Category Archives: News

Man on the moon

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Neil Armstrong on the Moon. (NASA photo, public domain)

There are moments we always remember.  Sadly, most of them are bad, like Pearl Harbor for my parents’ generation and September 11 for us.  Sometimes, however, the news is good, even fantastic.  Those of us who remember July 20, 1969 will never forget the thrill, the surge of optimism when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

I was driving home from the bay area yesterday afternoon when the radio said he had died at the age of 82.  In an instant, memory carried me back  back to a restaurant in Yosemite 43 years ago.  I was  up there for the summer, working to earn money to buy my first car.  It was slow at 4:30 that afternoon – the dinner crowd wouldn’t arrive for another hour.  The whole crew gathered in the kitchen where someone had placed a portable black and white TV with rabbit ears.

Later that evening, a friend and I lay on the ground near the river, gazing up at the summer moon, which was full that night, trying to wrap our imaginations around it.  The night was warm.  We lay there, not saying very much, until it was late.

Neil Armstrong. Photo by NASA, Public Domain

Several people who knew Neil Armstrong spoke on the radio.  A friend of his noted of the irony of a man who stood in the world spotlight but was one of the shyest and most retiring people she ever knew.  Everyone mentioned his patriotism and courage, as a combat pilot, a test pilot, and finally as a man who went where no one had gone before.

There are times in adolescence when we think we can do anything, like get a job in the mountains and earn enough money to buy a car.  There are times when nations believe they can do anything, like put a man on the moon.  The webs of cause and effect are far too complex to sort out, but both individual and collective achievements begin with strong intentions.  Even when we set out to find X and discover Z instead, some determination got us moving.

Neil Armstong seems to have been a decent and courageous man.  Now he is even more than that.  His smile from space will always remind us of how barriers can fall and new frontiers can be gained when we are motivated by deep and unswerving intention.

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew Bacevich – A book review

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Anyone paying attention knows that our nation has lost its way, but that’s where clarity ends.  How and when did we go wrong?  Sometimes I wish I could read the histories that will be written a hundred years from now, after time has lent perspective to the chaos of current events.  Thanks to Andrew Bacevich, we don’t have to wait for at least one piercing analysis.

Bacevich, a Viet Nam veteran, retired as a colonel after 23 years in the army.  He holds a PhD in American Diplomatic History from Princeton and taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998.  In March, 2007, he described the US doctrine of “preventative warfare” as “immoral, illicit, and imprudent.”  Two months later, his son died in Iraq.

Andrew Bacevich

In The Limits of Power, published in 2008, Bacevich steps back to examine our history from WWII to the present, to look at the root cause of the folly that has made constant warfare, with its huge cost in lives and resources, our norm.  Foreign policy and domestic policy are wedded together, he says.  Despite political rhetoric, our seeming state of perpetual warfare is not simply the result of international villains like Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, or even Osama Bin Laden.  To blame them, he says, is like “blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression or…attributing McCarthyism entirely to the antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy.”  Foreign policy has become “an expression of domestic dysfunction.”  Bacevich pulls no punches, and pinpoints the nature of this dysfunction in the title of his first chapter, “The Crisis of Profligacy.”

“For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.”

Bacevich says the critical, though seldom acknowledged, turning point was bookmarked by two presidential speeches.  The first was President Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech, though he never used the word.

The seventies was a decade of severe economic shocks that saw the first oil crisis, a stock market meltdown, and our transition from a producer to a consumer economy.  On July 15, 1979, Carter said the real crisis was not what OPEC was doing to oil prices, but our way of life, which makes us depend on foreign oil.

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God…too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.  Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.  But we’ve…learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

To continue down that road, Carter said, was “a certain route to failure.”  He urged a renewal of national purpose, characterized by national restraint and an effort to find and develop alternative energy sources.  The main effect of his speech was to provide ammunition to his political opponents.  Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, in his “morning in America” speech told us there were no restraints.  The energy crisis was the government’s fault.  The solution was to reduce federal spending and cut taxes.

In an effort to salvage his re-election prospects, Carter adopted a pugnacious tone, articulating the “Carter Doctrine” in January, 1980.  He said the nation would “use any means necessary, including military force,” to prevent any other power from dominating the Persian Gulf.”  Sadly, this endorsement of American imperialism rather than his earlier call to fiscal and moral balance is what guides our politicians to this day.  It isn’t hard to see why.  In the 1980 presidential election, Carter won just four states, while Reagan carried 48.  No one in Washinton missed the message:  the way to get elected is to pander to our illusions, to suggest that our credit is infinite and the bills will never come due.

