STONEWALL HARGETT

Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett is continuing the old Southern tradition of dogged, faithful persistence in a cause that is just plain wrong.  Like Stonewall Jackson before them, he, and the rest of the Tennessee Republican party are grimly holding off the future, using every trick they can muster.  But, just as the South was ultimately overwhelmed in the war over secession, the green tide of history will ultimately  roll over Hargett, Marcia Blackburn, Susan Lynn, Ron Ramsey, and all their tea-bag slinging cohorts.

Well, I don’t often start with “the deep green perspective” on things, do I?  So…what am I blathering about now?

I’m talking about a couple of related campaigns.  One is not on many people’s radar, while the other has a much higher profile, but they both reveal similar, peculiar, and disturbing patterns, not just in the way Repuglycans and Dimocrats jostle for power, but in the ways they work together to guard their joint monopoly on that power.  This two-party monopoly (call it a duopoly for short) is in many ways responsible for the disconnection between what the people of this country want and what becomes the law of the land.  There’s more than one way to run a democracy, and at the end of this talk I’m going to do my best to explain how we could tweak our governmental operating system to make it more responsive to popular ( as in, from the people) viewpoints.

First, the specifics.  The Green Party of Tennessee has been putting up candidates for over ten years now, but the words “Green Party” have only once appeared on a Tennessee ballot–in 2000, for no apparent reason, the state decided to give the Green, Libertarian, and Constitution parties a ballot line.  Then they changed their mind.   Why?  We’d like to know!

In Tennessee, our candidates are listed as “Independents,” down there in the miscellaneous list with the solitary visionaries and crackpots, even though we are affiliated with  an international movement and the Green Party has more members in the US than in any other country in the world.  This is partly because, here in Tennessee and in several other states, the duopoly has set up election laws, and an election law bureaucracy, that make it extremely difficult for any other parties to be listed by name on the ballot.

Here in Tennessee, a “third” party has to get petitions signed by tens of thousands of those who voted in the previous election, stating that they are members of the new party and want it to be named on the ballot.  Or something like that.  When we tried to petition for ballot access, our representative was told by officials that, while they couldn’t tell her exactly how the petitions needed to be worded, if they were not correctly worded, they would be rejected.  Can you say Kafka, boys and girls?

Moreover, the petitioning process is time-consuming and expensive, with the cost of gathering signatures estimated at about a dollar each, which is prohibitive for a small party.  It would cost us $40-50,000 to get on the ballot via the petition route, a fee the Democrats and Republicans do not have to pay.  Hey, some animals are more equal than others, as George Orwell pointed out.

Ohio’s laws were similar, and the Green Party there went to court and had them struck down as unconstitutional.  With this case for a precedent, we in the Green Party of Tennessee figured it would be no big deal to get our state to change its law.  Well, we didn’t figure on ol’ Stonewall Hargett, or the stalling tactics of his Dimocratic predecessor, Riley Darnell.  They do not want no stinkin’ Green Party line on the Tennessee ballot, no sah.  Once was enough.

Joining with the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party of Tennessee, we filed our case in 2007….and waited….and waited…..until May of 2008, when the state presented us with a voluminous number of highly detailed questions to answer–and only a month to answer them in.  The nature of the questions was such that the request seemed more like a stumbling block than anything truly relevant to the case.  They wanted to know every instance of anybody in the Green Party talking about getting on the ballot, the history of the Green Party in Tennessee, the history of the Green Party in the US, the details of every Green Party ballot access struggle in every state, the details of Green Party elections in every state–all in just one month, no extensions.

Well, we did it.  And then–nothing, again, for nearly a year and a half, when, in November of last year, we got notice that the State Attorney General would be taking depositions from all three parties involved…in just one week.

The Green Party’s designated litigant, Katie Culver, duly showed up at the Attorney General’s office–and did not get treated to any ol’fashioned southern hospitality.  First and foremost, she would have to wait for five hours while the state cross-examined the litigants from the Constitutional and Libertarian parties.  Oh, and by the way, there was no drinking water available.  Gee, was that some not-so-subtle physiological pressure being applied?  And of course there was the cross-examination….very cross, to hear Katey tell it–the state’s lawyer did her best imitation of a pit bull, badgering, insulting, splitting hairs, demanding irrelevant details, anything a lawyer can do to intimidate and browbeat a witness short of profanity and physical violence, and used up every minute of the two and a half hours allotted.  Hey, that’s what lawyers do…ain’t the adversarial American justice system wonderful?

And now….how long will it be until we can get a court to respond?  This was all done in relation to what is called “a motion for summary judgement,” meaning that the State essentially has no case for defending a law that has already been judged unconstitutional, and so we are asking a Federal judge to make them stop stalling and do the right thing already.  But a Federal Court order doesn’t necessarily get much traction here in Tennessee, where even state law is enforced at the discretion of those in power, as we shall shortly see, when we look at Stonewall Hargett’s strategy in failing to implement the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act.  First, though, let’s wrap up the Green Party story.

We are currently being given the runaround by Tre Hargett, who, as Secretary of State, is charged with administering elections, but we were equally mistreated by Riley Darnell, his Democratic predecessor.  Neither of the big boys wants to give the Green Party a seat at the table.  We’re an almost embarrassingly small operation, but we see having “Green Party” listed next to our candidates’ names on the ballot as essential to growing ourselves, and we feel that an increased “Green” presence in local, as well as national, politics is essential for the rescue of this nation.  What is the duop0ly afraid of?

music:  Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Small Axe“

OK, now for the high profile stonewalling case–Tre Hargett, et al., vs. the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act.

The TVCA was passed with near-unanimity by the Tennessee legislature in 2007 after a concerted campaign by local activists under the name “Gathering to Save Our Democracy.”  This act mandated that Tennessee voting shall be conducted on paper ballots and counted by the same kind of optical scanning machines that are used to grade standardized tests and validate powerball tickets.  This technology is well established, inexpensive, fast, and fairly foolproof.  Only one machine per precinct is needed, instead of the large number of what amounts to dedicated computers that touch-screen voting calls for.  Voters need only a private space and a number two pencil to mark their ballots, rather than each voter occupying an expensive machine for however long it takes to indicate her choices, as is the case with touchscreen voting.  It’s a much more efficient system.

This is especially significant when we look at what happened in Ohio in the 2004 election, which was conducted on touchscreen equipment.  The highly partisan Ohio Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, assigned fewer machines to Democratic Party strongholds, which lead to long lines, which lead to some people not voting because of inclement weather, work obligations, and general frustration.  Strangely enough, it was Blackwell who reversed Ohio’s decision to use optical scan voting machines, and instead use Diebold touch-screen machines…a company in which he just happened to own stock…I don’t know which of those two facts is more peculiar, especially in light of what’s going on down here.

Yeah, so what’s going on down here….in 2008, Tennesseans voted on touch-screen machines, and every open seat in the legislature was captured by a Repuglican.  Some observers chalk this up to a racist reaction to Obama in rural, mostly white Tennessee, and to the namby-pamby nature of the Tennessee Democratic Party, which is even more of a Republican-lite Party than the average state Democratic organization.  Others wonder if some chicanery was involved, but with electronic voting, “vapor ballots,” as some activists call them, there is simply no way to tell.

Touchscreen voting machines are computers, and as computers, they are highly suspect.  We all know that computers can have bugs, and computers can be hacked.  One example is a local, one-issue election in Georgia, where touch-screen machines recorded 200 blank votes–as if people would bother to show up for a one-question election, step into the voting booth, and then not vote.  Yeah, right.

Another, more serious example occurred in Florida.  In the words of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

Voters from Sarasota County announced today that they are filing suit in state court in Tallahassee asking for a re-vote in Florida’s 13th congressional district. The suit alleges that thousands of citizens were disenfranchised when massive undervotes plagued the tight congressional race between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan. In a high-profile battle over former Rep. Katherine Harris’ seat, the result was decided by 363 votes, yet over 18,000 ballots cast on Sarasota County’s e-voting machines registered no vote in the race, an exceptional anomaly in the State.

Official investigation of this contest failed to confirm that this was a problem with voting machines, but consider what official investigations found (or failed to find) about the Kennedy/King assassinations, CIA cocaine smuggling, 9-11, last year’s economic collapse,  the Christmas bomber in Detroit, or what-have-you, and you realize that doesn’t mean much  (except that a lot of us have lost faith in the government, quite possibly for good reason)…and this is, after all, only one example of the many problems with electronic voting.  Plus, let’s not forget that the president of the Diebold Corporation, one of the primary manufacturers of touch-screen voting machines, is famous for saying he wants to help elect Republicans, and that all the companies that manufacture touch-screen voting machines are controlled by known Republicans.

So, back to Tennessee.  Now in the majority for the first time since Reconstruction, the Republicans had a change of heart:  they listed  repealing or  further delaying implementation of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act as one of their primary goals, part of a broad offensive aimed at limiting voter participation and election accountability by requiring photo IDs to register and vote,and a host of other proposals generally designed to make it more likely that they would remain the party in power.  Most of these bills died in committee, but the GOP did succeed in stacking the state election commission and replacing many experienced county election administrators with Repuglycan  operatives, who now form an ersatz authoritative “echo chamber” for the Repuglican campaign against the TVCA.

