Response in Collaboration

'you come from the poor South, where my soul began; in that high sky your mother is still washing clothes with my mother. That's why I chose you, companera.'

pablo neruda

A friend participates in a collaborative blogging project they call The Four. And they are inviting responses to the quotation.

I've thought about the quotation enough to know all I can come up with is a sort of stream of consciousness. Aha! That's all I ever seem to come up with.

I suspect that Neruda was speaking quite clearly about geography, but like many people nowadays my experience and that of my mother were spread out in various locations. So my impulse was to take the meaning as a metaphor for a deep familiarity between persons.

A few words stuck out: mother, soul, companera.

One morning my mother woke up and said she didn't feel right and wanted to go to the hospital. Her complaints weren't very specific. In the hospital emergency room, if I remember properly, the doctors didn't finger anything specific either. She was old and weak. But they admitted her anyway. Within a day it seems clear now in retrospect that she entered a dying period. And, indeed in a week she had died. It was a week my father and I and then later my sister Sharon sat in vigil. Altogether it was an eventful week. There was much happening in my mother's mind, it was obvious to see that, but not so obvious as to what. The stories didn't always make much sense and anyway are too hard to tell because the stories and the feelings so intertwined.

There is something she told me which moved me very much and I like to share. At one point she looked at me and said,

"It's uncanny, when I look at you now, I see you now and as a baby and a child, a handsome teenager; I see you as you have always been at once."

I put quotation marks around it, the words probably weren't exactly that, but those are the words as I recollect. Her vision of me reminds a little of the curiosity that I can look at photographs of me, no matter what age I am in them, and see myself in the photograph. Well, even at my age, it still seems a little odd to look in the mirror and see myself, and that I always do recognize me. Odder still that I'd recognize a wolf looking back at me in the mirror as some people do. The point is that in recognition seems something of a mystery, at least to me.

I loved my mother very much and felt a sense of grief that nobody else would ever see me as she was seeing me then. She knew me before I knew myself and nourished me all along. With all my sadness, there was also a smile, partly a curious one. I couldn't imagine how she was seeing all of the me at once, clearly her sight was physics amended. And a smile because in her telling me what she saw, she made clear to me a cord connecting us together through time.

Neruda also makes such cords visible.

My thoughts turned then to what it means for the invisible to become visible. My mother said what she was seeing, and I'm sure she was seeing what she was saying. But for myself, when I'm saying a cord was made visible, I'm speaking in metaphor, seeing as a way to say something was made plain.

In the bathroom where I shave my face, there is a window that looks out onto the vegetable garden. We don't bother with a fence, so animals do visit the garden and eat there. I often see woodchucks in the garden. They have burrows against the foundation of our house. Really, I'm not sure how many animals occupy these dens, many. I can look out the window at them, but the geometry is such that it's not easy for them to see me in the window. With their backs to me and intently eating, somehow they still know when I'm looking. I imagine that I can tell when someone is looking at me too. I wonder what sense it is that receives the message of someone looking? And how is it that we can sometimes look at a stranger to us and know we share a familiarity? I think sometimes we can.

"Where my soul began" seemed so easily understood that I didn't pause there, instead turning my imaginations to "that high sky." I wonder about places I've never been, and Chile of all places is rich for imagination. My soul seems so specific, objective and precise, but on further reflection I know nothing of souls.

The photograph is of Blind Wille Johnson. I snagged the photo from a page a graduate student in history at San Fransisco State University by the name of Corry Dodson for a course "Computer Methodology For Historians." I like the pages and of course the photograph. What the photograph of Blind Willie Johnson has to do with the meaning of soul, is his haunting song Won't Somebody Tell Me What Is a Soul of a Man (YouTube video). I also like very much Bruce Cockburn's version of the song which can also be heard at YouTube.

The question doesn't have a good answer even when the question makes sense. Something that makes any definition for soul difficult is that I'm rather attached to my soul as you are to yours. Souls are personal and private. Our souls are also entwined with those who've come before us and we'll leave after us in the sense I was suggesting that my mother's vision of me made a cord between us visible.

I very much like the part of the quotation: "in that high sky your mother is still washing clothes with my mother." I don't know whether he wrote this as an old man, whether his mother was dead or alive. It doesn't seem to matter much, in that this entwining of souls seems removed from ordinary time; a relationship not a thing.

Our souls are the root criterion of life and there is a universe of souls. But I can't say what is a soul of a man.

I like the word "companera." Alas, I only speak English and my tongue is so often tied as it is. In a lazy way I render "companera" as "partner." In my imagination, I'm sure Neruda is speaking of his love too.

In my imagination I have my love, but not really. Still my imagination is so vivid that in one who is my love is mutual recognition, like children whose mothers wash clothes in that high sky.

Summer is such a lovely time. Still with steps on ground soft from a summer rain, a chorus of song birds singing vespers in the twilight, the smell of sweet grass in the air, and blossoms everywhere, I can feel melancholy. In the summer it's hard to take such feelings too seriously, if for no other reason than to hear the squeals of children playing in the distance which always raise a smile.

I love the poem I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. It doesn't take long to read, or you can hear Angelou recite it accompanied by music by Buckshot Le Fonque if you're inclined towards YouTube as I am.

The caged bird sings of freedom. Surely my life is a life of great privilege. But a caged bird sings and in that song is an understanding of soul available to us all, no matter how privileged. Our souls pine and yearn for the unattainable. The slightly bitter quality is necessary as our souls are in creation.

Myopic Visionary

Nothing came of my we20 gathering. The Repower America organizer bailed out which made it easy for me to let the whole thing slide.

On the morning of July 4th my dad topped off the gasoline tank in the car. The gas he got must have been mostly water, in any case the car conked out at the end of the driveway. The car still isn't fixed, so I've been more isolated than usual this month. That's just a cop out for not trying harder to get a group together to talk turkey about what's going on and what we might do together in response. The biggest hurdle I can't seem to leap is a feeling of lacking credibility.

On a different theme, I've been thinking more recently about a generation gap between Baby Boomers like me and younger folks. I like younger folks and it's nice to cross paths on the Internet. Part of the gap as I see it has to do with different approaches to new communications technologies. And then there's how the Internet puts me in touch with things I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise, like pictures on Facebook.

The daughter of friends put up pictures from a music festival she attended last weekend, and because I'm friends with her at Facebook I get to see sets of pictures of friends of hers where she's been tagged in photos. I don't know the kids in most of the pictures, but I knew some of their parents when I was their age. One of the dads' picture was posted. I haven't seen him in years, in fact seeing his picture made me think of meeting his dad so many years ago. I don't really know what's up in these young lives, but the pictures make me think about when I was young.

