At Our Worst When We Need to Be at Our Best

I work in a public library, and every once in a while we get a person passing through researching their family history in the region. This past week I met a rather remarkable fellow of this description. He is a retired computer programmer from a pioneering era in that technology, having gotten his computer degree through the GI bill in the middle part of the previous century. For some thirty years he has been researching one branch of his family, and in that time has documented and tabulated the lives and relationships of over 5000 cousins! All of them are descended from two brothers who settled in Maine in the 1600s, who brought with them three children each. In the course of America's history, their descendants played many innovative roles in science and other professions that have served to improve the overall quality and humanity of life in this country through time.During his fascinating conversation with me, I asked him where he hailed from, and he told me he was "ashamed" to say that he had formerly grown up and lived out his professional life in Detroit, Michigan. I asked him why he felt so negatively about a place for which he had been for so long a loyal citizen. He replied that Detroit had been disgraced and lost its honor as a city, and in fact, it was no longer a true city by any living definition of the word. Almost all the great industries had been exported by the company owners, who either left concrete deserts or gutted building where once there had been bustling productive life. Today the city has its gentrified cultural center, but the rest are miles of either abandoned neighborhoods, or neighborhoods made a living hell on earth by the encroachment of gang violence. He told me that some years ago over four million people left Detroit in a period of nine months, abandoning fine old homes unsold, and, for many of these emigres, entirely paid for. These were homes for which they had worked all their lives to comfortably retire in. He told me these refugees took to the road and searched even gravel and dirt back-roads for any affordable dwelling they might find in which to relocate themselves, all in a desperate bid to belong to any sort of real community that valued peace and good fellowship. The poor, especially African Americans, remain trapped in this dead community, where violence holds people hostage outside the redeveloped playgrounds of the rich. The genealogist who related these matters to me himself has become a nomad, traveling the country, living thriftily off a pension, and preserving a sense of pride in an America that once was, by discovering the historical and still current contributions of the great family to whom he belongs. In reflecting upon what he shared with me, a small-town librarian living in the Appalachian Foothills, I thought about how the economic "leaders" of our country have so trashed the legacy that so many millions before us worked to build for our nation. What a grave insult, but even more affectingly, what a heart-breaking shame that these leaders have chosen to throw it all away, not even having the innate capability to recognize its precious value, as they pursue the selfish goal of creating a mountain of wealth that does nothing for the good of the country in which they live, and from whose laws and established order they benefit.

Of Daemon Lovers and Nerd Lovers

I was helping an artist friend of mine sell his work at a popular media convention in a large city in Ohio, which focused on science fictional, fantasy, and alternative history themes explored through novels, comic books, electronic games and movies. There were many people dressed up in costume to celebrate their favorite imaginative universe, and there were also just as many who merely wore t-shirts and sweatshirts that advertised their specific interests in this diversified subculture. One young lady in particular caught my eye, because she wore a t-shirt that proudly proclaimed that she was a "nerd lover". The "everyman" caricature of a nerd in a colorful bull's-eye logo on her shirt did not evoke the kind of "nerd" now celebrated by the middle-brow magazine and newspaper press (i.e., the instant-millionaire entrepreneurial suave computer geek). This was definitely an attractively comical image of the kind of person my generation was talking about back in the 1980s when we meant "nerd" (i.e., a person enthusiastic about socially obscure matters). The most basic social division growing up was between nerds and jocks. Jocks were not necessarily the absurd numskulls portrayed in crappy Hollywood adolescent flicks. Jocks in the place where I grew up were often quite intelligent, but it was a different kind of intelligence. Jocks had a natural understanding of certain laws of physics in relation to their own anatomical mechanics and with inter-spacial relationships between objects and bodies in movement. That's why they were gifted as athletes. They didn't have brutish brains, but they could be brutish toward people they didn't understand. And not all nerds were intelligent, whatever Hollywood B-movies might claim. Nerds were most generally people who were more interested in doing other things than sports. However, as I said, this was only the most basic division. There were nerds of high reputation among nerds! These were the cool artists, skilled role-playing gamers, experts on science fiction and fantasy authors, creative writers, poets, musicians, science geeks, mathematical wizzes, etc. I have often wondered: are nerds as a group of social underdogs merely a product of 20th and 21st century culture, or have there always been nerds as long as there have been human beings? Well, historically there have been nerds as we know them today in all basic essentials of personality and obscure bents of enthusiasm at least since the 1920s, when adolescents began building crystal radio sets and collecting pulp science fiction, fantasy and weird tales magazines. Ham radio operators, locomotive fans, model rocket builders are also durable nerding avocations from the healthy heart of the 20th century. Then there were (and are) the comic book enthusiasts, classic horror fans, science fiction movie-goers, and aficionados of rare folk, jazz and blues recordings. What about before that? Well, the Romantic Period of the first half of the nineteenth century was probably the finest hour of the nerd, for in what other time could a poet be the macho lover, the admired celebrity, the tragic hero -- and for what? Well, they wrote a lot about nature and natural forces, transcendent hopes, mad visions, pantheistic intimations, star-crossed love, the supernatural, old legends, weird folklore and how life was just too darned short! Then, there was some talk of pedants in the eighteenth century: people obsessed with the obscure details of arcane subjects. But what about before even these relatively recent historical phases? And what about whether and what kind of woman would love the type of nerd that might have existed in earlier eras of human history? Well, there are a set of folk ballads from all over Europe that were told and retold from the Middle Ages and through the Early Modern Period, which are generally assigned the classification type known as "The Daemon Lover". Notice here we're not talking about "demon", meaning, "an evil spirit". We're talking about an otherworldly being with human traits who is wholesome enough to attract the love of a mortal woman. Daemon lovers were different than the other sorts of lovers you encounter in the folk ballads. For one thing, daemons were loyal to their lovers, they did not murder their ladies in fits of jealous rage, and if there was any tragedy to be had, it was usually theirs for taking the risk of loving a woman not of their own species. And why would a human woman take up with such a supernatural being for a lover? Well, in addition to the fact that they were well-treated by these creatures, the daemon was also usually quite skilled at some attractive art, such as music (i.e., both singing and playing a musical instrument exceedingly well), and taking their lovers on wonderful journeys through imaginatively beautiful worlds. If we are not going to try to force a literalistic interpretation here (i.e., that there were actually such supernatural -- or perhaps extraterrestrial? -- creatures), but apply a little handy-dandy Jungian analysis (as well as some good social-historical sense), the daemon lover seems like an archetype of some kind, and I posit that perhaps what we have here is the ancient psychological symbol of the nerd, and an explanation as to why nerds of nerdish excellence (unlike in Hollywood movies) do find wonderful women to love them! Of course, there are ladies who love men of physical prowess and recreational intelligence, and this must go back to Stone Age times when skilled hunters were seen as the best providers for women who wanted to have children just like these robust, adventurous men they admired. But there must always have been other sorts of men, because Nature likes diversity, and these were the ones who probably became the skilled toolmakers, the inspired shamans, the transporting musical performers, the talented storytellers, the ingenious totem carvers and cave painters, and eventually, as time passed, the folk ballad singers themselves. It seems obvious that the daemon lover is an avatar of the folk ballad singer himself. And who else is the folk ballad singer but the Medieval version of the nerd. What would the armored jocks have done without these singers and strummers of wild adventure and romance as the knights lounged on their benches with their silk-gowned babes of an evening by the hearth-side sharing a tankard of bubbling ale? Fortunately for us nerds, there were other sorts of sweet lasses waiting for us in the corridor after the performance was over. Some women naturally prefer men of skilled mind over men of skilled body. And that is what we nerds of today have to remember. There are women born to like us, and they are typically equally skilled in some form of art or intellect. They are the lovely nerdinas of the world! I myself found a truly wonderful and delightful woman of this sort a few years ago. What we as a group must remember is to take pride in who we are, and not fret over what we are not. So if you have a nerdish interest, develop it into a form of excellence, and as Jimi Hendrix sang, "let your freak flag fly!"

