Core Values

Citing Bill Clinton's presidency and his sponsorship of the anti-worker North American Free Trade Agreement, a correspondent at my favorite political discussion group asks whether the Democratic Paty "core" has changed.

The problem isn't that the base of support for the Democrats has changed. The bulk of Democratic voters always has been, and remains, a bit clueless. They only think they're being led by liberals, and they think wrong.

The problem is that Democratic politicians are hypocrites, and always have been. See Dennis Perrin's new book, "Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War."

You can't accuse the Republicans of hypocrisy. They never pretend to be anything except bloodthirsty warmongers and capitalist greedheads who actually believe that the United States is ruled by a "commander in chief." And believing has made it so.

The Democrats have always -- and I do mean always -- pretended to be the compassionate, humanitarian side of the political spectrum, and they're so good at pretending that besides believing their own bullshit, they periodically fool even the most experienced and sophisticated among us, including people like myself who should know better. I was fooled completely by their empty promises in 2006 to end the Iraq War. Fooled again!

This masquerade, and its accompanying history of Democratic crimes against humanity is very long indeed, and it runs from the Trail of Tears (Andrew Jackson) to Japanese Internment (FD Roosevelt) to the Gulf of Tonkin (Lyndon Johnson) to NAFTA (Clinton) to the proposed endlessness of the war in Afghanistan (Obama).

See also Dennis Perrin's blog post from yesterday and reflect on the fact that you probably have a portrait of a mass murderer who was also a Democrat in your pocket right now.

I'll vote for Obama this year of course. The reason is that the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, occasionally have enough sense to avoid behavior that's self-destructive. But as for real liberalism, humanitarianism, compassion, and economic democracy -- sorry, we don't stock those items here in Wal-Mart Nation.

The problem is not that the "core" has changed; the problem is that it hasn't. The other facet of this problem that we rarely allude to, perhaps because it's so depressing, is that there is no possible viable political position to the left of the Democratic Party. Voters are so thoroughly hypnotized by the smoke and heat of the political process that they're unable to imagine a party that would actually serve them. But our current economic troubles might change that, as briefly, but very temporarily, occurred in the early '30's.

Enquiring Minds

For nearly a year now, the National Enquirer has been floating a story concerning John Edwards's alleged mistress and the "love child" the couple supposedly produced. The reasons no other media have picked up this story depend on who you talk to.

Last night the Enquirer ran its latest installment in this sordid tale:

The married ex-senator from North Carolina - whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer -- met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 - and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn't leave until early the next morning.

(Snip)

...(A) months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

People scoff at the source, but it's a legitimate story. I noticed that "John Edwards" is right up near the top of AOL's most-searched items today.

As a Republican participant in a discussion group I frequent says (somewhat obliquely), this appears to be a Republican attempt to deal with the possibility of an Obama-Edwards ticket. Edwards would certainly be a very effective choice for the second spot, if he'll consider it. Such a turn of events could further amplify Obama's already considerable advantages.

If that were to happen, and this accusation turns out to be true, all Edwards would have to do to defuse it is go on national TV, confess his sins, and ask forgiveness. I've observed that most Americans are willing to forgive anything except theft, murder, and lies. The reason: who among us is qualified to cast the first stone?

If the accusation is false, and he can prove it's false, Edwards doesn't have to say a word about it. Somebody else can handle that job for him. A DNA test might be useful in this case.

Dirty Hippies Overrun America

Dirty (expletive deleted) hippies are overruning America, smoking pot in our great universities, practicing free love in city parks all over the country, and going to the polls in increasing numbers in order to implement their agenda to overthrow the American Way of Life and annoy moderate, reasonable, sober-minded citizens.

These are the kind of people who would wear a tie-dyed tee shirt to your sister's wedding. I mean, YUCK!

NBC's Mark Murray reports: Here's one result from the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that will be released tonight at 6:30 pm ET on Nightly News and MSNBC.com... With the news that Iraq's prime minister wants the US to set a timetable for withdrawal, 60% of registered voters believe it's a good idea for the US to set such a timetable, while 30% say it's a bad idea.

I don't know what happened to the other 10 percent. They either didn't have an opinion or wrote with the wrong end of the pencil.

Atrios, from whom I learned about this itemette, comments that "Far Left America agrees with Obama's left wing radical peacenik position," adding, "America: A nation of dirty (expletive deleted) hippies."

Conversation heard in the West Wing last week: "Your Awesomeness, the people are revolting."

"Damn straight they are."

Which World is the Real One?

On line early this morning, attempting to educate myself in the fine points of modern-day financial magic tricks, such as usurious sub-prime and adjustible rate mortgage lending; the bundling of such mortgages, then cutting the bundles into pieces and selling those pieces to unsuspecting pension funds as Collateral Debt Obligations; and the complexities of the practice known as "short selling" or "naked short selling." As I learned the basics of these larcenous conceits, I began to feel a familiar fear accompanied by rage rising from the pit of the stomach, to the throat, and on to the brain.

Fear is the most corrosive emotion. However, it's often justified, and it aids us in self-preservation.

The stunned government and toothless regulatory agencies are powerless to stop these destructive, predatory practices, which now threaten to demolish millions of the real lives of real people.

We're at the mercy of enormous destructive forces beyond our control -- or anybody else's control. It's profoundly disturbing, and thinking about these things too intensely for too long will drive a person to madness.

Trying to calm down, I sat cross-legged on the floor of my sister's living room, in a quiet suburban neighborhood on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. As it looks out the window at a cool, overcast day, the eye beholds nothing but dense, profuse greenery. It exudes peace, calm, a moist, quiet wisdom, full of the presence of that which never changes, which is millions of miles and thousands of years above and beyond ARM tranches and CDO's and Wall Street traders who stand to profit in billions by betting that the economic collapse they helped to cause is sure to come.

Which of these worlds is the real world?

Inside/Outside

Sometimes I have to run from political discussion, the same way people run away from plagues of communicable disease.

For close to 30 years now, political discourse in America has been noisily dominated by people of extaordinarily low moral character, chiefly apologists and mouthpieces for an imperialist, predatory, and destructive ruling class. They rationalize the corruption that class has wrought, and savagely attack anyone who disagrees.

My experience in opposition to these tools and accessories tells me I can be a revolutionary, but I can't be a revolutionary all the time. Anybody who doesn't occasionally escape having to deal with Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney surrogates and all the other monstrosities of the postmodern meltdown of civilized behavior is going to go nuts.

I find the healing and rejuvination I need through the personal practice of yoga. And it's very personal the way I do it, involving explorations of inner space as much as exercise. I hope to share this personal method, with all its idiosyncratic quirks, with other people close to my own age within the next few years, once I've developed the practice and aesthetic to a more mature articulation.

Yoga in America is mostly the legacy of Sri Krishnamacharya (pictured), who never left India, taught for many years, and died in 1989 and the age of 101. He taught Mr. Iyengar, who has probably been the most influential of Krishnamacharya's spiritual descendents among students in this country. Iyengar has spent much time in the U.S., teaching and lecturing. Krishnamacharya's son, Mr. Desikachar, was the primary teacher of the person whose method I follow, Gary Kraftsow of Philadelphia, who traveled to India at age 19, stayed with Desikachar four years, and returned to his homeland in his early 20's to spread the good news.

