Tout passe comme des nuages...
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Dream language and logic -- Notes.
And why are dreams and dream-images so indirect and covert? Perhaps for two reasons. One is that the dreaming mind simply does not speak the same language as the waking mind. Dreams convey knowing in a language of dense imagery, usually conveying multiple, even contradictory meanings, for even the logic of dreams is different from the logic of waking life. It is exactly the logic of the psycho-emotional world, which has no difficulty with contradiction, tension, and simultaneity, all concepts anathema to waking logic. The other reason is that dreams are often beginning to tell us what we are not ready to hear. It is the nature of our psychic being that we already know what we seek to know, and what we seek to avoid knowing.
Friday, July 29, 2016
The Texture and Image of Thunder
I grew up in the southern part of Michigan,where thunderstorms and tornadoes are frequent and epic. Sometimes they are raging, maniacal frenzies of destruction, sometimes gentle electrical stimulations of the Earth’s generative apparatus. While the furious lashings of cataclysm were thrilling and sparked a delightful instinctive reaction at the base of my spine, it was the soft rumblings of intimately murmured thunder that moved my poetic soul. I was always intrigued by the way a discharge of thunder could roll voluptuously about a rural or urban landscape, like a familiar voice, almost purring like a great and ancient cat.
As the thunder’s voice spoke of the ancient marriage of sky and earth, I would follow it with my ears and eyes as it crossed over a field or strolled down a city street, sometimes originating in a high, crackling plaint, to descend in frequency but build in depth and strength, sometimes arising from a quiet basso profundo to a comforting rumble that felt like a squeeze around the middle, only to return to its distant low chanting and dwindle away. Often the voice of thunder moves across the landscape under the sky, crossing away and back again, more than once, meandering like a lost old man, a fully embodied thing, a spirit seeking to and fro for a home.
Such is the poetic reflection of my soul’s response to the being of thunder. But I am also a scientist. So I knew that the embodied being of thunder was an illusion (though no more so than we ourselves are), its material nature being that of a complex series of atmospheric compressions and relaxations. But that complexity of vibration is also not without its poetic vitality.
Thunder results from an extremely high and rapid pulse of temperature variation as trillions of electrons make their exit from an excessively negative region to the more open and positive spaces of uncharged atoms -- a flight to which many of us can relate. Their passing along an established corridor heats and expands a chaotically shaped tube of air, which then, just as suddenly, collapses with the force of thousands of tons of atmosphere. It is a brief, singular, and very local event. Why then, my poetic and scientific minds wondered together, does this event spawn that entity that roams about the countryside, that long chanting voice, that familiar old man, both directionless and purposeful?
That question haunted me a long time. There is a seeming paradox between the instantaneity and locality of the lightning event and the lingering, wandering quality of the thunder. In a simple sense, it is understandable: The instantaneous event causes a lingering disturbance, as a single rock thrown into a pond leaves a lingering disturbance on the surface. This explains the duration of the thunder, but not its character. The ripples on the surface of the pond have a particular character, a pattern of concentric rings, easily recognized in any context, that is a product of the properties of still water (its surface tension, density, viscosity, etc.). What was it about the atmosphere that produced the singular character of thunder? And what is more, why is it that, although ripples on a pond are everywhere mostly the same, every stroke of thunder seems a unique individual, a snowflake, a signature, a fingerprint, never heard just so before, and never to be heard just so again?
Students in my mathematics classes have become accustomed to my tangential divergences from the subject at hand. I like to think they also, eventually, come to appreciate that these divergences are never random, but always connect in some way, though perhaps not obviously, to the matter under consideration. The superficially digressive nature of my dialog with them about mathematics is simply a reflection of the interconnectedness of all things. What do the Taoist stories of Lieh Tzu have to do with the irrational solutions of quadratic equations? Why, everything, students. Everything.
But those who have not sat or stood or wandered about in my mathematics classes (or science, or history, or literature… just what class is this, anyway?) will have to learn patience and trust that it all connects back together.
There is a man who can echolocate like a bat.
His name is Daniel Kish. Blind since 13 months because of retinal cancer, he began at an early age to click with his tongue. Listening to the way the click echoed about a room, Kish could understand things about his environment: Is there a wall nearby, is the room large or small? The more he clicked and listened, the more Daniel Kish derived information about his surroundings. Is the door open or closed? Are there people in the room? He began to detect finer and finer objects,and became able to detect an object as thin as a 3 inch diameter pole at a distance of several feet. Eventually, Daniel Kish was able to play ball and ride a bicycle using his clicks to create an image of the world around him. This is exactly the process used by bats, dolphins, other toothed whales (such as orcas) and a few species of bird to navigate in a dark or murky environment. Kish not only navigates by echolocation himself, he teaches the skill to blind children, through his organization, World Access for the Blind.
Daniel Kish’s ability seems inconceivable at first glance (google the name to find many striking demonstrations, including an excellent TED talk). Yet it turns out that latent echolocating ability in humans has a neurological basis (see, e.g., http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/06/14/getting-around-by-sound-human-echolocation/). Further reflection only amplifies the plausibility of human echolocation. Dolphins are genetically similar to humans, and have intelligence and sociability that compare to human traits. Indeed, nearly all of the echolocating animals are mammals like us.
Neurological work such as that referenced above shows us that it is not only neural inputs from the eyes that stimulate the visual cortex of the brain. In fact, sounds with echoes stimulate the visual cortex of sighted people, and much more so in the blind who have trained in echolocation, like Daniel Kish. So, as Kish says, vision is much more than sight. In fact, Kish describes the experience of echolocating in visual terms, saying that it is “like lighting a match in the dark.” (http://www.worldaccessfortheblind.org/).
So, all of us are capable of echolocating. Our visual cortex is stimulated by the texture of an echo, contributing to our image of our surroundings. This is not surprising to me. Another phenomenon that has always fascinated me is the way a sound changes as it moves through the environment. I notice how a lawnmower that moves toward and away from a barn wall changes its timbre in the same way as an electric guitar played through a flanger -- an electronic effect that creates a tiny echo, and varies the length of the echo over time. I also notice how the sound of an impact-head water sprinkler changes as I walk across the lawn, thus changing my spatial relationship to the sound source and to the objects in the environment. As I reflect on this fascination, I note that a lawnmower and a sprinkler both emit short bursts of sound at regular intervals.
My wife is a dancer. She never gets lost. I’m a mathematician. I get lost driving to the same grocery store I’ve been to a dozen times, even though it is nearby. As a dancer from a very young age --practically from infancy -- Tamara has a highly developed sense of place and position, rooted in the vestibular sense of the brain-body system. I not only lack a well-developed vestibular sense (and thus am a terrible dancer and get lost a lot), but also have had poor vision since infancy. My extreme myopia was not noted until I was six years old. Is it possible that my fascination with sound and its relation to the environment is rooted in a glimpse of echolocation that I developed in childhood as a compensation for my visual and vestibular deficiencies?
My fascination with sound and its relation to the environment. That brings us back to the topic at hand. Which was thunder, in case you forgot. Early in my musings on thunder, I had begun to hypothesize that the duration, character, and sonic texture of thunder arises from a series of echoes of the original clap, echoes that reflect off various large-scale objects in the environment: trees, hills, buildings. The initial clap is a short burst of sound with a white spectrum: It contains an equal mix of nearly all frequencies, including those above and below the range of human hearing. It is very short. A first echo occurs as the soundburst reflects off trees and buildings near the original clap, the narrow physical location of the torrent of electrons. Later echoes occur off more distant objects. Sound loses power as the inverse square of distance, but the power of sound is also inversely proportional to the square of the frequency. So low frequency sounds have more power and travel farther and through more objects than high frequencies (which is why, from outside the car of someone who is rocking out to the Foo Fighters, you hear only the bass). So as the sound travels farther, the higher frequencies drop quickly below audible power. The frequencies with the longer path to travel take longest to reach your ears. Thus, a nearby thunderclap begins with a mix of frequencies, but the average frequency drops over time, as more distant echoes reach your ear. For distant thunder claps, only the lowest frequencies reach your ear, and they have all traveled very different paths as they reflect off many distant objects, so the sound begins in a low rumble, seems to change location a lot,then quietly attenuates in a bass decrescendo. So there. I had explained some coarse features of the sonic envelope of thunder. It is accurate, insofar as it goes.
But Daniel Kish just gave me a much richer understanding of the texture of thunder that blew my coarse analysis out of the sky. Kish says we can use a short sound burst and the texture of its echo to create a complete visual image of our surroundings. My long-term fascination with the texture of sound, coupled with my early poor vision and general lack of spatial orientation have stimulated in me a particular responsiveness to that image. It is an image that exists not just in the imagination or in the poetic soul, but in the visual cortex. It is something we see. “Vision is not in the eyes, it’s in the mind,” says Daniel Kish. When I hear thunder, I see an image of the landscape around me. As the flash of lightning briefly illuminates a dark sky, so the clap of thunder illuminates -- insonnates -- the landscape surrounding me. Not only that, but,unlike light, sound travels through and around objects. The sound I am hearing contains a three-dimensional image of a landscape that is somewhat transparent. It is the singular beauty of that ephemeral image that explains my fascination with thunder, my perception of it as a character, a movement, an embodiment.
