EMBODIED SPACE

TUMBLEWALL

2009-01-21T06:05:05Z

Here on the edge of walls falling
stands the recently united America
recalling the old injustices
admonishing "be patient"
that King said could not wait
from his cell which we now see
was our cell, too, whose walls
now tumble down.

Sure, many do not remember.
But, when talking heads say
the country has found itself
some recall the old impatiences
who fought to crumble these walls
revealing exposed people
hopeful that today’s impasses
will lead to other walls
for us to tumble down.

So we stand here
on the edge of walls falling
in the still uniting America
and look out on the land
in wonder
at what shall be done
to make more walls crumble
in remembrance
of those who first faced
cell walls yet untumbled.

Composed on the afternoon of the Presidential Inauguration, 20 January 2009.

HEADKEEPING IN APOCALYPTIC TIMES

2009-01-10T16:51:04Z

Recently a video has surfaced by talk-host Hal Turner who claims the U.S. is preparing to demonetize the dollar and issue a new currency called the "Amero." Turner claims the U.S. government has minted 900 billion of the coins and stored them in China!

The Turner video and his claims of a new U.S. currency are as silly as they are false. The Snopes.com article http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/amero.asp should be sufficient refutation of the urban legend that Turner seeks to disseminate.

I was very disheartened by all the conspiratorial urban legends viciously created and consciously and unconsciously, continuously (re)circulated about Barack Obama. Seems that America has been especially prone to millenarian (sell your possessions and wait on the hill) and apocalyptic groups and thinking for a long time. It will not cease now.

In no way could the U.S. government unilaterally make such an extremely radical alteration in its currency. First, it would be a cataclysmic destabilization of not only China with whom the U.S. economy is closely articulated (and the U.S. does NOT want a destabilized China), but also of Japan, who holds approx. $880 billion, Taiwan ($260 billion), and South Korea  ($230 billion) and also of the U.S. itself.

Alongside the rantings of paranoiacs, we can hold out some hope for positive human behavior during tough times. Yes, always there are people who respond well, even heroically, during adversity, but I think we are already seeing increased negative behaviors as result of financial pressure on people: suicides, crime (banks robberies have exploded in New York City recently), possibly racial/ethnic strife, family problems, drug use (could this get any worse?), and even the Hal Turner-type paranoiac-conspiratorialists.

Seems utopia is nowhere in sight; dystopia is closer to us. But, hopefully, the economic downturn will run its course within two years. In the meantime, we--the whole world--must use the interim to reorganize some critical matters: energy use, transportation, etc. It is an opportunity to rectify some fundamental human lifeways. How much do you think this will happen?

To modify how modern humans relate to the environment in which we are ontologically embedded is a radical project. It's a spiritual endeavor that cuts to the core of how humanity sees itself and its relation to Creation. Religious views necessarily will have to change; but they will not change easily.

No, I do not believe in an Apocalypse. But, now in the 21st century, I do believe in the continuity of turmoil experienced in the 20th century, but not necessarily of the same formation. World history is replete with cataclysms. If you look at 14th-century Europe (Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror is about that diasterous era), it was an astoundingly cataclysmic time as was the 20th century. If you look at 20th-century China, it was an incredible time of upheavel and human tragedy. There's no reason to think that the world is now somehow immune from at least some of this. But, the scaremongers--the psychotic Hal Turners and dispensationalist Hal Lindsays (remember The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series?)--of the world do not help. They benefit by their scare tactics.

When many people are even more prone to being swayed by sensationalism and conspiracy theories and demogoguery and "prophecies" and religious extremism, it's a time when rational people must keep their heads straight. I remember the words of Rudyard Kipling's If:

     "If you can keep your head when all about you
     Are losing theirs...."

In these times, I'd say headkeeping is psychologically and spiritually tough to do.

STARLIGHT LED

2008-12-15T00:48:59Z

This Christmas story is not pleasant (in our limited view) and I have related it to only a few people and usually not in much detail. Some people from my hometown in Kentucky (Central City) who knew Theda Jarvis do not know the story (just two weeks ago I informed a few of them), as she moved from there in the 1960s.

