Class Struggle Ecology

Moments ago, I submitted my final paper for my philosophy class at SFSU, “Seminar in a Classical Author: Marx.” As you might expect, the class was right up my alley.

Dr. Landy suggested that, in selecting a topic, we find published work that we knew we disagreed with, but didn’t quite know why. I immediately thought of the eco-socialism of John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, and I welcomed the opportunity to read his books and develop my own critique.

Here is the summary at the end of my paper. The whole thing (.pdf) is here.

There is no reason to believe that a technologically advanced society, like a primitive society, cannot co-evolve with nature in a desirable direction. However, there are significant illusions—ideological obstacles—that must be overcome to successfully articulate and promote the idea that the working class can bring about such a society.

These illusions can be summarized as:

  1. The reification of nature; its characterization as a “thing” to be protected and a source of ethical value (as in a right way to live), rather than as one side of the labor process by which both man and nature are transformed.
  2. The characterization of capitalism as a force that threatens both man and nature, rather than as a transient social order and historical stage of human development.
  3. The view that nature has inherent value (“natural capital”), rather than developing a critique that the exploitation of natural resources is appropriation of previously produced (socialized) surplus value and expansion of the scope of capital.
  4. The view that uncontrolled growth makes capitalism a mere destructive force, rather than acknowledging that: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society (The Communist Manifesto, quoted in a footnote in Capital Vol. 1, p. 617).”
  5. The view of environmental and social regulation as merely holding back the forward destructive power of capitalism rather than, as Marx said of the 1867 Factory Act, “By maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one (Vol. 1, p. 635).”
  6. A view of science and technology as intrinsic instruments of capital rather than as instruments of labor that have been appropriated, temporarily, for capital’s ends. That is, rather than the insight that science and technology, in their lasting essence, expand the power by which “man through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.”
December 14, 2024 by The Nature of Belief 0

After the loss, a love letter.

Today would be a good day to take a long walk, if you can. Get out in nature. Do it alone, or in the company of a close friend. Start a new self-care routine. Exercise and eat well.

Last night, after I’d satisfied myself that the bad news was indeed bad news and was not going to be reversed by some miracle—this was about 8:00 San Francisco time—I turned out the light and lay in the dark and waited for sleep. It’s important to let yourself feel grief, to feel it fully. That’s not easy for me, as it isn’t for many of us, but when I manage it, I always find some healing wisdom in it.

What came to me, as I lay quietly, was the memory of a conversation I had some years ago with a friend of a friend. Barry’s a few years older than me. He’s practiced meditation lifelong. We were sharing a dinner I’d prepared. Barry told me a story from his life—something about his father—and after a while came around to some advice for me. “Let your misfortunes humble you,” he said. “Let them wear down your edges.”

Losing is humbling. It’s all the more humbling when you know you’re in the right and you thought you’d win. For now, I’m not going to shake my fist and vow to fight another day. I’m letting myself feel the loss.

For now, that will be enough. I do expect to get something from it, to carry me forward. Humility, when it’s genuinely felt, opens up compassion, and if you accompany that feeling, if you go with yourself on a journey inwardly, you’ll find that in time the same feeling turns outward, inexorably. I intend to extend more kindness to those close to me, and to reach out to others who I meet who need or offer kindness. This will be the expression of my grief.

For me, this is the right preparation for resistance. The time for that will come soon enough. By resistance I’m thinking not only of political resistance. Fascism is a totality. Cruelty and indifference—those human failings—come in countless forms. They seep into every aspect of life and social relationships. For this reason, cruelty and indifference can be resisted in everywhere, in art, and music, in building social connections, in every aspect of one’s behavior toward oneself and others. In every moment.