In 1983, President Reagan proposed his “Star Wars” missile defense shield, implying that our national security and way of life were wedded to military superiority.  “Defense is not a budget item,” he said.  George Bush didn’t think so, nor do this year’s presidential candidates.  The President criticizes the Ryan budget for draconian cuts to key domestic services, but says nothing about its huge uptick in military spending – perhaps because for Democrats too, “defense is not a budget item.”

Bacevich articulates solutions akin to Carter’s – an end to the fool’s errand of trying to reshape the world in our image and an effort to set our own house in order.  He cautions that expecting those in power to adopt such a course of action is like expecting the CEO of a major car company to lobby for public transportation – there’s too much power and money vested in the status quo. Among other suggestions, he says:

“No doubt undertaking a serious…national effort to begin the transition to a post-fossil fuel economy promises to be a costly proposition.  Yet…spending trillions to forcibly democratize the Islamic world will achieve little, while investing trillions in energy research might actually produce something useful.” 

Technical innovation has been an American strongpoint, from the Mahattan Project to the space race, to the digital revolution.  In contrast, our efforts to reshape other cultures has been rather dismal.

If a change of course is possible, Bacevich does not think it likely.  Throughout his book, he quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, a pastor, theologian, and author who wrote between 1930 and 1960.  He gives us this quote by Niebuhr:

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

The Limits of Power is a disturbing book to read, but one I can recommend to everyone who prefers hard truth to subterfuge and lies.  For a more recent look at Andrew Bacevich and his ideas, I recommend this interview, conducted in March, on “Moyers and Friends:” http://billmoyers.com/episode/moving-beyond-war/

As they say in 12 step programs, admitting there is a problem is the first step toward a solution.

The hour of the wolf

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Welcome Library, London, CC by NC

On monday morning, I woke around 3:00am with a sense of dread far out of proportion to the rather mundane dream I’d been having.  A thunderstorm rolling by increased the sense of menace at this darkest hour of the night.

The hour of the wolf is the phrase I’ve always used for such moments.  “It’s always darkest right before dawn,” we tell ourselves by daylight.  “It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black,” says a demotivational poster you can find on despair.com.  That is the hour of the wolf (though despair.com is a funny website).

When I was an undergrad, we used to say, “Wherever two or more are gathered, they’ll start a film society.”  College film societies of the time loved Ingmar Bergman, and I did too, so I knew his 1968, The Hour of the Wolf, but it wasn’t one of my favorites from his surrealistic period.  The best definition I know came from dialog in the “Hour of the Wolf” episode of Babylon 5, in 1996:

“Have you ever heard of the hour of the wolf? … It’s the time between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. You can’t sleep, and all you can see is the troubles and the problems and the ways that your life should’ve gone but didn’t. All you can hear is the sound of your own heart.”  – Michael J. Straczynski, writer, Babylonian Productions.

Since I couldn’t sleep, I tried to remember what I knew of the phrase.  A long time ago, I read that it was coined in medieval Paris.  The gates of the city were shut at night, but during the winter, wolves sometimes slipped through at dusk.  At the darkest hour of the night, they would glide through the streets like shadows to prey on the poor unfortunates who were sleeping alone on the streets.  “Hour of the wolf” was the phrase coined by those who encountered the grisly remains in the morning.

Hint:  thinking of wolves chewing corpses doesn’t help you get back to sleep.

I knew by then what was keeping me up.  Some of it had to do with the Colorado shootings.  It’s hard to sleep easy after such an event, but that was not the heart of it.  On sunday, I’d listened to Chris Hedges, a guest on Moyers & Company, in a segment called, “Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones.'”

Hedges is a journalist who worked for the New York Times until he was “pushed out” for outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq.  The interview is important and very depressing, like much honest reporting these days (when you can find it).  

http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-capitalism’s-‘sacrifice-zones’/

It’s hard to know what to do with this kind of unpleasant truth.  One good thing that came out of this post is that I learned the source of the phrase, “live with the questions.”  Therapists, especially Jungians, like to quote it, but it was Rainer Maria Rilke who first penned it.  In 1903, in Letters to a Young Poet, he said:

“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

We have met the enemy…

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The Colorado shootings will forever cast a pall over the opening day of the latest Batman movie, the kind of action-adventure fantasy many of us were looking forward to as an escape from all the other bad news that fills the papers these days.

I cannot add anything to the expressions of grief and outrage that the people of Colorado have and will make, but I heard one thing this morning that gave me pause.

The governor of Colorado said, “This is the act of a very deranged mind.”  It’s a natural thing to say, and we hear the same words after every similar tragedy.  The Texas Tower.  Oklahoma City.  Columbine.  The first thing we try to do is assure ourself that the crime was the work of a nut or monster.  The last thing we want to hear are comments now emerging from people who knew the suspect and say he seemed “really smart,” and “a nice guy.”  It’s terrifying to think that an “ordinary person” or a neighbor could do something like this.

Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who Martin Luther King nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, was versed both in Buddhist and western psychology.  His teachings gave me the concept of “store consciousness.”

Thich Nhat Hahn

This is the part of our unconscious psyche where all possible tendencies reside, like seeds, waiting to germinate.  The ones we water with our attention, thought, and action are the ones that grow.  Like all Buddhists, Thich Nhat Hahn believes that we cannot know for sure which seeds we have watered in previous lives, but our proclivities in this life, for good or ill, give a strong hint.

Metaphysics aside, we can recognize the truth of the core concept – the seed tendencies we water are the ones that grow.  The only memorial we can make to the people who died in that theater is to stand beside those like Thich Nhat Hahn, Martin Luther King, and all men and women of goodwill of the present and past.  We can join with them in trying to give the water of attention to qualities like compassion, patience, and non-violence – the seeds we want to grow.

Those who follow this blog know how often I quote Walt Kelley’s comic strip character, Pogo, who said, “We has met the enemy and he is us.”  It doesn’t have to be that way.

American Dreaming

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This Norman Rockwell magazine cover, showing Thanksgiving on Walton’s Mountain, is a perfect illustration of The American dream.  The power of Rockwell’s vision of an American earthly paradise is so compelling that we long to believe it even though we know life was never like that and certainly isn’t now.  I started thinking about the power of the dream after reading an excellent article in Time Magazine:  “The American Dream:  A Biography” by Jon Meacham, in the July 2, 2012 issue).  Meacham’s conclusion supports what all of us know but wish we didn’t – the dream is in danger like never before.

The phrase, “American Dream,” first appeared in James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America , an optimistic history published in 1931, as we neared the depths of the great depression.  Adams wrote of:  “that American Dream of a better, richer, and happier life of all our citizens of every rank which is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world.”

Even in 1931, there seemed to be cause for optimism:  the day Adams finished his manuscript, President Herbert Hoover turned on the lights of the Empire State Building.  Technical marvels coincided with the Time article as well, but they didn’t belong to us.  On Sunday, three Chinese astronauts manually docked a spacecraft to their orbiting space station, a key milestone in their quest to reach the moon.  On the same day, a Chinese deep sea craft set a national diving record, reaching a depth of 7000 meters in the Mariana Trench.

It took two centuries and a civil war before the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was officially extended to everyone, and yet for a time, America offered a better chance to reinvent oneself, to start again, to rise above the limitations of birth than any other place in the world.  Abraham Lincoln called himself “a living witness” that any child could grow up to be president.  Somewhere along the line, things changed.

One interesting point that Meacham makes is that “there is a missing character in [the] popular version of the story of America’s rugged individualism:  the government, which helped make the rise of the individual possible.”  The Pacific Railroad and Homestead acts, signed by Lincoln, had much to do with knitting the country together and making allowing dreamers to “go west” or “light out for the Territory” like Huckleberry Finn as well as his creator.  It was government, under a southern president, that enforced the Civil Rights Act, and during the 60’s, launched the drive that put men on the moon and started us on the road to a micro-electronics revolution.

In the end, dreams do not depend on facts and figures, but more on a sense of hope and possibilities.  What was different in 1931 that allowed James Truslow Adams to write The Epic of America?  In it, he said, “If the American dream is to come true and abide with us, it will, at bottom, depend on the people themselves.”

If it did then, it does now.  What happened over the last eighty years?  There aren’t any easy answers, but there are many things we can and should be thinking about.

People and the Planet: A Report by the Royal Society

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On April 26, The Royal Society, the UK’s 350 year old academy of science, released the results of a 21 month study of patterns of population and consumption.  Sir John Sulston, chair of the working group, put it very simply:

“The world now has a very clear choice.  We can choose to address the twin issues of population and consumption.  We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption, to reframe our economic values to truly reflect what our consumption means for our planet and to help individuals around the world to make informed and free reproductive choices.  Or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward vortex of economic, socio-political and environmental ills, leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future.”  http://royalsociety.org/news/Royal-Society-calls-for-a-more-equitable-future-for-humanity/

The Society issued a 132 page report that makes several key recommendations  http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/people-planet/report/:

  1. The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.
  2. The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.
  3. Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high.
  4. Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings.

Please look at this video clip of Sulston summarizing the findings of the report, which he will present at the United Nations on May 1, ahead of the Rio+20 conference.