We Must Have Back Our Commons

NO VISIBLE MEANS OF SUPPORT is the legal catch-phrase in America for driving off someone who is not a resident. They take you out of the community and drive you past the city limits and dump you into the countryside. Sometimes the notion runs in reverse. The nomadic peoples roaming the wilderness of Asia and Africa today are being herded into the city slums. They are no longer permitted to live off the land as a mobile people. There is a third method. The President of France, Monsieur Sarkozy, himself the child of immigrant parents, is driving out his country's last nomads, the Romany, out past the limits of his country's borders. When my mother was a child, you could, while traveling, have a picnic upon any meadow beside the road. Nowadays you are likely to be shot at, no questions asked. In Mark Twain's time you could walk through anyone's property, so long as you were civil and respected the privacy of the landowners. Not all traditional concepts of property-held-in-common are nomadic or situational. The Mayan Indians did this in the form of agriculture for centuries before national and international financial and political authorities converged in the 1990s to invalidate the legality of their common property because there were no identifiable owners holding individual titles to the land. Then there are lost notions of common property from earlier periods of history. Everyone thinks of the Middle Ages as cruel and primitive in a social and economic sense, but in Medieval England, there were commons in every region, in every shire, in every manor, in every village, every one of them a form of social welfare for the destitute, the widowed, and for those whose personal property was inadequate to their survival without supplement. The commons of Merry Old England could be used for horticulture, grazing and wood-gathering through the ecological practice of coppicing. Let me digress for a moment to define this now archaic term. Coppicing is the practice of transforming a grove of trees into a rapidly regenerating source of wood fuel for cooking and warmth, by felling the central stalk of each tree and allowing sucker shoots to grow and mature. These suckers will form a multi-trunked tree and can be periodically and selectively harvested with pruning hooks, while keeping the tree itself alive for literally decades. A formation of these husbanded trees is called a "coppice" or "copse". This was a prudent exercise involving an economy and ecology of resources, and it happened in Medieval England, and it happened on designated common lands for all the peasants to share in. However, Tudor England, Stuart England and Hanoverian England each in its turn made inroads into dismantling the centuries-old tradition of the commons, which had been the Medieval method for providing a safety net for the hapless so that they would not be helpless. And who got those lands formerly held in common you may ask? Why the same type of people who are seizing the common lands that remain on the planet today: people whose aggressive lust for wealth brings misfortune to others. What will become of the great Tatars, the great Mongols, the great Masai, the great Tuareg, the great Berbers, the great Bedouin? I could go on. It is my hope they do not meet the same fate as the great Sioux, the great Cheyenne, the great Blackfoot, the great Ojibwa, the great Crow, the great Pawnee -- again, I could go on. In the time of Queen Elizabeth the First of England, the people who were forced off the commons were called "vagabonds" -- literally, "those in bondage to the road", and the catch-22 irony of it all was that Parliament passed a law proclaiming all vagabonds to be criminals bound for the scaffold with no legal protection or rights! There was no shred of any Romantic notion of "the wanderer" in the plight of these wretches made refugees within their own country. These vagabonds knew starvation, victimization by bandits, and were reduced to pathetic beggary. In cities like London, the women among them were often forced to find their means through the soul-slaying servitude of prostitution, while the men among them became nameless odd-jobbing drudges living hand-to-mouth in the filthy streets. Those that survived and found a stable niche in London were derisively known as the "cocken ey folk" -- archaic English for "cock's egg people", from the old proverbial saying, "worthless as a cock's egg"; this term persists today in the form, "Cockney". I myself am proud to say that I am descended from refugees from Northamptonshire who were forced off their tenant farms because the landlords wanted to raise sheep. They came to London like so many generations of poor country folk before them, and set up their lives in the wild suburbs of Hampstead Heath. By the grace of God, they found a means to prosper by becoming domestic servants in the households of Victorian gentry. All the while they saved their money, finally took ship to America and Canada, and found lives of economic and social freedom and betterment, such as they would never have known in the bottled-up society of 19th century England, which was not so merry for the poor of that era. But now the rot has set in even on this side of the world (i.e., America). Where will we find our commons of grace if the land to build dreams upon is all seized by the greedy few? Are there commons to share in the red dust of Mars? Have we even built the spaceship yet to deliver us?

Nature Versus Nurture

Authoritarian ideologies are permeating American culture, and for quite a while now have been using scientific research to back up analysis that implies that genetics determines one's station in life. For example, their ideological camp would imply that people are poor because they are controlled by genetically predetermined behaviors that result in a penurious existence, and so therefore, we should not try to eliminate poverty because, in effect, poverty is inevitable. This is just another form of the Early Modern Protestant concept of predestination, which holds that people are poor because of their moral condition, which was predetermined by God. Just as the philosophical argumentation and resultant secular reforms of the Enlightenment tore apart the socially destructive idea of predestination, so now must clear thinkers and clear observers today tear apart the socially destructive arguments of pseudo-scientific research, no matter how many millions of dollars are poured into these spurious assessments from conservative interest groups who want to justify the status quo. Though genetic research is a good predictor for things like being physically disposed to certain kinds of diseases like cancer, or fundamental organic mental diseases of the brain such as manic depression, to say that anything so complex as social behavior is the result of chromosomal molecules is as great a stretch of the facts as believing that some sort of Supreme Being never wanted us to have free will and opportunity but childishly decided from the get-go that some of us would be moral and socioeconomic failures! Certainly we need good researchers to break down these heavily funded arguments today that posit we cannot escape our genetics when it comes to succeeding in this world. Yet even common sense would tell you that no matter how gifted a person is, if the game-board is tilted in the opposite direction, that gifted person will undergo long or even impossible odds at winning. Yet the examples of history, that greatest of our teachers, can be our helper in defeating the noxious idea of the pseudo-geneticists that we are confined by our family background. Let's just look at literary history, and the literary geniuses of the English language alone for proof of this falsehood! Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of the masterwork, The Canterbury Tales, was the son of a simple wine merchant (remember, wine was as common then as beer is now) and the grandson of a hose-weaver (hosen were the woolen leg coverings of Medieval times). The great Renaissance dramatist and poet (and model for Shakespeare), Christopher Marlowe, was the son of shoemaker. Then there is William Shakespeare himself, a thorn in the side of everyone whose psychological comfort derives from the idea that only an aristocrat could produce the greatest literature of the English language. Theorists of the proper social hierarchy of intellectual ability have tried to say that Shakespeare, the son of a glove-maker, could not possibly have written such great plays as King Lear or Hamlet, but rather, Shakespeare was actually a moronic theater-hand who held the horses of the audiences during performances. Their theory goes that Shakespeare secretly made a compact with some aristocrat, like Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, wherein Shakespeare would take all the credit, so that the proper reputation of this artistically inspired aristocrat would not be "soiled" by having composed these incredible works of human insight! And therein lies the rub, for the very reason that no aristocrat should like to be known as a serious artist of any kind, is because aristocrats were all about mastering what they felt was their proper role: accruing wealth as a means to exercising power -- anything else was seen as the dalliance of the lesser social orders. For such a conspiracy to have been pulled off, literally hundreds of important folk who were friends with Shakespeare, or critics, actors, and aficionados, would all have to have been either duped or convinced to keep mum about the truth. This is asking too much, and you know what they say in any form of rational inquiry: the simplest explanation is always closest to the truth. The fact of the matter was, Shakespeare grew up with enough middle class social stability, education (yes, it was called a "grammar school" back then, but not the same kind of grammar school as taught the Three R's in the backwoods of Nineteenth Century America -- grammar schools in Renaissance England were more like private college prep schools are today), and Shakespeare came into contact as young man with enough sheer cosmopolitan culture in London through its libraries, bookshops and literary salons of intellectual debate, for any reasonably inspired and intelligent man of properly nurtured background and idiosyncratic personality to have produced every blessed one of his masterful works of drama. Now where would Shakespeare have been in a society that began acting upon the presumptions of the pseudo-genetic sciences that are now being used to influence and substantiate government and corporate policies beginning to affect our world today? He would have been written off and sold down the river before he might ever have lifted pen to paper. I could easily go on about other literary lights of our linguistic heritage, but even these few examples of this select group of scions from a middle class of skilled workers, I think, is quite sufficient to make my point against the arguments of our new breed of predestinationists. It is Nurture not Nature that makes the critical difference, and if we destroy our middle and working classes (I never quite understood the real difference between these two social designations), we will be salting down the furrows of future cultural greatness. In effect, our society would be left only with the wealthy to experience the nurturing forces of life, and as history has proven, the wealthy mostly train their children toward one thing on pain of ostracism: the art of money-grubbing and the concomitant power that results from capital accumulation and concentration. If all that remains are those obsessed with such things, we will become the most philistine state since Ancient Sparta, and what a dour and dreary existence that will make -- even for the wealthy.