To resist, however, requires having one’s feet planted firmly on moral ground. There is good news here. When I think of the campaign just ended—Kamala Harris’ campaign, a welcome expression of one woman’s personality—I think of the people who supported it, joined it, worked for it, and how what we did together was a high expression of social ideals, of social cohesion, of a mass movement toward a better society on a healthier planet. What strikes me most about our country’s division is not the grab-bag of policy differences, as important as those are. It is the stark difference between a spirit of inclusion and social trust on our side vs. the countervailing idea, on the other side, that society (and politics) are transactional.

The latter idea, along with its cynical illusion of what human beings are, is an expression of the capitalist epoch. The former ideal of inclusion and social trust has been expressed in all epochs but can only come to realization through our long and painful transformation to a society organized through the conscious intentionality of its participants.

So I’m grieving the loss of my child’s future, of the planet, of democracy. Perhaps most of all I’m grieving the loss of my illusion of where this country was at, when taken in total. We are more sick and more self-destructive than I’d feared in my worst moments.

In resisting, I’m preparing to give the fascists no quarter. Our side, with all its divisions and differences, has the main part right: It’s about inclusion, and trust, and being secure and vulnerable enough to reach out toward a common destiny. When we talk of unity, it is on this basis only: Everybody in, nobody out.

As to their side—and “they” are every person who, for whatever reason, endorsed or worked for or voted for fascism, and especially the cynics who pretend to be neutral but provide moral cover for fascists—our invitation is always there, in each and every moment, for any one of them to change their mind and join the human race. However, as long as I live (and I intend to go on living) I will fight their cruelty and indifference with everything I have, including, when I can muster it, my love and compassion for you, my comrade in arms.

November 6, 2024 by The Nature of Belief 0

Victory in 2024. Class War in 2025.

Crossposted to DailyKos

What happens next, after the convention? This is an historic showdown. It’s been brewing since 1964. Maybe since 1865.

Through the Republican Party, this country’s owners—the elite who control financial power—have knowingly and deliberately allied themselves with white privilege and white racism. Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Reagan’s carefully crafted nods to the KKK. Trump’s out-and-out race baiting.

This isn’t just prejudice, or bias, or bigotry. Business leaders pursued a cynical electoral alliance with white people who want, consciously or unconsciously, institutionally or violently, to defend the free passes they get up and down the class ladder.

That alliance is finally going down to defeat, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act the following year.

Don’t decry the country’s polarization. It’s a good thing.

Opposition to Black political power existed in both parties in 1964. (Remember Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party?)

That continued all the way through the ensuing decades. Remember Jimmy Carter’s comment about “preserving ethnic purity”? Or Bill Clinton’s attack on welfare and hyping of crime? To get elected then, Democratic politicians had to give a nod to white racism.

But that opposition to Black political power became concentrated as white-flight suburbs became integrated, and turned blue, and the exurbs and rural areas, to which the angriest and most fearful whites retreated (or holed up in) turned more and more red.

Now we’re down to a handful of swing states, and victory depends mostly on turning out the base. We’re going to do it, with all this love and enthusiasm.

Then what?

The most realistic scenario for the House is that we’ll win it narrowly. Hakeem Jefferies becomes speaker. The most realistic scenario for the Senate is that it stays the same, except Justice replaces Manchin in West Virginia and Gallego beats Lake and replaces Sinema in Arizona. Casey, Tester, and Brown keep their seats. Then the Senate is 50-50, with Tim Walz presiding and breaking tie votes.

And then: Schumer moves to bust the filibuster, which he would have done successfully in 2021-2022 if it weren’t for Manchin and Sinema. And then the House and Senate move the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and an updated Freedom to Vote Act and send it to Harris to sign. And follow up, quite possibly, with statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.

(If the Democrats win the trifecta and leadership doesn’t do this, we should pillory them. Right wing fascism has always been part of our politics, since before Joe McCarthy, and Nixon, and Goldwater. Voting rights and enfranchisement for DC residents and Puerto Ricans means permanent marginalization of the fascists. And it means Democratic politicians will no longer need to make that nod to white racism.)

Great, right? But it sets up a bigger showdown.

