TRYING TIME

We tried to make a difference, says the Christine Lahti character in the film, Running on Empty, about a pair of Vietnam-era activists (still wanted by the FBI for a killing) on the lam with their children. Yes, a difference that involved not supporting a government that had gone mad, that made Vietnam into something of a horror we could not live with. But we had a shot and it’s hard to say how far we got. We made a commune, we had some wild times, we created a counter-culture. We protested against the war with great vehemence. We made love, not war, got stoned a lot, listened to the Stones, Beatles and Bob Dylan. But hard to tell what it really came to, now. Sometimes it was a legacy of real efforts, sometimes an embarrassment where great gifts were squandered in the general mayhem.

We lived in a semi-darkness that was never repealed. We were not in the world, really. We skirted the real world, dancing on the edge of a precipice we could not really control. We had visions inspired by LSD that opened up a fantastic world of sensual joy, of playlands where the body could win back some sumptuous power, could sink into the wild muck of desire and never come back to the simple everyday. We did not know or even care much that there was no way back to the mainstream, because we had possibly stumbled into a private Blakean world of fire and symmetry, even though our own outcries were mostly geared toward antagonisms, targeting that hated military-industrial complex that was killing a lot of people and ruining our time on earth…There was no peace on earth in this time, nor in many others, for the course was set, the force was ready and we did not have a prayer against all that preformed power. Once armed, the nation had no will to disarm. There were too many interests, too much money to be made in the armaments business, the war business. This was Woodrow Wilson’s fear in 1917, Eisenhower’s in 1959, and it was ours in 1968, and into the 21^st Century.

But why does it now look like the whole thing was on our part such a questionable bunch of  moves? Was that not too much emphasis on failure, not enough on the sincere effort to make a serious change? We were in a groove of hope and youth, trying to get free of all the restraints of that time, what had been inherited from the 40s generation of our parents. They were children of the Depression, of the New Deal, of the Great War, and they worked hard to make themselves prosperous in their given nation, their victorious nation. There was a level of pride in being American, of standing against the evil tyrannies of the Second War. But our outcry was a different story, though it looked as though there was room for both— a concerted effort to succeed at the same time trying to stake out new ground for our generation.

The depression sets in during this time of life, plunging us downward with a sense of defeat. What kind of defeat? To lose a whole realm of faith in the future and in the simple power of the nation. It became an untenable play, a fog that did not play well, and we were carrying the burden of something that did not support us. Professions went out the window, addictions developed and stayed strong—the wired purpose of the early highs began to feel more like a futile effort to stay permanently on the margins. And a ruthless brutality took over the psyche of the nation, and the freeways were filled with rage, and American life became a driven mangle of consumerism and greed.

Precious losses gambled with the psyche’s shadow. We had our time in the sun, such as it was. But the heart got stalled, and we did not know how to stay alert to possibilities.

What did this sense of paralysis and fog consist of? Who put this thing in the perspective we implored our hearts to understand and under what influence? Still trying to comprehend experience and what draws us to the origins of the process. There was always the potential for deeper strains of wisdom, in the deep psyche, in the unconscious that worked from ancient sources—dreams, myths, memories and even hopes.

But still an effort can be made. For what? There’s the question. Who put us like this, still in a hurry to know ourselves, but clear anomalies always there, vying with any sense of order. This was our way of being here, standing in the sun, taking in what was offered, what was our gleaming purpose. Just to be here was all you got, just like any other animal. Not taking much seriously, really, but the daily grind, the give and take of prophecies and hopefulness. And yet these ageing bodies do not find reversal, no matter how much reconstructive surgery or pharmaceutical miracle gets applied. You have to seek out something you can live with, he heard that. For whose sake here? You see the whole enterprise of relationships, families, lovers dancing through the square. But what is that? Little resemblances of the sweet life, kisses on the run, embraces and relaxes, hiding true feeling, going the extra mile with someone, colliding with another’s view, taking up the task of implementing an individuality you aren’t entirely sure of. But then what comes round is a fierce solidity of individuation, a coinage that is hardened in your own rock formation, the quarry where you learned to stand your own ground and win your own case, and sometimes to take the lead in discovering new truths.

He had decided he would write. He would write what was going on in him, as well as he could. Nothing could stop that, and so it was his freedom; he knew there was a purpose for his freedom. And this freedom could be sent around, could contain some of that fathomless creative pool he knew was the true celebration of the human world, no matter the outcry was often less than the aspiration— the manifest desire to come to terms with life, and trying to find the right gesture that would stand flush against the multiplicity of the world.

Reading the new biography of Timothy Leary has been illuminating. A problematic gamer with a taste for women and pleasure, and drugs, drugs galore, still he was a believer in other possibilities for the human being. He advocated the possibility of a transformed individual, who had ‘turned on, tuned in and dropped out.’ He got himself in big trouble as a drug guru, even had Art Linkletter on his case, after Art’s daughter committed suicide supposedly under the influence of LSD. Tim did time, chased skirts, got into lots of trouble with the DEA and other Feds. He was a wild Irish rogue with a pretty good mind and a charismatic look. Still, there was as his friend Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) put it, a courage in Tim, and though locked into a stoned-out, high-rolling sex-filled lifestyle, still he took a turn based on his own outlook, and he tried to make a difference.

