On Reagan, Bigotry and Evolution

“I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

                                                                                    Mark Twain

  

In August of 1980, a former California governor chose to do an odd thing. Originally, before he was a governor, he’d been an actor in westerns portraying men with easy access to guns working out Civil War-era post-traumatic stress disorder. He was telegenic, he knew his part, and the rich loved him.

He showed up in an obscure town named Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he was to give his first speech after winning the Republican candidacy for president.

As we all know, many Americans still can’t point out Iraq or Afganistan on a wordless map, nor can they attach meaningful words to Philadelphia, Mississippi today. So, as we labor through our various manifestations of post-election depression, as we wonder mightily at where all this hatred is coming from and struggle with our very memories, the following are a few meaningful words I would like to attach to Philadelphia, Mississippi, which I fear has become yet another blank spot on the low-information map which we Americans seem to prefer these days for navigating around painful issues.

Philadelphia, Mississippi was the town where three civil rights workers--James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner--were murdered by the Klan only sixteen years before Reagan showed up, in 1964, the same year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. In fact, the murders of the three young men during the civil rights action known as Freedom Summer was one of the big straws that finally broke Jim Crow’s back in Mississippi and the South, and compelled the nation’s first Southern president since the Civil War into finally passing any civil rights act at all.

Freedom Summer, in turn, was organized by a lot of groups, but the main one was the now-legendary Students’ Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was a group of young people who believed in doing things that were seen as presumptuous and threatening to the powerful. Sit-ins, freedom rides, marches on Washington, things that would get them jailed, beat up, killed. They were willing, in other words, to put it all on the line in a commitment for justice we provincial citizens haven’t seen the likes of since. Not surprisingly, these kids became more powerful than the seemingly-insurmountable powerful interests they opposed, and in the process they invented concepts and phrases still widely held in contempt by those who would still keep them down. For instance, one of SNCC’s presidents, Stokely Carmichael, popularized the term “Black Power”, a phrase that defeated segregationists in the South found presumptuous at best.  And the presumptuous goal of Stokely Carmichael and the murdered men during the Freedom Summer of ’64?  To register eligible voters.  

That shadow you may be sensing peering over your shoulder is the ghost of madame Déjà vu. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

As with so many other campaign speeches coming from freshly-minted presidential candidates, Reagan’s speech was a calculated one, carefully crafted to set the tone for the candidate’s trajectory into history, and, as in real estate, armed conflict and other human endeavors, location was considered important. Reagan obviously chose Philadelphia, Mississippi out of approximately four million square miles of word-challenged United States territory for a specific reason: to aim his trajectory into history, and he did not mince his words. In an open ploy to woo working-class Americans away from paying attention to their own best interests, Reagan declared that “states’ rights” and truncated interpretations of the U.S. Constitution that would shrink the government’s power to regulate those who felt entitled to unregulated wealth, bigotry or both would be his central themes. Of course these were the very themes the South had used a century earlier to defend their “peculiar institution” and to forever justify the resultant Jim Crow century.

Reagan didn’t quite go so far as to call for a rebirth of the Confederacy, but in the eyes of all the white voters who openly resented the Civil Rights Act, “Black Power”, and who secretly carried the murders of Philadelphia, Mississippi within their own troubled souls, he did a good job of acting like he did. Madame Déjà vu was running a full-on cathouse, selling memories if nothing else.

Bigotry, like nuclear war, is a revelation you can rely on. The dread of both will sit there unexposed, invisible until it’s stirred and forced to the fore, floats for a while like sun specks on the skin of your eyes, temporarily annoying. Then gone just as quickly, denied and forgotten even though it’s swimming right before your eyes, like a shark, or sun specks.

Follow the thread of the cloth and it’s easy to see why we disengage before we trace the subject home. Be thankful, I guess, that it all comes so easy for us, but I still have a couple of questions. Is bigotry uniquely human and if not, does our uniquely-human bigotry necessarily steer us towards environmental catastrophe to the point of our own extinction? I mean, is it natural to be a bigot, or are we really the only beings on this planet hell-bent on destroying ourselves? Are there any studies? Ants, maybe? Wasps? Didn’t the Nazis have ‘God Is With Us’ stamped on every German soldier’s belt buckle? 
In other words, if we’re so smart, shouldn’t we evolve or something?