While big business has continued to back the racist, right-wing Republican Party as it drifted further and further into MAGA, Democrats built their coalition based on an ever-more social-democratic economic appeal—higher taxes on the rich, consumer protections, public investment, public schools, affordable health care. That’s been the Joe Biden/Nancy Pelosi formula for victory.

So now—if Democrats win the trifecta, and bust the filibuster, and pass voting rights legislation, and add two new states—they can win and exert Federal power without a nod to white racism, and also without fealty to big business and its neoliberal ideology and vision.

So big business is freaking out. And they are trying to figure out how to strike back. That’s what’s behind their pundits’ misrepresentation and panning of Harris’ anti-price-gouging proposal. That proposal is an indication of what could come: a pro-labor Harris administration that has proved its economic chops, following up on Biden’s industrial policy (the CHIPs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and more). More pro-labor policies (card check, anyone?) and pro-consumer policies (Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB unleashed) are sure to follow.

So what’s coming? In the next 77 days, big business is going to strike back at Harris, and strike back at Democratic House and Senate candidates. They might recognize that Trump is not viable, and that the chaos he brings is ultimately bad for profits. What big business really wants is an administration brought to heel—preferably a divided government that they can influence and bend to support their profit-making.

I think they are too late, and too wrong-footed, to be effective. I think that on November 5, we’ll win that most realistic scenario and get the trifecta.

That outcome would set up 2025-2026 to be interesting times. The Democratic administration will be primed, with high expectations from the base (us), to make major changes in the US economy—even greater changes than were made during the Democratic trifectas of 1993-94, 2009-2010, and 2021-2022. This time Democratic politicians needn’t be held back by the threat that business will help juice the GOP’s midterm white backlash, as happened in 1994 and 2010 (and 2022, but less potently)—because the dam will have been broken on voting rights and statehood, and our majority will be permanent.

Big business’ remaining option will be to negotiate with a Democratic administration empowered by an enduring electoral majority that is united around a solidly center-left, social democratic economic agenda.

They are not going to like it.

August 27, 2024 by Crossposted 0

The discomfort of being a “White Dude for Harris”

I signed on to the call last night and was bumped to the YouTube stream. I sent money and watched for 40 minutes—a long enough time, I figured, to be counted.

On the subject of organizing and taking action as a group of white dudes, it wasn’t terrible—I never cringed—but it was lacking.

This is fraught territory.

From the New York Times:

Before Monday’s call, Ross Morales Rocketto, a Democratic organizer who helped start the group, acknowledged the discomfort some might feel about the group’s name.

“I don’t blame them,” he said in an interview. “Throughout American history, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that when white men organize, it’s often with pointy hats on, and it doesn’t end well.”

“What we are really trying to do is engage a group of people that the left has largely ignored for the last few years,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “There’s a silent majority of white men who aren’t MAGA Republicans, and we haven’t done anything to try to capture those votes.”

This is not terrible, but it isn’t revealing or insightful, either. Rocketto acknowledges the underlying discomfort, but the words he uses to assuage that discomfort are inaccurate and not completely honest.

Take any left venue—say, Daily Kos. Are white men largely ignored? Hardly. In politics, white men are the object of political persuasion, disproportionate to their actual numbers, the same way white men are disproportionately the object of any other kind of messaging, just about anywhere. That’s how dominance works.

That acknowledgement a good place to start.

The next step, I think, is to investigate what special political roles and responsibilities accrue to those of us who, by chance of birth, are on the dominant side.

The first lesson of being a white dude leftist is to step back, to be aware that one is holding a louder megaphone, and free up space for others to step forward. But that’s not what we’re getting at with a “White Dudes for Harris” group. This is a space, in fact, to step forward.

To what end?

I think that doesn’t have a fair answer, a complete enough answer, without acknowledging the social construction, the unreality, of our whiteness—and even, for that matter, our maleness as we know it. Our ultimate objective is to annihilate our white, male identity. That’s a radical concept for most people, but without it, I’m going to continue to be uncomfortable being a “White Dude for…” anything.

