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/

Shoeless in Cairo

I began this blog back in September of 2008 by posting an inspiring letter written by Jeff Halper of the Free Gaza Movement, which described his obsevations after his experence an Isreali jail. Now, I post again a letter from a Gaza Freedom activist, because the world cannot forget the plight of the Palestinians and the complicity of the world's most powerful forces to keep these people under a barbaric and siege.


Written by Mary Hughes-Thompson, part of the GFM (Gaza Freedom March) convoy that has been trying to
get into Gaza.

In about an hour the Gaza Freedom Marchers in Cairo will be meeting in Tahrir
Square to celebrate the beginning of 2010. January 1st will be the fifth day
of my hunger strike.

It was an eventful and exhilarating day for all of us here in Cairo. This
morning we began to arrive in small groups at a couple of locations in downtown
Cairo, intending to join and up and begin a solidarity march to Gaza. We
didn't expect to get far before being stopped, so we took what things we had
that would make it easier to spend the night in the street. As soon as we got
out of our taxi near the Museum, Hedy and I and Hedy's two friends from St
Louis were immediately surrounded by security police who tried to lead us away
from the area.

All around us we saw other small groups receiving the same reception. After
sitting on a bench in front of the Nile Hilton for half an hour, with half a
dozen police standing close and trying to persuade us to continue walking away,
we suddenly saw a surge of people crossing the street a few yards from us, and
we quickly rushed to join them. Free Gaza signs appeared, chants of "Free
Gaza" were heard. Passengers in cars and buses gave us a wave and a smile. We
were immediately encircled by several hundred policemen who placed barriers
around us and began to push us more tightly together. We tried to keep space
around Hedy, as we were pushed and squeezed. I feared my ribs would be
crushed as I was squeezed tighter and closer to people around me. A few people
fell or tried to sit in the middle of the circle and the police went after
them.

Suddenly I was pushed to the ground and fell flat on my face. As people around
me were pushed more tightly to the center, I feared I would be trampled.
Perhaps the police thought I had been sitting, because they grabbed my arms and
began to drag me along the ground. I felt my one shoe fall off, then the other
I tried to hang onto my things as some French people came to my rescue,
reaching out to help lift me to my feet, then leading me away next to the wall
and away from the police.

My shoes and my cane were swallowed up and could not be located amid the mass
of people. We stayed together for many hours, held tightly in our circle by
the police. It was very warm, but as always spirits were high, some enormous
signs were raised by young men who climbed the only tree we had in our
enclosure. It was a laurel tree, and many people raised branches above their
heads as we called for peace and freedom for Gaza. At the moment we knew the
march was taking place inside Gaza we chanted again: Free Gaza, Free Gaza.
Someone began to play an accordian, and I was pulled, shoeless, into a circle
of women, including Hedy, as we danced in a circle while people around us
cheered.

Eventually, after several hours, some members of American Veterans for Peace
who had been watching over Hedy persuaded her it would be safer if she left.
They felt the police were getting more threatening and were worried they
wouldn't be able to keep her safe if we were rushed and attacked. Hedy
reluctantly agreed to go outside the circle to talk to some press who wanted to
interview her, so Hedy, Sandra, J'Ann and I were, after some negotiations,
escorted outside where Hedy was greeted by reporters.

So here I stay in Cairo, grateful to be merely shoeless, somewhat bruised and
only slightly battered, still strong and determined, proud and humbled to be a
part of this amazing family that has come together from around the world to
stand in solidarity with Gaza, Palestine and to remember what happened in Gaza
a year ago. We may not get to Gaza this time, but we believe we have made a
joyful noise in Cairo.

Happy New Year everybody. Free Gaza. Free Palestine.

PS: One of my shoes was later found.

Visit http://www.freegaza.org/

Seven Twenty-First Century Social Sins

In honor of International Human Rights Day, The Seven Twenty-First Century Social Sins

1.Power without Wisdom
2.Pleasure without Awareness
3.Science without Humanity
4.Knowledge without Understanding
5.Politics without Accountability
6.Commerce without Conscience
7.Spirituality without Connection

I believe in a progressive philosophy of examining ideas from the past, processing them to find what about them is useful and not so useful in the present, and reworking them so that they can help us to move society forward - to progress. In this way, beautiful customs that have passed on through time can be respected and continued, notions that may have been the product of ignorance or that have become obsolete can be discarded, and new customs and traditions can be woven from those most durable threads of tradition, being reinforced in the process.

In keeping with this philosophy, here is my updated version of the list that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi laid out in 1925 in the journal, "Young India." His list of social behaviors to avoid was, of course, the product of his place and time, which was Colonial India struggling for self-determination and social justice. Gandhi's Indian revolution was truly innovative as a widespread social movement in its rejection of the use of violence, and his ideas, manifested by his actions, have been an inspiration to all who have advocated for social change through peaceful resistance – from figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Cesar Chavez, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, Howard Zinn, Wangari Maathai in Africa, Ramzi Kysia of the Free Gaza Movement, to artists and musicians such as John Lennon, Bob Marley, and many, many more, from around the globe, representing all walks of life.

Although Gandhi's potent demonstration of the power of non-violent insistence upon change is timeless wisdom, this updated version of Gandhi's Seven Social Sins is necessary because the original applied to a world that has changed significantly since that time. In 1925, the idea of Communism was gaining ground, the European Empires were experiencing their final decline, oil dependency was on the rise, geopolitics were undergoing tectonic shifts, and Free Market Capitalism had yet to become the weapon of choice to be wielded by the United States in order to maintain its total dominance upon the world stage of today. In those years between the two World Wars, workers and poorer people of the world were demanding inclusion in the new kinds of governments that were replacing the waning monarchies, while those who had benefited from the monarchical structures and their hierarchical social constructs sought to hold on to their power and wealth. This was only one chapter in the eternal class struggle that stretches throughout the story of human civilization, but at no other time in history was the notion that the lesser classes might become enfolded into the structures of governance more energized, as the dismantling of old regimes gave way to new opportunities.

It was this wave of opportunity that opened the door to new ideas about how societies should structure themselves, and what pitfalls they should avoid, that Gandhi was boldly walking through when he presented his Seven Social Sins to the subcontinent of India and to the world. Here is his original list:

1.Wealth without Work
2.Pleasure without Conscience
3.Science without Humanity
4.Knowledge without Character
5.Politics without Principle
6.Commerce without Morality
7.Worship without Sacrifice

The differences between the two lists reflect very different attitudes that have arisen with time. Gandhi's version was just like his dress - simple, basic, unadorned. The list appeared, with no discussion whatsoever, for his followers to contemplate as they struggled to recreate an independent India. I have recycled Gandhi's list, demonstrating my philosophy of examining, processing, progressing, and have adorned it with a few new ideas of my own. As the people of the world seek ways to demand social justice in the face of the current economic uncertainty, a cohesive foundation for how to challenge social policies and philosophies that have failed to live up to their promises will be of the utmost importance. It must be stressed that this is a matter of basic human rights, not one of capital flow or market readjustments. Gandhi framed the struggle of the poorest classes of India as being the same struggle as the entire society's right to self-determination against British colonialism. This lesson that various social struggles are not fragmented, but rather, are all one and the same - struggles against wildly unequal distribution of wealth, against the hoarding of power, against the undermining of democratic principles, against environmental destruction - are all connected.

1. Wealth without Work - Power without Wisdom

The idea of, “no wealth without work” has its origins in the ethical argument against usury, or the charging of interest on loans, long seen as a social evil as well as a weakness of character. This idea appeared in the form of "just price theory," from the economic thought of the Middle Ages, and later, in Adam Smith's "Labor Theory of Value," both connecting a product's value to the labor used to produce it, which was further connected to the greater social good by its promotion of industriousness in individuals. As the Industrial Revolution dramatically raised the level of the world's commerce to new heights, economic theory leap towards new understandings, and capitalism based on credit and investment banking did away with the ethical frown upon what was once called "usury." In response to new imbalances that arose along with these changes, socialist philosophy took up the old slogan anew, as laborers felt the need to stand up for themselves, striving to once again recognize the value and dignity of work, to instil pride in each individual's role in society, to raise the status of the worker from that of the mere commodity belonging to the wealthy owners of the corporations that were steadily building their own empires.

Although the ideals behind "no wealth without work" may be noble and just, I feel that this phrase no longer resonates in today's world, where investment strategies and the use of credit have become acceptable means of obtaining wealth that offer some level of greater social good in society. The caveat here is that these means not be taken to excess, which is the hard-learned lesson of the economic collapse of recent years. There is a point of balance between being too dependent on borrowing and not borrowing at all. In a system that thrives on the flow of capital, more than anything else, it is of the greatest import to make sure that not only those who already have large amounts of capital to invest have access to credit. And, despite that tough lesson about handing out credit as if it were Halloween candy (indeed, on college campuses, credit card applications were literally handed out along with candy bars), there are some positive signs that "usury," when carefully initiated and vigorously regulated, can offer a greater good to society, as evidenced by the growing movement of "micro loans" to the world's poorest citizens. These people, often women who have come together to form small cooperatives in impoverished regions, do not need much to help them improve themselves and their communities.