Mrs. Jarvis, who was my mother-in-law, and whose eldest daughter dated my older brother, and who had been my seventh-grade teacher (when that eldest daughter was killed in a car wreck a month before graduating high school), and who was a friend of my mom, and with whom I spent several boughs-of-holly Christmases, was murdered on Christmas Eve, 1990. If my mom was scheduled to become the angel in charge of quietistic contemplation (she died young: age 63), Mrs. Jarvis would be head of the heavenly Department of Selfless Giving. A lifelong, devout Christian, she was all about giving, and placed it in fervent action. In fact, at her moment of death, she was loading her gifts for friends and family in front of a shopping mall and on her way over to her other daughter's house to spend with grandkids.

One of the tragedies of a life ended early (in our limited view) is the potential interaction that does not happen. My daughter, Mrs. Jarvis' unmet granddaughter, has grown up (now almost 16) with no grandparents. I have no doubt that Mrs. Jarvis would have moved here to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to help raise her newest grandchild. And what a positive influence she would have been! Still teaching, perhaps in her 40th year, including as a music teacher, she would have made all the difference in a child's life. My daughter Sanjina Marie cannot know the misfortune of a vacuum that could be filled only by a grandmom of Mrs. Jarvis' selfless, giving qualities.

I recall her singing O Holy Night onstage at her church, perhaps the Christmas before her death. The second stanza goes, "So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming...." If the essential message of the Christmas story is that of a Guiding Light, then the story I have related, which turns tragedy into some ultimate triumph for us to see through the tears, helps show us the way. Mrs. Jarvis fervently lived as a light sweetly gleaming.

COUNTERING PSYCHOTERRATIC ILLNESS

2008-12-14T07:31:16Z

I wonder whether we are all headed to a Truman Show artificial reality in what some are calling a "post-human" world.

Seems the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has recently perturbed three groups of Brits: Christians, naturalists, and historians. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/081209/entertainment/axed_from_oxford

This reminds me of the discussion and controversy surrounding the publishing of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), which included as an appendix 500 facts (I believe) that Americans should know to be "literate" culturally, so as to be able to take part in public dialogue. (Later, Hirsch would publish dictionaries of cultural literacy.) We in education at that time (I was working on an MEd in secondary social studies and teaching high school) were strongly skeptical of his pedagogical recommendation to simply teach cultural facts. The teaching of facts is not effective pedagogy. But now I wonder how young people are to absorb sufficient cultural background, or cultural literacy, for continuing social cohesion. This, it seems, has not been resolved, and today does not appear to be on anyone's agenda. That a dictionary drops references to nature is not encouraging.

In a related matter, I ran across an article in Australian Psychiatry (2007, vol. 15 Supplement) in which the researchers studied people in New South Wales, Australia, in terms of their psychological stress induced by the persistent drought there. The researchers were applying the new (since 2003) psychiatric term solastalgia: the earth-related mental illness where people's mental wellbeing is threatened by the severing of "healthy" links between themselves and their home and territory. Geographers call this a loss of sense of place or placelessness. In the U.S. data relate that Americans get out into nature less; e.g. there are decreasing numbers of hunting and fishing licenses issued each year.

The connections I am making between a British dictionary that drops vocabulary reflecting the natural environment (flowers and landscape terms), and the loss of cultural literacy in America, and the great changes that both our local and global environments are going through is that we are headed toward increasing experience of solastalgia. In these times, it seems to me, we need greater emphasis on solidifying our experience of where we live, the localities in which we are embedded, our sense of local places.

I know many people revere the beauty, even sacredness, of nature, etc. Perhaps we, and many other adults who understand, will someday become docents to reintroduce younger people to their natural environment. Perhaps we are the reserve cadre of wise old ones--who feel "at home" in the world--who shall one day help to combat the widespread lived experience and pathology of solastalgia. It will be therapy for those missing the nuturance of their "mother"--Mother Nature. Nature is not only beautiful (and sacred), it is needed for human mental health.

GIANT MEMORY

2008-12-14T06:38:47Z

At the University of Kentucky, I was privileged to be selected in the second crop of walk-ons, in 1965-66, to play on the freshman basketball team, after three scholarship players became ineligible. At 6'2" and never a guard in high school, I actually got some playing time at forward.