Because what I really want to say to fellow white dudes, whether they are my fellow progressives, or the legions of the uninformed and uninvolved, or the nutty MAGA types, is this:

The old world was built around the white patriarchy, around imperialist domination, sexual domination, exploitation and destruction of nature. Now that old world has to die, because as long as power accrues on that basis, the horrors of inequality and war will go on, right up until the time the planet becomes completely uninhabitable. We have to change.

But more than that. When we white dudes give up our white, male identity and the privileges that go with it, in part or in whole, individually or collectively… whenever we do that, even a little bit, we make ourselves individually more free, and we make our fellow white dudes more free, and we make everyone else more free.

I don’t pretend that is easy, or that it’s obvious how to do it or when to do it in each aspect of our political lives and our everyday lives. Sometimes its difficult to defend one’s humanity—to set boundaries and to pursue aspirations that every human being deserves to keep and to have—without invoking the identity that has been given to us. But we can try to be aware of the differences between our universal rights on the one hand and our special privileges on the other.

What I do know is that when I do it—when I do yield and fold under my special status as a white dude—I feel more empowered, not less. I feel more able—not less—to provide, to protect, to guide, to watch over. I am more of a man for it.

And maybe working to make a Black woman President can be part of that experience.

And I know that I want to spread the word about that.

July 31, 2024 by Crossposted 0

About Joe Biden’s empathy, and yours

Cross posted at Daily Kos

It was painful to watch Joe Biden last night, as he read from the teleprompter, as he struggled to speak with cadence, to find pauses, to use his voice to emphasis where emphasis belonged. His face was mostly frozen, masked; there was no warm smile, no cocking of the head, no basking in the limelight, only the words spilling out, wonderful words, historic words, uplifting words that were delivered as if from within a deep vault weighed down with a heavy lid.

I felt badly for him, and for us.

Joe Biden, whose whole schtick was warmth, touch, empathic looks, an ease with children, caring and compassion for the disabled—Joe Biden had always been a real man who carried his insides on his outsides and his emotions on his sleeve. Where is that man now?

I’m sure he’s still there, inside; that Dr. Jill can see him, and all those close to him can see him given some time and patience and a quiet room. On the TV last night, that Joe Biden was hard to see.

There’s some irony in that, because Joe Biden is a man who lived and worked through this whole television era, the era you can say began with the Nixon-Kennedy debate, in 1960, the first televised Presidential debate, when Joe Biden was just 17. As time went on, public life became more and more about communicating an ineffable sense of being genuine, of being real and integrated, to the camera and the airwaves and to make that ineffable thing come through, via pixelated rendering, to people’s living rooms. Joe Biden had it mastered; when he said the ACA was big fuckin’ deal, you knew he believed it was a big fuckin’ deal, and when he told that boy not to worry about his own stutter, you knew Joe was bringing forward oodles of love and encouragement from somewhere deep in his heart.

There’s more irony. We’re living in a time where words matter a lot less than they used to, especially the words of politicians, because nobody believes what anybody says anymore; anything anybody says has to be filtered by the way they say it. “That’s so real,” kids will say—as if they are aware that most of what they hear, day in and day out, is not real.

Which it isn’t.

The real is our weapon, our ace in the hole, because the other side—the Republicans, Republican politicians, and dyed-in-the-wool regular Republican people, whether they are the kind of Republicans who brag that they walked their high school graduation when they actually didn’t, I mean rural drug users like my neighbors, or whether they are the other kind of Republicans, well-coiffed polyester-clad old people driving their Lincolns—those people on the other side don’t have access to real, because their own real (the real they have deep inside them) is encrusted in an impenetrable shell of white privilege, which is so impenetrable they’ve never experienced their own real themselves. So when these Republicans cheer each other on, and cheer on Trump, the whole noisy business of it resounds with fake, fake, fake, and it’s the same— boring and predictable—regardless of whether it’s Representative TalkingHead on CNN or somebody being interviewed at the town diner and acting like they seriously had a real opinion, which they don’t, or somebody’s drunk uncle riding shotgun in the pickup truck with his head hanging out the window. Fake.

