DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

Nashville has a building code and zoning ordinances. Theoretically, this is a good idea—a way of deciding where your right to swing your arms ends and my nose begins. Unfortunately, it sometimes turns into a way to legitimize punching someone in the nose.

A small, almost humorous example is the case of my mother-in-law’s chickens. My mother-in-law has kept chickens in her back yard for as long as she has lived there. A year or two ago, a local real-estate firm wanted to raise property values in her neighborhood, so they went around looking for codes infractions—and it turns out keeping chickens in your back yard is a code infraction, at least in that neighborhood. None of her actual neighbors cared a bit—many of them in fact appreciate her occasional surplus eggs and broiler hens. It was a corporate person, the kind of person who, even less than a vegan, doesn’t appreciate the reality of homegrown chickens, that complained to codes. Corporate persons are demons, committed only to fattening themselves at the expense of whatever they can find to devour—and they don’t appreciate fried chicken, just the money to made from selling fried chicken. So, at the behest of this corporate non-person, whose only stake in the neighborhood was its desire to make more money from it, the codes people were dispatched to shut my mother-in-law’s chicken coop down.

Now, I haven’t eaten chicken in almost forty years, but if I were going to eat chicken, I’d rather eat my mother-in-law’s homegrown backyard chicken than some multinational corporation’s hormone-saturated chicken. As fuel prices rise and supply lines attenuate, we had better encourage local food production any way we can—and if that means altering the zoning codes to allow people to raise backyard chickens, let’s do it, and to hell with conceptual ideas of property values. A neighborhood that raises its own chickens is more valuable than a neighborhood that doesn’t. There’s something to eat there!

Now, that’s one very personal example. At a similar level of nitpickyness we find laws against unmowed lawns, unliscenced vehicles, loose dogs, ugly fences, and the like. Many of these provisions actually do work to the benefit of flesh-and-blood neighbors who would like a little leverage on their sloppier fellow citizens.

A little further up the scale we have Metro requirements that dwellings be hooked up to the municipal electrical, water, and sewerage systems in a responsible fashion. Such provisions cut both ways. They prevent landlords from renting so-called substandard housing to people, but they also prohibit homeless individuals from creating their own shelter, and at the other end of the spectrum they prevent innovative, off-the-grid housing from being created here in Davidson County—and at this point, we come back to my mother-in-law’s chickens. With supply lines and fuel sources looking increasingly dicey, we need to allow creative housing options to flourish in Davidson County, not just for those who have land and want to do something different, but for those who have nothing and would like a place to call their own. The importance of giving people at the bottom of our society a sense of ownership and achievement has often been noted, so why not allow them a chance to call someplace besides a homeless shelter home? There is plenty of unused land in this city—do the Titans really need so much parking space? That’s a spot where showers and toilets are already available and underutilized, most days of the year.

And then there are times when the zoning board is just a way to legitimize punching a whole neighborhood in the nose. The Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing cities to condemn private property to facilitate large retail development is only going to make this worse. We have had numerous examples of private hijacking of the public trust already, from the malls that grow like cancers in our suburbs to Vanderbilt’s destruction of the northern half of the Hillsboro Village neighborhood so rich college kids would have a place to play games and park their parents’ cars. The only way to stop any more of this kind of piracy from happening is for more people who understand the limits of growth to get on the zoning board.

We do not need any more retail outlets. Commercial retail sales are no longer the engine that drives the economy, they are the open artery that is bleeding America dry—thanks to the movement of virtually all consumer goods manufacturing to China and other low-wage enclaves. This is why the Democratic Party’s economic platform doesn’t make sense any more. Consumer spending no longer circulates money in the country, it sends it right out of the country. The funny thing is, we could probably do without new consumer goods for years, if we were collectively unneurotic enough to quit looking for satisfaction in material things. This country is awash in clothing and household goods—that’s why the u-storit business is booming. We could not import any consumer goods for five years and just have a great time going to each others’ yard sales and nobody would go naked or run out of furniture or kitchenware or entertainment possibilities. That’s how to cut the trade deficit. Think about it.

I heard something the other night that I thought was one of those crazy hippie rumors, so I tracked it down on the net and found this story. It’s almost three years old, but the information in it is still current, and it comes from a highly reputable source: England’s Manchester Guardian. The Guardian is not, I repeat, not a tabloid, but this really is their headline:

Sun’s rays to roast Earth as poles flip

Earth’s magnetic field - the force that protects us from deadly radiation bursts from outer space - is weakening dramatically.
Scientists have discovered that its strength has dropped precipitously over the past two centuries and could disappear over the next 1,000 years.
The effects could be catastrophic. Powerful radiation bursts, which normally never touch the atmosphere, would heat up its upper layers, triggering climatic disruption. Navigation and communication satellites, Earth’s eyes and ears, would be destroyed and migrating animals left unable to navigate.
‘Earth’s magnetic field has disappeared many times before - as a prelude to our magnetic poles flipping over, when north becomes south and vice versa,’ said Dr Alan Thomson of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh.
‘Reversals happen every 250,000 years or so, and as there has not been one for almost a million years, we are due one soon.’
For more than 100 years, scientists have noted the strength of Earth’s magnetic field has been declining, but have disagreed about interpretations. Some said its drop was a precursor to reversal, others argued it merely indicated some temporary variation in field strength has been occurring.
But now Gauthier Hulot of the Paris Geophysical Institute has discovered Earth’s magnetic field seems to be disappearing most alarmingly near the poles, a clear sign that a flip may soon take place.
Using satellite measurements of field variations over the past 20 years, Hulot plotted the currents of molten iron that generate Earth’s magnetism deep underground and spotted huge whorls near the poles.
Hulot believes these vortices rotate in a direction that reinforces a reverse magnetic field, and as they grow and proliferate these eddies will weaken the dominant field: the first steps toward a new polarity, he says.
And as Scientific American reports this week, this interpretation has now been backed up by computer simulation studies.
How long a reversal might last is a matter of scientific controversy, however. Records of past events, embedded in iron minerals in ancient lava beds, show some can last for thousands of years - during which time the planet will have been exposed to batterings from solar radiation. On the other hand, other researchers say some flips may have lasted only a few weeks.
Exactly what will happen when Earth’s magnetic field disappears prior to its re-emergence in a reversed orientation is also difficult to assess. Compasses would point to the wrong pole - a minor inconvenience. More importantly, low-orbiting satellites would be exposed to electromagnetic batterings, wrecking them.
In addition, many species of migrating animals and birds - from swallows to wildebeests - rely on innate abilities to track Earth’s magnetic field. Their fates are impossible to gauge.
As to humans, our greatest risk would come from intense solar radiation bursts. Normally these are contained by the planet’s magnetic field in space. However, if it disappears, particle storms will start to batter the atmosphere.
‘These solar particles can have profound effects,’ said Dr Paul Murdin, of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. ‘On Mars, when its magnetic field failed permanently billions of years ago, it led to its atmosphere being boiled off. On Earth, it will heat up the upper atmosphere and send ripples round the world with enormous, unpredictable effects on the climate.’
It is unlikely that humans could do much. Burrowing thousands of miles into solid rock to set things right would stretch the technological prowess of our descendants to bursting point, though such limitations do not worry film scriptwriters. Paramount’s latest sci-fi thriller, The Core - directed by Englishman Jon Amiel, and starring Hilary Swank and Aaron Eckhart - depicts a world beset by just such a polar reversal, with radiation sweeping the planet.
The solution, according to the film, to be released next year, involves scientists drilling into Earth’s mantle to set off a nuclear blast that will halt the reversal.
Given that temperatures at such depths rival those of the Sun’s surface, such a task would seem impossible - except, of course, in Hollywood.

That’s the Guardian’s report, and I think it is a bit light on details. The last such reversal was a million years ago, which means that our Homo erectus ancestors managed to survive it without burrowing deep into the earth. It must have been a bitch for them to lose cell phone service, tv, and satellite radio , though.

So far, none of the magnetic field reversals that have taken place have wiped out all life on this planet—I mean, as far as we can tell, we’re alive, and not just the hallucinations of our dying hominid ancestors, right?–but a more recent issue of the Guardian carried news of a disaster that is actually happening—southern Europe is in the grip of a Saharan drought. It is replete with irony—in Spain, citrus orchards are dying for lack of water while international consortiums build vast retirement cities for northern Europeans on the Mediterranian coast, each one replete with its own golf course—and, the article points out, a golf course in an arid climate uses enough water to supply ten thousand people with all their personal needs for a year. Too bad about the oranges…let ‘em eat golf balls,
and may this remind us that the Europeans are no saner than we are, just differently crazy. Let’s hope we all go sane together, and soon.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more outrageous, it got more outrageous. It’s not enough to believe three impossible things before dinner, it’s got to be six. Or ten. Karl Rove and the Bush gang are spinning and blowing smoke as hard as they can, but there are some facts that just won’t go away, no matter who they nominate for the supreme court—which is an audacious move to make,since the questions and answers involved in the Valerie Plame affair should be enough to remove Mr. Bush and his gang of slime from office and preclude them from nominating anyone to the supreme court. How many criminals get to appoint their own judges? In any parliamentary democracy they would have had to resign or risk being shouted down. In the tin-horn countries of the world, their own military would have taken them out by now. Up against the wall, Mr. President!

Here are the facts

1. Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA operative, in charge of the worldwide U.S. effort to keep rogue nations from creating weapons of mass destruction. Her unmasking has virtually destroyed that effort, put the lives of many of her associates in danger, and made life less safe for everyone on the planet. The CIA does have its good causes, and this was one of them, but no more.

