Category Archives: Politics

Full Faith and Credit: a personal story and parable.

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My wife and I got married in Santa Fe in 1976.  We didn’t have a lot of money, but our mothers were gone and our families and friends were on the coasts, so there would only be eight in the wedding party.  We arranged to have the reception and put everyone up at the lodge in a nearby national monument.

I worked in a printshop that had been one of the finest in town.  We still did brochures for the Santa Fe Opera, but signs were clear that the glory days were over.  A husband and wife team had started the shop, but they divorced, and with only one of them running the business, glitches appeared in the billing system, the revenues, and the payroll.  About the time we booked the rooms and locked in arrangements, my paychecks started to bounce.

The pressmen and I started cashing our checks at grocery stores and the boss’s bank, since our own banks charged fees for deposits that bounced.  The day before the wedding, a teller said, “I’m sorry, I can’t cash this check.  Your employer’s account is $1000 in arrears.”

“Please,”  I said.  “We’re getting married tomorrow, and we have to pay the caterers.  If they’re $1000 in the hole, what does another $150 matter?”

She bit her lip and scrunched up her eyebrows, then smiled, and handed me the cash.  “Congratulations!” she said.  “Have wonderful wedding day.”

Crisis narrowly averted.  But…

Do you think I ever put my faith in that employer again?

Do you think other nations will put their faith in United States credit again?

I’ll answer the first question.  We set about saving money to move back to California where economic prospects were better.

I don’t know the answer to question number two, but I do know that trust takes time to build and is easy to squander…

Ship of Fools

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Ship of Fools. German woodcut, 1549

Ship of Fools. German woodcut, 1549

I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone to learn that this is my second post of this title in two years.

“The ship of fools is an allegory that has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. The allegory depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction.“ – Wikipedia

The Wikipedia entry documents the origin of this image in a method that Renaissance people developed to rid themselves of their mentally challenged fellows.  As Michel Foucault put it in Madness and Civilization, “they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then ‘knew’, had an affinity for each other.”

OK, I gotta say it – don’t you wish we could send all members of the Federal government off on a Carnival cruise and hope the engine stalls at sea?

“Ship of Fools” has been a recurrent image in literature, art, and music for 500 years.  Somehow it’s comforting to to know that folly and madness are nothing new, even – or perhaps especially – at the helm of the Ship of State.

Informed Citizen Disorder

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Words can sometimes illuminate.  Bill Moyers’ recent interview with Marty Kaplan, Professor of Entertainment, Media, and Society at USC, gave me a phrase that crystalizes the sense of despair that increasingly follows attending to current events.  “Our spirits have been sickened by the toxins baked into our political system,” Kaplan says.  That’s one definition of what he calls, “Informed Citizen Disorder.”

Marty Kaplan by adamrog, CC-by-SA-3.0

Marty Kaplan by adamrog, CC-by-SA-3.0

Kaplan has an impressive and varied resume; a degree in Microbiology from Harvard; a Ph.D in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford; twelve years as a Vice President at Walt Disney Studios.  Kaplan wrote speeches for Walter Mondale and co-authored the screenplay for The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) starring Eddie Murphy.  He was the founding Director of the Norman Lear Center at USC, which studies “the social, political, economic and cultural impact of entertainment on the world.”

In the interview with Moyers, called Weapons of Mass Distraction, Kaplan spoke of the weeks he recently spent in Brazil, watching the widespread protests against “political corruption, economic injustice, poor health care, inadequate schools, lousy mass transit, [and] a crumbling infrastructure” while the government spends billions to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.

One of the obvious questions Kaplan asks is where are the protests in our country?  With ills so blatant and parallel to Brazil, where is our outrage?

“Sickened spirits,” is one of his answers.  Another is misdirection; what passes for journalism often has us asking the wrong questions as it feeds us “the infotainment narrative of life in America.”  Learned helplessness is another factor that Kaplan often cites.

