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November 23, 2008
Thinking Otherwise
By William Irwin Thompson
“We Irish think
otherwise.” Bishop
Berkeley
Thoughts on Bailing Out Detroit
pt 2, November 22, 2008
What do extinction and apoptosis have in common? (Relax, you have a dictionary and Wikipedia just a mouse
click away.) Roshi Joan Halifax would say impermanence. Without
extinction, biospheres would suffocate; without programmed cell death,
cancerous organs would kill organisms.
With apologies to Darwin, properly speaking, species
don’t evolve, biospheres do. In the hominization of the primates, the narrative of the moment tells
us that upright posture and encephalation were characteristic of the shift from
hominid to hominin; but both these traits are expressed in a shift of
environments in which the climate in the biosphere changes from tropical rain
forest to sparsely forested savannah. Individual apes, such as gibbons can do
nicely for themselves in the dense forest with a single mate in a group of two
or three; they have only to reach out lazily and pluck their fruit from the
tall trees in which they safely live. But when the climate changes and the
trees become sparse and widely separated, the primates have to descend, stand
tall to look around for predators, and learn how to deal with all their fellows
doing the same thing. Those who can read faces and body language, understand
news systems of association through dominance, come to terms with complex
mating and collective protection of neonates in small groups, begin to
experience selective pressure toward developing brains that can map all this
new activity. And so in the Baldwinian evolution of “use it or lose it,”
an activity reinforced heightens its further development. That is the good
news; the bad news is that the shift from one biospheric organization (or
attractor) is a catastrophe bifurcation.
As we all are beginning to learn living through this
economic catastrophe bifurcation, our global economy is not a market but a
planetary biosphere. Trying to understand the day’s news with the eighteenth
century economics of Adam Smith is like trying to understand the neuroscience of the
brain with phrenology.
There is, however, good news for conservatives.
Evolution is not simply a linear system of progress; it is also inherently
conservative. If a cell develops that works through olfactory detection, it can
be tinkered with to work also for photoreception. If a fin works well in water,
it may also be conserved to be used in a new way as an arm. If cyanobacteria can be useful at large in the
shallow seas to produce an oxygenated atmosphere; they can also be tinkered
with to become mitochondria inside cells to aid the larger and more complex
cell with a nucleus to consume interior pollutants, produce a new energy cycle
with ATP, and help the nucleus along with its invention of sexual reproduction.
And in the archetypal association of sex and death–what Opera is all
about–mitochondria take up a new role in apoptosis. Innovation is cool, but
conservation is good. We need both.
So when conservatives try to conserve something, it
is a mistake to become Jacobins and send them to the guillotine or Leninists to send them to the firing squad. But it is also a mistake
to follow them and refuse to come down out of the trees.
In my lifetime, the social biosphere has been built
upon the automobile. It gave us the suburbs and the shopping mall. But notice
now that there are waves of foreclosures in the suburbs and the closings of
many retail chain stores in the malls that can’t hold out even a few weeks for
a Christmas season that may prove to be the worst in memory. This social
biosphere is a world built on cheap gas, credit cards and charge accounts. In
World War II, FDR extended credit to the producing factories to get us out of
the Depression; in the postwar era, Truman extended credit to the consumers to
keep us out.
In my father’s time, there were still horses and
buggies and blacksmiths. He moved from his family farm in Indiana to Chicago
and became first an auto mechanic in World War I and then an auto salesman for
fleets of trucks for GM in the thirties and forties. Then came World War II and
there were no longer fleets of trucks to sell to businesses but only tanks and
army trucks to make for the Government. Times were hard, and like so many
others, we moved to California in 1945 and took part in the emergence of the
era that is now coming to an end.
I am no prophet, but it seems to me that the world
that is emerging for a new generation is quite different from my time. If we
resist it, and an unimaginative government seeks to respond to lobbies and
pressure groups to block innovation, then this new generation will suffer
greatly and it will take another twenty years and perhaps another country for
the new cultural ecology to emerge. Certainly, this transition will be easier
for Switzerland, Denmark, or Ireland than for us.
I would hazard a generalization to say that this new
cultural ecology is one of the suburbs re-clustering into small cities, with
ribbons of ecosystems replacing parking lots and added to freeways, and upscale
whole foods being produced locally by subscription farming for local markets
and artisanal restaurants rather than fast food fuel stations in strip malls.
