I know it's long, but do yourself the favor and take the time to read it all.
There is so much wisdom here, you'll be glad you did.

The Link



POCKET PARADIGMS
BY SAM SMITH

Part One

Link to Part Two

Advertising

THE AVERAGE American is subjected to 3,000 commercial messages a day. If you have a good day, a half dozen people will tell you a truth worth remembering. Thus the lies win out 500 to one.w

America

We have to turn off the amps of propaganda and hype, the reverb and distortion of our fears and failures, and listen to the country unplugged. Some of the best things can only be heard when everything else is still.

In the end, it is not the culture from which we came but the one each of us is helping to create that will matter. It is our common fate rather than our disparate pasts that will ultimately describe, redeem, or destroy us.

In short, America is not the answer; it is only a good place to look for the answer. America has never been perfect; it's just been a place where it was easier to fix things that were broken.

A good way to think about the history of our country is that it has involved repeated conflict between the specifics of the soul and institutional abstractions -- between people and places on the one hand and, on the other, a succession of systems desiring to exploit, subjugate or supplant them. You can say that one of the great characteristics of Americans has been not merely opposition to a system of the moment but antipathy towards unnatural systems in general -- opposition to all systems that revoke, replace or restrain the natural rights of human beings and the natural assets of their habitats.

We should seek a cooperative commonwealth based on decency before profit, liberty before sterile order, justice before efficiency, happiness before uniformity, families before systems, communities before corporations, and people before institutions

Balancing rights

Politicians and the media have taken to talking about "rights and responsibilities," as though free speech and free religion and not having cops raiding your house without a warrant were privileges we citizens only get when we're well-behaved. When politicians or journalists say that a constitutional right must be balanced by something else, they are really talking about reducing or eliminating that right. In fact, the rights listed in the Constitution are not bargaining chips, but permanent guarantees. Your constitutional rights, to borrow a phrase from the Declaration of Independence, are "unalienable."

Individuals possess fundamental rights that are inalienable and not contingent on responsibilities assigned by the state. These rights are to be restrained only by a due concern for the health, safety, and liberty of others and are not to be made subservient to the arbitrary and capricious dictates of the government.

Baseball

Baseball is among the most democratic of sports. Each player is given great freedom and specific turf to guard, but this individuality only works when all the members of a team cooperate. Baseball, Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, is unique in that the game is not restricted by either time or space -- games theoretically can go on forever as can an out-of-the-park homer. He also notes that while in other sports you might hear fan suggestions that the ref be fired, it is baseball in which the crowds cry, 'Kill the umpire!' Thus the game, like America itself, celebrates not only a deep distrust of authority and a lack of limits, but also cooperation, individuality, and community.

Blame


HOW TO AVOID BLAMING THE WRONG THING

1. Count the bodies. If something bad is happening there should be evidence of it. Besides, counting the bodies helps to order priorities.

2. Get facts before you get scared. Just because a politician or a journalist says there's a threat doesn't mean there actually is one.

3. Just because it's on TV doesn't mean it happening to you or your neighborhood. Just because it's at the top of the news doesn't mean it should be at the top of your mind.

4. Fight issues not people. Your gun-loving, anti-abortion neighbor may also oppose plans to store nuclear waste nearby. Find out. After all, most of us are right only part of the time.

5. Don't try to crush those with whom you disagree; convert them.

6.Before "they" can do you any real harm, "they" probably need money and power. If "they" don't have it, you are probably worrying about the wrong "they."

Budgets

AT TIMES, it seems that there are no governments anymore, only budget offices. As the numerologists rose in power, programs increasingly became transformed into line items. Numbers began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced to figures and policy became a matter of where one placed the decimal point..

Bush administration

WOULDN'T IT BE nice to go back to a time when presidents were only corrupt and broke into offices instead of destroying the whole republic?

IN HER FEW short days in office, State Secretary Rice has publicly chastised Palestine, Israel, Iran, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain. For a purported diplomat this may be a record outside of North Korea or the late Roman Empire. While Rice's intent is that of an imperialist, her manner is that of an prissy third grade teacher apparently unaware that not only are most whom she scolds not in the third grade, they're not even in her school district.

A DYSFUNCTIONAL DESPOT, George III, failed to prevent the creation of the American republic, which lasted over two hundred years until a dysfunctional despot, George II, destroyed it.

Campaigns


2008

Richard Cheney says the election of Kerry-Edwards might lead to a major terrorist attack. Could be. We don't really know. What we do know is that the election of Bush-Cheney certainly did.

George Bush is consistent, but consistently wrong. John Kerry is inconsistent, which means he is occasionally right.

This would be a good year to follow the Mae West dictum: whenever faced with a choice between two evils, always pick the one you haven't tried before.

Don't think of this election as a choice between candidates but between battlefields. Would you rather spend the next four years fighting Republicans or Democrats?

Capitalism

IF THE theorists of corrupt capitalism are correct and the market tells all, they may be hard pressed to explain why Carl Fiorina is getting a $21 million severance package from Hewlett Packard. After all, the all-knowing market went up 7% on her departure.

I READ that the 200 richest people in the world have a combined wealth greater than the GDP of each country in the world except for five. If we are going to have this sort of thing, it may be worthwhile thinking about reviving feudalism. At least under that system, the elite had some social responsibilities. And manners.

SOMETIMES I stand in an airport bookstore and try to figure why God decided to reveal all of life's mysteries in such a place. Why didn't God make philosophers and theologians and poets as all knowing as MBAs?