The poetic soul anthropomorphizes, reifies, deifies. The rational and scientific mind tend to dismiss these processes as delusion, projection, and wish-fulfillment. But are they? What is the human that is the image of anthropomorphism? A human being is a complex of chemical and electrical processes that take place within a spongy bag of seawater. Yet we are this soul, we are this ego, this person, this spirit, this being in relation to other beings. If we allow this anthropomorphized, reified, and deified conception of ourselves, then are we so wrong to ascribe it also to natural entities as defined and romantic as ourselves? Shall we not see the living, conscious, godly entity that lives in the forest, the stone, the sea, the flock, and the thunder?
As the thunder’s voice spoke of the ancient marriage of sky and earth, I would follow it with my ears and eyes as it crossed over a field or strolled down a city street, sometimes originating in a high, crackling plaint, to descend in frequency but build in depth and strength, sometimes arising from a quiet basso profundo to a comforting rumble that felt like a squeeze around the middle, only to return to its distant low chanting and dwindle away. Often the voice of thunder moves across the landscape under the sky, crossing away and back again, more than once, meandering like a lost old man, a fully embodied thing, a spirit seeking to and fro for a home.
Such is the poetic reflection of my soul’s response to the being of thunder. But I am also a scientist. So I knew that the embodied being of thunder was an illusion (though no more so than we ourselves are), its material nature being that of a complex series of atmospheric compressions and relaxations. But that complexity of vibration is also not without its poetic vitality.
Thunder results from an extremely high and rapid pulse of temperature variation as trillions of electrons make their exit from an excessively negative region to the more open and positive spaces of uncharged atoms -- a flight to which many of us can relate. Their passing along an established corridor heats and expands a chaotically shaped tube of air, which then, just as suddenly, collapses with the force of thousands of tons of atmosphere. It is a brief, singular, and very local event. Why then, my poetic and scientific minds wondered together, does this event spawn that entity that roams about the countryside, that long chanting voice, that familiar old man, both directionless and purposeful?
That question haunted me a long time. There is a seeming paradox between the instantaneity and locality of the lightning event and the lingering, wandering quality of the thunder. In a simple sense, it is understandable: The instantaneous event causes a lingering disturbance, as a single rock thrown into a pond leaves a lingering disturbance on the surface. This explains the duration of the thunder, but not its character. The ripples on the surface of the pond have a particular character, a pattern of concentric rings, easily recognized in any context, that is a product of the properties of still water (its surface tension, density, viscosity, etc.). What was it about the atmosphere that produced the singular character of thunder? And what is more, why is it that, although ripples on a pond are everywhere mostly the same, every stroke of thunder seems a unique individual, a snowflake, a signature, a fingerprint, never heard just so before, and never to be heard just so again?
Students in my mathematics classes have become accustomed to my tangential divergences from the subject at hand. I like to think they also, eventually, come to appreciate that these divergences are never random, but always connect in some way, though perhaps not obviously, to the matter under consideration. The superficially digressive nature of my dialog with them about mathematics is simply a reflection of the interconnectedness of all things. What do the Taoist stories of Lieh Tzu have to do with the irrational solutions of quadratic equations? Why, everything, students. Everything.
But those who have not sat or stood or wandered about in my mathematics classes (or science, or history, or literature… just what class is this, anyway?) will have to learn patience and trust that it all connects back together.
There is a man who can echolocate like a bat.
His name is Daniel Kish. Blind since 13 months because of retinal cancer, he began at an early age to click with his tongue. Listening to the way the click echoed about a room, Kish could understand things about his environment: Is there a wall nearby, is the room large or small? The more he clicked and listened, the more Daniel Kish derived information about his surroundings. Is the door open or closed? Are there people in the room? He began to detect finer and finer objects,and became able to detect an object as thin as a 3 inch diameter pole at a distance of several feet. Eventually, Daniel Kish was able to play ball and ride a bicycle using his clicks to create an image of the world around him. This is exactly the process used by bats, dolphins, other toothed whales (such as orcas) and a few species of bird to navigate in a dark or murky environment. Kish not only navigates by echolocation himself, he teaches the skill to blind children, through his organization, World Access for the Blind.
Daniel Kish’s ability seems inconceivable at first glance (google the name to find many striking demonstrations, including an excellent TED talk). Yet it turns out that latent echolocating ability in humans has a neurological basis (see, e.g., http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/06/14/getting-around-by-sound-human-echolocation/). Further reflection only amplifies the plausibility of human echolocation. Dolphins are genetically similar to humans, and have intelligence and sociability that compare to human traits. Indeed, nearly all of the echolocating animals are mammals like us.
Neurological work such as that referenced above shows us that it is not only neural inputs from the eyes that stimulate the visual cortex of the brain. In fact, sounds with echoes stimulate the visual cortex of sighted people, and much more so in the blind who have trained in echolocation, like Daniel Kish. So, as Kish says, vision is much more than sight. In fact, Kish describes the experience of echolocating in visual terms, saying that it is “like lighting a match in the dark.” (http://www.worldaccessfortheblind.org/).
So, all of us are capable of echolocating. Our visual cortex is stimulated by the texture of an echo, contributing to our image of our surroundings. This is not surprising to me. Another phenomenon that has always fascinated me is the way a sound changes as it moves through the environment. I notice how a lawnmower that moves toward and away from a barn wall changes its timbre in the same way as an electric guitar played through a flanger -- an electronic effect that creates a tiny echo, and varies the length of the echo over time. I also notice how the sound of an impact-head water sprinkler changes as I walk across the lawn, thus changing my spatial relationship to the sound source and to the objects in the environment. As I reflect on this fascination, I note that a lawnmower and a sprinkler both emit short bursts of sound at regular intervals.
My wife is a dancer. She never gets lost. I’m a mathematician. I get lost driving to the same grocery store I’ve been to a dozen times, even though it is nearby. As a dancer from a very young age --practically from infancy -- Tamara has a highly developed sense of place and position, rooted in the vestibular sense of the brain-body system. I not only lack a well-developed vestibular sense (and thus am a terrible dancer and get lost a lot), but also have had poor vision since infancy. My extreme myopia was not noted until I was six years old. Is it possible that my fascination with sound and its relation to the environment is rooted in a glimpse of echolocation that I developed in childhood as a compensation for my visual and vestibular deficiencies?
My fascination with sound and its relation to the environment. That brings us back to the topic at hand. Which was thunder, in case you forgot. Early in my musings on thunder, I had begun to hypothesize that the duration, character, and sonic texture of thunder arises from a series of echoes of the original clap, echoes that reflect off various large-scale objects in the environment: trees, hills, buildings. The initial clap is a short burst of sound with a white spectrum: It contains an equal mix of nearly all frequencies, including those above and below the range of human hearing. It is very short. A first echo occurs as the soundburst reflects off trees and buildings near the original clap, the narrow physical location of the torrent of electrons. Later echoes occur off more distant objects. Sound loses power as the inverse square of distance, but the power of sound is also inversely proportional to the square of the frequency. So low frequency sounds have more power and travel farther and through more objects than high frequencies (which is why, from outside the car of someone who is rocking out to the Foo Fighters, you hear only the bass). So as the sound travels farther, the higher frequencies drop quickly below audible power. The frequencies with the longer path to travel take longest to reach your ears. Thus, a nearby thunderclap begins with a mix of frequencies, but the average frequency drops over time, as more distant echoes reach your ear. For distant thunder claps, only the lowest frequencies reach your ear, and they have all traveled very different paths as they reflect off many distant objects, so the sound begins in a low rumble, seems to change location a lot,then quietly attenuates in a bass decrescendo. So there. I had explained some coarse features of the sonic envelope of thunder. It is accurate, insofar as it goes.
But Daniel Kish just gave me a much richer understanding of the texture of thunder that blew my coarse analysis out of the sky. Kish says we can use a short sound burst and the texture of its echo to create a complete visual image of our surroundings. My long-term fascination with the texture of sound, coupled with my early poor vision and general lack of spatial orientation have stimulated in me a particular responsiveness to that image. It is an image that exists not just in the imagination or in the poetic soul, but in the visual cortex. It is something we see. “Vision is not in the eyes, it’s in the mind,” says Daniel Kish. When I hear thunder, I see an image of the landscape around me. As the flash of lightning briefly illuminates a dark sky, so the clap of thunder illuminates -- insonnates -- the landscape surrounding me. Not only that, but,unlike light, sound travels through and around objects. The sound I am hearing contains a three-dimensional image of a landscape that is somewhat transparent. It is the singular beauty of that ephemeral image that explains my fascination with thunder, my perception of it as a character, a movement, an embodiment.