Despite its excellent pedigree, there has been a tendency for American yoga practices to diverge quite radically from the traditional teachings as they were handed down by the masters, who were Sanskrit scholars before they were anything else. Half a world away, the practice has evolved into mostly an exercise program, sometimes with a little Sanksrit chanting thrown in to lend authenticity. I recently saw a DVD where brief chants of "Om" and "Namaha" preceded a vigorous session of what is sometimes called "power yoga," a combination of Hatha yoga asanas or postures and aerobic cardiovascular exercise.

I'm not against this practice. It's mostly beneficial to those who do it, and can't hurt people who are careful (except maybe for cardiac patients), although I would think practitioners may be prone to injury if they get too carried away and vigorous with some of the ligament-stretching poses.

I've studied only a short time and learned very little. But I do strongly believe that yoga for mental and physical health is not about perfecting poses, or bending the body into specific postures. It is, as Kraftsow says, "about the practitioner, not the process," and always needs to be adapted to the needs of the indidual. "Yoga's purpose is to enhance the flow of one's life," the teacher adds.

For someone like me yoga is not about exercise. That's part of it, but not the most important part. I've been severely emotionally agitated for the last couple of years. Part of that has been personal, but part of it has been political -- profoundly political.

Sometimes I need to get away for a few hours or days, and do something to calm the troubled waters.

History -- A True Record of Real Events Which Actually Happened

Discussion boards can drive a person nuts, because you have one group of people saying "Gas prices only went up dramatically after Bush took office," and another group saying, "No, there were price rises and shortages that were Carter's fault," etc.

I can understand why people argue about "What's the right thing to do now?" or even why they disagree about the significance of past events. But arguments about what actually happened in the past are dumb. There is, after all, a historical record.

The history of fuel prices closely follows the ups and downs of crude oil prices.

In recent times, the price of crude jumped up from historically low levels below $20/bbl at the time of the Yom Kippur War, when it spiked up to over $40. That was in '73, and besides the dramatic price rise there were shortgages due to an Arab embargo on oil exports to the U.S.

The price remained at that level until the early '80's, when there was another big spike upward at the time of the Iranian Revolution, and it continued to rise during the time of the Iran-Iraq War, when it went up to about $70. People were really hollering then, as the price of gas went way over $2.

But that spike didn't last long, and oil fell gradually over the next few years until it reached very low levels slightly over $20, and even fell below that mark briefly in the late '90's. Never to return, one might add.

As a response to extremely low prices, OPEC cut production and the price started back up, but it didn't really take off until after 9/11. It rose precipitously after 9/11, and then the upward trend became almost vertical in '03, with the Iraq War, more OPEC cuts, and the weakening dollar under the neocon Bush administration.

See this comprehensive and easy-to-read graph at the petroleum market site WTRG.

History matters, and the people who say the catastrophic rise in oil and gas prices occurred during the GW Bush years are right. It probably would have happened even if the Democrats had been in power though. Bush didn't cause peak oil, but his administration didn't respond to the situation, which has now become an emergency. I doubt that any Democrat (except Big Al) would have done more, however.

Global warming -- the twin crisis of peak oil -- began when James Watt invented the steam engine and has spiked in a manner similar to the recent rises in the price of oil over the last 50 years, when fossil fuel consumption doubled, then doubled again. To those who cling to the lies of global warming denial, I can assure you that I saw it with my own eyes when I escaped from California via the Central Valley on the seventh of this month. In California the undebatable effects of human activity on the earth's fragile environment are clearly visible to all but the blind.

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Usury

"The wages of sin is death," the Bible says. I can't cite chapter and verse, but it's in there somewhere.

For the rich man who ignored a diseased beggar named Lazarus camped out at his gate (one of Jesus's parables), the payback for sin was worse than death. Both men died the same night, but the next morning the rich man looked up from the flames of hell to see the beggar resting in the bosom of Abraham in heaven.

That rich man may have been an executive vice-president of IndyMac.

Last night on Bill Moyers' Journal, journalist William Greider talked about the economic sins and crimes of the neocon Bush administration and their role in the "mortgage meltdown," which is shaping up to be another gigantic transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the haves, additional to the gigantic transfer that occurred with the enactment of the Bush tax cuts.

Greider identified the practice that caused the evaporation of billions of dollars of imaginary wealth, which will now have to be paid out to financial institutions as real wealth supplied by the taxpayers (that's you and me) in order to forestall economic collapse, as usury. All three religions "of the book," Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, regard usury as one of the most serious moral transgressions, and those who engage in it as worthy of severe punishment.

For those unfamiliar with the term, Greider explained it succinctly:

Usury, to be clear about it, is rich people taking advantage of poor people by lending them money on terms that are sure to make them fail. All three of the great religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, had a moral prohibition against usury because they recognized that society can't function like that. People of great wealth and their institutions like banks naturally have the power to overwhelm people of lesser means. And you can't allow that in a decent society. It won't survive.

(Snip)

Congress repealed the law against usury. It was done in 1980 by a Democratic Congress, Democratic President. And, of course, the Republicans all piled on and voted for it. And that was the first stroke, only the first of many, in which they stripped away the regulatory laws from the financial system and from banking.

And that allowed the free market modernized gimmicks of one kind or another, all these things we're now reading about, to flourish. And that's where we are. I mean, the gatekeepers said to the banking industry and to the financial industry, "We don't think federal control or regulation is good for you, so we're, therefore, liberating you to do your own thing.

The full transcript of this interview is here.

The specific neocon crime in the "mortgage meltdown" occurred when Federal Reserve chief Greenspan became aware of the practice of "sub-prime" loaning and the prevalence of adjustible rate mortgages (ARMs) designed to trap borrowers in unrealistic paybacks -- which are clear-cut cases of usury -- winked at it with his one good eye, and said nothing.

Some people say unregulated free markets will solve all our problems. They're liars, and to hell with them. The "mortgage meltdown" reveals the naked evil of this intentional and deliberate lie. As Jesus made clear, hell is where God will put them if we don't.

Hail, Caesar

I once knew a bright young man who worked very hard. He worked so hard, and was so bright and so on top of things that he became indispensible to the company he worked for. Then, after, he had worked for that company for ten years, he walked across the street and opened his own office, and took half that company's accounts with him.

You might say he was a revolutionary, in his own way.

The Roman aristocrat Octavian was that kind of very bright, very young man when, as Augustus Caesar, he dispatched and eulogized the Roman Republic. Actually, what Augustus did was more just a burial; the dysfunctional, gangster-ridden republic had already been dead for some time. In its place, Augustus erected the military dictatorship we know as the Roman Empire.

Al Gore made a public and well-publicized energy policy statement yesterday. Not young any more but still very bright, Gore pitched a dramatically rational proposal stressing the need to replace a petroleum-based economy with an electricity-based one with all due haste. He made clear why we can delay this necessary conversion no longer.

It is Al Gore, not Barack Obama, who will bring change to this country. Revolutionary change. And the Obama administration will find his authority -- moral and intellectual -- indispensible.

Gore will rule without having obtained his authority through this country's degraded, corrupted, and moribund joke of an elections system. However, this in itself is not particularly revolutionary, since co-rulers have been exercising power through several of the last few administrations without ever having been elected. Who ever voted for Karl Rove, for example?

What is revolutionary is Gore's commitment to the truth as he sincerely understands it. This makes him the exact opposite of the system whose very existence he haughtily refuses to even acknowledge, commonly known as the American political system. The fundamental characteristics of this system are stupidity and frivolity, expressed as televised sound bytes, buzz phrases, and corny quips producing giggles. It has nothing to do with democracy.