2. Karl Rove is subject to Executive Order 12958, which specifically forbids those privy to classified information from disclosing it directly or confirming that someone without security clearance knows something that is technically classified. This executive order was revised and updated by George W. Bush on March 25, 2003,

3. Mr. Rove learned about Valerie Plame’s CIA cover at a White House briefing before he talked to anybody in the press about it. This happened in late June or early July of 2003, not that long after EO 12958.

4. Rove, at very least by a nod and a wink, which is still a violation of Executive Order 12958 , let several reporters know that Valerie Plame’ worked secretly for the CIA and encouraged them to publish this information.

5. Penalties for violations are not optional. EO 12958 specifically says “Officers and employees of the United States Government … shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently … disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified.”

6. Mr. Bush is stepping back from his constitutionally mandated duty to enforce his own executive order.

So the question gets to be, what does the Bush junta think they have to gain by all this?

Let’s step back and check into the action in the natural world. On the Pacific Coast of the U.S., coastal water temperatures are running 3-5 degrees warmer than normal. Tropical species are appearing in water where they have never been seen before. Mortality of some seabird species is up by a factor of 50. On the Atlantic coast, the ocean off St. John’s, Newfoundland, is the warmest it’s ever been, and the sea ice last winter was the thinnest, although the Labrador Current is running colder than normal—possibly as a result of increased ice-cold meltwater flowing into it from the Greenland icecap. In the Caribbean, we have had two major hurricanes in JULY and the water is, again 2-5 degrees warmer than normal.

On another front, Peter Raven, curator of the Missouri Botannical Garden and a recognized expert on ecology, said recently in an interview in England’s Guardian newspaper, that he believes we will see half to two-thirds of all species on the planet go extinct in the next hundred years.

What this mean to me, folks, is that the disaster snowball has started rolling and picking up speed.

The Bush junta, of course, officially denies all this, but I think they’re lying about what they think about climate change just as surely as they’re lying about just about anything else you’d care to mention. You see, if they deny it, they don’t have to do anything about it. If they cut all the safety nets, throw out all the safeguards, and grab all the resources they can for themselves, they figure they’ve got a better chance of making it through the impending disaster, and you and I are more likely to die, and then they won’t have to deal with us and our annoying questions.

Bush’s ranch is set up to be solar powered. Frist is building a bunker in his new house in Nashville. No telling what else they are doing in undisclosed locations around the country. They know there’s a storm coming, and they want to be the ones to survive. That’s why they don’t care a rat’s behind about conscience, integrity, fairness, or compassion: they think we’re standing at the end of history, the beginning of a new dark age in which they can be the lords and write the history. Meanwhile, they figure, you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omlet.

Are they insane? Quite possibly. I believe that it is still possible to reorganize society along sane lines, to create a world in which concerned neighbors and not the devil will see to the hindmost. The same Jesus they love to flaunt said, “Howsoever ye treat the least of mine, is how ye treat me,” and I believe that is the standard to which we need to hold ourselves. George, Karl, Dick, and their ilk can run, they can even hide for a while, but ultimately they cannot escape their fundamental miscalculation: the stability of a society is not based on its material resources but on the morality and sanity of its members: and when it comes to morality and sanity, the Bushies haven’t got a clue. They are as doomed to failure as the Third Reich. I just pray we can get these bad actors off stage without the catastrophic conclusion that it took to end Mr. Hitler’s little morality play.

May God have mercy on your soul, Karl. You may be able to B.S. the American people but you can’t B.S. Nature.

Much thanks to Truthout.org for many of the facts and quotes in this story.

P.S. (added in September) Since I wrote this, all that warm water in the Gulf of Mexico has parlayed into two more major hurricanes….and who’s in charge of the reconstruction effort? Karl Rove!

By now, every Tennessean who isn’t brain-dead—about 33% of the adult population, according to one recent survey—knows about Operation Tennessee Waltz, a sting operation in which the FBI set up a dummy corporation that paid bribes to Tennessee lawmakers so they would introduce legislation favorable to the corporation. The bill actually attracted several co-sponsors who weren’t bribed, but should have been indicted—except that it’s not illegal just to be stupid and venal.

The day after the arrests, Speaker of the Senate John Wilder prayed publicly for his busted colleagues, calling what had happened “entrapment.” The sad thing is, he was right—getting paid to introduce legislation is just business as usual for Tennessee legislators.. A dismaying amount of what is supposed to be public policy in this state is designed for the benefit of special interest groups—from the sales tax that benefits the wealthy to the welfare-for-contractors outfit known as the Department of Transportation to the facts that you can buy beer, but not wine or distilled spirits, in grocery stores, and that you can’t buy beer in a store that sells wine and distilled spirits.

