DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

A reader of my blog last month asked me some serious questions, so I’m going to take this opportunity to respond to them. To refresh your memory, I had spoken about my admiration for Ken Jakes’ “no money from Political Action Comittees” stance, and dismay with Lonnell Matthews for taking advantage of so many of the offers that Ken had turned down. I also had voiced my support for Karl Dean.

Here’s what a reader said about these issues:

“I guess I’m somewhat confused about a lot of things said in this post. First of all, the PAC money mentioned as coming to Candidate Lonell Matthews Jr. all comes from local groups within Nashville. School teachers, plumbers, pipefitters, government employees etc. It’s not like he was supported by AT&T, Colt Arms, Blue Cross etc. We’re talking working people who get together to promote a little justice in our local society by supporting like-minded people.

And as regards Karl Dean, I’m stunned that you have chosen a millionaire Belle Meade lawyer whose huge personal fortune comes from strip mining in West Virginia and Wyoming. I’m speechless.”

and here’s my initial reply:

“One of the major sources of political bankroll in Nashville is the business community, specifically big players like Gaylord, who, according to Ken Jakes (who as far as I can tell has no reason to lie about this) use their influence to circumvent zoning and environmental laws. So, when he accepted money from the Nashville Business Council, Lonnell WAS accepting money from big corporate players.

As far as Karl Dean goes, the question is not where his money comes from, which he has little control over, since it’s his wife’s inheritance, but what he’s going to do with it. And no, he’s certainly not perfect, but my call is that he’s less imperfect than Bob Clement.

To me, there’s an underlying issue here, the populist/progressive divide, and questions like why so many politicians who start out somewhat progressive but mainly populist end up being demagogues like Huey Long. I plan to write on this topic for my show next month.

Thanks for caring enough to say something” So, here we go.

Now, here’s the thing: all of the other candidates I supported were taking PAC money and I had no problem with that. Jerry Maynard had loads of endorsements, including the Nashville Business Coalition. Megan Barry, the “ethics candidate,” accepted endorsements, although most of hers were from genuine grassroots groups such as the Sierra Club, the Tennessee Equality Council, and the Nashville Neighborhood Defence Council. But she did accept the endorsement of the Greater Nashville Hotel and Lodging Association….must have been a fluke.

And, among Lonnel Matthews’ endorsements from the firefighters, the Democrats, and the police, all of which fall into my correspondent’s characterization of “working people,” was…the Nashville Business Coalition! Hmm…the NBC doesn’t maintain a website, although it apparently meets regularly and endorses candidates and ideas…this mysterious entity may be linked to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, and may include Gaylord, HCA, and all the other big players that Ken Jakes was so concerned about, but I’m going to have to keep researching to find out, it seems.

As far as the Green Party thing about not taking PAC money, it starts to look like a question of how you define “PAC.” I had always thought of PACs as big spenders at the state or national level, not the local Service Employees International Union or gay rights advocates. To run a competitve citywide race in a big city like Nashville takes money, and so Jerry Maynard and Megan Barry took money from organizations they felt comfortable with. I can’t fault them for that.

The race between Ken Jakes and Lonnell Matthews, on the other hand, drew on a voting pool of less than ten thousand voters, in a district designed to elect a black candidate. Considerably fewer than half the eligible voters turned out, which gave white candiate Ken Jakes a fighting chance. When you look at the lopsided precinct-by-precinct results, you can see that the votes were cast largely along racial lines, and that it would have taken a lot for Lonnell to lose. So Ken’s totals probably wouldn’t have been improved by endorsements, but he got to look noble by declining to seek any. Lonnell probably increased his margin of victory a little with the advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts he made for the runoff, but it’s significant to note that his vote total for the runoff amounts to his votes in the first round plus the votes for William Mason, the other major black campaigner in the first round.

As for the Dean-Clement race, I have yet to meet Karl Dean, but all of my friends who met him were impressed with the fact that he does not come across like a stereotypical politician. “He’s a mensch,” one of my Jewish friends commented. He’s been involved in Metro government long enough that I’m sure he’s got some dirty laundry, but hey, don’t we all? We need people in power who are not typical, people who are not habitually committed to the status quo, and I think Karl Dean is as good as we’re going to get for now, so I voted for him. If he screws up badly, I won’t vote for him again.