I got to go on the road trip to Knoxville, that year, the year when the varsity was labeled "Rupp's Runts," led by first-team All-America and later NBA coach Pat Riley, Louie Dampier, and Larry Conley, and ranked number one in the country. For the sports-minded, you might understand when I say that that anointed team performed--no, it was more like soared--as a unity of poetry-in-motion. (There's a Hollywood movie about the 1966 Wildcats and their loss to Texas Western.) The game at Tennesse was, of course, the only regular-season game U.K. lost. I remember the U.T. arena seemed strangely underlighted. Perhaps that prefigured the dark and mournful bus ride back to Lexington.

I used to take a long time showering after practice, so I met Coach Adolph Rupp twice as he was waiting for his driver at the side door of Memorial Coliseum. Coach Rupp apparently, as I saw once, got physical therapy from someone, possibly one of the trainers, so he stayed late, at least some evenings. He was quite friendly and talkative (in his high-pitched voice) and I was incredulous that he--a living legend in my mind--bothered to speak to the nobody-me at all. He appeared to me as a giant falcon, with his aquiline, beak of a nose, soaring above the rest of us, but always capable of descending for a quick swoop on the flesh of mere mortals. Luckily, he was well fed (and friendly!) when I met him.

WHO AM "I"?

2008-12-14T06:32:58Z

I would say we are ontologically correct to sometimes wonder, as we all do, whether we are simply a figment of our imagination. Indeed, I say that we are always active in our own self-creation. Instead of the Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum--"I think, therefore I am"--which posits an Ego, an I who is a priori (presupposed), I would say, Placebo, ergo sum--I hallucinate myself into being. The perennial problem, of course, is just who is this "I" who we all think exists?

Stay tuned: I'm working on it. Ha! Meanwhile, "I" "am" here.

ENGLOBED MIND

2008-12-03T03:23:19Z

A famous quote by T. S. Eliot, part of a poem in his Four Quartets, has stuck in my mind for years because I realize very personally its meaning, and informs some of my thinking about the geographic imagination. The latter I define simply as how we see the world and our place in it. I have altered his poem to read thusly:

   We shall not cease from [self-]exploration
   And the end of all our [mental]exploring
   Will be to arrive where we started
   and know the place[--and ourselves--]for the first time.

As we come to understand ourselves in relation to the local places where we dwell and the globalized world in which we increasingly inhabit, we will come to know ourselves to that degree.

Humans today are englobed (or ensphered) intellects, hopefully rooted to a particular place, and also aware of the world as a whole, as a unity. We are thus "glocal" (local and global) cosmopolitans, mindfully dwelling in a place and responsibly inhabiting, living on, the globe.

FUTURE LOOKS

2008-11-25T06:13:45Z

The future is not

what it used to be.

The past will not be

what it was.

The present looks both ways

and decides.

GONE TO HEARTS EVERYWHERE

2008-11-22T04:45:42Z

Can anyone here tell me what happened to my ol' friend John?

John lived from 1917 to 22 November 1963 with a great deal of verve and humor and intelligence. I had read his book, Profiles in Courage, in early high school, so I knew that he was an intellectual force, or rather that he himself respected intelligence and the courageous belief that the human mind could devise solutions to problems. John had courage.

He also introduced me, because he read them, to a new author, Ian Fleming and his fictional British spy, James Bond. John had style.

I can tell you where I was that afternoon at around 1 p.m. on a Friday when our school principal announced that John was dead. I was in the school library with my girlfriend, Diann Wright. She can tell you that I presciently said to her that we would always remember where we were at that laden moment. Because at that instant, the world changed and we changed. We had to live thereafter in a heavier world feeling vacant without John. John had presence.

Can you tell me where he's gone?

John has gone to hearts everywhere. Those hearts can only hope to emulate his courage, style, and presence.

LIVING AT (CYBERSPATIAL/"REAL") HOME

2008-11-13T05:12:59Z

The diasporics and nomadics of the world share a new sense of global space, but, also, a concomitant placelessness. In fact, I believe nearly everyone in the world does today to some degree. From the "global souls" written about by Pico Iyer to the stay-at-"homes" (with "home" now a contested term) who experience telepresence while viewing their TVs which show event-spaces around the world--we all now have some expansive sense of global space while feeling the alienation of placelessness.

