APPROPRIATION OF VOICE

let me add a couple of cents worth of support for the poor beleagured writers of canada who are enduring an infection that is silly and stupid — appropriation of voice is an incredible nod to narrow tribal thinking at a time in history when we know so much more. i have alot in common with fruit flies. i share emotions with honeybees and fish and all animals. i share affection like slugs, and like slugs i remember these experiences in the same way, with the same brain processes. how big a stretch do you think it is to write about a woman if you are a man? to write about an old man if you are young? why aren't we being ostracised for doing that? why aren't we being ostracised for any fiction? i'll tell you why: fiction is just another tool for getting at the truth, as is imagination, empathy, mirror neurons, group contagion and other manifestations of social thought, dangerous or not.

loosen up, guys, and have a look over your shoulder — you are on the wrong side of history, truth, knowledge and progress.

CURIOUS

there is a curious mixture of sense and nonsense on the radio news that upon reflection i have concluded is a fair typification of the human condition. mixed with news of mr trump these days, in ever smaller proportion, are other news items: of cyberhacking — this time data ransom attacks around the world —  from the vatican, of miracle sightings and canonization, of trump supporters defending their man, to name a few, along with reports of saudi princesses abusing other humans compelled to serve them and chicago mayors all serving jailtime. 

wait a minute; where is the good stuff? come to think of it, it may not be much of a mixture after all. the poor well-fed well-informed well-cared for beleaguered literate middleclass citizen must be barely clinging to life these days. how terrifying.

COMPETITION VS COOPERATION

why are all sports competitive? there didn't get to be seven billion humans on the planet because we are good at competition, lots of failed animals failed while competing with their own kind; more it was because we learned to cooperate. i don't think it takes alot of imagination to conjure up ways people can play a game toward a higher score by means of better cooperation — games where everyone playing is essentially on the same team and cooperation is rewarded, as it so often is in life. 

the highly competitive among us are and always have been mostly doing things that make life better for themselves, and often, much tougher for others. is that really still so valuable to us now, now that what threatens us is not lack of fitness but lack of cohesion?

fighting fires is all about cooperation; the enemy is not a person. the team wins if they can, but there is really no opponent who loses, the fire being a phenomenon without a will. 

soon the earth will be on fire. what do you think can save it for the creatures? competition?

i don't think so.

NAMING IT

the healthcare debate in the US is already tiresome. i hear alot of talk from rightwing politicians who speak for all the world like ideologues. the problem is not only that they are not truthful in anything they say, not only that they abandon pragmatism as well as truth, not only that their agenda is (slightly) hidden from a naive constituency, the real problem is that their ideas are stupid, and if allowed to prevail will soon hurt the people they profess to represent (as opposed to the people they truly represent, of course).

really, we should call them idiotlogues, because that is what they are.

DANGEROUS IDEAS

when i was a young kid, a little catholic kid, i was told by my perfectly sweet shy mother what a shame it was that my friends, who were mostly protestant (along with a jew or two), would never get into heaven. i couldn't believe what she was saying and as was my habit i called her on it. but to her it was a matter of faith, and authority, and one did not question one's faith, or authority in general. she also believed in experts, believed they somehow had a direct link with the truth.

these are dangerous ideas. Us and Them is the most dangerous idea on the present planet earth and the world's only military superpower has just installed at the helm an Us and Them damagogue of epic proportions, who is surrounding himself with others just like him.

this does not bode well for anybody. it is way past time for people to stop rooting for themselves, in any guise, and start rooting for the survival of the planet.

BIAS

humans have frailties that make them vulnerable to extinction and one of the most problematic is confirmation bias. believing that your country, your religion, your city, state or region, your sex, color, generation, even your hockey team, is better than others is just another way of believing you are better than others. and that is a fundamental problem for the species. 

LATE TO THE PARTY

there is a fundamental struggle going on in america which i think could have been resolved about five hundred years ago; that is the struggle for cultural dominance between religion and the scientific method. this debate has been resolved most successfully in europe and parts of the east, and it leaves america deeply late to the party. 

this is dangerous; when the world's only military superpower is embedded in a fractured and still unevolved ethos it will be tempting for them to continue to enforce domination in world affairs by increasingly bellicose military means. 

this is an existential threat to them and the world entire. if americans cannot step up to the reality bar quickly, President Loser, the new demagogue of hate installed in the whitehouse, will have to be stopped by people outside its borders, and that is a threat to the planet of epic proportions.

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

the people who live within the world of finance are addicted to a game. it is not a game of survival against the elements of the cosmos that are hostile to life, it is not a game of self-reliance or belonging in a global enterprise — what i would label the real games of life — more it is a game like a boardgame. i wish it weren't so, but i am afraid the tired old game they insist on continuing to play is the depression-era game of Monopoly, a game whose ideas and principles were long ago, at least morally, discredited. and like the game, this modern capitalist system will end just as surely as the game of Monopoly ends, and in precisely the same way, when one combatant has acquired all the capital and there is noone else left standing with anything to lose. 

and like people in all places through all time, when there is nothing left to lose, people get ugly.

PRESIDENT LOSER

mr trump is forgetting the first principle of elected office — try not to piss off the people. let's hope it continues. he is a dangerous fascist racist whose constituency is not now and has never been the people, except in the sense of whom to fool, his constituency is corporations and elites around the world.

EARTH MODEL 2003

(from a talk given at a writers' night at the Saturna Café November 02 )

First I would like to erect a model of an earth worthy of our children— second to consider how our current situation differs from that model—third to suggest how our present sorry path can be deflected toward it.

THE MODEL

The place I would like to see my children live in is free of intimidation destruction and murder— it is free of any institutional inequality between individuals and also free of any semblance of group rights or privilege including rights of corporations or religions or political parties and other non-individual entities presently treated as individuals under the law.