The campaign against paper ballots whas been a classic propaganda play.  Secretary of State Hargett and State Election Co-ordinator Mark Goins cried crocodile tears, insisting that they wanted to carry out the law and switch to optical scan machines, but there wasn’t enough time, there were no machines that met the legal standard, and it would cost too much.

Every single one of these statements is a lie; but, as Nazi propaganda master Josef Goebbels said, if you repeat a lie long enough, loud enough, and often enough, people start to believe it, and that’s what Hargett  and Goins did.  Their lies have been unquestioningly echoed in newspapers across the state, creating the illusion that there are good reasons not to switch to a verifiable voting system by the next general election.

Their claims were ludicrous on even cursory examination–other states have changed over to optical scan systems in less time than Tennessee has to make the switch, and those states have demonstrably saved money by doing so; the money to buy the machines is available from the federal government at no cost to Tennessee, and the cost estimates provided by the GOP’s hand-picked election commissioners were way out of line–claiming that it would cost $50 per ballot to do a hand recount (when states like Missouri and Nevada spend a nickel per ballot for hand recounts), or that it would cost $70,000 to store a filing cabinet full of ballots for two years.

Like Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, Stonewall Hargett’s campaign almost worked. Last year, the Tennessee legislature came within one very principled Republican vote of putting off the TVCA “until 2012″–which you can bet would turn into forever.

So, they are going to try again this year.  Gathering to Save Our Democracy, Common Cause, and that radical hotbed, the League of Women Voters,  are doing what they can to persuade some of the non-ethically challenged Republicans in the Tennessee Senate to keep the TVCA on track for implementation in 2010. (Full disclosure:  I know there are Republicans who are not ethically challenged because my father was one–but that’s another story.)

This month will reveal the outcome of the struggle in the Tennessee Senate, but, unsure whether there will be a “Rock of Chickamauga” in this battle,  some election activists are looking ahead and establishing communication with the US Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission.

Just what is at stake here?  By holding on to power in the state through the 2010 election, the Repugs will be able to redraw district lines after the 2010 census in ways that will guarantee them solid majorities in the state legislature and the state’s US congressional delegation–though it’s easy for me, as a Green, to argue that most of our so-called Democrats, being of the blue dog stripe, are hardly better than Republicans, anyway.  Well, there is a difference.  Democrats, however conservative they may be, generally feel obligated to at least make a nod to the real world in terms of environmental/ethical/social justice legislation, while the great majority of Repugs pledge allegiance to corporate profits only and throw no crumbs to the common people.

But, as I said when I started talking, the green tide of history, or perhaps the end of history if we are not careful, will roll over the Republicans, and most Democrats as well, like Sherman marching through Georgia.  The power they are grasping for will turn to sand and slip through their fingers. While they are busy passing laws to let people pack concealed heat and keeping gay couples from adopting children, or even laws to make everybody buy private health insurance, the growth economy that is closer to the core of their belief system than Jesus Christ Himself is imploding, the gasoline that powers their SUVs is drying up, the global industrial economy that produces the Prius is coming apart at the seams, and the climate is bucking like a wild, unbreakable horse with an unwanted  rider on her back.  Nature bats last, and don’t you ever forget it. Those who are not “reality-based” enough to deal with all this are setting themselves up for a very painful collision with..reality.

music:  Zappa, “A Lie So Big”

OK, I’ve been giving you an earful about the travails of the Green Party as we try to get our name on the ballot, and the shenanigans of the Republican Party as they maneuver to maintain dominance over the Dims and keep us out of the picture.  Is there a better way?

There are several improvements that could be made to the US voting system, although, considering the hash we just made of health care reform, my hopes are not high for their implementation.  Look, we set out to drive stakes through the hearts of the health care, insurance, and pharmaceutical vampires and it looks like we’re ending up with a law that fines us if we don’t give them our blood .  So, do I really think the Repugs and Dims are going to open up their monopoly on electoral power?  Do the good cop and the bad cop ever hang it up and bring in a mediator instead?  The Green Party is part of the ruling coalition in some countries, but we can barely get a ballot line in this one.

When I look at political reality in this country, I do actually find some grounds for hope, specifically when I look at the issue of the so-called “Drug War.”  While the federal government has done everything it can to maintain worldwide marijuana prohibition, local campaigns have opened one state after another to legally, readily available medical marijuana, and the federal government has had to get on board and stop prosecuting medical marijuana users and suppliers in states where it is legal.

In a similar way, it may be possible to make changes in the way we vote for candidates that gradually percolate up to the national level.

The way that many  Green Parties have gotten into parliaments in Europe is through the practice of “proportional representation,” in which, as I understand it, voters cast their ballots for the party of their choice, and then the seats in the legislature are divvied up according to the percentage of votes each party receives, whether the party got a majority in any one location or not.

Much as I like this idea, I think this would be a hard sell in America, where people are used to the idea that their local representative in government is literally representative of the views of a majority of those in her district.  Another practice, however, is more compatible with what we are used to in this country and, I think, would be an easy sell for a referendum, although I’m sure both major parties would fight it as fiercely as private insurance battled the public option and expanded Medicare.

That practice is called “instant runoff voting.”  It’s pretty simple.  You get to vote for your first choice AND your second choice, in races where there are more than two candidates.  A candidate has to have a clear majority to win.  If no candidate has a clear majority, the second choices of those who voted for the candidate in last place are counted, and so on up the line, until somebody has a clear majority.  This eliminates the “spoiler effect” that happens when liberal votes get split between two competing candidates (say, Ralph and Al, just f’rinstance), allowing the conservative candidate (let’s call him “George”) to win without a majority. If everybody who voted for Ralph could have indicated that Al was their second choice, then, since Ralph is running behind Al and George, and nobody has a majority, all those second-choice votes for Al turn into real votes for Al, and Ralph is Al’s savior instead of his spoiler, and maybe Ralph gets a place in Al’s cabinet instead of his picture getting a place on Al’s dart board.

Medical marijuana had to struggle for a while before it started catching on, but this idea is much less divisive than legalizing the noble herb.  At least, I haven’t heard about anybody saying that Jesus spoke out against instant runoff voting, or that instant runoff advocates are sinners who will roast in hell for our immorality.

So…it’s not immoral, it’s certainly not fattening, and it’s not really illegal, just not yet the law of the land, and I like it….hmm, I must be getting old…but I digress.

Instant runoff voting is not a guarantee of success for the Green Party.  We would still have to contend with mainstream media that has a blatantly corporatist, duopoly party bias and enormous disparities in fund-raising ability, due to the fact that we, on principle, will not take money from the usual political sources. (Who, considering their principles, are unlikely to offer it to us anyway.)

Here in Tennessee, there is no provision for popular referendum, but it might be possible to persuade a city to make the move.  To do that, we will need progressive, persuasive candidates at all levels, and we will need to pump up our state organization and create some political muscle.  Would you like to be part of a political organization that works for  people instead of big business?  We are having our annual meeting and nominating convention in Knoxville on February 20, and would love to be overwhelmed by fresh faces.  Check out our website, gpoftn.org, where details will be posted soon.  Hope to see you there!

music:  Leonard Cohen, “Democracy“

BROKENHAGEN

It looks like the climate conference in Copenhagen produced good news and bad news.

The bad news was that, as the final weeks, months, or years (nobody knows!) tick down before we have passed over enough “tipping points” to fall into climate chaos, the governments of the world were unable to agree about how to stop, slow, end, or reverse the process.  It’s not that we don’t know what  to do, it’s that there is no way to make those who are doing most of  the damage–the government/industrial complexes of the US, China, India, Canada, and Russia–there is no way to make them–or is it us?– stop. Everybody agreed to keep talking,  but the climate time bomb is still ticking, and we have no idea when it’s going to go off or how much damage it will do.

The good news is that the governments and big businesses of the world were unable to come to the agreement that some had hoped to ratify–an agreement that was more of a mutual suicide pact than something that would actually have curbed, or even helped the world adjust to, global climate change.

It kind of reminds me of the old anti-gun law bumper sticker that read “Ill give up my guns when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.”

But this isn’t about just about guns, it’s about the whole growth-oriented worldwide consumer economy.  The upper classes and their hypnotized minions in the bourgeoisie and what’s left of the working class (Wow, I sound like an old-time commie, don’t I!?), all those under the spell of eternal growth, either don’t care how many people have to die for them to keep enjoying their high standard of living, or at best think there is some technological breakthrough just over the horizon that will make it work.  I have a feeling they are very, very mistaken.

As I understand it, here’s how the breakdown happened:

The Chinese see themselves, probably correctly, as the next great superpower, and are unwilling to let anything stand in their way.  China’s  leaders  also know that they need to keep their economy moving, or they will have hundreds of millions of very unhappy people chewing on their asses.  Are they aware of the fact that their growth plan will melt the Himalayan ice cap and leave them (and India) without an adequate water supply?  Probably.  Are they planning to  negotiate for, or maybe just seize,  far eastern Russia’s copious water resources?  Probably.  Do they figure that India and the rest of south Asia, who are dependent on the glacier-fed Mekong, Irawaddy, Bhramaputra, Ganges, and Indus Rivers, but do not have easy access to Siberia, will thus be made more dependent on China and thus increase China’s world hegemony?   Probably.