But what games are left for us? The clouds of old age have come our way. A friend is in search of a liver transplant. Another is losing his eyesight. Women once beautiful are putting on weight. Even if all goes well, we don’t have long. I recently got scammed for the contents of my checking account. The land of the free and the home of the hungry, the rage for money. I have no idea what to do next. The Democrats took back the Congress. A black guy named Barack Obama is talking of running for the presidency.

I’m living on Social Security, but now even that has been jeopardized by scammers. We tried to make a difference. And Superman had Lois Lane, played by Terri Hatcher, who will always be beautiful, just as Jackie Kennedy will always be beautiful, even riding in that car in Dallas, her rose colored dress just the right touch for a colorful fall day in a parade about to turn terribly ugly, about to turn the page of history we have all been living. What a difference that day made, compared to our attempts to make a difference, watching the years unfold, watching the crowded roads, watching the sun set on so many mighty dreams.

—Bill Pearlman

ROGER FEDERER: An Appreciation

Watching Roger Federer on a tennis court is something that invokes the greatest feelings about sport. With Federer, tennis approaches art, but still keeps its competitive energies alive and well. It is an act of play, a movement of muscles and nerves, a balancing of fervor and balletic coherence. It is Balanchine, Baryshnikov and Laver; it is it own gliding motion across that green and white-lined stage.

It requires a redefinition of form when someone comes along who produces a transcendence in a proscribed human activity that is included among the many sporting events reported around the world. But each sport can be said to have its masters: Ronaldinho in soccer, Tiger Woods in golf, Karch Kiraly in volleyball; surely Michael Jordan in basketball. But for my favorite sport and one I continue to play, Federer stands apart and delivers his winning and exact groundstrokes inevitably, powerfully and with an astonishing grace. Bravo!

Film Review: Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain breaks new ground in American filmmaking. It is at once a love story and a deepening of the question of sexuality in human relations. It has often been alleged in psychoanalytic literature that violence is a form of repressed sexuality and that if we could only learn more about loving one another, the world might be quite a different place. In Brokeback, two cowboys, played by Heath Ledger (Ennis) and Jake Gyllenhall (Jack), find themselves working sheep on a Wyoming mountain one summer. They live on beans and whiskey, and the work is demanding. At the height of a stormy cold night, Jack calls Ennis back to the tent to help him beat the cold, and we get an awkwardly spontaneous eruption of sexual activity. They both discount it the next day, each saying he isn’t ‘queer’ and that it was a one shot deal. But then it isn’t and the complications begin. Each marries, has a family, but they get back together for a proposed fishing trip once a year. There’s no fishing, as Ennis’ wife finds out. The territory is bisexuality and the love of men for each other, while still maintaining straight heterosexual lives.

The power in the film comes from odd juxtapositions, of hidden (forbidden) love, and the acceptable & traditional family conventions. The inevitable breakdown of this agenda unfolds slowly, with Ennis losing his family, becoming a divorced father (with two daughters), and Jack becoming more distanced from his wife, a Rodeo queen, and their son. The point is that this is not going to end happily, and we learn of Jack’s forlorn fate toward the end of the story.

But I find the film both moving and refreshing, an American western without the swagger of the John Wayne tradition. Ambivalent sexuality, and acting that enters the category of greatness, especially the work of Ledger and Gyllenhall. Wonderfully shot by Rodrigo Prieto and directed by Ang Lee with a slow, deliberate mastery; written with great and authentic care by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, from a story by Annie Proulx. But whatever the basis of the original storyline, the work Lee has given us is as important as anything in recent American cinema. It is an American story, amid the breathtaking scenery of the Rocky Mountains (shot actually in Alberta). It is not quite passionate, nor particularly proud of itself, but comes into focus as a true experience of what happens between two men, thrown into a lonely raw wilderness, with each other as accomplices and unlikely lovers. There is a natural authority in the piece that breaks into artistic verity and smiles back at us, amid the tears and exultation of the whole uncertain process of living.

—Bill Pearlman

Red Fridays

Very soon, you will see a great many people wearing Red every Friday. The reason?

Americans who support our troops used to be called the "silent majority". We are no longer silent, and are voicing our love for God, country and home in record breaking numbers.

We are not organized, boisterous or over-bearing. We get no liberal media coverage on TV, to reflect our message or our opinions. Many Americans, like you, me and all our friends, simply want to recognize that the vast majority of America supports our troops.

Our idea of showing solidarity and support for our troops with dignity and respect starts this Friday -and continues each and every Friday until the troops all come home, sending a deafening message that..