Now, I am not a big fan of any form of alcoholic beverage, but I see no point whatsoever in this peculiar arrangement. Former governor and beer distributor Ned Ray McWherter wanted it that way, though, so that’s how it is.  Yep, folks, the plain fact is that the law in Tennessee is for sale to the highest bidder, even on days when the FBI isn’t trolling for suckers.

Our legislature is busy minding the short-term bottom line, spending money in ways that make them richer but that leave us unprepared for the kind of future we are likely to have—one without the plentiful fossil fuels it takes to make good use of all these roads and sprawled-out cities. When I look at what goes on in the Tennessee legislature, I have to roll my eyes and clutch my stomach at the way nearly everything they do is and say is irrelevant and out of touch.

You, dear listener, could most assuredly do a better job than your current state legislators. Please—get together with your friends, get up a nominating petition, and start talking. It’s not too early. You probably won’t win the next election, or even the one after that. But what else can we do but go for it? The hour is getting late.

There are vampires among us. They prey on those who are mentally or physically ill, on the aged, the infirm and handicapped members of our society. They grow fat and healthy from the misfortunes of others. Once they waited for their victims to seek them out, for the help they claimed to offer; now they aggressively encourage people to fall into their clutches through television advertisements and other mass media methods. Newspapers, magazines, TV stations are happy to lend assistance to these modern-day Draculas, for they pay their helpers well—with the blood money they have extracted from honest, hardworking Americans like you and me.

I am talking about the people who run the so-called health care business in general, and about one man in particular—Bill “the Vampire” Frist. He can say his stock in HCA—the bloodsucking demon that actually does his dirty work—is in a blind trust, but he has devoted plenty of time and energy during his senate career to legislation that benefits the company his father and brother started—and that recently paid the largest fraud settlement in history, 1.7 BILLION dollars, for bilking the government, aka you and me, the taxpayers– through medicare overcharges. Due to the intervention of the Bush Whitewash, I mean White House, no one was indicted for this crime. Bill Frist’s brother and father who as directors were certainly liable, are not Martha Stewart, if you know what I mean.

Bill the Vampire is a prime example of what’s wrong with America’s so-called healthcare system. There are millionaires in the health care business because honest, hardworking Americans like you and me have been overcharged for health care. There is no reason for Bill the Vampire Frist—or Phil the Vampire Bredesen—for that matter, to be as obscenely rich as they are. It’s extortion, pure and simple. You need healthcare, they have a monopoly, you’re gonna pay what they tell you—or else you can suffer and die.. Your house, your land, your retirement savings, your childrens’ inheritance? Too bad! Fork it over—Bill the vampire is hungry for your blood.

I just about gag when I consider how many people have accepted Bill the Vampire as OK because he was clever enough to get so obscenely rich. “Look at the nice art museum he gave us, “ they say. I say he built it with money he stole from sick people in Tennessee. And eight bucks a head to get in? Some gift!

I am dismayed that there are enough fools in this state to elect Bill the vampire to two terms in the United States Senate. He and his vampire brother and father (whom Bill the vampire himself has likened to don Corleone) should have been stripped of their wealth and put to work doing something real—like maybe helping out Mother Teresa’s clinic in Calcutta. Bill’s brother Tom is probably the second richest man in America, with a personal fortune estimated by Forbes Magazine at two BILLION dollars. That would fix Tenncare!

The whole idea of for-profit healthcare is obscene. Healthcare needs to be non-profit, and oriented towards maintaining wellness rather than pill-peddling. This is a personal issue for me. I has a co-worker, a kind, gentle, conscientious man, who put off going to see a doctor—he had no health insurance, and most of these things clear up on their own,.right? His didn’t. He died from a curable infection, racking up tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts for his family in the process, because the so-called health food supermarket we worked for and the corporate culture it’s just another part of were both too cheap to give him access to medical care and time off to go see a doctor and then rest and recover.

That’s obscene.

It’s obscene that medical care is so expensive that people don’t seek it because of cost concerns. It’s obscene that the for-profit system is oriented towards peddling more and more pills and treatments to more and more people, when the right thing to do is to work to create general wellness through diet and lifestyle, but hey, there’s no money in that, nothing to patent or franchise. Bill the Vampire is going to do everything in his power to prevent that from happening. And don’t look to him to ask the federal government to bail out Tenncare, either. The for-profit medical system doesn’t care if there are people who can’t afford it—it’s doing quite well off those who can, thank you.

But his conscience is uneasy—that’s why he’s building a bunker into the basement of his new house. “Just what does he think is going to happen?” wondered the neighbor of his who told me about what she had seen at the construction site. Hey, this is a guy who pretended to adopt cats from animal shelters, took them home and was nice to them for a night, then practiced surgery on them until they died. He says he regrets it—but talk is cheap.

