DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

I just returned from a two-week swing through New England, and overall it was a very encouraging experience. I lived in Vermont for several years in the nineties, and in many ways felt as if I had left the US for a saner country. It was very refreshing to visit again and find a place where sanity and counterculture have spread and grown, rather than eroding and fragmenting as they seem to have done here in the south. And no, it wasn’t ”like I’d died and gone to heaven.” There were plenty of problems still to solve, both personal and political, everywhere I went. But it felt like there was the will and intelligence and infrastructure to do it. Let me give you some examples.

There are nearly 600 organic farmers in Vermont, according to the state’s organic growers’ association. Considering the small size of Vermont, this means that organic farmers are pretty ubiquitous. Not quite as ubiquitous as dairy farms—there are about 1400 of those left, down from a 1947 peak of 11,000. But gee, that’s one organic farmer for every thousand Vermonters, and about one dairy farm for every four hundred and thirty people. If we had a similar proportion here in Tennessee, there would be about five hundred organic farms and over a thousand dairy farms just in the Nashville area alone. That sure would be a different Nashville, wouldn’t it?

These aren’t just fruit and vegetable farms. There are meat and field crop producers, as well as some overlap between the organic farm numbers and the dairy farm numbers, so we are talking about the possibility of a whole diet from locally grownorganic food—yes, even homegrown sweets, because there are honey producers and maple tappers aplenty up in the northeast woods. And there are cafes and co-op grocery stores in the small towns, vibrant little community centers where people eat and shop and meet their neighbors and talk and argue and plan and create.

Not all of this food gets consumed locally. In fact, most of it gets shipped down to Boswash, the Boston-Washington urban conglomerate, where the money is. But the Vermonters would like to keep more of their produce at home, and they are working on ways to keep it local, and benefit their communities as they do. The organic farmers have teamed up with a food-policy think tank called Foodworks and Shelburne Farms, an environmental education center, to create FEED, “Food Education Every Day,” an organization which works to get local school and other institutional cafeterias to use as much local food as possible, and to educate schoolkids about the many advantages to locally grown food. They have gotten the state legislature on board, and so there are grants and incentive programs, but the program practically sells itself. I should add that it’s not a ”top down” affair; each school district, in a council of teachers, administrators, farmers, and cooks, determines its own priorities.

They have had to add one step to make it work better, but that step adds value for everyone. In Vermont, the garden season and the school season barely overlap, and everyone involved quickly realized that having a way to process and preserve food would make it more available. So, voila! Small-scale canning and processing has become part of the mix, adding value and local employment. Tomatoes and peppers become salsa or tomato sauce; carrots are made into carrot sticks, bagged, and stored; apples are sliced by the bushel—don’t ask me why, but they found out that most kids will eat more apples if they are sliced first! Processing also enables them to use produce that is not aesthetically pleasing enough to sell fresh.

And then there are the in-school educational programs—soup making contests, with the kids as judges; farm visits where kids get to pick their own carrots, blueberries, apples, or whatever; school cafeteria staff, long the subject of bad jokes, get to do something creative, nutritious, local, and tasty. It’s a win/win situation, and it’s growing. Vermonters did not seem overly worried about political, economic, or even ecological collapse.

I’m glad to know they’re up there and doing so well. I hope their inspiration spreads. We could use some of that energy down here, where locally grown food, organic or not, is still a novelty, and the organic food stores depend on trucks from California and Florida to stock not just their produce, meat, and dairy departments, but all the other grocery shelves as well. Five hundred organic producers in the Nashville area? What have we got now, about five?

What would it take to start growing our growers to the point where we might imagine local farmers providing a measurable share of the food that is eaten in middle Tennessee? First of all, we have to look at our tax codes and land valuation and zoning policies, which make it much more profitable to subdivide land and sell it than to grow food on it. Zoning has to recognize that small-scale food production is a legitimate use of one’s home, although I think there should be some common-sense limits to this! Then there are infrastructure questions—how to help people get into farming, I think the way to do this is to find people who can take on a backyard garden with a fork and a hoe and feed their neighborhood, then help them graduate to a half-acre or an acre and feed their community with occasional help from teenagers, retirees, or people who want some healthy exercise after sitting at a desk all week. And of course there are weather questions. We don’t yet know if last year’s stunning heat and drought was a terrible anomaly, or the beginning of a new pattern. Growers will have to learn to be flexible; we do live in a climate in which, with a little simple protection, salad vegetables and leafy greens will produce all winter, and that’s likely to keep on being the case, no matter what our summers become.