He's perfect for the role he's about to assume -- a rich, overweight aristocrat who absolutely refuses to defer to the immaturity and silliness of the network pundits, or the spin of editorial-page writers, or the hysterical barking of fascist personal-attack artists, or the evil mustard gas mutterings of vampires like Charles Krauthammer, or even the dity money of corporate lobbyists. His attitude seems to say "There's no time for that stuff."

Reactionaries fear the truth more than anything. Truth is a fire that lights revolutions, and illuminates the dark corners of privilege and corruption, and the even darker corners of the minds of the members of our ruling class, which largely consists of Neanderthals like Senator Phil Gramm.

Update: Bob Herbert's column this morning (7/19) is on the Gore inititiative. A sample paragraph:

When exactly was it that the U.S. became a can’t-do society? It wasn’t at the very beginning when 13 ragamuffin colonies went to war against the world’s mightiest empire. It wasn’t during World War II when Japan and Nazi Germany had to be fought simultaneously. It wasn’t in the postwar period that gave us the Marshall Plan and a robust G.I. Bill and the interstate highway system and the space program and the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the greatest society the world had ever known.

When was it?

Now we can’t even lift New Orleans off its knees.

Creative Vandalism

The great and well-known stencil graffiti artist Banksy started the trend, and now others are picking it up.

(See here for some of Banksy's recent work, and scroll horizontally.)

Illegal, but very high-quality political art is popping up all over. It's saying things you won't hear on the corporate news networks (Action McNews) or even NPR, and is an important expression of populist outrage.

The new kid on the block is Ron English, a legitimate artist doing illegal billboard art. My favorite of his is "Evolution: It's Not for Everyone," which he put up in Spain.

I also like his "Playdate Iran."

The work of Ron English was brought to my attention by Grace Nearing on her blog Scriptoids.blogspot.com.

Any good, competently done, political graffiti in your neighborhood? Take a picture and send it to me via e-mail, and I'll post it here.

DB

Summer Idyll

Here in Port Orchard the summer days slide by slowly and silently. Even the few cars passing on the street seem hushed and muted, and only the occasional complaint of a crow or song of a thrush ripples the warm, still summer air.

This is my ninth day here following my escape from California, and I haven't seen this kind of a string of unbroken, warm and sunny weather on Puget Sound since I was a kid growing up here. Over the years the persistence of cool, wet, cloudy conditions seems to have become more and more prevalent with every passing year.

Today the purple mountains, laced with a remnant of winter's snows, are beautiful. The cloudless blue sky and the still blue water reflecting it are beautiful. The trees and lush greenery are beautiful. Even the people are beautiful, if you don't get too close.

How much longer can this last? I'll report back on these conditions in a day or two.

Today I walked the two miles down Pottery Road to Albertson's and back again. On the return trip, carrying a backpack with a few groceries, I broke a heavy sweat trudging along under the warm sun, and my shirts got soaked through. When I was in Desert Hot Springs, I didn't think 75 or 76 degrees could possibly be enough heat to cause a person to perspire, but I was wrong.

Now it's time to go water the yard, and that's another thing most people here have forgotten how to do.

Beautiful Vista Mierda

On a discussion group I frequent, Joe brought up the topic, "'Beautiful ________' (your Village Name)" and commented "The slogan is thrown around here to motivate villagers to become slaves to property 'beauty' while getting them to pay higher property taxes, too. Again, it reminds me of the P. T. Barnum comment."

I never thought of it that way before, but it does make sense now that Joe pointed it out.

Here in Beautiful Port Orchard (and it is beautiful), I guess if people are willing to work hard enough, they too can raise the assessed value of their property.

Probably better to put a '54 Chevy up on blocks out in the front yard, a washing machine or refrigerator (preferably the former) on the front porch, and let the dandelions grow.

I expect to have a bumper crop of crabgrass this year. I'm also trying to get my uncle, the one with the beard who always wears blue overalls and no shoes, to sit on the front porch beside the washing machine with a shotgun in his lap and a gallon bottle of something or other beside his chair.

Now that's what I call property beautification.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

In 1860, on the eve of America's Civil War, a poor, single seamstress, Mary Hoffman, lived by herself in a boarding house in New York City's tenth ward. At 28, she was approaching the age of what that era designated "spinsterhood," and had little to recommend her, as she was powerless, unconnected, isolated, and alone, among the humblest and lowest rank of proletarian workers in the harsh, dirty, overcrowded city.

Mary found herself pregnant and unmarried, an unacceptable and socially ruinous circumstance in that time, even in the big city. In mid-19th-century America, no one but a prostitute, or "fallen woman," would dare give birth to an illegitimate child, then openly raise it.

She desperately looked for help, and either with the aid of a friend, or possibly because she was a distant blood relative, was able to prevail upon the family of William Andrus, who lived far away from New York City, in the town of Syracuse, near the northern margin of New York State.

Mary Hoffman gave birth to a baby girl in the Andrus home on Lodi Street in Syracuse sometime in 1861 or early 1862. William Andrus, a common laborer, and his wife already had three children, but they agreed to raise Mary's baby, now named May, as their own. Mary left the Andrus home shortly thereafter, and it is doubtful whether she ever saw her child again.

No one knows who May's father was, but I suspect it might have been one Henry Underhill, a 29-year-old single baker whom the 1860 census indicates was boarding in the same house as Mary at that time.

******************************************

May Andrus, for so she was called, grew up in Syracuse and followed her mother in eking out a living with her needle. She was working in a sewing sweatshop in Syracuse when, at age 18 or 19, she caught the eye of the shop foreman, a hot-tempered, domineering young man close to her own age, John Henry O'Connor, the son of Irish immigrants.

The two married and soon began a trek westward, stopping for a while in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then, with the covered wagon and brace of oxen of Hollywood movie fame, followed the Santa Fe Trail to the tiny settlement of Deertrail, in eastern Colorado, where John Henry attempted for the rest of his life, with varying degrees of success or failure, to become a prosperous rancher.

Mary Hoffman went on to marry a rich man, Culver by name, who either was or became a mining entrepreneur in Colorado. Near the turn of the century when she was close to 40, May Andrus O'Connor received a letter from Sallie Norton, a daughter of William Andrus and his second wife. Norton didn't divulge any information about May's mother's marriage, or about Culver, but did inform May that her mother had died, and that at the time of her death she was in possession of a million-dollar mine (which she had probably inherited from her husband). Mary Hoffman, Sallie Norton said, had wanted to cede partial possession of this property to her lost daughter, but the Andrus children -- May's adopted brothers and sisters -- had seized all of it.

As far as we know, May never followed up this information with any attempt to litigate for possession of money and property alleged to belong to her. She lived and died poor. She and John Henry left Colorado and relocated to the Puget Sound region at the ends of their lives, during the Great Depression, and are buried under paupers' gravestones in Hillcrest Cemetery in Kent, Washington.

The reason I know these things is because Mary Hoffman was my great-great grandmother; John Henry and May Andrus O'Connor my great-grandparents. My mother and my sister Christine spent several years digging this history from a fragmented and inchoate mass of letters, photographs, family Bible inscriptions, and census records, then put it together using intensively deductive logic.

Schwarzenegger in Paradise

"Arnold Schwarzenegger was in Paradise today," said the male voice on the radio.

"Too good to be true," I thought to myself. This was three days ago, on Monday, when I drove the length of California. It costs about $120 in gas, provided you have a car that can get 30 mpg or so.