Learned helplessness entered the language of psychology in a now-famous experiment conducted by Martin Seligman in 1967.  Dogs were subjected to electro-shocks with no means to avoid them.  Eventually, they stopped looking for an escape and entered a passive and “hopeless” mode.  In the experiment’s final phase, when means of avoidance were introduced, the dogs did not discover them, because the helplessness had been so thoroughly learned they no longer even tried.  Researchers had to retrain them to manipulate their surroundings again.

The analogies to our situation are obvious.  Citing incidents like the lack of change after Sandy Hook, Kaplan wonders how many times can we stand to have our hearts broken?  Answering a question from Moyers on “Informed Citizen Disorder,” he adds:  

“Ever since I was in junior high school, I was taught that to be a good citizen meant you needed to know what was going on in your country and in your world. You should read the paper, you should pay attention to the news, that’s part of your responsibility of being an American.

And the problem, especially in recent years, is the more informed I am, the more despondent I am, because day after day, there is news which drives me crazy and I want to see the public rise up in outrage and say, no, you can’t do that, banks. You can’t do that, corporations. You can’t do that polluters, you have to stop and pay attention to the laws, or we’re going to change the laws.

…every time that doesn’t happen…something bad happened and nothing was done about it…the sadder one is when you consume all that news…all the incentives are perverse. The way to be happy, to avoid this despondency is to be oblivious to it all, to live in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.'”

Despite everything, Kaplan remains an optimist.  “I have kids,” he says, “I have to be.  The world has kids, we have to be.”  The alternative to optimism, Kaplan warns, is to “medicate yourself with the latest blockbuster and some sugar, salt, and fat that’s being marketed to you.  The only responsible thing that you can do is say that individuals can make a difference and I will try…”

Not the happy-happy answer we’d get from the “infotainment” world, but though Kaplan is an optimist, he’s not going to feed us bullshit.  I urge everyone to listen to the interview or read the transcript.  A key finding with learned helplessness that researchers discovered and Kaplan cites, is that since it is based on perception rather than fact, it can be quickly reversed.  We’re not there yet, he thinks, but maybe as people become more and more unhappy with the state of affairs around them, a critical mass is building that will lead ordinary citizens to demand change as we have done in the past.

Paranoia stikes deep

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My title comes from a phrase Stephen Stills used 46 years ago in the lyrics of, “For What it’s Worth,” a song The Buffalo Springfield released in January, 1967.

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

Those lyrics came to mind today around noon, when the dogs started barking. I found a UPS package on the doorstep, lightweight, about 10x8x8, from a local address I didn’t recognize.

“Expecting a package from a place called ‘Copperfield?'” I called to Mary, who was in the other room.

“No,” she yelled back. “Be careful opening it.”

“Honey, if it’s a bomb, being careful won’t help.”

“No,” she said. “I mean that poison.”

“OK,” I called. “I’ll start with the packing slip. That’s probably where they put the ricin.”

It turned out to be the can of black touch-up paint I’d ordered for our wood-burning stove. As you might have guessed, I wasn’t really scared of being blown up, but it was the first thing that came to mind. And why not? “They” consider my phone calls worth logging, and my internet hits, and my credit card use. Those of you with newer high-definition TV’s should realize there is a built-in feature that allows a 3d party to peer into your living room. That’s old news, as in posted at least a year ago, to a collective yawn.

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear

That’s the heart of our problem: what’s happening ain’t exactly or even a little clear, except maybe, “step out of line, the man come and take you away.”

One of the few people in Washington I admire, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Independent from Vermont, posted a survey on his website. Here are the four questions:

  1. Do you favor or oppose the National Security Agency’s program to monitor online communications in order to protect the nation from terrorist threats?
  2. Is it appropriate for the federal government to collect millions of phone records from American citizens, if doing so could potentially disrupt a terror plot?
  3. Do you think the president should or should not have the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor the electronic communications of American citizens without getting warrants?
  4. Do you favor or oppose changing the PATRIOT Act, which allows the government to collect the phone records of American citizens without a warrant?