Real is, in fact, our ace in the hole because so-called swing voters are people who are inured to logic or anything that involved parsing words, anything that would require thinking through propositions such as: Are Nazis bad? Or: Should hungry kids should be fed lunch? and who live as if any and all facts can simply be dismissed with shrug and a redirection of their attention to the immediate needs of the day. And these people respond—if they respond at all—to that feeling of real, the feeling that cuts through the words, and decide whether they like Candidate A or Candidate B based on that feeling, regardless of whether Candidate A is a felon who wants to inject them with bleach vs. Candidate B who has spent their whole life trying to protect vulnerable people from felons armed with hypodermics. The swing voters don’t believe anything either way, and they don’t really care about anything either, but they know who how they feel and who gives them that warm feeling of connection, of mutual identification. Joe could give them that, but he can’t anymore, because he has a progressive neurological disease that’s only going to get worse, even as he has good days and bad days.

Which brings me to the unreality—by which I mean a lack of empathetic understanding—that characterized most Democrats’ reaction to poor Joe’s condition. Most Democrats didn’t see the man and his suffering; they saw only his role with regard to the election, like he wasn’t a human being at all, like he should continue, for everyone else’s benefit, to play the role of the candidate we needed even as it was clear he couldn’t do it anymore, which was something that he didn’t want to admit and those closest to him didn’t want to admit (they’d lose their jobs, or their power, or both) and that most of us minor players didn’t want to admit either. Finally, Joe had to admit it to himself, although he couldn’t admit it in the speech last night, because then he’d have to resign the Presidency too, so he said something about passing the torch, a pat phrase which served adequately, even if it wasn’t really believable and wasn’t really real.

Last night I found myself wishing he didn’t have to do that, and that we all didn’t have do that. Wishing that we could all just share our appreciation and love with him and with each other, as in Joe, what a great job you’ve done, and we’re sorry to see what’s happening to you, but it is happening; we see it, and you know what? You rest and take care, and we’ll be fine. Joe’s embarking on a new part of life’s journey; he’s going to learn things about himself and when he learns them he’ll wish he’d known them all along, because that’s what happens when the flesh weakens and the cacophony of thoughts slows. I’m getting old, and I’m experiencing it myself. It’s not bad.

I’m wishing we all didn’t have to do that—the posturing and pretending that most everybody here at dKos demanded we all do, the whole time from June 27 to last Sunday—because when you allow yourself to feel the real, to see the human there, in each of us, see, you get a little of that superpower Joe had, or maybe still has but can’t express so well anymore, and that Kamala Harris has—god love her and keep her safe—that superpower to change somebody. Not to change their mind, but to change their feelings, so that they can change their own mind.

And that, in significant part, is how we’re going to win this election.

July 25, 2024 by Crossposted

Let Kamala Do It.

Biden should resign the Presidency now and allow Kamala Harris to be sworn in. Then he should release his delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

If Biden can’t campaign effectively, then he can’t govern effectively either. Being President is at least as challenging as running for President, and the stakes are just as high. If Joe Biden can’t go toe-to-toe with our own wannabe dictator, how well will he do in ongoing confrontations with our nation’s adversaries?

Did Biden have “a bad debate,” “a bad night”? That’s a weak argument. Being able to self-regulate, think, and act under pressure, and do so consistently, are key qualifications for the Presidency, as for any high-level management job. You can’t go create a disaster on Thursday and make up for it the following week. Nor is it convincing to say he can run on his record. That was then, before what we all saw July 27. This is now.