California, the Golden State, used to be synonymous with Paradise, but on Monday it was more like the sixth circle of Dante's Hell, where heretics are trapped in flaming tombs, and even those are about to be foreclosed upon.

Left Desert Hot Springs at six a.m., got to Bakersfield by ten, I-5 shortly thereafter. Straight up the middle of the state, the Great Central Valley, for the next eight hours. The entire valley -- 600 consecutive miles -- was smogged in, and very hot and sultry. It's what you call an ecological disaster.

Didn't see the big fires, which are over on the coast by Highway One, but I saw a caravan of fire trucks cruising at 65 on their way there.

Some summer or fall in California, the wind will blow over the parched earth, then a bank of clouds off the Pacific will send down dry lightning. Then the whole state will catch fire, and there won't be enough fire trucks or firefighting crews or airpanes or helicopters or fire retardant in the world to put it out.

California has had it, and on Monday I escaped.

In Redding, at the north end of the valley, the temperature was 112-114 at six in the evening, which is about what it had been in Desert Hot Springs, at the other end of the state, the day before.

Spent the night in Dunsmuir, CA, at a pretty, cool spot up the in the mountains, about an hour south of the Oregon line. The next morning I crossed the frontier without incident, and escaped from California about seven. There was no stop at the border; I didn't even have to show my passport.

The Life of a Blog

I have to leave off writing this blog for a short time.

A person who used to be very dear to me has been hospitalized here in town, in a very serious but inscrutable condition. The doctors are at a loss, and I'm finding the situation very stressful, taxing, and productive of grief.

I'll be back when these difficulties have resolved themselves.

And be assured, I'll be back.

Fantasy Island

On another forum I was encouraged to visit the web address of one Lindsey Williams, a self-appointed energy expert who claims there are more than adequate supplies of petroleum in the world -- easily enough to support two-buck gas and the continued regime of happy motoring.

But I declined to visit Williams's site, because I already know the main outlines of the theory he’s peddling, which consists of equal parts infantile fantasy and snake oil. I call it “The Creamy Nougat Center” theory, and it’s the idea that the earth’s core is spontaneously generating crude oil, which is seeping into the bottoms of the world’s petroleum reservoirs as they are emptied from the top. I hope someone will correct me if I have some aspect of this fundamentally wrong.

Thus desperate and fearful people are lured into believing that there’s just as much petroleum to be had now, or shortly will be as much, as existed at the beginning of the second industrial revolution, ca. 1865 or so.

This, of course, begs the question, “Where is it then? Where is this embarrassment of abundance?“ If, as it was in the beginning, so it now and ever shall be, why has oil production in the U.S. declined every year for over 30 years, by about five percent a year? Why are the Saudis having to pump ever-increasing amounts of sea water into their main field at Ghawar, and relying more and more on horizontal drilling techniques just to maintain current levels of production?

In order to answer those questions, you have to turn to the snake-oil part of Williams’s scenario, the conspiracy theory. I’m less familiar with that part of it than I am with the “creamy nougat” part, since I see no reason to learn the details of complicated, Byzantine, and convoluted scenarios involving the oil giants, Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission, secret meetings at the Bohemian Grove, etc., etc. It suffices to point out that if there was any truth to this conspiracy theory, every bureaucrat in every oil ministry in every country currently struggling to maintain production levels would either have to be in on it, or would have to be an unwitting dupe of the master conspirators -- something that’s clearly impossible.

No credible expert in the field has paid the least notice or given the time of day to these crackpot theories. I’ll cite the Princeton geology professor Ken Deffeyes as an example, and he’s just one of dozens I could cite, who in his commentary on the situation this week bluntly advised, “What do we do? First – admit that there is a problem . . . It's the oil supply, stupid.”

Admit there’s a problem, which is to say, two-dollar gas and happy motoring are gone forever, and little Pollyanna, who sticks out her lower lip and doesn’t want to admit there’s a problem, really is not helping.

All of this reminds me of an incident that happened a few years back when a young friend of mine, on fire with the new life he’d been given by A.A., visited the cirrhosis ward in a large metropolitan hospital. He was sure he’d be able to help some of those poor, suffering bastards. But as it turned out, he couldn’t help any of them, because none of them had a drinking problem. Every single one of them testified that alcohol was not a problem, that “I can take it or leave it.” And this, even though the day of reckoning for them had arrived.

The day of reckoning has been bearing down on us for a long time, and now it’s here. The first thing I did this morning, as I usually do when I get up on Monday, was visit Jim Kunstler’s blog, for his weekly installment of the bad news. And I’ll admit, it does take a strong stomach and some real courage for any normal, ordinary citizen to wrap his or her head around the truth.

But we’ll be a lot worse off if we don’t acknowledge it, and take personal steps to cope with it. The phrase that comes to mind is from Mr. “T” -- he of “A-Team” fame, who always used to say “I pity the fool who…” Yes. And I pity anybody who has not taken some concrete steps in his or her life to deal with these new realities, because you’re getting crushed like bugs.

And just one more thing. Obviously, there’s going to be a third industrial revolution, and the gangbusters new industries that arise during that phase of development will focus on renewable and clean methods of energy generation and energy conversion. There was a time when this country would have been leading the world in investing in, and developing and, yes, selling the new technologies. What happened to us? Why have we become so backward, inept, and unable to deal with the realities of changing conditions?

This is not the America I grew up in.

What Do You Have?

What do you have when you have a country where the government has "fought many wars," bringing the country "to the verge of bankruptcy?"

--Where "an inefficient...financial system" is "unable to manage the national debt," which is "both caused and exacerbated by the burden of grossly inequitable" (and insufficient) "taxation?"

--Where there is a deep resentment of the continuing "conspicuous consumption" of the ruling class?

--Where there is ongoing and rising high unemployment and inflated prices?

I'd say you have the French Revolution on your hands, from the looks of it.

The major social disruptions usually occur when a society has been experiencing the sort of crisis described above, and then things improve just a little bit. At that point all hell can break loose, as it did in 1789.

This is the year the Republicans will be swept from power. The Democrats will take over, and people will be expecting big improvements. But the Democrats won't deliver the kinds of big changes voters are anticipating.

There'll be some improvement, but there'll also be a lot of foot-dragging. We won't be leaving Iraq any time soon.

That is, unless major social disruptions occur. Could happen.

That Which Never Changes

"God" is a word impossible to get one's head around. "Supreme Being" is almost as bad.

Our yoga teacher -- my daughter's and mine -- sometimes refers to "that which never changes." There's something nearly possible to think about. But what could it be? Everything changes. Even mountains change. Even the universe changes.

But some things change so slowly that for our intentions, for purposes of the length of a human lifetime, they change so slowly and imperceptibly that we can perceive them us unchanging. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," didn't much like the world, but he liked the dioramas at New York's Museum of Natural History ("where I went as a kid") because they never changed.

I've been spending time lately near the three-times-lifesize bronze statue of the Buddha in Golden Gate Park. As far as my limited senses can tell, it never changes. I'm sure it does, really. I'm sure it erodes. But it hasn't visibly eroded since I first visited it in 1965. It was cast in Japan 218 years ago, and brought to where it stands now in 1949. I'll bet it hasn't changed a bit since then.

He reminds me that suffering doesn't change either. For most of us, it comes and goes, but it always remains the one thing all human beings have in common.

