Common Wonders
Co-creating a culture of peace
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The Big Lie Marches on
The war is over, sort of, but the Big Lie marches on: that democracy is flowering in Iraq, that America is stronger and more secure than ever, that doing what’s right is the prime motivator of all our military action.
And the troops will be home for Christmas. Hurrah! Hurrah!
The Spiritual Jackpot
The topic was “Indians of the Midwest” and the professor was knowledgeable and conveyed serious respect for Native culture, but something kept gnawing at me as she talked.
There are two types of Indian stereotypes, she said — the negative (the ignorant savage, the abductor of white women, etc.) and the romantic (woo-woo, New Agey, let’s play Indian, “go ’Skins!”) — and left it at that, implying, OK, if you are non-Native, the best attitude to strike is a certain respectful distance, neither denigrating the culture nor seizing hold of it like an idiot. If you want more, attend lectures and look at the artifacts on display behind glass cases, but DO NOT TOUCH.
Used-up Heroes
At a sports bar in downtown Minneapolis called Sneaky Pete’s, “Young men fueled with alcohol begged Boogaard to punch them, so they could say they survived a shot from the Boogeyman.”
I’m thinking, wow, we power our society as much on adolescent energy as we do on fossil fuels. And the consequences are probably even more devastating.
Project Bugsplat
“The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest, waste, weed . . .”
But what about “bugsplat”?
That’s the word for the cop at UC Davis, walking up and down the line of students sitting with their arms locked, zapping them in the eyes with pepper spray. It’s the word for the Tunisian police and bureaucrats who humiliated Mohamed Bouazizi and destroyed his livelihood as a street vendor. It’s the word for anyone whose power exceeds his humanity.
Saluting Rapists
Remember that awkward silence that fell across the nation back in ’94 when Bill Clinton’s surgeon general used the M-word?
Jocelyn Elders, speaking at an AIDS conference at the U.N. about reducing the risk of sexually transmitted disease, said that masturbation “is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.”
Sanity in Exile
Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran . . .
Or as Mitt Romney put it, playing the irresponsible-lunatic game convincingly enough to become the leading Republican presidential candidate: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.”
The consensus congeals: Our next war must be with Iran. A report issued by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which the New York Times called “chillingly comprehensive” (though this is debatable), stoked this long-simmering agenda. It charges that Iran has conducted secret experiments on nuclear triggers and created computer models of nuclear explosions, among other things, which proves that the nation, despite its leaders’ protestations to the contrary, is pursuing . . . oh God, oh God . . . a nuclear weapons program.
Public Enemy No. 1
“Play faster!” he cried, wildly, over and over. “Play faster!”
The dame who was tickling the ivories complied, out of control herself. The music revved to a dangerous velocity — oh, too fast for decent, sober, well-behaved Americans to bear — and . . . well, you just knew, violence, madness, laughter were just around the corner. The year was 1936 and, oh my God, they were high on marijuana, public enemy number one.
The News of Empire
“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”
I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy.
Iraq Syndrome
This won’t be Vietnam, exactly. No helicopter whisking the last remaining Americans off the roof of the embassy. A contingent of 16,000 State Department contract employees — over 5,000 of them armed mercenaries — will be staying on, running what’s left of the American operation in Iraq.
But there’s little doubt we lost this war — by every rational measure. Everyone lost, except those who profited from (and continue to profit from) the trillions we bled into the invasion and occupation; and those who planned it, most of whom remain in positions to plan or at least promote the wars we’re still fighting and the wars to come.
The Abandoned Class
Will Occupy Wall Street hold together long enough to cut to the deep chase?
Will it find a voice to articulate not merely the pain of the struggling middle class but the endemic unfairness and racism of inescapable poverty? “Everyone is important,” read the sign of an elderly protester. My God, what if it were true? What if we could see, in the desperate thrashing of the abandoned class, everyone’s future, that of the 99 percent and that of the 1 percent?
Building Community, Building Peace
In our techno-saturated society, we have the casual capacity to capture any unfolding event on film — even an act of shocking violence — and send images of the live action around the globe just by whipping out a cell phone.
Two years ago, Chicago’s Fenger High School had its 15 minutes of horrific fame when the beating death of one of its students, an honor student named Derrion Albert — waiting for a bus after school, caught suddenly in a surge of gang violence, savagely beaten with two-by-fours and railroad ties — was recorded on someone’s cell camera and became an international spectacle.
Our Overripe Moment
“The Future is calling and has some serious concerns. Please pick up.”
It’s a Sunday afternoon, fivish, the sun is sinking and a chill is in the air. Ah, Chicago, vibrant with culture, crime and capital, but sort of dead at this hour of the ebbing weekend. I’m downtown and I’m not sure if the future is calling, but my heart is pounding as I walk west on Jackson to LaSalle, in the shadow of the great edifices of capitalism.
Beyond the Nation-State
Is there such a thing as a relaxed nation — one that isn’t, you know, obsessed with its borders and sense of identity?
We can easily see how absurd it all is when we read about the hikers recently released from prison in Iran, where they were held in cruelly restricted confinement for more than two years because they had inadvertently strayed across the border, out of U.S.-occupied Iraq. The inhuman nature of Iran’s response — the trumped up charges of espionage against the two young men, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, and their companion, Sarah Shourd, who was imprisoned for over a year — were gleefully obvious to the American media . . . because they were Americans, and Iran is part of the Axis of Evil.