The poetic soul anthropomorphizes, reifies, deifies. The rational and scientific mind tend to dismiss these processes as delusion, projection, and wish-fulfillment. But are they? What is the human that is the image of anthropomorphism? A human being is a complex of chemical and electrical processes that take place within a spongy bag of seawater. Yet we are this soul, we are this ego, this person, this spirit, this being in relation to other beings. If we allow this anthropomorphized, reified, and deified conception of ourselves, then are we so wrong to ascribe it also to natural entities as defined and romantic as ourselves? Shall we not see the living, conscious, godly entity that lives in the forest, the stone, the sea, the flock, and the thunder?
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
After Bernie, Jill!
The following is an update of my previous post about Jill, Bernie, and the Movement. The current post reflects recent events, including Bernie's surprising endorsement of Hillary three weeks before the convention.
I'd first like to say my farewell to Bernie. Many are bitter or angry with Bernie for endorsing Hillary before the convention, instead of continuing his candidacy until the nomination as he had promised many times to do. This anger is justified, and I cannot and will not deny its validity. I can't honestly say that I share it, though. Instead, I find that I remain grateful for the incredible work he has done as a focal point for a movement that was never about him personally. I also find that, while many have lost faith in him as a spokesman of the movement, and again I cannot deny that loss of faith is well founded, I personally retain confidence in him as a person, a member of the movement, to carry the torch down whatever avenues remain open.
The movement is about far more than a presidential candidate or a presidential race. So it is only a minor course adjustment for me to return to my Green roots and support Jill Stein for president, while I continue to work in the broader movement for social change that includes countless groups from Occupy to Idle No More, from Black Lives Matter to Tar Sands Blockade, with all the marches, kayaktivism, rallies, and occupations that they began long before Bernie, and will continue long after Bernie.
So, farewell, Bernie, thank you, and now on to a defense of Jill Stein in a campaign where many people will argue (falsely, as I will show below) that "A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump!" No, it's not. Let's examine some of the arguments.
*Since Hillary will now be granted the nomination in a ceremony that is more coronation than convention, why not just vote for her? The answer to the “hold your nose and vote Blue” argument is simple for those who follow the campaigns and the issues. To begin with the most damning, consider why Democrats and Independents alike were so appalled by the Bush, Jr. regime. While this regime denied climate change, invested in coal and oil, obstructed gay rights, and defended torture, clearly the most onerous action was the entry into a devastating war, illegal and based on deliberate lies, that killed thousands of US citizens and millions of Iraqi and Afghan people, destabilizing the region and causing incalculable damage and blowback. This is the reason Bush is such a hated president. Thinking of this, consider that HRC voted in favor of that war. Thus, HRC is complicit in the most heinous of Republican actions. She is not an alternative to Republican policy, but a continuation of it.
Beyond this, HRC is on the wrong side of a host of issues that are of critical and urgent importance: Fracking, coal, the TPP, health care, education costs, financial sector regulation, electoral reform, and campaign finance reform. The TPP, in particular, is a potential death sentence for the planet, and obstructing the path to universal health care is a death sentence for millions of US citizens. One may understand compromise as a strategy, but to embrace the exact opposite stance on the most critical issues is not compromise – it's suicide.
*Greens who oppose Hillary are merely parroting right-wing lies and conspiracy theories. No, we're not. If you review the above list of issue-centered concerns, you will find no mention of e-mails (and Bernie was right to dismiss this distraction at the outset), Benghazi, or Whitewater. Trumpies might jump on those false accusations, but we stick to the real issues. It might be worth noting that one of the reasons that Trumpies and other right-wing voices adhere to those common conspiracies instead of the real issues is that when it comes to the real issues – those mentioned above – the Trumpies and right-wingers are in complete agreement with HRC. So they cannot attack her on those substantive grounds. A notable exception is that Trump opposes the TPP, although not for the right reason: As a real estate mogul, Trump cannot profit from moving manufacturing overseas to nations where there are few labor and environmental laws. Since the TPP does not benefit him personally, he can afford to oppose it, thus capitalizing on public opposition to it, especially among workers who rightly fear overseas job loss.
*There are more than two choices. One cornerstone attack is that there are only two choices for president: the Democrat or the Republican. This attack often comes in the form of the soundbite, “opposing Hillary is equal to voting for Trump.” For people under this belief, the only alternative to the two major parties is not voting, which they consider irresponsible. They might be right about voting being the responsible thing to do, and they might not, but they ignore the fact that there are more than two parties to vote for. There are eighteen parties. I have been a member of the Green Party since before Bernie came along. I have changed my registration to Democrat three times: to vote for Jesse Jackson in 1984, for Barack Obama in 2008, and Bernie Sanders in 2016. If Bernie does not receive the Democratic nomination, I will change my registration back to Green and support the excellent candidate Jill Stein, a serious contender who has developed an enormous amount of political maturity over the course of her multiple runs for the Green Party.
*But... Ralph Nader, 2000! The argument that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 as been adequately debunked here: [ (copy and paste the link) http://disinfo.com/2010/11/debunked-the-myth-that-ralph-nader-cost-al-gore-the-2000-election/ ] . In Florida 2000, Nader took 4% of the independent vote. At the same time, 13 % of registered Democrats voted for Bush. Therefore, it was not Nader who cost Florida the election, but Gore's failure to energize his own base. The danger of repeating that error for the DNC is clear: Bernie has energized the base to an astonishing degree, while Hillary captures votes solely on name recognition, preferential media treatment, and a perception of inevitability as “Obama's chosen.” I should add that I have never supported Nader for president, and in fact, I voted for Gore in 2000. I admire Nader's work in consumer advocacy and journalism, but he was never a good presidential candidate, because he is abrasive and can be condescending. Jill Stein, in contrast, is an outstanding, personable, eloquent, and presidential candidate.
It is also worth noting that Jill is not the only minor candidate in the race. Gary Johnson is running on the Libertarian ticket, and currently polling in double digits nationally. Libertarianism is a more conservative philosophy than the Green platform, so Johnson is as likely to draw off the Republican vote as Jill is to draw off the Democrat vote. The notion that minor parties only draw down Democrat votes is part of the false narrative perpetuated by the Democratic party to trick people into voting for Democrats against their own interest and conscience.
Finally, in our worries about the spoiler argument in general, remember that Hillary voted for the very crime that we consider to be the worst act of the worst president in US history: The Iraq war. Getting her into office is not as important as standing against the system that puts war and profit ahead of human life.
*But... Trump 2016! Fear is a powerful motivator, and the corporate elites know this. They use it, and are masters of it. They know that fear shuts down the reasoning centers of the brain, and reduces people to an emotional fight-or-flight state. In order to surmount the Trump fear argument, we must first overcome our fear. Once we do so, and bring our emotional response under the scrutiny of reason, we find that the fear actually has little basis.
I find it is important to point out that if Democrats were so afraid of Trump, then they should have supported Bernie from day one, since he was clearly the one who was energizing the base and beating Republicans in the polls. If the Democrats choose to field the weaker candidate, then it is not our responsibility to support that candidate no matter what. It's not to us to give up on our dreams and support the candidate who opposes everything we stand for (see the issues above) because of their delusional support for the only Democrat who could conceivably lose to Trump.
Trump will never be president. He never intended to be, and he never will be. History shows that open bigots cannot be elected (since Reagan). Both the Bush win and the Romney loss illustrate this. Even the Bushes knew that they had to at least pay lip service to minorities, including immigrants, gays, Native Americans, blacks, and women. Without those blocks, they could never have been elected. Romney lost because of his open disdain for minorities and persons of lower income. Don't be fooled by Trump's sweep of Republican primaries. He was only being supported by Republicans, a generally bigoted population. He will not be sufficiently supported in the general election, and polling already shows this. Even his own party is treating him as toxic. He cannot win. Don't worry about it.