In this imagined place the rights of individuals (the only human rights) are enshrined in international law without regard to sovereignty of nations and enforced by the United Nations. Earth itself and the biosphere are also protected by international law which supersedes all regional and national laws. The right to bear arms is restricted to the UN. All weapons of mass destruction— including and especially armed forces— are prohibited to any group smaller than that.

No other laws beyond individual, earth and biosphere rights are declared or enforced by the UN. Regional cultural and ethnic uniqueness are matters of individual choice as are methods of local governance or absence of governance provided international laws are not violated by custom or in practice. (In adjudicating these customs and practices there is no escaping the conclusion that any form of institutionalized privilege is inimical to justice. And justice not peace is always the goal and in fact is the only path to lasting peace.)

There is no attempt at enforced homogeneity. Differences that do not result in institutional inequality are tolerated. The free exchange of ideas is encouraged. With the free movement of people care to control the rate of flow at least initially and for a period allowing the peaceful and non-disruptive movement of individuals is needed. There should be no destabilizing and hence destructive shift of population but rather a gradual diminution of regional inequities through transfer payments such as exist in the European Union and Canada. This will have a retarding influence on migration for most people, who naturally love their birthplace.

The enforcement of rights by the UN— including the free right to life health and education— includes the UN’s right to taxation of nations according to ability to pay and of individuals worldwide without regard to nationality. This will necessarily involve some arbitrary limits on the growing disparity of wealth among the world’s regions as well as its individuals.

This means that the wealthy will not continue to get wealthier but ultimately with the end of military expenditures and costs of reconstruction no person anywhere will ever be forced to live in jeopardy. This does not mean that charity will be forgotten as long as inequities persist but that no lives will be ultimately dependent on it.

If this seems utopian so be it. It is obtainable when once the mighty have been subsumed in the family of mankind. To this end the Thoreau-Gandhi-King ethic of non-violent non-cooperation has proved itself more powerful than propaganda and armies combined and is the only technique necessary— or in my view even possible.

THE PRESENT

Preaching any war of any description for any purpose intended to make peace is doomed by definition— war is not peace. The idea that Mr. Bush is going to Iraq to give the people freedom ignores the obvious, that the first right of any peope would of course be freedom from invasion.

The UN has already fashioned an international bill of human rights more than fifty years ago. It needs the ability to enforce these rights not only between nations but internally within nations without regard to custom or status either historical or by reason of power and wealth. And its charter already expressly forbids acts of aggression by states upon other states, which it also needs the ability to enforce either by arms or preferably by international isolation of responsible leaders. This prohibition should be widened to include any occupation by any foreign power either militarily or by any other means of intimidation or threat, with the sole exception of the UN itself.

No nation today, least of all the United States, could exist in its present form without the cooperation, willing or otherwise, of other nations. The power of non-cooperation should not be doubted. The United States once isolated from its markets, for arms especially, would experience rapid economic decline more certainly than if it were deterred by force (which in any case could prove fatal to all). The US economy and standard of living depend on arms exports and control of oil. This requires a climate of fear and conflict to continue. Peace, no matter how they posture as a peace-loving nation, is inimical to the whole American enterprise— a terrible predicament for them and indeed the whole world— and they are going to need outside help in the form of overt pressure in order to restructure and thence reduce the insecurity of the world, including themselves. In this our interests are the same no matter how differently perceived.

The world must help the US help itself. It must be weaned from this dependence on arms and armies— on intimidation destruction and murder— and the crime of murder, which is the ultimate denial of individual rights, cannot be suspended just because some leader(s) declares a military action a ‘war’. It also must be made an international crime of the most serious magnitude to profit from violence in any way at any scale— another task for the world court.

What are the rights of war? And where does the human (animal) notion of rights of any kind originate? I have a strong life-long feeling that I inherently own the right to my own life. I think all rights flow from that primary feeling. If this is true then individual rights, being the origin of all rights, must remain sacrosanct — and an idea like immunity from prosecution for any persons on the earth is an affront to all. The right of any person or nation to make war whether on its own citizens or others must be eliminated as individual reprisal has been eliminated between citizens under the rule of law within nations.

DEFLECTING THE PATH

The first step we must take in deflecting the current destructive path of history toward a model of equanimity is to strengthen the UN and to enshrine the Individual Bill of Rights in international law, at the same time giving the UN the sole power to enforce it — and only it — over the whole of the globe. We must wean nations gradually of absolute sovereignty, starting with adoption of the world court jurisdiction as the world entire and continuing with granting the UN the power of taxation, then on to the gradual lock-stepped dismantling of all the nations’ armed forces in favor of a small highly mobile UN peacekeeping and peacemaking force of conventional arms comprised of small representative forces from a majority of willing nations.

As a first step in reducing the world’s national armies, the right to conduct military operations should be restricted to the territory legally owned by each nation, including the area of its fishing rights, up to the first two hundred miles of surrounding ocean where shoreline exists without conflicting claims and along some midpoint between nations where jurisdiction might otherwise overlap. This would allow for a less disruptive shift in internal structures of power, including both political and economic power, within nations. Ultimately, the only forces in the world that will be legitimately mobile will be UN forces.

No nation can seriously call its military forces defense forces which is involved in invasion or occupation of any other nation on earth. Those are offensive actions, in both senses of the word. And how long can it take for all the world’s peoples to recognize that if no-one can leave the home territory there can be literally no-one to defend against except the UN, which will have such constraints against its actions as to be a most unlikely adversary. In any event, this position of allowing national forces as long as they stay home will be only a transient structure, and as the expense of keeping large forces will be a serious detriment to economic participation in a global economy, should die of its own weight, if in fact democracy is a workable system of governance.