WHAT'S the difference between believing in UFOs and believing in the flawless efficacy of the marketplace? Probably where the believer went to college.

THE RULES of the marketplace recreate the brutality, unfairness, and helplessness that humans have sought to escape for most of their evolution

Center

If you ask important people in politics, think tanks or the media where they stand politically, many will say "in the center." A lot of these folks like the center because it makes them sound reasonable and moderate. It also allows them to call other people extremists or gadflies or wishful thinkers for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom of the moment. Some members of the American elite have made whole careers of being measured and cautious. They like to write somber columns asking pompous questions like "Can the Center Hold?" What they really mean is: can they hold on to their power? But even if you do find the center, it's not necessarily the best place to be. My navigation instructor at Coast Guard Officer Candidate School explained it well: "If you take a navigational fix and it places you on one side of a rock and then you take another fix and it places you on the other side of the rock -- don't split the difference." Unfortunately, it's a rule not often followed in American politics.

Change

FROM THE American revolution to the underground railroad, to the organizing of labor, to the drive for universal suffrage, to the civil rights, women's, peace and environmental movements, every significant political and social change in this country has been propelled by large numbers of highly autonomous small groups linked not by a bureaucracy or a master organization but by the mutuality of their thought, their faith and their determination. There is no reason it can not happen again.

Citizen

THE QUESTION of whether we should give up our citizenship in favor of customerhood or being a taxpayer has never made it to the ballot. It doesn't have to. Like much political change these days, the idea has grown more by osmosis than by choice, the product of a "shared vision" among the elite, dutifully disseminated by a media that has lost much of its capacity for skepticism.

Cities

Usually the goals of urban policy closely parallel the economic interests not of typical residents but of large corporations and the media organizations that serve them. These interests are not limited to the urban core but increasingly reach deep into the suburbs. While the wonders of metropolitan regionalism may produce a near orgasmic response from a big city newspaper editor, urban planning professor or corporate executive, I have run into few other persons excited by the thought of living in a "region." Many, I suspect share the view of the character played by Michael Keaton, who in the movie, The Paper, screams at the globalist, gray haired, New York Timesish editor, "I don't fuckin' live in the fuckin' world! I live in fuckin' New York City!"

What gets forgotten is that a city is not a private club. A city is a place used by a large numbers of people for enormously disparate purposes. For many, the city is a means of upward mobility and to the extent that it functions in this manner, this helps everyone. On the other hand, once you start defining people or their activities as socially unacceptable, you also start eliminating methods of survival and sources of public revenues.

We have in recent decades been so intent on making our cities neat and orderly that we have forgotten that the major contribution of the city is its explosive and random potential. Our goal has been physical order and fiscal benefits; the results have been social disorder and huge deficits. A thriving urban ecology should not just be about clean air and trees; but also about communities and economic survival, justice, decent education, security, happiness, the joy of chance, variety, and opportunity.

Cities often fail us but it is their enduring service to both shelter and venture that makes even the grimmest among them continuing magnets. Even as those who have used them well and long for their own purposes flee to the quiet, comfort, and safety of another place, the artist, the drug dealer cashing in his chips for a legal business, the ambitious new immigrant, the young college grad, the entrepreneur, move in and begin the urban story again. Free from the predetermined human and physical geography of a rural or small town community, we have a chance to design our own environment. In the end, the city, becomes not just a place but, as Brown University's Arnold Weinstein has suggested, "work being done."

Communications

THE RHETORIC of contemporary "communications" is quite different from that of thought or argument. The former is more like a shuttle bus endlessly running around a terminal of ideas. The bus plays no favorites; it stops at every concept and every notion, it shares every concern and feels every pain, but when you have made the full trip you are right back where you started.

IF YOU CHALLENGE the contemporary "communicator," you are likely to find the argument transformed from whatever you thought you were talking about to something quite different -- generally more abstract and grandiose. For example if you are opposed to the communicator's proposed policy on trade you may be accused of being against "change" or "fearful of new ideas" and so forth. There is an hyperbolic quality to this language that shatters one's normal sense of meaning. Simple competence is dubbed "a world-class operation," common efficiency is called "Total Quality Management," a conversation becomes "incredibly transforming," and a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals is called a "Renaissance" weekend

Community

Communities are easiest to build in times of stress or out of painful need. Impressive self-sufficient communities were constructed in New York's Harlem and Washington's Shaw in response to racial exclusion. Similarly, to many veterans, few communities can compete with the bonds created under fire. Yet wistful as such memories may be, few would really attempt to recover them by reviving segregation or going back to war.

Certainly, much of what we have come to think of as normal -- the huge city, the massive state university, the mega-corporation, the multi-day Phish concert with 90,000 in attendance -- is, in a historical and biological sense, not natural at all but rather human community on steroids. The business of fleeing bad, and of building good, smaller communities, with all the concomitant excitement, success, failure and ambivalence, remains key to our lives and our souls. The form changes over time -- new communities these days are often ones of belief and habit rather than of place. And, disappointing as it may seem to the producers and participants, MTV's Real World is actually a very old American story -- the story of strangers in a new place making that place theirs. Together.

Congress

NOT THE LEAST of Congress' problem is that the cohesiveness formerly provided by congressional bosses, their role secured by rigid seniority, was never replaced by anything else, not, for example, by the enforced loyalty of a parliamentary system nor by the greater party emphasis of proportional representation. Congress has become retail politics at its most complex.