Now, I bear Bill the Vampire no personal ill will. I wish him no harm. I hope he sees the error of his ways, the gravity of his sins. I hope Bill the vampire repents and spends many years doing the right thing, promoting real public health, atoning for all the harm he’s done—after all, the Hippocratic oath enjoins physicians to “Frist—I mean First—do no harm.” He has done a lot of harm, from preventing people from suing Eli Lilly for putting poisonous Thimerosol in childhood vaccines and causing autism to preventing people from suing their HMOs (like his own HCA) for failure to provide adequate treatment. But I’m not holding my breath. I don’t know what the future holds—I have no crystal ball—but I do know there are vampires among us, and Bill Frist is one of them. Watch your neck.

The big story in Nashville lately is the school budget and the need for a tax increase to fund it. The backstory on this is that Dr. Pedro Garcia came to Nashville promising to raise test scores, and it hasn’t happened.

Now, the first thing I think about this is that it’s a bit of hubris to think you know how to raise test scores, even if you are superintendent of schools. There is a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle pressure these days to keep people as stupid, uninformed, and distracted as possible. They make better consumers that way.

But I digress. I’m trying to get to the root of the Nashville schools situation—that’s what us radicals do, is go to the roots of problems where they can be solved, rather than bat at their hydra heads forever like a bunch of Democrats. I start my analysis with two considerations: the notion of defining academic quality by standard tests, and the function of school in our culture.

Root one: defining academic quality by test scores, now mandated nationwide by the so-called no child left behind act, which i think is about the stupidest thing Teddy Kennedy has done since he drove off that bridge in Chappaquidick. Defining academic quality by test scores is a very mechanical/industrial way to look at schooling: Children are empty vessels sent in to be filled with facts, and their ability to repeat those facts on demand indicates whether their teachers are doing a good job.

Teachers I have talked with are troubled by this interpretation of their occupation. They report that they now are compelled to “teach to the test”most of the time—that is, the academic curriculum is defined by what is on the standard tests, leaving very little room for individual initiative on the part of teachers or students.

This leads into the second root of the Nashville public schools question: what are we sending our children to school for? To be able to regurgitate facts on demand? It’s not much of a life skill. I was very good at taking tests in school, always scored well, but I have yet to find a paying position that involves answering multiple choice questions.

The question of what we are sending children to school for is partially answered by “to prepare them for adult life,” which according to what the schools are doing, will involve increasing levels of surveillance, regimentation, and rigidity, and less time for creativity, relaxation, play and experimentation. Did you know that the art supply budget for Nashville’s primary schools, according to a teacher in the system, is only $1.50 per student per year?

From a Green perspective, not only Nashville’s but our nation’s educational priorities are all wrong. We are spending billions to prepare our children for a future that will not exist as it is being visualized. The world is changing faster than we can imagine. We need to spark creative thinking in our children, not just as in art projects, but as in problem solving. We need to teach them the scientifically circular nature of the world—we are in a closed system in which everything that happens affects everything else. We need to teach our children to know themselves and speak their truth, and to be tolerant of the differences that arise among honest people. We need to make sure every child has some kind of hands-on experiential skills—how to make, grow, or fix things. We need smaller schools, local schools, where parents and students and teachers are part of a real community—a community of people who live, work and play together.We’re a long way from doing that here in Nashville. We could start heading in that direction by electing a school board that will raise thoughtful hell with the status quo, and I think you, dear listener, might just be the person to do it. Go out and run for school board. Talk to lots and lots of people about how it is and how it oughta be and how to get there from here. Go for it. You can’t win if you don’t try.

Let’s engage in a little freewheeling fantasy, folks:

What would a demon do?

A demon, in Western religious tradition, is a servant of Satan It’s a demon’s job to make hell unpleasant for the rest of its inhabitants. And how might a demon torture thee? Let me count some of the ways:

Demons can make sure souls are trapped in unhappy situations—for example, a life in which your mother didn’t want to have you in the first place and lacks the motivation, support, and resources to bring you up happily. Hell for you, hell for her.

Or a life born to parents who wanted you, but who find their own lives disrupted and crushed by vast forces beyond their control—drought, flood, war, disease, overpopulation, famine, marauding oil companies—you know, the classic horsemen of the apocalypse. A refugee camp in Africa for your kindergarten? Hell for everyone.

Or something subtler—a life in the American underclasses as reshaped by the skinflints who have controlled our government for the last 25 years—Bill Clinton was the best Republican president this country’s had since Teddy Roosevelt–a life devoid of intellectual stimulation, emotional support, psychological understanding, nutritional intelligence, material comfort, and challenging opportunity, a life filled with distraction, exploitation, denial, dead-end jobs and constant glimpses of inaccessible luxuries enjoyed by the rich and famous. That’s America for a lot of people—and that’s hell.

These are all things demons could or would do to make life miserable for people—and the sad thing is, most of the people trapped in those hells would have no idea they were in hell.

Another thing demons can do to torment souls is to keep them from dying. For example, suppose someone were blind and unable to speak or move, suppose they needed a feeding tube to eat and were unable to respond to, or possibly even notice, any kind of outside stimulus whatsoever. Suppose that person’s brain had decayed to half its normal size?