This fundamental change in power will necessarily involve restructuring the UN so that veto status is eliminated and voting power reflects population with a qualified majority along the lines of the new EU constitution (with perhaps the addition of a ‘taxation’ factor). It should be understood that only nations in good standing would be accorded any vote at all and that to remain in good standing nations must comply with all UN qualified majority decisions and pay their taxes. This means the end of international unilateralism.

In game theory ‘tit for tat’ works out to be the cleanest simplest and most effective strategy of cooperation. Perhaps some modified less destructive version of that will prove useful in developing protocols for the new UN. But whatever system of control evolves it will have to focus mainly on national governments. They have done most of the killing and suppressing of rights throughout history and certainly lack any claim to legitimacy however they have arrived and for however long they have ruled. Only individuals have an inherent right to protection under international law— every group is suspect that is smaller than mankind and must prove itself worthy of international support by its egalitarianism and its actions.

Even mankind is too small a group. The biosphere— earth itself— is vital. The goal is to sustain life on earth indefinitely— not for one species or nation or region or generation but for all.

EPILOGUE 19 MARCH 2003 (after the invasion of Iraq)

I remain skeptical that these features of a world government can in fact be implemented without a possibly cataclysmic confrontation among the world’s nations— a confrontation that it is not at all clear we can survive. But whether this vision of our world will be brought about gradually through diplomacy or suddenly in the aftermath of a deadly war that some manage to survive, I also have no doubt that by the beginning of the next century if any of our progeny do indeed still exist they will live under the auspices of some form of world democracy, and absolute sovereignty with its concomitant right to bear arms will be a relic of history.

That is the real business of the twenty-first century. It is time we got down to business.

(from 2007) THE UNITED CITIZENS OF EARTH

There is a fundamental problem with the United Nations and that is the recognition of sovereignty of nations above the rights of individuals. This has effectively eliminated the possibility of the UN ever bringing justice to all the world’s people and that effectively eliminates the possibility of ever bringing peace. The United Nations was the start, and the only possible start, of the formation of a true world government and it has gone as far as it can go within the constraints of its original charter. It is time for a new or radically altered body— it is time to make the individual the basis for rights and obligations under the world body. It is time for the UN to become the United Citizens of Earth.

To make this fundamental shift a reality does not mean the elimination of nations. They are a (sometimes) legitimate form of regional government and many things presently under the control of nations can best be determined at that scale. Similarly, the division of powers within nations into smaller regional areas, even down to cities and towns and rural areas, each with its own government controlling issues that affect its citizens at that scale, is also workable. What is needed is a new definition of ultimate rights. Ultimate rights must originate with the individual and migrate upward, not in a hierarchy but a circle, so that the individual is not only closest to the most local governance but on his other side to the most global governance. The individual becomes the point on the circle from which all other rights emanate.

In practice, the defense of the individual’s rights, including and especially his life, would be the joint responsibility of the entire circle of governance and would remain paramount. Under this structure, whatever threatened the rights and life of the individual would be protected by other bodies of the circle and if one member of the circle was threatening those rights it would be the obligation of other members to protect them from the threat. In this arrangement, the exisiting practice of local governments being subject to regional control and regional governments being subject to national control would be extended to include national governments being subject to world control.

In nations at present local laws are similarly subject to regional laws and regional laws are subject to national laws. This hierarchy too must be extended to global laws, perhaps limited to individual and biosphere rights, which will supercede all national laws. And an international justice system whose jurisdiction is the entire globe must be part of any new charter.

This may sound simple, even obvious, but it will be an enormous struggle of the will of the people everywhere to prevail and bring to heel those powerful individuals within national governments that have been accustomed to controlling the power of societies, both economic and military.

Once accomplished, it will become apparent that while local police forces may maintain civil order in towns, cities, states and nations under the rule of law, none of these police forces will have any jurisdiction outside their geographic areas. The same must apply to so-called armies kept by nations. No national army should have any legal right to act in or occupy any territory not legally its own, no matter what the pretext. Only the army of the United Citizens would have legitimacy over the entire globe, and then only to defend the rights of individuals and biosphere threatened by national forces within or between nations. National armies would effectively be police forces employed only to prevent violations of rights not protected by more regional bodies, never to gain territory or expand influence, either political or economic. And national territorial boundaries in particular could only legitimately be altered by negotiations ratified by majority decisions of the world body in a full and free vote.

Failing this, global problems such as atmospheric warming and the newly expanding nuclear threat cannot be effectively resisted. The last decade has seen the increased militarism of powerful nations emerge, including the threat of widening the arena to include the space above our atmosphere. This is likely to be a greater threat to us in the near future than even global warming, and like global warming its pace is accelerating.

If we can’t restrain the powerful individuals in powerful nations I have no doubt we will all die together and the meek who inherit the earth will turn out to be cockroaches or viruses. What a failed experiment we will have turned out to be— what an epitaph written of us all.

The prospect of inaction or endless fractional infighting in the cause of protecting privilege is very real and the most likely impediment to survival. Whether the instrument of our demise is global warming or a nuclear cataclysm, or some other unforseen problem, the cause of our demise will have ultimately been the same— the inability of individuals to recognize the equal rights of all and to forego the domination of others.

IGNORANT AMERICA

this is the face of ignorant america. the mean, the cruel, the degenerate are inspired by this public display of sociopathy. if the american right wing wants to survive their demagogue and not be decimated by history, they must stop the man, stop supporting the man, stop enabling the man, not in time for the next elections in four years, nor in two years, not tomorrow, but now.