Yet, as the world globalizes--and because of it--people feel the need for a renewed sense of place: The need for attachment and rootedness to a place to counter the deracinated global sense of space. Using the term "glocalization," which indicates the interweaving of localities into larger economic spaces, I call the cognition of the continuum from local to global spaces, "glocal spatial cognition." We live in spaces from local to global.

In the case of bloggers--those who maintain a presence in their own blog sites, including ones such as MySpace--we create cybernetic space, to afford us some identity and sense of "home." Further, our cyberspatial presence also is partly defined by our presence in "real" space wherever we live. Indeed, we who have our own blogs are creating some sense of home--albeit, partly cybernetic and partly "real."

The computer and "real" space are now interwoven--we live at "home" with the machine. Thus, "home" itself is now cyborgian. So is our spatial cognition.

LEE'S THEORY OF REVERSED, UTTER CHAOS

2008-08-24T01:14:42Z

When a hurricane flutters its wings

in one part of the world,

it can eventually cause

a butterfly in another.

(Thanks to Edward Lorenz: Chaos Theory)

STILL TEACHING?

2008-08-17T02:26:48Z

"When you going to retire?"--some people ask, as if I have been hanging around too long already. At age 61 and in my eighteenth year of teaching, some think that I couldn't have much else to say, nothing to add pedagogically to our collective education, and can't possibly continue to guide the moral lives of young people. Perhaps this is true. But after lately living awash in too much Weltschmerz--despondency caused by the seemingly ubiquitous lying, urban-legend emails (the actual state of the world) spread about Sen. Barak Obama compared to the reality of his unique background (the truth as the ideal state of the world)--I could use some levity for a topic to think about. So, this anecdote.

Back to my teaching career: I will continue to teach as long as it is (relatively) fun and I think I have something to contribute. Since I grew up as a printer's devil in my father's newspaper office, in Central City, Kentucky, a job that I began around age six, and one that kept me covered in ink--anything after that would be seen as a better way to work for a living. I remember being smeared nearly completely over my adolescent body with black, greasy, probably poisonous, large and small streaks of newsprint ink. Back then, in the era of "dirty news-type," I was the Dickensian picture of a blackened child-laborer, who crawled under the large rumbling, hissing press to gather up any pieces of ink-covered newsprint that had fallen there. All work after that would be considered a relief. I think I'll continue teaching.

I also have had jobs shoveling asphalt onto summer heat-shimmering roads and dead half-rotted dogs off them in Muhlenberg County, Ky.; laying sod while yanking fingernails in Louisville, Ky.; selling men's apparel to surly customers at a clothing store in Lexington, Ky.; building houses as a general laborer in Napa Valley, Calif.; collecting Douglas fir cones from the tops of very tall swaying trees near Mt. Shasta, Calif.; landscaping and harvesting avocados in San Luis Obispo, Calif.; child-caring for two brats of a music-industry executive in Malibu, Calif.; and schlepping luggage as a bellman at a hotel in Biloxi, Miss. I also caught fierce non-cooperative NASA rhesus monkeys, injecting them with knock-out sedatives, in order to clean their wounds in a basement of the Chandler Medical Center in Lexington, Ky.

So, you see that after all these grievous jobs, teaching is a relief. Eating newsprint ink, sodding, hammering, shoveling fetid dead dogs, and injecting fanged monkeys were never considered as vocations. I'll keep on teaching.

SKY WALTZ OF CRYSTAL PILLOWS

2008-08-03T19:46:54Z

Snow fell in Ocean Springs
during stultifying school,
so I unlocked my students
outside to experience
ephemeral, mystical
atmospherics
of water-crystal pillows
floating
down
sashayingly
out of the sky

DIASPORIC BIG-BLUE NATION

2008-08-03T19:23:26Z

Living in fragrant Jamaica
I would settle at night
in tropical moonlight
on the front porch
of my non-electrified
one-room, isolated house
on a high, rocky goat hill
and tune in Cats' games
on a battery-powered radio
hopefully tuning the dial
finding Cawood Ledford's
soothing home-grown drawl
on the far Kentucky station
whose signal fast-breaking
through the ionosphere
was my sole nexus to Home.

