DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

I was telling you last month about the abandoned quarry that the Metro Solid Waste Advisory Board has approved as a new dump site. I got a chance to visit it a couple of weeks ago, and I want to share my findings and observations with you.It’s huge. It’s desolate, it’s beautiful, it’s dangerous, it’s right on the Harpeth River, it has great acoustics and a beautiful lake and, yes, water is flowing into it from seams in the rock and, since it isn’t getting any fuller, there must be water flowing out of it, too. The geology of the area is what is called “karst;” the rocks are shot through with wide cracks, through which water seeps or flows, sometimes creating caves. It would be easy for contamination from a dump here to enter the water table, and there will be no getting pollution out of the groundwater once it’s there. These things happen—just ask the people of Dixon about it.

This quarry is huge. Walking down into it reminded me of being in a canyon out west. One of my fellow explorers gasped, “it’s bigger than Bourdeaux,” referring to Nashville’s Bourdeaux landfill, which should, if proper recycling guidelines are followed, be big enough to hold all garbage of any category—construction, household, whatever—for the forseeable future. In other words, authorizing use of this site as a dump gives Davidson County way more landfill capacity than it needs. One begins to wonder if perhaps the operators are contemplating bringing in trash from elsewhere? It’s been estimated that this site will hold two hundred thousand truckloads of construction and demolition waste. Two hundred thousand truckloads at the current landfill disposal rate of about $150 a truckload is a lot of money—thirty million dollars, to be approximate. State Representative Gary Moore commented,”If they want to fill it up, they can do like anybody else and put up a sign and ask for fill dirt—but there’s no reason to be dumping any kind of trash where it might pollute the Harpeth River.” The quarry owners will not get thirty million dollars by advertising for fill dirt. They evidently don’t care if they end up irreversibly polluting the Harpeth River, if it pays them well enough. Such public spirited citizens, offering to donate the land for a park once they’re done getting richer off it.

This quarry is desolate. It is a site where the earth has been raped. The ground that has not been dug for the quarry has been scraped flat and looks like a parking lot. There are several dozen loads of construction waste already dumped here, which may be a violation of the law. Most of these loads are rocks and dirt, but we also saw plastic foam insulation and a mangled deck chair wrapped in the remains of an old-style blue plastic metro recycling box. We all found that very ironic.

Nashville currently recycles a minute percentage of its wastes, minute compared not just to the Solid Waste Board’s goals or what could be recycled, but minute compared to what we must contrive to reuse if we want to continue enjoying something like our current standard of living for very much longer. Did you know that if everyone in the world consumed petroleum and petroleum products (like fertilizer and plastic) at the rate we do here in America, the world’s known oil reserves would last seven to ten years?

I want to talk for a little bit about this whole recycling business. I hate to sound like the old coot I am, but when I was a kid, things mostly didn’t come prepackaged. If I wanted a toy car, I went to the five-and-dime store and they had a counter with toy cars lined up on it, bumper to bumper like in a parking lot, with little paper price tags on them, and the cars were made out of metal, so if you really wanted to you could melt it down and recast it and turn it into something else. I haven’t shopped for toy cars in a long time, but I think I know what I’d find if I went looking. I’d find a plastic car in a plastic-and-cardboard wrapper that is almost as bulky as the car itself, and that wrapper may have cost more to produce than the plastic toy it contains, and if an amateur like you or me melts the plastic down we may have fun but we will also end up with a stinky, polluting, unrecyclable mess.

It’s kinda the same with food—people don’t much cook any more, they take things out of boxes or cans or whatever and put them in the microwave, or bring home takeout in lots of so-called “disposable” containers or go to a fast food dispensary that, again, swaddles our meal in paper and plastic that probably doubles the cost of what we are eating—I know a little about this, I used to be a commercial fruit and vegetable farmer and I know that even the kind of basic packaging you buy for retail fruit and vegetable sales costs some money.