With the breakdown of the political parties and congressional autocracy, individual members of Congress have clearly gained independence, but they lack a concomitant growth in power. The condition can be described by analogy: if you go to a cathedral you are expected to keep the silence; if you go to a baseball stadium you may scream at will. In neither place, however, will your personal views attract much attention.

Constitution

SOMETIME BACK we proposed a ban on all new national monuments in America until we had legislators better equipped to judge who was worth memorializing. A similar principle might be applied to constitutions - no more constitutions until there are some constitution writers of the integrity and intelligence of a Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. Imagine the U.S. Constitution being written by the same crowd that set up the World Trade Organization or wrote NAFTA and you can see the problem. In the meanwhile, it would be best just to muddle along with treaties and other agreements, each regularly renewable in referenda by the victims of these pacts.

When politicians or journalists say that a constitutional right must be balanced by something else, they are really talking about reducing or eliminating that right. In fact, the rights listed in the Constitution are not bargaining chips, but permanent guarantees. Lately, politicians and the media have also taken to talking about "rights and responsibilities," as though free speech and free religion and not having cops raiding your house without a warrant were privileges we citizens only get when we're well-behaved. Don't believe them. Your constitutional rights, to borrow a phrase from the Declaration of Independence, are "unalienable." Of course, the country will work a lot better if you vote in every election, help out in your community, and are nice to your neighbors, but it isn't necessary in order to be protected under the Constitution. You can be a grouchy, selfish couch potato making crazy calls to talk shows and still have the same rights as the most faithful volunteer at the local church.

Corruption

1. Hit the corrupters at least as hard as the corruptees. The real danger in corruption is what the bribe buys, not the soul of the bought politician (which probably never was in that great a shape anyway).

2. The worst corruption tends to be legal, therefore hardly anyone notices it. Remember that corrupt not only means dishonest, it also means without integrity. In most jurisdictions the latter is not a violation of the law.

3. Just because the corruption is legal doesn't mean you have to accept it. Martin Luther didn't -- and so helped to reform a little church-run protection racket known as indulgences.

4. Simply because corruption is bad, don't assume all reforms are good.

5. If forced to choose between minor corruption and major incompetence, take the former. It's cheaper and easier to live with.

6. Favor corruption that is well distributed-- that gets down to the street over that which only favors a few. Thus: reform zoning policies before you worry about parking tickets.

Culture

OUR CULTURE feels like a bad craft fair where everything you see seems to have been made before, only better.

DESPITE THE IMPROVED economic and social status of women and minorities, despite decades of economic progress, despite Velcro, SUVs, MTV, NASA, DVD, cell phones, and the Internet you can't raise a majority that is proud of this country. We neither enjoy our myths nor our reality. We hate our politicians, ignore our moral voices, and distrust our media. We have destroyed natural habitats, created the nation's first downwardly mobile generation, stagnated their parent's income, and removed the jobs of each to distant lands. We have created rapacious oligopolies of defense and medicine, frittered away public revenues and watched indifferently as, around the world, the homeless and the miserable pile up.

Our leaders and the media speak less and less of freedom, democracy, justice, or of their own land. Perhaps most telling, we are no longer able to react, but only to gawk.

Too be sure, many of the symbols of America remain, but they have become crude -- desperately or only commercially imitative of something that has faded. We still stand for the Star Spangled Banner, but we no longer know what to do while on our feet. We still subscribe to the morning paper but it reads like stale beer. And some of us even still vote, but expect ever less in return. Where once we failed to practice our principles, now we no longer even profess to honor them.

An awfulness is drifting over us. Too many have become obsessed with what we should ignore and ignore what we should celebrate or fear. Too many have lost the capacity for either grace or decency, preferring instead tricks and treachery.

A culture that has so lost its way and forgotten so much is not the same as a flawed society bumbling through history trying to make itself better. Worst of all, such a fallen society lays the burden of its own failure upon each of us. Just as a strong culture buoys the individual and provides a stage upon which the brave, the compassionate, and the imaginative can act, so a craven, crumbling culture makes every act of individual will that much harder.

Culture of impunity

IN A CULTURE OF IMPUIITY, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition. The culture of impunity encourages coups and cruelty, and at best practices only titular democracy. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself.

In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught.


Democracy

AN AUTOCRACY you can have through simple sloth or indifference; a democracy takes constant tending. Tanks are not necessary to undo it; our own carelessness with words and thoughts can lead us to surrender without struggle what we once thought central to our cause. Our own absorption with contemporary scenes and symbols flashing across the screen can lead us to forget -- if we ever knew -- what went before and why those who went before once thought it mattered.

THE DEMOCRATIC FRANCHISE, while greatly broadened from a time when only propertied white males could vote, has lost its depth. We have, in effect, more people sharing less power. Take, for example, the New England town meeting, often cited as a model of direct democracy, in which each enfranchised resident had a voice and a vote in the proceedings of the community. By the 1990s the term's meaning had been completely turned on its head: now it is a meeting, perhaps nationally televised, in which citizens of a remote, impermeable government listen to, and are cynically manipulated by, an official or candidate. All three key elements of the original town meeting -- community, decentralized power and direct democracy -- have decayed and disappeared. Other traditional signs of a vibrant democracy have been either distorted or enfeebled. We are apathetic in our voting, removed from our representatives, regularly deceived in our discussions and ineffectual in our efforts to change our conditions.

