb essay at Progressive Review, excerpted below. Click on the title of this post to read the complete original.
Living as we do in what seems at times a second Middle Ages -- complete with Christian crusades against Islam -- we inevitably find our struggles centered on myths rather than on facts and competing philosophies. For the past quarter century -- ever since we elected the our first fully fictional president, Ronald Reagan, we have bounced from legend to legend increasingly indifferent to their effects or costs until we find ourselves today engaged in a war that we can't afford, nobody wants and nobody knows how to end.
At first, it just seemed like another problem with Republicans, but with the rise of the Vichy Democrats under Bill Clinton, it became clear that our absorption with fantasy had become not only bipartisan but omnicultural. Neither politician nor media, intellectual nor ordinary citizen, appeared all that interested in reality any more. ...
It is hard for reality to hold its own in such an environment and as Americans increasingly became preoccupied with selling and speculating, our collective psyches became ever more removed from substance and our language, our minds and our souls ever more trapped in the syntax, style and morals of the pitch.
It is small wonder that our politics has followed suit. Or that the media has lost interest in lowly facts, preferring instead to deconstruct propaganda, images, semiotics and efforts to manipulate the same -- becoming critics of spin rather than as narrators of reality. ...
... Clinton didn't really campaign for the presidency; he auditioned for it. He proved to the producers and directors that he could play the part.
This shift was in some ways even more dramatic than that which accompanied Reagan. After all, for the better part of a century, the Republicans had traditionally been mired in self-serving myths and Reagan merely took them to a new level. The Democrats and those to their left had been responsible for nearly all the political progress that America had enjoyed. With Clinton that all changed. Neither party was interested in real change any longer. The two parties now got both their money and their politics from the same sources.
And so it has been ever since. No more Jimmy Carter or Michael Dukakis to foul things up. When a wild card like Howard Dean appears, you dump him like Simon Cowell would, complaining of his poor stage presence one lone night in Iowa. If a rejected former auditioner, John Edwards, decides to go his own way, you just turn off the mikes and the lights of the campaign -- aka news coverage -- and reduce the election to the acceptables. A Gene McCarthy–like candidate can't even get off the ground.
Now, instead, we are offered the choice in the GOP of competing heroes -- 9/11 vs. Vietnam -- and in the Democratic Party of competing sociological icons -- woman vs. black. In fact, Giuliani was no hero in 9/11, John McCain has learned little from being one in Vietnam, Hillary Clinton offers nothing to the waitress or the stay-at-home grandmother raising her daughter's kids, and Barack Obama has no plan for the millions of young blacks and latinos deserted for decades by both parties. None among them has a way out of Iraq or misbegotten empire nor a way towards economic decency and social justice. But it doesn't matter, for we are not choosing a president but selecting a myth.
This poses a problem for a journalist. Journalists are supposed to either ignore or expose myth and help the reader find the way back to reality. But once political positions have more in common with evangelical fundamentalism into which one is born again than with philosophical differences that demand logical arguments and defenses, skepticism and exposure become the political equivalent of heresy and invite excommunication.
Although I had written critically of every president since Lyndon Johnson, it wasn't until the Clinton years that I was told -- directly and by inference -- that this was no longer permissible. The Clintons had helped create this climate by inventing the notion that to criticize them made you into a "hater" -- sort of like a Nazi or member of the KKK. ...
The web has contributed to this aura by creating places that are more congregations than sites, internet cathedrals where people go for confirmation rather than information, and where the holy book is the game plan of one candidate or another.
To follow instead where the story leads one, to face the imperfectabilities of the world, to engage in the audacity of reality is just too uncomfortable for many these days.