There is some pressure on us as individuals to reduce, recycle or at least stash our trash where it’s easy for someone to remove, but there is very little pressure on the companies that produce the trash WE are supposed to dispose of properly. In fact, packaging and disposable gizmos are big pistons in the economy, adding value to the GNP and creating jobs. We wouldn’t want environmentalism to hurt our sacred economy, now, would we? This dump could make somebody thirty million dollars—ain’t that sacred enough for ya? The dollar is my shepherd, I shall not want!

And then there’s electronic toys. I recently had a set of headphones malfunction—they no longer play treble sounds—I have a suspicion this could be easily fixed IF the headphones were made to be taken apart and IF I hadn’t bought them for under twenty dollars—because I know I couldn’t get ‘em fixed for twenty dollars, and, alas, I am not enough of a renaissance man to be able to fix my own headphones. So now my headphones are part of the 4,000 tons of electronic waste that is discarded every hour, not to mention the printer we had that just burned out and that now sits on our front porch…but I digress.

Yes, Charlie Tygard, the quarry is dangerous. We climbed over rocks that had fallen from the cliffs, and I saw plenty of standing rock that I wouldn’t want to get anywhere near, and for sure it wouldn’t take much for some drunk to slip over an edge and hit deep water or hard rock. But it’s no more dangerous than anyplace else I’ve been where there are cliffs. People have fallen to their deaths from the top of Burgess Falls, over by Cookeville, but I don’t hear the town fathers over there proposing to fill the gorge up with construction trash so nobody will ever have to be exposed to any danger there again.

This former quarry, this Earthrape crime scene, is beautiful, people, like I said it reminds me of canyons out west, like canyons out west it’s big enough to make me feel small, and I think there is something nourishing to our souls about being in natural places that give us a sense of how small and fragile we human beings are. My friends and I stood in the bottom of the quarry (well, at water level, anyway) and looked out across the water and up at the sky and drank in the immense scale of the place. We played drums and flutes and chanted and made a small offering to the spirits of the place, and thought about how where we were standing may someday be buried under two hundred thousand truckloads of trash.

The dump’s proponents are beating their drum about how dangerous it is, how much safer the area will be when it is filled in (unless the Harpeth is polluted from waste in the dump).I say: We have got to get over letting fear of injury rule our lives. Again, the old coot speaks: some of the best days of my youth were spent in abandoned quarries. They’re one of those places kids have always gone to get a taste of freedom and self-determination, and those places are seriously endangered in our over-supervised, over-regulated world.

So…what DO I think ought to be done with this beautiful ugly mess? The quarries across the road have been turned into a state park, but they’re much smaller, they’ve been abandoned much longer , and natural bioremediation has taken place—that is, the woods have grown back. I think the barrenness of this site offers an excellent opportunity to demonstrate intentional bioremediation, and as for the cliffs, they’re nothing a chain link fence couldn’t substantially (and discreetly, for the sake of the aesthetics of the place) prevent fools from falling off. Actually, there are no chain link fences at the state park, and while the cliffs there are not as high, they are still tall enough to be fatal.

Neither State Senator Douglas Henry nor State Representative Gary Moore, in whose districts the quarry lies, seem inclined to amend the State Scenic Rivers Act, which they helped write. Sen. Henry did qualify this, saying “I’m one of the authors of the State Scenic Rivers Act and unless the Department of Conservation recommends a change I’m not going to change it.” My friends in the conservation struggle are concerned about a certain pliability they perceive in the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. After all, the Department of Water Quality approved the discharge of sewage into the Rumbling Falls Cave system, and it took a lawsuit to stop them. This may take another lawsuit before it’s over. Start saving your pennies.

music:  James McMurtry, “Vague Directions”

Comments

So where is the situation at? Is there still time to do something: contact more groups, get a petition signed by residents of the area. And then there’s always bumper stickers.(I can make some.) Keep me posted. Caz
Posted by Caz on 03/01/2006 06:12:24 AM

