Tonight we eat, drink, pray, sleep, on this, the last day of Florida. Tomorrow it will be gone, Fort Meyers, the town where my grandfather died. My grandfather took us fishing on the gulf. We caught blowfish and threw them back. My grandfather was as cold and absent as those fish. He gave my brother and I turns to pilot the boat. When it was my turn, my brother deliberately told me the wrong way to push the throttle, so that I almost capsized the boat. I never got another chance. My brother did that for spite and envy. We were children. He was a broken child. Now he is a broken man, and my grandfather is dead. I was not invited to the funeral. I have never been to a funeral.
We went to Disneyworld once. It was supposed to be amazing. But I had lived in the Leblon region of Rio De Janeiro, I had been to Carnaval in Rio when I was five years old, so why would I think Disneyworld is amazing?
Tomorrow the storm comes and obliterates it all. Disneyworld and my grandfather's grave that I have never seen will merge with coral reefs in a shallow sea. But what I lost in Florida, I lost a long time ago.
Tout passe comme des nuages...
Saturday, September 9, 2017
Monday, July 17, 2017
Reflections on July 4, 2017
In the years and months leading up to July 4, 1776, a bunch of rich white men decided they were sick of paying taxes to England. They had no problem at all with slavery, genocide, and treating women as property, but they really didn't like paying taxes to England. So they started a war.
Now these rich white lawyers, bankers, and business owners did not actually want to risk injury, death, or mild discomfort in a war. So they did what all national leaders do in such cases: They hired a bunch of their well-educated peers to write copious persuasive propaganda for them, and flooded the streets with it in an effort to get poor farmers to fight and die to rid the rich business owners of their tax obligations to England. This propaganda campaign was so enormously successful that it is still believed, and even revered, to this very day. Indeed, the Fourth of July is the day of the public proclamation of the centerpiece of that propaganda campaign, T. Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence."
Like any good propaganda campaign, the documents cleverly replaced the real motivation for the war -- the rich peoples' desire to avoid taxes -- with a noble-sounding abstraction. Here, the abstraction used to cover the genuine motive was "liberty." Also like any good propaganda tool, the abstraction was on its face an absurdity. In a world of slavery, rigid and crushing class distinctions, and the total absence of women's right to self-determination, "liberty" was the absolute antithesis of the reality that the society was actually manifesting.
Today, we still live in a world where rich business owners, bankers, and lawyers enact policy that removes their own tax burden, while promoting extreme inequality and poverty and maintaining a school-to-prison pipeline and immigrant exploitation -- both modern forms of slavery -- and recruiting military "volunteers" from the most disenfranchised sectors of the populace to fight and die in wars that the ruling class have declared and manage to their own financial benefit. And astoundingly, after over two hundred years, the same propaganda campaign, using the same language, is still their tool to justify it all.
Well played, gentlemen. Well played.
Now these rich white lawyers, bankers, and business owners did not actually want to risk injury, death, or mild discomfort in a war. So they did what all national leaders do in such cases: They hired a bunch of their well-educated peers to write copious persuasive propaganda for them, and flooded the streets with it in an effort to get poor farmers to fight and die to rid the rich business owners of their tax obligations to England. This propaganda campaign was so enormously successful that it is still believed, and even revered, to this very day. Indeed, the Fourth of July is the day of the public proclamation of the centerpiece of that propaganda campaign, T. Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence."
Like any good propaganda campaign, the documents cleverly replaced the real motivation for the war -- the rich peoples' desire to avoid taxes -- with a noble-sounding abstraction. Here, the abstraction used to cover the genuine motive was "liberty." Also like any good propaganda tool, the abstraction was on its face an absurdity. In a world of slavery, rigid and crushing class distinctions, and the total absence of women's right to self-determination, "liberty" was the absolute antithesis of the reality that the society was actually manifesting.
Today, we still live in a world where rich business owners, bankers, and lawyers enact policy that removes their own tax burden, while promoting extreme inequality and poverty and maintaining a school-to-prison pipeline and immigrant exploitation -- both modern forms of slavery -- and recruiting military "volunteers" from the most disenfranchised sectors of the populace to fight and die in wars that the ruling class have declared and manage to their own financial benefit. And astoundingly, after over two hundred years, the same propaganda campaign, using the same language, is still their tool to justify it all.
Well played, gentlemen. Well played.