Will things work out according to their plans?   Don’t bet on it.  According to one witness, it was the Chinese who insisted that the commitment to an 80% cut in carbon emissions by 2050, as well as any other concrete targets,  be dropped.  China will not be immune to the disastrous consequences of this power play.

The US government and its major industrial corporations (who are not nearly as separate as they want us to believe) are still trying to be number one.  The US came to the conference with a “commitment” to goals that would protect its own financial interests but not the little people of the world, which seems to be the typical strategy of the Obama administration.  Hillary Clinton’s offer to create a fund to help countries deal with climate change was so hedged with conditions that it amounted to blackmail.  Fortunately, the US position in the world is slipping so fast that few countries are likely to take the bait.  Meanwhile, however, the back room, lowest-common denominator “accord” that Obama negotiated with the Chinese did more to trash the UN, the possibility of controlling carbon emissions,  and America’s standing in the world than all the fussing the Bush Junta and their bulldog John Bolton  ever dreamed of.

So where does that leave us?  On our own.  The big boys are too involved with preserving their own asses and assets to think about or care for us.   .  It’s time to learn to power down, to transition into the post-affluence, post-petroleum, climate-altered twenty-first century,   We need to learn to live  locally, to be both self reliant and interdependent.  We need to learn how to keep working with old friends and how to make new ones.  There’s already a group gathering here in Nashville to do this–in fact, there probably need to be several–it’s a big city.

I can tell you about two upcoming events that will address this need for local organization.  The first is this coming Tuesday, January 12th, at the Celebrity Scientology Center, 1130 8th Avenue South, at 7:30 PM.  Albert Bates, who attended the Copenhagen meeting, will be talking about where we go from here.  Albert combines brilliant, innovative insight with a great sense of humor, and I think this meeting will be very inspirational and should not be missed.  This event is free.

But, if that’s a little short-notice for you, save Saturday, January 30th, when local activist Susan Shann, who is working to birth the “Transition Nashville” movement, will talk at the Cumberland-Green River Basin Bioregional Council’s winter meeting.   She’s not as funny as Albert, but she sings better.  Susan will presenting between 1:30 and 3PM at Brookemeade Congregational Church, at 700 Bresslyn Road, and there will be other events and workshops as well.  Check out the whole schedule at http://www.meetup.com/Cumberland-Green-River-Bioregional-Council/ .  This event is also free.

Hope to see you there!

music:  The Grateful Dead, “Throwing Stones“

http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=brothermartin.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fecology.meetup.com%2F34%2F

GREEN JOBS–THE HOPE, THE HYPE, AND THE HIP

Last Saturday, I attended the Tennessee Alliance for Progress’s annual winter conference, whose theme this year was “Green Jobs.”  Now, I could use a job myself, or at least some income, and I have high standards about what I’ll do in exchange for money, and besides, I’ve also got strong  opinions about what kind of work is going to be important in our mid- to long-term future, so I definitely felt like I had something personal at stake.

Don’t get me wrong about being “out of work,” as they say.  I’m not “out of work”–I’ve got more to do at home than I can ever get done, and some of it involves real-world skills, not just running off at the mouth like I do here, but none of what I do ever seems to involve people giving me money for my time and effort.   They tell me that’s the wave of the future.  Tell it to the people I owe money to–but, I digress…already.

The first thing that was happening on Saturday morning was a little African drumming, dancing, and singing, led by Masankho Banda, “to help get us into our bodies,” as TAP organizer Nell Levin explained.  It was an enjoyable few minutes, once I got over the incongruity of boogieing in a former high school auditorium, but as I looked around, it seemed to me that the conference needed, not just for us attendees to get more into our bodies, but for more bodies to be present.  There were barely fifty (mostly silverhaired) people present, a fraction of the crowd that had been there the last time I attended, drawn by the bait of a talk by Jim Hightower, which, much as I love the man, sounded like a canned, one-size fits-all speech that he had polished a little too well…it didn’t relate to Nashville at all.  Ah, celebrity…

That was not a problem with this year’s opening talk, given by Ron Ruggiero of the Apollo Alliance, a West-coast based group advocating for–well, yes, “green jobs.”  They take their name from the original “Apollo project,” which was JFK’s push to put a man on the moon.  That’s the kind of intensity of focus, Ruggiero argues, that we need to maintain if we are going to transition into a sustainable economy and slow global warming.

Much of Ron’s speech was about, as he put it, “reframing the debate,” of getting out of the right-wing curmudgeon trap of equating environmentalism with job loss and curtailment of economic activity.  Green jobs, he argued, are a way to reunify the country, to regain our former global leadership in technology, and to reinvigorate the American middle class–he reminded us that , except for one year in the nineties, the median wage in this country has fallen every year since 1974.  He recalled the great transformation at the beginning of World War II, when the US snapped out of the last great depression and completely retooled many of our factories for armament production in just six months.  “Wouldn’t it be great to have a common purpose again in this country?” he asked.

The way to jump start this, he proposed, was through a bill now in the Senate, titled “The IMPACT Act,” an acronym for “Investments for Manufacturing Progress And Clean Technology,” which proposes to take $30B and loan it to small and mid-size manufacturing firms in this country to help them retool so that the US can once again manufacture things like electrical transformers, and stay competitive in the solar panel and wind turbine field, for example–guess who’s taking us to the cleaners on all three of these devices at the moment?  Well, he didn’t talk about that.  I’m going to try and just report the conference and then give you my opinion, but it ain’t easy.

“Do we have the political will to get this country back on the right track?”  He concluded.

Next up was Reuben Lazardo of PolicyLink, an outfit dedicated, as their website says, to

the creation of sustainable communities of opportunity that allow everyone to participate and prosper. Such communities offer access to quality jobs, affordable housing, good schools, transportation, and the benefits of healthy food and physical activity.

He was advocating a national policy, implemented locally, that would make it easier for low and moderate income families to weatherize and otherwise update their homes to make them more energy-efficient.  “We can’t solve climate change if the only people who retrofit their homes are the ones who can afford it upfront,” he observed, pumping for a revolving loan fund for homeowners like the manufacturing fund Ron Ruggiero had advocated.

This, he said, is where we can do the most to “green” our workforce and teach marketable skills to those who lack them–by hiring and training local people to work on each others’ homes.

Then it was workshop time.  I chose to attend the “Sustainability Innovations” session, since I knew all three presenters and feel that innovation is definitely needed.  Susan Shann of Earth Revolution was the first to speak.  She emphasized the importance of relocalizing our lives–obtaining our material needs from nearby sources and doing what we can to turn our neighborhoods into interdependent communities.  She talked about the Transition Town movement and the importance of “energy descent plans,” a change in tone from the featured speakers, who seemed to radiate the optimistic idea that all we have to do is get our fix from renewable sources, and we can go on shooting up energy like we always have….but I’m getting into my opinion again.  Back to narrative, dammit.

Shavaun Evans of Food Security Partners talked about her organization’s work.  They are endeavoring to bring more wholesome food into school cafeterias and “re-store” some of Nashville’s several “food deserts”–neighborhoods that do not have a large-scale grocery store within walking distance.  On a more immediate and basic level, they are also encouraging community gardens and creating farmers’ markets in these areas, where it is much easier to buy a beer, a bag of chips, a soda, a pack of cigarettes, or a candy bar than it is to find leafy green vegetables, fresh fruit, or even a piece of meat that isn’t soaked in salt, grease,  and nitrites. She observed that “faith-based communities” (i.e., churches) are already-formed communities that can be mobilized to organize around these issues.

Her mention of community gardening was a great lead-in for Sizwe Herring, of Earth Matters.  Sizwe has been creating urban gardens for years, and he was happy to talk about his work as creating both topsoil and community, as neighbors gather and work together in the way that we have organized ourselves ever since we became apes.  “Our goal is to get rid of lawns and create gardens,” he said.  He opined that many young people seem to panic at the thought of turning off their cell phones, ipods and gameboys, and stressed the the importance of teaching “unplugged” skills to childen, whch Earth Matters does both through its urban gardening programs and through “Kids to the Country,”  which gives a one-week immersion in simple country pleasures to inner-city kids.

There was time for a few questions, and I did my best to broaden the subject.  First, I asked Shavaun if there had been any discussion of using churches in Nashville’s food deserts as the basis for creating food co-ops, which would provide local control and help keep money in the neighborhoods, since chain grocery stores are, after all, designed to pump money out of the communities they “serve.” She told me the idea hadn’t come up, that they asked people what they wanted, and big chain grocery stores was the answer.  I was left wondering if ghetto folks even have the concept of a food-co-op, or worker-owned business…finding out what people want and doing your best to help them achieve it is the right idea, but maybe some education is called for, as well, so people can make intelligent choices.