Now, about those “wider issues,” that question of why populists become demagogues…let’s start with a bit of evidence that will seem almost too good to be true to some, and totally obnoxious to others. It’s a study done at UCLA, which seems to show that people who are politiically “liberal” use more of their brains than those who are politically conservative. This greater brain usage allows them to tolerate ambiguity and change their minds more easily, opening them to charges like “flip-flopper.” Sound familiar?

What does that have to do with populists and demagogues? OK, we’ve tended to conflate populists with progressives in this country, because the system, in spite of a lot of fancy ideals, is mostly weighted against the people, so it’s progressive to be an advocate for the common people. But there are two different kinds of being “for the common people.” There’s being for the people because it’s the fair thing to do, and then there’s being for the people because you want to get what’s rightfully yours, by god, and screw them all if that’s what it takes for you and yours to get your due. If that’s the kind of populist you are, then once you have “your rightful due,” you will do whatever it takes to defend it, whether that’s fair to everyone else or not—the “my country, right or wrong” approach. This is about a hundred and eighty degrees from the truly progressive, “the right thing, whether it means my country is wrong or not” attitude, and I think it starts to explain why a “liberal” and a conservative can look at the same facts and come up with such different interpretations, and that’s why some populists have the potential to turn into demagogues.

A corollary question is, what about people who are, as has been said of our new vice mayor, “progressive but not populist?” I think this is a viewpoint that rejects “right or wrong” populism but doesn’t fully articulate “for the good of everyone” populism, because the holder of the viewpoint has judged, rightly or wrongly, that the electorate is not ready for such a bold step. And, when you look at the people we elect on a national level, I’m sorry to say I think they’re justified in their pessimism.

music: Mothers of Invention, Hungry Freaks

Two sexually sensational stories graced the pages of the Nashville Scene recently, although they were pitched in radically different directions. Now, if you’re not from Nashville, or even if you are, there are three things you should know about the Nashville Scene. One is that it bills itself as “Nashville’s alternative weekly.” The second is that its editor, Liz Garrigan, is an admitted Republican. The third is that the paper is owned by the Village Voice, which is owned by that icon of the counterculture, Rupert Murdoch. Is that enough to rust your sense of irony, or what?

The original wave of “alternative weeklies” in this country was started by a widespread, disorganized gang of political and cultural radicals who lived on the cheap to scrap together newspapers that would present a sympathetic view of the counterculture and a critical view of the establishment. Papers like the East Village Other, the Fifth Estate, and the Berkley Barb put out stories and reviews that mainstream news distorted beyond recognition, or wouldn’t touch at all. Their weak spot was advertising; while they provided a forum for local community economic endeavors, their big revenue came from the record companies, and when the record companies got together and decided not to advertise in publications that referred to them as “capitalist pigs,” (which, really, does make sense from a certain point of view), most of the “underground press”collapsed in a matter of months, surviving only in bigger cities where there was enough local advertising to sustain them, and ultimately mutating into renamed, tamer versions of their wild and woolly original selves, like many of their founders and readership.

The “Nashville Scene” has no such honorable lineage. It was started in 1989 by an advertising executive and a disgruntled reporter for the Nashville Banner, a now-deceased, strongly Republican newspaper. In response to this loss of polarity, the Nashville Tennessean, formerly a crusading liberal Democratic newspaper, was sold to the Gannett chain and has since done its level best to be innocuous. And, after making a success of the Scene, with the motto “all the news that gives you fits,” frequently referring to the local establishment as “bizpigs,” and to their credit printing “the twenty-five most censored stories of the year” for many years, the Scene’s local owners sold out to Mr. Murdoch, whose publications are occasionally known for challenging peoples’ sexual sensibilities, but not the status quo. No more “bizpigs,” no more Project Censored.

But, as I so often say, I digress. A couple of weeks ago, the Scene put out what at first glance seemed like a National Enquirer-worthy story about an airline pilot married to a much younger woman who is serving a lifetime prison sentence. My first thought was, “Good grief! Tennessee’s got the most hackable voting system in the country and it’s being defended to the death by our election officials. We’re in the grip of a killer drought that has been brought on in part by widespread deforestation of the state in the name of economic development, and we cut thousands of people off from public health care rather than divert money from our road building funds or raise taxes on the wealthy, and THIS is what they’re featuring?”