WE CAN not be free if we can not retrieve the part of politics that once made it a natural, integral and pleasurable part of our lives, and if it now becomes so distant or so dirty or so cruel that we would rather not even think or speak about it. Someone else, to our great danger, will fill our silence.

About the most important job of a democracy -- next to serving its people -- is to make sure it stays a democracy. Forms of government don't have tenure, and governments that rely on the consent of the governed -- rather than, say, on tanks and prisons -- particularly require constant tending. As things now stand, we could easily become the first people in history to lose democracy and its constitutional freedoms simply because we have forgotten what they are about.

One of the best ways to revive democracy in our country is to make sure that every organization, church, school, or club is run according to its principles.

THE MAJOR POLITICAL struggle has become not between conservative and liberal but between ourselves and our political, economic, social and media elites. Between the toxic and the natural, the corporate and the communal, the technocratic and the human, the competitive and the cooperative, the efficient and the just, meaningless data and meaningful understanding, the destructive and the decent.

TODAY ALMOST every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government.

WHY WOULD a hard-won democracy willingly drift in such a direction? One reason is that if one is going to tolerate a growing divide between rich and poor, between those with power and those without, it is necessary to deal with the anger and alienation that results. If the traditional democratic approach -- making the system fairer -- is ruled out, then some form of oppression is required.

Ecology

Ecologist Donella Meadows pointed out that if a water lily doubling in size each day could eventually cover a pond in 30 days, half that growth would occur on the 29th day. Do you know what day it is for the climate?

Simplicity, conservation, and recycling should be central to our economy, our politics and our lives.


A POKER PLAYER'S GUIDE TO THE ENVIRONMENT

1. Calculate the stakes as well as the odds.

2. The odds of something happening at any moment are not the same as the odds of something ever happening. In ecological calculations -- especially ones in which the downside could ruin your whole millennium -- it is the latter odds that are important.

3. When confronted with conflicting odds, ask what happens if each projection is wrong. Temporary job loss because of environmental restrictions may come and go, but the loss of the ozone layer is something you can have forever.

4. When confronted with conflicting odds, remember that you don't have to play the game. There are other things to do with your time -- or with the economy or with the environment -- that may produce better results. Thus, instead of playing poker you could be making love. Or instead of getting jobs from some air or water degrading activity, the same jobs could come from more benign industry such as retrofitting a whole city for solar energy.

5. Don't let anyone -- in industry, government, or the media -- define an "acceptable level of risk" for your own death or disease. They may not have the same vested interest in the right answer as you do.

6. If the stakes are too high, the game is not worth it. If you can't stand the pain, don't attempt the gain.


Elite

WE need a trial to judge all those who bear significant responsibility for the 20th century - the most murderous and ecologically destructive in human history. We could call it the war, air and fiscal crimes tribunal and we could put politicians and CEOs and major media owners in the dock with earphones like Eichmann and make them listen to the evidence of howthey killed millions of people and almost murdered the planet and made most of us far more miserable than we needed to be. Of course, we wouldn't have time to go after them one by one. We'd have to lump Wall Street investment bankers in one trial, the Council on Foreign Relations in another, and any remaining Harvard Business School or Yale Law graduates in a third. We don't need this for retribution, only for edification. So there would be no capital punishment, but rather banishment to an overseas Nike factory with a vow of perpetual silence.

ANY ELITE that talked endlessly about the challenges of the first half of the 21st century and then forgot to put the year 2000 into their computer programs should be asked to resign.

SOME DAY our leaders may again be as good as our firefighters.

AMONG THE POWERFUL, "mistakes were made" but no one has to admit that they were the ones who made them. Instead, the elite rises as one to pronounce it not the time for blame, but rather for moving forward together into the future and putting this or that "behind us." Everyone nods their heads and the foxes are allowed back into the chicken house one more time.

LIKE A HIT AND RUN DRIVER, America's elite has left the scene of the accident. More and more, those who run this country have the character of wealthy, isolated strangers -- armed but afraid, intrusive yet indifferent, personally profligate but politically penurious, priggish in rhetoric yet corrupt in action. No longer does national myth connect them with the greater mass of America. Nor, any longer, does politics separate them from each other; Republicans and Democrats have become, rather than choices, degrees of the same dismal thing.

Empire

Unfortunately, complex failing systems have little capacity to save themselves. In part this is because the solutions come from the same source as the problem. The public rarely questions the common provenance; official Washington and the media honor it. Even a failure as miserable as that of Vietnam had little effect on the careers of its major protagonists, those men who not only were wrong but were wrong at the cost of 50,000 American lives. They remain quoted copiously, cited as experts and transmogrified into statesmen.

Ethnicity

It is hard to imagine a non-discriminatory, unprejudiced society in which race and sex matter much. Yet in our efforts to reach that goal, our society and its institutions constantly send the conflicting message that they are extremely important.

Many attempts to eradicate racism from our society have been based on the notion that those who harbor prejudice towards others are abnormal and social deviants. Further, we often describe these "deviants" only in terms of their overt antipathies -- they are "anti-Semitic" or guilty of "hate." In fact, once you have determined yourself to be human and others less so, you need not hate them any more than you need despise the fish you eat for dinner. This is why those who participate in genocide can do so with such calm -- they have defined their targets as outside of humanity.