The Republican Party is done with Trump, as he has served his purpose by scaring people into supporting HRC. The Repubs were never afraid of HRC. She is, in fact, their dream candidate: pro-corporate, pro-PAC, pro-Israel, against campaign finance reform. They put up a hostile front, but it's all for show. Even the front is collapsing as many top Repubs are saying they will support Hillary, because Trump is unstable. As if they didn't know that from the beginning. Just like the Democrats, the Republicans would rather lose the election than disappoint their corporate masters. It's important to remember that elections have always been orchestrated by corporate interests. The legal structure for super-PACs is merely the culmination of this fact. Elections are no longer up for votes; They are up for sale. The corporate elites don't care whether a Democrat or Republican is in the whitehouse, but they benefit from making the electorate care. HRC will benefit them, so they created Trump as the monster to scare us into voting for her. It worked pretty well on most people. The fear of Trump suppressed their reasoning centers and led them to support Hillary over Bernie, despite the rational observation that Bernie was the better candidate to defeat Trump. With an HRC victory, the corporations will consolidate their power in numerous ways: They prove that the power of super-PACs to influence elections is insurmountable, thus establishing a permanent position for themselves as king-makers, ending democracy in the process. They install a candidate who voted for war, wall street bailouts, maintaining insurance companies as gatekeepers to for-profit health care, and deregulating wall street – everything that they wanted and we didn't. As for the issues that divide Republicans and Democrats – gun control, women's health, gay rights, immigrant rights – well, the corporate elites do not care about those things in the slightest. They are perfect smokescreen issues to let us fight to the death over, while they laugh all the way to the bank. So, while we sit here voting for Hillary because we're afraid of Trump, they're celebrating because they were never afraid of Trump, only of Bernie.
*Voting for minor parties is just throwing away your vote. No, it isn't. Throwing away your vote is voting for someone you don't believe in because you think you have no other options. There are really two systems you can vote for. You can vote for a two-party system that has made halting progress on civil rights while making rapid and sure progress at consolidating corporate control over every major decision made in the United States. Or you can vote for alternatives that promote democracy and community-minded thinking. Voting against your own interest because you think you cannot win is irrational. We don't do what's right because we think we can win. We do what's right because it's right. We may not win this time, and we may not win next time, but every inch we move forward is another inch toward victory. The only way to lose is to give up. That's what I would call throwing away your vote and your voice.
So, what then? It's not my purpose here to convince people what they should do, only to argue that we should act out of conviction, not out of fear, and to suggest that there are other options than voting against your own belief, conscience, or interest.
I will vote for Jill Stein. Jill might not win, but moving up her poll numbers is an important statement. Every percentage point is an argument to others that this is a voice worth listening to, this is a legitimate and real alternative. I believe in the Green platform (which has everything that Bernie's platform had, and even better on some issues), and I am inspired by the international nature of the Green Party. This party began in Germany in 1980, and has had a significant global presence ever since. Please visit the website of the United States Green Party to learn more.
It's never been just a presidential campaign. The Bernie campaign grew out of diverse movements that had already gained enormous momentum across the nation long before Bernie announced his candidacy. Occupy, the climate movement, Tar Sands Blockade, kayaktivists, the anti-fracking movement, movements for net neutrality and against the TPP, Black Lives Matter and other racial, police, and economic justice movements, indigenous movements like Idle No More, cyber-activists like Anonymous, the BDS movement – all of these found a resonance with the Bernie campaign, and found in the man a champion. But he was never more than a spokesperson. To his enormous credit, Bernie was always very clear about that with his slogan: “Not me, us.” The movement was ours all along, it never belonged to him. If the system succeeds in marginalizing and sidelining Bernie, that will do nothing at all to slow or depress the movements. The Bernie campaign offered us a great and extended opportunity to coalesce our movements, gain a huge public platform, and get our message out despite active and pervasive media suppression. We have learned new techniques and forged new connections. We are stronger than ever, and we are legion. We fight on, and we win. Consider these victories already achieved:
“Democratic socialism” is no longer a “dirty word” in US political discourse.
“The 1%” has permanently entered the vocabulary of the discourse.
Universal health care and education have demonstrated broad popular support.
Shell was blocked from entering the Arctic.
Numerous gas pipelines have been disrupted and abandoned.
Gun control has shown up to 90% popular support and has reached a congressional vote.
Marijuana is being progressively decriminalized.
Increasing attention has been drawn to police violence and racism.
A major campaign has been run without super-PAC money that presented a substantial challenge to the establishment.
While few of these are outright victories, they definitely represent significant progress in the right direction. And we have only begun to fight. And this must be our understanding. A Hillary candidacy would not be the end of our movement, nor would it be the beginning. It is simply one event in the struggle.
Bernie is not the candidate, but there are other options than merely supporting Hillary, and I consider the option of supporting Hillary to be unacceptable. I will back Jill Stein and all of the movements that I have been supporting and participating in all along. Anybody who wants to give me shit about that for any reason can reread everything I just wrote, act in their own conscience, and bite me.
I'd first like to say my farewell to Bernie. Many are bitter or angry with Bernie for endorsing Hillary before the convention, instead of continuing his candidacy until the nomination as he had promised many times to do. This anger is justified, and I cannot and will not deny its validity. I can't honestly say that I share it, though. Instead, I find that I remain grateful for the incredible work he has done as a focal point for a movement that was never about him personally. I also find that, while many have lost faith in him as a spokesman of the movement, and again I cannot deny that loss of faith is well founded, I personally retain confidence in him as a person, a member of the movement, to carry the torch down whatever avenues remain open.
The movement is about far more than a presidential candidate or a presidential race. So it is only a minor course adjustment for me to return to my Green roots and support Jill Stein for president, while I continue to work in the broader movement for social change that includes countless groups from Occupy to Idle No More, from Black Lives Matter to Tar Sands Blockade, with all the marches, kayaktivism, rallies, and occupations that they began long before Bernie, and will continue long after Bernie.
So, farewell, Bernie, thank you, and now on to a defense of Jill Stein in a campaign where many people will argue (falsely, as I will show below) that "A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump!" No, it's not. Let's examine some of the arguments.
*Since Hillary will now be granted the nomination in a ceremony that is more coronation than convention, why not just vote for her? The answer to the “hold your nose and vote Blue” argument is simple for those who follow the campaigns and the issues. To begin with the most damning, consider why Democrats and Independents alike were so appalled by the Bush, Jr. regime. While this regime denied climate change, invested in coal and oil, obstructed gay rights, and defended torture, clearly the most onerous action was the entry into a devastating war, illegal and based on deliberate lies, that killed thousands of US citizens and millions of Iraqi and Afghan people, destabilizing the region and causing incalculable damage and blowback. This is the reason Bush is such a hated president. Thinking of this, consider that HRC voted in favor of that war. Thus, HRC is complicit in the most heinous of Republican actions. She is not an alternative to Republican policy, but a continuation of it.
Beyond this, HRC is on the wrong side of a host of issues that are of critical and urgent importance: Fracking, coal, the TPP, health care, education costs, financial sector regulation, electoral reform, and campaign finance reform. The TPP, in particular, is a potential death sentence for the planet, and obstructing the path to universal health care is a death sentence for millions of US citizens. One may understand compromise as a strategy, but to embrace the exact opposite stance on the most critical issues is not compromise – it's suicide.
*Greens who oppose Hillary are merely parroting right-wing lies and conspiracy theories. No, we're not. If you review the above list of issue-centered concerns, you will find no mention of e-mails (and Bernie was right to dismiss this distraction at the outset), Benghazi, or Whitewater. Trumpies might jump on those false accusations, but we stick to the real issues. It might be worth noting that one of the reasons that Trumpies and other right-wing voices adhere to those common conspiracies instead of the real issues is that when it comes to the real issues – those mentioned above – the Trumpies and right-wingers are in complete agreement with HRC. So they cannot attack her on those substantive grounds. A notable exception is that Trump opposes the TPP, although not for the right reason: As a real estate mogul, Trump cannot profit from moving manufacturing overseas to nations where there are few labor and environmental laws. Since the TPP does not benefit him personally, he can afford to oppose it, thus capitalizing on public opposition to it, especially among workers who rightly fear overseas job loss.
*There are more than two choices. One cornerstone attack is that there are only two choices for president: the Democrat or the Republican. This attack often comes in the form of the soundbite, “opposing Hillary is equal to voting for Trump.” For people under this belief, the only alternative to the two major parties is not voting, which they consider irresponsible. They might be right about voting being the responsible thing to do, and they might not, but they ignore the fact that there are more than two parties to vote for. There are eighteen parties. I have been a member of the Green Party since before Bernie came along. I have changed my registration to Democrat three times: to vote for Jesse Jackson in 1984, for Barack Obama in 2008, and Bernie Sanders in 2016. If Bernie does not receive the Democratic nomination, I will change my registration back to Green and support the excellent candidate Jill Stein, a serious contender who has developed an enormous amount of political maturity over the course of her multiple runs for the Green Party.
*But... Ralph Nader, 2000! The argument that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 as been adequately debunked here: [ (copy and paste the link) http://disinfo.com/2010/11/debunked-the-myth-that-ralph-nader-cost-al-gore-the-2000-election/ ] . In Florida 2000, Nader took 4% of the independent vote. At the same time, 13 % of registered Democrats voted for Bush. Therefore, it was not Nader who cost Florida the election, but Gore's failure to energize his own base. The danger of repeating that error for the DNC is clear: Bernie has energized the base to an astonishing degree, while Hillary captures votes solely on name recognition, preferential media treatment, and a perception of inevitability as “Obama's chosen.” I should add that I have never supported Nader for president, and in fact, I voted for Gore in 2000. I admire Nader's work in consumer advocacy and journalism, but he was never a good presidential candidate, because he is abrasive and can be condescending. Jill Stein, in contrast, is an outstanding, personable, eloquent, and presidential candidate.
