No Stranger To Strange Lands - Dedication And Apology

I honor the following individuals who have passed away in the time since I originally wrote this book. They were all of a previous generation, and had lived long and interesting lives:

My father, who came in with Queen Elizabeth, went out with Ted Kennedy, and always expressed his love for me in the very best way he knew how,

Edward Thomas Butler, 21 April 1926 – 26 September 2009,

And two inspiring men, both people’s historians, with whom I feel a special connection because of the part they play in this book,

Louis “Studs” Terkel, 16 May 1912 – 31 October 2008,

Howard Zinn, 24 August 1922 – 27 January 2010.

No Stranger to Strange Lands is dedicated to their spirits, and, most importantly, this book is dedicated to my Jamie, whose spirit for living life to the fullest and whose tremendous, unbounded capacity for love has inspired my mission to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new thoughts and new ideas; to boldly think what no one has thought before.

I thank my sister, Nancy Butler, and my friend, Pam Wynia, for their editorial assistance and advice, and my Jamie for his patience and for the cover art.

And finally, I must apologize for a grave mistake that I made. Despite everything that I profess in this book, I found myself acting shamefully when President Barack Obama went to Oslo, Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on 10 December 2009, where he made a speech titled, A Just and Lasting Peace, rationalizing his recent decision to escalate the War in Afghanistan. Overwhelmed by a mudslide of stultifying irony, I forgot what Howard Zinn had said one year previously in his speech of 8 November 2008, that war is antithetical to peace and stability because its outcome is unpredictable, as the perpetrators always seem surprised when their goals are not met, and it ends up corrupting everybody. In my desire to defend the President and hold on to the Hope that he represented, I was corrupted by this war, and by the anger and pain of that excruciatingly surreal moment in history, which tore a piece of my heart out and caused me to go just a little bit insane. I am sorry for allowing my distress to misguide me, for trying to rationalize the irrational, for wavering from my principles, and for misdirecting my anger.

Julie R Butler

3 September 2010

Lago Puelo, Chubut, Argentina

Monkey Business

Things To Do To Throw A Monkey Wrentch In The System And Get Our Government Back - Naomi Klein's suggestion comes at the end of this segment with Amy Goodman. The link to the interview with her and Noam Chomsky follows. And then follows the link to Micheal Moore's interview with Amy, where he is also demanding we find some way to get our country back from corporate control.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, right now—well, you just flew into Park City, Utah just before President Obama’s State of the Union address. Your reaction to it?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I mean, we knew the spending freeze was going to come, but to me, it’s really striking. I think what this moment represents is the decision, which we all feared would come, to pass the bill on from saving Wall Street, from saving the elites of this country from their own mess, a bill worth trillions of dollars, to regular people in need in this country. I mean, that’s what a spending freeze really means.

And we have to look at it in the context of the debt crisis that is occurring at the state level. There’s deficit—huge deficits being run up. California is the most dramatic example, but you’re already seeing how students are facing things like 30 percent tuition increases. Women’s shelters are being closed. So, you know, when the President says freeze spending, that’s saying to the states, “We’re not going to help you. We’re not going to bail you out.”

So this is really—this, to me, all comes back to the top-down bailout that should never have taken place in the first place, the decision that was made to throw the taxpayer dollars at the banks, at the elites, no strings attached, not to help the people losing their jobs, losing their homes. And now the bill is being passed on, because the debt crisis, the private-sector debt crisis, which started this, the banks racking up these huge debts, was never solved. It was just moved. It was just moved to the public coffers.

And now Obama is—this is a Hoover move. This is a Herbert Hoover move. And I think we have to say very clearly, he is not FDR. And, you know, in the spirit of Howard Zinn, who passed yesterday, I keep thinking, you know, what would he say about the State of the Union? And I think he would tell us to refuse to pay this bill, that we need a debtors’ revolt.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/28/noam_chomsky_and_naomi_klein_respond

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/26/michael_moore_on_haiti_the_supreme

And here is a segment from Thursday's Headlines on DemocracyNow! about something very important that everyone can get involved in making happen:

Dems Seek to Undo Supreme Court Ruling on Corporate ElectioneeringAnd Democrats are gearing up to try to counter the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to elect and defeat candidates. In a five-to-four decision, the Court overturned century-old restrictions on corporations, unions and other interest groups from using their vast treasuries to advocate for a specific candidate. Speaking on the House floor, Democratic Congress member Donna Edwards of Maryland said she’ll introduce a constitutional amendment to revoke the Supreme Court ruling.
Rep. Donna Edwards:

“The American people already believe that corporate special interests and their lobbyists run the show around here. I mean, the halls are crawling with them. But that’s not enough. Now the Court says to the big banks, to the drug companies, to the insurance companies, ‘Hey, all bets are off, and it’s open season. Our elections are for sale.’ A law won’t fix this; we have to fix it in the Constitution. So today I’ll introduce a constitutional amendment so that we, the people, can take back our elections and our democracy. This is not the People’s House Incorporated. We are the people. It’s our house, it’s our Constitution, and it’s our elections. And we plan to take it back from the United States Supreme Court.”

In his State of the Union address, President Obama renewed his criticism of the Supreme Court ruling, saying he hopes Congress passes legislation “that helps to right this wrong.”