Every red-blooded American who supports our men and women afar, will wear something red.

By word of mouth, press, TV -- let's make the United States on every Friday a sea of red much like a homecoming football game in the bleachers.

If every one of us who loves this country will share this withacquaintances, co-workers, friends, and family. It will not be long before the USA is covered in RED and it will let our troops know the once "silent" majority is on their side more than ever, certainly more than the media lets on.

The first thing a soldier says when asked "What can we do to make things better for you?" is...We need your support and your prayers.

Let's get the word out and lead with class and dignity, by example; and wear something red every Friday.

Dear Sue, I think your message is a good idea IF you substitute the word BLOOD for the word RED all the way through. A massive amount of innocent blood has been spilled as a result of our current President's petty, self-righteous, self-centered position of trying to take over a country so we can control its oil and get a major foothold in the Middle East.

We can support our troops by restoring and increasing the veterans' benefits that Mister Bush has eliminated so that all those soldiers who come back damaged by psychological devastation and blown off limbs and suffering from depleted uranium exposure, can get the help they deserve. If we really support the troops we will demand that our government help them in their recovery and train them for jobs if need be. We cannot support the troops unless we restore veteran's funding this administration has mercilessly cut.

We can support the troops by not sending them in harm's way until there are enough of them to do the job and until they are supplied with what they need and have enough armor.

We can support the troops by instructing our military recruiters not to lie to potential troops in order to get them to enlist. These lies are a disgrace to the uniform and end up embittering many of our young soldiers when they find out the reality of what they are expected to do, often having to serve terms painfully longer than they were promised.

The best way to support our troops is to do everything we can to protest the lies, deceptions, and criminal incompetences of this administration whose invasion of a country was based on calculated lies.

The longer we stay in Iraq the more terrorists will be created and the darker America's image will be around the world. It is at it's lowest ebb now. I must do everything I can to urge others to do everything they can to vote out our current administration and its appalling moral hypocrisy. That's how I can support the troops, by helping to get honest, knowledgeable, competent people in office who will support the troops wherever they are, in conflicts abroad or at home.

And now we are faced with the bungling incompetences of our current administration contributing to thousands of American deaths as a result of indecision, feeble leadership, and downright lack of concern and care for our less fortunate and desperate Americans around the Gulf.

No, I've changed my mind. It is better to wear black for a totally unnecessary, tragic war and all those unnecessary deaths, and more black for the terrible lack of creative, active help in mobilizing the military and the nation in helping our poor suffering Americans as a result of the most recent hurricane. This administration cut funds to complete work on the levees outside New Orleans! It diverted that money to Iraq & Homeland Security. Well, we are all paying for bad decisions and incompetency now.

No I'm just going to wear what I wear every day, and do what I can to support honest and competent people and help them get in office. Tacking on a ribbon, no matter what the color, doesn't support the troops. But having people in power who are intelligent, devoted to their jobs instead of taking vacations during national tragedies, who can provide creative leadership and restore the spirit of innovation to our major thinkers and get this country rolling again towards prosperity instead of massive debt, that supports the troops. We have to have an innovative energy policy that is as vigorous as the Manhattan Project, to get us on our feet again and out of our buddy-buddy relationships with the Saudis and their oil-rich ilk. I know Americans are capable of fantastic innovation, but without a leader who has foresight and vision, we're just treading water, just like our unfortunate fellow Americans in New Orleans. All this administration is supporting the troops with is incompetency.

Thanks for the mailing, but I couldn't help responding with some of my thoughts.

Sincerely,
Larry Goodell
 

FILM REVIEW: The Piano Teacher

Isabelle Huppert, as Erika Kohut in The Pianista (The Piano Teacher, in English) is an absolutely predatory, cold, once-ambitious concert pianist, who lives with her mother in a most unhealthy way, in modern Vienna. She and mother sleep in the same bed, and the mother drives the daughter crazy and vice-versa. The mother watches Erika’s every move, and confronts her when she comes home late, accusing her of all sorts of wrongdoing. Then comes the handsome male student, Walter, and Erika’s erotic weirdness gets to play out a bunch of ugly scenes. Erika is a cutter (in one scene, cutting her vagina), goes to porn shops, has the sexual imagination of a bottom feeder. She and Walter have a couple of sex attempts, but in one scene Erika won’t let him climax, but frustrates him. Erika writes Walter a letter describing the kind of sex she wants and it’s absolutely depraved. Walter doesn’t believe it. In another scene, at her apartment, Walter locks the mother in her room and proceeds to rape Erika, while Erika coldly puts up with it. There is also a strange, mad scene in which Erika mounts her mother sexually, in some desperate attempt at flailing affection. In the finale, Erika goes to a concert with the idea of murdering Walter, but only ends up stabbing herself in the chest. It’s herself that is the object of her hatred.