Yes, there is further resistance to this dump. I recently received this email: __To those on this email group. Please read and consider the implications for the Bellevue comunity over time. If you care to, send this questionaire on to all the people you know who will also benefit from the knowledge of this proposed legislation. I urge you to contact the links provided and give them your opinion. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Group one: Local Neighborhoods close by the requested landfill a. Do you know state agencies are being told the local neighborhoods close to the landfill, are in favor of this project? How do you think this can be proven? b. Were you ever told existing laws, based on solid science, require a landfill to be located at least 2 miles from the Harpeth River and this landfill is 500 feet? c. Did you ever receive a notice of a meeting to discuss this project where the words “landfill or dump” were used to simply describe the proposal to fill in a quarry? Wonder why? d. Have you ever attended such a landfill meeting on this project meeting where there were speakers who could provide “balance,” science or opposing views as you may expect in an adult discussion? d. Were legal assurances ever provided in detail to your attorney(s) for your neighborhoods, outlining the offer and the contract, size, details, time limits, performance, oversight of the landfill operations? e. Do you wonder why you know so very little about this landfill? f. Have you ever read or heard about environmental issues at stake for the Harpeth River and this project? g. Does the next ten years of putting up with a line of dump trucks sound like something you negotiated when you invested in your home? h Do your think your roadways are safe and durable enough to take the truck abuse and who will pay? i. If you have questions or concerns about this proposed legislation, contact the HRWA and ask to be kept apprised of this project. www.harpethriver.org or call 615-790-9767 Group #2 For those of us who live in the West Nashville/Bellevue Area a. While property taxes are going through the roof, schools are being underfunded and every department in Metro is being asked to reduce the budget, does it make sense to lose millions in dump fees which go to our government for income to pay for needed services and send it to a commercial owner of this dumpsite? b. Does Bellevue and “Landfill along the Scenic Harpeth River” sound sweet to you? c. Did you ever wonder why you know so little and never heard of any opposition from anybody or any agency, how something this big and debatable was so silent? d. Water runoff and stream destruction go hand in hand; does a major landfill full of demolition and construction debris 500 feet from the Harpeth make sense? e. The Laws are on the books for decades to protect the environment so why are they being challenged now for a private firm to benefit, and put the public at risk and loss? Group # 3: For those who live in Middle Tennessee,,Outside Davidson County a. Six counties are in the Harpeth River Watershed. Yet, only Davidson/Nashville is 100% responsible for trying to get the laws weakened to allow this landfill on the river’s edge and YET did you know 94% of the watershed is outside Davidson County? b. How does it make you feel to know Metro Davidson County wants to put you and your family at increased risk on this project without asking your opinion or permission? c. Does water contamination of drinking water in Dickson County sound like a path you want your family to follow in support of relaxing proven laws to protect you? d. Fishing, farming, livestock, family recreation and the ecology of the area benefits from a healthy river which is already suffering severely from development pressures. Does it sound like the politicians in Nashville are thinking of you and your interests in a proposal to enrich a commercial project and weaken the protections afforded for decades to all of the public with the Scenic River Act? You can do something today about this proposal for an exemption/exception to the current Scenic Rivers Act to protect yourself from loss. Invest a few moments to call or email or send a letter to the State Senators below who have pledged publicly that they will feverishly fight to defeat any attempt to weaken the current law. Don’t allow a vocal minority of politicians and developers who will benefit, to overpower your voice on this issue. The proposal is already being sponsored in the legislature and action is required. sen.douglas.henry@legislature.state.tn.us The proposed project is in Sen. Henry’s district. He wrote the original Scenic Rivers Law and will defend it, but he needs you vocal support now. rep.gary.moore@legislature.state.tn.us State representative and the project is in his district. He too is strongly against any measure to weaken the existing laws. Also contact: Cheatham Co. reps. rep.phillip.johnson@legislature.state.tn.us and sen.rosalind.kurita@legislature.state.tn.us. Tell them simply to stop any attempt to exempt the current Scenic River Act proposed by Metro/Nashville. They can also tell them if they ever heard of this before, given that the resolution states Bellevue is behind this proposal. If not, tell them ! thanks I will have an update on this story on my March show/posting
Posted by brothermartin on 03/01/2006 03:25:02 PM