Power

The most reliable indicator of relative justice or injustice in any society is the measure of income distribution, And the most accurate index of relative income distribution in modern societies is the Gini Coefficient.

An extremely well-written Wikipedia article explains it this way: The Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion most prominently used as a measure of inequality of income distribution or inequality of wealth distribution. It is defined as a ratio with values between 0 and 1: A low Gini coefficient indicates more equal income or wealth distribution, while a high Gini coefficient indicates more unequal distribution. 0 corresponds to perfect equality (everyone having exactly the same income) and 1 corresponds to perfect inequality (where one person has all the income, while everyone else has zero income).

A historical overview of the Gini Coefficient in this country would show it at relatively high levels in the early part of the twentieth century, with the most severe inequality occurring just before the onset of the Great Depression. From the time of the first Roosevelt administration the coefficient gradually fell, as an increasingly progressive income tax and the advent of Social Security redistributed the national income.

It reached an all-time low (highest level of equality) of .386 under the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Starting with Nixon, the tendency toward income inequality, i.e., the tendency of the rich to grow richer and the poor to grow poorer, began to increase. This tendency was exacerbated under Reagan and has reached absolutely unsustainable proportions under the Current Occupant, reaching an all-time high of .47 in 2006, the most recent year for which the index is available.

No other industrialized country has income inequality approaching anything near what exists in this country.

When a modern nation exhibits this level of inequality, it means the mass of citizens is necessarily indebted and impoverished, and unable to provide themselves with life's necessities. In our case, the necessity we are most critically unable to provide ourselves with is medical care.

This is a symptom of a populace that has been stripped of political power. Lack of power is the problem; acquisition of power is the cure.

If the corporate oligarchy will not give us back the political power that we as free citizens used to have, we will have to take it by force. It's the only way we can return a government to Washington that is willing to act in our interests, rather than the interests of a privileged few.

Without economic democracy, political democracy doesn't mean a goddam thing.

Mao Tse Tung once wrote that all political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. I don't agree with that, because in the present case, violence against a caste of oligarchs who have a police state at their disposal, while justified, would be self-destructive. However, as Gandhi and M.L. King taught, there is more than one way to skin a cat, or in this case, peel the thick layers of fat off the top of a corrupted ruling class.

Hilltop Destination

Today I took my usual morning walk to the top of the hill and got this lovely picture of a typical Cole Valley sidewalk scene. This small market at the corner of Stanyan and Parnassus has one of the city's nicer selections of cut flowers.

But alas, my errand was not mainly flower oriented, since my main destination this morning was the more pedestrian objective of Walgreen's, right across the street from this charming scene. I needed to get Metamucil cookies, since the biological reality of aging dictates that once most of us have passed 60, our natures need a little assistance.

The weather here seems to be transitioning from foul to fair. There's still a cool breeze and some high fog, but I'm hoping that by tomorrow it'll be summer again.

I've been here nearly a month now, and while I'm still charmed by this city, its crowded, intense, and relentlessly concentrated essence is beginning to wear on me somewhat. I'll be back in Desert Hot Springs by this time next week, but only for a few days; from there I travel north, to the truly cold country.

Human Sacrifice

I wish a copy of this morning's Bob Herbert column in the New York Times could be on every Congressperson's desk today.

It seems like the wars and the people who have to fight them are no longer topics of conversation in this country. They've just been filed and forgotten -- the wars and the warriors both.

As a nation, our callous and unfeeling attitude will come back to haunt us.

"The dog starved at his master's gate predicts the ruin of the state." (William Blake)

Yoga

I wrote in my private journal earlier today that "As Jim Kunstler predicted years ago, the energy crisis is turning into the everything crisis. And it's not the crisis that's upsetting so much as people's stupid reactions to it."

The unreflecting nature of a stunned and stupefied public eventually tends to drive calmer and more analytical types out of the political realm, and causes some to retreat toward internal sources of strength in an attempt to maintain equilibrium.

Maybe that's why yoga is gradually, slowly, but inexorably moving toward the center of my life, and replacing politics and activism increment by daily increment.

Yoga is not an exercise technique, although it incorporates that activity. And it is certainly not a performance art.

Yoga is a wellness program.

Yoga is an aesthetic.

Yoga is a philosophy.

Yoga is a way of life.

Its essence is utter simplicity.

Its demeanor is quiet, and doesn't call attention to itself. That's why it flies under the radar.

No Truth in Pravda; No News in Izvestia

Claiming that "U.S. news would drive me nuts" if she had to watch it, outspoken CBS News foreign correspondent Lara Logan used an appearance on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" to vent her frustration with war coverage in the American media.

She's already on record as claiming that Americans generally have no idea of how badly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going because of media suppression of pictures of American casualties.

Logan's opinions about the wars are derived from her intimate experience of combat conditions there. She's regularly on patrol with troops, and told Stewart, "I’m on high-value target raids, taking down some of the most wanted Taliban fighters and al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, and I’m told … ‘Unless it’s Osama bin Laden, who cares about — you know, Mullah bin Shagged, whatever?’"

That's because for most of us, the war is now off our radar, as Frank Rich pointed out in his NY Times column this morning. From early 2007, Rich says, most Americans had decided the Iraq war was a mistake, wanted us out of the Middle East, and basically stopped thinking about it (see Rich's "Now that We've 'Won' Let's Come Home".

That view is backed up by Lara Logan's observations that “Nobody really understands. And the soldiers do feel forgotten. … We may be tired of hearing about this five years later. They still have to go out and do the same job. … More soldiers died in Afghanistan last month than Iraq. Who’s paying attention to that?”

More of Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" interview with Lara Logan, plus video, is here.

Sweet Delight/Endless Night

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

--William Blake
"Auguries of Innocence"

But Ugly

Tourists are baffled by it, because they don't know what it is. Franciscans mostly don't like it and generally ignore it. It's one of the least known major San Francisco landmarks. The top of it looks to me like a three-masted frigate.

Shortly after work on this Rube Goldberg of a transmitter sitting atop Mt. Sutro was completed, the late SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote "I keep waiting for it to stalk down the hill and attack the Golden Gate Bridge."

Sutro Tower is useful for purposes of geographical orientation (it can be seen from everywhere in this low-rise city excepting those few places where it's obscured by tall trees or tall buildings), but ugly. The television stations which had it built in the early 70's to improve the city's spotty reception patterns could have just waited a few years, until cable came in, but they had no way of knowing that at the time.

This morning I climbed the steep Cole Street hill, which I can easily and pleasurably do now that I no longer smoke cigarettes, and took this shot at the corner of Schrader and Carmel. It's tee shirt weather here today, which is unusual, and the streets are crowded with pedestrians. I took a long walk and didn't worry about getting lost; I can always figure out where I am by looking for Sutro Tower.

Chicken Curry

Chicken Curry -- a cheap, nutritious, and delicious meal.

Get you a package of (organically-grown) chicken legs. Put 'em in a kettle with just enough water to cover.

Boil until that white scum stuff comes to the top. Skim it off, cover the pot, and simmer for an hour. The meat should be just about, but not quite falling off the bones. Put the meat and soup in another pot.

Rinse out the kettle and heat a couple tbsps of oil in it. Chop a yellow onion and sautee it until it's clear.

Add two tbsps of curry powder. Any kind is good, but I like Bolst's medium from India. Moisten the onion with a little soup if the bottom of the kettle dries out too much. Cook for a couple minutes, then add some more soup.