The Sounds of Silence

There’s a book out now. I haven’t read it but I think I should, and I think you should, too. It’s written by a professional musician, Bernie Krause, whose work on the soundtracks of iconic movies like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Apocalypse Now” as well as his regular work with iconic musicians like Bob Dylan, the Byrds, George Harrison etc. have made him a household name in households that hold professional musicians. He knows his way around recording equipment, in other words, which flags his other work of recording natural sounds in pristine habitats as particularly poignant and important. His book is about how the natural world is demonstrably and unequivocally quieting down due to environmental degradation and resultant extinctions. What stands out are some numbers: over the last 40 years, Mr. Krause has collected 4,500 hundred hours worth of sounds emitted from 15,000 species. He now estimates that half of those recordings are unique archives, impossible to repeat due to extinctions of habitat, species or both. 

Eminent scientists have been telling us for a long time. Eminent social malcontents even longer. Now it's our eminent musicians’ turn. It’s about time. Read about Krause’ book here, and see what you think. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/05-2 Thinking’s good, I think.

Speaking of thinking, I was driving home from town the other day, making my way west up Bear Creek Road where I usually get a good look at one of the clear and majestic Bitterroot canyons that remind me why I’ve chosen to live in Montana on short wages for so long. This time, however, I couldn’t make out the canyon a mile and a half away due to poor visibility from the smoke belching out of the giant fires to the west of us, in the wilderness, and to the south of us, from the Salmon River drainage in Idaho. The whole visible world was cloaked in an eerie, greenish-orange sunset. Quite weird and, in a perverse way, very beautiful. All I needed was a Bernie Krause soundtrack to cap it off, cinematographically-speaking.

But of course, this is no specially-effected movie of a future, fictional, degraded world a future, fictional, degraded society is struggling within like we throng to theatres to horrify ourselves with these days (“Hunger Games” just for example). My family, including our six-year-old daughter with still-growing lungs, has been breathing this off-color smoke for the last month. It’s become commonplace and expected this time of year now. I’ve lost count, but for the fourth or fifth time the Lost Trail ski hill on the Montana-Idaho border will be saved by the government the owner of the hill hates. Eventually, the deafening sound of extinction will waft over that hill, too, and for all his anti-government posturing, the well-meaning owner won't be able to stop the government from saving him, or find anyone else to blame when the ski hill finally burns other than himself and his tea-soaked cronies. Nice guy that he truly is, he’s willfully provincial. Been here too long to really understand, I guess, or to give a damn where all the meadowlarks went.

We talk much of future calamities caused by a heating world and, as a corollary, we like to scare ourselves with movies about bleak worlds that we don’t think apply to us. But we in Montana and throughout the West are just like that frog in the slowly boiling pot, who doesn’t notice she’s being boiled to death until just before the final degree kills her, and it’s far too late to jump out. Indeed, by that time, she’s quite forgotten how to jump.

These times are when Wilderness shines as the enlightened concept that it has been right from its early-20th Century start. Because we preserved some wild areas, a lot of people developed a yearning to go and see them. And because a lot of people heeded that yearning here in the Northern Rockies over the past decades, there's now a critical mass of people who might understand when someone like my humble self asks you to visualize those delicate, fairy-land tairn-ponds and wet areas up in the high country in August, fringed with pink elephant-head and purple gentian, whose primary late-summer contribution to the Whole is to ooze out the last of the melting snows into the headwaters of our creeks, which in turn are the headwaters of our rivers. Imagine now twenty years hence, more or less, when those high-altitude sponges dry up because all the snowfields disappeared in July, and there is forevermore no snowmelt to feed the creeks and rivers we paid so dearly for to call home. Imagine what’s left of our trout-laden rivers, slowing and warming to the no-return point where they can no longer support cold-water-dependent trout populations. Then ask yourself: will those living here in fifty years accept the resultant sucker holes to be the norm, and will they therefore find them beautiful. Or will they realize that there is some huge piece of themselves missing, that they are living in a horribly degraded world, forevermore? And then what?