It’s been called putting a bandaid on cancer, and that’s not even my wild-eyed, crazy way of saying it. Tennessee State Senator Steve Cohen, an elected official, called it that. But he’s an advocate of medical marihuana, so maybe he is wild-eyed and crazy. Still, he’s an state senator, and I, who am deeply suspicious of elected officials, am inclined to agree with him. What we are referring to is the ethics reform bill just passed by the Tennessee Legislature. Like any promise of reform from an unrepentant addict, it’s heartbreakingly meaningless. The bill puts limits on what lobbyists can do, but that’s like putting limits on how much a shark can bite instead of getting rid of the shark—if the shark has to take ten little bites to eat you instead of one big one, he’ll just take his time and bite you ten times to get what he wants, because you still haven’t kept him from getting what he wants.

What would “getting rid of the shark” look like? We can see an example in the State of Maine, which has recently made public financing of political campaigns a cornerstone of its democracy. Most Maine legislators are now campaigning with funds provided by the taxpayers of Maine, instead of the state’s wealthy business interests, and it is making a difference. Maine is now the only state in the Union that offers universal health care—something blocked year after year by lobbying interests although poll after poll reveals its popularity and study after study reveals its sanity. Just for another example, Maine has also passed legislation guaranteeing truckers overtime pay, although every trucking company in the state opposed it.

Here’s how lobbying and state government work elsewhere: in West Virginia, when legislation was introduced due to public outrage over accidents from illegally overloaded coal trucks, by the time the  lobbyists got through with it the law raised the legal load limit on coal trucks

A great deal of this has to do with the legal notion that corporations are “persons” in somewhat the same sense that you and I are persons: corporations are entitled to the same rights of free speech and discretionary spending that human beings are. (Fortunately, they have not yet been accorded the right to vote—although they can buy elections a lot more easily than you or I!) Now, there are some important differences between a corporation with the right of free speech and discretionary spending and a human being with those rights.

First, a corporation is likely to have a great deal more money and other resources than a human being—insofar as freedom of the press is for those who own one, they can buy not merely presses but editors and publishers and distributors and retail outlets. They can buy out their competition and shut it down much more readily than a private citizen can. Comcast, Bell, and some other big corporations are trying to do that to the internet, even as we speak.

Second, corporations, properly run, live much longer than human beings, and having composite brains made up of replaceable individuals dedicated to their service, are capable of carrying out more complex and longer-term plans than individual human beings. This can be a good thing. It can also be a very bad thing.

Third, a for-profit corporation is committed through its charter to one basic purpose: becoming bigger and wealthier. To state this a little differently, for-profit corporations are dedicated to infinite self-agrandisement. If this were the case for an individual human being, that person would be deemed a dangerous sociopath or psychopath, removed from all positions of responsibility, and segregated from society. In the case of corporations, we tend to put them in positions of responsibility and let them order society. I don’t know about you, but this does not make sense to me.

Not-for-profit corporations, by contrast, are primarily dedicated to providing some kind of service, rather than to self-enrichment. This is a much saner business model.

A fourth difference between corporations and individual humans is that, while humans may face capital punishment for crimes against society, corporations face no such direct threat. Only financial judgments may be levied against them, and if those financial judgments wreak havoc with the corporate bottom line, there are bankruptcy courts that are the financial equivalent of Intensive Care Units, designed to do everything they can to keep their corporate patients’ cash flowing. There is no such state-run fallback mechanism for individual human beings who run afoul of the death penalty—and due to recent changes in the law there’s a lot less help for those of us who fall into mere bankruptcy, too.