I haven’t taken the survey yet, because I’m still “Unsure” on two of the questions. I find that upsetting, given that Sanders also posted the text of Amendment IV to the Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Decades ago, H.L. Mencken wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the public alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Right now, I think we are all numb. More precisely, I think this is what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” When a creature perceives that it’s powerless to prevent harmful events, it becomes listless and depressed. Or disgusted with politics. One of these days I expect that listlessness and disgust to erupt as outrage. When and if it does, I don’t think it’s going to be pretty or the stuff of songs – there is too much we have collectively stuffed, and for too long a time.

One Nation Under Stress

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The title of this post comes from a new book reviewed on NPR, One Nation Under Stress:  The Trouble With Stress as an Idea, by Dana Becker, PhD.

According to Dr. Becker, “stress” is a recent concept.  The first article on stress in the New York Times was published in 1976.  The first diagnoses of “nervous disorders” or “neurasthenia,” came from the work of Dr. George Beard ca 1869.  In the NPR interview, Becker says that physicians of the time considered “American nervousness” to come from outside factors, related to the increasing pace of life after the civil war.  “Stress,” as we understand it today, is the polar opposite.

Now we have internalized stress, focusing on the risks to our health and the ways we should cope with it, through diet, exercise, yoga, and so on.  Our experience of stress derives from our ideas of stress, Becker says.  The internal emphasis on health is necessary, but we let it divert us from questioning the external causes of stress.  She gives an example in the NPR interview: many articles are written to help working mothers cope with stress – far fewer are written about the need for affordable daycare.  We may eat kale and do yoga to survive the 24/7 world, but we seldom ask why this is the norm and what the alternatives are.

This argument echoes a major concern of James Hillman, who I frequently write about here.  Though he was once Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, in 1992 he co-authored a book called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse.  In it, he said:

“Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway, our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture, and the crime in the streets, whatever – every time we try to deal with that by going to therapy with our rage and our fear, we deprive the political world of something.”

In her NPR interview, Dana Becker presented a balanced view of stress – it’s fine to treat the symptoms, which are personal, as long as we don’t gloss over the underlying causes, many of which are not.  The promise of new view of a modern ailment is enough to put One Nation Under Stress near the top of my “to read” list.

Change is the only constant

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That’s what they say in the tech industry.  That’s what Buddha said 2600 years ago.  And that’s what the National Intelligence Council says in a 140 page report, “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds.”

Click for the text of the whole report

Since 1997, the NIC, formed of all 16 US intelligence agencies, has issued five Global Trends reports, one after each presidential election.  For this one they engaged think tanks, government, and business leaders in 14 nations and concluded that the world will be radically different in 18 years.  The pace of change will be faster than at any period in modern history.

NIC Chairman, Christopher Kojm, says:
“We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. It is our contention that the future is not set in stone, but is malleable, the result of an interplay among megatrends, game-changers and, above all, human agency. Our effort is to encourage decision makers—whether in government or outside—to think and plan for the long term so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding.”

Here is a link to a summary of the report. ww.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-10/u-s-intelligence-agencies-see-a-different-world-in-2030.html

The NIC defines “megatrends” as scenarios likely to happen under all circumstances.  “Game-changers” are “critical variables whose trajectories are far less certain.”  Additional possibilities are listed as “black swans,” discrete events that would cause large scale changes, either for good (a democratized China or a reformed Iran) or ill (global pandemic, WMD attack).

The report identifies four megatrends, changes regarded as inevitable over the next two decades:

  • Diffusion of power:  The US will lose it’s international dominance, but no other nation will take its place.  “Power will shift to networks and coalitions in a multi-polar world.”  Though the report didn’t say it, as a student of World War I history, I have to observe that the last time the world was structured this way, things did not turn out very well.  The report identifies one best case scenario as a new era of US/Chinese cooperation.
  • Individual Empowerment: A rising middle class in emerging nations, increased access to education, widespread use of technology, and health care advances can improve the lot of large numbers of people. The report notes that technology is two edged sword: it can benefit and disrupt.  Advances sometimes create and at other times eliminate jobs.  Technology fosters communication but also  leaves infrastructure vulnerable to cyber-attack.
  • Demographic Change: World population will grow from 7.1 to 8.3 billion, and 60% world will live in cities (it’s 50% now).  This will strain resources and increase pollution. Aging populations may slow economic growth in developed nations. Immigration will increase.
  • Food, Water, and Energy Shortages: In 18 years, the world will need 35% more food and 40% more water.  Our intelligence agencies don’t waste time pretending climate change isn’t real.  They note that conditions like widespread drought have grown more severe in just the 18 months they’ve been working on the report.