It is also worth noting that Jill is not the only minor candidate in the race. Gary Johnson is running on the Libertarian ticket, and currently polling in double digits nationally. Libertarianism is a more conservative philosophy than the Green platform, so Johnson is as likely to draw off the Republican vote as Jill is to draw off the Democrat vote. The notion that minor parties only draw down Democrat votes is part of the false narrative perpetuated by the Democratic party to trick people into voting for Democrats against their own interest and conscience.
Finally, in our worries about the spoiler argument in general, remember that Hillary voted for the very crime that we consider to be the worst act of the worst president in US history: The Iraq war. Getting her into office is not as important as standing against the system that puts war and profit ahead of human life.
*But... Trump 2016! Fear is a powerful motivator, and the corporate elites know this. They use it, and are masters of it. They know that fear shuts down the reasoning centers of the brain, and reduces people to an emotional fight-or-flight state. In order to surmount the Trump fear argument, we must first overcome our fear. Once we do so, and bring our emotional response under the scrutiny of reason, we find that the fear actually has little basis.
I find it is important to point out that if Democrats were so afraid of Trump, then they should have supported Bernie from day one, since he was clearly the one who was energizing the base and beating Republicans in the polls. If the Democrats choose to field the weaker candidate, then it is not our responsibility to support that candidate no matter what. It's not to us to give up on our dreams and support the candidate who opposes everything we stand for (see the issues above) because of their delusional support for the only Democrat who could conceivably lose to Trump.
Trump will never be president. He never intended to be, and he never will be. History shows that open bigots cannot be elected (since Reagan). Both the Bush win and the Romney loss illustrate this. Even the Bushes knew that they had to at least pay lip service to minorities, including immigrants, gays, Native Americans, blacks, and women. Without those blocks, they could never have been elected. Romney lost because of his open disdain for minorities and persons of lower income. Don't be fooled by Trump's sweep of Republican primaries. He was only being supported by Republicans, a generally bigoted population. He will not be sufficiently supported in the general election, and polling already shows this. Even his own party is treating him as toxic. He cannot win. Don't worry about it.
The Republican Party is done with Trump, as he has served his purpose by scaring people into supporting HRC. The Repubs were never afraid of HRC. She is, in fact, their dream candidate: pro-corporate, pro-PAC, pro-Israel, against campaign finance reform. They put up a hostile front, but it's all for show. Even the front is collapsing as many top Repubs are saying they will support Hillary, because Trump is unstable. As if they didn't know that from the beginning. Just like the Democrats, the Republicans would rather lose the election than disappoint their corporate masters. It's important to remember that elections have always been orchestrated by corporate interests. The legal structure for super-PACs is merely the culmination of this fact. Elections are no longer up for votes; They are up for sale. The corporate elites don't care whether a Democrat or Republican is in the whitehouse, but they benefit from making the electorate care. HRC will benefit them, so they created Trump as the monster to scare us into voting for her. It worked pretty well on most people. The fear of Trump suppressed their reasoning centers and led them to support Hillary over Bernie, despite the rational observation that Bernie was the better candidate to defeat Trump. With an HRC victory, the corporations will consolidate their power in numerous ways: They prove that the power of super-PACs to influence elections is insurmountable, thus establishing a permanent position for themselves as king-makers, ending democracy in the process. They install a candidate who voted for war, wall street bailouts, maintaining insurance companies as gatekeepers to for-profit health care, and deregulating wall street – everything that they wanted and we didn't. As for the issues that divide Republicans and Democrats – gun control, women's health, gay rights, immigrant rights – well, the corporate elites do not care about those things in the slightest. They are perfect smokescreen issues to let us fight to the death over, while they laugh all the way to the bank. So, while we sit here voting for Hillary because we're afraid of Trump, they're celebrating because they were never afraid of Trump, only of Bernie.
*Voting for minor parties is just throwing away your vote. No, it isn't. Throwing away your vote is voting for someone you don't believe in because you think you have no other options. There are really two systems you can vote for. You can vote for a two-party system that has made halting progress on civil rights while making rapid and sure progress at consolidating corporate control over every major decision made in the United States. Or you can vote for alternatives that promote democracy and community-minded thinking. Voting against your own interest because you think you cannot win is irrational. We don't do what's right because we think we can win. We do what's right because it's right. We may not win this time, and we may not win next time, but every inch we move forward is another inch toward victory. The only way to lose is to give up. That's what I would call throwing away your vote and your voice.
So, what then? It's not my purpose here to convince people what they should do, only to argue that we should act out of conviction, not out of fear, and to suggest that there are other options than voting against your own belief, conscience, or interest.
I will vote for Jill Stein. Jill might not win, but moving up her poll numbers is an important statement. Every percentage point is an argument to others that this is a voice worth listening to, this is a legitimate and real alternative. I believe in the Green platform (which has everything that Bernie's platform had, and even better on some issues), and I am inspired by the international nature of the Green Party. This party began in Germany in 1980, and has had a significant global presence ever since. Please visit the website of the United States Green Party to learn more.
It's never been just a presidential campaign. The Bernie campaign grew out of diverse movements that had already gained enormous momentum across the nation long before Bernie announced his candidacy. Occupy, the climate movement, Tar Sands Blockade, kayaktivists, the anti-fracking movement, movements for net neutrality and against the TPP, Black Lives Matter and other racial, police, and economic justice movements, indigenous movements like Idle No More, cyber-activists like Anonymous, the BDS movement – all of these found a resonance with the Bernie campaign, and found in the man a champion. But he was never more than a spokesperson. To his enormous credit, Bernie was always very clear about that with his slogan: “Not me, us.” The movement was ours all along, it never belonged to him. If the system succeeds in marginalizing and sidelining Bernie, that will do nothing at all to slow or depress the movements. The Bernie campaign offered us a great and extended opportunity to coalesce our movements, gain a huge public platform, and get our message out despite active and pervasive media suppression. We have learned new techniques and forged new connections. We are stronger than ever, and we are legion. We fight on, and we win. Consider these victories already achieved:
“Democratic socialism” is no longer a “dirty word” in US political discourse.
“The 1%” has permanently entered the vocabulary of the discourse.
Universal health care and education have demonstrated broad popular support.
Shell was blocked from entering the Arctic.
Numerous gas pipelines have been disrupted and abandoned.
Gun control has shown up to 90% popular support and has reached a congressional vote.
Marijuana is being progressively decriminalized.
Increasing attention has been drawn to police violence and racism.
A major campaign has been run without super-PAC money that presented a substantial challenge to the establishment.
While few of these are outright victories, they definitely represent significant progress in the right direction. And we have only begun to fight. And this must be our understanding. A Hillary candidacy would not be the end of our movement, nor would it be the beginning. It is simply one event in the struggle.
Bernie is not the candidate, but there are other options than merely supporting Hillary, and I consider the option of supporting Hillary to be unacceptable. I will back Jill Stein and all of the movements that I have been supporting and participating in all along. Anybody who wants to give me shit about that for any reason can reread everything I just wrote, act in their own conscience, and bite me.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Jill, Bernie, and the Movement: A defense of voting for Jill Stein in 2016
To undertake right action should not need defense. However, in the complex political climate of the moment, the right action is not clear, and there are many who attack those who are taking what seems to be the right action to one person, but not to another. Some of the most virulent of these attacks are reserved for those who choose not to support Hillary Clinton even she becomes the democratic nominee. The following is presented in their defense.
I begin with discussion of the possibilities that remain for a Bernie presidential candidacy, which would simplify matters considerably, but which I calculate to be unlikely.
As of this writing, Bernie could still be the Democratic nominee. There has been much discussion as to whether the nomination process was rigged. It was. I take that as a given, an obvious fact to anyone who can read. However, the nominating process is not over until the convention, and anything can happen up to that point. Everyone acknowledges that a Bernie nomination is a long shot. However, there are avenues:
- HRC is under investigation and could be indicted. I consider this unlikely, because, like all wealthy and well-connected politicians, she is in a position to easily put herself above the law. If high-level political operatives could be indicted and convicted for their crimes, there would be few presidents who escaped impeachment or jail. It is now well known that crimes were committed at high levels under the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations, yet no president was ever held accountable in any real way. I do not expect we can consider HRC to be any different.