Huppert is superb at capturing the inhuman coldness and arch ambivalence of this woman, much as Elfreide Jelinek (winner of the 2004 Nobel) described her in the original book. This is some form of feminine ambition convoluted into a masochism that has great depth, though the mad elements in it outnumber the easily understood. She is a thorough and respected piano teacher, enthralled with Schumann and Schubert, who occasionally still gives public concerts, though not on the level she and her mother had hoped. The mother and daughter form a frustrated tandem, all tied to Erika’s great potential that never reaches the pinnacles they had hoped. Deprived so long of a normal life, devoted to her music, and aware that she was not going to become an international star, Erika becomes absorbed in self-punishment and a severity with students that is often sadistic, as when she puts a smashed glass in the coat pocket of a female student who is failing in her classes. Humiliation, frustration, pain, mutilation, forms of suffering both imposed and imagined keep Erika in a cave where only mother’s strange damaged love is real.

The intensity of Jelinek’s book is captured here by director Micheal Haneke with real power; the casting is excellent, with Benoit Magimel as Walter, and Annie Girardot, as Erika’s mother. But it is Isabelle Huppert who rises to this extraordinary occasion as a woman stuck in the lofty beauties of great Germanic music, as well as a pathological struggle to make sense of life outside music. Hers is the dense, abject failure to find identity as a woman, or as a sexual being; she lives in a private, impenetrable world of hermetic brutality, with a mad mother, and a thwarted will to dominate the musical world. Jelinek’s story may be a cautionary tale about the severe consciousness required to master a demanding art form, but also a reading with modern resonance of the tribulations of the Austrian soul. Not to be dismissed is also an implicit awareness of the tortured soul who wants to believe in some ultimate source, but has lost faith (in this case, in music), and has gone into a personal hell where redemption is not available. But Erika’s soul in extremis, as played by Huppert, seems so exquisitely human from various perspectives, that those of us who are concerned with the agonies of unbelief and self slaughter may perceive in Jelenik’s story what Jung called an enantiodromia, an unconscious counterposition that may be building up in Erika’s psyche, in resistance to the conscious controls imposed by her very acute neurosis. As in Samuel Beckett’s work, the bleak condition of the protagonist may imply a strange hope that accompanies the disintegration of character we have experienced in the artistic exploration.

Dossier: Red State Values

In red states in 2001, there were 572,000 divorces…blue states recorded 340,000…in the same year. 11 red states had higher rates of divorce than any blue state…In each of the red states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico, 46.3 percent of all births were to unwed mothers… In blue states, on average, that percentage was 31.7… Delaware has the highest rate of births to teenage mothers among all blue sates, yet 17 red states have a higher rate…Of those red states, 15 have a least twice the rate as that of Massachusetts… There were more than 100 teen pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 in 5 red states in 2002… None of the blue states had rates that high… The rate of teen births declined in 46 states from 1988 to 2000…It climbed in 3 red states and saw no change in another… The per capita rate of violent crime in red states is 421 per 100,000…In blue states, it’s 372 per 100,000…The per capita rate of murder and non-negligent manslaughter in Louisiana is 13 per 100,000…In Maine, it’s 1.2 per 100,000… As of 2000, 37 states had statewide policies or procedures to address domestic violence.. All 13 thtat didn[t were red statess…The 5 sates had statewide policies or procedures to address domestic violence… All 13 that didn’t were red states…The 5 states with the highest rates of alcohol dependence or abuse are red states…The 5 states with the highest rates of alcohol dependence or abuse among 12-to 17-year-olds are also red states… The per capita rate of methamphetamine-lab seizures in California is 2 per 100,000…In Arkansas, it’s 20 per 100,000…The number of meth-lab seizures in red states increased by 38 percent from 1999 to 2003…In the same time frame, it decreased by 38 percent in blue states…Residents of the all-red Mountain States are the most likely to have had 3 or more sexual partners in the previous year…Residents of all-blue New England are the last likely to have had more than 1 partner in that span… Residents of the mid-Atlantic region of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were the most likely to be sexually abstinent. Residents of the all-red West South Central region (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana) were the least likely…Five red states reported more than 400 cases of chlamydia per 100,000 residents in 2002…No blue state had a rate that high…The per capita rate of gonorrhea in red states was 140 per 100,000..in blue states, it was 99 per 100,000.—Reprinted from The American Prospect

No More Illusions - Clear-Minded Thinking about Impediments to Political Change in the USA

by Fran Shor

In the aftermath of the acquittal by an Oxford, Mississippi federal jury in December 1963 of five defendants responsible for jailhouse beatings of civil rights activists, one of those activists, Lawrence Guyot, denounced the fraudulent verdict. Ella Baker, the inspiring godmother of numerous civil rights organizations, counseled Guyot to “look beyond this foolishness. Don’t let it stop you.” Guyot and others in the Mississippi freedom struggle went on to build the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and other grassroots organizations that transformed the environment of racial injustice in the South. Although encountering constant setbacks and lethal white resistance, the civil rights movement changed the course of US history.