NATION-STATE

the theme of the new book i have begun is to me more fundamental than global warming or overpopulation. it is time to redefine and rejustify the concept of the nation-state:

there is only one excuse and one rationale for anything beyond anarchy as an organizing principle of humans and that is the pursuit of justice. peace is not a goal. peace is the natural outcome of reciprocal justice and unless and until that becomes the bounding principle of every state on this earth and every action taken in the name of that state, we humans of earth will have failed to secure a viable future.

which means to say, pretty much, since the idea that states all over the world will somehow reform themselves without coercion is without evidence, we are likely doomed as a species unless a world government can emerge with controlling oversight of nation-states.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE TAR SANDS

i think it's time the great hollywood blockbuster film took its rightful place beside the tar sands of alberta. they are both huge blights on our planet and our culture, sucking the air (and the carbon budget) out of the room of their respective fields of human endeavor and making it difficult for more worthy projects to replace them.

CLINGING TO FAILED IDEAS

the united states suffers from institutionalized ignorance and it is endemic. as a nation they cling to a capitalist-centered world view, a winner-take-all ethic and a profoundly unempathetic attitude toward other people, not only of the world but within their own country. like other unevolved nations they still rely on first-past-the-post elections, a two-party system which cannot represent the views of many of its diverse citizens, and control of government at every level by moneyed interests. 

this regrettable situation will be exacerbated by the newly elected government and those who still seek to present optimistic scenarios or caution against despair are guilty of wilful blindness. it will be bad. it will hurt americans and it will hurt us all. and by withholding its undeniable power to assist in solving the existential threats both to itself and the planet, the united states will be materially responsible for its collapse, if it should indeed come to that.

though i hear ringing in my ears, 'be careful what you wish for,' i do think it is past time for a world governing body to wrest control of world-scale issues from the hands of regional interests.

OSTRICHES

what is it about canadian politicians that they so resemble ostriches, who put their heads in the sand when threatened with a difficult situation? the sand these politicians are burying their heads in is the tar sands and they are not going to come out of it looking clean and spiffy. 

the only practical solution to canada's contribution in opposing the encroaching devastation of climate change (and the tar sands are the biggest single canadian contributor to our terrible, sasquatch-sized footprint) is the complete cessation of alberta's mining of these tar sands.

so why are we spending treasure to increase the destructive flow of bitumen from this terrible foreign-controlled site that we will someday soon have to start trying to distance ourselves from? this is not about jobs, pipelines don't add significant jobs for the size of the capital investment, this is unneeded and unwanted infrastructure that is running against the stream of not only history but also science, and it is purely based on the inability of a privileged segment of the population to admit that their privilege is based on the destruction of our future, all our futures, their own included. getting off the tar sands will require a lot of new green energy infrastructure, which really is much more labor-intense and will result in many more good, technical as well as construction jobs, than any pipeline proposal.

the oligarchs do not speak for us, the great majority of humans, nor for the other life of earth. this is the sickest short-sided stupidity at precisely the moment in the history of the exploitation of earth by modern humans when better ways are actually finally clear to us. we know what path we have to take. why do we let shortsighted, selfish and callous sociopaths continue to dominate the large-scale efforts of man? if they keep on, you will soon be saying goodbye and good riddance to capitalism in all its forms, the good with the bad. times are going to quickly overtake us. while we fiddle with corrupt political and capital systems, trimming the edges and trying to make them look like something they are not and never have been, the planet burns.

THIS NADINE GORDIMER

this nadine gordimer knows what a novel is. knows what structure is. knows what meaning to chase down, to capture, knows the shape of the trap that will snare it.

one reads The Pickup thinking it like a Y; two people from different places brought accidentally together, who go on living as one complicated strand made of two, the stem of the Y. but it is not a Y. it is an X. and the author has known it and known where it goes and what she is after nailing to the earth, to the page, and she does nail it, artfully, carefully, letting out just enough at every turn, to cause that wonderful novelistic thing —— the inevitable surprise.

you think you know, even for quite a time, until coming up from underneath there is emerging another knowing, the right one this time, to surprise you. this woman born of, emerging from, a cold materialistic world of privilege, which values privilege over justice, who seeks the enveloping warmth of family. this man born of family, emerging from a stifling, formal, inflexible set of meanings and imperatives that yet better values human warmth and care, though in poverty, who seeks the expanding potential of success unbridled, of privilege, security, worldliness, even wealth — everything he sees embodied in her. everything that she wishes to abandon in favor of the family he seeks to abandon — how can it be anything but a perfect X?

first with her friends at the L A café and then with his relatives in africa, she has sought the enclosing warmth of a family she has never known. he has sought a kind of privilege he has heard of but never known. they have been forced by the author to confront one another, and to confront the ideas they each represent. how inevitable. how perfect.

like life in a crystal glass, we get to see it clearly, in the clarity of the novelist's singular unswerving vision.

if life were as visible as this we would never need novels.

WRITING LIKE NADINE

i'm not self-protective; have no wish to be. because i'm not afraid.

oh, i think The Pickup is a grand choice. spending time with nadine is lovely. as i read i wonder what you are thinking, what you are really thinking; what you will say to me about it and what you really feel, and if they will be exactly the same thing. if that is even possible.

just curious. just wondering if you are afraid, and if so, of what?

(writing like nadine.)