What if, instead, we were to start with the unhappy truth that humans have always had a hard time dealing with other peoples, and that much ethnic and sexual antagonism stems not from hate so much as from cultural narcissism? Then our repertoire of solutions might tilt more towards education and mediation and away from being self-righteous multi-cultural missionaries converting yahoos in the wilds of the soul. We could turn towards something more akin to what Andrew Young once described as a sense of "no fault justice." We might begin to consider seriously Martin Luther King's admonition to his colleagues that among their dreams should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.

Just by dint of exposure to TV, it is virtually impossible to live in America and not have absorbed aspects of other cultures. We all, in effect, belong to a part-culture, which is to say that our ethnicity is somewhat defined by its relationship to, and borrowing from, other cultures. There are almost no pure anythings in America anymore. The sooner we accept and enjoy this, the better off we'll be.

Remember that everyone is an ethnic something. There are no unethnic Americans.

In the end, how well we get along will be decided not by our cultural differences but by the significance we place upon them. We may all be creatures of our own culture, but we are also all free to determine just what that means. Most important, the future is the one culture -- for better or worse -- we will all inevitably share and all help to make. We are, each of us, brothers and sisters in the tribe of tomorrow.

Experts

All expertise is filtered through the prejudices, beliefs, culture and presumptions of those who possess it. For example, one reason it is so difficult to get economic policies that benefit ordinary people is because ordinary people can't afford to hire an economist. Corporations and governments can.

Fascism

WHY IS IT safer to say "fuck" than to say "fascism?" One of the curiosities of post-cold-war rhetoric is that we no longer have a term for those who practice ideologies antithetical to democracy. Current American foreign policy seems aimed at turning incompetent communists into competent fascists, with China the potential jewel in the crown. One American politician once put it this way: "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." Would such a radical be allowed on Sunday morning talk shows today? Probably not, even though his name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Faith

WHAT this country needs is more people of faith: faith in the Constitution, in democracy, in fairness, and in common sense.

IT HAS been wisely said that "hope don't pay the cable," and faith is too often just another drug, producing hallucinogenic visions of a flawless future. This is not to reject either, but rather to return them to their rightful role, that of planting seeds of possibility rather than sowing false prospects.

Fear

Making some people afraid of other people is one of the best ways to control all of them

While the reach of modern media should make us all more cosmopolitan, it often doesn't work like that. This is in part because of what we choose to watch and in part because what is chosen for us to see. TV's typical view of the outside world is of a place rife with danger. Talk shows and programs like Cops can make it feel like you're under siege. CNN constantly scans the world for new battlegrounds. Before television, you got most of the bad news from your own town and neighborhood. Now you can get bad news from any part of the globe, any time of day or night. It's hard not to worry.

Fifties

They called my generation the "silent" one, the one America skipped in moving from George Bush to Bill Clinton. Maybe some of us were quiet because we were trying to figure out how to avoid becoming the man in the gray flannel suit or part of the lonely crowd. The struggle, we thought, was about individuality and no one spoke of movements. Our cultural heroes didn't organize anything. They hit the road. Our goal wasn't to overthrow the establishment, someone would say a decade later, but to make it irrelevant. Or, like Miles Davis in concert, play with your back to it. In the 1960s, when we were in our 30s, we were told that we already were too old to be trusted. It wasn't really true; in many ways the 60s was just the mass movement of something that had started in the 50s with our coffee houses, music and conscious political apathy.

SOME OF US MADE Humphrey Bogart an anti-hero in part, I think, because we already suspected that America was our own Casablanca, a place of seductive illusions and baroque deceptions, where nothing was at it appeared. After all, we had been taught that if we crawled under our desks, we would be safe from The Bomb. Even our teachers lied to us. Bogie knew how to live in a time of lies.

Fixing things

1. Fix your country or your community, not the "system."

2. Don't say you can't beat city hall until you've tried. And then tried again, using a new idea.

3. Think of new solutions, not new rules.

4. Don't make it uncomfortable for others to offer new ideas.

5. Don't worry about political labels. Be ahead rather than left or right.

6. Don't blame the weak for trouble caused by the strong.

7. Don't do the same thing over and over again -- and expect anything different to happen.

8. Think laterally. Imagine the solution you want and then figure out how to get there. Experiment.

9. Don't be afraid of making mistakes along the way.

10. Use your experts and not theirs. If you can't find an expert, become one yourself.


Food

I believe in a modified version of the end-of-history theory, namely that most good combinations of foods have already been discovered. Thus ordering mahi-mahi baked in blueberry jam with a sawdust glaze is probably not a good idea.

Foreign policy

WHEN Washington journalists speak of a "truly serious and sustained crisis" they are usually referring to something foreign. God produces disasters such as floods and earthquakes. Domestic policies produce homelessness and a high unemployment and similar persistent problems, but it usually takes another country to produce a serious crisis.

Freedom

Every time an American decides that it is too dangerous to exercise a freedom, that freedom is diminished

The first rule of staying free is to act free.

THE MOST necessary work of anyone who wishes to be free themselves is to protect the freedom of everyone around them

Free markets

On Wall Street there are plenty of free lunches but no free markets. Generally speaking, the smaller the business the more it resembles the great myths of capitalism. If you want to find out what free enterprise is really about talk to a street vendor and not a Fortune 500 executive

French

ON THIS BASTILLE DAY, a thank you to the much maligned French. They helped us win our best war - the Revolution - and tried mightily to keep us out of two of our worst - Vietnam and Iraq.

Future

We may not have an awful lot of time left. The cynical cruelties of those who lead us are not subsiding. The media has failed us, much of the church remains silent, and the intelligentsia willingly conspires with those in power. In such a time we must find allies not only among ourselves but among strangers, in unlikely ways and in unlikely places. And above all, we must each in our own way avoid the surrender of silence.