Now, I seem to be a bit far afield from ethics reform in the Tennessee Legislature, but I think real legislative ethics reform has to be sweeping enough to bring corporations to heel, including capital punishment for the most serious corporate crimes. That is, a corporation should be subject to dissolution for doing things that get large numbers of people killed or injured—think Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Dow, Dupont, asbestos, coal mining…the corporate sector in America is completely out of control. It should exist to serve the people, not the other way ’round, as our current government advocates.

I think another wider reform that would bring us a more ethical government would be greater competition in the political field. We need to work to break up the Demopublican stranglehold on elected office. The either-or political choices we are forced into by this monopoly do not encourage creative thinking. We need to make politics more of a multiple choice affair. Just for openers, we need to make it legal for so-called “third party” candidates to list their party affiliation on the Tennessee ballot.

Equally important would be the institution of Instant Runoff voting, which allows you to vote for your second choice as well as your first choice. For example, I’d rather see the Green Party’s Chris Lugo as senator from Tennessee than Democrat Harold Ford, but I’d much rather see Ford in the post than, just for example, Van Hilleary. So I could cast my primary vote for Chris, and my secondary vote for Harold. And, if Chris doesn’t win, but Ford can plainly see that he won because he was the second choice of a substantial minority of Green Party voters, then he knows he has to keep the Green Party faction happy to get elected. And if Chris gets elected because a whole lot of people feel more comfortable voting for a Green over a Democrat because they know they’re not supporting a Republican by splitting the non-Republican vote, so much the better.

Other reform measures that would result in a more honest legislature would be making referendum and recall readily available to the citizens of Tennessee, so that not only do the Republicrats lose their monopoly on elected office, the legislature no longer has a monopoly on enacting legislation. And of course, the foundation of any electoral system is a tamper-proof voting system—for which we need national legislation to replace Bush’s Helping Americans Vote Republican act, which, by pushing states towards non-verifiable electronic voting systems, makes it easier to steal elections.

Meanwhile, there’s cancer in our legislature and all we’ve got for it is this lousy bandaid. Guess we need to make more noise.

(no music segue)

Governor Bredesen gave his “State of the State” address recently. Compared to W’s recent remarks, Phil’s presentation was the very model of honesty and vision, but there was much he merely put a good face on, and much that he ignored.

Tenncare is, of course, the bull elephant in Tennessee’s parlor, and it was good to hear the Guv tie lifestyle counseling in as part of his health care reform package, but the fact remains that, as a health care millionaire, Bredesen is as responsible for skyrocketing health care costs as anyone. Is Dracula really going to curb the vampire problem?

Bredesen, like Bill Frist, has grown fat by profiting from others’ misfortune. Speaking of ethics reform, how ’bout giving up your ill-gotten gains, Phil? They’d help a lot of poor people stay alive. Phil says he will be proposing major health-care reforms soon, and has proposed a way to cover all the uninsured children in the state, but he’s not getting to the deep issue here—we are caught in the clutches of a for-profit medical system that is geared towards wealth accumulation, not promoting human health.

For example, over the last seven years, four diabetes lifestyle clinics along the line of what Gov. Bredesen seems to be proposing have opened in New York City, but three of them have closed because they lost literally millions of dollars, even though they were doing wonders for the patients who used their services. Healthier diabetics do not need to spend so much money on pills and procedures, and that, in our current economic regime, is not a good thing—it lowers the GNP! Ah, the religion of economics….put wealth before health, kiddies… Insurance companies balk at taking on diabetics, because they are obvious losers from the for-profit company’s point of view. For-profit hospitals must make the best-paying use of their time, and people pay more for kidney dialysis, amputations, and stomach-shrinking operations than they do for diet and exercise counseling.

And people who receive and apply that counseling, not only are lowering the GNP by not consuming so many expensive pills and procedures, they’re weakening the country by not buying the foods that contribute so much to the American economy—pizza, ice cream, cheeseburgers, french fries—excuse me, freedom fries—red meat, wonderbread—all the big contributors to the GOP—I mean GNP –are gonna get hurt if too many people change their diet. And if people are out exercising instead of watching TV, how will we control what they think and how they vote?