For many activists engaged in trying to defeat George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential election, it seems that the result is also a decision open to charges of fraud. Certainly, with 60 million votes lacking any paper trail and significant incidents of massive statistical anomalies in key states, such as Ohio and Florida, the electoral “foolishness” is yet to be fully investigated or explained. While it may not yet be time to “look beyond this foolishness,” we need to be clear-minded in our analysis of the illusions and impediments confronting us as we try to sustain ourselves in the future in order to make significant political change.

One of the most pernicious illusions is the simple- minded belief that we have a democratic political system based on “one person, one vote.” As in the civil rights period, the right to vote has necessitated periodic intervention in order to make the franchise more inclusive. Such inclusion is still incomplete as long as large numbers of citizens, primarily ex-felons, are prevented from voting. It is estimated that close to 13% of all African-American males are denied voting rights because of their criminal record. Although efforts at the state and federal level have been mounted to enfranchise these permanently excluded voters, the status quo remains in place.

In addition to the lack of full enfranchisement, there are fundamental inequities in the apportionment of votes. One of the most egregious examples is the apportionment for US Senators. For example, Wyoming, with a population of around 500,000, elects the same number of US Senators as California with a population of 35,000,000. That’s a 1 to 70 disproportion! Even in the more “democratic” House of Representatives, there are continuing apportionment inequities that favor smaller, whiter, and less urban populations. Added to this are disparities between congressional districts that reflect biased gerrymandering and the marginalization of racial minorities, as in the recent efforts by Republicans in Texas to redistrict the map in favor of their constituencies. Hence, the Republican political machine is adding its own malevolent policies of redistricting to an already antiquated and antidemocratic model of representation.

Beyond the retention of the arcane and unrepresentative Electoral College, the US political system refuses to take into account fair and democratic representation. Countries like Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand have institutionalized proportional and preferential voting in order to guarantee that representation is as fair and inclusive as possible. As long as there is a “winner- take-all” political system in the US, political alternatives (and with it, fundamental political change) will be lacking. Certainly, third parties historically have helped build pressure for political changes when the two-party duopoly felt threatened by the loss of key constituencies. Nonetheless, without fundamental electoral change, including when and how people vote, the system will continue to preclude real political change on a national level.

Beyond the impediments built into the political system, progressives continue to listen to the siren songs of those whose ideological illusions often substitute for clear- minded analysis. One example in the recent 2004 election was the insistence by Michael Moore that all those young and alienated voters could turn the tide towards progressive change. While Moore mounted his own Herculean efforts to turn out the vote, his sense of who the alienated were was rather blinkered, especially in a national election. Certainly, young people did vote in large percentages against Bush. However, their transitional situation makes reliance on them to be just a short-term strategy. Without building communities of resistance for the transition to middle age, young people will be all too easily de-radicalized. Furthermore, to believe that the alienated are the natural allies of the left is to disregard the awful history of demagoguery and nationalism in modern mass politics. It is not surprising that Bush rallied evangelical Christians and others around a nationalist melodrama of the “war on terror.”

Another illusion is perpetrated by rationalist radicals like Noam Chomsky in their arguments that setting forth the truth will eventually convince people to make rational choices. Not only does this discount the politics of resentment and irrationalism that political critics like Thomas Frank have pointed to, but it also neglects the way in which the semiotic environment has been degraded to simulated and hyper-real events. Rational thought and reality-based thinking are prisoners of imperial and infotainment circuses. It will take a lot more than truth to set people on the road to political change and fundamental freedom.

One final illusion that appears to have as many lives as a cat is the idea of taking over the Democratic Party. While there are progressive elements in the Democratic Party, its function as a collection of interests is towards a para- state institution, that is, a legitimizer of limited reforms at best that will help the overall system function more smoothly. Although working to pull the Democratic Party to the left is a vital task, it is also based upon the illusion that the Democratic Party would listen to the left before it would perform its legitimizing role. A hardheaded review of Clinton’s real impact on African-Americans or Kerry’s awful concession speech should put to rest the belief that the Democrats will advance the progressive agenda.

Without eschewing working with Democrats and their progressive allies, such as MoveOn, we need to recognize that fundamental political change can only come about through a coalition of struggle. This cannot be built through electoral politics, but outside of and prior to such politics. Moving people to make change means engaging them in real political struggle. Studs Terkel tells of a compelling transformation that occurred to a KKK member who was forced to work with African-American women at his work site to change terrible conditions confronted by all. In the midst of working to make those changes, the Klan member outgrew his prejudiced views of blacks and jaundiced view of politics.

If we are to move beyond all the “foolishness” that continues to impede the road to radical reform in the United States, we need to realize that this tragic journey will not be easy or without setbacks. While it may be that, as Dr. King put it so eloquently, “the arc of the universe bends towards justice,” we will have to bend our own wills towards justice without illusions and with all the intelligence and imagination at our command.