ROSS LOCKRIDGE/ALBERT CAMUS

i think camus and lockridge were living in very different places with both a different recent history and a different long history. as a young man camus was influenced by the dadaist movement, nihilism and the theater of the absurd after the devastation of world war one, with its utter failure both of the social order and of its intellectual and moral structures, and lockridge, who was living isolated from most of its effects in middle america (an america which had always been and remained quite self-referential), was not. (america lost some men in 1916-18 but it was considered europe's problem and it was europe that was laid waste.) the literary and intellectual influence in america was still rooted in the transcendentalism of the nineteenth century, in emerson, thoreau and especially whitman. lockridge himself seems to have been an extremely confident unstoppable force of nature, with whitman as his model and, though more conventional than whitman, accepted most of the permissions that whitman had conferred upon himself.

in terms of personality lockridge was unashamedly grandiose and considered himself the appropriate archetype of the great american drama. camus was a skeptical intellectual who did not believe in heroes at all, at least in the beginning. that changed  somewhat with The Plague, when he began to believe it made a difference what people did and did abandon the nihilism of his earlier work in favor of what has been termed by others, existentialism. but his approach to ideas and human behavior remained skeptical and critical.

if camus had been an american writer he might have been ignored but in france with its (sometimes problematic) intellectual tradition, his singular, original work found immediate favor with the intelligentsia which mediated french culture, unlike america where commercial interests and positivism dominated cultural expression from the beginning. 

though whitman had been an outsider most of his life, by its end he was revered somewhat in america (more in europe). lockridge seems to have wanted to be both as famous as whitman but in addition, to be successful in commercial terms as well.

so, though contemporary, these are very different men in terms of life experience and personality. camus grew up dirt poor in algiers and achieved surprising results early on because he was singled out in school as very bright and given access to privilege he never would have been granted by his humble birth, either in algeria or france. lockridge had no such deficits to overcome, early on or later in his brief life. he was kept out of the second war by health concerns and continued uninterrupted by its effects on the country in his singular literary ambition.

when it comes to Raintree County and The Plague, the differences in personality, in focus, philosophy (if lockridge can be said to have had any coherent philosophy) are stark. camus' work is philosophical, intellectual, abstract, cool and skeptical. lockridge's work is hot, emotional, unquestioning, accepting and much more stereotypical. he describes characters grandly, visually, as though the look and speech of them told all, but there are elements of stereotype, albeit very colorful stereotypes. camus' characters are unique, their identities are in their depth not on their skin, and they represent philosophical ideas and conflicting world views; one is hard pressed to find stereotypical types in the piece. 

though they are both good examples of their literary type, born of the same time, of the same western world and world view, these two works could not be more different in their purpose, construction, meaning, or as an experience for the reader. they both seem to me to contain much, and much that rewards the reader. in particular, lockridge and his opus i find slightly easier to admire for at least the scope of his ambition, than i did as a young man — camus i have always admired.

PURPOSE — A STRANGE WORD

why would nature want to convert grass into goat? 
what purpose is there in that? 
what purpose is there in me asking? 

i tell you, purpose has nothing to do with any of it. 
there is no nature with a purpose
there is no plan

there is just everything.

ONE OF THEM, YES

they wanting to see themselves as others see them
or, 
more
wanting others to see them as they see themselves.
yes that one 
that last one 
will be the 
sadder
one.

SOMETHING

we have the same issue with the conception of cosmos that we have conceiving life; they are both structured in time, they have a history, and the human mind is incapable of really understanding nothingness and timelessness, though we have invented zero. we cannot truthfully understand nonexistence at any scale. the meaning of our own death may be only too clear to us, as may be the various imagined ends of our universe, but to imagine no life and no cosmos at all — nothing at all — we have no language for that. nothingness is only relative, death is only relative. language is something and nothing cannot be contained in something. we are left with absence, another comparative. lack implies something missing. something is something the human mind cannot escape.

CAPITALISM UNDEMONIZED

capitalism could be saved. it's important not to demonize this method of production because of excesses of greed and hubris and sociopathic behavior, especially in the financial and energy sectors. the real freedom it brought to enterprise has been valuable and it has proved to be a more successful way of organizing production of material goods and services than the centrally planned economic model, which in comparison allowed even more corruption among the powerful.

the problem is that it bears watching, and regulating, when excesses emerge. the role of production and its ownership vs. state control of enterprise that has emerged in europe, especially since the second world war, and has come to be accepted there, is a better indicator of the way to salvage the good and eliminate the bad in so-called democracies around the world than the british and especially the american model. the key is to remove corporate influence from government and prevent it weaseling its way back in. the most important control needed to save the idea and ideals of democracy is to get money and influence, especially but not only corporate money, out of politics altogether and make elected representatives represent another constituency — the citizens of the state. at its core value, so-called capitalist democracy gives power to money, social democracy gives it to people. for this, the people need to be educated into thoughtful citizenhood.

and then — long live the people.

TIME'S ARROW

chaos (implied order) > cosmos > chaos (dispersal)

where one ends (or fades away) is not the same as where one begins. time does have an arrow, but this does not imply that a clock is not always starting somewhere in the physical universe(s).

REASON

our deepest motivations are not reasonable. reason is merely a tool we employ to accomplish what is innately needed. 

BRIDGE

a human is a bridge. by the things he can't let go and the things he adopts, he links the past to the future. 

MURDERERS

i live in a world full of murderers: murderous governments, murderous armed forces, murderous law enforcement agencies, murderous religious fanatics, murderous gangs of criminals, murderous youth gangs, murderous individuals, murderous psychotics, even murderous workplaces, highways, bars, nightclubs. 

sometimes i wonder if there is something wrong with me, that it offends me so. 

behind each murderer is an investor who profits from the crime. there is some general agreement among most public societies that the taking of a life is wrong. what about profiting from murder? about the killing business? about the accretion of wealth and power through supporting murder? is there general agreement about that? or is it considered just another economic activity, a legitimate countable positive addition to the GDP?

sometimes i wonder if there is something wrong with me, that this also offends me so, that people, individual people, allow themselves to profit in this way.

REAL AND NOT REAL

whether a book is fiction or nonfiction is not interesting. what is useful to know is whether the book attempts to get at something real — YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN; CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY; A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN; THE PLAGUE; THE PICKUP — or whether it is not real — HARRY POTTER; STAR WARS; ALL THE LIGHT YOU CANNOT SEE, and many many others. that is what should be categorized and clearly labeled for the reading public, not because real is inherently better — many people gain much from fantasy and other suspensions of reality, much more than i do — but because it is a more useful distinction to make in identifying a work for a potential reader. it is the underlying, original intention of the author from which every aspect and experience of the book in the mind of the reader will derive.