The exercise thing must have been a sop, like Bush’s “alcohol from switch grass” line—the very next day, Shrub cut the alternative fuels r&d budget. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Phil’s lifestyle counseling centers. And will health insurance for all of Tennessee’s uninsured kids be insurance that lots of them get put on Ritalin? Stay tuned.

An issue that Gov. Bredesen didn’t touch was the continuing deterioration of small-town life in Tennessee as Walmart continues to suck money out of the state. Sure, they’ve got the lowest prices around, partly because they have such a big, efficient distribution system, and partially because they underpay their employees. And sure, those low prices are a boon to low-income people, but if Walmart wasn’t driving wages down and driving out owner-run retail business, there would be a lot fewer low-income people who need to take advantage of Walmart’s low prices to stretch their shrinking food stamps.

But…what could the State of Tennessee do about Walmart, especially now that it’s ubiquitous?

The most obvious step relates back to the health care question—Gov. Bredesen could ask for legislation requiring all companies over a certain size to provide affordable, comprehensive health care plans to their employees. Yeah, I know that doesn’t establish not-for profit health care, but you gotta start somewhere. For another thing, he could ask for legislation that would, through zoning and tax incentives, work to preserve open land and discourage sprawl, so that the Walmart/strip mall plague doesn’t get any worse.

I think another big/little step would be to use the power, organization, and communication ability of the state government to foster community economic organizing—rather than bringing in outside corporations to provide services and employment in Tennessee’s dying country towns, we need to bring people together in those towns and help them realize their own strengths and their ability to provide for themselves. The Mondragon movement in Spain provides a template for this kind of worker-owned co-operative business. Neighborhood food, clothing, and shelter providers need to become the order of the day, because, as our Junkie-in-Chief put it in his speech, “America is addicted to oil,” and we need to break that addiction before it gets broken for us by crashing oil supplies and skyrocketing prices. When that day comes, Tennessee will, if current trends continue, find itself with an excellent network of four-lane footpaths, at least until the rivers change course and wash out the bridges. Then there will be some job opportunities for ferrypersons.

Phil spoke not a word about peak oil or global warming, nor did he offer anything that even remotely seemed like a way to meet these crises, crises that will turn low high school graduation rates and the so-called “meth epidemic” into the worst problems we wish we had. P.S. to Phil, if you want people to quit screwing around with amphetamines, you could try legalizing marihuana—or even legalizing amphetamine, which was an over-the-counter, cheap, nonprescription drug from its invention in the thirties until the mid-fifties, without producing any noticeable crime wave–not that I’d use it even if it was legal.  But, I digress.

Governor Bredesen could have showed some vision by asking the state legislature to endorse the Kyoto Protocols, or some courage by denouncing the war in Iraq (which, after all, has as much legal basis as the Nazi invasion of Poland!) and announcing that he will no longer allow Tennessee National Guard Troops to be sent over there to get their asses shot off to keep our fear factor government happening. He could have just shown common sense by proposing an initiative to cut Tennessee’s electrical consumption, or to encourage more solar design in all the development that’s eating what’s left of the countryside in this state, but he didn’t do any of those. He gave a nice, business-as-usual, nothing extraordinary about to happen around here speech—but business is not as usual and extraordinary things are coming to pass, and he will go down in history as a man who did nothing to prepare us for it. Sorry, Phil, you flunked.

music:  James McMurtry, “Candyland”

The United States of America took a giant step towards becoming a totalitarian fascist state this month with the confirmation of Samuel J. “Muss”Alito as a Supreme Court Justice, and now there is an argument over whether another step in that direction—the Bush junta’s domestic surveillance program– should be allowed to stand or whether that might just be too much.