In my stumbling, off-the cuff way, I brought up the change in culture that is called for when people quit buying package foods and start cooking with basic ingredients; the fact that we need starches and proteins, as well as fruit and vegetables, to survive, and the possibility that this, as well as providing the inputs and tools for large-scale gardening and cooking, was an excellent basis for job creation, but my effort to remind people of just how serious it’s going to get was mild compared to what another member of the audience, who introduced himself as “Earthman,” had to say.

“I live in Miami, and in Miami we get our drinking water from the Everglades, which, with only a one-foot rise in sea level, will change from being a freshwater swamp to being a tidal marsh.  When that happens, you are going to have five million people in south Florida whose homes and businesses will be completely worthless, and we are all going to need to move somewhere else.  A lot of us will be coming here.  I hope you’ll be ready for us when we come.”

That cheerfully delivered announcement may have been more reality than some people want to think about, but I really appreciated him putting the word on folks. It is going to get more serious than we can imagine, in ways we can’t imagine.

Next we broke for lunch, and after lunch we were treated to a recital of the poetry that had been created in the “youth workshop” while us older folks were getting the economic/political word laid on us.  I am grieved, but not surprised, to report that the kids are not alright.  Their natural childhood enthusiasm and excitement about assuming the duties, responsibilities, and pleasures of adulthood has been chilled by the realization that the world they are inheriting is depleted, unstable, and unfair.  Thanks, mom and dad, for this pile of crap that you are handing off to me….

Let’s take a little music break here, ourselves…

Eliza Gilkyson, “The Party’s Over“

After lunch came another “plenary” session, again featuring speakers a generation younger than most of the people they were addressing. It’s good to see the torch being passed.

Julian McQueen, from Green For All,  was the first of them.  He spoke of growing up in California in the 80’s, splitting his time between the Oakland ghetto where his father lived and the deep woods and clear running streams of Humboldt County, where his mother made her home.  He didn’t talk about the main agricultural product of Humboldt County, (so I won’t, either), but he talked about how blessed he felt to have made the deep connection with nature that Humboldt County offered, and how he was brought up short when several of his city cousins, all teenagers, without prior arrest records, attempted to rob a jewelry store and all received long sentences in adult prisons.  They are still in jail, he informed us.  (We all know what happens to young boys in jail–isn’t a D.A.  putting a teenager behind bars with older men tantamount to child abuse?)  Julian’s social conscience was outraged.  After first putting his efforts into better treatment for young offenders, he decided that the thing to do was go upstream and work on preventing young people from getting in trouble with the law by teaching them real things to do and setting them to work doing them.

“We can’t afford to throw anybody away.” he said, and then continued, “Last year was about ‘Hope’  “This year is about ‘change’. Change is harder than hope.  Change is about nitty-gritty details.  Change pisses people off, because it requires them to–change.  But change is what is called for at this time in our history.”  (I may not have gotten it completely verbatim, but that’s the gist.)  He talked about how sure, they have had great success in Portland. Oregon with their program of establishing a revolving loan fund for home weatherization and training “disadvantaged” youth to do the work, but Portland, he reminded us, is a fairly unique city, and “there are a lot more Nashvilles in the US than there are Portlands.”  Something about its proximity to Humboldt County, I think….but I digress…McQueen closed with a quote from Albert Einstein:

“The world we have is a product of our thinking.  We can’t change the world without changing our thinking.”

Next up was somebody from the East Coast, for a change…Dan Leroy, of Green Opportunities, an Asheville, North Carolina-based organization that trains at-risk youth, as they say, in…weatherization and ecological construction….and yes, I know, Asheville is more like Portland, Oregon than about any place this side of New Mexico…but ya gotta start somewhere. Dan described how he had begun by getting just $7,000 in grant money and used it for some demonstration projects, which had been so successful that he had been able to raise $80,000 to keep going, and the project is now rolling along.  He brought several of his young trainees with him, and they looked every inch the “disadvantaged youth” part; except for their air of calm self-confidence, they could have been a police lineup.  Each of them introduced himself briefly (yes, they were all young men), and one of them put it in a nutshell when he said, “This is my way to change the world.”

There was another round of workshops on the schedule, but I felt talked out for the day, and took my leave, sporting a “Green Party” button from our table at the conference which the GP of Tennessee had, in a very small way, helped sponsor.

OK, that was the conference.  What’s my perspective on it?

Well, some of it was a little too based on hope, and a little of it was way out into hype, and some of it was genuinely hip.

As I couldn’t keep from mentioning earlier, I think that anybody who is looking to the federal government for a real solution to this is strung out on hope and a sucker for hype.  The Obama administration’s record, from climate change to health care to the economic meltdown to the maintenance of the American Empire abroad, has been simply appalling.  Sure, there have been a few nice crumbs here and there,  and a few great gestures, but Congress has shown little inclination to do anything but bail out them that already has, and Obama has consistently either lacked the balls to challenge them, or simply been complicit in the continued corporatization of America.  War criminal Henry Kissinger got a Nobel Peace Prize, too, let’s not forget.

And it’s not just that the feds are unlikely to do anything to provide genuine relief, it’s that the US government is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, which is likely to seriously devalue the dollar, as well as dry up all kinds of domestic spending.  The government has committed itself to pouring our taxpayer dollars into the pockets of the wealthy, whether through bank bailouts, military spending, or forcing everyone to buy private insurance, and there ain’t no slack left for us po’ folks. 700 billion to line the pockets of Wall Street gamblers?   No problem.  30 bil to line the homes of the lower classes?   Sorry, can’t afford it….we got a war to fight…whattaya want to bet that’s how it comes down?

What was “hip” about this conference was, first, the introduction of “transition” and  “energy descent” into the dialogue.  What was hipper still was the notion of putting energy into teaching youth at loose ends real skills, and yes, conventional green home construction and gardening are very basic to that, but they are just the beginning.  Well, of course there’s all that cool solar stuff, but, in my curmudgeonly opinion, we are going to need to revive a lot of skills that have been nearly lost in the last two hundred years.  Metalworking–I think that blacksmithing is going to see a revival, especially the reworking of already manufactured metal into basic things like pins, nails, hoes, buckets, pots and pans, gears, bicycles, cookstoves–you get the idea.  Woodworking, likewise, needs to see a revival, and I think we need to learn to recreate the many uses water power enjoyed before steam engines and then electricity  displaced it.  Water power didn’t just grind grain into flour–it ran machine shops, cloth weaving factories, and all the other nascent industries of the eighteenth century.  On a more modern note, the skill of excavating dumps and reusing the various materials wehave entombed in them will come in handy on this depleted planet–and, as feeding ourselves locally becomes more of a necessity and less of a quirk, many of us will need to learn how to butcher animals and preserve meat–although we would do well to remember the hunter-gatherer adage, “The best place to store my surplus food is in my brother’s belly.”

I don’t think we’re going back to a hunter-gatherer culture.  It would be very traumatic to lose the percentage of our human population that would have to die for those who remain to succeed at it–but we are falling off a cliff and I don’t know how far it is to the bottom or how we will land or what we will find when we get there.  I’m old enough that I probably won’t still be around when things get stable again, but I do think that what we do now will make that landing either easier or harder, and thinking in terms of transition, energy descent, and teaching our youth how to cope and adapt will make it a whole lot easier.

Eliza Gilkyson–The Great Correction

B’RER OBAMA AN’ DE TAR BABY

One fine spring day, B’rer Obama  be strolling tru de woods wif his buddies Col. Methcrystal an’ Col. Betrayus and his ol’ Uncle Sam.  Dey be laughin’ an’ jokin’ ’bout dat ol’ fool, B’rer Brushcutter, and how he done been tricked into whompin’ dat ol’ rackety tar baby an’  got hisself so tangled up and messed up dat he done been eaten alive, an’  now B’rer Obama be livin’ in B’rer Brushcutter’s fine, big, white house.  Dey all agree, it a change dey can believe in.

“He sech a fool!” sez B’rer Obama, slappin’ his knee an’ laughing.  ”He shoulda never fallen’ for dat tarbaby jazz!  Lawd knows, Ah never will!”

Now, as dey be walking tru de woods, dey spies a big ol’ hill off to de side, an’ eben from a distance dey sees dat de hill be loaded with thangs dat makes dere moufs water:  fruit trees, honey trees, money trees, you name it, it be on dat hill.  So dey ‘cides to go get demselfs  dat luscious fruit and honey and money, an dey starts in lookin’ for a way up de hill.  De hill be steep and de brush be t’ick, and dey knows dey needs to find a path to get ‘em dere, so dey starts scoutin’ ’round.

Well, shonuff dey finds a trail, but who do dey spy on dat trail but B’rer Percypine, and dey know dey better not go thataway, ’cause evvabody knows B’rer Percypine be fussy and grumpy and selfish hisself, and pretty loose about stickin’ people withdem quills o’ his’n, an’ ’sides’, he gwine want a big share ob de goodies for hisself, an’ dey do not want to share nothin’ wif B’rer Percypine, no, no, no…an’ so dey keeps walkin’.