Capitalism Minus Democracy Equals the Roman Empire

Historians like to bandy about such phrases as "the glory of Rome", "the peace of Rome". These are both deceptive phrases, and interestingly, they are most often invoked when describing the civilization of Rome after they ceased being a functional Republic (i.e., when their democracy had been destroyed by the legal chicanery of rapacious aristocrats and the Senate was maintained only as a gentleman's business club). Life could be good for people in the ancient world of the Roman Empire, but you had to be free and you had to be rich. If you weren't, your life was grim. If you were a plebeian (a member of the working class), you had to compete with slave labor, and at any time you could end up going into debt, not being able to keep the bill-collector at bay and having to sell yourself, your spouse, and your children into slavery in order to pay them off. You had two elected representatives, the Tribunes, but they could only complain to the Senate (the elected body representing the wealthy classes); the Tribunes had no legislative power as the Senators had. So if you were poor and free, you were constantly overshadowed by the threat of falling into slavery, and you could not hold any official post with decision-making power. Your only hope was to become a client of a patron (who would belong to either the patrician class of hereditary large landowners of "divine" ancestry, or to the equestrians, literally "horsemen" but really the nouveau riche who had acquired vast fortunes from international trade). The patron would protect the interests of the client, so long as the client did the patron's bidding in any and all causes serving his designs, whether the client's moral conscience agreed with the missions he was sent on or not -- if anyone wants to know the social-historical origins of the Mafia, this is it. This social practice was the only way for a lowly freeman to ensure not being physically, legally or economically abused by more powerful folk in a society that assigned full de facto rights and legal protections only to the wealthy. Whether you had been a nobleman in a barbarian society and gotten captured in war, or you had been a skilled artisan and Roman citizen who had to sell himself into slavery because of mounting debts, to fall into slavery regardless of previous condition -- and yes, if your parents were slaves, you inherited their status as slaves -- was to lose one's status as a human being. In fact, you were considered an "animate tool" like a plow-horse. You could be abused with impunity under the law. This is what it means to live in a world where the only effective form of representative government limits itself to a wealthy over-class with legal advantages over everyone and everything else. This is also what happens when one's humanity pivots on one's ability not to fall into debt or such impoverished circumstances that you can no longer feed yourself and your family and must surrender yourselves to the slave-market auction block. This is not a democracy nor a model for a democracy. Yes, capitalism occurred in the Roman world on a scale that would not be matched again until the Renaissance Period a thousand years later. But we must stop allowing ourselves to be deceived into believing that "capitalism" and "democracy" are synonymous terms. Capitalism can function quite well without democracy, in fact, it "flourishes" into economic totalitarianism when there is no effective form of democracy to hold it humanely in check. For those who are not wealthy, this spells the end of their rights as human beings. We have people in our country who are working very hard to make a form of society happen here much like that practiced by the Roman Empire. I think most people living in America today (I would say at least 90% of the population) would not enjoy such a form of "time travel", as most of us would find ourselves propelled into slavery or the quasi-slavery of ethically-compromised client-hood under obligation to the powerful. We have wealthy people seeking to buy up our water aquifers even now, making potable clean water the preserve of the moneyed classes. Family farms are being bought up by agribusiness in unfair legal games of trade and financially onerous regulations of management. Can anyone say "latifundio"? Maybe the wealthy of our country would like North America to be more like South America. And guess whom Latin American aristocrats modeled their form of economic society after?

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

There are times when I feel caught between two different forms of madness, both derived from a species of deliberate ignorance. On the one hand we have an array of Wall Street businessmen eating lunch at a fine restaurant in Manhattan, who consistently replied to an National Public Radio interviewer that they "deserved" to be bailed out by taxpayers because they are the "intelligent ones" who actually run the country, and that they owe the American people "nothing", not even a thank you. How much self-deception can Wall Street businessmen baste themselves in before the fire of truth penetrates their monstrous egos and restores their sense of soul-saving humanity? Then on the other end of the spectrum we have the common run of folk whose ancestors were saved by FDR's New Deal, whose ancestors had a better quality of life because of Labor Unions, who benefit from Medicare and Social Security, and yet they oppose those who would bring about economic reform to save and renew the working and middle classes. We have a country that is gradually rolling itself back into a more primitive reality that can only lead to living conditions as bad as the nineteenth century. The elite are opposing the rebuilding and improvement of our country's infrastructure, and they are gathering the support of those that stand the most to benefit from such reconstruction by telling them that the "decent regular American" doesn't need government, most especially "its helping hand". They also slyly imply that regular people do not really deserve help (either from the public or private sectors), and can only have social worth if they remain self-reliantly impoverished. They play upon false pride, false shame, and sucker their supporters into settling for a degenerating quality of life. How much misery must people be duped into suffering before they realize they must vote for those who are trying to give them the means to succeed? In the meantime, the rest of us feel a tremendous and frustrating loneliness in the vital knowledge that we must learn to love each other and love our country again through our sovereign democratic government, in order for true human progress to happen. Will there be anything left when this meat-grinder of converging forms of ignorance has done its worst? Or will the ship we are on find a happy passage to escape the Devil's monetary stranglehold and the Deep Blue Sea's hurricane of hateful (and self-hateful) ignorance? We all share the same DNA, we are all cousins, there is no "other".

Social Implosion

National Public Radio did a story recently about how companies across the board have made it a policy not to hire or hire back people who were laid off during the Great Recession who are over thirty years old. Some of these people are now homeless. It's time to get out the old dystopian science fiction movie classic of 1972, Logan's Run, which speaks to this latest self-destructive behavior our society has conceived. In Logan's Run, people who turn thirty experience a warning signal embedded in the palms of their hands, which begins flashing a red ruby light. This light signals them that they must now go to a special place where they are "transformed" into a higher state of being. Some of the citizens of this far future world suspect that "transformation" really means "extermination" and attempt to escape their literally bubble-enclosed world into the wild, post-apocalyptic realm outside their dome. In the bubble world, life is all pleasure without pain, but only a temporary utopia, because it is a society that eliminates the problems of old age by eliminating people beginning physical decline entirely. Though the film depicts this in a sensational form, there really isn't much difference in practice to what we are doing now in our present-day society. We are making middle-aged people outcasts in our brave new economy. They are effectively shunned from participating effectively in our economic world, which is as good as social ostracism, otherwise known as social death. There was a time when we were wise enough to value people of proven experience and vastly accumulated practical skills. Such people had a personal history that told them what worked well and what didn't, and they knew when someone was trying to pull the wool over their eyes. These people were highly valued as leaders in the business world. They passed their wisdom to the younger people coming up through the ranks beneath them. Then they retired in old age with honor for a term of well-earned service to their company and society. They received a well-deserved pension, and those behind them could look forward to the same once they had completed their careers of proud dedication. In short, we were still connected with our truly ancient simian tradition of recognizing the importance of giving ultimate leadership to the "silverback", as they are called in the case of our evolutionary cousins, the gorillas. Look at how this was still emblemized in the culture of the twentieth century with such middle-aged male-lead film stars as Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, John Wayne, or middle-aged female-lead film stars as Katherine Hepburn, Betty Davis, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Kathy Bates. I am aged forty-two at the time of writing this blog, and was not discriminated against when hired as a public librarian during a career-change a few years ago, because state-run services still preserve the cultural ethics of our former business culture. The private sector by contrast has now become a jungle. The corporate world has forgotten there is a difference between being in one's superficial physical prime, and having reached a stage of life when one has entered the optimum phase of social and intellectual effectiveness, which comes later. All I can say to younger workers who are cooperating with corporate heads to continue this destructive trend is this: time flies, and it gets faster year by year. Before you know it, you will have reached the age of your victims. You will be especially struck by the irony of it all, if you get laid off at that time, because you will know that you are coming into the prime of your understanding and skills. Even putting aside your distress at becoming in your turn a victim of acute ageism, your objective self will think: what a waste!

Frustration

I had created this blog to get back to articulating the things I have really cared about since childhood, most especially our place in the natural world as spiritual and creative beings. Crosby, Stills and Nash (via Joni Mitchell) sang that "we have to get ourselves back to the Garden". But I find myself having to address the trends that disrupt a healthy relationship with the wellspring of our psychological being and our physical evolution. In short, there is no healthy escape because the Garden itself is now rampant with manifestations of the Serpent; I am speaking metaphorically, of course -- I actually like snakes! Hopefully the unhappy political overtones can begin to recede from this blog, if the people working to rebuild the economy of our working and middle class and to bring regulation back to our treatment of the environment are able to keep their offices and win more seats in this coming election. However, I will not stick my head in the sand for the sake of maintaining a blog of gentle poetic meditations, if the fabric of the American Dream continues to disintegrate through a combination of cynical, selfish, manipulative leaders twisting the electorate into a destructive swarm of misinformed, misled, fear-driven constituents. There are cinders in the wind, and they are settling on the sheaves of poetry and setting them ablaze.

An Unnatural Wonder!

I have been doing some investigating using cryptozoological logic, and I have inferred the existence of a hitherto unknown species of animal, which I shall dub, "homo republicanensis". They are a quite remarkable subspecies of the human family, and they have all the makings of the branch to adapt and survive all the human follies we are unrepentantly inflicting upon our planet and society. I have deduced the emergence of this cryptid in the human scene, because libertarians, Tea-Party Folk and Republicans keep alluding to these superior beings in their arguments. Apparently homo republicanensis differs from the normal human beings, with whom you and I come into daily contact, in the following respects: this subspecies does not get cancer from carcinogenic chemicals being dumped into our water system or put in our food, they are not vulnerable to the harmful effects of poverty, they do not need health-care services, they can meet all the expenses of life on a mere minimum wage job, they do not require a decent public education to excel in the world, they never get mental illness, they can prosper physically even if they have to live on the street in a cardboard box, they are able to find money left over after taking care of their necessities to pay the taxes the rich won't in order to fund the needs of our military industrial complex, and they are basically self-cleaning when they die. It is such a boon that a portion of the human population has evolved or mutated into a form so adaptive to the requirements of the reigning elite of our country. If all the normal human beings who have all those pesky needs and vulnerabilities die off, homo republicanensis can just step in and do the job of being the sole and homogeneous drudge -- I mean citizen -- of our fair nation. Then the conservatives can finally get their wish: a government that doesn't get bothered to do anything but what it was meant to do: protect greed and build weapons. In the meantime, I am moving on to a new theory with regard to this probable (and as yet hidden) new subspecies of human: I think that they must really be androids -- mere flesh and blood could not endure what they evidently do. Do androids get to vote?

How Are We Different? (And Does Difference Mean Better or Less?)