Lots of people I knew then have done remarkable things in their lives. For others life descended in a downward spiral. I'm not sure what the report about me looks like. I'm not much more together now than I was back then. That gets to the nub of my credibility problem.

My mailing address now is Freedom, Pennsylvania. Back when I was in my early twenties it was Large, Pennsylvania. I much prefer Freedom. Large was an unfortunate trauma. I was very convinced that the energy crisis required people to find new ways of living. I was very excited about the work of The New Alchemy Institute and the notion of housing as a means for food production. My mother purchased a derelict property in a coal mining company town, a patch town. Some of this time I spent trying to invent a more self-reliant sort of life style with this house. It all went to hell in a hand basket. I feel sure the stories could be told in a hilarious way, failure is after all quite funny, but even now that episode of my life is painful enough that I've never had it in me to tell the stories in a funny way.

One very nice thing about being older is having old friends. Of course my friends know some of the stories from at Large. Because the story of Large had a lot to do with acting on predictions about energy shortages and energy costs, part of the fail has to do with how wrong my predictions turned out. That's not changed my general pessimism about energy today. But some of my friends have heard me spouting off about the energy crisis for over thirty years now. And, well, what have I got to show for it?

Yesterday thinking more or less along these lines I remembered a book I have from the early 1980's called The Integral Urban House. I was nowhere near as systematic as the folks who created that place, but something very much like it was what I was aiming for. It's cool to see the book is still in print. I wondered about the house now. According to this news article from late 2007 the Integral Urban House is just a house now.

In looking for info about the house online I kept running into descriptions of Sim Van der Ryn as a visionary. I really do admire Sim Van der Ryn's accomplishments, but I wondered what it takes to call yourself a visionary? I was feeling a bit snarky about it, given that in an inventory of my life, I never saw what came coming. A visionary, I'm not. Still we're far from coping with energy issues in a constructive way, so maybe I'm a myopic visionary.

I'm being hard on myself, and hard on my generational cohort. Some criticism is well-deserved. We screwed up in so many ways. I'm wonder whether young people know that many of their parents looked towards the future and thought big changes were needed? And I wonder what, if anything useful, we might tell them of our responses to that vision?

Here's what Matt Cantor the author of the news article about the Integral Urban House said of its reversion to just being a house:

The experiment could not sustain itself and I guess we all had to take the blue pill and go back to making believe that everything would continue to be fine no matter how we lived, who we killed or how much oil we burned.

Ouch! That stings! I've never seen The Matrix, but I get the blue and red pills. With age comes wisdom; I'm a bit short on any claim to wisdom myself. There's an irony too that even in selling-out I'm a sad sack. Lots of my age cohort have done pretty well by choosing the blue pill--the choice to go back to a waking sleep. Often the biggest reasons for the choosing blue over red as it were for many of us was a vision of life for our kids. What a mess.

Now the kids are grown and facing their own decisions. I suspect young people see folks my age as cynical. I'm not sure we really are. I feel quite sure we care very much about the world in which our children will live. So why is it so hard to get together to discuss what we might do together about the perilous future? I can't get a coherent story together that might lead to some collaboration among friends. I'm working on it and will try again soon to have a gathering here.

we20

I live near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is not a particularly large city. It's famous as the Steel City, but iron and steel manufacturing is now so much reduced. Indeed Pittsburgh is part of the Rust Belt, places in the Middle Atlantic region of the USA once the manufacturing hub of the US. The picture was taken from the Spring Hill neighborhood facing more or less in the direction of the city. You can see the hilly terrain. Pittsburgh not a big city, it's also a city of neighborhoods, and the metropolitan area is composed of townships towns and municipalities. There's a small town flavor to the area. And I'm really in love with it.

Pittsburgh will be the setting for a meeting of the G20--Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors--in September. My first reaction was of hometown pride in being selected as the setting for an international event. My second reaction was to think of Seattle 1999. The World Trade Organization held a Ministerial Conference in Seattle. At least 40,000 protesters gathered and it became a watershed moment drawing attention to the issue of globalization.

Pittsburgh is gearing up for its Independence Day celebrations and one of the local papers tells us that the Three Rivers Regatta will be a test of security procedures for the G20 event. Oh joy! Seriously, I want them to get the security right. Partly that desire goes back to my hometown pride--perhaps foolish; I would like Pittsburgh to be seen in a good light. I don't want anyone hurt. But at the same time I believe public voices should have an opportunity to speak and be heard. Peaceful assembly is essential to that, even if I won't be part of it. I probably will avoid the whole Forth of July celebrations downtown too!

I'm not an activist. Saying that doesn't mean that I don't think, nor that I don't understand that in a democracy I have social obligations. It is surely true that the matters discussed at the G20 Meeting have real consequences for me and people all around the Earth. I intend to pay attention as best I can.

If 1999 was a watershed moment for anti-globalization movement, then the 2008 run on the financial markets was a watershed moment too. In 1999 people in developing nations, labor unions, young people and disenfranchised people of all sorts began to deeply question the neo-liberal policies that had dominated world economics since Reagan, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. Since 2008 even the most dyed-in-the-wool capitalists are raising questions too.

The job numbers for June came out today and nearly a half million more people ;have been forced from their employment; raising the official unemployment rate to levels not seen since Ronald Reagan was president. In 1976 there were about 250,000 people in Allegheny County--where Pittsburgh is--directly engaged in steel manufacture. By 1980 there were less than 5,000. Regionally job numbers have held up better than other areas of the country in this recession. That fact is somewhat tempered by the fact the region has never fully recovered the jobs since the 1980's.

The economy sucks, people are noticing. Even though unemployment is high, there is a perverse situation that the buying power of people who are working actually increased in June. So noticing the economy is a bit more nuanced than we might think. Something working people might notice are things shared in common that are in trouble. The state is cutting arts funding; in the scheme of things a very small budget item, but one which affects many people. This summer the Pennsylvania Governors School was cancelled which for more than 20 years had brought the brightest high school students across the state together to participate in dynamic learning programs during the summer. Regional funds for libraries are being slashed among many other cuts. So even for people working feeling their money goes a little further, they see effects of the poor economy. For most of us the signs are obvious.

What is not so obvious is what to be done. More than ever people are aware of environmental limits. Take the issue of atmospheric carbon. We all know it's a problem and such a big problem that none of us alone can do much about. It's a global issue. But I also think that most Americans look at the promise of "green" jobs suspiciously. We know we take cheap energy for granted so don't know how to think about how to get out of the spin we're in. Building more houses in ever sprawling suburbs doesn't make much sense to us, but neither do all the people who were engaged in construction building them and who are now out of a job. We take it as a given that our economy depends on growth, and to our minds growth is literally fueled by fossil fuels.