WITHOUT ATTACHMENT

i have recently been tasked with considering the present without attachment to a future, a stance that is perhaps closer to reality than most people understand, and have found it manageable. i now have left only the much more arduous task of separating the present from the past. in that task i am failing utterly.

UNDERSTANDING DESPERATE ACTIONS

there is a genetic component to tribalism but i think it is indirect — more it seems to be a precursor to a strong group identity that makes young people susceptible to influence in their earliest years. this varies between individuals in every group and the strength of a group identity that overwhelms the individual identity varies also between groups. this is largely dependent on how existential the threat to that group is perceived by its members. if you were growing up white in america in the fifties (as i was) there was no real perceived threat to the identity of your group, since it clearly dominated the surrounding culture. very little pressure was exerted on me to extract an adherence to loyalty to my group — in fact, when i became critical of it quite early on i was treated as a serious young critic and not condemned out of hand, though i think my thoughts along those lines would have continued unabated in any case and might have become more vehement the more external pressure was applied to me to conform to popular views. that was my nature.

this is not the case when a child is not a member of the dominant culture. the perceptions of the individual, family and group of a minority are quite different. that is why there is an inevitable link between the actions of the dominant group and the reactions of the minority. in these days of superpower almost all groups that are excluded will feel an existential threat and coalesce into enemy. the problem of america (or britain, or germany, or any other dominating power throughout history) will always be the same — in the desire to dominate and control others, whether you believe (like the above plus the french and other colonizing imperialists) that it is for the betterment of all and that the lives of all will be improved, or just that somehow you are exceptional (america's current gambit) and deserve to use others for whatever improves your own circumstances, the net result is the same — you will create enemies and enemies will resist you. and enemies under siege will become more extreme as individuals within perceive the threat to their group to be unequal and existential. the middle-eastern states, which were created largely without regard to tribal identities, are and always have been an unuseful construction, territories divvied up by the conquerers to suit their pleasure and their cat, and the present continued involvement by the same offending western nations will never resolve anything and may prove in the end to threaten the entire globe, or what of it is left inhabitable after we are finished degrading much of it for life in human form.

WILD AND FREE

the problem with being wild and free — one of mr thoreau's most famous lines and one i (qualifiedly) love and understand his meaning for — was the same problem for mr thoreau that the libertarians have; they never talk about competing freedoms. in mr thoreau's life he courted one woman ardently, but in the end, unsuccessfully. he wanted nothing more than to share his life with her, wildly and freely. she apparently wanted nothing of the kind. so yes, he felt free to court her, but no, he was not free to love her wildly and freely, and even loving her for the rest of his life — which he probably did — was not the thing he was after and may even have been worse for him than never having loved her at all. she, on the other hand, wanted a life without his love and she got it.

freedoms always compete. in the end, very often that equates with one person having a particular freedom at the expense of another's. we do not act. we interact. we take our chances. and we are sometimes barred from exercising the most poignant freedom there is, the freedom to love another, to share love with another, wildly and freely.

I AM NOT A GROUP

i am not a group. you are not a group. we are persons. individuals. responsible individuals, responsible for our actions, to ourselves and others of our kind, and every kind. i refuse to identify with any group smaller than mankind, even smaller than all life. we don't know what life is but we know it is us and it is important. it matters what we do. it matters what we think, how we view ourselves and how we view others. the only infidelity is to believe it doesn't matter. as a kind, quiet, intelligent friend once said to me, we cannot always control our emotional reactions to things but we can take responsibility for our actions in response to those feelings.

those who commit acts of violence against people viewed merely as others, strangers, symbols, an enemy, are criminals — individual criminals — and it matters not if they wear a uniform or any other symbol of belonging or identifying with a subgroup of humanity. they should be tried individually for their crimes. punishment of any self-identified group as a whole for what amount to individual crimes of some of its members, whether the group as a whole or even to a person approves those actions, is a philosophical, moral and practical error. if the surviving saudis who bombed the trade towers had been tried as criminals instead of triggering a warlike response from the US, if the people who aided and funded the criminals had been also tried as criminals in an international civil court, and no invasion or occupation, military or otherwise, had been carried out in the name of vengeance, the world, and paris in particular, would likely be a different place today.

WHAT DO WE HONOR?

why would i honor any aspect of the military, with its attendant nationalism and fear of others? organizing human society around elements of intimidation destruction and murder, the father the son and the holy ghost of believers, is unsafe at every level, from the individual to the planet itself. until we can find a path to more cooperative and generous principles of organization, earth, or at least its biosphere, will remain in constant jeopardy.

DISPOSABLE ART

underlying every work of art is the original intent that stimulated the production of the work. in ABOUT ALEX the intent of the filmmaker was to make an appealing film for young adults. this intention permeates every decision made along the way to completion, from the storyline, the number of characters, their personalities, the dialogue, the arc, and on to the conclusion; the work is inseparable from its generating concept. in THE TRAIN the underlying intent of the writer was to express to an audience the impact and meaning, in both emotional and intellectual terms, of the death of a parent. the desire to share a powerful, affecting experience with others permeated every decision made along the way to completion. no consideration was given to the effect decisions about the work would have on its audience, or whom that audience might be. the primary, indeed the only concern, was to communicate as effectively as possible a profound experience. it was left to future audiences to decide if the work is appealing. for the writer, it was enough to know it had succeeded on its own terms and satisfied its creator.

the likelihood of something genuinely original being created by the process of the first intention is more problematic and seldom leads to anything more than disposable art.