How we move from values to action and thence to influence is hard to conceive, but it may help to remember that each honest heart is a political organization in waiting. If it remains silent out of fear, lethargy, or embarrassment, it becomes another locked-up vote for the status quo. All over this country people are being abused by those in power. Their stories must be told and those who tell them must say that these stories are bad stories, even if this is the only power they possess. Movements are, at their core, just people discovering that they think the same thing and finally getting the courage to say it and do something together.

Globalization

WHAT CORPORATE America wanted was nothing less than the Third Worlding of the US, a collapse of both present reality and future expectations. The closer the life and wages of our citizens could come to those of less developed nations, the happier the huge stateless multinationals would be. Then, as they said in the boardrooms and at the White House, the global playing field would be leveled.

And so the greatest surrender of sovereignty in US history is chalked up as an inevitable result of a better world. This abandonment was not initially controversial, nor even readily apparent, because Americans simply were not told that it had occurred. They did not know that their country -- which defeated in turn the British, the Mexicans, the Confederacy, the Spanish, the Germans (twice), the Japanese, and outlived the Soviet Union, had surrendered without a whimper to a junta of trade technocrats armed with nothing more menacing than cell phones and Palm Pilots.

Once having capitulated on economic matters, Americans would be taught to accept a similar diminution of social programs, civil liberties, democracy, and even some of the most basic governmental services. Free of being the agent of our collective will, government could then concentrate on the real business of a corporatist state, such as reinforcing the military, subsidizing selected industry, and strengthening police control over what would inevitably be an increasingly alienated and fractured electorate. We would be taught to deny ourselves progress and to blame others for our loss.

Government

IT WASN'T ALWAYS like this. Grown politicians did not always go around ripping apart the normal functions of government just so they could claim to have balanced a budget. People who called themselves leaders did not pride themselves on setting citizen against citizen, or trying to see how many criminals they could fry, immigrants they could deny medical care and education, or welfare mothers they could further disparage. Reform was not always used by press and politicians as a euphemism for repeal.

Inaugurations

THERE IS A conspiracy of excess that develops at inauguration time. The president, the media and the public all join in the charade, not unlike youths drawn to mischief that will ultimately result in punishment but seems too much fun to miss. A political situation that months earlier had been seen possibly headed for a constitutional crisis is transformed by January into a mandate, a Mardi Gras, a "season of renewal," the beginning of the best 100 days ever and one of those rare moments when a poet is actually allowed on national TV.

Information

FROM COUCH POTATO to CEO to Supreme Court justice, Americans stagger under too much information. No longer, it seems, does truth set us free; rather it leaves us catatonic -- burying us in its details and imprisoning us in its walls of noise and glare. If we are an ordinary television viewer we may react by accepting the medium's primary message that life is a vicarious experience. We may adopt the role that television has proposed for us, that of spectator, and come to believe that we have no more control over the events on CNN or the 11 PM news than we do over the third base coach's signals on ESPN. If one is a Supreme Court Justice or President of the United States, the sense of overload and ultimate ineffectiveness may be even more acute, but this sense will be suppressed, remaining a sort of trade secret. Few politicians or judges will say, even euphemistically, "I am helpless." As long as they choose to hold office, they must remain unindicted co-conspirators in the myth of their efficacy.

Inner frontier

For the moment, there is no prophet among those cooperative cells of humans attempting to revive their communities, only the strong hint that these Americans, with their acute sense of the realities in which their hopes must float, are doing something beyond the readily apparent scope of their endeavors. In these small places something more is happening. Energy is being restored. Life is being born. The inner frontier, the only one left to us, is opening. America is once again being given another chance.

Intellectual property

WHY DO SO many of the people who talk about "intellectual property" not seem all that bright? On precisely what date and under what circumstances did an advertising jingle for a new type of tampon become "intellectual property?' When I was writing my last book, I had to write for permissions. When I asked for permission to quote Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," the venerable Ludlow Music Co. took care of the matter in a page and a half. When I wanted to quote from a book, the venerable University of Chicago Press worked its way through the problem in one long page. When I wanted to quote eight words from a Mac Davis song, however, I got a letter from some big LA law firm wanting a synopsis of the book, a copy of the chapter of the book in which it would be quoted, as well as all future earnings of my first-bom son. I decided to write my own intellectual property.

Intelligence

THE appointment of an intelligence czar is about as futile as it naming a secretary of decency. Attempting to solve real problems by bureaucratic reorganization is simply a more costly way of not dealing with them. The administration will continue to lack both intelligence and decency regardless of who is purportedly in charge of them. A president dealing with intelligence is much like a reporter, for whom the sensible guide has long been, "If your mother says she loves you, get another source." To filter all intelligence sources through one person, as the new law does, means simply that the president will have even less access to good information than he does now.

Irony

Irony used to be a weapon used against the powerful. Today it is increasingly used by the powerful to demean the weak.

Jazz

The essence of jazz is the same as that of democracy: the greatest amount of individual freedom consistent with a healthy community. Each musician is allowed extraordinary liberty during a solo and then is expected to conscientiously back up the other musicians in turn. The two most exciting moments in jazz are during flights of individual virtuosity and when the entire musical group seems to become one. The genius of jazz (and democracy) is that the same people are willing and able to do both.

Language

Speak United States. This rule, taught me by my high school math teacher, Mr. Breininger, was the best literary advice I ever got.