When I read the story, I was relieved to discover that they were actually onto something good. The heinous crime, it seems, was not committed by the woman, Teresa Harris—the heinous crime was that she had been imprisoned for it when she was only there as the virtual hostage of her abusive boyfriend, forced to witness a cruel and senseless death while she feared for her own life. An incompetent defense lawyer and a zealous prosecutor sealed her fate.

Her presence at this murder was the culmination of a lifetime of sexual molestation and physical abuse by literally dozens of relatives and so-called “friends,” none of whom have ever had to take any responsibility for causing such severe damage to a child.

It was just life in small-town, lower-class America. There are millions of girls and women in this country who have suffered this kind of abuse. Abuse is not over when it’s over. The repercussions are passed on through the generations. “It happened to me, so it’s no big deal if it happens to my daughter. She’ll get over it. It’s no big deal if my sons or brothers or cousins or father do it. That’s just how men are.” Most of the women who are abused, and the men who abuse them, don’t end up involved in murder. They just die slow deaths….

This attitude of helplessness, of passivity in the face of personal injustice, is a poison in our society. It poisons not just relations between men and women, but all our relations—political, economic, religious. A symptom of this poisoning is hypocrisy, in which we prosecute women when they act out their abuse and alienation without paying any attention to what made them that way. Teresa Harris is one example. Another was provided by the Nashville Scene the very next week, when they featured the tale of an exotic dancer who had been busted for giving “hand jobs” to patrons of the club where she worked, but had not lost her dancer’s license for this “crime.” The Scene’s reporter opined that this was just awful, as well as throwing in a gratuitous mention of Nashville’s private sex clubs and calling for them to be outlawed, too. I think this reporter has a problem.

Here we have the sad intersection of men so desperate for sexual release that they will pay a complete stranger $100 for the few minutes it will take her to milk them, and a woman so desperate for money that she will comply with their wishes. It’s certainly not a very happy arrangement– you can bet they don’t cuddle afterwards. Now, I find both parties’ behavior neurotic in the extreme, but I see no reason to criminalize the interaction. Hey, there’s millions of people in bars every night of the week looking for, and getting, something like this, except that the woman doesn’t come out of the experience a hundred dollars richer. Come to think of it, doing it for money makes it a lot more straightforward, y’know?

But I don’t mean to devalue a serious subject. While there are brave, outrageous women sex workers who wear their chosen profession proudly, the odds are that a woman who is selling her body has suffered from the kind of abuse and molestation that put Teresa Harris at a murder scene. Criminalizing them does not heal them.

And men…we like to talk about addiction in this society, but we consistently ignore the most pervasive addiction of them all—addiction to male orgasm. Everybody just assumes that’s normal, that’s what sex is about, “boys will be boys.” Nobody asks whether this is one of the origins of the malaise of our culture. Hey, “Sex sells.”

Think about it. Heterosexual men go through life, blithely assuming that women are supposed to provide them with orgasms, one way or another. This objectifies a man’s sex partner. That is, it turns his sex partner into the means through which he attempts to satisfy his addiction, and this creates alienation, even when two people love each other very much.

It is fair to ask at this point just how I’m defining “addiction.” My Webster’s dictionary defines the word as meaning”being devoted or surrendered to something habitually or obsessively.” I think it’s further in the nature of addiction that the proposed solution, whether it’s orgasm or heroin or alcohol or tobacco, doesn’t really fix the problem, and so another fix becomes necessary. Here, of course, we intersect with the definition of “crazy” as, “repeating the same action over and over again, expecting to get different results.” I believe the incessant male quest for orgasm fits within these parameters.

So, now what? and what does this have to do with the Green Party?

I think the facts laid out in this essay, from the crucifixion of Teresa Harris to the almost universal male selfishness that broke her, call for very specific actions, as well as an overall change of direction in our legal system.

First, we must reform our legal system so that District Attorneys can no longer build a career on the number of convictions they can get. Judges and D.A.s must be reoriented away from punishment and blame and onto the path of fact finding and appropriate action. Sending people to jail does not heal the wounded individuals who commit anti-social acts, let alone the wounded individuals who commit victimless crimes. And of course, many of those who commit so-called victimless crimes aren’t wounded at all, at least until the criminal justice system puts them through the wringer.