Well, shonuff, dey finds anodder trail, but lo! and behold, dey spies B’rer Rusty Bear on dat trail, and dey know dey don’t want to let him in on de goodies, ’cause he be even grumpier and mo’ selfish dan B’rer Percypine.  So, dey keeps walkin’, an’ finds a third trail, but Sistah China Doll be hangin’ out on dat trail, and dey know she kin eat ‘em outta house and home, and besides dey owes her a ton o’ money, so dey jus’ keeps walkin’.

An’ den dey fines’ a fourth trail, but’ dere is somebody settin’ on that trail, too, but who is it?  Dey hides behind a big ol’ tree an’ squints up de path, tryin’ to make out just who it could be.  De fellah kinda scrawny, but he be settin’ right in de middle ob de pafway, so dere ain’t no way ’round ‘im.  Dey gonna haf to get ‘im to move if dey gwine get de goodies fum de hilltop….but den dere moufs drops open as dey sees what sets behind de scrawny little fellah… a big ol’ field of opium poppies!  De biggest dey evah seen!  Nothin’ like it on de other trails!  An’ dey jest about danced wif joy when dey saw dat, ’cause dey knew dat dey could sell dem opium poppies and jest make a bundle o’ money, ’cause everbody dat buys ‘em allus want to buy ‘em again, and again, and again.

So de four buddies talks amongst ‘emselfs, an’ dis is what dey do:

Dey ‘cides dat B’rer Obama, cuz he be de smoovest talker amongst ‘em, dat he gwine talk to de little guy and see whetha he kin sweet talk him into steppin’ aside so dey kin get to de poppies and all de goodies on top of de hill.  An’, if dat don’t work, den Colonel Methcrystal an’ Colonel Betrayus gwine jes’ pick  de little dark guy up an’ move ‘im  out ob de way, but, jes’ in case he turn out to be bodacious an’ tenacious, dey gwine keep dere Uncle Sam in reserve, to come in an’ finish de fight, if it come to dat.

So B’rer Obama, he strikes on up de paf  toward de funny little feller, an’ de othas, dey follow right behind ‘im, cos’ dey want to let de litle feller know dat dey means serious bizness.  But as dey get up close to ‘im, de smell ob’ de poppies come on so strong, dey jes’ almost take leave ob dere senses, but on account ob de effect ob all dem poppy, dey don’t even realize how dumb dey is gettin’.  Dey jes’ hab dere minds on dem poppies an’ all de good stuff up on top ob de hill, and on gettin’ de little dark feller out ob de way.

So, B’rer Obama, he starts sweet-talkin de little dark feller, and nobody have a way wit’ words as sweet as B’rer Obama. Ah ain’t even gonna try and repeat what he say, but Ah kin tell you de birds done stop singin’, jes’ to hear ‘im talk.  But de little dark fellah, he don’t move or eben say nothin’.   So finally, B’rer Obama, he says. “L’il fellah, Ah has gibben you ever’ good reason an’ enticement Ah kin think of why you oughta get out ob’ our way an’ let us harvest dem opium poppies and go on up an’ get de goodies at de top ob de hill an den come down an’ harvest some moah ob dem poppies, and you ain’t sayin’ nothin’ an’ you ain’t movin’.  Now, de whole worl’ know Ah be a peace lovin, noble fellah, but Ah am gonna hafta ask my buddies, de good Colonels Methcrystal and Betrayus, to grab hole ob you an’ move you out of our way, unless you moves youself.”

De little dark fella, he don’t move and he don’t say nothin’.  So den de Colonels marches up and each ob dem lays a han’ on de little dark fella’s arms, to kinda heist him out ob de way, but den dey gets a big surprise.  Dey cain’t lif de skinny little feller an inch, and dey finds dey cain’t take their hans off him, neither.  Now, iffen dey hadn’t been so obercome wit’ de smell ob de poppies, dey would have done figger out dat dis was anodder tar baby, jes’ lahk de one dat done messed up  B’rer Brushcutter, but dem poppies will cause a person to lose all dere reasoning, an’ dat’s a fact.  So they holler an’ fuss, an’ byimbye Col. Methcrystal he haul off an’ whomp de little dark feller a good one right in de brisket, to try and make ‘im let go, but de little dark feller was a shonuff tar baby, an’ shonuff Col. Methcrystal done got his han’ stuck in de tarbaby’s belly.  So, he holler for Col. Betrayus to whomp de tarbaby upside de head, an’ shonuff he done it, an’ shonuff his han’ done got stuck, too, an when dey try an’ kick dere way loose, dere feets is stuck too, first thing you know, and dey is hollerin” for B’rer Obama to help ‘em out, and B’rer Obama, he tries to pull ‘em loose ob de tar baby, but quick enuf he find hisself stuck too, an he call on his Uncle Sam, an’ Ah don’t hardly haf to tell ya de res’.  Dat little dark feller didn’t seem so big, but dere was plenty ’nuff tar to get all four ob dem jes’ as stuck as dey could be, an’ dey wan’t gettin’ none ob dem poppies, nor de fruit, nor de honey, nor de money.  It was a shonuff mess.

So dey rollin’ aroun’, and cussin” an’ fussin’ an’ tryin to extract demselves, an’ before you know it, dey done attract de ‘tention ob B’rer Percypine, B’rer Rusty Bear, an’ Sistah China Doll all three, an’ dey come runnin’ to see what de matter be.  An’ dey see B’rer Obama an’ his buddies all wrapped up in de tar baby, an’ dey see de pretty field of poppies, an’ Sistah China Doll, she say, “Lawdy, lawdy, looks like y’all done met de same fate as B’rer Brushcutter.  Ain’t that a shame!”   But she be laughin’ so hard, dey kin tell she jest bein’ smart wit’ dem.

An’ B’rer Obama say, in his sweetest, kindest, most convincin’ voice, “Sistah and brothas!  Please, please help us get ourselfs out ob dis tar baby.  We done tackled him to keep him from terrorisin’ everybody, an’ to keep him from spreadin’ all dese here opium poppies aroun’, an ‘ ‘cos he be blockin’ de way to all de goodies at de top ob de hill, .  Wit’ jes a li’l help from y’all, our bestest friends in de whole worl’, we kin finish the job we done started.”

Den Sistah China Doll, she say, “I don’t t’ink so!  I t’ink it you dat owe me a few favas, not de udder way ‘roun.  In fact, dis jes’ might be de time to collect on all de moneys whut you all owes me.”  So she go tru all dere  coats until she done foun’ dere wallets, an’ she jes’ take all dere moneys, ‘cos dey all owes her bigtime, an’ done got squirrelly when she tries to collect.  An den’ she an’ B’rer Rusty Bear an’ B’rer Percypine get demselfs to de top ob de hill and get all de fruit an’ de honey an’ de money, an’ on dere way back down dey picks all de poppies, an’ lef” B’rer Obama an’ his buddies to de tender mercies ob de tar baby, as de sun be goin’ down an’ it gettin’ mighty cold an’ mighty dark.

As de sun go down on him an’ his buddies, an’ de spell ob de poppies wear off, B’rer Obama realize dat he has gone and done de same fool t’ing as B’rer Brushcutter, and too late he realize dat, jes’ when you think you knows ever’ting, shonuff you gonna find out whut you don’t know.  An’ dey all swears dey won’t neva be sech fools agin.  But, in de night, de hyenas an’ teabaggers done come and tear de flesh off all four ob dem, cos’ dey stll all tangled up an’ helpless in dat tarbaby, and dey didn’t get no second chance.  Ah ‘pologize for  dis story not havin’  a happy ending, but dat is DE END.

(no time for music, but if there were, I’d play this.)

SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DENMARK

I am amazed and dismayed at how difficult it can be to get some people to cut loose of a bad idea.  Sometimes it’s local–like the May family’s recent hiring of a notorious  zoning attorney to work on getting their “Maytown Center” fantasyland approved.  Sometimes it’s national–like all the people who project their liberal expectations on Barack Obama and keep urging him to stand up and roar, when the reality is that he’s just a pussycat in Wall Street’s lap, and no more likely to pounce on Wall Street, the insurance/pharmaceutical establishment, the military establishment, or America’s carbon- and credit happy way of life than your cat is likely to pounce on you and eat you for breakfast.

And that brings us to the climate talks in Copenhagen.  Prospects do not look good for a serious, binding treaty, and why?  Two main reasons: the first is that big corporations are addicted to short-term profits and have the political clout to make sure that nothing interferes with their money fix.  The second is that we, the people of the United States, or “estamos jodidos“, as they say in Mexico, are  addicted to our petroleum-inflated, corporate-backed standard of living, and will happily vote out of office or ignore any politician who attempts to interfere with our comfort fix.  Ask Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, or Cynthia McKinney.

Thus, we have the irony that many of those who excoriated the Bush junta for dissing “the reality-based community” are now themselves out of touch with hard, physical reality.  The hard, physical reality is that the climate is changing much faster than the IPCC predicted it would.  The hard, physical reality is that the planet’s carbon dioxide level passed the threshold of safety at 350 parts per million, and agreements that “hold” us to 450 ppm will not prevent massive, catastrophic changes to the only planet we have to live on.  Nature bats last, she doesn’t negotiate, and she doesn’t care how much some pundits fume about East Anglian emails.