I have a background in forestry, native-plants restoration and living large parts of my life outdoors, which doesn’t make me any kind of an expert. Just savvy enough to tell you definitively—and with profound sadness--that this is not only going to happen. It’s happening. To us. Right now.

We are living in the slowly-boiling pot. Living through our lungs in this case, viscerally, just like the frog does with her skin. We just refuse to admit that we are so confined, that we have so confined ourselves. Egocentric critters that we are—and I’m no pschycologist either--I’m guessing our degraded day-to-day reality is too much like being the star in a scary movie where the screenwriter goes on strike due to poor working conditions and refuses to save us from impossible odds. Too scary to look at.

I’ve often said that Denial is a great human tool for getting ourselves out of the woods with a broken leg, but it's also a tool that devolves into dented monkey wrenches used inappropriately as hammers when applied to politics and other social disciplines where you actually have to acknowledge the Pain in order to do anything about it.

We have all the information on Global Warming we need to compel us. Our leading scientists have been warning us for a quarter-century that it’s an observable, replicable and therefore-scientific fact that we are living far beyond our means, that catastrophes and gothic-cloaked, degraded environments await us all, rich and poor.

Now it appears even our leading musicians are willing to speak with the same irrefutable authority. And yet here we are, a quarter century after scientific officialdom felt comfortable enough with its data to declare to political officialdom that we simply must quit shitting in our nest or else, and political officialdom has not only done nothing, but has willfully shifted the state vehicle in reverse, causing the first dire predictions to become either increasingly more dire, or true. In the course of human evolution, this reversal is predictable, significant and worth examining by every one of us. The fact that bigotry—racism, religious zeolotry, apocalyptic teabaggery, war, you name it--blends so seamlessly with earthly destruction is one of the huge and impossible Pains we must acknowledge if we’re going to get ourselves out of these woods. To put it even more bluntly, our current pathetic behavior is a Pain that every single one of us denies at great peril to our children, our grandchildren and to ourselves.

Poor frogs. Poor us.

How about we evolve or something?

On Calling Myself a Progressive

I figure the word “progressive” has a pretty good pedigree but is subject to abuse through overuse.

I would claim it in the sense of an objection I have long held, that “environmentalists” such as myself are opposed to “progress”. I’ve always countered that charge with one of my favorite counter-points, which is that while I’m in no way opposed to progress, I’m just not seeing any lately.

Speaking of clichés, we progressives didn’t invent the six-syllable mouthful of language corruption that now effortlessly rolls out of our mouths through overuse and abuse: “environmentalist”. I think corporate media hung that hat on us and we were collectively too out-of-tune with Poetry to voice offense. If I were to describe myself with a comparable six-syllable insult to the English language, I would follow Montana writer Rick Bass’ lead and identify myself as a “human-f---in’ bein’ ”.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party; Dan Happel, Our Planning Board and Agenda 21

When Madison County Commissioner Dan Happel made his “Agenda 21” presentation to the Ravalli County Planning board last month, he defined himself. He told the board—and us—that he was a qualified expert on “Agenda 21” because he had been involved in the “liberty” movement most of his life. Chairman Jan Wisneiwski  further qualified Happel’s  claimed “expertise” on the topic-at-hand by allowing fundamentalist prayer to be presented before the proceedings, liberally sprinkled with “citizen comment” that fundamentalist prayer, as well as this “educational” presentation on “Agenda 21” were relevant to planning board discussions about clean air and water because “we are a Christian nation” and that President Obama is a “critter” http://www.bitterrootstar.com/2012/03/27/planning-board-hears-about-agenda-21/  .

Okay. It’s true. People have a perfect right to claim that the moon is made of green cheese. It says so right in the Constitution—not that the moon is made of green cheese but that one has the right to say it is.