Law

THE TECHNOLOGY of torts, with its tyranny of precedents and its infatuation with retribution over resolution, has, in the words of the country & western song, walked across our heart like it was Texas. No politics, no ideology, no culture has been immune. All of American life has been hauled into court. Thus we find in our path not only the endless droppings of corporate attorneys, but civil rights advocates who insist that the law will lead us to love each other, feminist counselors who believe that the world's oldest conflict can be settled on appeal, colleges that publish what amounts to a lawyer's guide to correct sex, and public interest activists trying to run a revolution out of the courthouse.

Obviously the law has had a crucial role in such matters as civil rights and bringing the megacorporation to heel. But such achievements hardly justify an exclusive contract to direct the course of social change. If today's lawyer-leaders had come to the fore thirty years ago, the 60s would have been just a lawsuit, not a cultural and political revolution. There would have been no music, no madness, no drama, and without them, probably not much change as well.

Laws should be handled like prescription drugs, but many of our politicians think of them as being more like popcorn or M&Ms -- something to munch on. This is unfortunate since much of America's success to date can be traced to one simple rule: don't make too many rules. Much of America's failure to date has come from ignoring this rule.

Throughout history, community order has largely grown out of the cooperation and effectiveness of individuals, schools, families, and the strength and local institutions. The police have been there not to maintain order, or even to define it, but to assist and protect the community and to intervene in those rare cases the normal community systems can't handle. One should not expect the fire department to come over and cook your dinner safely or light the logs in your fireplace; nor should one expect the police to replace the normal functions of individuals, families, and community institutions. Yet that is precisely what we have done.

The drive for family and community remains so strong that some of the young have created a surrogate for what has disappeared. They call it a gang

WHATEVER the source, it now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance. We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a testament to our fear and lack of trust.

Liberals

Three reasons liberals have a hard time winning elections:

1. NPR has a program called "Marketplace" but it does not have one called "Workplace."

2. Liberals talk more about gay marriage and abortion than they do about healthcare, jobs, or social security.

3. Liberals give the impression that if you want to vote Democratic you have to give up your gun and your Bible.

Lies

The endless argument about who said what to whom about what in order to get us into the Iraq war demonstrates an illusion about honesty shared by all sides. It is yet another iteration of a phenomenon I first noticed during the Edwin Meese nomination hearings. It became clear then, and so many times since, that America - including its politicians, media and ordinary citizens, had accepted a legal definition of honesty, to wit: if a public person can not be proved to have lied by the rules of a criminal court, he or she can't be called dishonest and, in the case of a nominee, remains qualified for office. In other words, our standard for confirmation to high office had become no better than that for acquittal of a common thief.

This stunningly low bar has been implicitly invoked many times - most recently and dramatically to exonerate our two latest presidents - and it helps to explain the decline of American politics. Once you leave your judgment of politicians to a court or a prosecutor, it is far too late to do much about them.

Consider, for example, some common synonyms for honesty: sincerity, integrity, frankness, candor, openness. Is there anyone, even on the Fox Network, who would argue that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al at any point displayed such characteristics in dragging us into the Iraq disaster? And how is it that we place such a lower value on such virtues than we do on the question of whether the aforementioned told a prosecutable lie?

In 2003, I was asked by Harper's to compile a history of the beginning of the Iraq war told entirely in lies by Bush officials and advisers. As I began to work on the project, I was reminded over and over of how little lying often has to do with court-defined perjury. It more typically involves hyperbolic hoodwinking, unsubstantiated analogy, cynical incitement of fear, deceitful distortion, slippery untruths, gossamer falsehoods, disingenuous anecdote, artful agitprop, and the relentless repetition of all the foregoing in an atmosphere in which facts are trampled underfoot by a mendacious mob and their semantic weapons.

One does not have to analyze such language legally to understand its evil. One need only have enough understanding of the manner of the honest, the sincere and the candid to know almost instinctively when their opposite is in command.

Yes, some of the Bush capos may have done it so poorly from time to time that they can be successfully prosecuted. But our ultimate standard for judging their words and claims - whether as a Sunday talk show commentator or as an ordinary citizen - should be an ethical and not a legal one. If we let such con artists get away with their ultimate trick - which is having us believe that if we can not prove their swindle we must accept it - we will have fully surrendered to their treachery.

Life

LIFE is a endless pick-up game between hope and despair, understanding and doubt, crisis and resolution.

Media

THE PRESS NEEDS to learn the difference between a con and a concept.

THE MEDIA teaches us that life is a vicarious experience

WOULDN'T IT BE nice if the Washington Post covered the breakup of the republic as well as it covered the break-in of an office?

THE JUSTIFIED CONCEIT of a free press is that, on average, Michael Isikoff is going to tell you the truth more often than a Pentagon or White House press secretary. Finding this truth requires far more than documents and statements or the faithful stenography of faithless officials. It requires finding people who, rightfully in fear of their jobs, are at least willing to share a bit of the truth with a reporter whose confidence they trust. It requires judgment, perception, and inductive reasoning on the part of the scribe and it requires considerable courage on the part of the whistleblower. Once you believe the journalist no more trustworthy than an official source you no longer need a free press.

SHOULDN'T A BUSINESS like journalism that yaps so incessantly about ethics run somewhat fewer, shorter, and less repulsively self-promoting stories about its trade association dinners? Or at least give equal time to the corrugated steel manufacturer's annual gathering?