My idea is to look at financing of any sort, in any amount, not simply as a means of trade for goods and services, but as a source of power. Money is power. Many things offer power, including social status, physical strength, pure numbers, access to government representatives, charisma, the secret to nuclear fusion, etcetera. As the lesson about depending too strongly on credit has taught us, so, too, does any kind of power require moderation. This moderation is a kind of Wisdom. Therefore, Power Requires Wisdom.

No power without wisdom. No mere marketing of ideas without digging into the basis of those ideas, who is paying for the marketing of them, how they benefit certain individuals more than they offer any greater good, and how their very veracity might be in question. No unfettered freedom of access to government officials without some show of how the policies that one is pushing for would actually offer some greater good for society. No governmental position of power without strict mediation of how that power can and cannot be used. No trusting that those in power are there because they somehow deserve to be there, without any proof that they are capable or to be trusted with their power. No monarchy or dynasty. No impunity. No lack of oversight and regulation.

To tie power with wisdom is also to re-assert the relationship of those who hold power with those who allow them to hold that power. It is a reminder that in society, the many give tacit consent to their rulers when they do not voice their opposition to this relationship. If the many would understand that they, too, hold power - of numbers, of denial of services, of the ability to stop commerce, in entirely peaceful ways, especially when they can become organized and act in unison - then the powerful would be wise to look after the well-being of the larger community instead of only their own self-interests. And wisdom is, further, a connective and expansive force. It sees in terms of interaction rather than competition, relationships rather than enmities, community rather than self.

I feel that this framing of the issue, of no power without wisdom, without oversight or moderation, without connection, without a larger scope of vision addresses the ills of the modern world more than the framing of the issue as no wealth without work, as the former can be seen as a divisive point that can only degenerate into class struggle, in which the lower classes are viewed as committing one of the biblical seven cardinal sins - envy - while the upper classes are viewed as committing another - gluttony. The real sin here is that of generalization, which feeds the perception that the extremes of a situation are the norm, and that the actions of some represents the sentiments of all. The issues involved in class struggle are not simple. Rather, they are infinitely complicated, easily misunderstood by oversimplification, and inherently divisive. So, by replacing the reference to class struggle, as well as to the outdated connection of wealth to physical labor, with a very different characterization of wealth as a form of power, I hope to take a positive step forward toward the goal of reformulating how societies understand the problems presented by inequities of wealth and other types of power.

2. Pleasure without Conscience - Pleasure without Awareness

Mahatma Gandhi was devoted to a life of simple living, weaving his own clothing out of cotton, and minimizing pleasure and extravagances for the sake of spiritual purity. In this context, pleasure itself was to be avoided, and the having of pleasure was, if not sinful, then connected with guilt. I reject the idea of guilt trips that religious codes tend to impose, so I have substituted "awareness" for "conscience," and I believe that this admonition fits in with modern attitudes about how pleasure enhances our lives, which we should not constantly feel conscientious or riddled with guilt about. I feel that the 1960's cultural revolution - of progressive rock music, personal and sexual freedom, use of mind-altering drugs - ushered in a new understanding of how pleasure can actually enhance one's awareness in surprising ways, and is not always an act of pure hedonism, when that expanded awareness is a connective force instead of an isolating one. It is possible to have keen awareness while experiencing pleasure, if we put our minds to it, as opposed to closing ourselves off to the wider world and pretending that we are in some other reality. Celebrations such as Christmas and Thanksgiving are other examples of how we can enjoy ourselves while at the same time being thankful for the source of our joy. As long as we do not take things to extremes, do not celebrate for the sake of the pleasure itself, and make sure to remain aware of and connected to the larger situations around us, pleasure does not have to bring on pangs of conscience. Pleasure with awareness has the power to heal and re-energizing us to face larger realities with renewed vitality.

3. Science without Humanity

Einstein reiterated this idea with his famous quote, "It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity." What Gandhi warned the world against, Einstein commiserated had happened. Einstein spoke of atomic weapons, but his observation goes well beyond that in today's world of i-phones and c-scans and gm-foods. The degree to which we do not understand how our gadgets work, let alone the consequences of their manufacture, distribution, and use, has lagged farther and farther behind the level at which we are enamored with them. And from this level of comfort with not understanding derives a tremendous disconnect, a fatal attraction to having no interest in understanding the world around us which leaves us dangerously vulnerable to campaigns of misinformation - the ultimate paradox of the "information age." So society becomes fractionalized, compartmentalized, separated into clusters of special interest groups, digesting information in small bits, sound bites, disambiguated twitters, and our ability to comprehend what it all means for our society, and what it says about us as human beings, gets lost in the onslaught of fragmentized info-porn. This is the nightmare that science fiction writers could not have dreamed up. The computers have not become frighteningly human-like, rather, the humans have become like machines. We must work to regain our humanity in the face of this advanced dependence upon technology.

4. Knowledge without Character - Knowledge without Understanding

Gandhi's idea of "no knowledge without character" carries the implicit meaning that it is "moral" character that must not be lacking. It seems to me that this kind of language was the norm in Gandhi's day, when speaking of how persons were to act in society, with all of the religious connotations included, whether those be Hindu or Muslim or Christian or any other. However, being a proponent of the idea that religion and "morality" are not necessary to motivate people to be upstanding and kind and generous, I want to get away from moralizing. The idea of "no knowledge without understanding," does just that - it takes knowledge out of the realm of a gift that must be paid for with morality and places it in the realm of a kind of power that requires a moderator.

To moderate knowledge with understanding seeks to take knowledge further than the mere collection of information. It ensures that the human element will be present, so that we will not be machines, nor will machines that collect information be anything like humans. To actually understand something is connective. It looks beyond the information and tries to make sense of it, using capabilities that only the human mind possesses. This is, in large part, what makes us human - to understand past, present, and future; to understand that when I do a certain thing, a predictable outcome will occur; to understand that symbolic sounds can be developed into language...

But "no knowledge without understanding" pushes us further, to keep learning new things, to strive to make sense out of what we know so far, to ask "why" after we know "what" and "where" and "how." It goads us toward the wisdom that, to paraphrase Socrates, a wise man understands how little he knows. And it entreats us to continuously connect all of the tidbits of information together into a larger understanding.

5. Politics without Principle - Politics without Accountability

Gandhi hoped that politics could be principled, that the political arena would be self-regulating, in a way similar to how the world of business was supposed to be mediated by such economic theories as the "invisible hand." Politics that lacked principle would be unacceptable to the citizens of a democracy. However, it seems that the opposite has come to pass, that politicians who choose to be principled cannot compete against those who are willing to market themselves insincerely, and worse, spend much of their energy attempting to demonize their political opponents - a process that continues on far past the political campaigns to infect governance itself. The result is that truths become buried under infinite levels of rhetoric, all constructive conversation on issues gets left by the wayside, and citizens become either polarized or cynical about the process, a situation that can only lead to a crisis of confidence in government. So the foundations of democracy - government by the people - begin to crack.

While one would reasonably expect politics to be principled, in its absence, what is needed is accountability. When individuals are found to be in blatant disregard of facts in their politicking, they need to be expelled from being involved in any way from the political process. Accountability would literally apply to accounting in terms of how much money is being spent on campaigns, and limits need to be placed, so that the process is not infected by its insipid undermining of the democratic process. And accountability would also apply in regard to openness of government, with fair access of all to their representatives, and a tracking of how much time and resources are being spent on the actual work of governance, along with further limits on how much precious time and resources can be spent politicking. Forcing the agents of government to account for their actions in a much more immediate and transparent way would go far to reign in the unprincipled politics that have caused so much confusion, polarization, and cynicism in today's political arena, and would begin to repair the foundation of democracy upon which the nation stands.

6. Commerce without Morality - Commerce without Conscience

While Gandhi spoke in terms of morality, I wish to move away from such terminology, for the reason that I have already stated, and also because of the danger of moral relativism. Morality is not universal.
It is dependent on society's mores, understandings, and distinct viewpoints. Not only does morality differ from society to society, but from individual to individual, as each one of us is free to develop our own belief systems within pluralistic societies that include many different religions and philosophies. Yet, some sort of code of conduct, some moderator, some set of principles, must apply to everyone in society, where we must all treat each other with a certain amount of respect, regardless of our personal moralities. A different framing of this concept would be to turn to "conscience," instead.

In this context, "conscience" does not imply guilt so much as empathy and compassion. When we are considering how to treat others in society, conscience can be our guide, as this goes beyond any religious moral code or belief system. The logic of "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is as universal as any principle gets, having been present in systems of thought from Confucianism to Buddhism to Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions to New Age philosophies to any thoughtful consideration of how to be a conscientious person. Similarly, when we have conscience about how our actions will effect the different strata of society and the environment, those larger entities within which we all operate, we connect ourselves with our surroundings and thus have a vested interest in doing those things that will help to keep those bodies vibrant and healthy.