Bush, Cheney, and Gonzalez are taking the rather Orwellian stance that their clear violation of the FISA law is not a violation of the law, because the President can do anything he wants during wartime, and we’re at war—except that we are not, by the way, legally “at war.” The resolution that the Senate Democrats so spinelessly approved gave Mr. Bush permission to use all necessary force to go after Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but that is not the same as a formal declaration of war any more than a separation agreement is a finalized divorce. The Bushoids are stretching the truth here, and mostly getting away with it. No wonder they think they can act outside the law.

The administration is insisting that it’s only interested in people directly linked to Al Qaeda, but my sense is that this is just like all the pressure to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge–it’s intended to set a precedent which can then be followed with more outrageous demands.

And what’s the state of the Onion? It’s enough to make you cry! Mr. Bush finished his speech with “God Bless America.” I say, “God help America!” This country is cruisin’ for a bruisin’. We had as much right to invade Iraq as the Nazis had to invade Poland, and now all the chickenbleep neocons are working it up for a nice, clean air war against Iran. Whomp that tar baby one more time, Mr. Rumsfeld.

Not only are the cowards in the government outraged about being called to account for their illegal surveillance program, they’re all upset that it was revealed. They say it’s a serious blow to our intelligence effort, and that heads will roll when they find out who leaked it.

Our intelligence services’ intelligence quotient must be pretty low if they think that people in the U.S. (or anywhere else) who are talking to Al Qaeda DON”T assume that their phones are tapped. I mean, what are they expecting to hear? “Hassan, it’s me, Mahdi. Our sleeper cell will be meeting tonight at 8PM at the Public Library. Look, we need to talk to Osama about this bomb we’re building for him. Is he there? Could you put him on the phone? Hey, Osama, baby, how’s it goin’? You’re staying in Brindaban-alQat, eh? Like it there? That little hotel by the wadi, that’s where you’re staying? Yeah, that’s my uncle runs it, tell him his nephew Mahdi sez “hello” and I’ll be thinking of him and all the folks back home when we blow up that refinery at 15th and J streets in Houston next week.”

C’mon, guys, get real, they were on to your surveillance long before the New York Times broke the story. You want to prosecute someone for really screwing up our national security? Then give up the guys who outed Valerie Plame and quit playing hide-and-seek with Fitzgerald. Valerie Plame really was on the front line in the effort to keep dangerous weapons away from dangerous people, and you guys blew her cover and destroyed the network she had created, destroyed a working intelligence effort that was keeping harm from being done, and for what? Because her husband told the truth about your lies. How do you sleep? George? Dick? Don? Condoleeza? How do you sleep?

I don’t know how Senate Democrats can sleep, either, except for 24 of them. Twenty spineless cowards who claim to be Democrats joined with the Republican majority to shut down debate on MussAlito’s nomination. Forget about abortion, forget about his apparent willingness to say what people want to hear in order to get a job. This guy is behind the “Unitary Executive” theory of U.S. government 100%., and the Unitary Executive theory basically throws our whole system of checks and balances out the window and concentrates power in the hands of the President. The Bush junta has succeeded in stacking the Supreme Court. We’re stuck with a pack of relatively young, conservative creeps there for maybe the next thirty years, guys who will uphold the intrusive power of corporations and the U.S. government whether it makes sense or not. Thank you, Senate Democrats—sincerely thank you to the two dozen who tried to stop this, and a big “thanks for nothing!” to the ones who kissed Bush’s ass.

And, by the way, Rahm Emanuel, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee, has announced that the committee will not be supporting peace candidates in the 2006 election, in spite of the fact that the war is hugely unpopular, in spite of the fact that a Democratic peace candidate came within a hair of winning a traditionally Republican district in Ohio last year and the war is even less popular this year. The Democrats are putting their money on candidates like Tennessee’s Harold Ford, who wants to throw another 375,000 U.S. troops into Iraq so we can “win.” Harold, I got news—we ain’t got another 375,000 troops, and we have no more right to be in Iraq than the Germans had to be in Poland—how many times do I have to say that before it goes national?