WHAT WOULD happen on a TV news talk show if the host or one of the guests whispered? Would the ratings immediately drop? Or is the noise just to make people think something's happening?

MANY reporters aren't reporters anymore; they're just semiotic sharecroppers on some corporate plantation.

A NEWS CONFERENCE is a device by which the establishment keeps large numbers of reporters in one place to keep them from covering the news every place else.

IF YOU WANT to complain about anonymous sources in journalism, is it okay to quote "leading experts" in order to bolster your case?

WHY DOES the media always refer to people defending our civil liberties and the Constitution as "activists" or "advocates?" Wouldn't "citizens" do just as well?

TV treats politics much as it does wide screen movies; it snips off the right and left sides until the frame fits comfortably within the more equilateral shape of its eye. The edges of our experience are lost and we find ourselves staring at a comfortable center -- which in the case of politics, means we find ourselves endlessly watching the President while much of the rest of American democracy passes unnoticed.

IT IS in the nature of democracy that we are constantly being called upon to act before we have all the facts. It should not surprise us that writing about democracy is as incomplete as its subject. Journalism, after all, is to thought and understanding as the indictment is to the trial, the hypothesis to the truth, the estimate to the audit. It is the first cry for help, the hand groping for the light switch in the dark, the returns before the outlying precincts have been heard from.

THIS WRITER proposes to serve not as an expert, but rather in the more modest and, I would argue, more constructive journalistic role of being the surrogate eyes and ears of the reader. Consider me simply someone who has traveled this trail several times before and thus might remember where the clean water is to be found, the names of some of the rarer plants and possibly even a shortcut home.

ABSENT A SMOKING gun, editors often favor stories that explain import, perceive perceptions, and reveal meaning. Detailed chronicles of the daily joys, inanities and mishaps of politics have faded. News is being replaced in no small part by the reflections of various writers about what the unreported news means to them or is supposed to mean to us.

The first rule of media survival is use it; don't let it use you. We must ignore the role the media has prescribed for us -- audience, consumer, addict -- and treat it much as the trout treats a stream, a medium in which to swim and not to drown. The trick is to stop the media from happening to you and to treat it literally as a medium -- an environment, a carrier. Then you can cease being a consumer or a victim and become a hunter and a gatherer, foraging for signs that are good and messages that are important and data you can use. Then the zapper and the mouse become tools and weapons and not addictions. Then you turn the TV off not because it is evil but because you have gotten whatever it has to offer and now must look somewhere else.

The media should inform citizens and provide a means by which citizens may address government rather than serving as a vehicle by which members of the government and elites tell citizens what to think.

THE media is purportedly our surrogate priest, parent, and teacher, but is, in fact, gangs of burglars breaking and entering our brains and stealing time and space from us in a way not even our parents experienced. What was once extraordinary became merely unusual and finally universal as we moved from manuscript to microphone to camera and cable. With each step, context, environment, and points of reference became ever more distant and external. With each step, we became ever more dependent on things and people we would most likely never see in their unprojected, unfilmed, unrecorded nature.

TODAY, outlets such as C-SPAN and PBS function as karioke bars of political centrism. Far from encouraging the sort of vibrant debate our country needs, they apply a gag on democracy by limiting how one may speak about it.

Mid East

THE MOST misleading myth about the Middle East is that an end to violence is a necessary precondition to peace negotiations. An end to violence should rather be one the goals of peace negotiations. The killings emphasize the need for such talks rather than serving as justification for avoiding them.

NO LESS THAN Washington's politicians and lobbyists, Washington's journalists are creatures of the capital's culture. The status of their subculture has improved measurably in recent decades, aided in no small part by the growing tendency of journalists to write about each other -- a tool of upward mobility unavailable to other trades and professions.

This is not to say that most reporters are overpaid. The stories one hears about media stars -- such as the network hotshots and those who appear on talk shows engaging in an activity known as "talking out their ass" -- are the exceptions. Many print reporters especially pay a lifetime penalty for being excessively literate and insufficiently good-looking or garrulous. Further, like many hardworking government workers, they have little voice in the decisions of the system they serve. They remain trapped in a purgatory between the disdain of the public and ineffectualness within their own bureaucracy.

POLITICAL JOURNALISTS, like sports writers, are enthralled by the mechanics of action, a fascination that results in us knowing much more about how a bill was passed that about what it contains. Such journalists, were they to cover a cross-country drive, might well do so by describing only what had occurred under the hood.

Moral values

Why do all moral values have to go into families and TV? Can't we save a few for public policy and budgets?



Link to Part Two

loved it.

I got as far as Bush Administration and this quip about CONdi and am ROFLMAO :


"...IN HER FEW short days in office, State Secretary Rice has publicly chastised Palestine, Israel, Iran, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain. For a purported diplomat this may be a record outside of North Korea or the late Roman Empire. While Rice's intent is that of an imperialist, her manner is that of an prissy third grade teacher apparently unaware that not only are most whom she scolds not in the third grade, they're not even in her school district..."

I'll collect myself and read to Z now!

I think we should all review this one more time.

Thank you MM.

It's a good read, and there's a wealth of good things to ruminate on.

I have read it four times already.

Baseball is not unique in this. Cricket actually does go on for days and days.

The story isn't to be taken literally.
The writer is an American,
and in America we don't play much cricket.
But we do play Baseball!


I'm sure if the writer had made the effort
he could have come up with a dozen good analogies.

good one.

of course Bush was appointed not elected.