DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley prophesied that people would be divided into work/social classes by prenatal nutrition.  “Epsilons,” the lowest class, were intentionally dumbed down by prenatal alcohol exposure and used for menial tasks. Paul Krugman reveals  that American culture has spawned something similar…..

   “Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.     As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory - and hence the ability to escape poverty - for the rest of the child’s life. So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

    L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.

    But progress stalled thereafter: American politics shifted to the right, attention shifted from the suffering of the poor to the alleged abuses of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely abandoned.

    In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably understates the true depth of many children’s misery.

    Living in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.

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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”

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

And finally, I would like to remember the recent death of Robert Anton Wilson, who has for over twenty years been one of my inpirations, for his ability to merge spirituality, psychology, and politics—and never lose his sense of humor. This excerpt from his 1980 book, The Illuminati Papers, is typical of his advanced thinking.

“If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. ‘A cure for unemployment’ is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left.

“I would like to challenge that idea. I don’t think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.

“What I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete. A Work Esthetic will have to arise to replace this old Stone Age syndrome of the slave, the peasant, the serf, the prole, the wage-worker — the human labor-machine who is not fully a person but, as Marx said, ‘ a tool, an automaton.’ Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity — as an outlet for their creative potential.

“(’Creative potential’ … refers to the inborn drive to play, to tinker, to explore, and to experiment, shown by every child before his or her mental processes are stunted by authoritarian education and operant-conditioned wage-robotry.)

“As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, ‘What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?’ The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show. “
This is the kind of creative thinking that I would like to foster in contemporary politics. Given the current decrepit state of our economy, is such utopianism still possible? Well, as Peter Singer pointed out, there really is plenty to go around; and Wilson himself said, in one of his last interviews, “My optimism rests on the fact that, historically, in emergency, people often mutate in unpredictable and creative ways. As John Adams said, the American Revolution took place ‘in the minds of the people in the 15 years before the first shot was fired.’ I suspect a similar revolution is occurring in the minds of educated people worldwide.”

That means the revolution is over, and we have won; all that’s left to do is to implement our program. Let’s roll!

music: Kate Wolf, “Friend of Mine”

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

I’ve been reading an extraordinary book lately, renewing and expanding my knowledge of recent history, oftentimes in ways that leave me shocked and angry—not just at the tragedy of the events themselves, but at the shallow and slanted way in which they were reported to me and the rest of the American public, if they were reported at all—for this book is not just a history, it is a history of how history is reported, and it lays to rest the myth of “the liberal media.” Even though it is nearly twenty years old, it is still fully relevant to current events, because some things—like the fundamentally conservative, not liberal, bias of the mainstream media—don’t change.

The book is Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, subtitled “The Political Economy of the Mass Media.” It examines several major news stories of the sixties, seventies and eighties in deep and well-footnoted detail: terrorism and electoral politics in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the so-called plot to kill Pope John-Paul II, and the three wars in Indo-China—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In all of these cases, I was astounded to discover the difference between reality on the ground and what I had been able to learn about these events from the mass media (even my cynical reading of the mass media) and even from such alternative news sources as were available at the time—about which I have to say, thank goddess for the internet—it has made the news much more democratic and diverse.

Chomsky and Herman point out that the so-called “liberal media”–the television networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time and Newsweek—consistently ignored obvious connections between governments and terrorist activities in El Salvador and Guatemala, while straining to create them in Nicaragua; pumped up the idea of a KGB-Bulgarian plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II when there was no credible evidence to back up the claim (and a great deal of evidence pointing to the fascist-leaning Italian secret police’s manufacture of the plot).

I had long been aware of how widespread state terrorism has been in Central America, and the “plot to kill the pope” seems like the stuff of comic opera, but somehow I had missed just how completely and intentionally devastating America’s assault on Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam had been. The United States’ objective was to destroy the fabric of civil society in those countries, and through our superior weaponry we all but succeeded—in disrupting the lives of millions of people who were not actively hostile to this country and certainly represented no threat to America. If tht’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is. Chomsky and Herman posit that the military’s aim was to demonstrate to the third world that it was not worthwhile to engage in guerilla warfare, because US airpower would more than make up for any success against our ground troops—and the overwhelming sympathy that the people of Vietnam had for the Viet Minh (“Viet Cong,” the authors point out, was in fact a derogatory term) made U.S. success on the ground an impossibility.