The Old Integrity
The old order and the old integrity slowly collapse, but the statues remain, and the words. How odd they sound:
“The founder of the University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller, on December 13, 1910, made provision for the erection of this chapel and thus defined its purpose: As the spirit of religion should penetrate and control the university, so that building which represents religion ought to be the central and dominant feature of the university group. Thus it will be proclaimed that the university is dominated by the spirit of religion. All its departments are inspired by religious feeling, and all its work is directed to the highest ends.”
The Theology of Armageddon
The woo-woo nuttiness of it all defies the imagination, beginning with the idea of a course in “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare” at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Nuclear ethics?
Does that mean no nuclear weapons should ever be used to promote sexual harassment?
Captives to the Logic of Violence
A decade later. The abyss keeps deepening, the wars keep squandering our blood and treasure beyond all logic except the logic of violence.
What ended on Sept. 11, 2001, it sometimes seems, was human evolution.
Suddenly, an irreparable schism opened between those in power and the rest of humankind, and a decision fell into place that war for profit would never end — and there was nothing to be done about it, as the corporate media conveyed to the world with a knowing shrug. What fell into place was armed insanity as perpetual background noise, and any reach toward global community, understanding and forgiveness went on permanent hold.
Internal Combustion
What entitlement! I hit the gas, power off to my destination. No one asks me whether the trip is serious or banal, necessary or foolish, conscious or impulsive. I just go, ripping up the miles as though they were daydreams. The engine purrs. My name is Everyman, and I have the power of gods.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not addicted or anything. I can get off oil whenever I want to. On the other hand, I may be willing to sacrifice 740,000 acres of pristine boreal forest in Northern Canada — part of one of the largest intact ecosystems left on the planet — along with, oh, 166 million birds, and all the remaining caribou in Alberta, before I do. Tough call.
Common Sense in a Coma
“Then there is the issue of how the Afghans will be able to pay for their greatly enlarged police and military, which by some estimates will require $10 billion a year to sustain come 2014 — 10 times the Afghan government’s annual tax revenues.”
Of all the ironic absurdities and preposterous twists in the war on — I mean the war to promote — terror, this quote from the New York Times back in April, which I came upon as I was researching something called the Strategic Partnership Declaration between the United States and Afghanistan, felt the most like a mugging.
Equal and Opposite Lunacy
As crashing economies and austerity measures slap ever more ferociously at the lives of the vulnerable and disenfranchised, the Western world, with all its hidden poverty and institutional racism, may continue to convulse.
The riots that broke out in London over the weekend and spread throughout Great Britain, triggered by the controversial police killing of a 29-year-old man, have sent shockwaves in all directions. Who knew things were so unstable, that Britain’s struggling neighborhoods were just one incident away from such destructive lunacy?
The Sky Is Weeping
When our lives are torn open, when the worst possible thing happens, what we have, finally, are our roses and our courage.
“I chose to stay in Oslo the entire week. It has felt like the most natural thing to do. I have never experienced any place any time in my life with such a complete absence of aggression. It feels like the city itself has gone into a peaceful place.”
Blaming the Muslims
“I saw people being shot. I tried to sit as quietly as possible. I was hiding behind some stones. I saw him once, just 20, 30 meters away from me. I thought ‘I’m terrified for my life,’” the young survivor said to a Reuters reporter. “I thought of all the people I love.”
And there’s the moment, in all its politics and horror: no more than this. Young adults — teenagers — being stalked and methodically murdered at their bucolic summer camp on Utoya Island in Norway. In God’s name, why?
Military-Industrial Journalism
Rupert Murdoch’s specialty has been the practice of journalism in cynical mockery of our thirst for knowledge.
Suddenly it’s clear to everyone.
Hacking a missing teenager’s cell phone? Deleting calls, interfering with the desperate search for her whereabouts? Tapping the phones of terrorist victims, dead soldiers? What kind of newsroom culture could possibly value the intimate tidbits of unbearable worry and sorrow thus obtained? What kind of organization would call it “news”?
Panetta’s Gaffe
Leon Panetta, on his first visit to Iraq as secretary of defense last weekend, reached for a Bush moment ten years too late.
“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” he said to the assembled troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad, according to the Washington Post. “And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaida. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”
The Five-Fingered Ways of Knowing
“We are a people who never made singing or dancing an unrespected way of knowing. All of the five-fingered ways of knowing remained open to us.”
For anyone trapped in Western consciousness, here’s some good news. The Earth has nearly completed a revolution around the sun since Woman Stands Shining, a.k.a., Pat McCabe, a Navajo writer and scholar, spoke those words at the 12th Language of Spirit Conference. That means the 13th annual conference — a dialogue “exploring the nature of reality,” among aboriginal scientists, scholars, healers and artists and their Western counterparts in a wide array of fields — is coming up soon.
The End Times
“All the evidence shows that we are nearing the end of man’s tragic experiment in independence from God.”
Wow, I thought. They get it. And suddenly I felt a burst of solidarity with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The words are from one of their tracts, which was given to me because I have this passion for talking about God — a wild glee, almost, for stepping up to The Big Serious and wrestling theology with the neighborhood proselytizers.