—Fran Shor teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His e-mail address is: f.shor@wayne.edu. This article was reprinted originally in CommonDreams.org.

—TOP OF PAGE—

Democrats Need a Religious Left

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

For years the Democrats have been telling themselves "it's the economy, stupid." Yet consistently for dozens of years millions of middle income Americans have voted against their economic interests to support Republicans who have tapped a deeper set of needs.

Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a society that seems to place materialism and selfishness above moral values. They know that "looking out for number one" has become the common sense of our society, but they want a life that is about something more-a framework of meaning and purpose to their lives that would transcend the grasping and narcissism that surrounds them. Sure, they will admit that they have material needs, and that they worry about adequate health care, stability in employment, and enough money to give their kids a college education. But even more deeply they want their lives to have meaning-and they respond to candidates who seem to care about values and some sense of transcendent purpose.

Many of these voters have found a "politics of meaning" in the political Right. In the Right wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their "meaning needs." Most of these churches and synagogues demonstrate a high level of caring for their members, even if the flip side is a willingness to demean those on the outside. Yet what members experience directly is a level of mutual caring that they rarely find in the rest of the society. And a sense of community that is offered them nowhere else, a community that has as its central theme that life has value because it is connected to some higher meaning than one's success in the marketplace.

It's easy to see how this hunger gets manipulated in ways that liberals find offensive and contradictory. The frantic attempts to preserve family by denying gays the right to get married, the talk about being conservatives while meanwhile supporting Bush policies that accelerate the destruction of the environment and do nothing to encourage respect for God's creation or an ethos of awe and wonder to replace the ethos of turning nature into a commodity, the intense focus on preserving the powerless fetus and a culture of life without a concomitant commitment to medical research (stem cell research/HIV-AIDS), gun control and healthcare reform., the claim to care about others and then deny them a living wage and an ecologically sustainable environment-all this is rightly perceived by liberals as a level of inconsistency that makes them dismiss as hypocrites the voters who have been moving to the Right.

Yet liberals, trapped in a long-standing disdain for religion and tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underlie the move to the Right, have been unable to engage these voters in a serious dialogue. Rightly angry at the way that some religious communities have been mired in authoritarianism, racism, sexism and homophobia, the liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to religion that it has both marginalized those many people on the Left who actually do have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused to acknowledge that many who move to the Right have legitimate complaints about the ethos of selfishness in American life.

Imagine if John Kerry had been able to counter George Bush by insisting that a serious religious person would never turn his back on the suffering of the poor, that the bible's injunction to love one's neighbor required us to provide health care for all, and that the New Testament's command to "turn the other cheek" should give us a predisposition against responding to violence with violence.

Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk about the strength that comes from love and generosity and applied that to foreign policy and homeland security.

Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk of a New Bottom Line, so that American institutions get judged efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize people's capacities to be loving and caring, ethically and ecologically sensitive, and capable of responding to the universe with awe and wonder.

Imagine a Democratic Party that could call for schools to teach gratitude, generosity, caring for others, and celebration of the wonders that daily surround us! Such a Democratic Party, continuing to embrace its agenda for economic fairness and multi-cultural inclusiveness, would have won in 2004 and can win in the future. (Please don't tell me that this is happening outside the Democratic Party in the Greens or in other leftie groups--because except for a few tiny exceptions it is not! I remember how hard I tried to get Ralph Nader to think and talk in these terms in 2000, and how little response I got substantively from the Green Party when I suggested reformulating their excessively politically correct policy orientation in ways that would speak to this spiritual consciousness. The hostility of the Left to spirituality is so deep, in fact, that when they hear us in Tikkun talking this way they often can't even hear what we are saying--so they systematically mis-hear it and say that we are calling for the Left to take up the politics of the Right, which is exactly the opposite of our point--speaking to spiritual needs actually leads to a more radical critique of the dynamics of corporate capitalism and corporate globalization, not to a mimicking of right-wing policies).

If the Democrats were to foster a religions/spiritual Left, they would no longer pick candidates who support preemptive wars or who appease corporate power. They would reject the cynical realism that led them to pretend to be born-again militarists, a deception that fooled no one and only revealed their contempt for the intelligence of most Americans. Instead of assuming that most Americans are either stupid or reactionary, a religious Left would understand that many Americans who are on the Right actually share the same concern for a world based on love and generosity that underlies Left politics, even though lefties often hide their value attachments.

Yet to move in this direction, many Democrats would have to give up their attachment to a core belief: that those who voted for Bush are fundamentally stupid or evil. Its time they got over that elitist self-righteousness and developed strategies that could affirm their common humanity with those who voted for the Right. Teaching themselves to see the good in the rest of the American public would be a critical first step in liberals and progressives learning how to teach the rest of American society how to see that same goodness in the rest of the people on this planet. It is this spiritual lesson-that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and on the well-being of the earth-a lesson rooted deeply in the spiritual wisdom of virtually every religion on the planet, that could be the center of a revived Democratic Party.