The Persistence of Slavery in the United States of America
It is tempting to think of slavery as an anachronism in the United States. However, the modern slavery system in the US has three major branches, without any one of which the US economy cannot operate in its current form.
The first branch is mass incarceration and unaccountable police shootings. Prisoners in federal prisons, many privately managed, are forced to work without compensation, and under constant threat of physical violence. The majority of these prisoners have been arrested for marijuana crimes, for which black citizens are far more likely to serve jail time than white citizens arrested for the same offense. The threat of police killings keeps the arrested black citizen in a state of terrified compliance that is part of the discriminating nature of this system.
The second branch is the undocumented worker system. Although some elements loudly call for the expulsion and exclusion of undocumented workers, the fact is that these workers are needed so completely that without them, the entire US agricultural system would collapse overnight. There are already several documented cases where excessive crackdowns on undocumented workers have resulted in massive loss of crops, which cannot be picked without labor. Because the workers are so desperately needed, efforts to exclude them are not genuine. This is why such efforts always have limited effectiveness. It is also why workers in this condition are prosecuted, but the agents and institutions who employ them never are. The Kafkaesque immigration system understands that it really wants the workers, and its only function is to keep the workers in a constant state of fear and disenfranchisement. In other words, the US immigration system serves no other purpose than to guarantee a limitless supply of workers who are completely devoid of legal and human rights, and can therefore be ill-treated, cheated, and subjected to deadly working conditions, with impunity. They receive compensation, and are technically free to leave, but that compensation is very far below minimum wage, carries no fair labor guarantees, and is often arbitrarily withheld in pervasive acts of wage theft. The supposed freedom of the workers to leave is also complicated by the third branch of the modern slavery system, which is the systematic destabilization of governments abroad that serve as sources of immigrant and exported labor.
The third branch of the modern slavery system is the exportation of slavery that began in earnest shortly after the end of slavery in the US. Under presidents T. Roosevelt and W. McKinley, the US began military incursions into the Caribbean, South America, and the Philippines, where it supported the most ruthless dictators and opposed all populist movements. The justification generally offered for these incursions was "to protect US interests." These interests were largely agricultural ventures in fruit and sugar, which required vast labor forces in slavery or near-slavery conditions. This type of foreign policy continues to this day in the form of covert military and economic operations that maintain despotic governments in countries where the US has manufacturing and mining concerns. Among the most egregious examples is the 1973 coup conducted against Chile's Salvador Allende, and more recent examples include US support of the military coup in Honduras, and the effective kidnapping of Haiti's Jean Bertrand Aristide. These actions occur with consistency through both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their effect is that labor in foreign countries is kept from organizing, and maintained in effective slavery conditions, and these conditions also serve as a strong deterrent to the return of immigrant labor, thus reinforcing the second branch of modern slavery. "Free trade" agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP are crucial elements in this system, and should really be thought of as "free exploitation" agreements.
With these three branches of slavery firmly entrenched -- mass incarceration, undocumented labor, and anti-labor interventions abroad -- the US cannot pretend that its economic system has ever subsisted without a massive substrate of slavery to support it. We need to return to first principles to discover and propagate a system of social organization that truly embodies fairness for all, and we cannot deceive ourselves that we have yet achieved that. We cannot pretend that slavery is an artifact of the past. It is an existential reality of the present, and, unless we act, of the future.
The first branch is mass incarceration and unaccountable police shootings. Prisoners in federal prisons, many privately managed, are forced to work without compensation, and under constant threat of physical violence. The majority of these prisoners have been arrested for marijuana crimes, for which black citizens are far more likely to serve jail time than white citizens arrested for the same offense. The threat of police killings keeps the arrested black citizen in a state of terrified compliance that is part of the discriminating nature of this system.
The second branch is the undocumented worker system. Although some elements loudly call for the expulsion and exclusion of undocumented workers, the fact is that these workers are needed so completely that without them, the entire US agricultural system would collapse overnight. There are already several documented cases where excessive crackdowns on undocumented workers have resulted in massive loss of crops, which cannot be picked without labor. Because the workers are so desperately needed, efforts to exclude them are not genuine. This is why such efforts always have limited effectiveness. It is also why workers in this condition are prosecuted, but the agents and institutions who employ them never are. The Kafkaesque immigration system understands that it really wants the workers, and its only function is to keep the workers in a constant state of fear and disenfranchisement. In other words, the US immigration system serves no other purpose than to guarantee a limitless supply of workers who are completely devoid of legal and human rights, and can therefore be ill-treated, cheated, and subjected to deadly working conditions, with impunity. They receive compensation, and are technically free to leave, but that compensation is very far below minimum wage, carries no fair labor guarantees, and is often arbitrarily withheld in pervasive acts of wage theft. The supposed freedom of the workers to leave is also complicated by the third branch of the modern slavery system, which is the systematic destabilization of governments abroad that serve as sources of immigrant and exported labor.