Long hard reform movements, both politically and scientifically based, established that people of all "races" and both genders have equal potential, and can (and do) make equal contributions to the betterment of our world and society. Of course, creating "an odd man out" has been a part of a rather cynical political ballgame for many centuries now, whether or not the strategic exclusionists playing it really believe what they claim. Whatever the case, the writer of this blog had been under the impression that the democratic revolutions of the past four centuries had been about establishing the fact that all people, rich and poor, had a right to equal access to political decision-making, judicial justice and the elements of happiness and well-being in this world. This was based on the reasoned argument that all people of all stations in life have potentially the same power to make a positive difference in improving our shared existence. But now we have these libertarians (I like to call them what they are: Social Darwinists), who argue that the only people who have an actual and practical right to make decisions about our world are those who are wealthy. This is based on the irrational idea that the ability to accrue wealth makes one intellectually superior to others. Yet it is not difficult to observe and learn about intelligent people who are not interested in devoting themselves to confiscating riches but would rather use their intelligence to make critical scientific discoveries, create artistic, musical or architectural wonders to inspire us, or find ways to bring social justice to the abused, the exploited and the neglected. If we reduce the politically and economically enfranchised element of our society in practical terms only to those who can successfully compete for wealth against others, we will not only create a truly philistine society and a highly unjust society, but also a terribly moronic one. Intelligent children are born to all socioeconomic brackets; it may be just as truthfully said that children of only average intelligence or less are also born to every strata of society. This doesn't require a sociological/educational study: you see it every day just rubbing shoulders with people. Just as it is stupid to raise only one genetic strain of an important food crop, or breed only a few genetic lineages of a certain kind of animal (because of the importance of genetic diversity in meeting the challenges of changing ecological conditions and the problem of inbreeding with troublesome recessive genes), so the same holds true for worsening the conditions of the middle and lower income earners. By supporting policies which remove safety nets and engage in cut-throat laissez-faire capitalism, the best do not get winnowed from the chaff as libertarians would claim. Just as many (if not more) people who might make (or might have made) important or at least positive contributions to society are neutralized (or worse), because of the unnecessary hardships incurred upon them. What is more, any society that abdicates a practical sense of moral obligation to all people regardless of income, status or intelligence level, is bound to self-destruct. Eliminating compassion for our fellow human beings (because it is deemed "inefficient") creates a society that will tear itself apart through its own cold-blooded selfishness. In short, a lack of compassion in political policy is the most irrational agenda of all.

Just Call a Spade a Spade

All the elaborate economic explanations, political justifications, and righteous-sounding blather that clogs our media about why people are losing their pensions, medical coverage, unemployment coverage, can really be summed up in one truthful phrase: the people who run our society are, simply put, nothing more (and nothing less) than selfish. The rest is crap. Those who support these policies are under the misunderstanding that (1) they will somehow never be on the wrong end of a cut, and (2) that they themselves deserve these kinds of "amenities" but somehow other sorts of people do not. I have news for the supporters of this abandonment of human decency: everyone is a human being, made in the image of God. There is no "other". When people abandon anyone, they abandon God.

Imagination

When we are children our imaginations flow as freely as our curiosity, and the two of them reinforce each other. Happiness in adulthood relies in part on imagination, as well as that other thing that comes naturally to us first as children: love. Love is the awakener, healer, restorer and expander of our spirits. With the loving attitude of respect, curiosity delves the mysteries and makes us a grow in mind and reality. But the fruits of curiosity and love cannot be fully actualized without imagination. Imagination helps us to understand others in a dynamic rather than nominal way, and it helps us make a better society, both socially and materially. The great irony of the era in which we now live is that the realization of imagination is completely lacking among those who have the power and means to affect the common good. The monetary resources that can make our people and civilization shine are trapped by those who make no constructive use of it. A massive concentration of capital under the control of the few who would rather just hoard it, who live lives higher than most can even conceive, and they (along with future generations of their families into the imperceptible horizons of time) will only ever need a fraction of this immense wealth to see to their every necessity, fancy, notion and whim. They could use this huge surplus of wealth to fund ec0nomic rehabilitation here and abroad through useful projects of life ameliorating research, dynamic education and mentorship programs, cultural exchange and development, life-enhancing physical structures, green energy. infrastructures of humane utility and transportation, which could together easily pull our world out of economic decline, civil strife, urban decay, political agony. Please remember we are talking about billions of dolllars, and collectively as a class adding up to trillions. Think of what it would take to make any given social project or service happen and operate at truly effective and optimal levels. Most would amount only to several millions of dollars, and a billion is a million millions! A visitor from another planet would think that the wealthy and powerful are utter fools to have as their highest aspiration to bleed their societies dry and sit on their piles of money, monitoring its accumulation as electronic blips on a computer screen with moronic avidity. Is that any way to run a world that is not headed for termination? Somehow, somewhere, at some point in their lives, the wealthy of our nation traded their imaginations for the very flat intelligence of bestial cunning. The rest is just the fumes of the dragon's lair.

What Appeals to and What Preys Upon the Emergent Popular Mind

A co-worker of mine who has a master’s degree in Art once told me that trends in the creative expressions of culture are symptomatic of the social psychology of that culture. As a librarian, I come into contact with all sorts of media, including juvenile, young adult and adult [comprehension] materials that betray a growing obsession with zombies and vampires. At first one could easily ignore such things as just a couple of the myriad derivative expressions of American culture that get recycled ad nauseam. But after the past few years, these two particular “expressions” have obviously revealed themselves as “obsessions”; they proliferate comics, movies, and novels to such a degree that you would have to be a very dull-minded librarian indeed not to conclude that there is something very peculiar about it all. I have my own theory about this trend, and it is guided by my colleague’s insight. This is more than just some faddish diversion that will soon be replaced by another. Zombies and vampires have been a part of American popular culture for some time now, but I have noticed that there have been definite phases or incarnations of these fantasy figures. Vampires were originally loathsome in folklore, being dead souls who refused to abandon their hideously-animated corpses, but through black magical means would sustain themselves by murdering and feeding off the blood of the living to maintain their limbo-like existence. Later these rough edges of folklore began to receive a polish, turning vampires, male and female, into figures of forbidden sexuality, feeding off the blood of the living but not always killing them – instead welcoming them into the fold of a glamorously cursed existence of undeath through an eroticized form of parasitic rite. And yet, vampire stories, whether in the cinema or in books, were just one of an array of horrific figures to play upon the Freudian subconscious and divert the imagination. Zombies have undergone just as serious an evolution in popular culture, appearing first merely as people who have unknowingly ingested a “voodoo” serum that robs them of their independent will and makes them obedient slaves of their voodoo-masters. This was the zombie of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Then in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, zombies became people infected with some sort of microbe or perhaps radioactive mutation that made them a violent horde of unreasoning destroyers of human life; this second stage in the myth obviously played upon societal fears that the more riotous aspects of the emergent counterculture would undermine the traditional social fabric of America. Today zombies and vampires are again strangely altered. Vampires are now wholly "sympathetic figures, having become the most sexually and heroically alluring characters in the popular imagination, bar none. They are in the mainstream romance novels now, and we need say nothing of young adult novels. In the meantime, zombies now are presented in science fiction as an inevitable and omnipresent threat in our near future. They will enfilade the remnants of civilization and those privileged to have escaped the contagion. Though now presented as generally cannibalistic, their delicacy is human brains. If one can see the mythic argument that these two figures play upon in the imaginations of people (especially those between 13 and 30) more now than ever, it seems quite reasonable, even imperative, that some form of constructive analysis occur, as these are morbid obsessions, however entertainingly "refined" they may currently be as escapist forms of dark fantasy. This is not to pursue a moralistic line on what people choose to entertain themselves, but to ask objectively, why these things and not something else? From my vantage point, such peculiar interests have risen to a level interpretable by social psychology. So what in society might have bearing on these engrossing subgenres? If you look at American culture today, whatever whitewash is given, the highly successful people are those who engage on some extreme level of economic exploitation of the environment itself and the human labor to make capital profitable. There is very little reciprocity in the economic arrangements we find today. And our natural environment, reduced by mountain-top-removal coal-extraction and fast-food/junk-mart strip development is becoming as wan as the complexion of the vampire's victim. The masters have crushed and undermined the powers of collective bargaining. The wealthy and powerful are a small elite, and their exquisite reputation depends on how much they can extract from the land and human beings without cost to themselves. The males among these folk often have trophy wives and mistresses, and whether male or female, they get their way by manipulating the political and judicial systems to favor their business interests, not to mention their free hand with media spin. Anyone who does not play this game and play it well is a "no-account" and may become one of their victims (if not by being reduced to wage slavery then at least through economic exclusion through their policy of investing minimally in the domestic economy). The message is there for young people to see every day in the “information” media; the advertisements using male and female models is intensely aristocratic in its packaging and context, and actors and actresses mimic the power-culture in their high-profile daily lives and in their dramatic roles in movies. This “sexy” powerful elite of our society who take and give nothing back but their superficial sheen have their arguable psychological avatars among the fantasy figures of the vampires, a rare and elite group, presented in contemporary media as being appealingly cursed by their youthful immortality, which depends on the blood (the essence of vitality) of those whom they make their victims. The zombies, on the other hand, simply embody the anxieties of such an exclusive culture both among the high and low in its society: more and more of us find our work has been replaced by wage-slaves in the Developing World -- people treated as "subhuman" and denatured of their human rights. Those who have secure remunerative employment in the game as it is now played know deep down how fragile their position is, for there are monthly more and more people who are becoming unemployed or under-employed. Many people have given up trying to find even a slender slice amidst all the "reserved wedges" of the economic pie. What will become of these hordes of disenfranchised people? What will such vulnerable people do (or what will become of them in the social scheme) if no real hope is given to them by the “in club” of financial vampires? What degradations of human identity will occur among them as they are increasingly shunted into undesirable slums where drugs and drug-dealing form the only remunerative economy? The brains that have concocted such a hell would definitely be a delicacy that these unwilling zombies would (subconsciously) wish to devour in revenge. But there is no need for there to be socio-economic "zombies" nor "vampires" in our society. Give people work that will enable them to enjoy a humane existence, and they can be citizens again. Invest a chunk from otherwise uselessly enormous profits to develop the national economy, and vampirism may be replaced by healthy spirituality. In this way capitalism can humanely rid itself of the zombies of its guilty conscience. Humanity will flourish again if it rids itself of such parasitism.