This connective principle applies to all aspects of our lives, extending into how we conduct the commerce that is required in modern society to obtain most if not all of our vital needs. The idea that commerce is not a part of the human experience, that the same codes of conduct do not apply to the businesses that we create, participate in, and interact with, because these entities are not actual human beings, makes no sense, whatsoever. The strongest moderator of them all, beyond principle, beyond meek attempts at accountability that consist of fines which are simply worked into the cost of doing business, beyond awareness, which informs, but does not motivate to act conscientiously - conscience must be the moderator of commerce, as it is not something separate, but something that is at the very heart of the human experience and what society is all about.

Economic understandings that separate the "market" out from our daily lives and assume that scientific theories and numeric formulas hold all the answers to how money flows through society have been called into question again and again. Their failures to describe, let alone predict, economic realities might be remedied if they were to be reunited with human considerations, such as defining costs in terms of loss of productivity due to workers' health issues and attitudes, and with even more expansive evaluations of cost, such as the costs to the ecosystem imposed by pollution and environmental destruction. This expansive view of cost analysis might just find that there is a correlation between conscience and the well-being of our businesses in the same way that individuals find themselves to be happier when they are conscientious members of society.

7. Worship without Sacrifice - Spirituality without Connection

The name of "Mahatma" meaning "Great Soul," was given to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi while he was agitating for improvements in the desperate living conditions of poor workers in 1918, against largely British landlords, their militias, and their government supporters. He was arrested for his "agitating," which consisted of making detailed studies of the atrocious living conditions, leading clean-up campaigns, helping village leadership to initiate new school and hospital building, and advocating for the rights of the untouchables. He practiced Hinduism all his life, insisting that all religions were equal, their main purposes being to encourage compassion and brotherhood, while also all having their weaknesses to hypocrisy and dogma. As the title of his autobiography indicates, "The Story of My Experiments with Truth," he was dedicated to the search for Satya, or Truth. And he sought purity, simplicity, and self-sufficiency, practicing spiritual as well as politically-motivated fasting.

Mahatmas Gandhi was, of course, an extraordinary man, and his radical simplicity would be unacceptable in today's world, where appearances are all-important and we are bombarded by commercial messaging from all sides. Jimmy Carter was laughed out of office when he suggested that we all turn down our thermostats in the winter and wear sweaters instead. When the mantra of a whole society is "consumerism," because going without is pessimistic, unsupportive, and unpatriotic, it is extremely difficult to change attitudes and habits that seem to be rights rather than privileges. I can't help but note that Micheal Moore, who certainly isn't one for spending big on fancy wardrobes or expensive haircuts, is the closest thing to a modern-day Gandhi as we are likely to have, as he has been advocating an action plan that combines going without in order to get our personal finances back under control after such over-dependence on credit, involvement in the processes of government, and a program of person health as a microcosm of public health. In his most recent film, Micheal Moore, like Gandhi before him, has tied economic justice with religious-based ethics. Certainly, such concepts can
be seen as a kind of "sacrifice" that can be practical as well as spiritual.

Although this is a holistic approach to social ethics that seeks spiritual guidance, expressed as "worship" by Gandhi, once again, my concern about resonance in a society that emphasizes materialism over spirituality drives me to seek some other way of framing the issue that he was getting at that does not tie worship and spirituality to sacrifice. The idea is to find an approach that nurtures the whole person, so that however we each see ourselves, some sort of a spiritual dimension would be present in our attempts to find a social code that makes sense. My feelings on how this spiritual dimension can be interpreted in the most wide range of possibilities, by adherents to many different religions, or to no religion at all, is to advocate for spirituality as connection.

This connection would be with what we each understand to be "God," and with each other, and with nature. Any sacrifice that would come from the seeking of spirituality would be generated by the desire to connect, and therefore to give something of oneself, to look beyond personal gain, to purify ourselves with the aim of achieving deeper connections through such practices as meditation or prayer or ritual or song and dance or simply taking a moment to be in awe of the universe around us. At the heart of what it means to be a human being is to connect, in mirror of the synapses in our brains. Connecting is conscience, is accountability, is understanding, is humanity, is awareness, is wisdom. The connective principle is what I believe God to be, a higher purpose than the individual, that which we all seek in the form of love, comfort, community, one-ness of being.

This kind of spirituality does the opposite of separating us into different religions and sects. It manifests the idea that Gandhi expressed about the purpose of all religions being to instill compassion and brotherhood. Tragically, he was not successful at convincing the Hindus and the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent that their religions were of this nature, instead of allowing distrust and enmity to cause the division into what is today India and Pakistan. Gandhi was, in fact, murdered because of this rivalry, which he was trying to mediate, and today, these nations are still plagued with ethnic and religious violence.

Nonetheless, I believe in the will of the people to work together to bring an end suffering, to put a stop to violence that only leads to more violence, to push our societies toward progressive change by challenging the status quo and insisting, non-violently, that society must re-order itself so that all will enjoy the benefits of peace and more equitable prosperity. As for the current situation in the United States, the biggest hurdle that must be overcome is the influence of lobbyists and campaign donations on the political process. There needs to be a concerted, focused campaign toward reforming this system, led by a massive citizen's movement, because the politicians are not going to do it on their own. But behind this focused campaign, let there be a set of guiding principles. These are a start, a push toward the process of innovation to come up with new kinds of ideas that might resonate even more strongly. For if we consider the huge success of freeing India from British ownership that Gandhi did achieve through years of influential writing and speaking about his new ideas, acting positively, and sacrificing his freedom as he languished in jail for years, only to come out fighting once again, and then go on to look at all those who he inspired who have also been successful at instituting changes large and small, then our tasks will also appear to have achievable solutions.

Peace is a State of Mind

President Obama's success depends upon the bravery of trust in the process of creating peaceful change.

I recognized the power of his motivations early on, and I have supported him despite several faltering steps that he made at the beginning of his presidency. It was only when I learned that President Obama had made a deal with the pharmaceutical companies to help pass his health care reform that my support had wavered, as I wondered just how far President Obama would go in playing this kind of politics, after winning the presidency on the strength of his inspiring speech titled, The End of Small Politics. But, when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, my trust in the bigger process prevailed.

I had allowed myself to wander, briefly, away from my own arguments about why President Obama deserves our trust and support, even though many of his actions seemed contrary to his message of “change.” I had seen in his visage a figure who did have big plans to end small politics, but who was a practical visionary, who understood that he had to work carefully within the system as it exists. I saw a man with ideas that were more expansive than most people could even comprehend, a longer-term plan that involved patiently negotiating the change that he had promised, and a keen intelligence about how to face the world's colossal complexities. I had seen great promise in his cross-racial identity. And I had hoped that I was right and everybody else was simply wrong who immediately jumped to the conclusion that, because everything was so complicated and his actions were confusing, he had been a fraud during the election, that there never was any “change we can believe in.” By taking this attitude, they have joined the ranks of those who had always disliked and mistrusted Barack Obama, for whatever reasons were in their hearts, and are thus failing to provide the support that he told us that he was going to need to enact that change. As I wrote on my blog, “Change We Can Believe In” is not a spectator sport.

For those of us who believe that this could and should be a less violent world, that nations could solve their differences through peaceful negotiation instead of through war, that a great nation does not need the greatest show of military might to sustain its greatness, it seems that our ideas are always being brushed aside as naive, as politically unfeasible, as unrealistic idealism. And now, we who see in President Barack Hussein Obama a truly transformative figure, because we understand the stupendous scope of his vision and see the alert shine of competence in his eyes, are again and again being sidelined by so many skeptics who do not believe that President Obama is interested in creating peace in the world, and that the Nobel Peace Prize was just so much wishful thinking.

When the President of the United States already has a record of working on nuclear disarmament, and this President had immediately, upon taking office, moved to show his commitment to changing policies of the previous president that were offensive to the ideas of democracy and world citizenship by signing the statement about closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and then stressing the importance of the State Department in creating less militaristic, much more negotiation-oriented foreign policy, and furthermore, when this President reaches out to the Muslim world with a truly inspiring speech in Cairo, then backs off of an aggressive and destabilizing plan to place missiles in Eastern Europe, and actually takes action to engage with repressive regimes in Iran, Burma, and the Sudan in order to apply this nation's power peacefully, I say that this is major change toward a more stable and peaceful world that is more than worthy of a prize.

President Obama is making huge strides in several important areas in the world already, yet I find that people focus only on the difficult domestic situation wherein the military, as well as other organizations that operate in the murky, secret realm of “national defense,” such as the CIA, are made up of career operators who have other ideas than creating peace in the world. President Obama faces the conundrum that he is expected to act militaristic, as the Commander in Chief of the world's largest military, so it is difficult for people in this society to see him as an agent of peace. I would go so far as to say that peace is, in fact, regarded in this society merely as an ideal that dreamers and artists dwell in, not a viable reality.