In June Jason Bradford put a presentation he made at "The Generation Green Tent" during the Summer Arts and Music Festival at the Benbow Lake State Recreation Area. It's a great presentation that I encourage reading and sharing. One point he made was:

Problems with the environment or natural resources are problems with the economy because human economic systems are a subset of planetary ecological systems. Environmental issues should be the main topics on page 1 of the business section of your local newspaper—assuming you still have one.

He also makes the point that we are about off our rockers because of the cognitive dissonance over what we know and our assumptions about the economy. Perhaps in 1999 there were lots of Americans who interpreted the issues of globalization in familiar frames like: Buy American, or Don't ship our jobs oversees. But now the reality of global climate change has taken hold. The link Bradford makes between economics and environment is very real to us, even if we don't talk together about it much.

The other evening a paid organizer for Repower America called me on telephone. I must have signed a petition or given out my details at some point. My sales resistance isn't so strong, so I try pretty quickly to dispense with such calls. What kept me connected a little longer was the money pitch never began. And that left me with an opportunity to run my mouth, saying I'm not going to do anything if it means my having to go anywhere. This isn't entirely a snot-nosed reaction, transportation is something I have to plan and ration. But Pablo on the other end must have learned well in organizer's school because he came back with an idea for "Green Barbecues." The idea is to invite your friends over to talk about economic/environmental issues. Perhaps together we can do something useful. Then closing the sale, Pablo had me pick a date. The date is July 8, 2009.

we20

In April the G20 met in London. In advance of that meeting I stumbled upon an effort called we20--that's their FaceBook page. The basic idea of we20 is for people all over to create meetings of 20 or so to discuss the dire problems we all face. And the most important part is to try to think of a plan to put actions to our words. The organization is entirely neutral, we20 doesn't take a position. What they have done, however is to create tools so that individual we20 meetings can share with others. That Web site is here. At the time I first discovered we20, I thought how smart that all was, but didn't act on it. Then recently I noticed a Tweet from we20 at Twitter about Pittsburgh and it jogged my memory.

I've committed to try to entice a few friends to my place for a Green Barbecue so that the Repower America organizer can encourage the people who show up to sign their petition. I think that's a good thing.

Almost all of my friends want as little to do with the Internet as possible. We talk about face to face being so important, but I'm not sure how many I can actually attract Wednesday night. Still, I know my friends think they should be doing something about the pickle we're all in. It took Repower America to get me off my duff, but the essential thing for grassroot efforts is for people to get together and share some intention. With these Green Barbecues, Repower America hasn't developed a way to tell the stories online like we20 has. So while my friends might not see anything about it online--including this blog post--I'm still keen on using the Internet to connect. So I've listed the event at the we20 Web site. I'll also try to report on it there and at the FaceBook page.

I maybe missing something essential, but I don't think it matters too much what we call small grassroots efforts to get together to address our challenges. But I do think it important more and more people do get together for that purpose. There are online communication tools, I think they're great and intend to explore them. Still the basic point is to get together and get to work. Our survival and happiness depends on it.

Stories

My friend Pingting noting my lack of posting here wonder if I got lost in the garden. I have been busy in the garden the last few months, but I've also been writing elsewhere. One of those places is Ned.com which is a social network I like. Ned.com grew out of the Omidyar Network's experiment with social network sites to help people organize to do good. That experiment closed and Ned uses the coding of the old site. There are a few hold-overs from the Onet days there too.

I like having pages of things I'm thinking about online. My thoughts sort of go around in circles and it's nice to have pages to remind me where I was when I last took up one topic or another. I'm quite forgetful, so I also like having access to old links. These sorts of purposes work against other people engaging with what I put up. In discussion forums people expect others to say more or less on topic. Often my experience at a place like Ned.com is to be thinking about multiple threads so my comments tend to blend topics. This can be very annoying to others. But people sharing a history together, even online, has its advantages; among them is that some people are used to me and my digressions.

Recently at Ned.com a German-Palestinian national introduced a project he's embarking on. By the way the link is to a Page at WiserEarth another social networking site like Ned.com where the purpose is to connect people together for positive action. Al Saad is new to Ned.com, so I didn't want to leave one of my rambling missives on his thread, for fear of putting him off, nevertheless his project sent my mind reeling in many directions.

Al Saad after living in Germany for the last twenty years plans to return to Palestine to help catalyze the creation of a holistic green economy there. I've noticed that Al Saad mentions not infrequently that English is not his home language. I've also noticed that all of the pages he's put up in English are clear. So if you're interested to find out more about his efforts, don't let the English be a reason not to. Wael Al Saad is using online social media to connect to others, so there are plenty of ways to follow and interact with him. I think the WiserEarth page is the best place to start.

I think in stories and I think most people do. Something that stories do is to establish that something is part of a whole and meanings aren't just personal, but created by groups. When I encountered Al Saad's project two different sets of stories started spinning: Stories about Palestine. And Stories about creating a green economy.

The subject of a green economy is one that dominates the threads at Ned.com. My friend Linda Nowakowski introduced me to Buddhist Economics. Nowakowski is not Buddhist, but she had been teaching business related courses in Thailand for many years. I've heard to half-jokingly say that her mission is to take the Buddhist out of Buddhist economics. By that I think she means finding ways to relate the really good ideas contained in Buddhist economics to fellow westerners. The term Buddhist economics is related to E. F. Schumacher who wrote the popular seventies book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Schumacher's ideas are still current, not the least of the reasons for that is the work of the E. F. Schumacher Society, which has labored since 1980 to create and promote strong local economies.

Schumacher coined the term Buddhist economics, but it wasn't coming out of deep scholarship about Buddhist theology. Indeed, Schumacher himself was a late convert to Roman Catholicism. And his interest in that general direction came from time spent in India in the 1950's where he developed a keen interest in Gandhian economics. Thailand has a long Buddhist tradition, so the emergent schools of Buddhist economics there. There is a wonderful online resource Buddhist Economics by Buddhist monk Phrabhavanaviriyakhun. Even in Thailand, Buddhist economics remains part of heterodox economic thinking, nevertheless it is part of economic discussion there.