Freedom Can Be a State of Being

Just as there are those who have evolved culturally, politically, psychically to hold the Earth in contempt, there are those of us who have evolved otherwise. Though fear and despair may weaken our connection to what we love, spiritual discipline may strengthen our connection to each other and this precious world that is our own special home. If we let our love flow freely, so may we maintain the freedom of the Earth from those who would destroy it. This beautiful world is all that we have. It matters not there may be other habitable worlds many light years away. Even if we could reach them, non would have the same character of beauty as this one. This must be as true as the fact that each of us, however many superficial similarities we may bear to one another, is observably a unique being to the lights of those sensitive and patient enough to listen and perceive. We must face the fact that we share this world with fellow members of our species who are motivated by set of values that are utterly alien to the good of our world. It is a shame that this must be so, but we must not seek their mercy, for they will not give it. They are blind. We must instead win the support of those who would love the Earth as we do, if they were not trapped by confusion and fear. The expression of freedom, especially love, is one of the most joyous acts of being, and it is infectious, because it is the natural inclination of any spirit not absolutely weighted down by darkness. Express your love of living things, and others will join you. One by one, as a composite being, like a great jelly fish, we might act to save this Earth from under the grasping hands of those who bear it no good will. We are born of this world, nourished by this world, shaped by this world. Let us act as though we are grateful, and the Earth will respond.

Meddling vs Nurturing

These days those who speak most vociferously about liberty seem not to know what that word means. When one looks at the actions of such people, the following fact emerges: these people seem to think that liberty means the right to interfere with the liberty of others. In other words they have decided that they (unlike pettier criminals) should not have their actions ethically regulated by a governing body, that they are somehow above what is just for the greater good. I would like to suggest an alternative view of liberty: liberty is the freedom to grow as a human being without doing harm to others, or exacting a cost upon the well-being of others. Thousands (and later millions) of people fled Europe to Canada and the United States over the last few centuries because they were fleeing disenfranchisement and/or persecution. Here, by varying and increasing degrees, immigrants of different ethnic groups and their descendants could worship or not worship as they chose, access public education, enjoy public parks, start businesses, enter higher education, pursue professional careers. And yet these freedoms were always overshadowed by the presence of racial slavery, and later Jim Crow Laws, and new permutations of educational, entrepreneurial and job discrimination. This cancer, never obliterated by even legal reforms and social education, has grown to poison the well of liberty for people of all "races". We are recycling the shackles that our forebears escaped when they fled other parts of the world to come here: economic disenfranchisement, religious prejudice, severe social stratification, unfettered elite power, reduced rights of the small farmer and entrepreneur, financially onerous licensing, oligarchic public codes, political-corporate cronyism, dismissal of social justice as a legal issue in jurisprudence, destruction of our public spaces of recreation and restfulness, hyper-militarism, the de facto indifference of legislators to the interests of he poor and the middle class. In the meantime, the places that were once sources of such oppression are now what America had once been progressing toward: the governments and citizens of Europe and parts of Asia promote and protect a humane existence for all: the freedom to be spiritual in your own way, the freedom to be able to take care of your infants and children without interference from onerous and unreasonable work responsibilities or constraints, the freedom from fearing the loss of shelter, medical care, adequate nourishment or employment, the freedom to speak truth to power, the freedom to be artistic according to one's own lights, the freedom of academia to discuss the issues of the world without threat of dismissal from the influence of special interest groups, the freedom to financially afford higher education and specialized training, the freedom to enjoy quality public education in which critical thinking and imagination are espoused, the freedom to access all pertinent information on serious global, ecological and human issues, the freedom to enjoy affordable pervasive public transportation, the freedom from discrimination in employment because of age, gender, religion. The "liberty" of a society not to care for its members is the destruction of real freedom. It leads to the complete derangement of society, cultural meltdown and the end of civilization (read your history books, folks!). What is especially sad is that this derangement in the human species is spilling over into the psychological equilibrium of the animal world: marginal wilderness lands are being seized and desperate elephants denied their food sources are now rampaging through encroaching human settlements, the denizens of housing developments that have erased forest and meadows have been attacked by swarms of birds. What is worse is that human greed for real estate is driving animals of the same species (for example, lions and chimpanzees) to begin attacking and killing each other because of severely reduced environments for food resources. The old saying "freedom isn't free" is right, but the price of freedom is not always purchased with violence in foreign wars or hounding people with increased armies of law enforcement officers and private security. Our more precious liberties are won and protected by a fully-empowered government that represents the collective will of those who cannot otherwise protect themselves and freely exercise the responsible liberties that make for a humanly decent life. The wealthy can always buy their freedom and the liberty of their will, but democracy was created to extend the freedoms the wealthy can take for granted to those of humble means. When there is true liberty for all, only the petty sociopaths enact crimes. The normal person who can find good work and see proper reward for his or her good work will always choose the honest path rather than the brief self-destructive rewards of materialistic criminality. However, when there is only freedom and access to the necessities and amenities of life for the few, the sociopathic will governs the country, and democracy withers away. So then wither also the ecosystems that are always under the mercy of such an economy of power and privilege.

Why Beauty is Good for Us

We are drawn to natural beauty by spiritual (or psychological) instinct. We can be culturally trained to ignore or even despise natural beauty, and such training always serves dubious purposes -- usually to encourage or condition people to settle for or endure an ugly existence. I deal not in superficialities here. I'm not talking about beauty as defined in magazines and movies. I also do not confine myself to visual beauty, nor even a single standard of beauty. Beauty can be intellectual as well as physical, sensory as well as imaginative. Art, if it is honest, can be another aspect of what I speak, for if we are in touch with Nature (including that within ourselves), we express Nature. Thought art is technically "artificial", if it is inspired it is not artificial in the sense of being false. There are many people who have been desensitized to beauty, and programmed to fixate on culturally negotiated concepts of beauty that do not uplift the spirit. There are people who can be shown a meadow or a forest or a river passing through a beautiful dale, and they will feel nothing. In cases where the person is not in some way mentally damaged or congenitally wanting, the root cause of this lack of responsiveness may lie in the fact that their culture has trained them to commidify all elements of existence. Material value is all with such people. The training may have begun in childhood through something as simple as physical deprivation from Nature, but surely it has been actively ingrained beginning with adolescence. The concept of Nature as having an intrinsic, independent, even magical value is something emotionally real to children; not only did I experience it as a child, but I have seen it repeatedly occur in children during my adulthood. The divorce of our nature from Nature happens as a consequence of what is presented to us as a "mature" and "realistic" attitude toward the natural world. De-spiritualized societies institutionalize this training. That it is not healthy can be construed not merely from the heedless damage we do to our very living environment in our current age. Conversely, there is also the positive evidence that love and respect for Nature exists on a society-wide level among tribal groups where the psychological health of the entire group remains a priority of survival as much as the acquisition of material necessities for group success. The divorce from Nature seems to coincide in the evolution of civilization at the same time that ideologues encourage a divorce from the natural affinities between human beings that otherwise naturally arise out of sharing a common social purpose. Just as human societies begin to parasitize Nature, one can detect parasitization of certain social groups upon others within that society. Where one finds a respect for Nature and a responsible use of its gifts. one finds a similar respect for and just compensation toward the fellow members of the society so collectively engaged. In such circumstances one also inevitably discovers a deep appreciation of Nature for its quality of beauty, and personal artistic evocations of that appreciation accompany this -- though never of one single standard from one such culture or person to another, for Nature itself is infinitely complex in its beauty. We must first teach our children to not be ashamed of their love of Nature's beauty (which lies in its movements, sounds and scents, as well as appearance), and other more broadly beneficial behaviors will inevitably follow. From the seed of a child's simple love of Nature's beauty will follow the positive and informed associations necessary for a mature sponsoring of our biosphere's survival.