The third branch of the modern slavery system is the exportation of slavery that began in earnest shortly after the end of slavery in the US. Under presidents T. Roosevelt and W. McKinley, the US began military incursions into the Caribbean, South America, and the Philippines, where it supported the most ruthless dictators and opposed all populist movements. The justification generally offered for these incursions was "to protect US interests." These interests were largely agricultural ventures in fruit and sugar, which required vast labor forces in slavery or near-slavery conditions. This type of foreign policy continues to this day in the form of covert military and economic operations that maintain despotic governments in countries where the US has manufacturing and mining concerns. Among the most egregious examples is the 1973 coup conducted against Chile's Salvador Allende, and more recent examples include US support of the military coup in Honduras, and the effective kidnapping of Haiti's Jean Bertrand Aristide. These actions occur with consistency through both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their effect is that labor in foreign countries is kept from organizing, and maintained in effective slavery conditions, and these conditions also serve as a strong deterrent to the return of immigrant labor, thus reinforcing the second branch of modern slavery. "Free trade" agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP are crucial elements in this system, and should really be thought of as "free exploitation" agreements.
With these three branches of slavery firmly entrenched -- mass incarceration, undocumented labor, and anti-labor interventions abroad -- the US cannot pretend that its economic system has ever subsisted without a massive substrate of slavery to support it. We need to return to first principles to discover and propagate a system of social organization that truly embodies fairness for all, and we cannot deceive ourselves that we have yet achieved that. We cannot pretend that slavery is an artifact of the past. It is an existential reality of the present, and, unless we act, of the future.
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Science and Witchcraft
Witchcraft is science, too.
No, wait! Really! Listen.
The pre-Christian indigenous peoples of Europe were committed to understanding the relationships among the elements of the world: Plants, animals, stars, and stones, all were the subjects of their inquiry. Their understanding was good, as it had to be for them to endure the trials of the millennia. They learned about disease and medicine, nutrition and the body, reproduction, and the health of their ecosystems. Their knowledge tended to favor qualitative study over quantitative, but many of the understandings they achieved, in harmony with nearly every indigenous culture on every continent, are the same as those only now being understood by modern science: That everything is connected (quantum theory), that healthy ecosystems require cooperation among species (biodiversity), that forests communicate and adapt together with fungi in the soil (symbiosis), that good design standards are already found in nature (biomimetics), that reality can subsist in seemingly contradictory states (quantum theory), that living systems are spontaneous and unpredictable, within regimes of predictable behavior (chaos theory). The pagans of Europe developed a sophisticated astronomy that is reflected in the architecture of Stonehenge and myriad other stone circles scattered across the countryside of the United Kingdom. The science of the time was known as wicce, an Anglo-Saxon word that is cognate with the English words “wit” and “wisdom,” as well as with the Sanskrit “veda.”
It was only after the forced Christianization of Europe, and especially under the bloody reign of the Inquisition, that the word wicce was changed to “witch,” and given dozens of negative associations, including associations of evil intent and service to demonic forces. The craft of the wicce was painted as grotesque and abominable, and the knowledge and insight of folk women, the craft of wisdom, was largely lost. This propagandizing was part of a larger project of demonizing indigenous beliefs, and overthrowing the largely (but by no means exclusively) matriarchal society of pagan Europe, and supplanting it with a patriarchal system of dominating empire and religion.
Certainly, the pagan science of nature included teachings that were metaphorical and mythological in character; But then, so does modern science. Is not entropy largely a metaphorical concept? And witchcraft adopts a mystical current in its conceptualization of the world, but so have many of the well-known Western scientists: Pythagoras the occultist, Gregor Mendel the contemplative monk, Sir Isaac Newton the devoted alchemist. Indeed, a level of spiritual mysticism is something Western science could use more of. For the mind without the heart, science without conscience, is the paradigm that brought us the nuclear bomb, drone warfare, runaway climate change, and global ocean death. Ironically, the science we are counting on to resolve these problems is the same science that created them. To resolve the problems does not require new science or technology as much as it requires new conscious orientations to the way we use the science and technology that we have now, and that we continually innovate.