Buddhist economics interests me in large part because it turns thinking about economics towards thinking about the stories we use to make sense of things. There are plenty of posts online of scientist ruminating about religion. I'm sure that thinking scientifically is a very useful invention. My problem with the notion that people should give up on religion and take up science, or essays something like that, has not so much to do with science as it does with how I believe people think: We think in stories. The method of science is to create new knowledge by testing propositions. Yet people need to understand the world as part of a whole and religious stories create a foundation for most people. What's more because stories are socially constructed and ubiquitous in our everyday lives most of the time we don't explicitly think about the stories explicitly. People today confront great challenges. To name just a couple there's the twin challenge of peak oil and climate change cause by among other things carbon in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

I'll be the first to admit that my recent writing at this blogs--sparse as it is--is quite awful. It doesn't hold up. I think it's part of wrestling with how we as people know. I'm convinced by science, but the stories remain. So I'm now, and have been clumsily trying to figure out some consilience between the two realms.

I do spend a lot of my time gardening. It's a bit embarrassing even with all the effort my garden looks chaotic. Some of my friends wonder why I spend so much time on flowers; Why not stuff you can eat? Part of the reason for flowers is simply serendipitous. There were areas of the property that were hard to maintain and growing stuff there seemed the easiest thing to do. I have had a long interest in organic gardening, and certainly have grown food over the years. I am also interested in permaculture. Permaculture agricultural techniques mimic natural ecologies. But permaculture is not only about growing things, it's also about culture. Part of the allure of permaculture is the sense that it's easy. There are tales of people growing all they need to live with just a few hours of labor a day. I don't really think such stories are apocryphal, but I do think it's hard work to invent and get systems like that up and running.

Agriculture with fields of one crop in neat rows mimics what happens after a fire or a flood when a more complex ecosystem is disrupted. Such monocultures aren't really sustainable over a long time. And of course monocultures are very vulnerable to being wiped out by pests and the weather. Agriculture is hard risky work and over the 10,000 years or so people have been practicing, we've come up with clever ways to deal with the risks and downsides. Permaculture seeks to make growing systems that are more durable and resilient and yet still productive. Wonderful work is being done in this direction and I'm all for it. In a way my flower beds allow me an opportunity to explore and learn about this type of growing.

Something I spend too much time on is mowing grass. I would like to move towards much less of that. But my elderly father owns this property and I'm not going to change the stories of grass in his mind. He's also got very much of a farmer's idea of how growing food is done. That's good and I've learned much from him. But to some extent his vegetable garden represents a bunch of chores I don't particularly like. In particular, I just don't get his fascination with tilling the ground so much. Anyhow, the reason I do some of my gardening activities has to do with stories. These sorts of stories are along the lines of: That's how it's done. That's what they say. Mostly we never go into the whys of neatly sheared grass or denuding the soil to grow things.

Wael Al Saad's ideas for Palestine are closely related to permaculture ideas of mimicking complex ecosystems not just in agriculture, but also in business enterprises. So part of the challenge is to find ways for people to hear these new stories without the old stories of "They say" and "That's the way it is done" precluding them.

Palestine is an ancient and holy land and the religious and political stories often work against collaborative approaches to solving problems. Indeed one of the first thoughts that popped into my head--not thoughts really--were maps and pictures of the area from a book of Children's Bible stories I had as a child. Somehow in my mind these images were yellow from age, even though I haven't seen the book in probably forty years and I have no idea whether the pages have actually yellowed. That was a big clue to me that some of my stories of Palestine are tired stereotypes. There are always real pitfalls to stereotypes, and the perceived affection for the land from childhood acculturation may be a serious pitfall. In any case thought were running as I read some of the materials Al Saad has posted.

I've become really fond of the Web site Religious Dispatches. A couple of recent articles are interesting in re stories about Palestine. The first is more obviously connected than the second, Time for Jews to Abandon the Old Foundation Myth of Israel? by Ira Chernus. It's worth reading the whole article. Chernus in part of the piece talks about the work of Brit Tezedek v'Shalom, an American peace and justice organization. The group addresses head on the foundational myths of modern Israel and explores new foundations as a way towards peace.

The second article is Disco-Reggae at Abu Ghraib: Music, the Bible and Torture. Author Erin Runions explores the question:

What does it mean when a country that likes to proclaim itself a defender of freedom plays a song about liberation to people it is torturing?

The essay perhaps isn't directly related to Palestine or Wael Al Saad's project, but is related to the foundational myths of the USA.

The 2000 presidential election in the United States was not settled immediately, so there was a period for debate. I did not vote for G. W. Bush, because he seemed quite frightening to me. At a party shortly after the election--I think, it could have been just after 9/11--an old acquaintance lit into me about my raising concerns about Bush's millenarian beliefs. I think part of the ferocity of his reaction was the sense that in making it I was being disingenuous. I was sincere about my concerns, so as the administration proceeded I was attuned to events premised on such thinking. Nonetheless even now I'm startled by some revelations of what happened dribble out. Gentleman's Quarterly's slideshow of Pentagon intelligence briefs sent to President Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq surprised me. As did the fact that Bush told France’s President Jacques Chirac:

This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.

I'm not sure why I'm surprised, but the surprise is related to the cognitive dissonance that the sordid facts of torture under my flag provoke.

The "Disco-Reggae" song in Runions' piece is Rivers of Babylon (YouTube) by Boney M. Years ago I was entertaining two of my aunts with a trip to the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. We stopped to eat at the "Dirty O" a hot dog shop. The real name is the Original Hot Dog Shop, but the "Dirty O" gives hint that the place is slightly dangerous. I avoided sitting upstairs near the bar, but was still worried a little about the whole idea of eating there. The hot dogs and especially the French fries are great, so my aunties were enjoying it. Over the juke box the original Melodians rendition of "River's of Babylon" came on. One of my aunts heard "Zion" in the song and said that the song is why a grandchild is named Zion. I mentioned for the edification of the other aunt, who knows her Bible, that it was a psalm put to music--it's psalm 137. Runions points out the irony of forcing an Iraqi POW to listen to loud repetitious playings of the song:

When US interrogators chose songs with references to Babylon linking Iraq and ancient Babylon, they were also tapping into a lengthy apocalyptic tradition in which Babylon becomes a mythical figure of evil; the biblical account of Babylon conquering Judah, exiling the people of Israel, and destroying the temple has long been read as part of an enduring spiritual struggle. In the United States, Babylon is often used to represent what the nation opposes.

Yet at Abu Ghraib, the allegory of “Rivers of Babylon” works uneasily, contradictorily. In the usual pattern of apocalyptic and national biblical interpretation we would expect the ancient Israelite captives to represent the United States, under threat by Babylon. But in this case, it is the Iraqi (“Babylonian”) detainees weeping by the waters of Babylon, while US soldiers are the cruel captors.