In Finland You Will Find It

I have had the good fortune to have twice visited the country of Finland, visiting in particular a friend my wife had made years before when she spent her senior year of high school as a Rotary International Exchange Student in Helsinki. Her lovely friend, an educator of children and master of children's musical theater, now dwells in the nearby town of Lohja with a delightful family of two bright sons, two gifted daughters, along with a musically-talented, quiet and good-hearted husband. On both visits, I also enjoyed the company of various members of the extended family of this Finnish couple, going with them into the breathtaking wooded lake country. In J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the adventuring fellowship of heroes find a brief but restorative respite among the Sylvan Elves and their queen, Galadriel. The love the Sylvan Elves had for their land -- both what grew upon it and the fellow beings who took their sustenance from it -- is a collective love that stands in good mythic comparison to the social reality I came to understand on my two visits to Finland in 2005 and 2006. The Finnish people, comprising the Saami in the Far North, and the Suomi in the southerly provinces, have lived in their part of Scandinavia for literally thousands of years. Other than a highly respected Swedish minority descended from immigrant settlers during the days of Sweden's rule (the country is legally bilingual in all its signage, product labels and official documents), the majority of the populace do not speak Indo-European languages, but Ural-Altaic languages. The beginning of their limited participation in European Continental civilization began really only in the 1500s, and most of their country (with the exception of its Baltic coastal cities) remained much as it had for untold centuries until the latter part of the nineteenth century. For most of their history as an organized political region they have been either a province of the Kingdom of Sweden or the Empire of Russia. Compared to other European countries, it can be said that, while in intrinsic terms Finland is very old, in modernist terms, this country is very young, even compared to the United States. All this is an introduction to my central point: it is a very unspoiled country both in terms of its natural environment and its people. The citizens I have met there and the individuals I have actually gotten to know communicated to me something wonderfully different in their patriotism: they actually love the land itself for itself and they love each other (all the citizens!) as one great family. This is a spiritual and social depth of connection that is wanting in places where patriotism is all about idolatrous flag-worship, spiritually-bankrupt saber-rattling and religiously protecting the narrow interests of an almighty stock exchange over the well-being of the labor force. There is still a sense of community in Finland like that which was once common in America. Their country is in the northern part of the hemisphere, so they have long dark days in the winter. This can have a depressive effect, so neighbors visit each other for fun social games, sympathetic conversation, storytelling, refreshments and spontaneous jocularity to keep each other's spirits up until the days begin to lengthen again. Their population and capitalist economy is growing, but they are taking pains to preserve what they know to be a rare state of natural pristineness and healthy traditional fellowship in their country. They have fought off Nazi Germans and Soviet Russians with only humble resources, and they would do it again to any other that would despoil their hard-won country and do harm to their modestly spoken, hardy fellow citizens. Global political and business trends seek to shame them for their social welfare state as somehow "backward", and try to shame Finland into paving over their land to make room for invasive globalized business ventures. However, the Finnish people as a whole remain stoutly resistant to these testing claw-swipes on their pride. A simple illustration is their dedication to see to the free university education of any citizen who would stand to benefit from it. To do otherwise is in their minds (as clearly stated to me) tantamount to an abandonment of their children. Collectively, they take care of each other like a big family. People are free to work without fear of how they will take care of themselves when they are too old to work. Young people are free to pursue their studies without fear of how they will manage to pay off their academic debts once they enter the world of professions. I saw very few obese people in Finland. They are hard-working, but they have not yet been deceived by the free market myth that selfish individualism is the only legitimate form of society. In Finland, the less you earn, the less you're taxed; the more you earn, the more you're taxed. People there aspire to achieve creative contributions not greed. Yet none of them ever need fear homelessness due to joblessness, nor being able to afford any form of health care that their well-being might require. In Finland, they have not forgotten that other law of nature that social darwinists and libertarians seem to forget (or ignore): that members of a species do not merely compete to succeed materially; they also take care of each other in order to succeed psychologically -- which is everything! This tradition of mutual care is evident in the remains of even our distant ancestors in the evolutionary tree of the Hominid Family: bones that were lovingly buried and showing signs of handicaps from injuries suffered many years before their deaths; evidence, in short, that when alive, they were taken care of by a group of their fellows. Well, this spirit remains alive, in some places more than others. Finland, I salute you! If Americans would, just as the Finns do toward their own country, learn to actually love the natural living land of America and all the life upon it, including their fellow citizens, imagine the things we could accomplish! For one thing, climate change could be overturned.

The Roses Must Remain

If there is a voice in Nature, it is its emphatic presence that stands (when it is allowed to stand) in disregard to the miseries we inflict upon each other and ourselves, and amidst the human chaos that we cannot control. I was sitting on my front stoop a few days ago and watched a bee gently gliding from one white clover flower to the next. From down the hill I heard a passing siren for an ambulance, and the peaceful scene continued. I thought about how many trillions of times this scene has been re-enacted, the plant and the insect in harmonious relationship. It has happened through all our wars, privations, oppressive regimes, plagues and personal tragedies. Nature remains in so many ways an imperturbable expression of beauty. What a valuable thing for someone who is depressed or distressed who can open their heart and mind to the beauty of a scene directed by the painterly wings of a butterfly or the rolling gait of a woodchuck or the graceful careening of a hawk's flight. Then consider it all banished, paved away, and the person walking alone in their misery does not have this happily accidental form of access to Nature's constancy. A profound form of subtle consolation has been taken away, and the person in misery loses a valuable spiritual perspective and a living embodiment of sturdy hope in the face of life's madness. There is a reason that is not maudlin or small-minded behind the old expression, "take time to stop and smell the roses". Humankind can create wonderful realities for itself, but it can also create artificial hells. Immersion in the creations of humankind, however beautiful or comforting, cannot elude the hard knocks of life. That is why the roses must remain -- for the sake of Nature (of which we are only a small part) and for the healing of ourselves. The persistent and consistent beauty of Nature in its forms and movements is also the root inspiration of all perdurable art. When art only derives from itself, its ability to enrich the soul grows paler and paler. The luster of Nature never fades, but vigorously renews.

Human Beings in the Natural Scheme of Things

It is quite understandable and forgivable that the average person either does not believe or is ambivalent about the existence of extra-terrestrial life or the presence of remnant populations of hominid species on our planet (i. e., sasquatch, yeti, etc.). After all, there are literally thousands of distractions and burdens to preoccupy the life of any given individual that are far more demanding and confrontational. Nevertheless, there are those of us of perfectly sound mind who, through life's infinite variability and the accidents of experience, encounter something that does not fit into the natural scheme we were brought up to accept as forming reality. Then there are those of us that have never encountered such extraordinary things but for whatever reason are sensitive to the open-ended mysteries that really define our place in the world and the universe. The fact that believers and eyewitnesses are socially ostracized represents a political act of sorts in of itself. Then, when you have actual civic authorities denying the possible existence of such phenomena and abrogating (or at least belittling) scientific investigation into such matters, we have an overt political act of an authoritarian nature. So, in terms of how little it would practically cost society to officially honor the mounting physical evidence and persistent testimonials from people of all walks of life in terms of these outre matters, why is there such a blockade? Since one cannot really determine a practical reason for being utterly close-minded in these matters, it must be an ideological issue. The "cost", in short, is the threat such areas of understanding pose to a vested interest in an unequivocal position that is highly unscientific: the hubristic proposition that human beings are utterly unique! If there are remnant groups in the remote regions of this planet of fellow hominids, which possibly run in variety from Neanderthal populations in the Caucasus Mountains, to Australopithecines in the Himalayas, to homo heidelbergensis in Southeast Asia, to Gigantopitchecus in the Pacific Northwest of North America, then we must palpably (rather than merely theoretically) embrace the truth that we (homo sapiens) are really only once branch of the hominid family, and that, after all, we are animals like any other primate. Additionally, we must admit to populations of hominoid species which have successfully eluded our political control for tens of thousands of years. On the other hand, admitting that we are being visited and studied by extraterrestrials is to face the fact that we share the universe with sapient beings vastly more sophisticated than ourselves. Either way our sense of preeminence is threatened. The consideration that either we still have some close relatives surviving on Earth, or that we aren't "the only brightly-lit show in town", really is not a problem for those of us for whom it is natural to feel humbly captivated by the wondrous complexity and vastness of Nature and the Universe. Understanding a profounder chain of being only makes our experience of life more rich and profound, and indeed, more progressive in its broader insights. But the fact remains that there are those who are not content merely to simply and passively ignore (as most pragmatically do) the existential possibility of other human-like species, native or non-native to our world. There are those who instead expend intense and aggressive amounts of energy for no discernibly rational and constructive purpose to defame, distort, distract and destroy efforts to establish a broader understanding. It is with this portion of the population that you will coincidentally discover an obsession with power and control. Yes, many things do boil down to love or money, but we must not forget this third preoccupation our kind tends toward. The desire to preserve various kinds of inordinate power and its status quo affects intensely our progress in scientific endeavors even generally speaking, which is something many people fail to realize. However, to look at the very credible evidence that we either have living siblings clothed in a thick growth of their own hair, or that we experience visitors to our planet in suits of "interstellar silver", is to acquire a healthy measure of humility about our place in the cosmic order, and perhaps lead us to act with a healing modesty to our own fellow human beings.