And so, the atrocities at My Lai were the rule, not an exception. John Kerry’s “war hero” status devolves into war criminal status—do we know how many innocent civilians he killed?

The war on Vietnam was an attempt by the Western economic system to destroy the working, communal peasant network that was in place in southeast Asia, and force the people there to adopt a consumerist way of life that would benefit the Western economic system. The same kind of eminent domain that the Supreme Court just approved, on a transnational scale.

This is not, however merely a book of history—it is a history of how the history has been told, and it is easy to connect the dots—the same cover-over is going on today. Just as there were no hard questions in the popular media about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, there are no hard questions about why there was no wreckage scattered around from the airliner that allegedly hit the Pentagon, nor a call for a good explanation of why the World Trade Center collapsed from below when it was struck from above, nor an explanation of why World Trade Center Building 7 imploded several hours later when it had not been hit by an airplane or damaged by the collapse of the main towers, let alone a good explanation for why the “Bin Laden likely to use planes to attack U.S.” briefing was ignored, why Colin Powell lied to the U.N., why the Bin Laden family was allowed to leave the country unquestioned, why no interceptor planes were scrambled when the hijacking started…the list goes on and on

I am marking this fourth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center by asserting that it wasn’t a terrorist attack—it was a sucker punch, My fellow Americans, we have been had. That pain you feel is George Bush’s fist in your gut.

Just as the media unquestioningly accepted that the rebels in El Salvador and Guatemala were communists, and that the death squads had nothing to do with the government and were not trained, equipped, and encouraged by the United States, so today the media accept that the struggle in Columbia is narcotraffickers versus government, with some uncontrollable right-wing death squads floating around, and that the trouble in Iraq is with a small minority of the population there.

And just as there were no questions about whether the United States had a right to be in Vietnam, only questions about whether the war was winnable, so there is no discussion in the mainstream media about whether the U.S. has any right to be in Iraq, only arguments about whether we can prevail against the “insurgents.” The question is too embarassing to ask, because the answer is that the United States had as much right to interfere in Vietnam—and in Iraq—as the Germans had to send their troops into Poland in 1939.

Let me say that again, more clearly: the United States has as much right to invade Iraq as the Germans had to invade Poland. Again: the United States has as much right to invade Iraq as the Germans had to invade Poland. Please tell all your friends to tell this to all their friends. It’s the thousand pound gorilla in America’s living room: the United States has as much right to invade Iraq as the Germans had to invade Poland. Do I make myself perfectly clear?

All those who support America’s current war of aggression in the middle east—including recent Democratic candidate Kerry and current front-runners Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—are complicit in war crimes just as surely as any member of the 1939 German government. There is no good reason for the United States to have military forces in Iraq. None. Zip. Nada. The World Trade Center bombing was allowed to happen by the Bush junta, if it was not actively planned by them. And you’ll never read about it in Newsweek.

The book, again, is Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.” Read it and weep. Read it and get motivated. Happy anniversary.

One of my favorite political texts is Robert Thurman’s “Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real
Happiness,” first published by Riverhead Books in 1998. Robert Thurman was one of the first Americans to find his way to Dharamsala, India, and become a Buddhist monk. He came back to America, decided to drop his vows but remain a Buddhist, and married. You’ve probably seen his daughter in the movies—Uma Thurman.

I’d like to share my review of this slim but profound volume with you. I originally wrote it for a magazine called The Country Rag. It’s no longer published but there is a memorial website.

Overall, human civilization seems to have had a deleterious effect on this planet’s ecosystem. The Indus and Euphrates valleys, two once-fertile areas where civilization first arose, have been trampled into desert by our passage there. Europe, once a vast, wild, trackless forest, is now largely farm and city—and its forests are beginning to die. Here in America, in our own lifetimes woods and wilderness have become spaces preserved only by the strength of the government, as corporate greed for their wealth of “raw materials” drives their “value” up to the point where immediate exploitation becomes the only economically rational thing to do.