But when these people start citing “studies”, “reports” and “experts” to back up their “green cheese” claim, Us the People—the ones who are footing the bill for such discussions to be allowed on the public’s dime under the guise of being somehow relevant to county business--have the perfect right to demand a forthright answer from them as to what dark hole they’re pulling this stuff out of.

If you’re not content with dismissing the whole Foxnewslandia mess our commissioners have brought down upon our taxpaying heads as Freeman/Posse Comitatus/ “patriot” (and dangerous) nonsense—which it is--and you’d like to know just where people like Happel and Wisniewski are acquiring their superior knowledge of the shadowy, comic-book world of super-villain environmental Stalinists trying to take over the world through mind-control and zoning, here’s some samples from the horse’s mouth for your examination:

In 2008, a “Freedom 21” conference was held in a Dallas, co-hosted by the far-right, conspiracy-oriented Eagle Forum and the far-right, conspiracy-oriented American Policy Center (APC). Other “patriot” organizations presenting  at this “educational” event included the far-right, conspiracy-oriented Freedom Advocates, the far-right, anti-U.N. Soveierenty International, and of course the far-right, conspiracy-oriented John Birch Society, who once insisted that President Eisenhower was a communist.

The subject of the conference was the new catch-all, Far-Right conspiracy theory: an obscure 300-page non-binding (read: toothless) document presented at the U.N. Earth Summit in 1992 that discussed and offered help to local communities in areas such as energy efficiency, clean air and water. This document, one of literally millions of similar obscure public and international documents that float around in our info-age world, was named by some similarly-obscure bureaucrat “Agenda 21”.

And there you go. That’s all you need to know to be as “educated” about “Agenda 21” as Wisniewski or Happel, other than some spin that came out of that 2008 conference that have since become common coin and litmus test combined for all of those who’ve felt threatened by the existence of the first non-white president’s right- leaning administration, including our own Celebrating Conservatism phenomenum here in the Bitterroot:

·         Agenda 21  is "an anti-human document, which takes aim at Western culture.
Sustainable development policies will require "a police state" and ultimately "turn America into a globally governed homeland where humans are treated as biological resources."

·         "Sustainable development can exist only when people are controlled by government."

·         Agenda 21 advocates have drafted an Earth Charter which they compare to the Ten Commandments and keep in an Ark of Hope”.

·         "The major goal of the sustainable development movement is to disarm Americans."

·         "Feminism has destroyed society,"

·         Schools should "spend more time on prayer than putting on condoms"

·         "Diversity is a code word for teaching homosexuality in schools."

·         "This is not some nice little debate…this is war."

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/behind-the-green-mask  http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2008/winter/earth-worship

So we can use the Far Right’s own chosen metaphor: War, usually the worst expression of American xenophobia and nativism, and by extension, the worst of Montana, your home. These folks, including our local government officials, are feeling comfortable enough now to declare war on the environment (and environmentalists), women, our schools, our courts, public employees and anyone benefiting from public services of any kind that they don’t approve of.

This is crazy, destructive stuff brought to us by people who have chosen not to be reasonable, that is picking up steam every day throughout the country and here in the Ravalli County commissioners’ meeting room every time it isn’t filled with angry citizens demanding our elected officials and the boards they appoint to represent us stick to reality when doing our business.

How about us striving to be part of the best? Let’s counter this stuff. It’s dangerous. It’s crazy and you gotta show up. Otherwise, they win. 

Again, your commissioners now apparently think it’s proper county business to discuss whether anyone advocating for sustainability, a clean environment, or even zoning are in reality Stalinist operatives working to send everyone in Montana to work camps in Seattle.

Here are the links to last Wedensday’s commissioner meeting:
http://www.rcwatchdog.org/
Part 1 Video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCpsxXzySBQ
Part 2 Video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNCTNzWMM5Y
Part 3 Video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1rWH7I7lqQ

On Fukushima Debris Washing Up on Remote Beaches in Alaska and Washington

I have a blue glass globe sitting on my shelf, along with other nick-nacks and mementos from my past that I consider "cool". It’s a hand-crafted Japanese fishing float from the latter part of the last century. I found it on a deserted beach in Western Washington when I was working there in the wild salmon industry. At that time, the mid-seventies, there were no other salmon industries other than wild ones, but that’s another rant.