Yet to take that seriously, the Democrats are going to have to get over the false and demeaning perception that the Americans who voted for Bush could never be moved to care about the well being of anyone but themselves. That transformation in the Democrats would make them into serious contenders.

The last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked their legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by Martin Luther King. We cannot wait for the reappearance of that kind of charismatic leader to begin the process of re-building a spiritual/religious Left.

We are up against a very difficult period ahead. There will be struggles to end the war in Iraq and to protect us from what is likely to be very scary moves to limit civil liberties, decrease social supports for the poor and the powerless, increase militarization and even new wars. If we face all this with the kind of liberal and progressive movements that we've been relying on the past, we are likely to continue to be very ineffective.

That's why taking the Tikkun ideas and building a new kind of social change movement is such a pressing priority. We are not asking people to become religious or spiritual if you are not; we are asking for a new sensitivity to this arena, and new ways of talking to people and new ways of framing progressive ideas, and a new sensitivity to awe and wonder to replace a narrow utilitarian way of approaching other human beings and nature.

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Outside the Law

[An editorial from The Guardian of London]

Outlaw behavior, or at least some types of it, pains Donald Rumsfeld. The US defense secretary is particularly anguished by newspaper leaks of torture in Iraqi prisons. That amounts to a violation of national security, he told senators on Friday in Washington. The torture sickened him too, he said, but he saved his famous arched eyebrow for the villain who put this "radioactive" material into the public domain rather than let the system of military justice run its course.

Mr. Rumsfeld, like his president, does not much care for truth. Truth undermines his own portrayal of himself, his administration and his nation as victims. He apologized last week for the scenes reproduced alongside his own image on split television screens: the prisoner on a leash, the piles of naked bodies, the nude, hooded figure with wires dangling from his finger tips. He even offered to pay for the damage. He also warned that there were more, and more horrific, photos and videos still to come. Something of what he feared appears on our front page this morning. Mr. Rumsfeld regretted that images like this have offended the world. Yet he knows from the same Red Cross sources that first warned of the abuses more than a year ago that torture continues under coalition direction, and he left too much unacknowledged. These images are more than merely unfortunate and embarrassing now. They are shaping the way the world sees the Iraq occupation.

Mr Rumsfeld did not apologize for the Red Cross reports of unarmed Iraqi prisoners being shot to death by military personnel in watchtowers. He said nothing of the "interrogation techniques" developed by US intelligence agencies and taught to security services the world over, including here. He expressed no regret for employing private contractors to question people who were accused of no crime, then hiding their sadistic behavior from public scrutiny. He never mentioned how sorry he might be for turning over captives to other governments using even cruder torture methods. He showed no contrition for continuing to hide hundreds of people in Guantánamo Bay away from the law. Such leaders have placed themselves outside the bounds of international law, their own code of justice and their much-admired constitution. In doing so, they have also removed the protection of law from those who follow their orders.

George Bush started to withdraw the US from the international community at the beginning of his presidency. Earlier this year he dismissed foreign objections to his policies by insisting that the US needed no permission slip from the rest of the world to defend itself. At home, he has evaded oversight by Congress on matters of finance, intelligence operations and foreign relations. He sidestepped questioning by the press by holding fewer news conferences than any other modern president.

The Iraq revelations have given much of the world its voice back. The Washington Post reported yesterday that "profound anger" is building within the US Army against Mr Rumsfeld's rule. Now some soldiers have gone on the record calling for him to go. All this marks a quantum shift in the politics of the Iraq occupation. We need to hear now from others about how they believe the torture system - for that is what it is - came about, and what changes they propose. We need to hear from John Kerry. And we need to hear from Tony Blair too. Above all, we need to have a sign from President Bush that he understands his mistake, not the mistakes of a handful of ill-trained reservists acting out policies developed by intelligence services over many years. That sign could be given by presidential order, no permission slip needed from Congress, from coalition partners or from the United Nations. Close Guantánamo.

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Placitas as Community

Placitas (taken here as the entire 30-square-mile expanse bounded by I-25 to the east and the remainder of Sandoval county to the west and north) has a way to go before it can really be called a community. Among other things, it lacks one of the basic elements of a true community: institutions. An institution, in this sense, is a patterned way of living together that is distinctive to a discrete group of people.  For example, the ingrained practice in the United States that the losers in political contests step aside peacefully for the winners is an institutionalized practice.

In Placitas, we have a growing number of organizations, including two churches, a volunteer fire department, a senior center and several subdivision homeowners’ associations and water boards—even a new and struggling Chamber of Commerce—but as to true institutions we have very few of our own. That is, we have very few ways of doing things, or connective bonds, that are distinctively our own and that are channeled in predictable ways. (Perhaps the closest to a true institutional attitude is the instinctive resistance of the people of Placitas to further land development.)