This situation is why we elected Kamala Harris to be Vice President. To step in if Joe Biden is unable to serve. Kamala should serve he remaining four months of Biden’s term while running for re-election as the incumbent President.

If Biden resigns as President now, Democrats will unite behind Kamala Harris at the August convention. Sure, there are plenty of ambitious egos out there, but you can bet they’ll all fall in line rather than challenge an incumbent President Harris for the nomination.

Harris will make a fine President. We already decided that four years ago. And, as the incumbent, she’ll make a fine 2024 candidate.

  • She can take full credit for this administration’s accomplishments, because she was part of the team that won them.
  • Her youth and vigor change the perceived dynamic of the race. It will no longer be between two old, white men.
  • She represents change, and can run against “more of the same.”
  • She appeals to core Democratic constituencies. A solid Black vote will keep Georgia and North Carolina in play. Compared to Biden, she isn’t as compromised with Arab-Americans. And she has an advantage with Asian-American voters.
  • Of all potential candidates, she is best-suited to focus the election narrative on abortion rights.
  • She’s got a law-enforcement background, as a big-city District Attorney and state Attorney General.
  • She has a stellar resume, having won repeatedly won statewide office in a big, diverse state, served in the Senate and then as Biden’s VP candidate and VP. She’s exceptionally qualified to run for President and to be President.

Most of all, we’ve seen that Kamala can take it to Trump, relentlessly calling out his corruption and lies—and do so energetically and articulately. She can rally opposition to what most of the country agrees is an existential threat to democracy. Matched against hypothetical Democrats, she holds her own, but that’s not what’s at stake here. Head-to-head against Trump, she can make the contrast clear—responsible, sane, and knowledgeable vs. off-the-rails narcissistic, demented, and above all, old.

Does Kamala have negatives? Of course. Her approval/disapproval ratings are only a little bit better than Biden’s or Trump’s. Every candidate has negatives. But not every candidate is sitting VP and can be made the incumbent President and presumptive nominee instantly, by the action of one person—Joe Biden. Kamala can. Joe should act now.

July 2, 2024 by Crossposted

Post-Industrial

This morning, as Zoe was headed for another week of 9th grade, she said she still liked school, but what she didn’t like was being in school for eight hours to get two hours of learning.

I knew just what she meant. By her age, I’d been feeling that way for a couple of years already. Eighth grade was as far as I got in any kind of conventional schooling. I couldn’t stand the idea that I was being trained in the indispensable skill of being bored. It feels like a deliberate crushing of your spirit. It makes you employable.

We’ve been saying “post-industrial” since the 1970s, even before the Reagan-era watchwords “automation,” “offshoring,” and “rustbelt.” Fifty years on–and with my retirement from engineering to focus on writing–I’m getting visions of what post-industrial life it might really be like.

One day in 1985, in my senior year studying civil engineering, I took the subway downtown to a job interview. The firm was in a converted loft building, in the garment district. The sewing machines had been supplanted by carrel desks, in melamine rows, where white-shirted men sat, many of them with copies of the American Institute of Steel Construction manual. I recognized the red leatherette cover, the way each man had hedgehogged his copy with paper clips marking pages with the key tables, so he could look up the entries to his calculations. They were sizing girders and beams and braces for bridges and skyscrapers, writing the calculations on paper sheets, formatting the calculations to allow ready checking and review.

The first IBM PCs had already arrived in that office. Those men’s jobs were about to evaporate, in favor of better calculation methods (finite element analysis) that can analyze structural designs more beautiful and elegant than what came before.

At its best, engineering education instills a mental closeness to material properties. This closeness is akin to what is required for, say, baking or leatherwork, but at the higher, more abstract level made possible when the material properties are made consistent by quality control in manufacturing. The engineer’s confidence in a design–confidence that the bridge or building will stand up and not fall down–is derived from confidence in the mathematical representation of how the steel compresses or stretches or bends, rather than direct observation. But it is still, in some sense, still felt, and as such, it is still craft.