Whatever shred of consciousness such a person might have left would perceive itself as being in a dark, soundless room, unable to move, for a period of time that would seem infinite, for they would have no way to mark time. Doesn’t that sound like the kind of torture someone would encounter in hell?

Wouldn’t the compassionate, loving, Christian thing to do be to let that poor, trapped soul die and go to heaven? Doesn’t it seem demonic to force such a person to stay for years in the dark room of what is left of her mind? Sounds worse than Abu Ghairab to me!

Of course, to be a demon, you need to be inconsistent, so while you are sparing no expense to keep people alive, you must at the same time make it harder for people who are consciously and intentionally clinging to life to do so—by limiting how much financial assistance you give them, and making it harder for them to declare bankruptcy.

Another thing a demon would do to make life hell for people is be unforgiving. If you’re a young girl and you get pregnant, you’re going to have that baby. If you’re a young person whose learning curve happens to include petty theft, overt expressions of anger, wild driving, or the indiscreet enjoyment of sex or the wrong drugs, the demons would make sure that your youthful deeds follow you and cripple your opportunities for the rest of your life.

But—inconsistency rules! Demons let other demons get away with all kinds of behavior, especially if they are corporate demons. Did you ever notice that for-profit corporations are demons? They are legally considered “persons” but their basic, declared purpose is profit—that is, the “soul” of a for-profit corporation is essentially selfish. That’s quite different from how you and I are set up, isn’t it? I believe that my basic purpose is to bring about greater peace, love and understanding, and I believe that generosity is a far better impulse to exercise than selfishness. I’d guess you think pretty much the same way. You can’t write generosity into the charter of a for-profit corporation. But I digress.

Another thing a demon would do is demean the creation. Cut down the forests, pave the plains, pollute the air and water and be sure to spread shame and distortion around that extraordinary Divine creation, the human body. You know, it’s only flesh and blood and electricity, and it blooms and decays in the blink of an eye, but there really is nothing else like it in the Universe, as far as we can tell so far. We seem to be the only, almost infinitely tiny, piece of this entire, vast cosmos that knows that the whole show is here.

I have respect and admiration for the intelligence, wisdom, and communicative capacities of dolphins, pigs, wolves,and our various primate cousins, as well as octopi and the fabled giant squid, but until I hear them weigh in on cosmology or its equivalent, I’m presuming we know some very important things they don’t. But, I digress.

Maybe it’s just my DNA talking, but I appreciate the human form and like to see it celebrated—as in Alan Lequire’s exuberant sculpture at the head of Music Row. Well, maybe it’s because one of my friends posed for that sculpture and I love seeing her in all her radiant glory right there in the middle of that vast ugliness. But a bunch of people picketed that statue recently—there’s a campaign going on complaining that Alan’s statue is indecent. As they said in this week’s Nashville Scene, uncovered breast cancer is a lot more indecent than uncovered breasts. But this is just another aspect of the demonic campaign to convince us there’s something wrong with our bodies and their needs and urges.

Too big, too small, wrong color, smells wrong, wants to relax the wrong way with the wrong person—wrong, wrong, wrong. Love is not the law among demons—the name of their game is control and shame.

Is oppressing souls unpleasant for the demon? The demon doesn’t think so—demons are inured to their obnoxious environment and the pain they cause others. They are full of the self-righteousness that comes from knowing that you are doing the Lord’s Work and Giving Sinners What They Deserve.

But the fact is, that the evil a demon does is corrosive to him or her. Poor diet, stultified emotions, a blunted intellect and a warped world view eventually take their toll, and it is far more unpleasant to be a dying demon than it is to have been one of their victims, though that is scant consolation to those victims.

Now, you may have noticed something through my little discourse on demonology: All those things that would logically be done by a demon for the right and proper conduct of hell are being done by people who call themselves Christian. So-called Christians are against abortion, birth control, and serious aid to the profoundly impoverished. So-called Christians support the bland, malnourishing pablum of mainstream culture—their self-serving squawks against Hollywood vulgarity are just windowdressing.

So-called Christians fought to keep the tortured remains of Terry Schaivo alive, even as they moved to cut welfare, medicaid, and social security. So-called Christians have propelled the so-called war on drugs until it and its collateral damage have given this so-called Land of the Free the highest prison population per capita of any country in the world. So-called Christians have moved to relax environmental standards and ease up on corporate crime, while tightening the bankruptcy laws and changing the tax laws to remove incentives to large-scale charitable giving. So-called Christians create an atmosphere of obsession and compulsion around the human body that distorts perceptions for all of us and makes a rational, emotionally adult society an impossibility.

And yes, the good news is that these so-called Christians’ indulgent disinclination towards personal lifestyle changes and spiritual evolution means that those of us who know how to take care of ourselves in those ways will probably outlast them, although we may not have much of a world left to enjoy.

