Tag Archives: News

Twinkies, Part Deux

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My previous article, which indulged in bit of nostalgia about grade school lunches, missed much of the actual drama that put Hostess, the maker of Twinkies, Ho-Ho’s, and Ding Dongs, on the ropes.

It isn’t quite over .  A USA Today article by Kevin McCoy reports that Hostess management and the baker’s union are meeting for mediation today, delaying the company’s second bankruptcy filing in less than a decade  http://usat.ly/TU81SA.

The maker of popular snack foods has a billion dollars in debt, which it blames on an “inflated cost structure,” largely as a result of labor contracts.  The union contends the problem is years of mismanagement.  An outside financial analyst found that problems included, “years of underinvestment in products, facilities and equipment, long-term neglect of once-dominant brands and hollowing-out of a distribution system that once provided a competitive advantage,”

Bruce Maiman, a local contributor to the Sacramento Bee, interviewed workers striking at the local Hostess bakery who say their hourly wage and pensions are lower than other bakers like Oroweat and Sara Lee  http://www.sacbee.com/2012/11/20/4998328/blame-workers-unions-or-the-executives.html.  Maiman lists a string of gaffes by a management led by six different CEO’s in ten years.

Local workers claim that rather than replacing outdated equipment, money was recently spent to replace windows and paint the lunchroom, locker room, and floors.  “They want it to look pretty so they can sell it,” says the head of the local baker’s union.

Selling assets may well be the outcome.  US Bankruptcy Trustee, Tracy Hope Davis, joined the union in arguing against management’s current shutdown plans – which among other things, would grant them large bonuses.  Davis favors Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would liquidate assets according to US Bankruptcy Code priorities.

In other words, Twinkies may survive, so we’re better off waiting before spending $5,000, the going rate for a Twinkie on eBay.  This, says Bruce Maiman, just goes to show that “as long as human beings exist, the planet will never run out of Twinkies or nitwits.”   

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.

Alternate futures

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Last night, I gave up five innings of the Giants National League pennant victory to watch the presidential debate.

I sacrificed the five run 3d inning in hopes of hearing the candidates answer a single question that moderator, Bob Shieffer, asked about 40 minutes in:  “What is your vision of America’s place in the world?”

Seconds later, a voice-over interrupted with tornado warnings for several counties north of here.  By the time it ended, the candidates were talking about the economy.  I waited for Shieffer to lead them back to the question he’d asked, but it never happened.  Same old, same old, I guess – the same dysfunctional vision I wrote about in January, in a post called, “Sabre-rattling over oil:  better get used to it.” http://wp.me/pYql4-1AT

This was the first of several posts about the ideas of Col. Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran, West Point graduate, and currently a professor of History and International Relations at Boston University.  Like George McGovern, the first man I ever voted for as president, who died earlier this month, Bacevich is a warrior who hates warfare.

Sen. George McGovern (1922-2012) flew 35 bombing missions over Germany in WWII and ran for president in 1972 on a peace in Vietnam platform.

Bacevich pulls no punches in The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (reviewed here http://wp.me/pYql4-2kX).

Rereading key passages recently, Bacevich’s anger became even more apparent – the anger of a patriot who sees his country sliding down a slippery slope to disaster.  His core thesis is that in turning away from President Carter’s 1980 call for energy independence – never mind the lip-service it gets every four years – the United States has squandered lives and wealth in a hopeless series of wars aimed at compelling the rest of the world to play by our economic rules:

“For the United States the pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence – on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit.  The chief desire of the American people, whether they admit it or not, is that nothing should disrupt their access to those goods, oil, and credit…The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part through the distribution of largesse at home…and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.”

Bacevich argues that the status quo benefits those in power in Washington:

“…rather than addressing the problem of dependence, members of our political class seem hell-bent on exacerbating the problem…To hard-core nationalists and neoconservatives, the acceptance of limits suggests retrenchment or irreversible decline.  In fact, the reverse is true.  Acknowledging the limits of American power is a precondition for stanching the losses of recent decades and for preserving the hard-won gains of earlier generations going back to the founding of the Republic.”

In a 2008 interview with Bill Moyers, Bacevich said, “I happen to define myself as a conservative,” yet when you read his prescription for addressing the ills he enumerates, they parallel those of Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president. Moyers interviewed Stein on September 7: http://billmoyers.com/segment/jill-stein-and-cheri-honkala-on-third-party-politics/

Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate

Dr. Stein graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School, and has specialized in environmental health.  She got her start in politics with a successful effort to pass a referendum to reform election spending in Massachusetts.  Reality set in when the Democratically controlled legislature overturned the people’s will in an unrecorded vote.

Both mainstream presidential candidates refer to their “plans” to create jobs, though they haven’t offered specifics.  Stein has a plan too:  cut defense spending in half and use the money to fund a “Green WPA” which would train and employ many of those now unemployed to work toward true energy independence.

In a 2008 interview with Moyers, Bacevich answered the obvious objection that cutting defense spending would jeopardize national security.  Those persons and groups that wish us harm are ““akin to a criminal conspiracy…Rooting out and destroying the conspiracy is primarily the responsibility of organizations like the FBI, and of our intelligence community, backed up at times by Special Operations Forces.  That doesn’t require invading and occupying countries.”  Events last year proved him correct.

***  

What chance do ideas like these have of making it into the mainstream?  Little or none at present, but I don’t think that is the point.  Ideas rooted in reality can be seeds that sprout over time.  The first Earth Day was a peripheral event, but it has picked up momentum every since.

Bacevich repeatedly stresses that not all limits are bad, and despite the title of his book, affirms that he does believe in American exceptionalism  “if American exceptionalism implies that there are certain qualities that make the United States of America a special place, a wonderful place– a place worthy of a patriot’s love.”

In the course of their critiques, both Bacevich and Stein affirm that it’s love of country and citizens that motivates their efforts to change what’s broken.

After all, what other nation on earth could have invented the World Series?

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.

Ancient Mayan Newsflash: The World is Not Going to End in December

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We can all breathe easier on this score, according to a recent find at Xultan, in northeast Guatemala.  Archeologists discovered a wall in a small room that seems to have functioned as a blackboard for Mayan astronomers.  The 1200 year old calculations represent the oldest known Mayan astronomical tables, suggesting a future at least 6,000 years long.

Courtesty, National Geographic.

“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” asked Anthony Aveni of Colgate University, an expert on Mayan astronomy.  Aveni and others published their findings Friday, in the journal, Science.

Independent researchers call the find very significant.  The results of Mayan calculations of moon phases and the position of the Sun, Mars, and Venus were known from public monuments, but up until now, the means of calculation were unknown.  Aveni suggests the scribes may have been  “geeks … who just got carried away with doing these kinds of computations and calculations…”

Rain forest location of the find – Courtesy National Geographic.

At the end of the year, when we no longer have the the elections to worry about, and all your friends are starting to think of apocalypse, you can tell them about the Mayan geeks, and suggest they chill.

You can read more about the find here: http://tinyurl.com/cw4aqzx