Reason is very important to finding a way out of the mess humanity faces today, but reason alone seem insufficient. We also must become more aware of the stories which guide our lives and share new stories. Doing that is much easier said than done!

In thinking about the thread at Ned.com about Wael Al Saad's efforts to create green economies in Palestine, that's the point I wanted to make. But it took my roundabout rambling to come to the point. I'm still not sure what to write in thread because the focus is on "practical" issues. Mostly it seems raising the topic of stories seems to be a trivial concern: just stories. Still I'm convinced stories motivate much of what we do. Stories , what "they say" are fundamental to why I mow so much grass and do a hundred other things in my daily life. Stories animate our economies and determine the shape of markets. Stories lay behind why Americans torture.

Theologian Walter Wink in an essay Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence wrote:

This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.

There surely are peacemakers who are atheist and agnostic; just as surely there are religious peacemakers. Engagement across this divide of differing perspectives is a daunting challenge. Still the importance of working towards more peaceful coexistence is so important to be motivating. And to me it seems that taking stories seriously is an essential element in building such bridges. All of us are influenced in what we do do by stories. It is essential that we engage them.

Theological Musings

DaisyDeadhead asks in comments:

Did you get lost in the garden or what?

Yeah sort of. The bigger issue is trying to make complicated arguments and finding my thinking and writing not really up to the task. Then there's my idea of editing, which apparently goes something like: wait long enough to publish your long-winded post and probably nobody will read it anyway:-) I'll read over what I've wrote long ago and a publish it so I can go on to the next thing.

Continuing my habit of pointing to two rather unrelated things and drawing some sort of specious relationship, today I want to point primarily to two articles. Occasionally my Bloglines blog reader will update to an old post on some of the blogs I read. That happened recently with Keith Hart's blog The Memory Bank which pointed to a post made in November of 2008, Notes on the counter-revolution. So that's the first article I want to talk a little about. The second is an article by Jeff Sharlet in May's Harper's Magazine, Jesus Killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military. I subscribe to Harpers and I've never figured out exactly how much on their Web site is available to people who don't subscribe. My hunch is that the article is behind the fire wall; I still want to talk about it.

I discovered Kieth Hart's blog, Memory Bank, by way of Jeremy Weate's Naijablog last autumn. Memory Bank has become a real favorite and I enjoy Hart's tweets too. Notes on the counter revolution was published on his blog in 2008, but from the text it seems it was written in 2003 when Hart was Visiting Professor in African Studies and Anthropology at Northwestern University. In the piece one of the threads Hart picks up is being invited to a public meeting of a Committee against War and Racism. Hart remarks that he'd affected a dismissive attitude toward American progressives. On the train trip to this meeting Hart picked up pamphlet by Eliot Weinberger called 9/12 published by Prickly Paradigm Press. Prickly Paradigm Press is an outgrowth of Prickly Pear Pamphlets Hart started in Cambridge in 1993 with Anna Grimshaw. Hart writes:

All of this was passing through my mind while the Chicago Transit Authority train made halting progress toward Howard (a place chiefly known as the nearest source of booze and sex for the inmates of that dry Methodist town where I now earn my living). And it came to me then, not an original thought, but original to me. That we are living in fascism now. I recall a book of essays about America between the wars, called The Aspirin Age. A major theme was fascism then Huey Long, Father McLoughlin etc. And I realised what Weinberger’s pamphlet had demonstrated, that the Bush clique were a continuation of that thread, only this time with the corporate state within a state, the Pentagon in tow (fueled by two-thirds of American taxes), with the most irresponsible American corporations in charge and with fundamentalist Christianity as a vision for fixing the world. I understood more fully why my American friends were depressed. I could still hang on to my own vision of the liberal democratic tradition, but I can also now embrace more fully the vision of the American and European left. America has come under the control of fascists.

I think he's right about the "take over" and think in those terms in my own mind. But the word "Fascism" is so incendiary as to be almost useless in discussion. I haven't found a good alternative. David Neiwart has looked very carefully at the various strains of rightist politics in the USA. He's called people like Rush Limbaugh "para-Fascists" with the prefix meaning "near," I suppose. Trying to find a link to a reference to "para-Fascism" I landed over at his blog Orcinus and the big volume of threads on Fascism. This post A little more about Fascism provides evidence about how hard it is to talk about an American Fascism rigorously. I saw that at Daily Kos there's a conversation with Neiwert where he succinctly defines proto- and para- Fascism:

Proto-fascism is the full constellation of fascist traits arranged in nascent and semi-nascent forms. It’s essentially fascism waiting to mature. Basic examples: The Ku Klux Klan, the Patriot movement.

Para-fascism is something like quasi-fascism: An assemblage of some of the traits that make up the fascist constellation, but not all of them. Thus movement conservatism is para-fascist in the sense that it has a number of the fascist traits, but not all of them – particularly not essential traits like the open embrace of an ethic of violence.

Political scientist, Dr. Lawrence Britt's The 14 characteristics of Fascism is a handy reference if Fascism's meaning is very unclear. There are legitimate arguments about good definitions of the term. But there's a general understanding--being much too loose interpreting Neiwart's careful definition of para-Fascism as "sort of"--is how I agree with Hart's observation.

I voted for Barack Obama enthusiastically, but I never thought his administration would represent some sort of restoration. Optimistically I imagine an Obama administration might provide a little more space to turn the ship of state from the brink. I waver between pessimism and optimism. There's no doubt any turning will take time and it's hard to predict in advance where we'll wind up.

There's a lot to Sharlet's piece on the evangelical transformation of the military. One point that stood out to me was how important the Vietnam War and it's aftermath was to this transformation. Sharlet connects the lessons of guerrilla combat in the Vietnam conflict to a tactic of "infiltration" by fundamentalist Christians in the ranks of secular institutions. The Vietnam era perhaps was a catalyst, but Sharlet's own research shows that Abraham Vereide, the founder of The Family was keen on the tactic of infiltration long before Vietnam.

Sharlet previously wrote a book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. You can get some of the gist of what that's about by reading Sharlet's 2003 Harper's piece Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats. Talking about "infiltration" by fundamentalist Christians gets me pegged as some sort of conspiracy nut. It is difficult to talk about American Fascism, there's plenty of nuance and the broad brush approach glosses over important distinctions, just as there are important distinctions between fundamentalist Christian groups. I'm not at all sure of the extent or the various ways fundamentalist Christian organizations are related to one another. But from my own experience as a young man caught up in pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity, I saw of evidence for the employment of strategic infiltration. It seems fair to say that at least some well-connected Christian para-Fascist groups use the strategy of infiltration.