As the post-industrial future comes into focus, I’m feeling that the transition in the daily experience of work–its phenomenology–is away from the rote and regimented, away from looking things up, away from rule-based judgements. Those are all things computers, and artificial “intelligence,” can do faster, better, cheaper than human beings. No one needs to sit in rows, in carrels, doing a job.

We do need to practice craft, though, and more of it. We are swamped in commodities but have a deficit of value–and value comes from the application of human skill to material substance. Being able to practice craft requires discipline, grit, and the capacity to tolerate discomfort. But it doesn’t require–I don’t think–practice at boredom.

I envision a world, not within my own lifetime but possibly within Zoe’s, where work as we now know it is mostly replaced, not by leisure but by craft. Where human engagement in production of things, of commodities, is bit by bit replaced by the everyday application of feeling, creativity, and mastery to unique problems. And the output of that engagement is beauty, or service, or caring, or glory. But not money.

January 29, 2024 by The Nature of Belief 1

Standing in the ruins

of Cahal Pech in San Ignacio, Belize.

There is a lot of speculation as to why this city was abandoned after thriving for 1000 years.

I’m looking at the quality of the construction–the dressing of the stones, how carefully and masterfully they are laid up–and I’m wondering about the way these beautiful spaces were used. I’m thinking about what energy, what organization, it must have taken to build the city, to continually add on to it, to maintain it.

It must have taken an enormous division of labor–meaning an enormous exploitation of, and ranking among, the people who lived here.

One possible explanation of what happened is that the people who were doing the labor, who embodied the craft, decided they no longer needed to be exploited in that way. Maybe they just decided to stop building, maintaining, and serving. And once they decided to stop being exploited, there was no way the city could continue.

Cahal Pech

I continue my walk around the plaza. I look at the monuments.

Why is that possible explanation–that a refusal by laborers and craftspeople, a social evolution toward equality, brought down this city–why is this explanation not offered up? Why is it left unsaid?

Why not suggest, to today’s visitors, the idea that when the whole edifice of a civilization depends on social division and exploitation, the civilization itself is vulnerable to the eventuality that people will decide they don’t need to put up with that social division and exploitation anymore, and absent a solution for it, will let the city and the civilization decay into ruins.

Looking down on a plaza at Cahal Pech

I walk under the arches, stand on a wall and look down at an open plaza.

Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe the laborers and craftspeople and elites lived in this city, worshipped here, maintained it, and after 1000 years everybody got so good at building and maintaining it that they just didn’t need the ranking and the exploitation as much. Maybe the conscious experience of being one of the laborers and craftspeople who built, maintained, and served–maybe the character of that conscious experience changed.

And maybe the ruling elite, sensing the change in that experience, tried to ensure the social ranking nonetheless stayed more or less the same by giving the workers technical training, promised them the imminent return of manufacturing jobs, promised to maintain for them the secure feeling of a familiar social order in the face of advancing skills, knowledge, technology.

And maybe that didn’t work, couldn’t work. because the real glory of the civilization they had built wasn’t in the technology, wasn’t in the achievement of building the city, the glory was in human imagination and human ability to dream and to manifest dreams.

And the dreams of the people who had been workers were larger than the city itself, those dreams rose above figuring out better and faster ways to replicate and expand the existing order.

January 15, 2024 by Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0

The Weight

I can’t bring myself to say anything nice about Robbie Robertson, who wrote The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

1969 marked the rise of a southern inflected Americana in “hip” popular culture—Dylan’s Nashville Skyline was released that same year. On the folk side, it departed from the protest music of the Phil Ochs, the Weavers, the early Dylan. On the blues side, it left behind the intense experimentation that came out of Muddy Waters and led to Hendrix.

