The fundamental gift of Western Civilization (to accompany its many curses) is that it offers the promise of getting off the hamster wheel. Western culture broadly embraced the idea that time and existence is neither cyclical nor pre-ordained; life is not a predetermined and endless hamster wheel, but rather a blank terrain upon which we can plot our own course.
That is a profoundly important gift to humanity. Like so many accomplishments, whether attained by individuals or by entire cultures, it has often ceased to be an inspired gift and instead mutated into an excuse for complacency and arrogance. Nowhere is this more clear than that most western of western civilizations, our United States.
We in the United States habitually congratulate ourselves on our greatness, while often ignoring that it's actually been quite some time since we achieved something great. We congratulate ourselves on the election of 1800 rather than castigating ourselves for the election of 2000.
We are raised from birth to see ourselves as trailblazers, and conscious and consciencious shapers of a better future, but quite often we are blazing nothing at all beyond treadmarks on a hamster wheel. Nowhere is this more clear than in the fields of education and energy.
Education and energy are two idols of American politics. All politicians, regardless of ideological huge, bow at the altar of these twin totems. They endlessly intone upon the importance of each, all the while consigning national policy on both to a hamster wheel.
First, for education. Education is funded locally. This is the first clue that national politicians are being disingenuous when they speak of its importance or when they insist that all children have "equal opportunity" in education.
Here's how education policy consigns us to the hamster wheel rather than the ladder or the open road or however else you would have it: education is funded by local cities and towns.
So, if you live in a poor city or town, the funding for your schools will be very poor.
Accordingly, you will receive a poor education. Then, you will have poor job opportunities, meaning you will get a poor job. With a poor job, you will never have any hope of moving out of your poor neighborhood. And when your poor children are born, they will attend the same poor schools that your poor ass did.
That is a hamster wheel. Millions of children are consigned to poor schools, poor choices, and poor futures simply because they were born in.....a poor neighborhood. Now, you might think that poor neighborhoods would get MORE money for schools. And you'd be wrong.
Conversely, of course, if you are born in a rich neighborhood, you will go to rich schools, giving you rich opportunities to gain a rich job and enable you to remain rich so that your children will go to rich schools.
So even in the country that claims to be classless and based entirely on law and merit, who your parents are is still the single best indicator of where your life will take you.
Now, for energy: we all know that the U.S. uses more oil that any other nation and that an-ever increasing proportion of that oil comes from foreign, often hostile, forces.
And what do we do with our oil? How do we use it? To get more oil. We need to get oil because without oil, how could we get more oil? Hamster wheel much?
The biggest consumer of oil on earth is the U.S. military. What does the military use all that oil for? Well, protecting oil.
In 2002, we bought oil from Iraq to fuel our tanks and planes to invade Iraq so that the oil in Iraq would be secure. Because we needed it for our tanks and planes. Which were now occupying Iraq. Circle of life.
The biggest air force in the world in the U.S. Air Force. The second biggest air force in the world is the U.S. Navy. They both consume reservoirs of oil so that they can protect the dwindling reservoirs of oil remaining.
That is not a policy, it is not a plan, and it is certainly not a path. It is a hamster wheel, and a greasy one at that. If only we had an education system that could teach our children to think through such fundamental contradictions....
Between last week's deadly raid on ships bound to Gaza and Helen Thomas' recent remarks, Israel is once again dominating the headlines. And as usual, most opinions offered betray fundamental ignorance of the matter at hand.
Ms. Thomas' comments that Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine and go home" were swiftly and justly condemned. Most of the coverage of the event, however, focused on who would get Ms. Thomas' freshly-vacated seat in the White House press room rather than on the factual and ethical merits of her statement.
Most analyses of Israel, regardless of their speaker or author, fail to acknowledge 2 inescapable facts. Firstly, there was a moral imperative to give Jews a defensible homeland after the Holocaust. Secondly, the Palestinians were punished for the crimes of the Europeans when their homeland was taken from them.
Both of those facts are as true as anything could ever be. Why then are most people incapable of agreeing with both of these facts? Because most people have an agenda, and whatever their preconceived notions may be, they will inevitably ignore one of these two facts.
Israel-haters act as if the Holocaust never happened. Israel-lovers act as if nobody lived in Palestine before 1947.
But the Holocaust did happen. And when Helen Thomas said that Israelis should "go home", she was asked where that home was. The first two words out of her mouth were "Germany" and "Poland".
The picture above gives the reader a glimpse into how the Jews (including women and children) were treated at "home".
Since Germany is where the Holocaust was conceived and Poland is where it was largely carried out, this goes beyond tone-deafness. I would try to come up with an absurdist analogy for such ignorance, but there simply isn't one.