For journalists, at least, it wasn't always like that. Here, for example, is an except of HL Mencken's coverage of the 1920 convention:
"No one but an idiot could argue seriously that either candidate is a first-rate man, or even a creditable specimen of second-rate man. Any State in the Union, at least above the Potomac, could produce a thousand men quite as good, and many States could produce a thousand a great deal better. Harding, intellectually, seems to be merely a benign blank -- a decent, harmless, laborious hollow-headed mediocrity. . . Cox is quicker of wit, but a good deal less honest. He belongs to the cunning type; there is a touch of the shyster in him. His chicaneries in the matter of prohibition, both during the convention and since, show the kink in his mind. He is willing to do anything to cadge votes, and he includes in that anything the ready sacrifices of his good faith, of the national welfare, and of the hopes and confidence of those who honestly support him. Neither candidate reveals the slightest dignity of conviction. Neither cares a hoot for any discernible principle. Neither, in any intelligible sense, is a man of honor." ...
... Try to think of a single contemporary establishment newspaper that would publish HL Mencken today and you can sense the problem.
It's much like the Iraq war. No matter how bad or stupid it is, we must still support the troops by letting them get killed there another year or whatever. We are not allowed to say that the administration, the Washington establishment and the media have failed us as has happened seldom before. ...
I come from a school of journalism that said, to the contrary, that if you didn't report the parking tickets you should turn in your press pass. What people did with the information was their business; reporting it was yours.
I also can remember a liberalism that assumed every good Democrat was fighting a two-front war: against the GOP on one hand and against the SOBs in the Democratic Party on the other. I suspect many of today's liberal mythmakers would have wanted us to adapt to Carmine DeSapio, Richard Daley, Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the interest of beating the Republicans and maintaining party unity. But the funny thing is that the party was stronger back when it lacked such phony unity.
Fundamentalism in religion or politics comes to no good end because life always contradicts itself. ... Just when you think you're among the faithful, someone betrays you.
Similarly, when you walk into the voting booth, artificially implanted illusions, false faith and naive hope won't do you any good. It is far better to take some reality along, even if you have to take a barf bag as well. To be sure, you won't have the exhilaration of delusional faith but you will be one more voter who knows how the magic really works, and when you know that the magic will no longer fool you and yours will be one more ballot cast for the real.
In the end, no matter who are our leaders are, we, at best, come in second place next to their own interests. Knowing this and why -- and not pretending otherwise -- may not be the meat of myth, but it is certainly at the core of our survival.
Living as we do in what seems at times a second Middle Ages -- complete with Christian crusades against Islam -- we inevitably find our struggles centered on myths rather than on facts and competing philosophies. For the past quarter century -- ever since we elected the our first fully fictional president, Ronald Reagan, we have bounced from legend to legend increasingly indifferent to their effects or costs until we find ourselves today engaged in a war that we can't afford, nobody wants and nobody knows how to end.
At first, it just seemed like another problem with Republicans, but with the rise of the Vichy Democrats under Bill Clinton, it became clear that our absorption with fantasy had become not only bipartisan but omnicultural. Neither politician nor media, intellectual nor ordinary citizen, appeared all that interested in reality any more. ...
It is hard for reality to hold its own in such an environment and as Americans increasingly became preoccupied with selling and speculating, our collective psyches became ever more removed from substance and our language, our minds and our souls ever more trapped in the syntax, style and morals of the pitch.
It is small wonder that our politics has followed suit. Or that the media has lost interest in lowly facts, preferring instead to deconstruct propaganda, images, semiotics and efforts to manipulate the same -- becoming critics of spin rather than as narrators of reality. ...
... Clinton didn't really campaign for the presidency; he auditioned for it. He proved to the producers and directors that he could play the part.
This shift was in some ways even more dramatic than that which accompanied Reagan. After all, for the better part of a century, the Republicans had traditionally been mired in self-serving myths and Reagan merely took them to a new level. The Democrats and those to their left had been responsible for nearly all the political progress that America had enjoyed. With Clinton that all changed. Neither party was interested in real change any longer. The two parties now got both their money and their politics from the same sources.
And so it has been ever since. No more Jimmy Carter or Michael Dukakis to foul things up. When a wild card like Howard Dean appears, you dump him like Simon Cowell would, complaining of his poor stage presence one lone night in Iowa. If a rejected former auditioner, John Edwards, decides to go his own way, you just turn off the mikes and the lights of the campaign -- aka news coverage -- and reduce the election to the acceptables. A Gene McCarthy–like candidate can't even get off the ground.