ORIGINAL MAYBE SOMEDAY

i don't understand the casual enslavement of other species. it seems to me an unnecessary cruelty. and there is enough inescapable cruelty in the world that it is hard for me to imagine why people so thoughtlessly add to their burden and the burden of the ethos of life on earth by indulging in it. i have lived three-quarters of my lengthening life on vegetable foods and non-leather attire and am healthy and fit.

the only kind of enslavement i understand is perhaps the kind participated in by pets; dogs, cats, even horses i understand. still i used to root for the horse to pitch me off and escape to freedom. though i treated them well and cared for them, in me they would have found a silent ally. even the goats i once kept for dairy products and were quite pampered i quietly approved when they found some little flaw in their imprisonment and escaped to the freedom of the woods (though i always chased them down and brought them back). but to kill their male babies, throwing them on the table and holding them down for the throat to be slit, though i am not squeamish, struck me as a pretty primitive barbarity. i learned from hunting to shoot, gut, skin and butcher animals, and from my little fishboat i brained a lot of fish, but it never fooled me into thinking it was necessary or less than cruel. and so i stopped.

the more i have lived with wild creatures and the more i have studied life, especially molecular genetics, the more i understand that we are all really essentially the same, living the same story. we just have different capacities. i can't outrun a horse and he, most times, cannot outthink me. but as far as the emotional life, the things we are genetically programmed to care about, like offspring, safety, food security, comrades, lovers — snails embrace. fish get excited. insects get angry. and ravens share. animals care for each other, not just their offspring, they look out for each other, they signal danger to the group, they cooperate, they learn. they think.

maybe someday we will all be a little more original and a little easier on the planet and the critters we share it with.

MY (SELF-SELECTED) JOB

for me the most important thing to do is to translate life into language and leave it around where you can find it.

GREECE AND THE FUTURE

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/coupland-greece-and-the-curse-of-leisure

hi marg
ya enjoyed it too, liked how long it was. unfortunately, by the end of it he had said enough contradictory things to amount to not saying much. and even a casual glance reveals a lot of sentences that just aren't true. there is a one-percent in greece. there are blue-collar workers, lots of them, and there are an educated managerial/professional class that live differently than the workers or the one-percenters. there are academics and students, lots of them too, there are fishermen, farmers with very small farms who work hard, alot of it hand labor, and yes, a prominent large crowd of civil servants with too-good too-early pensions compared to everyone else (including apparently german bankers) who seem to be a drag on the economy. but there are worse problems. think of the drag in the US on the economy (in the form of taxpayers) from the huge costs of the military and its adventures in search of secure oilfields and economic world dominance, with no actual return you can point to except alot of defense jobs paid for by the taxpayers, which adventures also cost the rest of the world alot of money each year. or the cost and human waste of their prison system of mass incarceration (again, at the expense of the taxpayers).

i am a practitioner of enjoying nothing to do and have always practiced alot. i value an undirected walk, an unplanned day and time to think and do whatever it occurs to me at the time i suddenly feeling like doing (like writing to you). so does mr. coupland. and he has made his own employment basically out of nothing anyone else wanted him to do, which i heartily approve. just like he talks about the greeks doing.

but i don't think the greeks here that i know are any better at that than any other north american. and most americans promised a good pension at an early age for doing a basically pretty slack job, whether growing up in greece or here, would probably leap at it. in the end, the greeks are just humans like all the others, influenced by the place they grow up in and conditions there, which for greece were pretty benign in terms of being protected from invasion and fed from the sea (and land) and housed in some pretty spectacular scenery. not like germany, which is not a hedonistic paradise by any stretch, and has a history of invasion and conflict stretching back a millenium, embedded as it is in a land mass of many small competing countries all pushing the edge of technology ever upward. and it is the german and british and french and US banks that encouraged greece to spend borrowed money both as consumers and as a nation, because they had idle capital wanting to make a return and they got good interest rates for lending to the greeks and also exported to them some of their production that the greeks then bought with the borrowed money. (i've got an old blog about that i will try to find.)

in the end, the european banks are going to have to eat alot of greek debt (which contains no calories) because they can afford it and greece can't and greece will still be in the euro zone and will still be a hedonistic paradise. and part of them will still secretly wish they were greek.

well, that turned out to be a bit of a rant. ;-)
cheers
h

hi encora

just doing lunch dishes and realized that both mr coupland and i missed what i consider the main point to take from the present ongoing euro quarrels, namely that prior to the post-world war two era there might easily have been an invasion or even a war over this much debt. the real news to take away from the whole dragged-out saga is that they are still sitting around a table talking (or not talking) and nobody's babies will be dead in the street, even though germany has all the arms and all the economic muscle. and that is huge. and that speaks more to the future of human life on earth than anybody's currency or debt decisions, whatever they decide. because as europe goes so goes america, china, russia and even the middle east (eventually) though they all would vehemently deny it.

happy face ;-)

SKEPTICISM NOT CYNICISM

certain activities the human indulges in are definitely beyond the pay-grade, like elaborate edifices built on a foundation of not having a clue what death is, or what life is either, within that tangled mess of neurons and associated electrons we are herding around the planet, beyond the realization that life is physical, death is physical and even human thought is physical. maybe it's good practice for something, though i am not sure what, unless it is learning to convince others, while we ourselves remain profoundly unconvinced, of things that advantage us at the expense of those others.

NIGHTHAWKS

the sound of the fireworks surrounds me from all the american islands this fourth of july night 2015, but honestly, it's the sound of the nighthawk behind me that thrills me and warms me. i have waited for them through some silent years and to hear them every night now so abundant is like the resumption of a song one had forgotten was being sung in its too-long pause.