The question that we must ask ourselves is, why is the idea of peace so unthinkable? Could it be that our society is afraid of peace? In a society that is afraid to trust anyone, a society where violence is a social norm, born of the swagger of entitlement, there is a deep-seated fear of what might happen if everybody were to lay down their arms, as well as their cynicism. Therefore, we must tear down this wall of fear, and find in ourselves the strength of character to admit that it is war and state aggression that is not viable. It is not naive to realize that modern warfare is not a noble endeavor, as it invariably either devolves into an asymmetrical morass or an unthinkable nuclear confrontation. There are no longer any “good wars,” and I believe that President Obama does understand this.

The situation in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, is not a simple matter of drawing down troops and walking away from a disaster of our own making. Whatever solutions there are will involve patient unraveling and insistent determination. And while it is a long-term process, we must all not only support but actively work diligently to help enact a change toward greater stability, because ultimately, peace is a state of mind.

Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism: It Looks Like You've Blown A Seal

The “national conversation” about the direction in which the United States is moving has grown ridiculouser and ridiculouser, if it can even be called a “conversation” at all. In fact, the definite lack of anything even resembling a “conversation” has turned the entire country into a madhouse of hyped-up fears and misdirected anger that are tearing the fabric of democracy into tiny, tattered pieces. While they see themselves as “patriots,” defending what they believe to be the real values and integrity of the United States of America against the agenda of a group of less-righteous reformers, these quite recently fired-up conservative activists are doing the nation a terrible disservice by preventing any constructive conversation from occurring, thus subverting the process of deliberative democracy and laying the groundwork for the very kind of social disharmony that Mussolini played upon in Italy and Hitler utilized in Germany.

The largest point that the “Teabaggers” are missing is the concept of “speaking truth to power,” where such tactics as citizen protests and street marches are necessitated by groups who have no voice in a national conversation, due to repression or social inequality instituted by the state, itself. But the people who are causing such a scene now are by no means a repressed group. They already have a seat at the table and are fully able to make their voices heard through regular channels of communication, through public discussion forums, through the news media, through access to their representatives, etcetera. Unlike the Iraq War protesters, for example, whose reasonable opposition to the attacking of a nation without any discernible proof of the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction or connection between Saddam Hussein and the actual 9/11 attackers was completely ignored by the Bush Administration and subverted by the war-mongering media, having been labeled as “unpatriotic” for wanting to be sure about these things before sending our troops into battle, not to mention destroying the lives of innocent people in Iraq and destabilizing the entire Middle East, there is no silencing and no sidelining of the groups who are taking to the streets now. The Obama Administration has been trying to invite conversation with conservative groups, and because of the fear that the president would be labeled as a “socialist” by these groups that it is actually the progressive, single-payer supporters who are being left out of the discussion.

So, whereas legitimate protest movements can only arise organically through bottom-up, grassroots community organization of repressed voices, which is actually the case for the single-payer movement, what is occurring now is an attempt by a set of top-down, well-funded, politically-connected, behind-the-scenes power brokers – insurance and health industry lobbyists, small-government ideologues, and other social and economic conservatives – to stir up unwarranted fear and underlying prejudices in order to simply shout down their opposition, instead of allowing any conversation to occur at all. This is a dangerous situation, indeed, for let us not forget that the Nazis came to power within the framework of a democratic government, and were enabled to commit their atrocities against the Jewish people by demonizing them as internal enemies of the state, just as progressives are being demonized by the right today. Italy was not a democracy when Mussolini rose to power, but there, too, internal enemies of the state were declared and targeted, Jewish people being primary among them, as well as anyone who did not go along with Mussolini's single-minded plan to create a better, stronger, and more pure Roman Empire.

In the face of these disgraceful and entirely undemocratic tactics, where facts do not seem to hold any sway and even the very nature of what democracy is supposed to be about has been co-opted by religious and economic ideologues, those who believe themselves to be centrist as a way of bringing the nation together have been bending farther and farther over under their pressure, which means that the result of the Obama presidency, so far, has been a reactionary lean to the right instead of the opening up of the national political discussion that progressives believed that Mr. Obama represented during the election.

Up until, well, today, when I read Matt Taibbi's recent articles on the fuckfest that “health care reform” has become (Sick_and_Wrong; PhRMA's Big Bribe Comes In) I had been arguing that President Obama has been cunningly biding his time to be able to work forward an eventual and practical progressive agenda, patiently negotiating the political landscape, showing Solomon-like leadership qualities, and living up to his promise to be everyone's president, not just the partisan Democratic party leader. However, I have finally come to the conclusion that he has, indeed, fallen prey to the Presidential Bubble, surrounded as he is by his army of advisers and assistants, out of touch with his campaign promises and his earliest grassroots progressive supporters. As Matt Taibbi so expressively points out, President Obama has already sold the country out on health care reform, and unless something changes drastically very soon, there will be no meaningful reform at all, rather, things look to get even worse for the citizens of the United States.

This is disastrous for democracy, for the nation, for the Democratic party, for progressives, and for virtually everyone except the healthcare industry. I am glad that I was able to get out of the United States and into a country where reasonably-priced healthcare is available (Uruguay) before this shit-storm hit the fan. The man who campaigned on a platform of change – and, very specifically, on health care reform - has turned out to be more timid about this change than his rhetoric promised. He has let the political hacks persuade him to retain the status quo, to not upset the apple cart too much, to take bribes from the pharmaceutical industry to ensure that his campaign coffers will be full. He has acquiesced to the demands of the noisy, violent, and misguided right, which is beyond disappointing. While I believe that Barack Obama is in no way fascist, I do believe that by allowing this health care reform “debate” to be guided by the industry lobbyists and their reverberating echo chamber on the right, who do not see the connection between individuals' access to health care and the health of the nation, itself, by failing to show leadership and direction on this, one of the most important issues that he campaigned on, Mr. Obama is allowing insipid fascism to sneak into his presidency and infect everyone that it touches more severely than the swine flu virus ever could.

Looking back again at History's lessons, let us remember that both Italian fascism and German Aryan fascism grew out of a desire to find a centrist, “Third Way” that would bring all segments of society together as one in service of a stronger, more unified, more pure, more directed, and supposedly more superior nation. Both of these fascist movements originally portended to represent this centrist middle way between the conservative, wealthy old guard who sought to maintain their positions of exclusive power, and the organizations of low-class laborers who were demanding more opportunities to participate in their own governance, the great promise of a new type of government called “democracy.” Fascism grew out of the desire to quell divisive polarizations, and the draw of this centralizing idea around the strength of the unified nation makes the present day struggle between the left and the right and the desire of this president to draw them both together, however that can be achieved, concerning to behold from this historic perspective. For what was accepted as the “middle ground” was, in truth, quite a bit further to the right than what was publicly admitted by the fascists who needed the support of the masses, the workers, at the same time that they much more discretely sought the wealth of the elite. It is this behind-the-scenes connection with sources of wealth, while purporting to be working in the interests of the general population, that is of greatest concern to me, and it defines the connection between Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism that I have been exploring in these essays.

The key here is to determine what fascism really is, and to not make false accusations. President Obama is not a fascist, as he has been accused of being by elements on the right. Socialism is not the same thing as fascism. And Obama is nowhere near being a socialist, anyway, having, for example, rejected offhand the single-payer option and accepted those pharmaceutical industry bribes. It is, frankly, ridiculous to even insinuate that a single-payer health insurance plan is somehow tyrannical socialist fascism. What it is is the government using its massive size to drive down the cost of health care, a notion that is actually highly capitalistic. What we have right now is actually more tyrannical and anti-capitalistic, where insurance companies interfere with the real supply-and-demand equations and create an inefficient, bloated, and politically protected system that costs the consumer more than what the services and products are actually worth, considering that the whole rest of the world pays less for their healthcare needs than the citizens of the United States are forced to pay. Just look at the financial disclosures of these companies – they are up there with the oil companies in percentages of pure profit that they are raking in as more and more U.S. citizens fall behinderer and behinderer.

If government officials insist on listening only to the health industry lobbyists, with their campaign contributions and exclusive party favors in hand, who have been infecting the “national discussion” about health care reform with self-serving vitriol that plays upon the emotions of people who are easily led astray by media personalities who gleefully revel in the effects that their enormous, gaseous egos have upon the single-minded and ill-informed, well, then that is what is fascist in this equation: the secretive collusion of business interests with government, along with their emotionally-laden, propaganda, dispersed by their allies in the media posing as independent agents, preaching uber-nationalism and phaux-populism and laying false blame for the nation's financial problems upon illegal aliens and big-government teat-suckers and hippie-dippie, love-in lovin', peace-nickety, morally-deprived, long-haired, dirty, Air America-listening, socialistical, untrustworthy intellectualistic, community-organizing “America”-haters...