Meanwhile, oil is pushing a hundred dollars a barrel, and there’s no telling where the price will jump the next time there’s a catastrophe to intensify the growing scarcity. Imported food, whether from California or across the ocean, is just going to get more expensive. The sooner we start providing for ourselves, the better off we’ll be.

music: Kristina Michelson, “Hippies in the Hills”

I recently reread Turtle Island,  Gary Snyder’s 1975 Pulitzer-prize winning  book of poems and essays. Many of the poems are simple, short (but reflective) nature snap-shots, like this one, entitled, ”Pine Tree Tops”

 

in the blue night

frost haze, the sky glows

with the moon

pine tree tops

bend snow-blue, fade

into sky, frost, starlight,

the creak of boots.

rabbit tracks, deer tracks,

what do we know.

But Snyder also turns his Zen-trained eye to the wider world situation, as in this poem,”The Call of the Wild:”

The heavy old man in his bed at night

Hears the Coyote singing

in the back meadow.

All the years he ranched and mined and logged.

A Catholic,

A native Californian.

and the Coyotes howl in his

Eightieth year.

He will call the Government

Trapper

Who uses iron leg-traps on Coyotes,

Tomorrow.

My sons will lose this

Music they have just started

To love.

***

The ex acid-heads from the cities

Converted to Guru or Swami,

Do penance with shiny

Dopey eyes, and quit eating meat.

In the forests of North America,

The land of Coyote and Eagle,

They dream of India, of

forever blissful sexless highs.

And sleep in oil-heated

Geodesic domes, that

Were stuck like warts

in the woods.

And the Coyote singing

is shut away

for they fear

the call

of the wild.

And they sold their virgin cedar trees,

the tallest trees in miles,

To a logger

Who told them

”Trees are full of bugs.”

 

The Government finally decided

To wage the war all-out. Defeat

is Un-American.

And they took to the air,

Their women beside them

in bouffant hairdos

putting nail polish on the

gunship cannon-buttons.

And they never came down,

for they found,

the ground

is pro-Communist. And dirty.

And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

So they bomb and they bomb

Day after day, across the planet

blinding sparrows

breaking the ear-drums of owls

splintering trunks of cherries

twining and looping

deer intestines

in the shaken, dusty, rocks.

All these Americans up in special cities in the sky

Dumping poisons and explosives

Across Asia first,

And next North America,

A war against earth.

When it’s done there’ll be

no place

A Coyote could hide

envoy

I would like to say

Coyote is forever

Inside you.

But it’s not true.

Snyder wrote these poems in the early seventies, when I was in my early twenties and he was in his early forties. It was a heady time. We in the counterculture were all elated with the optimism of youth; we equated starting our revolution with winning it. Snyder, at what now seems like a tender age, was one of our elders and mentors. With his twelve years in a Zen monastery, his love of wilderness and high country, and his prescient sense of the importance of deeply inhabiting a place, he pointed me and many of my co-conspirators to important practices and doctrines, to the importance of the long haul. One of his most prophetic poems in Turtle Island is the title poem from the section called, ”For the Children:”

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

I cry every time I read that. It brings together so much, and takes such a long perspective. It’s just the kind of grounding we need as the madness of a world gone wrong rises to a fever pitch all around us. ”We can meet there in peace/if we make it.”

But for me, the most impressive, most prophetic part of Turtle Island is a twelve-page prose section at the back of the book, written in 1969 and entitled ”Four Changes.” Like Martin Luther’s theses nailed to a church door, this slim manifesto is the foundation of a vast spectrum of political, social, and spiritual action that has come into being since. Very little of what Snyder proposes and predicts misses the mark, although he himself calls it “far from perfect and in some parts already outdated” in his 1974 introduction to it. His warning about the danger of ”a plutonium economy” is truer than ever now, as the Bush junta seeks to slip billions of dollars of subsidies for new nuclear power plants into alternate energy legislation.