Germany and Poland was indeed home for millions of Jews 70 years ago. But then the Germans and the Poles murdered nearly three-quarters of them. Is that a "home" that a survivor should have pined for in the death camps? Were Jews in Auschwitz thinking, "oh, if I only I could go home to Poland"? No. Because Auschwitz was in Poland.
So the surviving Jews clearly needed a home in which they were not a perpetual minority subjected not just too run-of-the-mill discrimination, but to physical extermination. And here's where it gets messy.
In any just universe, the Jewish homeland would have been carved out of Germany. Or Poland. Or somewhere else where they had lived for centuries. If the Europeans were truly interested in paying their blood-debt, they would have surrendered some of their own territory to the Jews.
But they didn't. Instead, the chose Palestine. Why? Two reasons. Reason the first: the Palestinians had no means to resist. The Europeans took this approach: why pay for our own crimes when we can force a defenseless third party to pay the debt for us? Reason the second: anti-Semitism did not end with the Holocaust, and although the Europeans stopped exterminating Jews, they still, deep down, wanted them gone.
And so Israel was created. "A land without a people for a people without a land", the saying went. A touching sentiment. Except, of course, for the fact that Palestine in 1947 was NOT a land without a people. There were people in Palestine. Specifically, Palestinians.
"Palestinian" is not a race. It is not an ethnic group, although most Palestinians are ethnic Arabs. It simply describes a person who lives in Palestine. It's like saying "Rhode Islander".
When Israel was created, most Palestinians were Arab, but there was a sizable Jewish minority. Even among the Arabs, there were large numbers of Christians. Palestine was very mixed and relatively peaceable. And then came Israel.
It is a matter of fact that hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes into squalid refugee camps for the sin of not being Jewish.
And that is precisely why this issue is so impossible; the Jews cannot be blamed for killing and dying for a defensible homeland in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Palestinian Arabs cannot be blamed for violently resisting the seizure of their lands. The only appropriate blame here belongs to the Europeans.
Yet it is the Europeans, and the Americans, who act holier-than-thou when it comes to this issue. They casually castigate one side or the other, with no reflection upon their own role in creating this disaster.
I doubt that any meaningful peace in Israel / Palestine will be realized in my lifetime. If Jesus didn't live to see it, I doubt I will.
Partly this is the fault of the people who live there. But it is also the fault of people like Helen Thomas and countless others, who indulge the extremists on one side or the other by trafficking in the fantasy that one side or the other should just "get over it" or "go home".
The fact is, both sides are home already. They are the equivalent of two mortal enemies consigned by the gods to live for eternity together in a ten by ten foot cell. And just like prisoners, "going home" is not an option.
The only civilization in the history of the world that has never been entirely subjugated is China. Every other civilization that has ever existed has, at one point or another, been conquered by germs, guns, or steel. Some have re-emerged. Some have not.
But what is it that makes empires fall? Generally speaking, great civilizations fall by devouring themselves. Sometimes they are devoured by their own ideas (Nazi Germany), sometimes they are devoured by their lack of ideas (Soviet Russia), but usually they are devoured by consuming all of their natural resources, in a drawn-out orgy of self-indulgence.
The stone heads of Easter Island are iconic talismans of the ancient past. But the Easter Islands are not like Stonehenge or the Pyramids; something different happened here.
The pyramids and Stonehenge were never "discovered", because people have lived with them since they were built. The Easter Island statues, by contrast, had to be re-discovered, because the civilization that built them disappeared.
How did this happen? The islanders exhausted their most important resource, thereby devouring themselves. What was that resource? Trees.
Needless to say, the islanders were very sophisticated people. If they were able to build the statues, they obviously understood that every time a tree is cut down, the resource it represents is gone until a new tree can be grown in its place.
Despite this, the islanders cut down every last tree on the island. Why? They needed the trees as construction material for their statues.
These statues were obviously profoundly important to the islanders. You can't eat statues, so the islanders clearly placed great value in them. Even to the point where every last tree was sacrificed, this sophisticated civilization just had to have its statues.
And they got their statues. But the price was extinction.
It strikes me that the American empire is on the same course. We can easily look back on the Easter Islanders with disdain, deigning them primitives, savages, incapable of managing their own resources. We look back and say, "how could they have been so stupid?"
But what will people say in 1,000 years of the American Empire, which tied its ankles willingly and knowingly to a resource that everyone knows is utterly non-renewable?
Unlike the islanders' trees, oil cannot be regrown. It is non-renewable. Yet we, "sophisticated" and "civilized" and "rational" as we are, have done just what the Easter islanders did. We just have to have our statues.
Our statues are not quite as aesthetic as those of the islanders; our statues are highways, McDonalds, aircraft carriers, and pesticides.
From 9/11 to the Iraq War to the ongoing oil spew, what recent catastrophe of ours has not been in some way a function of our dependence on oil? Oil brings us these catastrophes when it is plentiful; what hell are we in for when it becomes scarce?