To sum up, dear citizens of the United States of America: You are foaming at the mouth, and your engine is smoking, and in every sense of the phrase imaginable, it looks like you've blown a seal!

Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism: How Fear and Laziness Lead To A Headache-Inducing Web of Conspiracies

In my essay titled, Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism: Lessons from History, I began by decrying the polarization in the United States with the view that it is extremism on the religious, economic, and political right that is causing division, while the ideology of the progressive left works toward freedom, democracy, and respect. However, I did not elaborate on this introductory point, only returning to it at the end of the essay, where I addressed Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism. Rather, I went on to express dismay about the New World Order conspiracy theory, how it diverts attention from the real culprits of greed and repression, and then I launched into my exploration of what a failed democracy might be, looking into several terms in their historical usages, and thus arriving at “fascism,” to embark on a more detailed study of its complicated nature. After showing how fascism can creep insidiously into democracy when democratic principles are not adhered to, I summed up my conclusions about what constitutes fascism:

“The tendency toward totalitarianism, militarism, fundamentalism, populism, in conjunction with the economic-political policy of corporate collusion with top members of the state, the perpetuation of the idea that the workers and middle class must depend on those same corporate leaders as the best path between the extremes of oligarchy and socialism, the deceitful way that popular support is gathered, and the opportunistic method of utilizing crises to gain inexorable power and control – all of this describes what fascism is.”

That essay was written back in the fall of 2008. Now, there is a new president, a man who I consider to be an honest broker, a progressive, a natural-born leader with amazing skills of communication, intellect, and patient practicality. He is a relatively dark-skinned man with African ancestry, but not simply a black man, rather, a man of mixed race, which, to me, is a beautiful realization of the connective principle, a representation of complexity, and a hopeful symbol of real, peaceful, progressive change. During the election, he promised government transparency and inclusiveness. He said he wanted to make government work for everybody. He moved people in a way that no politician in recent memory had. Perhaps I am now wrong to stave off the cynicism that has caused so many in the United States to give up all hope for real change because they cannot believe that such a man as I have described could actually exist, that his presidential campaign rhetoric had been politics as usual, and that the “change” that he spoke of was a hollow promise, a ruse. While many of his initial supporters on the left have already become disillusioned, there are all of the people who opposed his candidacy in the first place, who do not trust him, who even fear him, either because they are ideologically opposed to progressive ideals themselves, or because they believe in the conspiracy that Barack Obama is an agent of the dark forces that rule the workings of the world from behind their secretive curtain, that he is actually a Secret Militant Muslim, CIA-sponsored, America-hating, Tyrannical Fascist, or some combination thereof.

So, in this essay, I intend to go back through those different characteristics, which, as I explained in the previous essay, do not each on their own indicate fascism, but which do tend to be expressed in some degree or other in fascism, to take a close look at how Barack Obama is not a fascist, and then to examine how this conspiracy theory, combined with the politics of the United States' democratic system, has brought its society to this level of insanity.

Let me begin with populism, since it is this characteristic that those who see fascism in the face of President Obama seem very concerned about. Yes, Barack Obama was swept into office by what might legitimately be called a massive wave of populist support. This wave was even more populist, in the sense of a grassroots groundswell, than any other popular support for a candidate in recent memory, because Barack Obama overwhelmed the Democratic Machinery itself, defeating seven other candidates and the heir apparent, herself, moving literally from the fringes to the center of attention, with historic amounts of small donations at the beginning. This presidential campaign was a particularly heady one, after eight years of Republican stewardship of a nation that was plunging into the abyss of economic uncertainly. The stakes were high, and people actually cared, getting involved within their communities and showing up by the tens of thousands to hear a man speak who actually made sense to them and gave them hope. All of this was, indeed, frightening to his political opponents, and so they did their best to paint the scene as a mob-mentality, his enthusiasts as blind lemmings, his campaign's stage-craft as nefarious, dangerous, cult-of-personality-building propaganda. Well, duh – it was an emotionally-charged national political campaign, brilliantly run, headed up by a man who actually HAS a magnetic personality and is able to communicate eloquently, sound sincere, look good, and appear presidential, all qualities that are sorely lacking in most of our politicians. The whole point of what has long been referred to as “political pageantry,” since well before Mr. Obama and his team came along, is to get the supporters riled up and active. As far as mindlessness and a mob-mentality is concerned, I never witnessed any unruly behavior or heard any sloganeering or hateful rhetoric at his gatherings, nothing as inane as the bizarre “Drill, baby, drill!” that the Republicans were mindlessly chanting at their convention, due to a lack of any other issue that excited them. As the Ayn Randers like to point out, envy is one of the deadly sins, and first the Clnton campaign, then the Republican Party were as green as Kermit the Frog when they saw the amazing power that Barack Obama had over people. Populism, in the simple sense of a popular majority, is precisely how United States presidents get elected, when they are not being appointed by the Supreme Court. And just because a candidate is more popular than, say, the Beatles, does not mean that there is something frightening afoot. It simply means that more people than ever are getting involved in the democratic process, and that somebody actually shows real leadership abilities.

Militarism – Candidate Obama had to present himself as tough and capable enough to be the Commander In Chief of the world's most powerful military. It is a job requirement of any president of the United States of America. I would characterize the culture in the United States as being pretty militant in general, and Obama had to appeal to this character to get elected. But one of his major campaign points was the pulling out of the United States military from Iraq, because we had no business being there, and to instead re-focus on the Taliban in Afghanistan. The reality is that that is an even bigger quagmire than Iraq, and in my opinion, we do not really have any business being there, either, but the Democrats cannot afford to be peaceniks when it comes to national presidential elections. Other than that, President Obama has very clearly put an emphasis on the State Department and the Special Envoys to help negotiate peace in both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in Pakistan, deliberately rejecting the belligerent, militaristic foreign policy stance of his predecessor. Additionally, he has been trying to clear up the mess that the military confinements of the men at Guantanamo Bay present to the United States, returning the rule of law where the military tribunal system had been failing miserably. And as to the United States themselves, there has been no sign of any military crackdown on anyone, no rise in police brutality, nothing – not even domestic spying – that would indicate the usual signs of brutal fascism. It is, in fact, citizens who are ideologically opposed to everything about President Barack Hussein Obama who are becoming militant in the United States at this time, not the President nor any of his supporters.

Fundamentalism – In my previous essay, I tied the willingness to use violence toward some “higher cause” with fundamentalism, and again, the opponents of President Obama are the ones showing themselves to be fundamentalists, not the president. I, myself, am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal progressive, and I consider Barack Obama to be a practical progressive. However, he has, from the moment he was elected, made a concerted effort to reach out, to talk to everyone, to negotiate and deliberate, to bend toward whoever is willing to constructively discuss issues with him, to be inclusive. This, to the chagrin of us lefties, at times. But he said, “I will be your president, too.” to the entire nation, and that is certainly far from the exclusive attitude that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had taken, and far from the usual politics on Capital Hill. Although the right is throwing a tizzy fit about his emergency spending in light of the unprecedented economic crisis the country is facing, the left is also angry that he has not done more to reign in the financial institutions that were bailed out with taxpayer dollars (during the still-Bush Administration, mind you). Another example of his straying from the liberal game plan was his turnaround on his promise of transparency, where he decided that he should keep the most recent prisoner abuse pictures secret, as well as deciding with the CIA on some other issues that angered us liberals. That is not fundamentalism. That is practicalism, and I give him credit for that, even though I disagree with him. If anything, his fundamental issue is to make the government work properly again, more democratically, as well as more efficiently, and there is really no fundamentalism present, in the sense that I described it, as reductionist ideology riddled with contradiction, in anything that Mr. Obama has said or done.

In the health care reform debate, the President is most definitely not the fundamentalist. The reform was one of his election mandates, and it must be done. The health care system in the United States is an absurdity. Access to health care is a human right, not something to make maximum profits off of. Lack of health care in the United States is weighing the nation's productivity, as well as its spirit, down. It is one of the founding principles in the United States Constitution, the part about, “We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” That means that it is one of the government's jobs to promote the well being of the people of this nation. The fact that it is the insurance companies, the for-profit health centers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that are behind the “grassroots” protests, where uninformed people are screaming and shouting and threatening violence because they are being told that this is some kind of government tyranny, speaks for itself. (Look it up – politifact.com, snopes.com, factcheck.org.) The President has not said anything like, “You're either with us or against us.” He has continually said that he invites constructive conversation, yet all he gets in return is yelling and screaming and threats with guns.