TO YOU

to marg
on sunday i thought i detected a note of criticism or at least surprise when i was talking about my physical health, your words and body language indicating to me you think it is an obsession or a bit neurotic, something quaint and somehow a deviation from common sense or at least the norm. so i want to talk a bit about that in a more organized way, on paper.

life is physical, human life no less than any other expression of life. death is physical too. your moods are physical, involving chemical outputs triggered by other chemicals triggered by events both external and internal that activate gene expression to influence mental as well as physical activity in addition to your feelings, which are thoughts. those thoughts are physical too. they involve electrons in a brain architecture of neural circuitry embedded in a sensing physical body and all their inputs come through that body's sense organs. all life is embedded in a cosmos that is also physical. there is nothing else. as fine as you can cut it, everything is physical all the way down. we are an animal of earth. we have developed uniquely complex neocortical oversight of brain function which has made us what i would call the thoughtful animal. but all animals have thoughts, all animals remember, all animals modify their behavior over time based on experience (otherwise why even have a memory). we are not unique in kind but only by degree.

if you want to have the best life you personally can have (which will not be identical to others for many inherent reasons) it pays most dividends to attend not to your thoughts, which follow, not to your moods, which follow, not even to your ideas, like the ideas i am proposing here, which also follow as an expression of your physical wellbeing. the first requirement of a human who wants to have useful thoughts and feel happy in mood is to be physically fit, strong, with good oxygenation and endurance. i have read a lot of misguided philosophy and a bit of very misguided religion and have found all of it, with the possible exception of george lakoff, to be more or less spastic groping in the dark morass of unsystematic minds. it seems for some reason rather bleak to most people to think of life as "merely" physical. oh, they of little courage! what would they rather it be? the dreams of a wicked god, whatever that is (probably a bit of undigested spinach).

i am having the best life i can muster by paying attention to the one thing i can control in this vast unplanned cosmic manifestation that is self-aware life. i am taking care of my body and it is going to last a lot longer than some others, because death too is entirely physical. even if you don't believe any of this, that would still not be an argument for letting your body decline below its potential for want of simple focus and an uncluttered understanding. most people are victims of themselves, their own worst enemies. i am trying not to be that. and here you can laugh: i think that makes me, even though unusual, the normal one. ;-)

  

PEOPLE AND STUFF

at bottom, capitalist democracy favors stuff over people, social democracy favors people over stuff. dress them up all you like but when you take their clothes off they will still look different.

FINDING LINKS

there is empiriical evidence for the concepts of justice, fairness and individual rights in other species, and for the presence of active empathy. we need to find the genetic links to these traits, to provide clear evidence to the doubters among us that in this as in so much else, we are not unique on this planet, that these behaviors are inherent animal properties that precede philosophy, religion and even homo sapiens.

the most active and useful part of our culture worldwide remains the search for evidence of the truth; and that is what science does.

WHERE DOES GOD COME FROM?

you can't find the reasons why people believe in god by looking out at the cosmos because they are not out there. if you want to know why people persist in believing in a god or gods you must look inward to the study of human personality because in there is where the reasons can be found. look at personality genetics and the evolution of life on earth, the history of life and man, if you really want to know.

WRITING LIKE CEZANNE

people have fear. 
animals. 
people are animals. 
animals have fear. 
insects. 
insects are animals. 
fish are animals. 
all animals. 
all animals fear.

BREADTH

i love the night
i love the stars
they aren't just wallpaper

MONEY IS SPEECH VS SPEECH IS MONEY

i took my speech into the walmart the other day to buy some stuff but they wouldnt sell me any. no matter how much i tried to explain to them about the Supreme Court, the final arbiter in the land, and about how their decisions were binding on all the citizens of the country, they just wouldn't listen to reason.

amazing that a bunch of ten dollar employees could think they know better than the highest authority the law allows. talk about the emperor's new clothes — how is he going to talk his way into a new suit in this kind of place? 

maybe somebody ought to mention to the court how thin the robes have got lately.

FISH IN A BARREL

what do you think of a government that shoots fish in a barrel?

what do you think of israel?

PLAIN SPEECH PLAIN TRUTH

i was approached on the ferry going home recently by a petitioner with a document to sign. it was protesting the move by the government to allow pipelines across canada from the tar sands in alberta to the west coast, then in tankers down the coast to american refineries. i said i agreed that was not in our interests and would sign it but that it was futile, a pathetic effort really compared to the forces arrayed against it in favor of the pipelines and tankers. what i wanted to sign, might even be willing to work for, was a move to get the money out of politics. money is not speech. that is only one of a growing list of grievous  errors made by the worst supreme court in american history, a court which also reinforces another grievous error committed in the early days of the twentieth century, by affirming that corporations are people, with all the rights of individual citizens. corporations are not people, not individuals, not citizens. there are more examples in america of the emperor's new clothes than i care to enumerate. 

what ever happened to simple honesty and plain speech? gun-owning americans are not militias, corporations are not persons and money is not speech. get it?

PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE

there is a great deal of talk lately about peace in israel — actually i have been hearing more or less constantly all my adult life about efforts to bring peace in the region — but still there is no serious talk of justice. 

peace can never be the object of negotiations. that is impossible to attack as a first principle. there is only one route to peace and that is through finding just solutions, blind, disinterested, egalitarian solutions to problems between (self-identified) factions of the population. as long as individual human beings continue to see themselves as different and more deserving of the considerations of life than so-called enemies there is no prospect for justice. 

and no matter what rules to promote order may be imposed on the parties by intimidation, destruction and murder, no matter what historical rationale is advanced, the prospect of peace without justice will remain forever beyond the grasp of all. 

the old end justifies the means argument rests on the assumption that neither one is fictional. in reality the ends never arrive, but are always just one more action away, retreating apace as the troops advance, like the mirage they are, while the means, everpresent and ruefully if not brutally real, are the reality we all endure.

ONE WORLD

found in my desk drawer

chernobyl blew half a world away and they told us 
not to drink the rainwater.
now the wheatgrass and wildflowers are trembling in the breeze
looking nervous
and i wonder how we're going to tell them
not to drink the rainwater.