Of special interest to me was Sulston’s critique of GDP as the key measure of economic wellbeing for nations.  GDP, he says, drives growth to levels that cannot be sustained.  Michael Meade once observed that unbridled growth in the body is cancer, and unbridled growth in the body politic is a parallel ill.

Growth is such an ingrained measure of wellbeing that re-imagining global socio-economics will not be simple or easy.  One tactic, according to the working group, is to factor in real costs:  what are the real costs of disappearing forests and species?  What is the real cost of water when the study predicts that 1.8 billion people will live with severe water scarcity by 2025?

The issue of water brings to mind my previous post, “Another Regulation Conundrum,” http://wp.me/pYql4-21e, which describes a couple’s 40 year effort to create an self-sustaining and non-polluting homestead.  One of their projects was recycling household “gray water.”  The county building codes have no provision for such experimental ways of doing things, and the couple has racked up large fines and an eviction notice.  In a very real sense, the status quo is the problem.  According to the Royal Society, not only our building codes but the mindset behind them must change or the quality of life for everyone will continue its spiral of decline.

One parting thought:  the study was released on Thursday.  Why haven’t we heard it mentioned on any US media?

Another Regulation Conundrum

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My previous post centered on regulations to force bloggers to disclose seemingly small-fry issues, like whether they were comped with an ebook for reviewing independently published authors.

Thursday’s paper ran a story from the New York Times on a more weighty and poignant regulatory issue.  The article, “Marin County battles hippie holdout,” tells of David Lee Hoffman, an entrepreneur of artisan teas, who designed and built 30 structures during the 40 years he lived on a rural hillside.  Inspired by youthful treks through Tibet and Nepal, Hoffman, 67, and his wife, Ratchanee, have tried to create a sustainable, non-polluting, homestead.  In the process, by ignoring repeated notices of violations of county building codes, they racked up $200,000 in fines and have just been ordered to vacate their home until the violations are fixed. The case is now before a judge.  http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/26/4443307/hippie-askldj-flaksj-dfklaj-sdlfkj.html

photo by Jim Wilson, New York Times

The Hoffman homestead contains such fanciful structures as the Worm Palace, a Solar Power Shower Tower, and a moat, which is integral to recycling household water.  One of the county’s chief concerns is their method for disposing of human waste, which uses worm colonies to help turn human waste into humus.  Composting toilets are not legal in Marin.  The county also says it’s worried about an excess of rain, which could flood the moat and send the gray water into nearby creeks.

Hoffman says, “I did what I felt was right.  My love of the planet is greater than my fear of the law.”

***

There’s nothing simple about the regulations that govern our lives, and many of them serve us well.  I like clean water and knowing the content of the food I eat.  I want pure aspirin when I have a headache, and I want to trust the odometer when I shop for a used car.  If I buy a hot dog during a ballgame, I don’t want to have to think , of Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle.  And I might not want to live downstream from the night soil in the Hoffmans’ garden.

And yet…

Most of us know, in the corners of our awareness, that many of our problems are beyond the capacity of our current institutions.  We know that business as usual is part of the problem.  That regulators do not create solutions.  As Einstein said, “One cannot alter a condition with the same mind that created it in the first place.”

How do we enable people like the Hoffmans, willing to devote their lives to imagining new ways of living?  If we fine and evict people for living their dreams, pretty soon we’re going to run short of dreamers.

Bill Moyers Interviews Andrew Bacevich on the Middle East

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On January 4, I published a post called, “Sabre Rattling Over Oil:  Better Get Used to It.”  http://wp.me/pYql4-1AT

I quoted from a 2008 interview between Bill Moyers and Col. Andrew Bacevich in which Moyers says, “Our finest warriors are often our most reluctant warmongers.”  Now we the privilege of hearing these two in a new discussion on Moyers & Company as we seem to drift helplessly toward our third war in a decade, and voices of reason and restraint are drowned out in the hysterical ranting of politicians.

Please be sure to look for the show on PBS this weekend, or watch it on billmoyers.com  http://billmoyers.com/episode/moving-beyond-war/

Andrew Bacevich on Moyers & Company

This week, on an all-new Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers and Bacevich explore the futility of “endless” wars, and provide a reality check on the rhetoric of American exceptionalism.

“Are we so unimaginative, so wedded to the reliance on military means that we cannot conceive of any way to reconcile our differences with groups and nations in the Islamic world, and therefore bring this conflict to an end?” Bacevich tells Moyers.

Bacevich also answers the question of whether Iran is a direct threat to America with a definitive no. “Whatever threat Iran poses is very, very limited,” he tells Moyers, “and certainly does not constitute any kind of justification for yet another experiment with preventive war.”

Andrew Bacevich is a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who retired as a colonel after 23 years in the military, to teach history and international relations at Boston University.