It was unusual to find a lot of manufactured flotsam washed up on the beach in those days. What you did find oftentimes fell under the category of “cool”. When you found this cool flotsam, you were considered to be “beachcombing” because you were actually searching for “cool” things, like blue glass globes that ripped off of Japanese drift nets far out at sea, floated through untellable adventures and end its mystery journey landing magically at your feet.

We knew at the time that rogue drift nets were a terrible thing. They captured and strangled non-prey species back then, just as they do now, and we knew that. But there was only about half the population on the planet as there is now, and, in hindsight, that seemed to warrant a more forgiving perspective. I don’t have any other plausible explanation for our negligence. In other words, notwithstanding the preponderance of evidence to the contrary, we considered that since the Japanese were still making these otherwise-deadly fishing floats out of hand-blown glass, and that since those little hand-made blue bubbles would float and bob hundreds, even thousands of miles of wild, open sea before landing, unbroken, on some wild shore, we could therefore allow ourselves the luxury of random blessing. That since there were a few billion less people trashing our increasingly and disturbingly modern world of thirty years ago, the blue glass balls that floated the deadly ghost nets would be considered just short of quaint, something to beachcomb for. This illusion wasn't hurt by the fact that, in those days, we didn’t trip over a lot of actual garbage looking for them.

As we all know now, in the few short decades since then those wild shores quickly, almost magically, became littered with actual Filth. Plastic bags and wrappers, pop and beer cans, disposable diapers, oil slicks, you name it. In a word, anything that you’d find in your neighborhood landfill was now on wild beaches become garbage dumps for cultures and communities hundreds and even thousands of miles away.

Because of our negligence.

The worst was yet to come, and now it has, as we knew it would. The Fukushima disaster is just the latest filth for us to trip over on our "wild" walks. We’ve all heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the pool of plastic garbage in the North Pacific Ocean, estimated at anywhere from twice the size of Hawaii to twice the size of our continent. Unimaginable at any size, but leave the size argument for scientists to figure out. We the People know about this garbage patch because it exists, its existence is logical and it gets a fair amount of press coverage. What’s less well-known but as equally-obvious as the nose on your face is that there are other of these giant monuments to our abusive ways, in every great body of oceanic waters covering our beautiful world where ocean currents gather and trap our floating filth, our cultural disgrace, on a huge, almost unimaginable scale.

And imagination, my friends, is the key to this thing. Thirty-five, forty years ago, a mere half a lifespan, in the post-Silent-Spring environmental awakening, we knew that things were pretty bad and heading south, but we didn’t use our imagination. We couldn’t imagine how much worse it could get how quickly. And now that it has, and our cultural filth encircles us by the simple physics operating within every natural current of our living Earth's breathing mechanisms, we still can’t quite get a bead. We go on, sipping our coffee, smelling the diesel-tinted air around us, scheming about vacationing on a 3,000-passenger ocean liner while simultaneously blanking out the unimaginable thought that a typical ship of that size and type produces about 16,000 pounds of solid waste a week (not counting the unimaginably-copious diesel fumes it belches out 24-7), much of which ends up swirling in one of these unimaginably-huge, toxic toilet bowls. How sad is that?

We used to call them Tidal Waves, back when unimaginable things seemed almost quaint. Now a Tsunami wipes clean the coastline of a modern, carbon-centric culture. What are the real consequences of that? Imagine, if you will, a swath of just one modern city, with its cars and buses, oil slicks and unresolved toxic secrets getting washed out to sea in a matter of hours. Where’s it all going to go? Where else? Just like the handmade Japanese fishing floats, Japanese industrial waste will bob the waves for hundreds, thousands of miles, having their secret adventures we will never be privy to, finally washing up on a formerly pristine beach in Alaska, Washington, Oregon. At our feet. Is anything pristine anymore? Have we ever had the right to think of anything as "wild", since Silent Spring was published in 1962? Are we really that small yet?