In his recent article Sharlet relates the views of "another veteran serving in the Senate"--I wonder who?--who relates the rise of fundamentalism in the officer ranks of the military to the racial integration of the institution. The military had become split along racial lines so religion became a way for "white men at the heart of military culture to come to an understanding of themselves based on something other than skin color."

Sharlet also points to the waning days of the Reagan Administration and a rule change. Prior to the change the military had apportioned chaplains based on the demographics, so Presbyterians, Catholics, Methodists, Southern Baptists, etc. were all represented as separate categories. In 1987 the rule change lumped Protestant denominations together as simply "Protestant." Sharlet notes:

Today more than two thirds of the military's 2,900 active-duty chaplins are affiliated with evangelical or Pentacostal denominations.

The "take-over" didn't just happen, but was implemented.

I don't equate Christianity, even fundamentalist Christianity with Fascism. I know from listening to Keith Hart's Cambridge lecture on International development that Hart doesn't use such a broad brush to paint fundamentalists and Pentecostals as Fascists either. He points to the collusion of interests: of corporate state within a state, the bloated Pentagon, irresponsible and larcenous corporations to new variations of Christian fundamentalism which all together make such a toxic brew.

I've remarked many times here that I don't believe in God. My religious friends have a hard time believing me when I say that. I am not hostile to religion and was raised as a Christian. There's much in various religions I find good and beautiful. As a result many of my atheist friends have a hard time believing me when I talk about not believing in God. I'm just not sure how to think and talk about God. And it seems that thinking and talking about religion is something else entirely. Nevertheless these are subjects that I think about.

It was a surprise to me in reading Sharlet's piece that my reactions to the Christian views expressed there were not so much from the point of view of an un-believer as from the point of view of my understandings of Christianity. Of course, as an un-believer my point of view is suspect, still it seemed curious to me how I was approaching the topic.

Now with president Obama it's the Republicans yelling "Fascist." This doesn't mean Americans right and left are joining together in anti-Fascism. The opinions of what constitutes Fascism are highly divergent. The Editors at The Poor Man Institute have ridiculed Republican commentator Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Change relentlessly. The Editors even have a book Liberal Fascism out. It's only five bucks to download and I probably will. Satire makes me laugh and laughter can indeed shift our perspectives. Keith Hart makes and important point about American Fascism that it's a vision for fixing the world. In that light it's perceived as a very good thing, but the ideology makes me recoil, nevertheless it's serious business.

Compassion is a emotional reaction to the suffering of others, profound enough that we want to do something to alleviate the suffering. The Christian soldiers in Sharlet's piece believe God building a new nation through their efforts and sacrifices. That point of view is not something new to Christianity, to other religions or even among atheist ideologues. Karen Armstrong was one of this year's Ted Prize winners. In her talk she said that compassion is central to all the world's religions. Certainly, the compassionate stream of Christianity is also very long and ancient. It's easier to imagine that the violent stream and compassionate stream of historical Christianity run parallel and never meeting. But the metaphor of streams suggest they necessarily merge just as waters do. Perhaps what brings them together is the emphatic impulse to repair the world. It's important to feel you are doing good, but divergent ideas of what "doing good" means is often baffling in their differences.

Tonight I read a very moving piece in The Walrus, No Small Mercy: How a Rwandan genocide survivor made peace with the man who almost killed her (HT: Africa Unchained). The stories of Alice and Emmanuel are told in their own voices. For both worshiping in churches is something they did prior to the genocide and after. Religious belief is meaningful for both. But their story of forgiveness doesn't refer to God, the stories are deeply human.

Religious beliefs for many, if not most, people provides overarching themes to make sense of the world. Quite diverse sets of beliefs become attached to religion. There are atheists who seem to imagine that by disposing of God other beliefs that many atheists also object to will become unattached and fall away. That seems wishful thinking to me. People have to make sense of the world and religion is one way we do it.

Still it's important to for consensus across divergent religious beliefs. The founders of the USA were particularly concerned about this and our Constitution prohibits the establishment of religion in order that there be a framework for democratic consensus without state religion. Sharlet's article reveals that many in the officer ranks consider their oath to defend the Constitution secondary to a religious mission.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus reviewed Reza Aslan's book How to Win a Cosmic War. Lewis-Kraus quotes from Aslan's introduction in re the USA warring against Muslim extremists that what's needed is:

"to strip this ideological conflict of its religious connotations, to reject the religiously polarizing rhetoric of our leaders and theirs, to focus on the material matters at stake, and to address the earthly issues that always lie behind the cosmic impulse."

Many Americans are probably unaware of the extent of religious extremism in the United States military. Sharlet's article helps to shine a light where attention is urgently needed.

Dirt

Blogging holds an attraction to me, but apparently it's not at all addictive. I seem to be writing posts that don't really come together on a theme. I still have some ideas about that; Buddhist economics, religion, social change, etc. But not tonight.

The news of the shooting deaths of three Pittsburgh police officers has made national headlines. Much has been made of the paranoid politics of the shooter. The attention seems a good thing in as much as we're infamous for The Paranoid Style in American Politics and the economic situation increases my worry about it. The fact of the matter is when it comes to tragedies that get a lot of press, I know that I have to step back and put my toe in the water gradually. I avoided TV Saturday, even still I heard the TV footage of the gun fire. Skimming the paper today I was moved to tears reading about the slain police officers. So I went outside to play in the garden.

The daffodils are in full bloom. This particular picture is from last year about this time, but there are daffodils all over. Most of the daffodils come from digging bulbs from that patch, remnants of a garden planted long before my time at this place. In the summer that patch grows up to bramble and golden rod, but underneath it all is a carpet of Ornithogalum or Star of Bethlehem. those bulbs spread wildly and so at various times I've not been too fond of them. Now I sort of marvel. I suspect just a few bulbs long ago came in the mail and were planted. Or perhaps it was a friendly gift; either way the vast territory now covered probably began with just a few bulbs.

Last Spring I dug a bed along the front of the property. While I had long wanted to plant along the front, I hadn't until then. My father never wanted me too, in part because he thought the surveyors hadn't allowed enough space in the front and the fields. Last year they planted corn in the field right in front. When the farmer plowed he turned the tractor on our plot when he plowed and left deep ruts. I mow--as much grass as there is to mow--with a walk behind mower and ruts are a pain in the neck. So I cut the sod off all along the front. I dug up some lilac suckers and planted them at the front edge of the bed and seeded the rest with sunflowers, flax and some other stuff. What I seeded in didn't thrive, especially the length near the corn planting. I think the run off form the rains simply compacted the soil too much. Nevertheless I was please to discover this Spring that every lilac sucker had lived.