- The DNC, at the convention, could realign its superdelegates behind Bernie on the grounds that he is more likely to defeat Trump. Yes, they could, but I doubt that they will. The DNC has backed HRC relentlessly, despite polling showing her more vulnerable to Trump, for months. My personal take on this is that the DNC would rather lose the election than give their party over to a candidate who will represent the people over the corporations whose tools the DNC are. Let's be clear: Bernie represents a threat to the establishment, and they hate him unto death, and will do all in their power – including total self-destructon – to eliminate that threat.
- California is still being counted, and many counties are flipping for Bernie. True, and that would be great. However, I do not think that, on its own, will be enough to propel Bernie to the nomination. In order to win the nomination outright, Bernie needed to sweep California decisively enough to overcome even the unfair process to which he was subjected. That did not happen.
As of this writing, I have definitely not written Bernie off, and if he wins the nomination, then the process forward is simple and clear: Help carry Bernie to a sweeping victory and into the whitehouse. The remainder of this discussion is carried under the assumption, however likely, that Bernie does not get the nomination, because only then does the path become much less clear.
As of this writing, Bernie may yet run as an independent or Green. Sure, he might, but I find that highly doubtful. Bernie is a person of honor. When he signed on to the Democratic Party he did so honorably, with the understanding that if he loses the nomination, he is still a member of the party and owes it his loyalty. I believe he will honor that commitment, and I will not fault him for it. Furthermore, although I will debunk the spoiler argument below, I believe Bernie is acutely aware of the spoiler perception, and he will stridently avoid that role. Of course, if Bernie does run as an independent or Green, then the path forward is simple: We help carry Bernie to a sweeping victory and into the whitehouse. However it is not something to expect, and again, the remainder of this discussion concerns what to do if Bernie is not a candidate for the presidency under any party.
If Hillary gets the nomination, why not just vote for her? The answer to the “hold your nose and vote Blue” argument is simple for those who follow the campaigns and the issues. To begin with the most damning, consider why Democrats and Independents alike were so appalled by the Bush, Jr. regime. While this regime denied climate change, invested in coal and oil, obstructed gay rights, and defended torture, clearly the most onerous action was the entry into a devastating war, illegal and based on deliberate lies, that killed thousands of US citizens and millions of Iraqi and Afghan people, destabilizing the region and causing incalculable damage and blowback. This is the reason Bush is such a hated president. Thinking of this, consider that HRC voted in favor of that war. Thus, HRC is complicit in the most heinous of Republican actions. She is not an alternative to Republican policy, but a continuation of it.
Beyond this, HRC is on the wrong side of a host of issues that are of critical and urgent importance: Fracking, coal, the TPP, health care, education costs, financial sector regulation, electoral reform, and campaign finance reform. The TPP, in particular, is a potential death sentence for the planet, and obstructing the path to universal health care is a death sentence for millions of US citizens. One may understand compromise as a strategy, but to embrace the exact opposite stance on the most critical issues is not compromise – it's suicide.
Bernistas who oppose Hillary are merely parroting right-wing lies and conspiracy theories. No, we're not. If you review the above list of issue-centered concerns, you will find no mention of e-mails (and Bernie was right to dismiss this distraction at the outset), Benghazi, or Whitewater. Trumpies might jump on those false accusations, but we stick to the real issues. It might be worth noting that one of the reasons that Trumpies and other right-wing voices adhere to those common conspiracies instead of the real issues is that when it comes to the real issues – those mentioned above – the Trumpies and right-wingers are in complete agreement with HRC. So they cannot attack her on those substantive grounds. A notable exception is that Trump opposes the TPP, although not for the right reason: As a real estate mogul, Trump cannot profit from moving manufacturing overseas to nations where there are few labor and environmental laws. Since the TPP does not benefit him personally, he can afford to oppose it, thus capitalizing on public opposition to it, especially among workers who rightly fear overseas job loss.
There are more than two choices. One cornerstone attack is that there are only two choices for president: the Democrat or the Republican. This attack often comes in the form of the soundbite, “opposing Hillary is equal to voting for Trump.” For people under this belief, the only alternative to the two major parties is not voting, which they consider irresponsible. They might be right about voting being the responsible thing to do, and they might not, but they ignore the fact that there are more than two parties to vote for. There are eighteen parties. I have been a member of the Green Party since before Bernie came along. I have changed my registration to Democrat three times: to vote for Jesse Jackson in 1984, for Barack Obama in 2008, and Bernie Sanders in 2016. If Bernie does not receive the Democratic nomination, I will change my registration back to Green and support the excellent candidate Jill Stein, a serious contender who has developed an enormous amount of political maturity over the course of her multiple runs for the Green Party.
But... Ralph Nader, 2000! The argument that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 as been adequately debunked here: [ (copy and paste the link) http://disinfo.com/2010/11/debunked-the-myth-that-ralph-nader-cost-al-gore-the-2000-election/ ] . In Florida 2000, Nader took 4% of the independent vote. At the same time, 13 % of registered Democrats voted for Bush. Therefore, it was not Nader who cost Florida the election, but Gore's failure to energize his own base. The danger of repeating that error for the DNC is clear: Bernie has energized the base to an astonishing degree, while Hillary captures votes solely on name recognition, preferential media treatment, and a perception of inevitability as “Obama's chosen.” I should add that I have never supported Nader for president, and in fact, I voted for Gore in 2000. I admire Nader's work in consumer advocacy and journalism, but he was never a good presidential candidate, because he is abrasive and can be condescending. Jill Stein, in contrast, is an outstanding, personable, eloquent, and presidential candidate.
It is also worth noting that Jill is not the only minor candidate in the race. Gary Johnson is running on the Libertarian ticket, and currently polling in double digits nationally. Libertarianism is a more conservative philosophy than the Green platform, so Johnson is as likely to draw off the Republican vote as Jill is to draw off the Democrat vote. The notion that minor parties only draw down Democrat votes is part of the false narrative perpetuated by the Democratic party to trick people into voting for Democrats against their own interest and conscience.
Finally, in our worries about the spoiler argument in general, remember that Hillary voted for the very crime that we consider to be the worst act of the worst president in US history: The Iraq war. Getting her into office is not as important as standing against the system that puts war and profit ahead of human life.
But... Trump 2016! Fear is a powerful motivator, and the corporate elites know this. They use it, and are masters of it. They know that fear shuts down the reasoning centers of the brain, and reduces people to an emotional fight-or-flight state. In order to surmount the Trump fear argument, we must first overcome our fear. Once we do so, and bring our emotional response under the scrutiny of reason, we find that the fear actually has little basis.
- I find it is important to point out that if Democrats were so afraid of Trump, then they should have supported Bernie from day one, since he was clearly the one who was energizing the base and beating Republicans in the polls. If the Democrats choose to field the weaker candidate, then it is not our responsibility to support that candidate no matter what. It's not to us to give up on our dreams and support the candidate who opposes everything we stand for (see the issues above) because of their delusional support for the only Democrat who could conceivably lose to Trump.
- Trump will never be president. He never intended to be, and he never will be. History shows that open bigots cannot be elected (since Reagan). Both the Bush win and the Romney loss illustrate this. Even the Bushes knew that they had to at least pay lip service to minorities, including immigrants, gays, Native Americans, blacks, and women. Without those blocks, they could never have been elected. Romney lost because of his open disdain for minorities and persons of lower income. Don't be fooled by Trump's sweep of Republican primaries. He was only being supported by Republicans, a generally bigoted population. He will not be sufficiently supported in the general election, and polling already shows this. Even his own party is treating him as toxic. He cannot win. Don't worry about it.
- The Republican Party is done with Trump, as he has served his purpose by scaring people into supporting HRC. The Repubs were never afraid of HRC. She is, in fact, their dream candidate: pro-corporate, pro-PAC, pro-Israel, against campaign finance reform. They put up a hostile front, but it's all for show. Even the front is collapsing as many top Repubs are saying they will support Hillary, because Trump is unstable. As if they didn't know that from the beginning. Just like the Democrats, the Republicans would rather lose the election than disappoint their corporate masters. It's important to remember that elections have always been orchestrated by corporate interests. The legal structure for super-PACs is merely the culmination of this fact. Elections are no longer up for votes; They are up for sale. The corporate elites don't care whether a Democrat or Republican is in the whitehouse, but they benefit from making the electorate care. HRC will benefit them, so they created Trump as the monster to scare us into voting for her. It worked pretty well on most people. The fear of Trump suppressed their reasoning centers and led them to support Hillary over Bernie, despite the rational observation that Bernie was the better candidate to defeat Trump. With an HRC victory, the corporations will consolidate their power in numerous ways: They prove that the power of super-PACs to influence elections is insurmountable, thus establishing a permanent position for themselves as king-makers, ending democracy in the process. They install a candidate who voted for war, wall street bailouts, maintaining insurance companies as gatekeepers to for-profit health care, and deregulating wall street – everything that they wanted and we didn't. As for the issues that divide Republicans and Democrats – gun control, women's health, gay rights, immigrant rights – well, the corporate elites do not care about those things in the slightest. They are perfect smokescreen issues to let us fight to the death over, while they laugh all the way to the bank. So, while we sit here voting for Hillary because we're afraid of Trump, they're celebrating because they were never afraid of Trump, only of Bernie.