FREEDOMS OF PYROTECHNICS PAST

2008-07-05T04:39:27Z

While jogging across the new Biloxi [Mississippi] Bay Bridge this evening at dusk, with fireworks exploding at eye-level celebrating American freedoms, my mind was also bursting with some mental pyrotechnics concerning our parents of the World War II generation. Running through my mind was Mark Twain's realization that, "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be..." Here I'll change his quote to, "But when I got to be 50, I was astonished to learn he (the parents of the Baby Boom generation) was part of what Tom Brokaw rightly labeled the "Greatest Generation." My parents, as possibly were yours, were part of that greatest generation.

Our stories of our parents are about all we have left. I wish I could return Our Town-like for one day and not be nearly unconscious as I was growing up, caring only about my small, little-league-baseball world, and truly see for a while who our parents were and realize their extraordinary worth.

If either of your parents were around the Neapolitan (Italy) area during the war, they probably had fear for their very lives, when bombing lit up the night skies, but also hope for future freedom, as did almost all Italians when Allied Forces were liberating Italy. They might have been nearby for additional pyrotechnics when Mount Vesuvius erupted, in March 1944, as bombers flew past. (I have seen the photos.) Perhaps your dad was in the 88th Division, which first gathered in North Africa, the first draftee division to see combat when it entered the Italian Campaign. Or perhaps he had already fought with the Fifth Army, which saw heavy fighting in North Africa and Sicily before landing on the Tyrrhenian Sea Coast for the slogging up-the-peninsula campaign.

I really have little basis for imagining the horrific circumstances of those crucial and strategic times and places. All I now know is that we owe them--that stoic generation. The least we can do is to remember, as we enjoy the fireworks of freedom that they helped ensure would continue until this very day.

GOD IS A BELIEVER

2008-07-04T20:57:01Z

The following I wrote in response to a message whirling around the blogosphere about the newly-discovered cross shape of an important body protein called a laminin. It has caused an eruption of faithful glee about how God reveals himself (!) to anyone who believes in that sort of thing! You'll notice my sarcasm.

God is so very, very cool! He holds the human body together with a cross-shaped protein! The same symbol that the Norse god Thor holds as a hammer! That many ancient civilizations have used as a sacred symbol: Egyptians, Indians, etc.! That the Romans used to crucify many thousands of humans! Yes, the perfect symbol that God has chosen for us, now revealed at so many thousands of years into human civilization, and now for us to use in slide-show presentations about the coolness, the awesomeness of the Creator. God really believes in these ancient pre-Christian cultural symbols. How cool!

LICENSING GOD

2008-06-22T20:57:52Z

You might have read recently the New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/us/06license.html) about the South Carolina legislature voting unanimously to allow its residents the choice of purchasing an auto license plate exhibiting a cross over a stained-glass window with the words "I believe." This is a Constitutional issue into which many people also inject their ideas of who were the Founders of America.

Make no mistake, nearly none of the Founders (and later Lincoln and by far most all presidents) were what today would be labeled "Christian," even though some of them included references to God (most were Deists) in speeches and letters (particularly Washington, but surely not Franklin).

John Adams (born Congregationalist; converted to Unitarian, which rejects divinity of Jesus) thought that religion was actually good for the masses (his term) to help keep them in line, but not suitable for educated, Enlightenment, rationalist thinkers like himself (and Jefferson, with whom he corresponded in many letters). Ironically, Adams today might think license plates with crosses would be good for the uneducated rabble to help keep them in line!

Seems to me, though, that a cross on a license plate, since it is a free choice not required by government (although it is a governmental activity--here is the controversy); and that the practice does not establish a religion, since all religions are free to design their own symbols for which they can petition the State--then the cross-on-license-plate practice would be protected exercise, according to the First Amendment.

I give thanks to Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison who were "guided" (Adams disputes this; he said they used only their rational faculties) in setting up government for maximum freedom.

For my personal plate, I would like to design a symbol for a religiously syncretistic Pagan-Buddhist-Baptist, which I am (with atheistic-rationalist proclivities)! Perhaps the buddha sitting on a river bank reading the Sermon on the Mount (certainly the most radical of biblical scripture) by the light of the full moon on the summer solstice and surrounded by a swaying circle of bodhi trees.