Over the years I've grown various sorts of ornamental grasses on the property. So I thought to dig those and make a hedge on the field side of the line. That's been slow going. Really it seems I can only manage to dig one large clump, divide it up and plant it a day. I'm almost done, just another 15 or 20 feet to plant. But in the meantime I also have to attend to the bomb craters left where I've dug the grasses. Oh and there's plenty more transplanting to do.

Over the years I've worked in my dear friend Cora's garden too. Cora is such a delightful person I simply enjoy visiting her. There's also something very special about the place where she lives, it's enchanted. Always there seems a bit of magic interacting with that space. For one thing there's a steep gorge with a small creek that runs hard in the rain, so there's a lot of stone around. I like rocks.

Sometimes when people visit my place they ask where I got all the rocks. I dug them up. The back part of the property is very rocky ground. For many years I cursed the rocks because it makes any digging very slow going. Still over the years seeing how nice stone walls as stepping paths are, now I only wish I had the gumption to dig more. I don't really, only what's unavoidable, well then of course when I come upon a rock. I say the rocks sing to me, but it's not as if I hear a tune, rather it's more thinking of a spot where the rock would fit well in the garden.

I had arranged to meet Cora in her garden on Friday afternoon. It rained hard on Friday so I went anyway. Cora's husband had used a back hoe to dredge the creek bed in a stretch to lower the water table near their garage. Cora reacted with some disturbance. In part because a nice stand of Forsythia lay mangled under the soil from the creek bed.

The soil around here can be quite heavy with clay in parts. The area right around where I live was known for its pottery making in earlier days. In places in my back garden, in between areas of very stony ground, are veins of clay quite suitable for making pots. That's true of Cora's garden too, although her place is close to the Allegheny river and the clay is of a different sort than by my house.

The soil from the creek bed was rocky and full of shale in some parts, and the ground upon which it was laid quite sticky with clay. It might seem that trying to grade the area and untangle the broken bushes buried under soil in the rain made little sense. But once I began the wet almost seemed an advantage. The ground was so soft that as I pulled the rocks out I could chuck them to the stream embankment and they stay put. There wasn't enough stone to make a proper wall, but enough to secure the stream bank so the soil wouldn't erode right away back into the stream. In between the rocks will provide good spots for planting. Once I had gotten the bigger rocks out in a small section I used a grape hoe to grade throwing the smaller rock on top of the larger ones. I was covered in mud from flinging rocks and soil. To my amazement I was able to grade the whole length, probably 75 feet or so long, before dark.

I was pleased.

Back at home one of the areas where I gathered ornamental grasses was along a section of the back boundary planting behind an old stone barn foundation. Years ago I'd planted three lilacs and a line of Forsythia. Outside the barn foundation, a dairy barn, they must have dumped stones and cinders for years to keep the mud down from the cows. So there was a long section between the lilacs and the Forsythia I hadn't planted to shrubs because the digging was so rough. I had wanted to extend the lilac hedge between the existing lilacs and the Forsythia. First I had to dig up the grasses and then also attend to dividing perennials planted too just to get the soil reasonably level. It's been probably six years since I dug in those beds to any extent.

People often say you can improve the soil. Here in the USA the approach is very often to buy bales of peat moss. I've bought many bales of peat moss over the years. I'm not sure it's really a very environmentally friendly thing to do as the bogs the peat comes from are sensitive ecosystems. But the truth be told the real reason I don't use peat moss anymore is I could never afford the money and time to incorporate it into the soil in the quantities needed to really make a difference. The best way to improve the soil I've found is to grow a variety of plants in the area to be mended. Digging in the back bed after six years I was impressed with how much more friable the soil is after six years.

So finally today I'd prepared the soil enough to gather a batch of lilac suckers to plant. Earlier in the week I had also dug up some Forsythia suckers to lengthen that section of hedge too. The suckers are small, so it will take a few years for them to grow into size. I've been spreading the perennials about. Years ago I got a packet of Rudbeckia seed--All Sorts--from Thompson and Morgan. They were pretty Black-eyed Susans, but only one of the species in the mix lasted over the winters. I think it must be Rudbeckia fulgida, I'm not certain however. They bloom a week or ten days later than the Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm' I've planted and are taller. 'Goldsturm' is a selection of Rudbeckia fulgida, and the differences between the plants makes me think my identification might be wrong. Whatever the species is, it spreads. While Black-eyed Susan's may not be my favorite flower the great drifts of them in bloom really are pleasing. So in my lilac garden I dug up some plants. I didn't think there were so many there, but in no time I had a big arm load which I carried up to the front boundary. It seems a bit boring to pull apart the older plants, but I must have planted over five hundred in the front bed. I know from experience that these little divisions establish quickly.

I used to start lots of plants under lights to set out. One of these years I'll get back to that because I always enjoy having the variety, I especially find it nice for vegetables. Alas, for the last few years I haven't bothered. One of the discouragements was I was getting acquisitive and planting seeds for plants needing more care than I would give them. So the variety of flowers I'm growing now isn't as diverse as I want. For the last few years I've planted more and more beds with plants that grow with little care. Still the list of species like that is long and I've been busy spreading plants around.

So for the last few weeks I've been delighting in the dirt. The frogs at my little pond are peeping. These are little tree frogs, we call them Spring Peepers. Later in the season Green Frogs will sing. In the Spring I seem to have endless ideas of things to do in the garden, but by June I'm worn out. The pace of growth accelerates and by June it's a verdant season of grass. Ah but the Spring puts on a splendid show here in Western Pennsylvania. Sometimes, especially when the trees are in bloom,it's excruciatingly beautiful.

Social Studies

Spring has arrived and I've been busy outside gardening incompetently. We've got a rain deficit, but today it rained which gave me an excuse not to work outside. In theory this allows me time to blog, but I've been putting it off.

Part of the problem about writing is I know what I'm writing is of little interest to anyone. The reason for writing is to explore various contrary ideas. One of those ideas is "Religion can be a powerful force for good in the world." That idea resonates with me, although I've got big problems with the ways the force of religion are playing out in the world for the worse.

I also have a hunch that Buddhist economics has something important to offer the study of economics. I'm no scholar! My hunch seems to follow the trail Karl Polanyi blazed with the insistence that economics are embedded in societies and cultures. Karl Polanyi contrasted two views of economics: the neoclassical and what he termed the substantive meaning of economics. It's this latter meaning, of a livelihood strategy, of most interest to me.