Even our one school is not really our own. It is subject to our influence, perhaps, but that influence is limited by the willingness of  the larger School District to listen to our concerns. Secondary school students (in increasing numbers apparently) are sent into the Bernalillo system, to various private schools, or to middle schools and high schools in the larger metropolitan area. This is important, because high schools, with their athletic teams, debate teams, school colors and all the other trappings that define a singular institution, are an important component of community.

Greater Placitas is a loosely connected group of subdivisions strung out for seven or eight miles along Route 165, with another fifteen or twenty additional housing clusters (Rainbow Valley is one; another is Dome Valley) spread mostly around the back roads. The three oldest of the platted subdivisions, Ranchos de Placitas, Placitas West (which was auctioned off in 2.5-acre lots by the Bureau of Land Management in 1963, but took 20 years or so to fill in), and Placitas Heights, are all about 40 years old.

Placitas Village, while it is not an incorporated area, has a long history, since it is the seat of an Eighteenth Century Spanish land grant, and very powerful community norms, as newcomers have discovered, sometimes to their discomfort. The Village is a community, an assemblage of people with similar histories and with sometimes-intricate family interrelationships, built around a post office that serves the entire zip code, an ancient water system, and the San Antonio de las Huertas land grant. But Placitas as a larger entity has a very brief history and perhaps for that reason alone seems to lack most of the elements of true community. In other words, Greater Placitas is not a small town held together by informal networks of family and relationships, where everyone knows (or would like to know) everyone else’s business. It is not even a suburb, but more like what used to be called an exurb—separated from the nearest metropolitan area, but still a distinctive place whose residents travel elsewhere to work and shop.

Most of the other subdivisions were designed by land developers. Only two are as much as twenty to thirty years old —Placitas Trails, Placitas Homesteads and Tierra Madre. Some are just getting started: La Mesa, Sundance Mesa, Vista de la Montana, Puesta del Sol, Overlook, Desert Mountain, Sky Mountain, Vista de Oro and the newest, Anazasi Trails, are no more than ten or fifteen years old and are still evolving. It would be hard, however, to call any of these subdivisions true neighborhoods. Not yet, anyway. They are collections of adobe and adobe-style houses with a homeowners association, which functions in most cases as a kind of zoning board, enforcing the subdivision covenants and restrictions, plus a communal water system and networks of asphalt or improved but unpaved roads.

The kernel of any future community may lie in our shopping center with its small super market, which also includes a bank, a beauty salon, two restaurants, a computer service store, a dry cleaner and a video store. Any place where people get together, or run into each other, has the potential for a communal “feel.” There is also the large, commercially-zoned area adjacent to the shopping center which could conceivably be developed in ways conducive to community (a community center, let’s say.)  Add the Sandoval Signpost, and our own home-grown real estate companies and you have some inchoate but promising harbingers of community. But we’re not there yet.

Most important as an impetus to community may be problems that can only be solved through collective action. One of the older subdivisions, Ranchos de Placitas, for example, has developed a strong sense of shared history, growing, perhaps, out of the subdivision’s success some years ago in rehabilitating a crumbling water system. There’s nothing like a nice crisis to bring people together. And there will be more of them as the subdivisions age.

Some people, of course, may not want community. That isn’t what they came here for. They like the large lots, separated by arroyos, the relative isolation, the lack of social pressure. It’s hard to build a community of would-be hermits. Placitas may have more than its share of such anti-communitarians. They came here to get away from all that. Who can quarrel with their right to be left alone and not to participate? Another negative factor is that children-per-household is below, and median age in Placitas is significantly above, the state average. Children bring strangers together. We don’t have very many in Placitas.

Nonetheless, as time goes by, movement toward community should continue, as people settle in and more and more communal problem-solving is required to maintain our quality of life. When people get together to solve problems or to plan improvements, or even to sell products (such as works of art), institutions are being built. The local recycling operation, for which dozens of people volunteer a couple of times a year, is a good example of institution-building that has broader ramifactions. So is the holiday arts and crafts fair, which has been occurring here for over a decade. And there is the distinguished Placitas Artists Series, another well-established program. People have worked together very successfully in dealing with problems such as badly-maintained pipelines, or protecting open space. A plan for a local public library is already in the works; a few local people have gotten together, acquired a land gift, and hope to build a tennis court near the Village. There is even talk about applying for one of the low-power community FM stations that congress recently authorized. This would really have an integrating effect.

It seems unlikely that we will ever have our own government, although some among us would like to see us split off and become a county, a proposal with too many unknowns to catch on. We do have distinctive problems, and it would be good if the citizens of Placitas could have a larger say in determining our collective future. Some kind of sub-county organization for designated areas would work very nicely, but there is nothing in current state law that would make that possible.

So the movement toward more community activity, as more problems (and opportunities) emerge, would seem to be inexorable. Sooner or later, we’re going to be a real community, whether we like it or not. —RH

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Beginning in medias res, temperate thoughts on the implied themes for contemporary American verse, an essay by Bill Dodd

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