The southern-inflected Americana was mellower than those styles, it hit savory notes of homecoming and rightful place,; it wasn’t threatening or jazzy or strident. The 60s were becoming the 70s. Hippiedom had leaked from the college campuses and artists’ ghettos; a lot of regular guys came back from ‘Nam and found they couldn’t fit in either, grew their hair out, and pretty soon you couldn’t really be sure that someone who wore long hair and beads and smoked dope was actually aligned with the values in the Port Huron Statement. Politically, they could be anywhere, and you might be rebelling against anything, or nothing.

And soon after there was country rock and southern rock and Olivia Newton John. And the revolution was postponed; it was over really, and Nixon’s men would soon be Ford’s, and then Reagan’s, and (some of them) eventually Trump’s men.

If I was charitable (or as charitable as I ever get) I could dismiss Robertson as just an ignorant Canadian, a commercial opportunist cashing in on a reactionary trend, like so many smart and ambitious people do when a nation drifts toward fascism.

Except I can’t be charitable, here, I have to be pissy and damning, because there are, out there, white folks whose need for feelings of comfort and reassurance outweigh any moral sensibility, and who will, as a result, make excuses for that song, or even for (God help us) Sweet Home Alabama, which sound the same notes as the lame excuses you’ll hear many white people make for Trump supporters (because they’re low-information or tied to the land and have economic anxiety, or something).

Those excuses reveal what “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” reveals, which is not only latent longing for a more potent and virile white supremacy, but something deeper in the souls of white folk: A craving for a fake version of authenticity that can paper over the deep-down inauthenticity that defines them.

You see, the Canadian Robertson’s latching on to Americana was a cynical cashing in, but it was much more than that, it was an ingestion and spewing out of the endless lie that is the American South itself, the lie that imbues every twangy syllable, every fatty overly salted meal, every exhausted acre of farmland. Just this week, it had to be said that no, there is no redeeming quality to the history of slavery. None. And there is no genuine authenticity to be had in any of its trappings.

No matter how you try to twist it.

There is great power in throwing it all away, in finally dismissing that fake Southern white bid for authenticity, in dismissing all of it, for what it was and is. And that power is to be allowed to seek something new, a new grit and authenticity in the American soul, one that recognizes the Southern white lie, calls it out, stamps on it, and then looks forward to something better.

(Crossposted to DailyKos, where it generated some interesting discussion.)

August 9, 2023 by The Nature of Belief 0

Healing and Toxic Positivity

Retirement, career change, aging, call it what you will. I’m experiencing those changes, I’m feeling addled, or wiser. Call that what you will, too.

This morning, an article in the Washington Post. I so admire Deb Haaland, and I admire Joe Biden for appointing her. She’s sitting in long public meetings, taking testimony about the collective trauma suffered by indigenous people.

On this Saturday in June, Haaland rarely spoke for hours, listening deep into the afternoon, thanking everyone for sharing their stories of brutality and grief. The tour is essential to her department’s mission; healing a constant in her conversation.

“In a way, we’re also healing our country. That history is American history,” she said a few days later in her Interior Department office, down a wide hall lined with portraits of past secretaries, almost all of them White men, almost all curiously painted indoors and devoid of sunlight. “It affects every single American. It affects you whether you realize it or not.”

My own life experience with trauma taught me: The trauma is bad, but you know what’s worse? The denial that follows, the covering up. As in: It didn’t happen, wasn’t that bad, shouldn’t be dwelled upon. Move on.

Because that denial follows up the trauma with othering, as in: This is your problem, this what makes you different from us, this is what makes you less than. Keep it to yourself.

Which makes much of social life, and especially social media, an immersion in a toxic stew of inauthentic positivity.

As I experience these changes, this mid-60s time of life, more and more I’m OK with not being OK. I’m kind of settling into it. I’m learning that healing is not at all about moving on, or returning to “normal,” it’s about coming to terms with what has been and what is.

And what I see in the culture at large is mindless frenzy, the collectively enforced positivity locking all of our faces in the same hideous grin.

July 19, 2023 by Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0