The four changes he calls for are in the realms of population, pollution, consumption, and transformation, and each is divided into sections addressing large-scale political action, local community action, and ”our own heads,” which addresses the ways in which we as individuals help create obstacles to the better world we can envision in our clearest moments.

”Population” states that, although humanity is only a part of the web of life, we are now an inordinately large part of it—and this was in 1969, when the world population was nearly half of what it is now. Due to the intransigence of many governments and religious institutions, and despite the Chinese government’s strenuous efforts to limit the Chinese birth rate (one of the few qualifiedly good things it has done, in my opinion), there has effectively been no progress on this issue. I think this is in large part because the only option third world people have to insure that they will be cared for in their old age is to have as many children as they can, in hopes that at least one of them will be in a position to help them when the time comes. Governments, by and large, have shown no interest in ameliorating this situation, because it would involve taking money away from those who have it and giving it to those who don’t, and that is, as the Democrats are quick to say, a political impossibility. So, at this point, it’s starting to look like the human population of the planet will be limited by war, starvation, and pandemic, which will do little to slow what many biologists are now calling a planetary extinction event on the order of the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Will we humans ultimately be consumed by the wave of extinction we have unleashed? To the extent that they are capable of considering the question, I think the other species with which we share this rare spot in the universe wouldn’t mind if we did. We have ignored Snyder’s prescription at our own peril. We are going to have to work hard to re-establish ourselves as worthwhile neighbors on this small blue planet.

Much of Snyder’s section on pollution deals with DDT, use of which has largely been eliminated, although plenty of other chemicals have taken its place in the rush to foul our only nest. What Snyder says in the subheading ”our own heads” is worth repeating, because it looks at the attitude behind widespread pesticide use, not one specific chemical: ”there is something in Western culture that wants to totally wipe out creepy-crawlies, and feels repugnance for toadstools and snakes. This is fear of one’s own deepest natural inner-self wilderness areas, and the answer is: relax. Relax around bugs, snakes, and your own hairy dreams….” Truly, there can be no revolution in the world without a revolution in our own minds and hearts.

In the consumption section, he keys in on our overdependence on oil and overuse of water, decades before peak oil and drying continents became large-scale causes of concern. ”(M)ankind has become a locust-like blight on the planet,” he says, ”that will leave a bare cupboard for its own children—all the while in a kind of Addict’s Dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress—using the great achievements of science to produce software and swill.” (Wow—I hadn’t even heard of ‘’software” in 1969!)

To combat this, he proposes, at the macro-level, that economics needs to be seen as a minor branch of ecology, that the criminal waste of war must be shown for what it is and ended. At the community level, he calls for sharing and creating, whether it’s skills or garden produce or clothing, for breaking the habit of unnecessary possessions, which leads to the internal work: ”To live lightly on the earth, to be aware and alive, to be free of egotism, to be in contact with plants and animals, starts with simple concrete acts. The inner principle is the insight that we are inter-dependent energy fields of great wisdom and compassion—expressed in each person as a superb mind, a handsome and complex body, and the almost magical capacity of language. To these potentials and capacities, ‘owning things’ can add nothing of authenticity. ‘Clad in the sky, with the earth for a pillow.”’

The fourth change is ”transformation,” regarding which Snyder says, ”We have it within our deepest powers not only to change our ’selves’ but to change our culture. If man is to remain on earth he must transform the five-millenia-long urbanizing civilization tradition into a new ecologically-sensitive harmony-oriented wild-minded scientific-spiritual culture….What we envision is….a basic cultural outlook and social organization that inhibits power and property seeking while encouraging exploration and challenge in things like music, meditation, mathematics, mountaineering, magic, and all other authentic ways of being-in-the-world. Women totally free and equal. A new kind of family—responsible, but more festive and relaxed—is implicit.”