Meanwhile, under the thick armor of every smug, selfish, self-righteous Christian/demon there stirs a sad soul that is crying out for love and understanding.

It is our compassionate duty to them to dodge their thrashing as best we can, regard them with love and caring, and pray that a chink in their armor somewhere, sometime, somehow, will let someone give them the love they need. Hang in there, brothers and sisters—patience is a cardinal virtue.

In European news, the E.U is in self-described deep crisis. First, France and the Netherlands voted to reject the proposed European constitution, which has all but scuttled the nearly 500-page document, putting a halt to what had seemed like the increasingly inevitable complete political union of Europe. Second, the EU’s summit last week broke up without coming to any resolution of the ongoing controversy over agricultural subsidies.

Many people, mostly of the neoLiberal persuasion, are worried. They see this as a victory for reaction. I’d rather see it as a victory for that prime Green Party value, local control. Given a choice, people declined to live in a Federal Europe in which unelected bureaucrats could overrule popularly elected local officials and laws. We in America know what that looks like: The Supreme Court just gave the DEA permission to ignore local medical marihuana laws. Talk about mean-spirited…but I digress.

It’s also worth noting that these elections were one of the few times acceptance of the EU constitution has been put to a popular vote. The states that had already ratified the EU constitution—most of the rest of Europe—had mostly done so at the legislative level, and not given their people a chance to decide the question directly. That’s something else we’re familiar with in this country—legislative bodies that don’t follow the will of the people but instead cater to special interests—think of the gap between the overwhelming popularity of single-payer universal health care among the American people and the political impossibility of reigning in the medical/insurance establishment and doing something about it.

The main issue that crashed the EU’s most recent summit was agricultural subsidies, which means something very different in Europe from what it means here. The bulk of American agricultural subsidies are paid to industrial-scale farmers who grow for the industrial-international market. In Europe, agricultural subsidies largely support the current evolution of traditional peasant culture, farmers who grow food for the people of their own regions and countries. Those countries are looking at the increasing tenuousness of international trade and the rising price of the petroleum that moves it, and saying “no way are we gonna scuttle local production of our food and start trusting that it will keep on coming from a politically and ecologically unstable place thousands of miles away.”

Now, if only we’d gotten that smart here in America….that’s what the Green Party would like to see, but when push comes to shove the democans and republicrats are both pushers of NAFTA, CAFTA, and GATT, all of which are designed to internationalize agriculture. So, the ruckus in the EU is positive in two ways: the people spoke up for keeping more local control when they voted against the EU constitution, and their governments listened and stood up for them when the question of cutting farm subsidies—and destroying an important component of their national culture—was raised.  I’m not saying the EU is a bad thing. I’m impressed with the way borders have been opened and the need for military spending has been re-evaluated and refocussed. But I don’t want to see a homogenized, deculturalized Europe, any more than I enjoy seeing it happen in America. They stood up for themselves and won over there, and we can do it here.

What’s the Green Party’s vision for middle Tennessee?
Did you know that Tennessee used to be among the top ten fruit and vegetable producing states in the country? Right up there with New York, Michigan, California and (at the time) New Jersey?That was in the early part of the twentieth century, when most of the people of Tennessee lived on small, highly diversified farms—highly diversified because the farmers had too much at stake every year to put all their eggs, so to speak, in one basket. Yes, lots of people kept chickens, hogs, and cattle, grew peppers and cabbages and blackeyed peas and strawberries and pears and peaches, back in the day when Nashville had a farmers’ market because there were so many farmers in Davidson County.

We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, now that we bring well over ninety percent of what we eat in from thousands of miles, or even a hemisphere, away, as the price of the fuel that brings it here starts its speeding spiral upwards? But I digress…The downside of Tennessee’s agriculturally and otherwise more self-reliant culture a hundred years ago was widespread poverty with its attendant ignorance and physical and emotional suffering. Tennessee was effectively part of the third world.

The Green Party does not yearn for that past—it’s the Republicans who are doing their best to drag us there, in all the worst ways.The Green Party wants to revive the best part of old Tennessee—community self-sufficiency,whether in food, health care and medicine, fuel, culture, clothing, or decision making. Our current economic structure is basically a siphon that sucks money from individuals and local communities into the pockets of large corporations and their already wealthy shareholders. Our current economy is a treadmill—the faster it goes, the faster we must go, and the faster we go, the faster it goes.

Both major political parties support this, arguing only over how much to siphon and how much to speed up the treadmill.The Green Party proposes to take out the siphon and turn off the treadmill. A great deal of what needs to happen will have little to do with government, except that government needs to be willing to step out of the way and let it happen. Other things will need a strong, coherent government in order to happen. We believe it is the purpose of government to stand up for the people. What we have happening now is government by and for special interests—specifically large, for-profit corporations.