Here is a link to Guernica Magazine's interview of Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur that show that there is hope from within the system to find ways to fix it:

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/1432/kaptur/

And finally, the link to the second segment of Thursday's DemocracyNow!, which pays tribute to Howard Zinn, who passed away on Wednesday. The world will miss you, Howard Zinn, but we are so glad that you could share your wisdom - that war is unpredictable; war involves committing evil for the sake of a possible future good; war corrupts everybody involved with it; and that Democracy is The People, not the structures of government.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for your active patience.

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/1432/kaptur/

Studs Terkel excerpt from No Stranger

excerpt from No Stranger to Strange Lands: A Journey Through Strange Coincidences, Connective Thoughts, and Far Flung Places

Studs Terkel
...I seem to be existing in separate realities. One reality is my daily life and the regular people I encounter, who don't seem to be concerned at all about the downfall of this nation due to the stealing of the elections – twice – and the lying us into an unnecessary war and the depletion of the federal coffers so that the only thing government can spend money on is the “war on terror” - goodbye education system, goodbye affordable health care, goodbye social security, goodbye infrastructure, goodbye government regulators of industry... Then there is the reality that I seek out on the internet, the “left-wing” blogs and information sources, and LINK TV. It is truly a bubble unto its own. One that is full of the most creative, intelligent, talented, aware, caring people, one that could and should be a more widespread non-bubble phenomenon, if only its message could get past the corporate right-wing propaganda machine that passes for “news” in this country.

Today, Amy Goodman was in Chicago to interview Studs Terkel for two hours – an amazing man and another national treasure – why had I not heard of him before? Why isn't he more commonly known outside of Chicago? His radio show played for an hour, five days a week, from 1952 to 1997. He interviewed really interesting people like British philosopher Bertrand Russell, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, author James Baldwin, Pete Seeger, who played with Woody Guthrie in the group, The Almanac Singers, and many, many more famous and not so famous people. He was very active in supporting the workers rights movement, the civil rights movement, and was blacklisted as a Communist during the McCarthy era. He, like Howard Zinn, was most interested in the telling of history by regular folks and through diverse viewpoints, in order to counter the prevailing narratives that the powerful would like us to believe. In this interview, he starts out by stating that the “greatest generation” came out of the 60's, not WWII. He talks about the perversion of our language and our thoughts concerning key words like “Commie” and “Liberal” and “Terrorist.” He, like me, wants to know why the so-called “center” is actually so far to the right, thus painting so many as being on the far left fringes that should really be considered mainstream. Much of this is because we do not understand our own history and background. Studs digs right into Alan Greenspan, lamenting that he is a big Ayn Rand fan and throwing in that she believed that the rich deserve to be on top and the poor deserve to be “down there.” He calls the free market ideologues “members of the new religion we have,” and points out the irony that the children and grandchildren of the people that were saved by the actions of the New Deal government during the Great Depression are now ignorantly calling out “too much government.” His rapid-fire 95 year old mind then moves right into how the response to the attacks of 9/11 have been an insult to our common sense of decency and to our intelligence... and that just begins the interview. Later, he comes around to finish out his overall thinking on all of this:

“How could it be at the end of World War II, we were the most honored powerful nation in the world? 'Honored' is the key word. Today we’re the most despised and feared. How come? Because the American public itself has no memory of past. You know, Gore Vidal used a phrase, 'the United States of Amnesia.' I say the United States of Alzheimer's. We forgot what happened yesterday. We know all about Paris Hilton. We know about that. But what do we know about -- why are we there in Iraq? And they say, when you attack our policy, you’re attacking the boys. On the contrary, we’re defending those boys. We want them back home with their families, doing their work and not a war that we know is built upon an obscene lie. We know that now. And so, it’s this lack of history that’s been denied us, just as the case of this guy who was told the government saved them during the Great Depression.”

I was particularly struck by the quote that Studs Terkel pulls out of his jacket pocket during the interview when the subject of James Baldwin comes up. Here is Terkel quoting Baldwin:

“History does not refer merely […] to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it, the past, with us. And we’re 'unconsciously controlled' in so many ways, that history, the past, is present now in all we do.”

That is obviously a very important idea to Studs Terkel, and it is exactly what I am driving at about history not only being so important to inform our actions, but that it actually exists in a substantial way in the present as well as in the past. The denial and rewriting of history has been purposefully perpetrated on this nation in order to distract us from caring about anything but what our next purchases will be. At the same time that we are amnesiacs, we are “unconsciously controlled” by a past that we do not know. No wonder we are so confused and easily distracted. Perhaps it is not me who is schizophrenic, but the rest of society, the ones who do not realize that they are so easily manipulated by the corporate interests that run this country, who do not know the historical facts upon which the present stands, who do not recognize the hypocrisy of so much that comes out of the mouths of our illustrious leaders. Isn't it strange that it is Progressives who want to remember the past accurately, in order to be able to understand ourselves better, while Conservatives want to conserve not the past, but the status quo, and are perfectly happy rewriting the past to follow the narrative they want to disseminate in order to hold on to their status and power? They tend to gloss over the bad and the ugly and glorify the “good” parts of history's story. They get mad when someone brings up the painful particulars. They attempt to bury those not so happy memories. This is not healthy for individuals nor for societies. As James Baldwin points out, the past does not go away. It stays with us, and we need to have the strength of character to work through the hard parts as well as the happy, to own up to them and heal them, not just ignore them and let them unconsciously control us until they burst out in some uncontrollable rage. History and Memories – they are both, if not themselves irrational, very closely connected with the irrational universe of the Emotions.