It is not a time to look only backward, but neither is it a time to look only forward. Seeking our roots in our own indigenous culture, from whichever continent it originated for each of us, can offer us the wisdom that we need to guide our application of the knowledge that we always seek. To live sustainably and responsibly in the post-post-modern world will require a lot of science, and quite a bit of witchcraft.
No, wait! Really! Listen.
The pre-Christian indigenous peoples of Europe were committed to understanding the relationships among the elements of the world: Plants, animals, stars, and stones, all were the subjects of their inquiry. Their understanding was good, as it had to be for them to endure the trials of the millennia. They learned about disease and medicine, nutrition and the body, reproduction, and the health of their ecosystems. Their knowledge tended to favor qualitative study over quantitative, but many of the understandings they achieved, in harmony with nearly every indigenous culture on every continent, are the same as those only now being understood by modern science: That everything is connected (quantum theory), that healthy ecosystems require cooperation among species (biodiversity), that forests communicate and adapt together with fungi in the soil (symbiosis), that good design standards are already found in nature (biomimetics), that reality can subsist in seemingly contradictory states (quantum theory), that living systems are spontaneous and unpredictable, within regimes of predictable behavior (chaos theory). The pagans of Europe developed a sophisticated astronomy that is reflected in the architecture of Stonehenge and myriad other stone circles scattered across the countryside of the United Kingdom. The science of the time was known as wicce, an Anglo-Saxon word that is cognate with the English words “wit” and “wisdom,” as well as with the Sanskrit “veda.”
It was only after the forced Christianization of Europe, and especially under the bloody reign of the Inquisition, that the word wicce was changed to “witch,” and given dozens of negative associations, including associations of evil intent and service to demonic forces. The craft of the wicce was painted as grotesque and abominable, and the knowledge and insight of folk women, the craft of wisdom, was largely lost. This propagandizing was part of a larger project of demonizing indigenous beliefs, and overthrowing the largely (but by no means exclusively) matriarchal society of pagan Europe, and supplanting it with a patriarchal system of dominating empire and religion.
Certainly, the pagan science of nature included teachings that were metaphorical and mythological in character; But then, so does modern science. Is not entropy largely a metaphorical concept? And witchcraft adopts a mystical current in its conceptualization of the world, but so have many of the well-known Western scientists: Pythagoras the occultist, Gregor Mendel the contemplative monk, Sir Isaac Newton the devoted alchemist. Indeed, a level of spiritual mysticism is something Western science could use more of. For the mind without the heart, science without conscience, is the paradigm that brought us the nuclear bomb, drone warfare, runaway climate change, and global ocean death. Ironically, the science we are counting on to resolve these problems is the same science that created them. To resolve the problems does not require new science or technology as much as it requires new conscious orientations to the way we use the science and technology that we have now, and that we continually innovate.
It is not a time to look only backward, but neither is it a time to look only forward. Seeking our roots in our own indigenous culture, from whichever continent it originated for each of us, can offer us the wisdom that we need to guide our application of the knowledge that we always seek. To live sustainably and responsibly in the post-post-modern world will require a lot of science, and quite a bit of witchcraft.
For She Speaks
Everything I have to say is already written in nature. Each word I need to write is there, somewhere written on a leaf, waiting for me to find it.
I used to dream that I would find letters of the ancient tongues, in the veins of stones, and that all I would have to do is follow the right path, and they would spell out my salvation, my escape, my redemption, my escalation, alephabetically elevating, beita betaken, a gammel across the glimmering desert and through the deltalet of daybreak, until the tavtauzeta of the further dawn, and last returning, to see the sun again, the same sun again, the same sun from above as below.
I used to dream that I would find letters of the ancient tongues, in the veins of stones, and that all I would have to do is follow the right path, and they would spell out my salvation, my escape, my redemption, my escalation, alephabetically elevating, beita betaken, a gammel across the glimmering desert and through the deltalet of daybreak, until the tavtauzeta of the further dawn, and last returning, to see the sun again, the same sun again, the same sun from above as below.
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Ostara
Frost on fen
Forest and field
Yield to Eostar’s
Sweet breathing
And buds extend
In the tilting Sun
Of Great Ostara’s coming!
Forest and field
Yield to Eostar’s
Sweet breathing
And buds extend
In the tilting Sun
Of Great Ostara’s coming!
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