Add a chopped large carrot and a chopped, unpeeled large potato. Shred the chicken meat and throw that in. Add as much soup as personal preference dictates. Add salt and (importanta) cayenne to taste. I use about 1/8 to 1/4 tsp of cayenne. Just remember, once it's in, you can't take it out.

Simmer for an hour and serve on steamed white rice. Top with anything your heart desires; possibilities include raisins, salt peanuts, cashews, bananas, plantains, chutney, etc., etc., etc.

Eat. Enjoy.

Vegetarian?

Then just leave out the chicken, and use a vegetarian bouillon or vegetable stock. Trader Joe sells a pretty good one.

I respect and admire the vegetarian lifestyle, which continues to gain adherents daily. However, I could not live without chicken soup, one of the most nutritious and versatile foods known to the human race, and since I need to cook chicken meat to get the soup, I figure I might as well eat the meat too.

Boss Hogg

The ideal weather returned yesterday, after four days of a cold, foggy, windy, December-in-June interlude that frequently oppresses the spirits of this otherwise fabulous city. I've resumed my extended walks, and this morning snapped this pic of an ancient, antique Cadillac with its disintegrating ragtop at the corner of Grove and Masonic. It's a fitting memorial to the internal combustion engine at the end of the age of the car.

With gasoline at $4.79 a gallon two blocks away at Fell and Masonic, "The Dukes of Hazzard" has been canceled and won't be returning to this town anyway for the fall season. Even in the land of NASCAR, where drivers depend heavily on pick-'em-up trucks, that show will be running a curtailed schedule.

Closing his eyes and going to sleep this morning, President Bush urged Congress "to end a federal ban on offshore oil drilling, according to White House officials who say Mr. Bush now wants to work with states to determine where drilling should occur," according to this morning's NY Times.

The Times article notes that "the federal Energy Information Administration estimates that roughly 75 billion barrels of oil in the United States are off-limits for development, and that 21 percent of this oil — or 16 billion barrels — is covered by the offshore moratorium." The United States consumes a billion barrels of oil every fifty days.

Personally, I'd be skeptical about the mathematical abilities of anyone who thinks that 16 billion barrels of offshore-derived oil, which could come on line a minimum of two years from now, would at this point or any time in the future have any significant effect on either world supply or prices.

They Said "I Do"

The first couple to be to be married under California's new interpretation of the laws governing marriage is a lesbian pair who have lived together 55 years.

Phyllis and Del finally tied the knot and made it official. I saw their picture in the paper, and they certainly look harmless enough. They don't appear like the sort who could demolish the foundations of society.

Some people feel that gay marriage threatens and undermines the institution of marriage, by which they mean exclusively heterosexual marriage.

I guess I don't have a dog in that fight, since I'm not married and have no stake in that institution.

If it is an institution.

Reverend Malthus Returns

"Kunstler is too negative," people frequently say to me when I mention his name. And it's true that reading Jim Kunstler is not exactly going to be a laff riot for anyone with two fully-functioning brain hemispheres.

However, I must point out, as Kunstler himself has on more than one occasion, that there's a difference between what I would like to see happen and what I have reason to believe actually will happen with regard to, say, the price of gasoline, or the prospect of the continuing political stability of the United States, or the possibility of world-wide famine.

It's not that Kunstler is too negative; it's reality that frightens people (me included) to tears. However, if we fail in the unpleasant task of facing the truth, we'll suffer even more grievously than if we ignore it, by instead dwelling on more pleasant topics such as Lisa Marie's baby bump.

Kunstler has the annoying habit of making accurate predictions. I've been reading him since right around the turn of the century, and everything he predicted back then has come to pass, without exception.

"(S)hortages of food and oil are two fiascos that are pretty clearly predictable for the second half of the year," he cheerfully prophesizes in this morning's column. "That's bad enough without figuring in the 'unknowns' that could kick up American hardship a few more notches. The hurricane season just got underway..."

His Monday-morning screed also mentions the 19th-century demographer Reverend Thomas Malthus, who 200 years ago shocked the world with the gloomy observation that human populations inevitably outrun the food supply, since human reproduction, capable of doubling a given population in every generation, can increase geometrically, while available food supplies are limited only to arithmetical rates of increase.

Malthus has fallen into disfavor among academics during the past few decades, and with the world's population rapidly approaching seven billion, the philosophers of "progress" have seen no reason to take Malthus's deep-rooted pessemism and conservatism seriously. But the collapse of the kind of agriculture which made the earth's present-day population possible -- an agriculture based on petroleum "inputs" such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides -- may be at hand.

Malthus is back, along with the Four Horsemen. If you don't like contemplating such things, avoid reading Jim Kunstler; he'll only depress you. If, on the other hand, you want to prepare for what's coming, read Kunstler, read Malthus's "Essay on the Principles of Population," and climb to the top of the bell-shaped curve to get a view of the world from Hubbert's Peak.

Ain't No Tellin'

George Packer's New Yorker article, "The Fall of Conservatism," is competently argued and backed up by evidence both historical and anecdotal, and it's generated a lot of buzz. It's worth reading, but I don't entirely buy it.

Ain't no tellin' what's going to happen. If underlying social and economic conditions were roughly the same as they have been the last 100 years or so then the political system would be predictable. Conservatism would go dormant for a couple decades, like liberalism did from 1980 to 2006, then after a time would reassert itself.

The problem is, underlying conditions are radically changed. This country has lost a lot of power in the last eight years spinning its wheels in Iraq to the tune of three trillion, and is now the world's biggest pauper (which is one reason it's lost quite a bit of that power).

The Vietnam War wiped out our gold reserves. This one was all put on VISA. And now the credit market is tapped out, the great suburban build-out is over, gasoline is unaffordable and will mostly stay that way from now on -- all the sources from which our wealth and power derived are broken or gone.

Maybe a majoriity will turn viciously right-wing under the pressures of poverty and anxiety, wanting to make scapegoats of immigrants or some other vulnerable group. There could be a kind of fascist revolution of that sort. Or on the other hand we might turn to radical environmentalism, and turn on the TV news to see drivers of gas buggies getting pelted with stones, and people turning in their neighbors to the re-ci police for not recycling their paper bags.

There's just no telling.

Anne Frank's Diary

by Dian Hassel

Anne Frank was born on June 12 in 1929. On her thirteenth birthday, she received the gift that would affect the world forever, a diary. Forget that she was an adolescent---her thoughts were so mature, so world-wise. Her family lived in Amsterdam, and one month after receiving this diary, she and her family went into hiding to escape the persecution of the Nazis. They lived in hidden rooms in her father's office building for two years, until someone gave them up. She died of typhoid in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a fifteen-year-old. If you're so inclined, pick up a copy of her diary (required reading in quality middle schools and junior highs)---just imagine what we have missed, not having a 79-year-old Anne Frank now, and all of the preceding years of wisdom and observations.

I was fortunate enough (as a twelve-year-old) to visit the building where they hid on June 27, 1968 (recorded in my diary). Our family was doing seven countries in thirty days. There were scheduled tours that day, but my buddies on the trip, another 12-year-old named Dan and his 9-year-old sister Beth, decided to take off on our own! We went off for the whole day by ourselves, figured out the bus routes and got to Anne Frank's house. It was perfectly safe for us to do that then, and our parents weren't worried. We had enough money with us to take care of all the expenses of the day, including a very nice bread, cheese and fruit lunch in a park. Forty years ago, and I can remember every detail!"

Here are a few quotes from Anne Frank's diary:

"No one has ever become poor by giving."