But the wealthy elite who dominate our political system don’t seem to get this.  They think that the “political reality” that serious climate change legislation won’t fly trumps the “physical reality” of impending disaster, so if we can’t shut down every coal plant in the US and China in the next three years, if we don’t stop deforesting the tropics for grazing land and Canada for tar sand, if we don’t stop acidifying the oceans before we kill off the phytoplankton that provide 70% of our oxygen, it’s OK.

It’s not OK.  Maybe the plutocrats who run the big businesses of the world think their wealth will permanently insulate them from the consequences of their inaction.  In the long run, they are very, very wrong.

But in the short run, which unfortunately is all that counts for most people, it has been true.  Those who are suffering the most from climate change, or who are about to suffer the most from climate change, live in the third world, while it is we in the first world, with our material addictions, who have triggered  the catastrophe.  Geography insulates us from them.  Hurricane Katrina was an early warning, a reminder that calamity can strike America, too, and we should not let the fact that the Atlantic has been relatively quiet since then lull us into a false sense of security.

If, as seems likely, there is neither an agreement nor even an agreement to come to agreement as a result of Copenhagen, there is one deus ex machina that might derail catastrophic climate change, and that is economic collapse, which has already idled thousands of oceangoing cargo vessels worldwide, and at least slowed down that once fast-growing source of carbon emissions, which along with international airlines, was exempted from control under the so-called Kyoto accords.

Economic collapse has all but shut down urban sprawl in the US.  Home construction was the last big domestic industry possible in this country, since you can’t readily build homes in China and ship them here, and even building materials imported from China turn out to be suspect, as the recent flap over weird sheetrock demonstrates.

And, if the Chinese and Indians try to keep their economies (and carbon emissions) strong by developing their domestic economies, they will first find themselves up against the hard reality of spiraling oil prices and diminishing oil supplies, and then they will have to deal with their countries becoming uninhabitable as the Himalayan glaciers melt off over the next thirty years, drying up the sources of all of both countries’ major rivers.  Ooops….where’s a sixth of the world’s population gonna go when they get thirsty?   And, considering how much the US owes China, are we gonna be able to tell them no, they can’t come here?  Yes, the stage is set for chaos, boys and girls….

And the US government is gridlocked.  The “solutions” they pass in Congress are pitiful.  It’s not about what the Repugs won’t let the Dims do.  That’s a puppet show, and the puppet master has a Repug puppet on his right hand and a Dim puppet on his left, and we’re supposed to believe they’re really different.  The gridlock is that the wealthy, who are creating and benefitting from the mess the planet is in, won’t let the government do anything that is against their interest.  Forget “We, the people.”  It’s “We, the rich people, ” and they are determined to keep their priviliges no matter what.

“Green corporations” are a crock.   Walmarts with “green roofs” and massive energy conservaton systems and recycling, even if they’re full of “green products” are still part of the problem, not part of the solution, because they are still designed to pump money out of communities and into the hands of shareholders. It’s not just about changing content, it’s about changing form.  Once upon a time, the dinosaurs were so big and ferocious that  us mammals could barely hang on. Then the planet went through some sudden changes, and the dinosaurs’ size and inflexibility worked against their ability to adapt.   We’re approaching a similar point, but the dinosaurs of this age are the legal fictions of giant corporations and national governments.

What this means for you and me is that it’s time to take things into our own hands.  No, I don’t mean let’s go burn down Brentwood,  Temporarily thrilling as that might be, it would create a lot more problems than it would solve.  I mean let’s get together with our friends and neighbors and figure out what we can do together to get ready for the  excrement that’s already hit the fan.  Let’s turn our lawns into gardens and build henhouses and keep milk cows, let’s learn to make, make do, and do without.

This is going to seem terribly futile from a certain perspective.  BIg changes are afoot, and I’m telling you to grow beans?  And to that, I can only reply with trite maxims like “Start where you are,”  or “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”  Trite, but true.

I know it’s short notice, but I’ll be getting together with some old and new friends Monday night here in Nashville, 7:30 to 9,  to continue the discussion of what we can actually do…..go to earthrevolution.org and send a “contact” email to rsvp, and you’ll get directions.  Thinking globally, acting locally, y’know?

Ah, this just in–according to our Copenhagen correspondent Albert Bates, US EPA administrator Carol Jackson has announced that, no matter what Congress does or doesn’t do, the EPA will regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and that US emissions will be going down.  A bold move, or at least a bold gesture.  Call me cynical, but I have to wonder how long it will take the Congressional coal&oil caucus to muzzle her efforts, and maybe even give her the Van Jones treatment.  Stay tuned….

music:  Jefferson Airplane, “Crown of Creation”

EVEN IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY STILL WON’T COME

There’s no rest for the weary, it seems.  No sooner did Maytown Center go down for the count than another concrete monster arose to threaten us:  a new downtown convention center.  Boosters believe (and believe me, belief is the operative word here!) that building a new temple to Mammon on the south side of downtown will attract worshipers from near and far to our fair city, and that these pilgrims (aka convention attendees) will inject so many shekels into the local economy that it justifies us going six hundred million dollars into debt–and it’s getting a little vague about whether that includes construction of the hotel that just has to accompany a convention center..never mind that, this year, Nashville’s hotel occupancy rate was only 55%, a better-than 10% drop from last year.  This is just an anomaly, boosters say, although some of them are willing to think that hotel occupancy may not turn around for another three or four years.

Who are they trying to kid?  The question is not when more people will be able to afford $100-a-night hotel rooms, but why anybody thinks the common people are ever going to be able to able to splurge like that again.  Haven’t they noticed that this country’s credit, at both the individual and governmental levels, is largely exhausted?  We hear talk of “recovery,” but that’s just whistling in the dark.  America has had a zombie economy for twenty years, and the only thing that kept that zombie walking was sucking the blood out of peoples’ home equity, which has now, in case you hadn’t noticed, been sucked dry.  We are not going to see hordes of free-spending conventioneers partying in the streets of Nashville.  The only free-spending parties of the future will be held in the Hamptons and similar locations, under armed guard if the hosts are smart.

Back to Nashville.  Convention center boosters say we can pay for their pet project by dedicating sales taxes from the area around  the convention center to paying the debt on the building.  Only problem is, to make the numbers work they have cast a very wide net in defining “the vicinity of the convention center.”  The three-square-mile zone they have proposed includes East Nashville (which should threaten to break away from Nashville proper and become a separate city if this kind of foolishness continues), much of West End Avenue, and areas on the north side of Charlotte Ave., aka the ghetto.  None of these areas are likely to see much traffic from the proposed convention center, but that last one really sticks in my craw.  We will be literally taking money from the poorest people in town and giving it to bondholders, i.e., rich people mostly in some other location.  That is not the way to build a better Nashville.

Building the convention center will create or save hundreds of high-paying construction jobs, the boosters claim.  That’s a cynical hunk of flim-flam if ever there was one.  I know enough about the construction business to know that the folks who really make out are the guys running the company, not the boots on the ground.  Again, a transfer of wealth to them that has.  Giving a few hundred construction workers a short-term job is like giving heroin to junkies–it will keep them happy for a little while, but sooner or later they’re going to need another fix.  They, and we, would be much better off  if we invested something towards retraining them (and all the management/publicity types) in skills that will actually be useful in the future, like gardening, cattle herding, butchering, tanning, leather working, blacksmithing, water wheel construction, or any of a host of near-forgotten pre-industrial skills that were temporarily eclipsed by the great oil bubble, which is bursting around us as I speak/write.

Pre-industrial skills?  What about all the cool, high-tech, high-paying green jobs everybody’s salivating over?

Oh, there will be a few of those, and I’m sure we can apply some of our new knowledge to improving the old technologies, but in my raving, prophetic opinion, most of the high-tech “green energy solutions” we have seen are too tied in to the existence of our current oil-based economy to survive long or spread far without it.   The oil binge has been fun, but it’s about to be very, very over.

Well, I’m betting that even most people who are against the convention center would think that’s crazy talk.  There are certainly plenty of good arguments against it that don’t challenge the existing paradigm, as Bruce Barry and Metro Council member Emily Evans have repeatedly demonstrated.  I’m glad they’ve got the tact and patience to enter the machine and try and talk to the sleepwalkers…me, I’m staying out here on the pavement with my “REPENT/THE END IS AT HAND” placard.  There’s a place for everybody in this dance.

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “The Party’s Over”

STALLING TACTICS

Last Thursday, Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and Common Cause had their day in court, and the result was something of a standoff.  While Chancellor Perkins declined to force Hargett to buy optical scan vote counting machines, he did rule that the law as passed does not mandate that Hargett purchase machines that are not in fact available, as Hargett has been insisting.

I found it interesting that, when Hargett filed a brief with the court asking for dismissal of Common Cause’s suit, he did not attack their premises, he just attempted to claim sovereign immunity for the state, and questioned Common Cause’s standing to sue.  For those of you who don’t speak legalese, that means he said he couldn’t be sued over this, and if somebody could sue him, it wouldn’t be Common Cause.  As the first rule of lawyering says, “when the facts are against you, argue the law.  When the law is against you, argue the facts.  When they’re both against you, attack your opponent’s character.”  Hargett didn’t quite stoop to ad hominem attack, this time,  but he definitely had the facts against him., and he knew it.