What a tiny little world we live in, if we so choose. We can be interconnected in a broadbased, wholistic way, where we imagine and then pay attention to these realities and trends, and respond appropriately. Or we can be interconnected in ignorance and tragedy, sharing only in each others’ toxic flotsam. The former is an expansive discipline from a human perspective.The latter is very small and tight indeed.

Rachel Carson died of breast cancer in 1964, and from that time til now we have quite clearly not heeded, nor even honored the knowledge she gifted us. So barring what we should but somehow can't do, how about we do an exercise instead? Kind of like doing our morning stretches, or practicing on our guitar? Imagine our mom dying of an inexplicable, rare cancer, or our kid born with an inexplicable, rare deformity, or a neighbor’s mom or kid, or some stranger’s mom or kid. Then think of Rachel Carson, and all the other messengers who gave us the clear and unignorable warning decades ago when we could have actually done something with it but instead we blithely ignored. Then let's visualize four decades, an incredibly short span of time to have fit the negligent damage we have done to our ourselves and our Earth within. 

Then let's take a deep, cleansing breath, and act appropriately.

Abe Lincoln Wouldn't Be a Republican Today

There’s a curious debate going on within the circular world of the Missoulian’s opinion pages lately. It revolves (literally) around the intergalactic tenet that Hate Speech as practiced by such Confederate-General-wanna-be’s as Limbaugh and Beck over our public airwaves constitutes “freedom of speech”. One writer, a Mr. C. Ted Nyquest of Piltzville, went the extra mile in defense of Unbridled Capitalism, known to our forebearers as Slavery, and known to us today—thanks in large part to those very same millionaire Clear Channel shock jocks—as Tea Party Raving Nonsense (TVRN).

“In the capitalist free market,” Mr. Nyquest wrote, “…a product or service or the money therefrom is brought to the market and exchanged to mutual benefit. Both buyer and seller agree and benefit or the transaction doesn’t take place.”

My Response, published in small part by the Missoulian on Ma 22^nd, follows:

Mr. Nyquest,

Your attempt at old-fashioned phrasing in order to sound like an “expert” works to a point: you’ve channeled Jeff Davis in support of slavery. If you were aiming for sounding like a “Republican”, then Abe Lincoln you're not.  Abe is probably flipping in his grave as internet-educated malcontents corrode the English language he so loved in defense of Limbaugh and Beck.

Defending shock jocks who use our public airwaves to shout “free market” and “state’s rights” with Constitutions in their pockets and flags in both hands is not a credible defense of capitalism. Rather it’s an admission that you don’t understand American history. The Constitution, after all, was created after the Articles of Confederation (state’s rights on steroids) didn’t work, and a need for a stronger federal presence (and by definition recognized public commons such as our public airwaves) was determined necessary for the nation’s survival.

Abe almost single-handedly invented the meaning of "republicanism" over 160 years ago. It was a new political force meant to appeal to immigrants and people who didn’t believe that just because a "product or service"  is "brought to the market" and "exchanged for mutual benefit" that makes it somehow sanctified as "capitalism" and therefore should be considered sacred. They fought a war over it, and your side lost.   

Willful misrepresentation of facts for the sake of the rich has a long pedigree in America for millionaires like Limbaugh and Beck. For the rest of us—including immigrants, women and everyone in danger of being enslaved by our modern corporate monarchies—we’d do better following a different American path. In response to Jeff Davis’ constitutional misrepresentations, the real Lincoln, using good-old-fashioned English, replied, “Let us be diverted by none of those sophisticated contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored.”

Bill LaCroix    Victor, MT  

Are Vampires People, Too?

                                                                             or
                                             Quit Yer Whinin'

Capitalism is dead

But so are vampires

And so it follows

That the first thing you gotta do
If you don't like dead things sinking their teeth into you

Is to simply shine

With the light of day

Otherwise get used

To wearing neck braces

To bed.