In the midst of this soaring vision, he inserted a 1974 footnote: ”More concretely, no transformation without our feet on the ground. Stewardship means, for most of us, find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there—the tiresome but tangible work of school boards, county supervisors, local foresters—local politics. Even while holding in mind the largest scale of potential change. Get a sense of workable territory, learn about it, and start acting point by point. On all levels from national to local the need to move toward steady state economy—equilibrium, dynamic balance, inner-growth stressed—must be taught. Maturity/diversity/climax/creativity.”

There it is, Green Party politics in a nutshell. It’s not just about light bulbs, folks!! It’s amazing to reread a book I loved in my youth and realize that I have been living its directives ever since, along with many others, albeit, alas, not quite enough eco-lovers to actually change the direction of the country, yet. Hey, we have been saying this stuff for forty years now, constantly getting blown off and derided by the corporatists, while they dig all of us, including themselves, deeper into a mass grave. Can you hear me now?

Snyder finishes by addressing the possibility that the human experiment will come to naught with some classic Zen: ”Our own heads is where it starts. Knowing that we are the first human beings in history to have so much of man’s culture and previous experience available to our study, and being free enough of the weight of traditional cultures to seek out a larger identity; the first members of a civilized society since the Neolithic to wish to look clearly into the eyes of the wild and see our own self-hood, our family, there. We have these advantages to set off the obvious disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are—which gives us a fair chance to penetrate some of the riddles of ourselves and the universe, and to go beyond the idea of ‘man’s survival’ or ’survival of the biosphere’ and to draw our strength from the realization that at the heart of things is some kind of serene and ecstatic process which is beyond qualities and beyond birth and death. ‘No need to survive!’ ‘In the fires that destroy the universe at the end of the kalpa, what survives?’–’The iron tree blooms in the void!’

”Knowing that nothing need be done, is where we begin to move from.”

It’s all here in these twelve pages, fractally unfoldable into whole worlds of endeavor, garnished with the reminder that ”nothing needs to be done.” So, from that place of detachment, friends, let us draw inspiration from our elegant elder Gary Snyder and do all that we can, in a spirit of love, joy, and compassion. It’s the Green way.

music: Indigo Girls, “Wood Song”

Our truth in strange places award this month goes to Senator Christopher Dodd, of Connecticut, one of the long-shot contenders for the 2008 Democratic nomination, who said in the course of the Oct. 30 debate, in defense of his call for decriminalization of marijuana,

“We’re locking up too many people in our system here today. We’ve got mandatory minimum sentences, they are filling our jails with people that don’t belong there.

“My idea is to decriminalize this, reduce that problem here. We’ve gone from 800,000 to 2 million people in our penal institutions in this country. We’ve got to get a lot smarter about this issue than we are. And as president, I’d try and achieve that. “

The only other candidate who agreed with him was Dennis Kucinich. Hey, these two guys are so far behind they have nothing to lose. Former Senator John Edwards spoke for the front-runners when he said he opposed decriminalization because “I think it sends the wrong signal to young people.” The conversation quickly turned to what Sen. Obama was going to wear for a Halloween costume. Over eight hundred thousand arrests a year, over five hundred thousand in prison and countless others hung up in the probation/parole system, swept under the rug just like that. Somehow, one of America’s biggest legal disasters has become just part of the cost of doing business. What a message to send to young people. What a comment on the vibrancy of our democracy.

So remember this, all you pot smokers who are preparing to vote for Hillary, or Barak, or John—you are voting for someone who wants to put you in jail, take your children away, and confiscate your property. Kafka couldn’t have invented anything better. And if you aren’t a marijuana user, but some of your friends are, you’re voting for somebody who wants to suck your friends into the American gulag. You may think you don’t know anybody who smokes pot, but you can just about bet you do. With schoolkids encouraged to tell on their parents, it’s more and more peoples’ secret practice. Hey, a friend of mine, a ranting, raving, pot-growing, totally out-of-the closet hippie, has had to quit smoking in his house because his daughter is going through a teenage rebellion phase and knows she’s got a major hammer over his head with the issue.