What symbol would Adams design? Probably a facsimile of the U.S. Constitution--with a ratiocinating human brain perched on top

SCAPEGOATING FOR OIL

2008-06-22T01:54:47Z

As you take respite from reading the latest conspiracy theory about the cause of high gasoline prices, you might consider these facts:
1. The U.S. is still the third-largest oil producer in the world. The U.S, or rather the private oil companies operating within the territory of the U.S., produces 8.37 million barrels per day. For comparison, Saudi Arabia, the top producer, pumps 10.72 mb/d. (Russia is between the two.)

2. Gasoline prices in the U.S. are still about one-third lower than Canada's (at $6) and less than half Europe's (at up to $11).

3. An "American" oil company sells oil--a highly fungible commodity--on the world market at WORLD PRICES.

4. Global demand for oil is accelerating with the overheated economic growth of especially China and India and other emerging economies. This puts upward pressure on oil supplies (and prices).

5. We are in an era of "post-easy" oil. Much of the remaining reserves lie in technologically demanding fields. In addition, national oil companies around the world are holding the easy fields for themselves, increasingly pushing private companies into the technically challenging fields. Other factors coming into play are that the private companies are having to work in more off-shore fields and in politically and environmentally difficult areas. And another factor: More of the oil is heavier crude, which is more expensive to refine. In short, most of the remaining reserves will be expensive to produce.

Observations: 1. I do not understand the reasoning by some people who say that oil from Alaska would undercut and thus lower oil prices in the U.S. This is not a situation of two corner grocery stores competing to undercut the price of each other's salami sandwiches. Again, oil is a fungible GLOBAL commodity sold on a GLOBAL market. Unless American oil companies are nationalized (like in Mexico and Venezuela and other countries), then it is not "American" oil and the oil companies decide for themselves what to do with it. Which means the oil is marketed to the highest bidder at the highest price.

2. Americans are still ignoring that we are as profligate as a teen at the local mall with $20 in his pocket. Or, perhaps more relatedly: As profligate as a DC pimp after the oil corporation lobbyists have convened. What do you drive? What is your diet?

Fact: Raising the average mile-per-gallon of the American fleet by 10 mpg would save 4 million barrels per day. That's almost one half of current U.S. production. Observation: It would not be difficult to do, if we stop looking for scapegoats and push our politicians into passing the requisite legislation. For example, within a fairly short time, say two years, we could have every new automobile sold in America running a hybrid engine. Subsidy programs could take the older autos off the streets. We could conserve a huge heap of oil.

Ladies and gentlemen: If you are truly interested in actually solving an extremely serious problem (that relates to several important others), let's ignore the side issues and lower our energy consumption. Fuel efficiency is one of the big answers. We CAN do it. Not just on an individual level, but as a SOCIETY, with our citizens leading the way to require PUBLIC POLICIES (yes, this means political action) that are rational.

Save the goat and contact a politician.

FIERCE HOPE OF URGENT NOW

2008-06-17T02:54:52Z

"The fierce urgency of now" (Dr. M. L. King's phrase) should compel America to see Sen. Barak Obama through to the presidency. Now is the time. That urgency should unite supporters of Sen. Clinton with the Obama campaign. Now is the time. That urgency must energize those who understand that we cannot afford to wait on taking effective action on the global environment. Now is the time. That urgency should convince independents and Republicans that Sen. Obama can unite us so we can tackle America's problems, such as health care and a renewable energy policy. Now is the time. That fierce urgency tells us we must elect Barak Obama to the presidency. Now, at this urgent moment as a nation, now is that time.

Feel the urgency, America, feel the fierce urgency, to actualize what we once promised to ourselves as a nation and which has been dormant much too long: The hope that we the people would internalize the democratic power to solve problems of not just the privileged few, but of the many, even of the most, even--do we dare hope--of the all. Now is the time.

VISION OF ACCEPTANCE

2008-06-13T21:24:20Z

Anglo-Irish and Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) philosophized that "all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, or a re-birth as something not one's self."