National Geographic issue on extreme weather, published one month before Superstorm Sandy

Rather than summarize more of the report, I invite readers to check it out for themselves.  Let’s step back and reflect on what this means.

My dogs do not like change.  They find comfort in their routines, and if I am honest, so do I.  This month a 72 year old hardware store, where you could find anything, closed it’s doors.  So did a 76 year old nursery, where master gardeners could always diagnose the ugly brown spots on your roses.  That’s enough to put me in a funk, imagining our big box future, and yet this is nothing compared to what Global Trends 2030 suggests is coming – change at a faster rate than anyone living has seen.

Change that rapid generates fear.  Looking at the last decade, we see resistance to change spawning violence.  Religious fundamentalists are more vocal in nearly all denominations.  Reactionary politicians grasps at some idealized past that is gone if it ever existed.  The urge to get what is mine at all costs further disrupt economic life and generates even more fear.  People bemoan the loss of civility.

Do we have any guides for living through times like these?

As I asked myself the question, I remembered Joseph Campbell’s assertion that world mythology holds wisdom for all the turns that life can take.  And Marie Louise Von Franz, Jung’s closest colleague, said that fairy tales offer the “purest and simplest” expression of “the basic patterns of the human psyche.”  Do stories created by people who traveled by foot and ox cart really have something to teach us in the 21st century?

I believe they do.  Next time we will consider what the old stories may say about living through difficult times.

The Face of Class Warfare

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In the wake of the election, I more or less swore off posting political content here, except on special occasions like when the first day of a new month falls on Saturday. On days like this, I am allowed to provide links to stories I think are important.

Please check out this post on the website of Sen. Bernice Sanders (Independent) of Vermont: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=D3227558-DD10-4C92-AD1A-AD1E1E54543D

The good news is, Senator Sanders won a decisive re-election victory this past November. The people of Vermont know a good thing when they see it!

Rosebud

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It couldn’t be a finer autumn day in north-central California.  Going to vote this morning, in the golden-tinged sunlight, it was easy to bask in the hope of new beginnings, in the hope that difficult times will call forth a renewed vision and strength of purpose in those we elect.  Perhaps “ordinary” men and women will prove to be extra-ordinary in our times as they have done in the past.

Yet this week I’ve been thinking of Citizen Kane, for I fear that many who run for political office share the motivation of Charles Foster Kane, in what some have called the greatest American movie ever made.  Kane had a hole in his heart that no amount of money, or women, or power, or things could fill.

After his death, one of his friends told a reporter, “All he ever wanted in life was love.  That’s Charlie’s story, how he lost it.  You see, he never had any to give.”

How could he?  When he was a boy, his mother essentially sold him into public life for a comfortable yearly stipend.  The last word on Kane’s dying lips was “Rosebud,” the name of his boyhood sled, which represented the dream of freedom and warmth he could never force the world to yield up.

I think we have to know something about our own Rosebud, the hole in our own hearts, to keep our lives from careening out of control.  If we haven’t gone a few rounds with our private angels and demons, we might even enter politics for all the wrong reasons!

Joseph Campbell phrased it in terms of the Grail Quest.  In youth we may gain a vision or intimation of a Great Good, beyond the power of youth to bear.  We spend our lives on the trail of this Boon which we have seen and lost.  Something like that appears to happen to nations when the youthful vision gets lost, for the old stories make clear that when the Grail is hidden, the land becomes barren.

It’s a good day to pray for our new leaders, whoever they turn out to be, for “us and them” is just a destructive illusion; no matter what we may wish, we are all in this together.