And I’m betting that, as I was writing this on Friday afternoon, our Secretary of State and his minions were working hard to figure out how to keep dragging their feet, hoping that when the legislature convenes in January, the Republican majority will take them off the hook by delaying implementation of the bill until 2012, a move that failed by only one vote in the last legislative session.  It’s quite a change of heart from the near unanimous, bipartisan support the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, which mandated a return to recountable ballots,  received in 2008.  What’s going on here?

I think that a look at a couple of things that happened in Texas will answer that question.  The first is the famous (in some quarters, anyway) Texas redistricting struggle of 2003, when Texas’ Republican-dominated legislature did its best to redraw the state’s congressional districts to insure a permanent Repuglycan majority in the state’s Congressional delegation.  They only succeeded in doing this because the Bush junta disregarded a memo from US Justice Department lawyers saying the scheme was illegal–and not only did they disregard the opinion, they put a gag order on the attorneys who wrote it.  Ah, the Bush years….

And, what do you know…Tennessee will be redistricting after the 2010 census…and the Repugs would sure like to be in charge of that.

The other Texas story that bears on our situation here in Tennessee is what Lou Dubose of the Washington Spectator calls “the three percent solution.”  This refers to successful efforts to suppress minority voting in order to shave a few points off likely Democratic vote percentages, insuring Republican victory.  The Repuglycan attack on ACORN and their repeated raising of the straw man of “voter fraud” are just the tip of the iceberg, it seems.

In Texas, the county tax assessor is responsible for registering voters as well, and the position is an elected, partisan office. In Houston, a Republican registrar rejected voter registration forms for such picayune reasons as failure to check a box stating that they would be 18 on the day of the election, even though applicants gave their birth date just a line or two further down the form.

We could jump to Ohio at this point, and recall that the Republican Secretary of State there rejected voter registrations that were not on the right kind of paper.

What am I getting at?  Many Republicans in Houston won their races by the proverbial hair:  50.01%, 50.15 percent–you get the picture.  In effect, they won by denying the vote to individuals they thought likely to vote Democratic.

That’s how we get back to Tennessee, where Republicans are using every delaying tactic they can find to keep using easily-hackable, unrecountable electronic voting technology.  They don’t have to do anything blatant, just switch a few votes here and there, and they can insure that they wil be the ones with their hands on the wheel and their fingers in the till in Tennessee for the foreseeable future.

OK, so why did Democrat-appointed  Secretary of State Riley Darnell pimp for computerized voting, and where was the state Democratic party when he supported what the Repugs are now clinging to?  As for Darnell, he seems to have been enjoying perks from the touch-screen voting cabal–according to verifiable voting advocate Bernie Ellis,

Darnell  served on the board of  “The Election Center,” a group founded with start-up funding by the voting machine companies which continues to promote nonverifiable voting systems that are now being rejected nationally.

And rejected internationally, too.  In a recent decision, Germany’s highest court ruled that electronic voting machines are unconstitutional in Germany because the votes are counted in secret, a story that for some strange reason attracted little notice here in the U.S.

As for why most Dems went along with Darnell on this, it’s the same stupid solidarity that gives us  right-wing wannabes like Jim Cooper, Lincoln Davis, Phil Bredeson, and Harold Ford, Jr. and gets insulted when some of us refuse to support them.  Many of those involved in this fight are active, left-wing Democrats, none of whom have a prayer of ever getting nominated for elective office.  One Democratic functionary told peace activist Chris Lugo, when he offered to be the Democratic candidate for US Senate, to  “go to hell,” and that’s probably the inner circle of the party’s attitude toward my trouble-making friends in the fair election movement, although they will be tolerated as long as the hay they’re making can be thrown at Republicans.

Hey, guys and gals, why dontcha come join the Green Party, where you’ll be appreciated and can be in charge and able to make a difference?  The door is open….

music:  Frank Zappa, “A Lie So Big”

THE OLD WAYS

So…how did people live in this part of North America, back before us Europeans overflowed our native continent and made ourselves at home on this one?  How did they survive without central heat and air, insulated buildings, or even screens to keep the flies and mosquitoes out?

Charles Hudson’s The Southeastern Indians provides definitive answers to such questions, and many more.  I spent a good portion of my reading time this summer studying this thorough, eloquent, scholarly volume, which is really at least three books in one.

It is a guide to low-impact living in this bioregion, enumerating and describing the tools and techniques used by indigenous people to live in balance with their ecosystem.

It lays out what we can reconstruct of the social relationships, political organization, and belief systems that created the matrix of everyday life.

Its closing chapters are a kind of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for the native peoples of the Southeast, telling the awful story of how they were overwhelmed, out-gunned, marginalized, ripped off, and ultimately run off.  That’s why there are virtually no “Indian Reservations” in the Southeastern US–can you say “ethnic cleansing,” boys and girls?

The first thing we have to remember about the European invasion of North America is that the native people were decimated more by the diseases our ancestors introduced than by the depredations of our ancestors themselves.  It is estimated that 90% of the native population was wiped out by diseases that spread ahead of the newly-arrived white people, and this may have something to do with why the tribes encountered by the first European expeditions had no account of the construction of the numerous mounds that dot the southeast  and proclaim a certain cultural continuity with the more elaborate native civilizations of Mexico and Central America.  Archaeological reconstruction, recounted by Hudson, tells us more about these people than the remaining tribal people knew, but there is much we can only guess at.

The people of the southeast lived in small villages, made clothing, dwelt in well-constructed homes, and maintained public buildings and other community gathering places.  The only metal they knew was copper, which was rare and reserved for ceremonial objects.  They fired pottery, gardened, and caught fish, but their main food source was the deer, and they practiced a kind of silviculture, burning the forests regularly to encourage open spaces and new growth so the deer could flourish.

They were also extensive gardeners, and I was surprised to learn some of the crops they tended.  I had long known that squash, corn and beans were introduced from Central America, but I had no idea that, before those plants traveled up the trade routes, the natives harvested the seeds of big-leaf ragweed, knotweed, and a plant I had not even heard of, sumpweed.  They also made use of amaranth and lambs’ quarters seeds and greens, as well as sunflowers, though all these crops became secondary once “the three sisters,”, with their abundant yields, arrived.

Their “chiefs” were not active rulers in the European sense,but more like overseers of the common good or a court of last resort for questions that could not be resolved at a lower level.

They had no money, but practiced barter and  “gift economy.”  In Hudson’s words:

…person A would donate his labor or a share of his food to person B as a “gift,” without specifying any kind of return.  At some time in the future, person B would return an equivalent amount of labor or food to person A, with no haggling.

This is a truly radical meme, and its widespread reintroduction might well prove to be one of the best ways to heal our excessively monetized culture, which understands the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The main “crimes” the native people had to deal with seem to have been murder and sexual infidelity.  The latter, as in our own society, sometimes lead to the former, but there were no jails, of course.  A murderer’s life might be forfeit to the family that had lost a member, but there were other ways to atone for crime, and there was also an annual general amnesty at the time of the Green Corn Ceremony, which Hudson describes in great detail.

Stealing, within a given tribe, seems to have been pretty much unknown, which is not surprising, since communities were small and tightly knit, and there was no anonymity.  Inter-tribal raiding was quite another matter.  Whatever their virtues, the native people were not pacifists.  The difference, of course, is that for them, war was, in many ways, fun.

Much of the energy of warfare found a less lethal outlet through inter-tribal or inter-village ball games.   While the game they played was a rough, informal version of lacrosse ,the enthusiastic preoccupation of whole villages in the games and their outcome seems to be carried on in the modern-day south’s love affair with high school and college football.

The story of European intrusion into this vibrant, sustainable culture casts its sad shadow through the entire book, and fills its closing chapters.  The new settlers took unflinching, cold-hearted advantage of their superiority in organization, numbers, and firepower to systematically deprive the native people of their rights, their land and property, and even the possibility of judicial remedy. Some whites, I discovered, protested these injustices, but were unable to sway the politicians and land dealers from their determination to displace the native people.  The process was remarkably similar to the institution of segregation after the Civil War, and I see its  modern echo in
Republican attempts to disenfranchise the poor and minorities across the country today.  Alas, some things just don’t change in some peoples’ psyches.

We are so enveloped by our manufactured, monetized, alienated culture that it has become difficult to imagine a realistic alternative.  Charles Hudson’s book is a window into just such a world.  While we cannot go back to it,we can take a great deal of very practical inspiration from it as we move forward into what comes after this age of oil, imports, and plastic.

music:  Buffy St. Marie, “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone“

PLEASANTLY SURPRISED

I was an early booster of  CBCX, the tenth Continental Bioregional Congress, which took place about a month ago down on the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, but when my health fell apart, I dropped out of the planning process for the event.  Health, however, wasn’t my only reason for quitting.  As part of my effort to get involved with the larger bioregional movement on  this continent, I had joined the bioregional e-list, and one of my posts about the upcoming continental Congress prompted this response:

“How can you expect that a bunch of people who are dedicated to ‘living locally and lightly’ will find the time and resources to peel off at peak harvest time and cross the continent for a meeting about being local?”