And the issue is not “addiction,” the issue is control—the ability of the government to control peoples’ inner lives and personal decisions. Public acceptance of “the war on drugs” is what allows the further erosions of our freedom that are occurring as “the war on terror.” The corporatocracy has put across the Big Lie that marijuana is bad for you. That’s baloney. Using marijuana is of no more consequence than drinking beer, wine or coffee—actually, coffee is much more addictive than grass. Smokers do without just fine, but we all know what happens when people don’t get their morning cup of java!

In the same way, the abortion issue is about control over women, not the sanctity of babies’ lives. While Democrats are willing to support womens’ right to abortion, at least so far, that is about the only sop they are throwing us. Iraq? “No way out,” the big three all say. Bomb Iran? “Why not?” they all say. Get rid of treaties like NAFTA and the WTO that have destroyed America’s middle class and sent waves of Central Americans here, fleeing their own ”free trade”-savaged economies? Not a sound about that. Take down the insurance and pharmaceutical vampires that are sucking Americans dry in the name of health care? “They’re too big. We can’t do that.” C’mon, guys, they’re smaller than Iran—or at least weaker militarily. Financially, they might be bigger than Iran, come to think of it….talk about “sending the wrong message to young people”–the message here seems to be to kowtow to power and big money, no matter how morally repugnant…and that is definitely the wrong message to send to young people, but it’s the one the Democratic front runners are parroting. Hey, it’s what their corporatist masters want to hear.

”C’mon,” you may argue—all the major Democratic candidates have come out for medical marijuana—that’s progress!” That’s knowing which way the wind is blowing, nothing more. If their support survives the election campaign, you can bet they will devise a system in which the state has a monopoly on growing and distribution, and there’s mandatory testing for the families of marijuana patients to insure that the “medicine” is only going to the “proper” person. None of this sloppy, do-it-yourself stuff like what we’re seeing in California and Oregon these days. It’s all about control. Marijuana use encourages people to think for themselves, and we can’t have a lot of strong individuals in the anthill corporatist society that is the ultimate vision of both Democrats and Republicans.

Which is not to say that you have to be a toker to be a Green—certainly not—but you have to understand the significance of the issue. You have to understand how it is a “wedge issue” that opens the door to all kinds of other government intrusion into peoples’ private lives. It is a fundamental precept of the Green Party that people are basically trustworthy, just as it is a fundamental, unspoken precept of the corporatist parties that people are not trustworthy. And, from their point of view, the corporatists are justified in not trusting the people, because nobody in their right mind would go along with the corporatist agenda. That’s why they work to keep so many people hypnotized with television and other mind-control drugs, such as alcohol, Ritalin and Prozac. It’s only a war on some drugs. What kind of reality do you want to live in?

music: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Justice in the Streets”

The Democrats gave the Bush administration another pass on war crimes this week, as Senate Judiciary committee members Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, plus 5 other fascist sympathizers, broke with the rest of the Democrats to approve Michael “Waterboard” Mukasey as our country’s new attorney general, in spite of Mukasey’s equivocal stance on whether waterboarding, which was prosecuted as a crime by this country when the Japanese did it to us, is a crime when Americans do it to Muslims. Mukasey generously allowed that if Congress passed a new law specifically outlawing waterboarding, he would enforce that law. This was an easy offer to make, considering that Mr. Cheney, excuse me, I mean Mr. Bush, would certainly veto such a bill if Congress could pass it, and that there is enough Congressional complicity in war crimes that a veto almost certainly wouldn’t be overridden. They can’t stop a war criminal from becoming attorney general. They can’t stop funding the war. They can’t impeach Dick Cheney. They can’t even pass childrens’ health insurance, but they can by God slap down Moveon and Dennis Kucinich!

Meanwhile, a well-known terrorist sympathizer organization—ABC news—revealed that, in 2004, in an effort to determine whether it was illegal torture or not, then-Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin had himself waterboarded, and reported that, to quote Keith Olberman,

”even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die - still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn’t drowning.

”Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.’‘

And here’s a couple more Kafkaesque turns of the screw: Levin didn’t even say the US shouldn’t do it. He just said it should be timed very carefully and done under a physician’s supervision. That was too soft for the Bush junta; he was fired when Alberto Gonzalez took control of the DOJ, but not before Gonzalez appended a note to Levin’s report, saying ”Just because we embraced illegal techniques before doesn’t mean we were wrong.” War is peace, freedom is slavery, you get it….