We need to reform our whole society on the subject of sex, so that those who try and spread a rational, accepting attitude towards this basic human drive are not demonized and opposed by uptight parents and fearful clergy. It will take many, many people speaking out in many places for such a thing to happen. Our culture has relentlessly pilloried the prophets of this notion ever since Margaret Sanger first tried to disseminate information about birth control. The main lesson is that there is more enjoyment for a man in pleasuring a woman than there is in him coming, rolling over, and going to sleep. Male orgasm equals game over, everybody go home, y’know? With female orgasm, the sky’s the limit!

And we need to reform our economic expectations and opportunities, so that the lifestyles of the rich and famous are seen as the shamefully self-indulgent crimes against humanity that they are, while at the same time young women have more attractive and lucrative opportunities available to them than pole dancing and hundred-dollar hand jobs. I don’t see the Democrats coming up with the courage to tackle any of this.

Freud was wrong about many things, but one of the things he was right about was that peoples’ sexual attitudes form the core of their personalties. Violent revolutions and non-violent revolutions alike have failed in the face of the reactionary psychology of those they intended to help. To make a real change in America, we have to begin in the hearts of our most wounded and downtrodden women, and in the hearts of the wounded and downtrodden men who hurt them. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s the only thing we can do.

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “The Ballad of Yvonne Johnson”

If one example epitomizes creeping fascism in America, it is the recent Florida incident in which John Kerry did nothing while police tasered and arrested a student who asked him a rambling question about why Kerry had not contested the 2004 election and why nobody had moved to impeach Bush. Did Kafka write the script for this? Andrew Meyer had a non-soundbite question. He was trying to lay out enough background so that his question made sense, and had in fact gotten to his point, when University of Florida police moved in, manhandled him to the back of the room, put him on the floor and tasered him, while Kerry droned on, making jokes about the incident( “I’m afraid he’s not able to come up here and swear me in as President.”) and everybody in the room just sat and watched. Later, Kerry claimed he was not aware that Meyer was being tasered. Hey, the guy was screaming “Don’t taser me!” I guess this kind of answered his question about why Kerry didn’t contest the election. All that’s necessary for evil to triumph, they say, is for good people to do nothing.

When I was in college, an incident like that would have sparked a riot, tasers or no tasers. The fact that nothing happened is a sad commentary on the state of America today, and what’s sadder is that it’s not the only symptom of repression, or of passive acceptance of repression. We’ve all heard of no-fly lists, and the increased airport security that goes with them. Flying these days is like going to a voluntary prison,where they treat you OK as long as you do what they tell you. Step out of line like Carol Gotbaum or Doris Watson, and police who are trained to confront big, burly, healthy male criminal types will manhandle you to death. What happened to treating women, no matter how agitated, like ladies?

While these womens’ deaths are, so far, isolated incidents, there are plenty of people who have found that the friendly skies aren’t friendly to them any more. While the exact number is a state secret, there are an estimated 700,000 people either forbidden to fly in this country or subject to intense search and questioning every time they board an airplane. What have they done? In many cases, they are individuals who have spoken out against US government policy. This is political harassment, pure and simple. In spite of widespread protest, the government is planning to make travel even more difficult—by next year you will, if they have their way, need a passport to visit Canada and a federally-approved “real ID” to enter federal courthouses, national parks, and other locations. Gotta protect them national parks from freedom-hating terrorists, yessir. Oh, by the way, you won’t be able to get social security or open a bank account without it—and you may not be able to get one, and it may cost more than you can afford.

Plus, you can only cross the US-Canada border if you’ve been a very good little boy or girl. In June, I recounted the plight of a psychologist who has been refused entry into the US because of articles he published in praise of psychedelics, thirty years ago, although he has no arrest record and has been visiting his family in the US without incident for decades; now comes news that two anti-war activists, Medea Benjamin and Ann Wright, of Code Pink, were recently refused entry into Canada because of the arrests they have undergone to protest the war. Both had entered Canada with no problem as recently as August. It seems the US FBI gave Canadian customs the National Crime Information Center list so the Canadians would know who to keep out, and it makes no difference to the Canadians whether you were arrested for attempted murder or for trying to stop a war they themselves had the good sense to avoid. According to this standard, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu would all be denied entry into Canada. And speaking of Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner was briefly blackballed from speaking in Minneapolis because Jews in Minnesota interpreted his criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as “anti-Semitic.” Hey, Arabs are Semites too, y’know? And what the Israelis are doing to them IS a lot like apartheid! Anyway, THAT particular piece of American censorship was turned back by popular outcry.