Self Awareness and Free Will

The animals "beneath" us in intellectual capacity should never be scorned as "stupid"; stupidity is the inability to be responsible in one's actions. The animals with whom we share this planet act with responsibility to their respective species. They do not need to be encouraged or compelled to nurture or protect each other. It is in their nature to do so. Human beings, on the other hand, though we have natural drives in each of us to act responsibly in these ways, must be raised and socially encouraged to solidify our commitment to nurture and protect our fellow human beings. In tribal times, it was much easier to communicate the value of such behaviors and create a sense of commonweal. Unfortunately, the human experience these days is largely one of social atomization. Ruthless competition and amoral self-interest are rewarded, whatever the official line may state to the contrary. In effect, we have (in a collective sense) become cleverly stupid. In our moral disunity, we have fallen beneath the behavioral level of our fellow animals, who are governed by wholesome instincts -- whatever else one might say about the inter-species ruthlessness of Nature's food chain. The fact remains that animals within any given species do not destroy or weaken each other for selfish gain; if they have conflict, it is to improve collective strength. We, however, have cultivated a drive to undermine each other, to the point that we are fast eroding our collective survival (and therefore, in the long run, the succession of every single member of our species). Not even those clever enough at amassing individual wealth and power over others may find escape from this internally generated threat-- which is an irony they fail to grasp for all their cunning. Religionists speak of a Fall from Eden. Moral ecologists speak of Fall from Nature. The two essentially refer to the same problem, and these days, it has become the crisis of our civilization. We as a species, whether through evolutionary fluke or Divine Gift, have two resources that distinguish us from other animals. Our self-awareness makes us able to take in the wonder of the universe by affording a perspective of our place in it. This same capacity has begotten the second distinguishing trait: free will. Put another way (one might say a more scientific way), we are no longer strictly governed by instinctual behaviors. Here I am not talking about sex drive and fight or flight. I'm talking about the vital genetic programming to nurture and protect one's fellows without a second thought. Our free will has positive gifts: we are able to improve the quality and conditions of our lives outside the harsh rules of raw Nature. However, that freedom from instinctual control also means that we can choose not to do the right thing on behalf our fellow human beings. We must learn to be heroic in our ownership of these dimensions of mind, and at least do better than simple animals, who lack our perspective and ability to transcend environmental constraints.

Fatalism -- An Unnatural Behavior

There are only one two situations where you will see an air of fatalism affecting the behavior of animals. One is when they sense they are terminally ill and they stoically wander off from their social group to die in a private hidden place. The other situation is an artificial one: when animals are held in prolonged captivity or are chained up for a long time; in these circumstances you are seeing a broken spirit. Yet various degrees of fatalism have been present as a cultural phenomenon among human beings ever since we ceased being nomads and opted for a settled existence. There are religions that have appeared at different times and been described more or less accurately as "fatalistic". Such religions are psychologically symptomatic of the more limited survival options and the imposed constraints of social stratification, all of which resulted with the rise of agrarian and urban civilizations. Yet there seems to be a new sort of fatalism crowding out a reasonably hopeful consciousness in humankind today. This fatalism is not wholly religiously sourced -- though we do have the 2012 and Revelations millenarians feeding the miasma of pessimism. This more secular fatalism is, however, artificially induced. We have been led to believe that our business infrastructure simply cannot effectively switch in a timely way to sources of energy that do not create terminal climate change. This is the bluff of the madmen that run our energy industries. It is not that they cannot readily mobilize a shift; it is that they are unwilling. They are riding the high tide of greed, and they will not let go of coal and oil until it runs out -- even though the extractive procedures are destroying our marine ecosystems and the life-supporting qualities of our mountain landscapes and freshwater systems. The real revelations of fuel-oil derived from algae is one blatant example that indicate the lie we have been fed. Algae-oil does not harm our climate balance, does not pollute our biosphere, is cheaply produced in massive quantities, and has been proven to drive energy efficient motors and with a propensity comparable to fossil fuels. Ditto for wind machines for power-plants, and their energy can serve power-grids encompassing areas where there is not plentiful wind. How is it that we as a species so imbecilically demand that energy must be commodified as a "high-profit" venture. When the remnants of the biosphere are dying off a few decades from now in the withering final stages of global-warming's firestorms, where will these fossil-fuel industrialists take all their piles of money -- to the moon? The moon is as good a grave as the one they will have made of the Earth.

Who wiill be the Custodians of the Custodians?

We're the most intelligent species on the planet, we have self-awareness, and by fait accompli we have been duly appointed the "Custodians of Nature". I do not need to get into the well-established bundle of insanity that makes this responsibility so ironic. But in case you're reading this as a fresh visitor from another planet, I will briefly summarize the behavioral tendencies that makes us, "Nature's Jailers", a walking cabinet of conflict of interest cases; we the custodians engage in: destructive political and commercial competition for Nature's resources, extractive practices driven by corporate greed (which results in a myriad species going extinct each year), an unfair balance of ownership of the Earth's resources (a legacy of colonialism -- which forces impoverished peoples to farm marginal land turning it into desert), religious and male chauvinistic resistance to responsible birth control (which creates population densities that regional environments cannot support), and our shackled dependence on burning oil and coal for energy (which creates devastating drought through climate change). All of these factors make the human race the poorest example of what it is to be caretakers of anything so rare in the universe as a a planet with an actual biosphere. How is it that we evolved to be technologically capable of actually harming the whole planet's ecology, but did not evolve a concomitant awareness of and respect for our debt to Nature? But then again, it is not as if we treat our species any better than they way do the other creatures and features of this planet. If in all the time we have walked the earth we have never managed to learn to take care of each other except perhaps in general terms on a family level, and occasionally (under certain limited circumstances) on tribal and national levels, how could we be expected to act altruistically for Nature herself? Still, the fact that we actually have the capacity to look beyond the immediate concerns of survival and reproduction, that we can sense the beauty and profundity of the whole order of life and discover the chemical physical dynamics underlying it, it would stand to reason that a desire to protect, maintain and nurture our world and each other would follow. Perhaps that's where education would fit in. Too bad in America we're more concerned about our children being rote learners trained to see tests as the end-all of their schooling. But what if we allowed our children to appreciate all that there is to learn out there (not just what the politicians tell them to pay attention to), and develop the dynamic mental capacities to engage with those beacons of mystery (i.e., critical thinking tools)? Then the answer is solved as to how we can create a custodianship for the custodians of Nature (i.e., an ethical foundation that polices the ecological caretakers). The custodianship would be education itself. Those so educated would police themselves. An educated appreciation of the majesty and fragility of the web of life that binds us (and the massive lifelessness that surrounds us in the greater universe) would make our actions conform to a resultant ethics operative within the conscience itself. But if we keep our educational system running like a great bridge to nowhere, the "Bad Jailership" of the planet will be free to continue. These Bad Jailers know full well that there are not enough properly educated people with an adequate ecological perspective to oppose them politically. So they continue to merrily strip the planet down to its bones. These "Custodians" need Custodians.

Just who Painted the Upper Paleolithic Masterpieces?

Well, scientists will tell you that the Cro-Magnon people composed the incredible painted art, which survives in deep caves scattered across France and Spain, from a period of activity extending from about 35,0000 until 13,000 years ago. Scientists otherwise refer to these particular human beings as "archaic humans" or "early modern humans" or homo sapiens sapiens cromagnonensis. The genius of these creations is the combined lightness of line and richness of color in the depictions, not to mention the three-dimensionality, dynamic poses and anatomical accuracy in the execution. The subject matter is principally of herding animals (some of which are now extinct), such as wild horses, woolly mammoths, aurochs, ibexes, deer, bison, etc. The "canvas" is often of the most challenging sort, being the rather uneven and awkward surfaces of undressed stone that naturally form the walls and ceilings of caves, some of which are sea-caves! More ingeniously, these prehistoric artists have often chosen and adapted peculiar natural abstract (though imaginatively evocative) forms in the surface of these caves to enhance the three dimensional effect of their realistic subjects. All of it was done with flickering torch light, there being no benefit from natural daylight at their degree of remove from the Earth's surface. Coming from humans that are many thousands of years away from having any need of writing that we might otherwise know them, it is a profound link of understanding with the intelligence and values of the distant forebears to the present state of our species. It should not even be a concern that we should have to make any assumption about the color of the skin of these human beings, but in light of the latent racism raising its ugly head across America today in the form of the Tea Party movement, it is a matter that should be explicitly revealed. In point of fact, Europe was settled by groups of modern human beings from Africa some 50,000 years ago. At the time human beings made these paintings, our own DNA reveals that there had not been enough time for the mathematically calculable genetic drift to occur for these prehistoric people to look anything specifically like the average native European living today. In short, the master artists who painted all the exceptional paintings of such places as Altamira Cave and Lascaux Cave had a high melanin content in their skin and kinky hair. Need I be more specific? They were Negroes in the phenotypical or "racial" sense of that word. Gradually, these people would acquire lighter and lighter skin, and tangentially straighter hair over the succeeding millennia as an adaptation to the lesser quality of sunlight in Europe as compared to the plentiful sunlight under which the ancestors of every human being alive today evolved in Africa. This is a very small matter for those of us who realize the illusoriness of defining people by superficial physical differences, but I recommend the following book (which addresses itself to far more important and fascinating questions of human evolution), and which establishes the scientific truth of what I have just imparted: Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. Written by Nicholas Wade. Published by Penguin Books. Copyright 2007.