Now, instead, we are offered the choice in the GOP of competing heroes -- 9/11 vs. Vietnam -- and in the Democratic Party of competing sociological icons -- woman vs. black. In fact, Giuliani was no hero in 9/11, John McCain has learned little from being one in Vietnam, Hillary Clinton offers nothing to the waitress or the stay-at-home grandmother raising her daughter's kids, and Barack Obama has no plan for the millions of young blacks and latinos deserted for decades by both parties. None among them has a way out of Iraq or misbegotten empire nor a way towards economic decency and social justice. But it doesn't matter, for we are not choosing a president but selecting a myth.
This poses a problem for a journalist. Journalists are supposed to either ignore or expose myth and help the reader find the way back to reality. But once political positions have more in common with evangelical fundamentalism into which one is born again than with philosophical differences that demand logical arguments and defenses, skepticism and exposure become the political equivalent of heresy and invite excommunication.
Although I had written critically of every president since Lyndon Johnson, it wasn't until the Clinton years that I was told -- directly and by inference -- that this was no longer permissible. The Clintons had helped create this climate by inventing the notion that to criticize them made you into a "hater" -- sort of like a Nazi or member of the KKK. ...
The web has contributed to this aura by creating places that are more congregations than sites, internet cathedrals where people go for confirmation rather than information, and where the holy book is the game plan of one candidate or another.
To follow instead where the story leads one, to face the imperfectabilities of the world, to engage in the audacity of reality is just too uncomfortable for many these days.
For journalists, at least, it wasn't always like that. Here, for example, is an except of HL Mencken's coverage of the 1920 convention:
"No one but an idiot could argue seriously that either candidate is a first-rate man, or even a creditable specimen of second-rate man. Any State in the Union, at least above the Potomac, could produce a thousand men quite as good, and many States could produce a thousand a great deal better. Harding, intellectually, seems to be merely a benign blank -- a decent, harmless, laborious hollow-headed mediocrity. . . Cox is quicker of wit, but a good deal less honest. He belongs to the cunning type; there is a touch of the shyster in him. His chicaneries in the matter of prohibition, both during the convention and since, show the kink in his mind. He is willing to do anything to cadge votes, and he includes in that anything the ready sacrifices of his good faith, of the national welfare, and of the hopes and confidence of those who honestly support him. Neither candidate reveals the slightest dignity of conviction. Neither cares a hoot for any discernible principle. Neither, in any intelligible sense, is a man of honor." ...
... Try to think of a single contemporary establishment newspaper that would publish HL Mencken today and you can sense the problem.
It's much like the Iraq war. No matter how bad or stupid it is, we must still support the troops by letting them get killed there another year or whatever. We are not allowed to say that the administration, the Washington establishment and the media have failed us as has happened seldom before. ...
I come from a school of journalism that said, to the contrary, that if you didn't report the parking tickets you should turn in your press pass. What people did with the information was their business; reporting it was yours.
I also can remember a liberalism that assumed every good Democrat was fighting a two-front war: against the GOP on one hand and against the SOBs in the Democratic Party on the other. I suspect many of today's liberal mythmakers would have wanted us to adapt to Carmine DeSapio, Richard Daley, Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the interest of beating the Republicans and maintaining party unity. But the funny thing is that the party was stronger back when it lacked such phony unity.
Fundamentalism in religion or politics comes to no good end because life always contradicts itself. ... Just when you think you're among the faithful, someone betrays you.
Similarly, when you walk into the voting booth, artificially implanted illusions, false faith and naive hope won't do you any good. It is far better to take some reality along, even if you have to take a barf bag as well. To be sure, you won't have the exhilaration of delusional faith but you will be one more voter who knows how the magic really works, and when you know that the magic will no longer fool you and yours will be one more ballot cast for the real.
In the end, no matter who are our leaders are, we, at best, come in second place next to their own interests. Knowing this and why -- and not pretending otherwise -- may not be the meat of myth, but it is certainly at the core of our survival.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)