American censorship. It’s what’s happening, baby. We got Pearl Jam’s anti-Bush lyrics to “The Wall” cut out, we got Bono’s speech accepting the Liberty Medal edited for him. (The company did present his full remarks in another, longer video clip that fewer people would see.) We got Verizon trying to keep NARAL from using its flash messaging service, we got Yahoo and MSN deciding that Truthout’s emails are junk no matter what the recipients think. And, speaking of keeping people from finding things out for themselves, we got marijuana arrests at another all-time high. In 2005 it was one every forty seconds, in 2006 it was one every thirty-eight seconds. That may sound like a pretty trivial increase, but those two seconds mean that 47,000 more people—another 130 people every day– were arrested for marijuana last year, mostly for simple possession. More people were arrested for marijuana than for all violent crimes put together. Hey, is this a free country or what? It will only be a free country if lots and lots of us, too many of us to haul away or throw a wall around, start exercising our rights. John Kerry and his vacuous Democratic buddies—Hillary, Obama, whoever– are not gonna do the job for us.

music: REM, “Welcome to the Occupation”

We may never know if Dick Cheney’s move to nuke Iran was foiled by a brave and unsung band of levelheaded Air Force personnel, but something mighty strange happened in September. Nuclear-armed cruise missiles were mounted on a B-52 and flown from Minot, North Dakota, to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, which is the staging ground for flights to the Middle East. The official Air Force cover story claimed the missiles were being moved in order to be decommissioned, but missiles that are being decommissioned areGO moved to Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, and are crated and moved inside cargo airplanes, not mounted on the wings of a B-52.

The official story also claimed that the mounting crews may have thought they were loading dummy missiles onto the B-52, but live warheads are clearly marked to differentiate them from dummies, and the ground crew must have known what they were doing. The security procedures for handling live missiles are so rigorous, and the order to mount them has to come from so far up the chain of command, that this could hardly have been a ground crew error. They knew what they were doing. The as-yet unanswered questions are, why were they doing it, and who originated the order to put live missiles on a B-52? We may never know.

The last time a US military airplane flew with live nuclear weapons was 1968, when a bomber crashed in Greenland. One of its bombs blew apart, spreading nuclear contamination over a wide area. The other three have never been found. Hey, now that the Greenland ice cap is melting, maybe they’ll turn up! After that incident, the US quit carrying live nuclear weapons around in airplanes. It was the last of a long string of airplane accidents involving nuclear weapons, some of which nearly resulted in nuclear explosions on US soil. The US has since signed a treaty abjuring the casual transportation of live nuclear weapons, which this incident violated. Hey, treaties are just scraps of paper. If that attitude was good enough for Hitler, it’s good enough for our homegrown Fuhrer.

It’s a good thing those Air Force guys stopped the war with Iran, if that’s what was going on, because the Democrats ain’t gonna. A Democratically controlled Congress has unconstitutionally surrendered its right to declare war on Iran to the junta’s deranged judgment. Hillary and Obama have threatened Iran. Now all three Democratic front-runners are saying they think they’ll probably keep US troops in Iraq through their entire terms. Why worry about getting the Republicans out of office when the Democrats will do their job for them?

It’s about the oil, stupid. Iraq has got about a quarter of the world’s known oil reserves, worth about thirty trillion dollars, which makes the trillion we have spent so far seem like not a bad investment, from a certain, highly amoral point of view. Look at it this way: the “oil law” that the US keeps pressuring the Iraqi government to enact, and which to its credit it has declined to do, gives the bulk of Iraq’s oil and oil profits to foreign oil development companies, presumably US ones, such as Bush’s buddy Hunt Oil, which recently signed a separate contract with the Kurds. If we had merely removed Saddam Hussein without trashing the country, there wouldn’t be the confusion and disorder that seem to call for a big US troop presence, which allows us to press for this highly favorable (to US oil interests) law.