Totalitarianism – Observers have pointed to the unusually large number of “czars” that President Obama has appointed to help him sort out the mess that George W. Bush left him as a sign that he has made a power grab that amounts to totalitarianism. To those who distrust him, I concede that this looks scary. However, as with the fears about his mob-mentality following, one need only observe actual reality to see that, at least so far, nothing nefarious has happened. These so-called “czars” made a cleaver talking point for his political opponents, namely Senator McCain, the man who doesn't know how many houses he owns, so he must know something about delegating authority, and House Minority Whip, Eric Cantor, who is desperate to keep his name in the news cycles as a future Republican presidential contender. The reality is that they are presidential aids that have been appointed to keep particular focus on specific issues, as a practical way for the President to efficiently deal with many different issues at once. None of the czars have done anything crazy, other than to try to solve complicated problems. So the man can multitask – not scary, not totalitarian, at least not so far.

A real totalitarian state subordinates all of its individual parts to the service of the state. The cult-like leaders that usually represent totalitarian states are god-like embodiments of that state. Everything is about the state, itself, which demands unquestioning loyalty to itself and its leader. That is the face of totalitarianism, and I do not see any of that in the Barack Obama presidency. No-one is being silenced. No-one is being forced to submit to the demands of the state. The “death panels” that Sarah Palin thinks are a part of the government health insurance package are a myth, a scare tactic that anyone who seeks real information can see to be the exaggerations that they are. Everyone has continued to live their life just as they were before he was elected, well, as long as they have not lost their job or their health care or their bank accounts, which has by no means been a totalitarian plot to ruin everyone's wonderful Bush-era sunny days. There has been a certain fascination with Barack Obama and his family, which some might see as a cult following, but I do not see it as any more than the media's obsession with Brittany Spears or Micheal Jackson or Governor Sanford's love life.

None of these overt characteristics that may be present in a fascist state actually stands up to any close examination of the Barack Obama presidency, particularly the two possible characteristics that have been singled out and exaggerated by his political opponents that say that he is fascist. However, there are the more complicated, more covert factors to consider. First is the set of characteristics that are actually areas of some concern to me, because they are more systematic problems as well as holdovers from the previous administration, having to do with political-economic policies that tie business interests with agents of the government in a way that undermines democracy itself. Corporate collusion with government officials, the Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman school of thought about trusting the business elites to lead to the highest form of freedom, and the opportunistic use of crises to grab more wealth and power all fit into the conversation about what happened with the financial institution bailout that occurred just at the end of Bush's days, and then with President Elect Obama's earliest decisions about who would lead his all-important economic team. It was the bailout, with its total lack of oversight over all that money being doled out to the irresponsibly greedy financiers by other financiers, that was so infuriating, and which lead me to write about insidious fascism sneaking into our beautiful democracy in the first place, not any spectre of a populist candidate that made me think of Hitler or Mussolini speaking of the need for purity and cleansing of the nation in front of giant crowds. Then came the Obama economic adviser decisions, which caused me to question my faith in the man, as so many others were loosing theirs or pointing to that action as a distinctive lack of any promised “change” whatsoever. In order to maintain continuity, the reasoning went, Mr. Obama chose men from Goldman Sachs and the likes, the same group of people that had created the whole mess in the first place and then cleaned up to their own outrageous advantage. It seemed that the president-elect was doing exactly what the liberal left was afraid of, which was being corrupted by the same powerful business interests that had helped to get him elected – not much of a change at all. Those seeds of fascism do exist, and they must be watched closely, to see if they sprout, or to see if they will get weeded out by this president if they do sprout.

The final issue is one of deception. This is difficult, because it might lead to my having to face the fact that I have been deceived. If this is so, then either Barack Hussein Obama was simply toying with my heart, whispering sweet nothings in my ear, buying me chocolates and flowers, all as a ruse to get himself, well, we all know where that all leads. No-one likes to have their heart broken, thinking there is love when it was really just lust, or greed, or self-aggrandizement. Yet, we have to continue to try...

A much worse-case scenario is that the Obama presidency is not just a matter of one man's political ambitions, but rather, a conspiracy by the darkest of figures, who worked in the shadows to set Barack Obama up with a fake birth certificate, funneled money from his “rich father in Africa,” placed him in the nation's most prestigious law school, put him to work for the CIA through the guise of being an editor at Business International Corporation, got William Ayers to ghostwrite his fake biography, had him live in a small apartment in Chicago and pretend to be a “community activist,” moved him through the corrupt Illinois political process, and then orchestrated his presidential campaign, all in order to place him as their puppet in the White House in order to continue to amass even more power, to enslave the world's population to death, destruction, and indentured servitude from behind their evil curtain of already omnipotent hidden power.

Sadly, I am not making this conspiracy stuff up. Sadly, people fall prey to this kind of complicated conspiracy because they fear what they do not understand, they sense that, somehow, there have been lies and manipulations that were hidden by secrecy, and then the perpetrators of the conspiracy are able to convince them that any “information” that comes from outside the circle of conspirators themselves is suspect, and that it is they who shed light in the dark corners of the world. It was the secrecy itself that lead to the mistrust in the first place, the kind of secrecy that the Bush Administration was so fond of, but which goes well beyond that, with the secret workings of the CIA and other black operations by the United States government to destabilize democratic governments that have been considered to be dangerous to the economic prosperity of the United States throughout the world. In fact, an archive of classified documents from the Nixon Administration has just come to light, about the abhorrent behavior of United States government operatives in South America. The truth that these secret operations exist should appall all citizens of this nation that holds itself so proudly to be the beacon of Freedom and Democracy to the world, and now would be a good time to call for an end to the web of operators that work in the shadows of the world, even within the United States, one must assume, affecting political outcomes of democratic elections and spreading rumors and lies, and even actively removing leaders, such as Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, or Salvador Allende of Chile, or stopping the left-wing “Frente Amplio,” which, ironically, is now in power in Uruguay, in order that the people of the United States may have more gasoline to guzzle and more sugar to consume and cheaper goods, produced by laborers whose lives have been kept miserable so that we could live more comfortably.

Pardon my anger. It is this secrecy, along with the sheer hypocrisy, that leads to the anger and the distrust. But the anger and distrust must be directed at the proper culprits. To simply throw anger and distrust around, willy-nilly, eventually consumes the individual. Finding the proper target can be extremely difficult and frustrating, especially when the anger and distrust are being manipulated for some ulterior purpose. But being lazy or giving in to the frustration in the search for a culprit is the easy way out. And all of this is compounded by the state of the culture in the United States today, for as life grows more and more complicated, with new technology, the world wide web of infinite imagery and information and entertainment, new and more complex understandings the universe, and simply more and more people, it seems that the basic response to all of this complexity is to compartmentalize and to reduce and to simplify in order to try to make some sense out of it all. Sound bites, text messaging, and Twitter all exemplify this tendency to abbreviate and reduce, and it leads to a sort of mental laziness, an unwillingness to try to understand the details and the complexity of the world. So rumors and misinformation spread more quickly than ever before, fed off of this reductive tendency, and spurred on by the gullibility inherent in the notion that, because you perceive that you have been lied to and deceived by “them,” you can therefore only trust “us.”

Barack Hussein Obama is a figure upon whom the conspiratorial lies and misperceptions are grafting at lightening speed. The conspiracy theory that I had been so concerned about in my first essay was the 9/11 conspiracy, which had expanded into the idea that the elections didn't matter, because the powers that be were going to manipulate everything to their own benefit. They supposedly have the awesome power to affect everything, from the government policymakers, to the votes that disappeared into the Diebold voting machines, to the whole charade of Sarah Palin having been put forth, all parts of their evil plan. And now that Barack Obama emerged as the winner, he is assumedly their agent of choice. Now, I distrust the voting machines, because there is no way to verify the votes. However, to take my distrust of the Diebold machines, and place it in the hands of an international cabal of powerful puppet masters lets the Republican operatives, who have been in charge of the voting system and completely capable of stealing votes all on their own, off the hook. But the perception that the election was illegitimate, bizarrely, not only fits the narrative of the One World Order conspirators, but the same rumors about villainous manipulations of the whole political process have been swallowed line, hook, and sinker by Barack Obama's political opponents, who are gullible to the tale because they neither like nor trust this man who has darker colored skin, international family connections, and ideas that are admittedly vaguely socialist, but which are being conflated with fascism for purely political gain.