"Respect your elders" is a phrase I always take to heart in my personal life. This adage should apply not just to individuals, but to civilizations. The Easter islanders may seem ridiculous to us now, but at least they got some good sculpture out of their suicide.
As Bob Dylan wrote 48 years ago, "Ramblin' through this world, I've met lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen". And some will rob you with trillions of gallons of oil.
This is a crime in slow-motion. A crime that has killed nobody yet except for the unfortunate men on the oil platform when it exploded. Unlike a run of the mill mine disaster, unfortunately, the damage is not contained to a few blue-collar grunts; when a coal mine collapses, it doesn't spew tons of coal into the sky for weeks.
BP. British Petroleum, formerly known as AI, or Anglo-Iranian, has an interesting history. Anglo-Iranian took the oil from Iran and sent it to the Anglos. Very straightforward. Iranians had 100% of the oil. England got 90% of the profits. Free Market, bitches!
When an obstinate Iranian named Mohammed Mossadegh was elected by the Iranian people to demand a 50/50 profit sharing scheme with England, he was duly overthrown by Anglo-Iranian oil money and CIA-hired thugs. But I'm getting off track.
BP now is drilling for oil off the coast of the United States. (Didn't we win the Revolution?) Well, it turns out there was an accident. The well exploded. And it's at the bottom of the ocean. And here's where capitalism comes in.
Capitalism demanded that we create technology to drill for oil on the floor of the ocean. But it did NOT demand that we create technology to stop a leak on the floor of the ocean. It also does NOT demand that BP spare no expense in stopping the leak as quickly as possible; instead it demands that BP stop the leak as cheaply as possible.
Again, no civilians have been killed yet by this crime; nobody flew a plane into a building here. But the eventual toll may well be catastrophic. More oil spills into the Gulf every day. That oil washes ashore. When that happens, two things occur.
Firstly, the oil will kill most living things. Secondly it will seep into the groundwater. With all living things dead, the local economy collapses, foreclosures accelerate, etc. etc. etc.
With everything dead in the marshes near the coast, what will happen during hurricane season? Imagine Hurricane Katrina. Now imagine Hurricane Katrina with no marshes to slow its approach, all the while carrying not just wind and water, but trillions of gallons of oil.
Next time, New Orleans will not only drown, it will burn.
This is (I hope) a worst-case scenario. But what is the best-case scenario? However you slice it, it is going to cost this nation billions. Oil spills ain't free. Free market, indeed.
Senate candidate Rand Paul's critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has caused quite the furor these past few days. It got me thinking about the gap between theory and practice, and the unflattering things that said gap says about our society.
First, for Paul's critique. Paul, and most libertarians, feel that the Civil Rights Act should not have applied to private businesses. All civilized people believe that public institutions (i.e. schools) that receive government funding should not be allowed to discriminate. But what about private businesses?
Paul says that the government has absolutely no right to tell private businesses who they must serve. He says that in a free country, bigotry is allowed. He says that a store owner should have the freedom to post a sign out front reading "No Negroes" or "No Jews" or "No people over 6 feet tall" or anything else. And in theory, he's absolutely right.
Let's take a relatively benign example. What about gyms that only allow women to join. Is that unconstitutional? Well, technically, under the Civil Rights Act, it is. And doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous that the federal government would intervene in such a case? Of course it does.
Now let's take a more realistic example. Let's say the owner of a chain of restaurants refuses to serve black folks. Should that be legal? According to Rand Paul, it should be legal, however distasteful it may be.
And here's Paul's explanation of how such bigotry would be prevented from spreading like the cancer that it is: if one restaurant owner refuses to serve blacks, citizens (black and white alike) would boycott that racist businessman and therefore drive him out of business, thereby disincentivizing such bigotry. Makes sense, right? In theory.
But what about practice? What can we look to for an example of practice? Well, unfortunately, we have plenty of case studies. We need simply look at how private businesses operated before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when bigotry was legal.
When private businesses could serve or refuse to serve citizens at their own discretion, how did they behave? Were bigots weeded out by the immutable moral force of the free market? Were racists boycotted? Did white people boycott "white only" businesses? Did businesses who served everyone fair better than those that did not?
No. When private businesses were free to decide who they would serve, the huge majority of them chose not to serve blacks. What did this look like in practice?
If a black family was driving through the South to visit relatives, the adults would carry empty jars with them? Why? So that their children could urinate into them, since they knew very well that attempting to use a bathroom at any private business would lead to humiliation if not violence.
We gave private businessmen a chance to do the right thing. They failed to do so until they were forced to do so by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It is of course very unfortunate that it took the full force of the federal government to ensure that black folks would have access to toilets, beds, and cheeseburgers, but it did.