Once we have our hands firmly on a quarter of the world’s oil supplies, we can drop the price back down, and destabilize Iran and Venezuela. We have a counterweight to our massive debt to China. They won’t turn us into a washed-up, third-world economy, because they’ll depend on us for oil. We can go on driving SUVs and living in luxury, and laugh all the way to the bank. That’s what’s happening here, folks. The Democratic “front runners” are as committed to US hegemony as Mr. Bush, they’re just a little friendlier to the common people. Good cop, bad cop, they’re still the cops. I am tired of getting my choice only of which cop will be in charge of my persecution and interrogation.

It’s the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the rescue, though. Financial reality and ecological collapse will inevitably collide with the dreams of politicians. The subprime boondoggle is officially contained, but that’s just the official word. Life is just going to get tougher for the millions of Americans who have been living beyond their means just to survive, as they discover that bankruptcy is no longer an escape. Can you say “debt slaves,” boys and girls? The stock market is up, but the dollar is down, and it’s going to take more running than we can do just to stay in place.

music: Steppenwolf, “Monster”

In the movie Children of Men, we visit a near future world in which women had stopped having children almost twenty years previously, a world coming unglued as various, unspecified tragedies have destroyed the social fabric of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, leaving only England keeping a tight, dictatorial grip on order. I hate to be the one to break the story to you, but something similar seems to be afoot.

Inuit mothers are having a hard time making boy babies, with two girls born for every boy—hey, sounds like a pop song, doesn’t it? But the boys who are born are often underweight and sickly. Two girls for every nerd? Naah…..bad taste, Holsinger. Some villages are reporting that no male children have been born in the last several years. Scientists have investigated this phenomenon and found a culprit—actually, several. DDT, PCB, and the supposedly less-toxic substitutes for PCB that have come into widespread use since it was banned are turning up in incredibly high quantities in the bodies of Inuit who follow their traditional, mostly-wild meat diet. PCB and DDT were banned because they don’t break down, so the gotta accumulate somewhere. The Foreign Minister of Greenland, Aleqa Hammond, jokes about this, saying, “If you ate me, you would die,” but it’s no laughing matter. We’ve been discovering sexual anomalies caused by pollution in other species, but this is the first report we have of it cropping up in humans. As I understand the hormonal changes these chemicals cause in unborn babies, even babies conceived with a Y chromosome will come out looking female. I’m surprised they haven’t done this leg of the research.

Furthermore, this problem is not completely confined to the Inuit. Statistical research on the whole Northern Hemisphere reveals that there have been a quarter million fewer male babies born in the last few years than would be expected by the ratio that was prevalent through 1970. Is this a minor anomaly, or will it prove to be a growing phenomenon? Will the human race commit suicide by ending its ability to breed? Certainly sperm banks could provide a mid-term answer, and there may be scientific breakthroughs in the realm of parthenogenesis, but we’re not going to ban PCB substitutes. It would be too disastrous to the sacred economy, dontcha know?

I have often said that, if the human race expires and there is an autopsy, the verdict will likely be, “testosterone poisoning.” Maybe some kind of cosmic justice is afoot.

While we’e in the realm of possible human futures, I want to congratulate Doris Lessing on her Nobel Prize. I first encountered her work nearly twenty years ago, and her acute vision, lively style, and imagination have never disappointed me. From the wry realism of The Golden Notebooks to the eerily prescient science fiction of Canopus In Argos to the lucid , visionary psychology of Briefing for a Descent into Hell, she has not wasted a word, let alone a page. If you have never read her, go find some of her work and start in. You will be amply rewarded. And don’t wait for movie versions. She refuses to water her work down for film, and she’s right. Her stories are too rich to be crammed in to two hours of dialogue and moving pictures—but she helped Philip Glass make operas out of The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five and The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight. She’s got class.

I’m going to leave you with a couple of quotes from recent interviews with her. In The Washington Post, she said

“When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s,” she recalls. “What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire _ nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?” ….

“Quite a few people think it wouldn’t take very much to return to a few warrior bands, with a few breeding women. Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/07/AR2006100700369.html

and she told The Weekly Standard

“I keep trying to persuade myself that it’s unimportant, the fact that this culture is coming to an end, or probably is. So what? But when I think of the sheer pleasure of it - that hurts too.

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/Weekend/FI25Dk08.html

music: Incredible String Band, October Song