Here’s my suggestion: anybody that has been willing to say in public that they think waterboarding isn’t torture, or might not be torture, or they just don’t know, should be waterboarded, and then asked their opinion…Mr. Mukasey? Mr. Bush? Mr. Cheney?

In other news of the ongoing crackdown, Code Pink activist Ann Wright, a 29-year US Army veteran, was banned from Canada for a year for her anti-war arrest record in this country. She had been turned away from Canada earlier in the month, and was trying again on Oct. 25, having been invited by 6 Canadian M.P.s (that’s Members of Parliament, not Military Police!) to appear for a panel discussion on US-Canadian border security measures. She got quite an education in those security measures—her cell phone was confiscated for four hours while she was interrogated, and at the end of the interrogation she was told she was barred from entering Canada for a year due to

”failure to provide appropriate documents that would overcome the exclusion order I had been given in early October because of conviction of misdemeanors (all payable by fines) in the United States. The officer said that to apply for a Temporary Resident Permit (TRP) for entry for a specific event on a specific date, I must provide to a Canadian Embassy or consulate the arresting officer’s report, court transcripts and court documents for each of the convictions and an official document describing the termination of sentences, a police certificate issued within the last three months by the FBI, police certificates from places I have lived in the past ten years (that includes Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia), a letter acknowledging my convictions from three respected members of the community (the respected members that I will ask to write a letter all been convicted of similar ‘offenses’) and a completed 18 page “criminal rehabilitation” packet.

 

”Additionally, besides obtaining the Temporary Resident Permit, since I was being banned for a year from Canada, I would have to obtain a ‘Canadian Government Minister’s consent.’ The officer said that the TRP and the Minister’s consent normally took from 8-10 months to obtain. In the distant future, to be able to enter Canada without a TRP, I would have to have to be ‘criminally rehabilitated’ and be free for five years of conviction of any offense, including for peaceful protest.”

So…you were thinking that if things get too bad down here, you can just slip over the border?

OK, a little good news…I reported last summer on the election of Nicholas Sarkozy to the Presidency of France, and opined that, although he was called ”Sarko l’Americain” (Sarko the American, for you non-Francophones) and compared to George Bush, he was actually much smarter and hipper than Bush. Recent news from France confirms my assessment…sort of. Sarkozy has pulled out almost all the stops the environmentalists have been asking for. Appearing on the same stage with Al Gore at an environmental forum in Paris, Sarko said,

‘‘We need to profoundly revise all of our taxes… to tax pollution more, including fossil fuels, and to tax labour less.”

He went on to call for a freeze on the building of new highways and airports, moving freight traffic from road to rail, cutting pesticide use by half within 10 years, and the banning of GMO crops in France, which is Europe’s largest agricultural producer. He further pledged to expand local light rail and long distance high speed rail travel, and to create incentives for the purchase of more efficient automobiles and penalties for gas guzzlers. He also promised to improve the energy efficiency of all new and existing buildings, and proposed import taxes on goods from countries that have not signed on to the Kyoto protocol—like the US and China. Some conservative bloggers claim Al Gore wet his pants during Sarko’s speech.

And, while Sarkozy pledged to increase the role of renewable energy in France, the elephant in the room that he didn’t talk about was nuclear power. France generates 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, and they don’t know what to do with the waste either. It’s slowly contaiminating the whole country. They’re going to need that wonderful health care system Michael Moore says they have. It’s piling up at their nuke plants and leaking, except for the fraction they reprocess, which is leaking into the English Channel, some parts they have buried, which are polluting the groundwater, a chunk of it that they’re entombing in concrete, above ground, which will be full in sixty years…which seems like a long time, except that it will remain lethally radioactive for about another 24,000 years. Twenty-four thousand years ago, the last ice age was just beginning, and our cave-dwelling ancestors had to retreat out of most of Europe, including France. Oh, yeah, and the French send some of their nuclear waste to Russia, and it’s a Franco-Russian state secret just what they do with it there. Doesn’t that make you feel better? Have a nice holiday!

music: James McMurtry, ”Holiday” 6:30