Voting for minor parties is just throwing away your vote. No, it isn't. Throwing away your vote is voting for someone you don't believe in because you think you have no other options. There are really two systems you can vote for. You can vote for a two-party system that has made halting progress on civil rights while making rapid and sure progress at consolidating corporate control over every major decision made in the United States. Or you can vote for alternatives that promote democracy and community-minded thinking. Voting against your own interest because you think you cannot win is irrational. We don't do what's right because we think we can win. We do what's right because it's right. We may not win this time, and we may not win next time, but every inch we move forward is another inch toward victory. The only way to lose is to give up. That's what I would call throwing away your vote and your voice.
So, what then? It's not my purpose here to convince people what they should do, only to argue that we should act out of conviction, not out of fear, and to suggest that there are other options than voting against your own belief, conscience, or interest.
- If Bernie does not get the nomination, I will vote for Jill Stein. Jill might not win, but moving up her poll numbers is an important statement. Every percentage point is an argument to others that this is a voice worth listening to, this is a legitimate and real alternative. I believe in the Green platform (which has everything that Bernie's platform has), and I am inspired by the international nature of the Green Party. This party began in Germany in 1980, and has had a significant global presence ever since. Please visit the website of the United States Green Party to learn more.
- It's never been just a presidential campaign. The Bernie campaign grew out of diverse movements that had already gained enormous momentum across the nation long before Bernie announced his candidacy. Occupy, the climate movement, Tar Sands Blockade, kayaktivists, the anti-fracking movement, movements for net neutrality and against the TPP, Black Lives Matter and other racial, police, and economic justice movements, indigenous movements like Idle No More, cyber-activists like Anonymous, the BDS movement – all of these found a resonance with the Bernie campaign, and found in the man a champion. But he was never more than a spokesperson. To his enormous credit, Bernie was always very clear about that with his slogan: “Not me, us.” The movement was ours all along, it never belonged to him. If the system succeeds in marginalizing and sidelining Bernie, that will do nothing at all to slow or depress the movements. The Bernie campaign offered us a great and extended opportunity to coalesce our movements, gain a huge public platform, and get our message out despite active and pervasive media suppression. We have learned new techniques and forged new connections. We are stronger than ever, and we are legion. We fight on, and we win. Consider these victories already achieved:
- “Democratic socialism” is no longer a “dirty word” in US political discourse.
- “The 1%” has permanently entered the vocabulary of the discourse.
- Universal health care and education have demonstrated broad popular support.
- Shell was blocked from entering the Arctic.
- Numerous gas pipelines have been disrupted and abandoned.
- Gun control has shown up to 90% popular support and has reached a congressional vote.
- Marijuana is being progressively decriminalized.
- Increasing attention has been drawn to police violence and racism.
- A major campaign has been run without super-PAC money that presented a substantial challenge to the establishment.
- While few of these are outright victories, they definitely represent significant progress in the right direction. And we have only begun to fight. And this must be our understanding. A Hillary candidacy would not be the end of our movement, nor would it be the beginning. It is simply one event in the struggle.
While I still hope the Democratic National Committee is intelligent enough to select the winning candidate, I'm afraid that I doubt that they are. Or, more accurately, I doubt if winning the election is their real goal – keeping their corporate gravy train is the real goal, and that means backing HRC whether she wins or loses.
If Bernie is the candidate, then our decision is easy: back him all the way. It could still happen. But if Bernie is not the candidate, there are other options than merely supporting Hillary, and I consider the option of supporting Hillary to be unacceptable. I will back Jill Stein and all of the movements that I have been supporting and participating in all along. Anybody who wants to give me shit about that for any reason can reread everything I just wrote, act in their own conscience, and bite me.
A Dream of Transmigration
In this dream I am reading a book about the life of Aristotle. There is a passage concerning the development of the theory of transmigration of souls in Greek thought. In the passage, Plato is didactically questioning Aristotle. Aristotle seems to be at a philosophical impasse, unable to progress. Suddenly, Plato grabs a brass urn filled with water, and strikes Aristotle roughly on the head, and shouts, “Ask a question!” Aristotle is stunned into a briefly altered state, and shouts out, “What is the transmigration of souls?” By this time the dream's point of view has begun fluctuating between first person as a reader of past events, and first person as Aristotle himself.
Plato is delighted with Aristotle's question; the phrase “transmigration of souls” is a new one in the philosophy of the time. Together, teacher and pupil analyze the phrase etymologically. They decide that “transmigration” must refer to a movement that is beyond migration. It is a crossing of borders that is so emphatic that it causes the borders themselves to cease to exist. The philosophers then turn to the word “soul.” they are using the Greek word “psyche.” In the dream, this word is consistently pronounced in its Greek form: “soo-kay,” as opposed to the Anglicized “sy-kee,” because the Anglicized pronunciation is steeped in reductionistic associations of Western psychological thought (psychosis, psychosomatic, psychoanalysis, etc.). Maintaining the Greek pronunciation holds the word in a more multidimensional, nearly trans-verbal connotation.
Still in the dream, I reflect on the tension between the Western and Eastern elements of the story. Plato and Aristotle, the most quintessentially Western of philosophers, are engaged in a teaching method that is decidedly Zen: Bringing the student to an impasse, then inducing satori through a sudden strike. Whereas a Zen master would have struck with a staff, Aristotle uses an object more appropriate to his cultural milieu: a brass urn. Why filled with water? Is that a Taoist reference? And also the tension between the pronunciations of “psyche,” which suggests a tension between the ancient, mystical roots of Greek culture (the world of the Delphic Oracle and the Pythagorean Rites), with the modernized, Anglo/Germanized philosophy that became its later development.
Holding these questions and tensions, I awaken.
Discussing the dream with T., I find myself reminded of another dream I had about twenty-five years ago, in which I overcome fear to enter a haunted house. In the haunted house I discover an ancient brass urn, richly engraved, and compelling in its appearance. I reach out and touch the urn, and suddenly a huge ball of light and energy bursts forth from the urn and slams into the side of my head, entering me. It is the spirit of another person. I am not afraid, but elated and ecstatic. A testimony to the power of this dream is that I have carried it with me for so long. It is a memory as clear as any significant event in my waking life.
So. The brass urn full of water is a vessel that contains a soul. It is that with which Plato strikes Aristotle in the side of the head, just as I was struck before. And the transmigration of souls is a movement so complete that it erases prior boundaries.
Plato is delighted with Aristotle's question; the phrase “transmigration of souls” is a new one in the philosophy of the time. Together, teacher and pupil analyze the phrase etymologically. They decide that “transmigration” must refer to a movement that is beyond migration. It is a crossing of borders that is so emphatic that it causes the borders themselves to cease to exist. The philosophers then turn to the word “soul.” they are using the Greek word “psyche.” In the dream, this word is consistently pronounced in its Greek form: “soo-kay,” as opposed to the Anglicized “sy-kee,” because the Anglicized pronunciation is steeped in reductionistic associations of Western psychological thought (psychosis, psychosomatic, psychoanalysis, etc.). Maintaining the Greek pronunciation holds the word in a more multidimensional, nearly trans-verbal connotation.
Still in the dream, I reflect on the tension between the Western and Eastern elements of the story. Plato and Aristotle, the most quintessentially Western of philosophers, are engaged in a teaching method that is decidedly Zen: Bringing the student to an impasse, then inducing satori through a sudden strike. Whereas a Zen master would have struck with a staff, Aristotle uses an object more appropriate to his cultural milieu: a brass urn. Why filled with water? Is that a Taoist reference? And also the tension between the pronunciations of “psyche,” which suggests a tension between the ancient, mystical roots of Greek culture (the world of the Delphic Oracle and the Pythagorean Rites), with the modernized, Anglo/Germanized philosophy that became its later development.
Holding these questions and tensions, I awaken.
Discussing the dream with T., I find myself reminded of another dream I had about twenty-five years ago, in which I overcome fear to enter a haunted house. In the haunted house I discover an ancient brass urn, richly engraved, and compelling in its appearance. I reach out and touch the urn, and suddenly a huge ball of light and energy bursts forth from the urn and slams into the side of my head, entering me. It is the spirit of another person. I am not afraid, but elated and ecstatic. A testimony to the power of this dream is that I have carried it with me for so long. It is a memory as clear as any significant event in my waking life.