Meanwhile I'm all over the place in my thinking and am not sure what to do except ramble along.

That's a screenshot of a bloggingheads.tv episode featuring Carl Zimmer and Paul Ehrlich on the subject of Cultural Evolution. I wrote a grumpy piece in July about Ehrlich's ideas about cultural evolution. I've got to admit that seeing Ehrlich on video makes it hard for me to be cross. I very much agree with the sense of urgency he feels about humanity's prospects. But I still think the metaphor of cultural evolution confuses more than it illuminates.

Ehrlich thinks people need to change behaviors, and quickly, if humanity is to survive. Who isn't feeling the sense of urgency about the crises which confront us? Clearly science, that is the practice of reasoned arguments coupled with careful practical observations of the world, has much to offer as a way toward solutions.

The conduct of science is embedded in society and culture too and there are some blind spots. It seems to me that Ehrlich presumes social and behavioral sciences address haven't met with the same sort of progress as natural sciences have is a result of social scientists being insufficiently scientific. I don't agree with that assessment entirely. But mostly it's his apparent view of "culture" as some physical entity which seems most off base.

I agree we need to change, but how to is the question. I think social and behavioral sciences are immature sciences, but even still the work of social sciences finds its way incorporated into various technologies. Like the discoveries in the natural sciences leading to technological applications having polluting and antisocial effect; eg. nuclear bombs, the application of social sciences is hardly all good.

Public relations is a suspect field and the career of Edward Bernays, one of founding fathers of the field, provides clear examples of how social science research is applied. If change is needed, it is well to examine propaganda and the relationship between it and social studies.

A couple of Sunday's ago one the Pittsburgh Post Gazette's conservative mouth pieces, Jack Kelly wrote a column, Democrats unleash the attack dogs: But they picked the wrong target in Rush Limbaugh. Jack Kelly's columns tend to annoy me, and I suppose that's a reason I read them. The lede:

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer owe much of their 15 minutes of fame to Saul Alinsky, a Chicago Marxist who died in 1972.

made me scratch my head. Saul Alinsky a Marxist? I'd never heard that before and I wondered whether Kelly was right.

Searching online provides plenty of hits to conservatives calling Alinsky a Marxist. But there is much in Alinsky's career that would suggest otherwise. Here's what Alinsky said himself in a Playboy interview in 1972:

PLAYBOY: Did you consider becoming a party member prior to the Nazi-Soviet Pact?

ALINSKY: Not at any time. I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

...My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it's a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: "For the general welfare." That's where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today.

The line that Alinsky was a Marxist is parroted all over in American media. It's easy to imagine that person might wrongly conclude that the author of a book named Rules for Radicals was a Marxist. But it stretches the imagination to the breaking point to think that the numerous examples of "Alinsky was a Marxist" in the rightest media is a mistake. Rather it seems transparently a propaganda ploy.

I've become very fond of posts at Religion Dispatches. Yesterday there was a post by Hussein Rashid Osama and Orientalism: Where Islamophobes Meet Al-Qaeda. The article made me think about what's going on with the Alinsky = Marxist meme on right wing media sites. Rashid writes:

When Islamophobes want to demonize Islam, it is easy enough to take a passage from scripture and extrapolate all sorts of general ideas about how Muslims act, what they believe, or who they are in some fundamental way.

Rashid also presents a concise exposition about how Edward Said's ideas of Orientalism operate in America. I risk going way off track going into the post in detail, but the post is worth reading. Having brought up Edward Said's name it's fair to point out that Said was a frequent target of the same rightist factions who make Alinsky out to be a Marxist. What is relevant here is the sort of hermeneutic technique Rashid points to. Alinsky's writing certainly isn't scripture, but a similar technique is applied to his writing in order to prove he was a Marxist.

Oh crikey! I've got about a dozen pages open in tabs from sites like FreeRepublic, FrontPage Magazine, The Eagle Fourm, and various sites they link to. I'm trying to figure which ones best demonstrate my thesis. There are so many pages it's hard to pick! What many pages have in common is to posit deception on Alinsky's part, to say that his words are a sort of code. This article by John Perazzo illustrates this technique. Melanie Phillips at the British magazine The Spectator quotes Perazzo's article extensively in order to substantiate her thesis:

[I]n the world of Barack Obama, community organisers are a key strategy in a different game altogether; and the name of that game is revolutionary Marxism.

Part of the charm of a British publication, even a conservative one, is that articles like Phillips get some push back, something American-based conservative outlets prevent.

One commenter, AnotherPerspective, remarks:

Melanie, you have a remarkable talent.Linking Obama, Alinsky, and Marxism with so little effort or apparent embarassment. Perhaps next you could link good and evil, darkness and light, heaven and hell, intelligence and stupidity.

I'm no Marxist. A big part of that has to do with a philosophical difficulties with rigid ideologies, a position similar to Alinsky's. A part of it too is not really having the fortitude to be rigorous. Alinsky is long dead, and using his "Marxism" to tar Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as "Marxists" isn't convincing. There's another problem with it, and that's how is skews informed comment about Marxism in American discourse.

Public Relations and propaganda surely do influence people, and that influence is measured by changes in behavior. It's not satisfying to think that propaganda is just a tool which can be used for good or ill. In my prescription of the way the world ought to be, reason seems more virtuous. So it's ironic that one area of "successful" application of knowledge created by social science are "killer" propaganda and PR techniques.

Of course the Internet changes things. Recently I saw a page commenting on the influence of paid links on search engine results pages. The example used to illustrate is fascinating. After the World Trade Tower attack, it was revealed there were large put options taken out the day before the attack. Authorities thought these transactions anomalous. I heard about them at the time, but the issue seemed to fade into the woodwork. Apparently Mayo Shattuck III the head of A.B. Brown unit of Deutsche bank at the time grew sick of seeing his name come up in search results and hired reputation managers to improve the situation.

The Irish Elk is a species of deer that went extinct about 11,000 years ago. An enormous species, skeletal remains have antlers as long as twelve feet across. The consensus reason for the evolution of the trait is as a process of sexual selection. The big honking antlers conferred a mating advantage.

I've already said I'm not very comfortable with Ehrlich's cultural evolution project. I think cultural evolution makes sense only as a metaphor. But as a metaphor might social change driven by propaganda bear some formal resemblance to sexual selection in evolutionary biology? I doubt it. Here's another throw away question: What sort of designer would put a twelve foot long, eighty pound head rack on a deer? Ehrlich's urgency to understand cultural evolution, at root it seems is a call for technologies of social change. The current state of the art doesn't give me a good feeling about this project.