"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death."

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Tempus Fugit

Some say it crawls, but I say it flies.

My daughter turns 36 on Sunday. I can scarcely believe that eventful and exciting June night at Swedish Hospital in Seattle was way back in 1972, but there it is. Julie and I didn't have two nickels to rub together, but we managed to produce an issue who brings joy to the world and to everyone whose life she touches. And even at her advanced age, Rachel is still passes as "that Gypsy girl" most of the time.

Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the U.S. The first that I remember distinctly, Eisenhower, was the 34th.

On this date 122 years ago, the deposed King Ludwig II of Bavaria was found dead under mysterious circumstances in Lake Starnberg, near Munich. History books sometimes refer to him as "mad," but he was no crazier than you or I (I'm assuming that none of the readers of this blog are schizophrenics). He was merely an early prototype of the gay interior decorator, and had no sense of fiscal responsibility, which sort of goes with the territory. He built Neuschwanstein, beloved of travel poster photographers and the model for Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland. He also had a mouth full of black stumps instead of teeth, since he was addicted to sweets and dental hygeine wasn't very good in those days.

Also on this date in history, in 1934, Hitler met Mussolini for the first time in Venice. They made a cute couple, but Mussolini later referred to der Fuehrer as "a silly little monkey."

Thought for the Day

If you belong to City CarShare it costs you ten dollars a month in any month you don't need to drive anywhere and don't use a car.

When you do use one of "your" cars, which are conveniently located in neighborhoods throughout the city in "pods" of anywhere from two to a dozen vehicles, the chage is less than what it would be for a rental, and you never have to buy gas.

Needless to say, there's no worry about parking when your trip or errand is done, and maintenance, insurance, etc., are someone else's problem.

Steal Back Your Life, Part II

The energy crisis we're experiencing now could have been avoided. For less than what we've spent on this stupid, testosterone-fueled, illegal, and immoral Iraq War, we could have replaced most of the petroleum we use with an electrical generating capacity that could meet today's needs and then some. It would have been a matter of building a few dozen of the present generation of idiot-proof nuclear facilities and a few dozen vast wind farms, and converting private vehicles to electricity, or to gas/electric hybrids that can be plugged into a wall socket.

We could have once again had a railway freight system that takes a back seat to none, to replace all the smelly, dangerous, diesel-burning tractor-trailers that presently make the national highway system into an obstacle course.

Instead we chose to pour three trillion dollars, four thousand-plus of our own lives, and the lives of a million or so Iraqis into the sand of the Mesopotamian desert, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who have been maimed, invalided, or had their lives otherwise ruined. We did this in pursuit of petroleum and an adolescent need to act out some macho self-image.

The time to launch an emergency energy rehabilitation program would have been ten years ago. Or eight years ago. Five years ago would have been too close to where we are now -- we'd still be in the soup, just not as deeply.

There is no political leadership in this country worthy of the name, and hasn't been since Roosevelt died.

When a government has no interest in serving the needs of its people, when it violates the people's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," then the people have "the right to alter or abolish it." Or, Jefferson might have said, the duty to overthrow it.

Actually, "overthrow" is a rather harsh and inappropriate word, since it implies the kind of violence that would be foolish and self-destructive if ordinary people tried to use it against a war machine such as the one oppressing us. "Undermine" not only sounds nicer, it's more practical.

We can undermine our ruling class and the government which does its bidding by a) not buying stuff; and b) not paying taxes. The way to accomplish b) is to find some way to make a living off the grid, getting paid cash in an underground economy.

Piece of cake.

Now all we have to do to steal our lives back and seize the carrot is figure out how to live without oil and gas that we can afford.

Steal Back Your Life

If you're young, don't volunteer yourself into the armed forces, even if you're jobless. Better you should be scrambling for some crumby job than giving your life away for a few barrels of oil that will probably never materialize anyway. And be thankful there's no draft.

Get out of that straitjacket of a suburb, while the getting's good. Get back to the city, to a walking neighborhood where you can get to the store, the hardware store, the post office, etc. on foot. Donate the beater to Father Joe. Forget the price of gas, the price of oil. You'll guess what they are easily enough gauged by the prices of everything else you buy.

The earth can support its present population only if some are starving while others prosper, and only if we continue our ecologically destructive ways. It could support a population half as large if we lived harmoniously with Spaceship Earth only if we embrace vegetarianism, or near-vegetarianism. Steal back your life from the forces of fossil-fuel derived fertilizers and pesticides and the fossil-fuel burning machines that make agribusiness possible.

The purveyors of slow death tell us we asked for suburbia, for cars, for agribusiness, for Wal-Mart, for more and cheaper stuff at any cost. I don't remember asking for any of that.

Lots of people are banking on Obama, but I don't have a lot of faith in political solutions. I'm sure Obama is well-intentioned, but keep in mind that he has to work with the powers that be -- the corporations and the Pentagon and the alphabet special interests such as the AMA and the NAR and all the other movers and shakers who put us here, where we are today, or in other words, the very people we now must force to relinquish our lives, so we can steal them back and make them our own once more.

Immaculate Tranquility

The charm and grace of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park derives as much from what it's missing as it does from what it contains. Only a grossly insensitive person could fail to notice the complete absence of trash -- no shards of plastic bags or bits of paper cling to the shrubbery, no soda cans blight the sparkling pools, and there is scant evidence of even vegetable debris such as leaf litter and pine needles here.

Its immaculate, pristeen, and manicured state amplify the tranquility and languid, late-spring serenity of the garden, and this ambience is further enhanced by its centerpiece, a magnificent bronze seated Buddha cast in Japan in the late eighteenth century.

This is a "wet, walking" garden, as opposed to the "dry" variety of Zen rock-and-raked-sand landscaping also native to Japan. Its gentle, grassy slopes, punctuated with stone monuments, bonsai trees, and numerous shrubs and bamboo groves, are interspersed with narrow streams which the visitor crosses by steppingstones or tiny footbridges, and nearly imperceptibly-moving pools. You can get a small pot of green tea here, and slacken the pace of a too-busy life for an hour or so.

This garden, as diarists and chroniclers of the 1700's were wont to say, "shews how delightfully the hand of man (sic) is capable of felicitous improvement to the beauties of nature."

Designed in 1894, the garden was maintained by the Makoto Hagiwara family, who also resided within its walls, for 47 years, until they were sent to a concentration camp in 1942. During the war it was neglected, but the arrival of its resident Buddha in 1949, a gift of the Gump department store family, signaled its renaissance.

Admission to the Japanese Tea Garden is free on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings from 9:00 until 10:00 a.m.

Hippie Hill

Yesterday this unremarkable but nevertheless famous grass-covered slope in Golden Gate Park lay quiet and all but abandoned in the late morning sun. But on the same sort of rare June morning as yesterday's, at the same time of day forty years ago, it was seething with activity. There were drummers (as many as 20) drumming, guitarists guitarring, pot-smokers smoking, and devotees of the stronger grades of psychedelics rolling on the grass in ecstatic transports, watching the luminous and diaphanous angels of Jehovah descending from heaven with their hair aflame and their loins quivering.

And while all that is true as well as in keeping with the current historical view of San Francisco in the sixties, it only conveys one aspect of a multifaceted phenomenon. Beneath the frivolity and Bacchantism, behind its celebratory face, there was a serious and analytic side to the hippie revolt as well, and the same drugs that lent themselves to flights of ecstasy also enabled their users to see history and the society which had nurtured them in a new and profoundly disturbing light.