The only reason to second-guess this law now would be the assumption that people no longer harbor the bigotries they did 50 years ago. Is this a safe assumption? In large part, it is. How do I know this? Well, take a look at our president, for starters.
But do we really want to put that assumption to the test? In fact, a huge part of the moral revolution that led to the election of Barack Hussein Obama lay in the 1964 Civil Rights Act; forcing white people to let black people sit next to them at the lunch counter was not quite as trivial as it seemed at the time; it was the foundation of an historical moral awakening.
In theory, the libertarians are right, but in practice libertarianism in businesses led to institutional racism on a scale seldom matched in the history of the world. In theory, free people do the right thing by each other. In practice, unfortunately, they rarely do.
Although I consider myself a rather jaded person, I still revel in my ability to be surprised by the shit certain people are willing to pull. I have recently been thunderstruck by how utterly propagandistic the mainstream news is.
I'm not talking about cable news. I'm talking about Nightly News with Brian Williams. That broadcast is as close as we come these days to a relatively detached telling of the facts.
Two events I'll mention here have recently made me feel like I was ten years younger, as if certain scales never fell from my eyes. The first was the coal mine disaster. The second was the failed truck bombing of Times Square.
First, for the coal mine. Upwards of 30 people were killed. The types of people who have no connection to the types of people who give us the "news". So 30 people were killed in a coal mine because the cost of making their workplace safe was far more than the government fine for failing to make the workplace safe.
Simple as that. Safety was more expensive than the fines for being unsafe. Case closed. The value of a human life, the cost of orphans and widowed wives, was reduced to an item on a spreadsheet. The government's fines were not enough of a deterrent.
And how was this reported? Most of the news was about the "tragedy", implying an unavoidable aspect. The follow-up reporting was about the victims, about how much Billy Bob loved God and his children. About how much Bobby Ray loved coal mining. About how much Danny Joe loved hunting and football.
THAT is propaganda. A crime is committed, and we are told that it was unavoidable and that the only thing we can do is patronize the dead as God-fearing freedom-lovers.
And forgive me for noticing that the Nightly News is owned by General Electric, which has a, how shall I say, vested interest in cheap coal.
Then we have the failed bombing in Times Square. I just saw an "expert" on the Nightly News tell me, and millions of others, that "the system worked". Let us count the ways that this is utter propaganda.
Firstly, an unmonitored man drove a truck bomb into Times Square in broad daylight. Secondly, he lit the bomb and walked away. Thirdly, he boarded an airplane the next day, despite being on the no-fly list.
The system worked? THAT is propaganda. The system most decidedly did NOT work. But, thankfully, neither did the bomb.
Let us pretend that the bomber in this case was not an idiot with firecrackers and gasoline. Let's pretend he knew what he was doing. Let's pretend it was Tim McVeigh who lit that fuse and walked away.
He drives a truck bomb unserveilled into the most public place in America. He lights the fuse. We walks away unmolested. The bomb goes off. 500 people are killed. In that scenario, would we say "the system worked"?
No. Yet this is exactly what happened, except that, thank God, the bomb-maker was incompetent. The system did NOT work. But neither did the bomb.
I'm not surprised that there is propaganda on the internet. I'm not surprised that there is propaganda on cable. But the network airwaves are common property. Everyone gets NBC. And when the lowest common denominator, the one common voice, is pure propaganda, it makes me think we'd be made wiser by boycotting all the "news".
People, we can start again
Adam and Eve if you want
But this time,
We'll respect God's word from the jump"
--Ghostface Killah, "No, No, No", 2007
People generally have two obsessions: the inescapable reality of death and the concomitant urge to be reborn. All deep thoughts, and all good art, are born in this crucible between the hammer of death and the anvil of the promise of rebirth.
But our obsession with rebirth is what makes us who we are. "Adam and Eve if we want". This is what we strive for.
All thinking people live their lives on two parallel tracks: one track consists of paperwork, grocery shopping, and so forth. The second track consists of indulgence in the unattainable, the irrational.
The urge to read books that can't make you richer or sexier, the urge to paint or write or photograph when there is no "rational" reason to do so.
Every sentient person realizes that his or her "life" is mostly crowded with errands, with bureaucracy, with formality. The challenge lays in reserving enough time and space to be human beings, rather than simply human doings.
And with variety being the spice of life, we owe it to ourselves to branch out when we seek our creative and artistic relief from the drudgery of W-2 forms and car insurance.
From Albert Einstein to Lil Wayne, there are endless sources of information. Khalil Gibran. Ghostface Killah.
"In much of your talking,
Thinking is half murdered
For thought is a bird of space
That in a cage of words
May indeed unfold its wings
But cannot fly"
--Khalil Gibran, "The Prophet", 1923
"Why's the sky blue?
Why is water wet?
Why did Judas rap to Romans
While Jesus slept?"
--Ghostface Killah, "The 7th Chamber, 1995