So. The brass urn full of water is a vessel that contains a soul. It is that with which Plato strikes Aristotle in the side of the head, just as I was struck before. And the transmigration of souls is a movement so complete that it erases prior boundaries.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
We Are
Remember when I asked you to marry me
And the fields were bright and covered with snow
And the light descended in colorful waterfalls
And the sky was gently starting to glow
And your eyes kept filling with tears for no reason
And I felt that I hadn't the strength to go on
But the time gave us both the things that we needed
And we built a hearth on the land and the stone
All those moments mingle together and intertwine
And converge to embrace what we have become
And the sea and the sand have become our intimates
And we live for the pain and the joy we have known
All God's sweet domain belongs forever to us
We who live in eternity
Together alone
Who live at the whim of the elements
The air and the water, earth, fire, and stone
In your eyes I can still see the flickering firelight
And the gates of mystery, silence, and song
And we dream of faraway places and fairy tales
Where our spirits abandon the ground and take wing
And our hearts hold fast to our dreams
And our dreams hold fast to the spirits divine
And the stars, the angels, and all of the elements
Bear witness with their breath to the truth that we are.
And the fields were bright and covered with snow
And the light descended in colorful waterfalls
And the sky was gently starting to glow
And your eyes kept filling with tears for no reason
And I felt that I hadn't the strength to go on
But the time gave us both the things that we needed
And we built a hearth on the land and the stone
All those moments mingle together and intertwine
And converge to embrace what we have become
And the sea and the sand have become our intimates
And we live for the pain and the joy we have known
All God's sweet domain belongs forever to us
We who live in eternity
Together alone
Who live at the whim of the elements
The air and the water, earth, fire, and stone
In your eyes I can still see the flickering firelight
And the gates of mystery, silence, and song
And we dream of faraway places and fairy tales
Where our spirits abandon the ground and take wing
And our hearts hold fast to our dreams
And our dreams hold fast to the spirits divine
And the stars, the angels, and all of the elements
Bear witness with their breath to the truth that we are.
Friday, March 25, 2016
Easter: A Panreligious Swirlie
Easter, in its current incarnation as a popular holiday often perceived as Christian in inclination, consists of a superficially incomprehensible whirling of mismatched symbolic entities: A bunny carrying a basket of eggs, a children's searching game, daffodils, the resurrection of Christ. This archetypal maelstrom can be best appreciated by understanding that it consists of a number of divergent cultural strains that all share a celebration of springtime marked by a solar event – the vernal equinox.
The Vernal Equinox is one of eight significant solar events of the year: The winter and summer solstices, the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the four cross-quarters that lie between them (Brigit, Imbolc, Beltane, and Samhuin). At each of these times the Earth passes through a point in its orbit that can be measured with archaeoastronomical instruments such as stone circles or sundials. For human cultures that have depended on natural cycles for sustenance throughout millennia, these occurrences are of great traditional importance, and so feast days tend to cluster about them: Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, Idh, even groundhog day (which falls near Brigit), among many others, are commemorations of these events. Since they are so important to so many cultures, symbols from disparate cultural histories tend to converge around these significant calendrical moments.
A currently popular internet meme derives the modern English word “Easter” from the Sumerian fertility goddess Ishtar. I am not aware of any scholarly support for this derivation, however. Philologists tend to derive the modern term “Easter” from a Celtic or Germanic pre-Christian goddess of the same name (see, for example, The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology). Even this derivation is disputed, and some simply derive the name from “East,” the direction from which the Sun rises. Since the Vernal Equinox celebrates the return of the sun from its winter seclusion, and since the V.E. is the first of only two dates of the year on which the sun rises precisely due East, this seems plausible. The internet meem may not be entirely wrong, however, as Ishtar may be linguistically cognate and symbolically syncretistic with the pagan fertility goddess variously renedered “Ostara,” “Eostar,” etc.
The rabbit and egg, both symbols of fertility, are probably correctly associated with the pagan goddess, although one is always dealing with uncertainty when reconstructing pagan thought and symbolism, since the pre-Christian religions were so thoroughly obliterated by the domination of the Roman Catholic Church, whose mission was supported by the full weight of the Roman Empire, which was acutely interested in replacing the matriarchal, naturalist pagan thought system with a patriarchal, militant, and imperial one. But there is more behind the symbolism of the egg than its obvious connotation of new life. The egg is also a potent symbol of druidic knowledge, and Mary Chadwick, in her seminal work on druidism, describes the ritualistic pursuit of the druidic egg as a feature of druidic lore. The quest for the egg, believed to represent secret knowledge (because the hard eggshell hides the mystery of life), may shed some light on the modern popular ritual of the Easter egg hunt. Yet there is another understanding of the symbol of the Easter egg that relates to Jewish tradition.
The Jewish culture celebrates the V.E. with the festival of passover, whose Hebrew name, “Pesach,” gives the Romance language its cognates for Easter (e.g., Spanish “Pascua”). Passover is an exceedingly rich and complex confluence of symbols in itself. But of interest here is that one of the elements of the seder (the traditional passover meal) is a hard-boiled egg. Since this is the only tradition in which an egg that plays a prominent role in the V.E. is boiled to hardness, it is likely that the passover feast is the origin of the modern Easter egg. To understand how a symbol can become degraded from a prominent ingredient of a high holy feast (the hard egg is a traditional food of mourning, and represents the mourning of the loss of the first and second temples), it is necessary to understand that Judaism was as fiercely repressed under the early Catholic Church as was paganism. Both religious cultures were targets of the notorious Inquisition (which was not merely Spanish, but pervasive throughout Europe and the American colonies). Symbols of the religion were repressed by a brutal regime, and became cryptographic. The origins of such symbols were hidden and forgotten, but at the same time cherished and remembered. Such is the contradictory lot of a repressed symbol. The result is a transformation and codification of the symbol that makes it difficult to recognize.
If we accept that Jewish symbols are hidden within the modern Easter celebration, then another aspect of the Easter egg hunt becomes understandable. It is de rigeur in this ritual that the eggs are hidden by adults and searched for by children. This is an unmistakeable parallel with the Jewish tradition of the hiding of the matzah. At passover, parents in Jewish families traditionally hide a piece of matzah somewhere in the house. The children are tasked with finding the hidden matzah. In the Easter egg hunt, we find a distorted image of the Jewish search for the passover matzah, played out by Christian families. This should serve as a reminder of the close historical kinship that exists beween these two cultures, though hidden by centuries of repression.
The Christian religion seems to have no overt symbol in popular Easter ritual, but since its historical documentation records the crucifixion of Jesus as occurring at passover, and the resurrection shortly after, it follows that the resurrection should be celebrated at the time of the V.E. It is possible that the celebration of the resurrection only became a significant part of Christian ritual observance as a deliberate effort to displace the celebration of the Jewish Pesach and the pagan Eostar from popular medieval European consciousness. Such arguments have been made with regard to the Christian celebration of Christmas at a time when biblical historians generally agree that Jesus was unlikely to have been born, but was a significant feast day for pagan religions. But there is another interpretation that may be used to understand the celebration of the resurrection at the V.E. In “King Jesus,” Sir Robert Graves claims parallels between Christian symbolism and ancient worship of a solar deity. The sun “dies” in winter and “returns from death” in spring, so the resurrection that is celebrated may be that of the Solar God.
Thus, at Easter, we see a confluence of perhaps five religious currents: the Sumerian Ishtar, the pagan Eostar/Ostara, the Jewish passover, the Christian resurrection and the resurrection of the Solar God. All of these constellate around a time that is of special significance to all living things: the transition from dormant to vivacious state that is engendered by changes in the solar angle as the earth passes through its timeless orbit. The cycles of nature are embodied in the celebrations of all religions. Thus we have the name from the pagan and perhaps the Sumerian fertility goddess, the rabbit her symbol, the egg that is at the same time a fertility symbol, the druidic egg, and the passover egg, the search for that egg that comes by way of the passover celebration, and the resurrection from Christianity and perhaps a solar Christian precursor. All are viewed through a distorting lens of history, and the images capture both the tragedy of oppression and the victory of remembrance. We may see them as living testaments to the manner in which cultural survival transcends oppression, and coexistence, in some form, is not only possible, but inevitable.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Ostara
Frost on fen
Forest and field
Yield to Eostar's
Sweet breathing
Buds extending
Into the tilting Sun
Of Great Ostara's coming!
Friday, February 26, 2016
In the Wastelands of Summer
In the Wastelands of Summer
Bathed in moon’s milk
The echoed extension
Of rock with belly nude
All lichen-covered
And stood upon by a wolf
Whose howl's his hunger,
Gnashes stone and air
This Hell-hound
Is my Self’s shadow
His hunger my sustenance.
It is a sprite that takes my hand
It is a sprite that takes my hand
In the library of leaves
Reads the words of trees
Gazes in the eyes of stars
And, reflecting, out from them.
And O, the sky, with storms thrown
Over its horizons,
As she dips her quill in combs
Of honey
And writes upon a dandelion,
One, Only One,
The One and Only Book she writes
Is the one we live in.
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