Enough with the noble rhetoric, you say. Give me some details! What can we do? How could we actually, rubber-meets-the-road improve the quality of life in middle Tennessee? We got an automobile plant on the best farmland in the area. Most of the farms that used to feed us have been turned into subdivisions. Most people don’t garden or even live walking distance from a grocery store, and they’ve all gotta drive miles on the same roads at the same time to get to work. Watcha gonna do about it, greenboy?

Well, as one of my favorite frogs once remarked, it’s not easy bein’ green. A lot of damage has been done to the human/ and natural ecology of middle Tennessee. Sometimes I despair about this—it seems like a debate over where to put bandaids on a dying man—and friends, it may be. We may be too locked in to the self-destructive pattern of late-period capitalism to avert catastrophe, but we have got to try.

The Green Party does not, however, have a vast, overarching, detailed program of how to do this. The Green Party approaches things differently from the Democan-Republicrat—“let-us-tell-you what you need and whether it’s working for you” song and dance. One of our primary principles is to give people power over the decisions that shape their lives—so we do not have a top-down solution that we intend to impose on you the people.

What we would do as the party in power is use the government to grow solutions from the bottom up—get people together in neighborhoods and communities and facilitate discussion of issues and answers. As a governing party, we will help people learn what they need to know to make intelligent decisions, and then use government as a tool to implement what the people want, rather than what the wealthy and their lobbyists want, which is the way it works today.

But wait, you say, people in Tennessee are crazy as outhouse rats—they’re against an income tax, even though it means most of ‘em would pay less in taxes—they’re for a lottery, which is an increased tax on the (mostly poor) people who can’t do math very well—they’re against gay people being able to adopt children, even though it’s spare-the-rod-and spoil-the-child Christians who are more often in trouble for child abuse. What makes us naïve Green Party people think that turning decision making back to the people will result in intelligent decisions? What is to keep it from resulting in widespread repression—nightshirts and ponies, creationism, cars up on blocks in front yards in Brentwood? AAGGHHH!

Well, I would like to propose that if the y’all are smart enough to put the Green party in charge, y’all are smart enough to figure out your own lives without hurting anyone else. And if y’all keep voting in the same old same old, things will keep going round and round just like always, further and further down the drain, and then we will still have to figure it out for ourselves, only from an even more difficult position than we are in already.

Now, I was a young man back in the 1960’s,(”you made your own amusements then”) when we first had this vision and called it things like “participatory democracy.” and “sustainable culture.” Forty years ago, it would have been easier to take the path we propose. The forces of greed, ignorance, and selfishness have done everything they can to throw roadblocks in our way since then—but they can’t outspin the fact that they are running America over a cliff. We in the Green Party have a better idea. We invite you to take charge of your own future.

It seems to me that the root question that is dividing America is, “How loose is it OK for people to be?”and its corollary, “Is it OK for people to do things that could be considered mistakes from a materialistic point of view as long as they gain insight from their actions?”

The Right-wing Christian, Republican answers to these questions are, “not very loose,” and “no, it’s not OK.” The Democrats don’t understand that this is an issue. I have to tell them, “it’s NOT the economy, stupid!” These questions, folks, are at the root of the Republican-Christian “moral values” offensive. And whew, is it ever offensive! Support for laws that suppress “loose” sexual behavior—and the suppression of laws that support it—heterosexual out of wedlock, homosexuality, abortion, birth control, overt portrayals of sex in movies and magazines, breasts on television, four letter words in music or on the air—support for all these forms of personal repression—springs from the root, psycho-physiological uptightness of somewhere between a quarter and a half of the American population.

Those of us who are confronted by the congenitally uptight on any of these many fronts generally ignore the root from which all this springs, the taproot from which the poison ivy of Republican repression has spread.  Small wonder. This taproot is well-nigh inassailable, ringed about with police forces, prosecutors, plea bargainers, special task forces and enforcement agencies, judges, legislators, big money from many industries, and far, far stiffer penalties than abortion, homosexuality, or sex out of wedlock will get you—so far.

That root, dear friends, is the drug laws. When we as a society grant permission to penalize and demonize that form of private behavior, we in principle give them permission to penalize any private behavior.Why do they go after “drugs” so seriously, when study after study has shown that, especially with proper guidance, no harm and in fact great good can come out of the use of marihuana and its allied psychedelics, which after all are at the heart of drug repression in the Western world?

That is because, when properly employed, these substances are deconditioning agents that can help dissolve the mental fetters that bind people to the blind, ignorant status quo, the habits of attitude and consumption that support the corporate dominators of the world. And so there is persecution abroad in the land, accepted under the rubric of drug abuse and its prevention.

Speaking of the creeping malaise of fascism in Germany, pastor Martin Niemoller said;” First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

I am here to tell you, people, they are coming for the potsmokers and the mushroom chewers and the acid trippers, and if you don’t do something about it, you WILL be next.