"Growing up," I heard lots of people saying at the time, "watching 'Leave it to Beaver,' I knew something was really wrong, but I didn't know what it was."

The hippies were among the first to recognize that the American way of life, by the latter half of the twentieth century, had evolved into a way of death, and that besides making war on innocent people half a world away, our very manner of living entailed violence against the earth herself. These were the days when gasoline was still fortified with lead, when the eight-cylinder seven-m.p.g. behemoth ruled the roads and streets of our incrasingly polluted and ravaged country, and the U.S. still led the world in oil production as well as consumption, and in the uses pesticide and the profligate generation of waste, toxic and otherwise. It was one of the most important reasons members of my generation dropped out of the mainstream of American society, as Henry Miller wrote, "as naturally as a twig falling into the Mississippi."

At the time, such a reaction to the materialist and consumerist cult of living death, that now-discredited way of life increasingly rejected by that very society from which it sprang, was seen as wild-eyed radicalism, and its proponents as dangerous, drug-addled subversives who needed to be dealt with harshly. It was the serious and analytical side of the sixties which gave rise to the forty years counter-revolution that has now given us Nixon, Reagan, the two Bushes, a host of right-wing think tanks founded in the wake of the sixties, the Neocon wing of the Republican Party, and the daily toxic waste generator of right-wing hate radio.

With the collapse of the second Bush administration and dissolution of the Iraq occupation, the counter-revolution appears to have finally run out of steam, and the second phase of the revolution may be set to begin. But as Robert S. McElvaine (see link above) points out, "Of course no peace will be achieved before those who have been the main political beneficiaries of the Forty Years War launch their final offensive--and we can be sure that it will be offensive."

For my part, I'm ready to see life return to Hippie Hill.

Not Your Grandpa's Depression

At this point, even Republicans are beginning to suspect that what's happening is not part of the normal "business cycle," i.e., the normal capitalist pattern that begins with recovery from collapse, then moves successively through boom, mania, panic and collapse. It's something different and completely unprecedented this time.

The price of oil and the onset of the Long Emergency are what's driving this fiasco, which has dovetailed with the off-the-chart foreclosures rate and its attendant evaporation of billions in imaginary capital. Bank failures loom, and we citizens of the World's Greatest Democracy are probably in for some real material hardship, although the truly rich won't suffer, of course.

Still, this is going to be worse than the Great Depression, because the only things in short supply then were work and money.

At Beliefnet/U.S. Politics, we haven't even seen any of those "the economy is really, actually great" threads from the usual suspect lately, although she's still around.

Republicans continue to try to put on a brave front, but secretly they're shaking like a bunch of dogs shitting peach pits.

Old Hat

There's no reason for anyone who lives within busing distance of Haight Street's Wasteland vintage clothing store to ever buy any new garment except socks and underwear.

The deportment of the store's employees matches its tasteful and restrained facade. The clothing, shoes, and miscellaneous items inside are chosen carefully and artfully displayed.

It's the perfect place to get that new old grey fedora to go with your new, used Doc Martens, which, somehow, magically, fit perfectly.

You'll be the envy of all the other accountants in the office, I can assure you.

Oh, Henry

I'm reading Henry Miller's Black Spring. This guy was a writer, but impossible to classify. His work isn't fiction, nor memoir (although some of it is memoirish), nor criticism, nor political analysis, although it contains elements of all those things. It's more like stream-of-consciousness improvisation, kind of like jazz in print.

Miller is always intense. I don't know where he got the energy, but reading him tends to wear a person out. He knew things very early that the rest of us only figured out much later. For example, he knew that America was a menace to the rest of the world way back in the twenties and thirties, and also was aware that the nineteenth and twentieth century were eras of civilizational decline. Here he is commenting on the meaning of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe:

"A remarkable book, coming at the culmination of our marvelous Faustian culture. Men like Rousseau, Beethoven, Napoleon, Goethe on the horizon. The whole civilized world staying up nights to read it in ninety-seven different tongues. A picture of reality in the eighteenth century. Henceforward, no more desert isles. Henceforward, wherever one happens to be born is a desert isle. Every man his own civilized desert, the island of self on which he is shipwrecked: happiness, relative or absolute, is out of the question. Henceforward everyone is running away from himself to find an imaginary desert isle, to live out this dream of Robinson Crusoe. Follow the classic flights of Melville, Rimbaud, Gauguin, Jack London, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence...thousands of them. None of them found happiness. Rimbaud found cancer. Gauguin found syphilis. Lawrence found the white plague. The plague -- that's it! Be it cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, or what not. The plague! The plague of modern progress: colonization trade, free Bibles, war, disease, artificial limbs, factories, slaves, insanity, neuroses, psychoses, cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, anemia, strikes, lockouts, starvation, nullity, vacuity, restlessness, striving, despair, ennui, suicide, bankruptcy, arterio-sclerosis, megalomania, schizophrenia, hernia, cocaine, prussic acid, stink bombs, tear gas, mad dogs, auto-suggestion, auto-intoxication, psychotherapy, hydrotherapy, electric massages, vacuum cleaners, pemmican, grape nuts, hemmorhoids, gangrene. No desert isles. No Paradise. Not even relative happiness. Men running away from themselves so frantically that they look for salvation under the ice floes or in tropical swamps, or else they climb the Himalayas or asphysicate themselves in the stratosphere...

"What fascinated the men of the eighteenth century was the vision of the end. They had enough. They wanted to retrace their steps, climb back into the womb again."

Neighborhood Joys

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as the late Fred Rogers used to sing. The sun is shining and it's about 60 or maybe 65 degrees. It's a good day for walking.

The Alpha Market is the heart of this little enclave, standing squarely at one of its two main intersections (Cole and Parnassus), right next to the big hardware store. On the other side of the street are a fitness/pilates studio and an excellent sushi restaurant.

The other main intersection is a block away at Cole and Carl, where the "N" streetcar stops. There's a laundromat there, and a video rental place, and more restaurants.

Looking to buy clothes? On Haight Street there are always excellent deals at the Goodwill Store, and one of the best used clothing stores in the world, Wasteland, is just a few doors down. Why buy anything new?

Occasionally I do have to leave the womb of Cole Valley, but even then most everything is within walking distance. For example, this morning I had to leave the neighborhood to buy two grams of high-grade marijuana, in a shop about ten blocks away. I also had to go to the hospital (University of San Francisco/St. Mary's -- one of the world's best) to schedule a CT scan. That took me outside the neighborhood, as I had to cross the Golden Gate Park panhandle, but it was still only a fifteen minutes' walk.

I could easily settle down here and never leave.

Stencil Graffiti

The ugliness of freestyle tagging is increasingly taking a back seat to stencil graffiti.

Under the influence of the U.K.'s great stencil artist Banksy, stencil graffiti has become a major influence in public art in the world's more cosmopolitan cities. Not all of it is great, or even good, but a surprising amount of it is very high quality.

In this city most of the stencil graffiti is executed on the sidewalks rather than private buildings. This puts it squarely into the realm of public art, as opposed to vandalism. But even though it's more polite than tagging, it expresses an anti-authoritarian, outsider aesthetic. As such, it is revolutionary.

Other traits of the revolution to come include anonymity, the uncompensated production of free art, goods, and services, a tendency to use hit-and-run tactics rather than prolonged confrontation with the powers that be, and humor, especially satire and sardonic ridicule.