I brushed it off at the time, but the remark planted a seed that kept growing in me…it sounded uncomfortably close to the old joke about how most people would prefer a lecture about enlightenment (or salvation, depending on your religion) to the real thing.

Then, as Summer began to cool into Fall, I volunteered for not one but two weeks away from our homestead, yes, right at the peak of “harvest season.”  Interesting, I thought, but noted that my excursion to a Buddhist retreat center in upstate New York  deepened relationships I already had going rather than launching me into new ones.  It also served to renew my relationship with my  spiritual practice, which is, after all, the wellspring of my politics.  To me, that seemed like a much more literally radical (as in, “to the root”) step.   Besides, I had our winter’s firewood supply pretty much in hand, and my wife had our garden under control, so I didn’t feel like I was leaving anything critical swinging in the autumn breeze.

After returning home, settling in a bit, and hearing of my local bioregional buddies’ enjoyable and stimulating experiences at the event, I decided to go check it out for myself, just in time to catch the final day.

I arrived at lunchtime, and felt immediately at home with the hundred-plus crowd of mostly new but somehow familiar faces.  It reminded me of the time in the early eighties when, for the first time since 1970, I ventured out of the woods to a Grateful Dead concert, and discovered that not only was I not the last freaky hippie in the world, I was not even very freaky compared to a lot of people.  Well, the magical kingdom of Shakedown Street has been swept away by the black-throated winds of DEA persecution and economic insecurity, but those of us with a deeper perspective on the planet have found other, subtler venues in which to meet, and CBCX was definitely one of them.

After lunch, I toured The Farm Ecovillage with the extraordinarily informative, insightful, and humorous Mr. Albert Bates and a goodly crowd of bioregionalists, commiserating and laughing with him about some of the simple, straightforward, common-sense things that Tennessee’s now-statewide building codes will not permit, and receiving a good brush-up session on alternative building techniques involving bamboo, straw, and earth, which I look forward to applying here at home.

Did I ever tell you that I consider myself an artist whose canvas is the land I live on?

Twilight found me sitting in a darkening room with eight other Congresspeople (I guess that’s what to call us!), reflecting on ecological despair.  All of us shared our experiences of starting back in the 60’s and 70’s with a great deal of optimism about what needed to be done and how simple it would be to accomplish it, and how, to one degree or another, all of us had found our faith in human sanity sorely tested by the venality of the political process, the  easy manipulability of the American body politic, the weakening resolve, changing priorities, and psycho-emotional hangups of ourselves and those whom we supposed were our best friends, and the interpersonal conflicts and chasms resulting therefrom.

Solutions?  Or at least coping strategies?  It seemed to boil down to the story of the Zen monk who fell over a cliff and found himself hanging on to one little sapling that was gradually pulling loose from the precipice as he clung to it.  Growing next to the sapling was a wild strawberry; he plucked it and ate it, finding that it was the best wild strawberry he had ever eaten, and in that moment attained enlightenment.

Yeah, we’re all in that situation, and would be whether the world was going to hell in a hand basket or not, but it seems especially pertinent to remember to enjoy what you can, when you can.  I believe it was Edward Abbey who suggested that those of us who are trying to save the natural world spend half our available time saving it and the other half savoring it, so we don’t lose touch with what’s really important in life.

After eating dinner with the ever-more familiar crowd, I attended an early evening session on Transition Towns, and was glad to see several of my fellow conspirators from Nashville there, soaking up ideas that in most cases are coming from and being applied to much smaller places.  Smaller political units, whether you’re talking about the state of Vermont or the city of Hohenwald, Tennessee, are much easier to deal with than cities the size of Nashville–where, according to one city council member, you pretty much have to be a millionaire to become mayor.  The odds are not good when you’re dealing with millionaires.  It’s much easier for a millionaire to be part of the problem than to be part of the solution, as Jesus pointed out two thousand years ago.

I think we need to apply the transition town model to Nashville a lot more aggressively than has been done so far.   Mayor Dean’s “Green Ribbon Commission” came up with a lot of window dressing.  There’s a “Sustainable Tennessee” movement that is a bit more down to earth, but all reports I have heard from them indicate that they do  a lot of wishful thinking along the lines that we will be able to maintain something like “business as usual” into the indefinite future.  Local food is a good beginning, but we also need to figure out how to  provide ourselves with something to cook it on, something to cook it in, and something to cook it with. An LEED-certified service economy just isn’t going to cut it.

I think we need to figure out where our shovels, shoe leather, and saw blades are going to come from, because none of these items are being produced in Tennessee any more, and it’s hard to have a civilization without them–not to mention paper, pens, and ink.  We have built a massive, highly specialized culture that is dependent on a steady supply of fuel and raw materials that shows every sign of drying up.  The sooner we begin to prepare for this transition, the easier it will be, for the simple reason that there will be fewer resources available the longer we wait.

I know, I always say that.  You want to know more about the Bioregional Congress.   Hey, there may or may not be another one–I have the sense that we are about to all be very, very busy on a very local level.

There were dozens of possible conversations awaiting me, but  I had had enough thinking and rational discourse for one day.  It had been a good day, and I was glad to discover that my concerns had been unfounded.  I unpacked my drum and saxophone, joined a group of old and new friends around a bonfire, opened up, and channeled ecstatic energy into the world for a couple of hours.   That’s what the revolution is for, right?

music:  Eliza Gilkyson, “The Great Correction“

WORKING OFF THE CLOCK

I was off the air and the blog last month because I was on the road, accompanying my son and a mutual buddy on a journey to the east–and yes, that kind of ” journey to the east,” for all you Hesse fans, but our cover story was that we were just going up to help some friends build an addition…fortunately, we never needed to use that cover story, although it was true.  “Our friends” needed an addition to the temple at Padma Samye Ling retreat center, and we were happy to be able to do something for the Tibetan Lamas who have done so much for us.

Wait a minute, you say–this is “Deep Green Perspective,”  not “Deep Buddhist Perspective”–are you about to get all faith-based on your readers?

As I’ve said elsewhere in these pages, I see religion and politics as inseparably intertwined…your politics is part of how you express your true religion in your everyday life, whether you think of it that way or not.  Another part of “true religion” is how you treat other people, but “politics” is just a word that means “how we treat people en masse.”  Another expression of religion in everyday life is our attitude towards what happens to us–which dictates how we treat  people, which is our true politics, which is why it is so important to know how to adjust your attitude, however you choose to do it.

Well, as so often happens, I’m digressing.  Working at the retreat center provided me with some valuable insights not just about myself, but about our culture and the nature of work.  Let me explain.

The three of us shared a dormitory room in the retreat center’s kitchen/dining building.  We never used an alarm clock while we were there, just woke up in the morning, got dressed, went upstairs and fixed ourselves some breakfast, and then walked up the hill to work.  (There was no group program going on, so arrangements were fairly informal.)  We worked until lunch, which was prepared by the folks who live at the center, and then after lunch we worked until we came to a natural stopping place, or we were tired, or it was time for evening practice, or it got dark.  Every afternoon and some mornings, we were brought tea and cookies, and spent a good half hour sharing them with the folks who brought them to us, all the while discussing anything from questions about Buddhism to current events to details of the work we were doing.  When we were done for the day, we went back to our dormitory, cleaned up, took a walk in the beautiful countryside or went to evening practice in the temple, and then fixed ourselves some dinner, after which it was just about bedtime.

At the same time as we were doing our work, another construction project was going on, and when it became apparent that his knowledgeable hand and eye were needed there, my son Silas left the two of us to carry on and lent his skills and talents to the other project for a few hours.

Here’s the thing:  we were not keeping track of our hours on this job.  We just did it.  We were volunteers.  Our sole interest was in doing the job well, not just as a matter of personal integrity but because, like the builders of cathedrals in Medieval Europe, the structure we were working on was important to us.  Our labor was not, as Marx termed it, “alienated.”

People don’t talk much about “alienated labor” these days; most people take it for granted that what they do for a living has little to do with their real interests in life.  This is one of the great curses of modern society.  For the most part, nobody is invested in their work, and for good reason:  most of what our society defines as “work” is, in the long, “deep green perspective,” highly destructive of either the planet or the human spirit. From raw materials extraction to factory work to sales and service and banking, “work” wrecks the world.  Even teaching and medicine, with their noble aspirations toward education and the relief of suffering, mainly serve to indoctrinate and regiment the young in the first case, and to create sickening profits for pharmaceutical firms and so-called “health care providers” in the other.

Not that what we were doing was totally cutting-edge new–or old–”green tech.”   In the midst of the Appalachian forest, we were using 2X4’s imported from the Czech Republic as well as thoroughly mainstream sheet rock and fiberglass insulation.  But the mode of our work was different.  We weren’t in it for the money.  Here’s to the day when that’s just how it is for everyone.

music:  David Rovics, “After the Revolution“