I agree that periodic or even continual rebirth is called for, but I'd say the rebirthing must be about becoming more of one's self, not a rebirth "as something not one's self." The renewal must emerge out of the essence of who one is, what one's historical narrative has led one to. Then, it is not a new mask one puts on but another layer one takes off to reveal the new face of current existence.

Today, I become more of who I have always been "striving" to become for this very moment, whether or not I knew teleologically there was a certain time-space I was going. The process is inexorable. I never presciently knew--still don't--where I was going. But, I shall continue to become I.

The famous epitaph on Yeats' mausoleum reads bleakly, "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!"

Mine might read, "Cast a warm, assenting eye/ On life, even death./ Horseman, pass by with resolve/ With recognition of who you are!"

PROPAGANDISTIC WORD-IMAGES

2008-06-13T01:30:35Z

MediaMatters was being much too generous when it labeled as "obtuse" E. D. Hill's recent use of the word "terrorist" on Fox Network in relation to the Obamas. Obtuse means dull, insensitive, stupid, difficult to understand. Hill's words, however, are manifestly understandable. It seems to me they must be seen as calculated effort to sow frightful word-images in the minds of Americans. Think of it: a professional TV commentator does not make a slip of the tongue on the order of saying "terrorist," when speaking of a presidential candidate.

This was no less intentional than Sean Hannity--another Fox Network entertainer-propagandist--keeping alive through a couple of news cycles the false story about the supposed use of the word "Whitey" by Michelle Obama. Fox and Hannity unconscionably claim it was just covering the story about a "rumor," a rumor they were reasonably sure was false--there was never ANY evidence--because the rumor machine about the Obamas has been working overtime for some time now. Yet, they kept alive a lie. Thus, Fox Network must be understood as a prime cog in the anti-Obama rumor machine.

Prepare yourselves America: What we have seen so far is just the warm-up to the juggernaut Swiftboating of the Obamas. Those of us who understand this must keep struggling for truth to find its way into the civic forum. Otherwise, Fox, Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh will rumor us and slip-of-the-tongue us into another administration of barbarity and--I can use this word with verity now--obtuseness.

SEN. OBAMA AND RUMORS

2008-06-12T16:02:16Z

In a country so large in population it should not be surprising that there are forces at-large in our country who see it as their place to spread lies about politicians running for office whom they oppose. And now we have the powerful electronic medium of the Internet and email which is easily used to keep lies alive.

To wit, the anti-Obama machine has been working tirelessly (and evilly, in my estimation) to smear his history, words, and intentions. Entertainer-propagandists such as Rush Limbaugh, who is a master at innuendo, have spread the lie about the purported comment by Michelle Obama uttering the label "Whitey" at a public event. No tape has ever been produced, but the Fox Network and Sean Hannity thought it just fine to keep the rumor going through some news cycles before commentator Roger Stone admitted he did not have the tape and did not know of anyone who did.

The point is--and Sean Hannity and his ilk know it well--that just bringing up a rumor in a supposed news show is enough to cause doubt in the public's mind. That is the purpose of the creation of rumors. And, that is one of the evil purposes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Expect more of it. It is a sickness in the civic forum and I blame people like Hannity and Limbaugh and their network sponsors and their funnelers of disinformation for egregious direliction of civic responsibility.

You can log on this website that Sen. Obama's campaign must maintain solely to combat the rumor machine.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fightthesmearshome/

I announce here that I have made a monetary donation to Sen. Obama's campaign for President.

COMBATING HUMAN BONDAGE

2008-06-11T17:47:24Z

I can think of two effective strategies Americans can pursue to combat human bondage in the world. One is to pressure our own Congressional leaders into requiring the Bush administration (and the one to follow) into recognizing that sex slavery is not the only slavery occurring in the U.S. According to an article in Foreign Policy (March/April 2008), 17,500 new slaves enter the U.S. each year, yet the Justice Dept. releases less than only 2 percent. It is question of priorities.

A second front is to pressure the U.S. government into pressuring the U.N. to increase its pressure on member countries. (This, of course, is one of the main problems of the U.N.: it is an organization of member states, not an organization with much power delegated to it from member states.) Every country in the world has laws against slavery, yet little is done in many countries that have slavery. For example, South Asia has 10 million of the 27 million humans enslaved in the world today. India has the greatest number of any country.