Why do we do this? Why are we as a species so ready to foul our own nest? This widespread fouling is created by the acts of countless individuals, acts prompted by individual perceptions and decisions. Although the perceptions and decisions are individual, I believe they can be seen to be prompted by certain common assumptions, psychologies, and myths.

A common human assumption, because it has been true for all our thousands of years of history up until the last few hundred years, is that, no matter how much of a mess you make, it’s ok, because nature covers over everything sooner or later. In the last hundred years, though, we have gone from maintaining small pockets of human culture in a vast sea of nature to the reverse situation.

The human psyche is built for individual survival. When we were islanders in the vast sea of nature, subject to plagues and droughts and ice ages, bands of humans learned to compete with each other for scarce resources and hoard them against hard times.The predominant myth of the dominant culture on our planet is an angry and jealous god, harassed by an evil other whose strength is in this world, a god who will resolve his struggle with that evil other in a way that will destroy this world we live in—probably very soon.

This god, like a feudal lord, cares more about whether we humans acknowledge his suizeranity than how we behave among ourselves.These are the attitudes that we, as Greens, face when we take up the challenge of altering the course of American politics. They run deep. They are not swayed by logic, catchy phrases, demonstrations, or legislation. To change them, we need to know how to change attitudes and override psychological conditioning. We need a countermyth that posits a steady state world, free of overarching cosmic conflict.

That is a lot to come up with from scratch! Fortunately, there are a few places on earth where humans have been able to create high culture in harmony with nature, and by studying these, we may derive a template which can be applied to the reshaping of America. Tibet was one of those places.

In Inner Revolution, Robert Thurman tells the story of the rise of Tibetan culture, weaving it in with the rest of world history in an inspiringly unique way. For example, the early part of the seventeenth century saw widespread conflicts over the interplay of religion and government. In Europe, this was known as the Thirty Years’ War, and resulted in the disestablishment of the Catholic Church and the placing of the quest for material wealth and power in the driver’s seat of our civilization.

In Tibet, by contrast, the struggle ended with the ascendency of the Dalai Lama, who was (and is) recognized as the incarnation of Compassion (as if the Pope were Christ incarnate), and who proceeded to act to create peace and harmony in the country based on the realization that the millenium had come and they were living in it.

Thurman’s narrative is not only historical. He also imparts the essence of Buddhist philosophy and practice, and the fruits of that practice. Here is a paragraph that shows this kind of bridging:

“Millenial or apocalyptic consciousness… develops when a person breaks through the shell of habitual self-centeredness, sees through the falsely created view of the absoluteness of the ordinary world, and realizes truth in an instant. A healthy person in the melting aspect of the moment of full orgasm loses himself or herself completely and has an instance of apocalypse before the structures and boundaries of inadequacy return with all their force.

“People absorbed in activity—runners running, musicians performing, artists creating , mothers giving milk—all of them have a taste of millenial consciousness, a momentary blissful freedom from dissatisfaction, self-concern, and pain. The consciousness in the enlightenment movement is called millenial when the vision of this freedom expands so greatly that it aims to create a nationwide and ultimately a world-wide society of perfect happiness based on enlightenment. It is apocalyptic in the sense of being instantaneously revelatory and ultimately decisive.”

I think that pretty much all of us who are involved in Green politics derive our passionate involvement in it from what he is talking about here.Thurman goes on to examine the question of how to apply the lessons of Tibet to the situation in America. Obviously this does not mean that most of us need to become yak herders! What he does do is extract a series of axioms and a “ten point program”(!) for political action.

Here are some sample “axioms”:

“16. The main rival of monasticism is imperialistic militarism, the core institution for secular and religious rules of ordinary societies. Militarism is anchored in organizations in which the human being’s basic feeling of enlightenment is trained out and armored over, encouraging individual regression to subhuman insensitivity, viciousness, and harmfulness. Militarism allows for a politics of compulsion, if it allows for any politics at all.”

