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?