The whole thing is beginning to make my head spin. That Hitler used conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers and others whose international ties amongst the Jewish diaspora were supposed to have caused them to have undermined the Germans during and after the Great War, in order to enslave the German workers, and now, we have conspiracy theories about international bankers who have been undermining the United States so that their evil enslavement can be exacted, wherein the belief is that the international conspirators are also the fascists, is headache-inducing to think about, at the very least. Where does the irony end – and where oh where is my bottle of aspirin? People have been whipped into a frenzy over government involvement in lowering the price of health insurance as a form of government tyranny, yet they didn't mind the spying, infiltration of organizations trying to counter repression and injustice, and deregulation of the banking and mortgage industries that looted everyone's pensions and 401K plans. And a smart guy, from a single-parent home, who made his way through the world with his brains and his good looks, who has some refreshingly different ideas about how government can function, well, he just isn't to be trusted... Isn't innovation and being able to rise up to higher levels of society supposed to be, uh, the “American Dream?” The real conspiracy is that the “American Dream” is a nightmare, not because of any international overloards maliciously manipulating everything from above, nor because envious socialists want to get their hands on everything in sight, but because of plain old greed and a thought system that praises selfishness, and the most greedy and selfish will play on the fears and ignorance of those who do not bother to see the world as complex, yet knowable, if they would only continue to seek answers from many different sources and viewpoints.

on religious violence against medicine

I am now writing as an expatriate in Argentina, as a person who had to get out of the United States because life was just too frustrating for me there, in many different respects. From where I am right now, I can observe major happenings in the States from afar, and not get so caught up in all the drama. There is plenty of drama in the national news here to get caught up in, if I want. From afar, I am not unaware of what is going in in the United States, rather, I have an entirely different viewpoint, filtered through Spanish-speaking news casters in Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Miami, all further informed by my more familiar news sources on the internet.

And so, on this day, a cool fall day in June, I am compelled to comment on the cold-blooded murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, who has been running a women’s health clinic that women from all over the world come to. The trained physicians and psychiatrists at the clinic literally risk their own lives in order to save the lives of women who need late-term abortions, women who are denied these medical services in the places where they come from. This doctor and all of his colleagues are very principled in their commitments to aid women whose lives are truly at stake, who may have discovered that they have cancer, or that some other life-threatening emergency has come up, or that the birth process endangers them, or that the fetus has not developed a brain or has other drastic medical problems that would deny them any kind of meaningful life. All of these reasons are legitimate, complicated reasons why a woman might need a late-term abortion, and there are many others, as well. The doctor, who was shot while he was at church, was simply being a doctor, a person who does not judge the patient and does not ignore what she – her body, her mind, her intuition, her will - is telling her to do, in the face of pressure from others who, because of religious ideology, are dangerously simplifying a complex issue that they are not very well informed about. Religion is a very powerful thing, but it is not medicine.

Dr. Tiller has been harassed in every way possible by single-minded opponents of women’s rights to safe abortions, from intimidation to threats to actual physical violence to the spreading of misinformation to use of the legal system. Citizen groups have forced him into court several times in recent years, and every time, they have lost their cases. They have been accusing Dr. Tiller of providing late-term abortions without any medical justifications, and they have tried to force the patients’ medical records into the public record, and every time, the doctor has prevailed, the medical records kept confidential, and his practices proven to be medically necessary and legal.

Because of all this, I been thinking about the issue of women’s rights to abortion, and have added a few words to my essay on the subject over on the writers’ website, Helium. Also, see the Democracy Now! show on this subject (as well as Amy Goodman’s blog post) for some insight into who Dr. George Tiller was and what his clinic was doing for desperate women in need. Perhaps this slaying of a medical professional by a religious zealot will bring the national discussion about women’s rights to proper health care into the spotlight in a way that brings the real issues forward, instead of just grazing the philosophical ideologies that people hold on the subject, ideologies that can lead to grave consequences when they are allowed to be pushed forward to the extent that this shooter did. Did that man consider the psychological effects that a bloody murder in a church would have on not only the witnesses in the church, but on the entire nation and the world?

Richie Havens Magic

The following is an essay I wrote back in March, just before the flurry of activity - the selling of all my belongings and settling of affairs - that has brought me here to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Having been here for just over a week now, I am finally getting settled into the pace and customs of this amazing country, so that I hope to have more time to write.

Today marks the 100 day anniversary of Barack Obama's presidency, and much analysis of his tenure is circulating in the thought-o-sphere. This article fits into the theme of the day because it is in tune with what Robert L. Borsage, Co-Director of the Campaign for America’s Future, has to say about judging not what our president can do for our country, but what our country can do for our president.

Richie Havens Magic

Richie Havens performed along with an accompanist on guitar at the Suwannee Springfest back in March, and I was lucky enough to get to see him. What a beautiful, shining example of a Wonderful Human Being he is! Jamie and I were standing together down in the amphitheater, and a good friend came and enjoyed the show with us, and then another beautiful friend found us, too. The whole incident was about peace and love and compassion, and was truly a moving experience. I must admit, I didn’t previously know who Richie Havens was. Our young friend knew because of her parents’ record collection. All the older hippie types knew very well who he was – Jamie had been very excited to see him. He had explained to me that Richie Havens is the guy who sings, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” I hadn’t known what that was all about, but as soon as the man started strumming his guitar with his intense energy, and then singing with his unique voice, so urgently insistent upon empathy and caring, I was very happy that he had come to our sweet little music festival there under the live oak trees, all decorated with Spanish moss, amidst the sand and fine black dirt, the results of the same dark leaf matter that stains the meandering Suwannee River black as tea, while a gentle rain did little to dampen the air of wonderment that enveloped us all – a subtle reminder of the power of our gathering to part the clouds and send the majority of the Lioness’ March Furies around us - quiet rain that cleanses our hippie camp-sweat and dirty sand-feet, then seeps underground to the river, nourishing spring waters that hearty music lovers know will likely rain down upon us, so be ready to get wet... And then, after the rains move out during the night, the haunting morning mist starts the new day with yoga and hungry children and up-all-night seekers of coffee, and as the day progresses, the hot Florida sun burns the mist away, high clouds fly overhead, sudden wild gusts of wind steal unsecured hats, and then the evening brings back the calm, the moisture, the changing of the seasons night time chill.


The two annual Magnolia Music events at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park display the very best qualities inherent in the United States of America – they move beyond the realm of the enjoyable and into that of the life-changing experience. They are a coming together of the most amazing community of music lovers in a sacred place, gatherings of just the nicest people you would ever want to meet – a few thousand of them, all happy to be there, sharing the love all around. I am sad if anyone thinks that this lovey-dovey-ness sounds corny, but a good dose of it makes those of us who have been there wish that the whole world could be like this, with everybody friendly and happy and at one with the enjoyment of the whole experience. It works nearly perfectly at the Magnolia Music festivals, similar to how it worked at Woodstock, the original, minus all the chaos of the new and the masses, and as it often works when people gather together for something that they enjoy – except that Magnolia Music has the concept down to a fine art, a well-established musical phenomenon and an all around dependably good time. It’s like going to worship at our lovely, outdoor church, complete with shrines to Bill Monroe and Vassar Clemens, where we camp, relax, and commune with each other and with nature, engaged in long days and late nights full of great performances and campfire gatherings by the most excellent, down-to-earth, heartfelt musicians that nobody has ever heard of, unless someone previously dragged them to a similar Americana music festival, (or they happen to be the festival headliner on Friday night), and celebrating the best qualities that humanity has to offer, all without suffering very much beyond maybe some wet clothes, a stubbed toe, lack of sleep, or the pain of having had too much fun the night before.

Literally everyone who is there is happy to be there. The kids love it. The parents love it. The young adults love it, the old hippies, and everyone in all the generations in between love it. The performers love it. Everyone, save perhaps a contrarian or melancholy teenager and the local and mostly unnecessary security guys, loves it. It refreshes our souls and our very faith in humanity to be there. It is something that a bunch of human beings are actually doing right on this planet. We all gather and have a wonderful time, and then we scatter to the winds and return to normalcy, to the black and white reality of the Kansases we call home. We go back to our own welcoming kitchens and our private bathrooms and our comfy beds and our daily routines, and I know that we all try to live lives that carry out the Spirit of the Suwannee to the rest of the world, to whatever degree we can – the love, the kindness, the all getting along – and that is, indeed a wonderful thing.


But this festival was different for Jamie and me, and I have been extra-inspired, maybe by Richie Havens, or by the freedom of not having to depend on making money in the booth that we have had there for the past eleven years (having missed only the very first Springfest). We were free, free, free little birds at this festival, just as we are soon to be expressing the ultimate freedom with our move to Uruguay. We are freeing ourselves from the burdens of possessions. We will be free to make of our lives something different, free to reinvent ourselves, free to truly express ourselves in a way that we have not been free before. For, although those who know Jamie and I well know our general opinions and outlooks, we have been silenced by our need to make sales in our booth, our sole means of income, and even at events like the Magnolia Music festivals, we have only whispered our true feelings. We have been silenced by the unspoken agreement that these festivals are not the place to talk about anything that might cloud everyone’s sunny day with thoughts that are not so happy. It’s not that we don’t know how to have a good time – Jamie is always having a good time, even when he is not. It’s just that I cannot separate my different experiences of life. I refuse to ignore certain realities that exist. Good times can be had, with the understanding that we must not take those good times for granted, that such good times are not sub-realities of some larger reality, but are rather a part of the continuum of our lives. When we attend our church, we must recognize the healing energy that is generated there, energy that could serve a larger purpose outside the festival bubble, if we would only allow the entirety of life to accompany us inside, if we would learn to connect all of our experiences instead of compartmentalizing, if we could see that the problems of inequity and violence around the world exist, even as we are enjoying our fleeting moments of joy and happiness, even if we choose to ignore it all, and so the way to make the world a better place is not to banish, but to acknowledge all of the world’s suffering by dedicating our celebrations to healing the pain of others as well as of ourselves. I believe that we can change the world with empathy, by being connected, by finding room in our hearts for all of reality simultaneously, by seeing our festivals not as a protective bubble of contentment and good weather amidst the world’s storms, but rather as a generator of energy that emanates from the banks of the Suwannee River up into the atmosphere and interacts with all the other energies that are constantly swirling around the planet Earth.