Healthy Shame

"Shame" in its original sense as a plain English word is merely the equivalent of words such as "modesty" or "humility", derived from the Romance languages. There are unhealthy forms of shame, for instance: feeling ashamed of one's ethnic origins or economic status, feeling ashamed of one's natural physiology. These forms of unwarranted shame are very common in our culture. But there is a healthy sort of shame that is strikingly absent, and it is to our harm: shame for showing disrespect or lack of consideration for the fellow members of our species. One can argue the point even without reference to religion: we can look at the examples of other animals (O, yes, we are animals too you know, and we should NOT be ashamed of that!). I could cite a myriad examples of how intelligent creatures look out for each other, to the degree that they will even, when necessary, engage in personal sacrifice. A person might say it's all instinct, but not if you witness it in action. There is something more there resisting the severity of the heartless universe. Bio-chemistry alone cannot construct a mind with the will to make and maintain something beautiful in the face of battering nature. Perhaps the strongest case for this argument can be found in the Emperor Penguin of Antarctica. I do not believe the story of its yearly cycle of survival and self-perpetuation can be better told than in the British documentary series, narrated by David Attenborough, called, Planet Earth. I advise you to buy this series or borrow it from your local library, for the profound story of this creature and many other forms of life. It will do your soul good. But getting back to this specific species of penguin, I will remark upon the implications of what I learned, and not spoil the story for you yourself to discover. Suffice it to say, this bird, this animal, this collection of special beings puts forth the most tremendous degree of cooperative effort despite grinding suffering at the hands of nature, and all for the sake of continuing its kind. There can be few other creatures who endure more than they. One might remark, how is it worth it to them? They must be too stupid to know any better! But then one observes the way they appreciate the payoff, the way they care for those young ones they miraculously bring forth and raise in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth (but also the only place where they might exist). Their endurance of bitterest weather for months on end to incubate their eggs, and the way in which they collectively preserve each other's lives in the process of this incubation, is pure spiritual beauty. Their love of their hatchlings is equal to this preceding effort. To know what they pass through, to see the life they assert in the teeth of chaos, should shame any human being to the tender arches of their feet. Though our own kind is riddled with members who have been dealt with harshly by the genetic roll of the dice, we collectively as a species, are one of the most fortunate on this Earth. If we were to do a tenth of what the Emperor Penguins do for each other toward our fellow human beings, we might begin to be worthy of the gifts we have been dealt in our evolution.

How to Judge a People

Throughout history human beings have stumbled upon a revelatory fact: the actual people of a political power may be quite different than the political power over them. Ironies form when you find a basic human affinity for someone you have been told is your enemy. In more recent centuries the basic agreement between human beings as opposed to the ambitions of political entities has come across most obviously between fellow scientists across the nations. In the Middle Ages, it was between fellow churchmen and churchwomen across feudal states promoting the cause of peace and compassion. During World War I and the American Civil War, Christmas was sometimes celebrated between opposing sides. There are World War II veterans and elderly civilians from eastern and southeast Asia who speak truthfully about how ill-treated they were by Japanese soldiers, and yet when General MacArthur occupied Japan to help them organize a new state, he found the common people of the civilian population more than ready to democratize, because they had been utterly unhappy ever since the imperialist military regime had mounted a coup d'etat over their democracy back in the mid-1930s. You cannot accurately (let alone justly) judge a people by the behavior of their government, even if that government claims to act by the will of the people. If you don't actually have the privilege to get to know a real live person from another country, another way to gauge the nature of their humanity is to read their poetry that relates to the natural world. It is in such poetry that clusters of refined spiritual qualities may be discovered. A great about thing about nature poetry is that it tends not to be a medium where poets seek to slip in propagandizing (and therefore hypocritical) airs. The natural world is neutral territory, by the very essence of its subject matter, a genre immune to the abuse of art seeking political advancement or to affirm political power, and therefore its creative canvas is a far more honest mirror into the real soul of a people through the nature-poets its culture produces. The haiku tradition of poetry in Japan (begun by the pacifist Basho) is a case in point, and shows that cold-blooded militarism was not at the core of Japanese culture, but lodged in the aristocratic periphery. Likewise the Chinese poetry by such reflective, nature-oriented poet-philosophers as Li Po and Tu Fu bears out the humanity of the Chinese soul, whatever one might say about the dread qualities of their historical empire. The Persian-language poet, Rumi evokes a wonderful unity of spiritual insight and keen natural observation. While the British Empire was wreaking havoc across the world, the true heart of their culture, exemplified by such Romantic and Victorian poets as William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Gabriel Rossetti wrote poems endeavoring to awaken the soul of humankind to its moral mirror in nature. Likewise while the United States was engaged in the slaughterhouse of its Civil War and the ethnic cleansing of the American Indian, you had poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson writing poetry about the healing and insightful qualities of beautiful nature. I could go on and on. However, just as the sharing of scientific learning is a cue to our basic and essential unity as homo sapiens on this planet, so also is the immediate appreciation we may discover across cultures in creative celebrations and explorations of the meaning of the natural world and human soul's place in it. Politics are a lie, but nature is ever true.

Shame in the Game

A hundred years ago, all the farmers in America were organic farmers. A hundred years ago, the majority of the people living were farmers. They led simple lives, worked endlessly and even if the year had mediocre returns, they never went hungry unless their parcel of land were particularly small and poor in quality. Animals drew the plows and harrows, and human hands sowed the seed and reaped the crops, shucked the corn, threshed the wheat, and the wind winnowed away the chaff. The implements were handmade and could be repaired by human hands. Farmers, men, women and children, had to eat heartily to get through the day's demanding tasks, and none of them suffered from obesity. At harvest time, often the whole community would pitch in to lend in hand for what meant at least local survival for everyone, and there was a communal feast of thanks as repayment for the help. The overhead costs of farming were quite proportionate to the means of the farmer, and the farmer had a firmer hand on the quality of his fortunes. Riverboats and railroads widened the opportunities for the sale of surplus, and what they did not eat directly from the field or sell at the market, they canned so that the dinner table remained plentiful even in the depths of winter. If you've read my profile, you know I am a librarian. Working at the public desk, I hear many interesting stories. One that proved particularly thought-provoking for me was when an organic farmer pointed out another patron walking out the door, telling me that this individual had made a rather idealistic attempt at our most important and very ancient human endeavor of farming. He had tried to farm as people did a hundred years ago. In fact, he had managed a life of subsistence, which was as far as his ambitions went anyway. He was more interested in pursuing a way of life, rather than to actually make a profitable business of it. And yet, he suffered the aggressive ridicule, mockery and eventual shunning by his neighbors, who were also farmers. It became so psychologically disconcerting that he moved away and to attempt a different means of life. The fact of the matter is that, while a farmer, this man had not put himself in debt for the purchase of copious amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, expensive farm machinery, fuel, repairs, etc. His only real cost beyond the sweat of his brow was the proper care of his beasts of burden. It is true, from the story I heard, he did not get the returns that his neighbors did, a point they made to him with derisive humor. And yet, he might have made a life of it, if his neighbors had been decent human beings, or if had managed somehow to ignore them stoically. And yet, we are all ultimately dependent on community. Social ostracism is a powerful and devastating tool, so I do not fault this man, who dropped his simple agrarian dream after a few willful years of trying. So what got under the skin of his fellow farmers that they abandoned their proper role as kindly, supportive neighbors of this unoffending individual? I have thought long about this, for I heard it over a year ago now, and I can only conclude that what drove these other farmers to be so unkind had to be quite gnawing psychologically. I think it was envy. Every farmer is now the pawn of corporate profiteering on an interdependent set of purchases in order to practice the advanced technological and scientific art of agriculture, such that the pawns in this scheme can thank their lucky stars if they actually break even. Otherwise they are in debt up to their ears in bank loans to manage the expense of the costly purchases now deemed necessary to practice farming. And yet we have the examples of the Amish and Mennonite communities who do not use those things. Where these very old "counter-culturalists" hold an advantage over the poor individual of the story I was told, is that the Amish and the Mennonites have each other to support and affirm the lifestyle of simple agriculture. If outsiders deride them, they have their collective faith to shore each other up emotioanlly. All of this now brings me to another music review: Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull. This is very much a companion piece to Songs from the Wood, and came out the following year in 1978. Generally speaking, the album contains rather imaginative though no less accurate songs about life in the country, but its centerpiece is a stirring encomium of the draft horse (or as the English say, "heavy horse"). This is the creature that from the invention of the horse collar in the ninth century, C.E., has pulled the plows and other field implements of Western civilization until the final domination of the tractor in even the remotest corners of country life in the 1970s. To his credit, Ian Anderson, the leader, composer and lyricist of Jethro Tull, had become a leader in the cause to preserve the breeds and continue to use them, pointing out that one day "the oil wells will run dry" and the heavy horses would be needed again to perform their vital work. This album is stirring, moving, edgily humorous and a great round of bumptiousness to enjoy listening to at the dawning of spring in our world right now (whatever our planet's long-term troubles). The album has also been digitally remastered to perfection by Chrysalis records. If you like Songs from the Wood, you will equally enjoy Heavy Horses. Happy Pesach, Happy Easter and Happy Verna Tempora!