“29. All one needs to understand the inner revolution and live the politics of enlightenment is wisdom about one’s long-term self-interest, good- humored tolerance of one’s own and others’ faults, trust in the adequacy of the environment and our fellow beings, and the courage to take up the responsibility of enlightenment.”

I feel very enthusiastic about reccomending this book. It is rare to see such adroit interweaving of politics, psychology, and spirituality, and I think anyone who cares about the fate of the earth and those of us here on it will be inspired and instructed by Thurman’s opus. The only things I would fault him for are failing to include an index or bibliography—but perhaps the lack of bibliography is to better encourage each of us to make our own search, which is all the more self-empowering—and that is the theme of this book.

I would like to leave you with some quotes from Thurman’s ten-point platform.

“Lately (the) democratic process has been effectively threatened by virtual autocrats who have pretended to champion the individual and his or her liberty against the supposedly oppressive domination by ‘big government.’ These corporate spokespersons have used the “big lie” technique and have come close to subverting democracy in the name of individual liberty. They have led revolts to diminish taxes for the very rich; called for law and order to imprison the very poor; tried to reestablish racist dominance patterns; attacked women’s rights to chose their roles and relations; pretended to defend religious freedom to promote religious bigotry; supported a demented international arms industry and an insane level of citizenry armament; attempted to remove all protections of the environment from short-sighted exploitation; and generally fostered a sense of alienation, apathy and confusion among the people. It is therefore essential that we reassume the idealistic high ground of democratic political activism and put libertarian principles at the fore of all policies. A skillful arguing of these principles will solve the major tough issues of the day and reunite the divisive, single-issue splinter groups into a winning coalition. To succeed, we must try to present enlightenment reinforcement as a developing middle way through the crippling polarizations.”

“The leaders of the 1980s rolled back the American and European welfare state by rejecting government’s role in managing society, holding up the white racist’s specter of the black welfare mother with nine children on the dole who rides in Cadillacs and swims in luxuries and so on. But this image was only a racist fantasy, and, on top of the injustice, these leaders didn’ t save any money at all but ran up the biggest deficits in history. What was saved in school lunches, nutrition for pregnant mothers, and so on was spent tenfold in crime prevention, prisons, and futile measures against the sheer destruction that always results from injustice. Job training was cut so that more money could be spent on unemployment benefits. Taxes were somewhat cut, but mostly for the rich, and the massive transfer of wealth to the top one percent of the population resulted not in a bonanza of investment and job creation but in a massive flight of capital to tax-sheltered investment in cheap-labor areas, with a disastrous loss of jobs and infrastructure in the developed societies. Our platform must be to reaffirm the altruistic welfare state, to prove that money invested in the lower end of the economic scale is money well spent. The removal of a poverty-ridden disaster area of the country is not only just but also saves funds in the long run and creates an incalculable treasure of human potential.”

“Enlightened activists are pro-wealth. They consider it the karmic evolutionary fruit of generosity in previous lives. A bodhisattva or messianic person wants to accumulate wealth so he or she can give it away to needy people, most creatively by investing intelligently in things that will provide long-term happiness to the people. But if wealth becomes an object of obsession, if it is used carelessly, it can be incredibly destructive, most of all to the wealthy people themselves. The enlightened democratic system institutionalizes revolution and uses progressive income taxes and other mechanisms to rebalance the rich/poor equation gently and continuously. Our platform reaffirms this policy of continuous, peaceful revolution out of compassion for both the poor and the rich. True wealth is a rich network of loving people, a pleasant and healthy lifestyle, a beautiful environment, and an inviting setting for expressing creativity. Money alone is a heavy burden, isolating its owner from real affection, ennobling unhealthy addictions, harming the environment, and causing boredom, frustration, and anxiety. Enlightenment cures all these problems through its prime virtue: generosity in all things.”

And I think that’s something we can all agree to. The book is Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness, written by Robert Thurman, published by Riverhead Books in 1998.