Well, most Democrats are whores—they’ll say and do what they think they must to get elected. The Green Party is a political party that stands for peaceful resolution of disputes, whether it gets us elected or not. And this year, with many Democrats trying to out-hawk Bush on this criminal war, it might just get a bunch of us elected. I’m ready.

music: Laurie Anderson, “The Day the Devil Comes to Get You”

My evangelical Christian mother-in-law recently invited me and my wife to go see “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” with her. Although I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ entire series several times (including reading it as a bedtime story to my children), I had been reluctant to go see the movie version, largely because so much has been made of it as a “Christian” movie, and because I didn’t want my visualizations of Narnia distorted by Disney Studios.

I didn’t have to worry. The movie is not preachy, and it is a feast for the eyes. But I’m not getting into a movie review from here, I’m getting into C.S. Lewis’ essential message, and what it meant to me when I first encountered Narnia, in a remote cabin in the mountains of California in the winter of 1969. I was visiting friends there, out beyond the power grid, where gravel roads tailed off into two-tracks that tailed off into saplings. It was the first time I had ever been so far away from civilization. As my surroundings sunk in on me, I was surprised and delighted with how overwhelmingly right it all felt. This was the way to live.

That night we sat down to read their young children a bedtime story. It was “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and it was the first time I had ever heard of C.S. Lewis. My friends and I found the book so entrancing that, children sleeping in our laps, we continued to read the book out loud to each other, finally finishing in the wee small hours of the night. The book had connected with our deepest longings, a message down through time that we were not alone, need not fear the outcome of the struggle that endangered us then and still does today—our vision of a relaxed, pastoral, reverent, and magical world was eloquently shared in C.S. Lewis’ vision. At a deeper level, the psycho-spiritual evolution of his four young protagonists was an inspiration to us in our struggles with our own personal shortcomings.

Seeing the movie reminded me of that ecstatic weekend in the California pines. That weekend, with my friends and C.S. Lewis, I was granted a vision of the world and my role in it, and over thirty-five years later it remains one of my defining moments.

I went on to absorb as much C.S. Lewis as I could find, fiction and nonfiction, in the years after that.  Although I became a Buddhist, not a Christian, I have never lost my appreciation for him. Seeing “The Chronicles of Narnia” on the big screen caused me to revisit the lessons I had learned from him. Here are some quotes I found. Ollie North likes this guy? He must not have read far enough.

In one essay, Lewis wrote: “Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in the other way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact . . . be treated as an enemy [by the State]. Like learning, like the family, like any ancient and liberal profession, like the common law, it gives the individual a standing ground against the State.”

So much for the Christian right claiming Lewis, eh?

In his adult science-fiction story That Hideous Strength, Lewis shared his vision of the modern world: “However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren books: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and returned to Britain across the great ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all.” That’s what Lewis said, about the darkness that has enveloped this planet, the darkness I like to refer to as “the religion of economics”–the notion that whatever makes the most money is best, and whoever makes the most money is most worthy.

In another essay, Lewis could easily have been speaking to the current political situation in America when he wrote (using a small “d”):

“I am a democrat… I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretentions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent.

“But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt.”

How could Lewis know that 43 years after his death, the United States would have a leader who believes he is appointed by God? And, as if speaking to the Bush junta’s plans to invade our privacy through the wonders of technology, Lewis wrote:

“The question… has become… whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting? Let us make no mistake about the sting. … To live his own life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death–these are wishes deeply ingrained in … civilised man.” (from Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”)

Lewis’ perspective on politics was to approach it by focusing on underlying principles, not short-term results. He is not left wing, he is not right wing. He is Green. I’m claiming him. And I’m grateful to be reminded of the inspiration at the heart of my politics. May I never forget where I’m coming from.

music:  Joan Baez, “Satisfied Mind”

Comments

Rock on, Bro.
Posted by sirensongs on 02/13/2006 12:08:22 PM