To conclude, keep the pressure on, especially on the U.S. government to take greater action within the U.S. and to pressure the U.N. to do more.

BIG SOCIETAL CHANGES LOOMING

2008-06-10T22:18:17Z

Well, well, a finite resource upon which our civilization has been based (petroleum) has finally caught up with our profligate system of transportation (and diet) and because of this the way we have designed cities. This was all foreseen several decades ago. As I have been telling my students for years, when they asked about oil running out, that oil will not run out--but our money to pay for it will. We can purchase all the gasoline we desire at $4 and on up to $8 or even $15 per gallon, when peak oil hits.

The structure of our cities will have to change. Kiss goodbye the suburbs, built on cheap--subsidized!--transportation in the form of an orgy of public highway construction. Already suburban housing prices are falling. We will simply have to live closer to where we work. Everything must take place closer to where we live.

Think of food production. Cities will again be ringed by farm production like they were before WWI. Is it rational that most of my food is imported from California across the continent or Chile thousands of miles away? Instead of California almonds, I can consume locally produced pecans. Now perhaps von Thunen's model (1826) of the spatial structure of agriculture production around cities will again become a model that edges closer to reality. Local food production and home gardens will flourish, even tomatoes grown in pots.

Fortunately, expertise and experience exists in every city. America is not devoid of thinking people (even if most people do not analyze their own lifeways). There are people who have been living and modeling the lifestyle of the future which is now arriving. One of these lifeways is vegetarian eating habits. We have been saying this for many years that a meat-based diet is unsustainable. Whether or not you consider the ethical and environmental ramifications of your dietary choices, your pocketbook will soon dictate your diet.

A side issue, but one that will prove to be crucial in coming decades, is that, due to global climate changes, agricultural zones will likely shift northward. Possibly we here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast can begin to produce mangoes and bananas and other tropical fruits. What can your bioregion grow?

Speaking of bioregions, the bioregionalists have also been saying for decades that society should conform to the exigencies of the natural region in which each is located.

One of my messages here is that among us are the ideas and expertise and even models of actual people who have been living according to how the world would soon become. That time is soon, even now.

DEEP STRUCTURE OF AMERICAN CULTURE AND ELECTORAL REALISM

2008-05-17T08:06:52Z

Recently while surfing political blogs, I came upon the phrase, "the prison-house of masculinist framings of the subject [of presidential electoral success]," advising that feminist true believers of Sen. Hilary Clinton should understand that if she were elected president, she could exercise power only to the extent that her program was masculinist (and thus be "imprisoned" by the exercise of masculinist power in America). The example of Margaret Thatcher's hyper-masculinist administration was proffered as proof.

My fear is that the word "white" must be interpolated immediately before "masculinist," so that the meaning acknowledges that the road to the White (prison?-)House is dualistically masculinist AND white (at least for now). Can Sen. Obama avoid this dictum? How far must he travel down that same road, exhibiting both characteristics, to have real hope of electoral success?

However, on the (literal) face of it, I'd say Sen. Clinton IS less privileged than a black man running for the highest office, due to the nationalistic American ethos of masculine power. Ontologically, America, overall, it seems to me, wants and psychologically needs to see itself as the most powerful force on the Planet (witness its puerile exercise of military power internationally). Thus a woman struggles electorally against this ethos, at least in some sectors of the American electorate.

Yes, I understand that, historically, black males were emasculated. I also observe that Sen. Clinton is patriarchalizing her image; but I thought the feminist movement was in part to allow freedom to choose one's identity (even a manufactured persona). Not so, evidently, in American politics.

So, in context of the deep structure of American culture in terms of its self-concept re the exercise of power, the paramount question of the present presidential election cycle becomes, to what extent have black males overcome historical emasculation by American society compared to the degree that that same culture will allow a woman to masculinize herself--and get elected to the most powerful office in the world?

Sen. Clinton understands what it would have taken to get a woman elected president in America. Sen. Obama? Let's see what kind of road he must tread down. It's difficult to see that it will be the one of his own choosing. In this pessimistic view, in Sen. Obama's case, too, the electoral path just might be a paddy-wagon ride to an ideological prison house driven by what America thinks it needs.