Richie Havens very much impressed me with his demonstration of our human connectedness, and he also did not shy away from the reality of politics. He was, I now know, a vanguard of the sixties social movement, whose gentle persona still has the power to awaken the soul. He appeared as a mystic, all in black, upon the scenic, beloved, lit-up-at-night amphitheater stage, transforming us all as if with a whisper of wise words and mesmerizingly energetic songs of peace, love, and action. Just seeing him there, still kicking – literally, as in his amazing karate kick at the end of the performance, to prove that he really is a master of great strength and beauty – his spoken words reminded everyone there that he had been a member of the Greenwich Village scene, along with other poets like Bob Dylan, and that along with the feelings of love and peace that we all experienced in those magical moments when he was on stage comes the work of utilizing that energy to change the world around us in a significant way. That is what the sixties social movements were all about, motivated by music and art and drug-induced awakenings of the soul and the exploration of true freedom, with the focus on building more peaceful and open societies, not just engaging in hedonism, as those who are too resistant to all that strangeness and change to actually listen to the deeper message believe.


I felt changed after that performance. Richie Havens lifted a cloud of concern that I have carried with me at the Magnolia Music events, the troubled feeling that all the magic and wonderment of the festivals was simply a far-too-well-kept secret, a bubble to remain un-popped, to which those of us in the know could turn to for comfort and a little taste of Heaven on Earth. Indeed, especially for those of us who have been living in the Deep South, this has been an oasis in a desert of closed-minded colloquialism and unacknowledged fear of real freedom. And while it has always felt good to recharge the old “soul-ar” battery, to participate in such a harmonious happening, to see that not everyone in this country is brainwashed by the militaristic, exceptionalistic national narrative that the entrenched powers constantly disseminate in order to hoard their power, it has also always bothered me that the bubble has remained so closed, that that glorious energy has not translated into any kind of momentum for wider social change. Even as music festivals have proliferated over the past decade, each one is its own bubble of joy through music, all of them isolated, each its own separate over-the-rainbow, Technocolor Oz, just dreams to be awakened from to our regular daily grinds, and none of them motivating anyone to do anything at all, once we drive out the gates and onto the highways with all the other traffic of the world. There has been no call to social action, only murmurs of “Can’t we all just get along?” tucked into sweet love songs and bouncy Donna Cajun rhythms that are impossible not to dance to and be cheered by.


Sweet Magnolia, where everything IS beautiful and we CAN all get along, setting for one of the most poignant and bittersweet moments of my life: when the United States began bombing Baghdad, on the eve of Springfest, 2003. I stayed up nearly all night on the eve of the destruction, wondering how it could come to this, a nation of free people, a supposed democracy and shining beacon on the hill, all falling in line behind the unsubstantiated statements of our so-called “leaders” - fear-mongers, oil and other big industry representatives, war-profiteers, capitalist empire-builders, one and all. If I had learned from reports of experts in the field that the aluminum tubes that were being claimed to be part of a secret, mobile, as-of-yet undetected nuclear bomb factory were actually the wrong kind of tubes for nuclear bomb making, then how did that President of the United States of America not know that? If the President had already been caught red-handed, lying to the world through the mechanism of his hyper-marketing message machine, then how could he be trusted by anyone at all by then? And when I heard Bill Bennett incredibly, disturbingly, disgustingly, mangle the words of John Lennon, stating that we needed to “give war a chance,” yet there was no outcry of righteous rage that I could register, beyond the knot that tied itself up in my own gut, I became so grief-stricken, so disparaged, that I had looked toward the Springfest with a glimmer of hope that my feelings would be widely expressed and that the missing outrage would materialize in an explosion of anti-war activism that might stop the madness from unfolding.


But, alas, no such thing happened. My heart ached upon hearing people state that this attack may well be all for the best – those were the high times of the “it’s all good” mentality, after all, a mentality that drove inaction and live-your-own-life sentiment, so that the Bush administration was enabled to get away with all of the undemocratic pillage that they wreaked upon the planet for eight excruciatingly long years. I, too, had participated in not raising a ruckus in the months leading up to then. I had emailed my government representatives, and sent a little bag of rice to the White House along with others who were registering our plea to send food, not bombs. Jamie and I had continued to set up our life-sustaining “magic stand” at those early spring festivals in Florida, where the theme was always fun and sun and good times, and there was no room for ruckuses amongst our slowly declining sales figures, nor for dissent amongst the unabashed Bush administration supporters, confidant that the forces of good inherent in our nation’s character would prevail. My tiny little protests did not make me feel very good about myself, and then I remember driving north past Tampa to Live Oak, and hearing that the student activist, Rachel Corrie, a U.S. citizen, had been run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer while she was trying to prevent the destruction Palestinian homes and water wells and gardens – my rude awakening to the plight of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government, with the aid and support of the United States of America, home of the free, land of the brave, world leader in the gobbling up of natural resources, and glaring example of what happens when the citizens of a democracy fail to participate in their governance, thus becoming complicit in the running roughshod over poor and beleaguered people all over the world by that same government due to sheer complacency and ignorance of happenings of the wider world.


And so, my solace, the Suwannee Springfest, was a huge disappointment to me that year, when we all only whispered in dark corners about what our nation was doing, largely divorcing ourselves from the reality of the lives that our bombs were destroying. No outcry was heard, at least that I was aware of from inside my little booth/cage, inside the festival bubble, inside the surreality of a country that thinks that it can do no wrong. That dark cloud has haunted me and made me angry from the inside out – to the point that Jamie and I have finally broken free of our gilded cage; free of our cycle of money in, more money out; free of the vast circles driven in pursuit of our own American Dream; free of the necessity for limits on our self-expression; free of the society that has so foiled my visions of what the promise of progress and social change was supposed to entail. I speak out now, inspired by Richie Havens, and by his call, not only for "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!," but also for strength of character and purpose, for speaking truth, and for connecting with the larger world around us. We are all connected, as individuals, and we really should all take responsibility for what our government does, because we are our own government. We all must remember, as was the whole point of the emergence of prophets like Richie Havens back in the day, to embrace the political as the personal, because just living our lives in peace and harmony isn’t getting the job of changing the world done. And just watching passively to see what happens won’t help our new president to achieve all that he can. Connect. Engage. Join with Richie Havens, and now the Dead, and everyone else who is voicing the need for us to keep alive the flame of social change that Barack Hussein Obama’s election ignited.


This final Springfest marked the end of a beautiful thing for Jamie and I, and we both thank everyone who supported our business at the Magnolia festivals through the years – we truly think of everyone at the festivals as our family, and we consider the festivals themselves to be our real “home,” whether we were living in a house or in our vehicle. We will very much miss the Spirit of the Suwanee, as expressed by everyone involved in the Magnolia Music events. But we are travelers who must move on or be consumed with the despair of stagnation. We are just wired that way – wired to move on, to explore new horizons, to visit far corners of the world, to detach ourselves from the comforts of a home and the blessings of being surrounded by friends and family. Without such movement, the weight of our world becomes unbearably heavy for us and crushes our souls. But the vacuum of our physical presence will quickly be filled with a new opportunity for me and Jamie to entertain you all not with personal adornments, the wonders of nature’s artifacts, and other colorful mementos to take home from festivals, but with some of our other skills, such as my writing, and Jamie’s photography. For those of you who don’t know, I actually have a degree in Philosophy: Values and Social Policies, and I guess I have been a frustrated writer for long enough, now – time to de-frustrate myself and open up that proverbial philosophy store I have always dreamed of. Through the wonders of the internet, we can maintain contacts and remain connected. I am planning to try to keep a journal here of our activities in South America, something along the lines of “Lo Que Pasa en Sudamerica – What’s Up in South America,” just little reminders that “America” encompasses more than just the United States; and that the world is big and diverse and interesting and interconnected; perhaps a little musical reportage; possibly some interviews with people we meet; certainly quite a bit of expatriate gadfliery. We will not be absent, just down south a bit farther, and I am looking forward to sharing the view from there. This is not an act of disconnection so much as it is a reconnection with life’s vital forces, a realigning of our fates, a revival of our spirits.

Viva la Vida!

note: Our South America Cultural blog is at: Because The Wrold Is Round...