Dead factories will be recycled into workshops for new Green technologies. On
the turn of the spiral, this would be going back to the nineteenth century on a
higher level. Don’t just think of the dark satanic mills of Manchester and
Birmingham, but think of the university town of Schiller’s Jena or Goethe’s Weimar in Germany.
To make the shift from postindustrial
civilization to an endosymbiotic biosphere of government, business, and
individuals, we need to invest directly in our citizens and not create nursing
homes of assisted living for dinosaurs like GM. The GI Bill and the Highway Act of 1956 that created the Interstate highway
system brought forth the post-Depression era of postindustrial civilization.
Once again, citizens will need scholarships to go back to colleges and stipends
to live on, and communities will need a new infrastructure of green
architectures and bacterial “living machines” for environmental
remediation. The difference between collapse and emergence is vision.
Cultural Historian William Irwin Thompson writes regularly for Wild River Review.
  Share
Comments Off
Thinking Otherwise
By William Irwin Thompson
“We Irish think
otherwise.” Bishop
Berkeley
Thoughts on Bailing Out Detroit
pt 2, November 22, 2008
What do extinction and apoptosis have in common? (Relax, you have a dictionary and Wikipedia just a mouse
click away.) Roshi Joan Halifax would say impermanence. Without
extinction, biospheres would suffocate; without programmed cell death,
cancerous organs would kill organisms.
With apologies to Darwin, properly speaking, species
don’t evolve, biospheres do. In the hominization of the primates, the narrative of the moment tells
us that upright posture and encephalation were characteristic of the shift from
hominid to hominin; but both these traits are expressed in a shift of
environments in which the climate in the biosphere changes from tropical rain
forest to sparsely forested savannah. Individual apes, such as gibbons can do
nicely for themselves in the dense forest with a single mate in a group of two
or three; they have only to reach out lazily and pluck their fruit from the
tall trees in which they safely live. But when the climate changes and the
trees become sparse and widely separated, the primates have to descend, stand
tall to look around for predators, and learn how to deal with all their fellows
doing the same thing. Those who can read faces and body language, understand
news systems of association through dominance, come to terms with complex
mating and collective protection of neonates in small groups, begin to
experience selective pressure toward developing brains that can map all this
new activity. And so in the Baldwinian evolution of “use it or lose it,”
an activity reinforced heightens its further development. That is the good
news; the bad news is that the shift from one biospheric organization (or
attractor) is a catastrophe bifurcation.
As we all are beginning to learn living through this
economic catastrophe bifurcation, our global economy is not a market but a
planetary biosphere. Trying to understand the day’s news with the eighteenth
century economics of Adam Smith is like trying to understand the neuroscience of the
brain with phrenology.
There is, however, good news for conservatives.
Evolution is not simply a linear system of progress; it is also inherently
conservative. If a cell develops that works through olfactory detection, it can
be tinkered with to work also for photoreception. If a fin works well in water,
it may also be conserved to be used in a new way as an arm. If cyanobacteria can be useful at large in the
shallow seas to produce an oxygenated atmosphere; they can also be tinkered
with to become mitochondria inside cells to aid the larger and more complex
cell with a nucleus to consume interior pollutants, produce a new energy cycle
with ATP, and help the nucleus along with its invention of sexual reproduction.
And in the archetypal association of sex and death–what Opera is all
about–mitochondria take up a new role in apoptosis. Innovation is cool, but
conservation is good. We need both.
So when conservatives try to conserve something, it
is a mistake to become Jacobins and send them to the guillotine or Leninists to send them to the firing squad. But it is also a mistake
to follow them and refuse to come down out of the trees.
In my lifetime, the social biosphere has been built
upon the automobile. It gave us the suburbs and the shopping mall. But notice
now that there are waves of foreclosures in the suburbs and the closings of
many retail chain stores in the malls that can’t hold out even a few weeks for
a Christmas season that may prove to be the worst in memory. This social
biosphere is a world built on cheap gas, credit cards and charge accounts. In
World War II, FDR extended credit to the producing factories to get us out of
the Depression; in the postwar era, Truman extended credit to the consumers to
keep us out.
In my father’s time, there were still horses and
buggies and blacksmiths. He moved from his family farm in Indiana to Chicago
and became first an auto mechanic in World War I and then an auto salesman for
fleets of trucks for GM in the thirties and forties. Then came World War II and
there were no longer fleets of trucks to sell to businesses but only tanks and
army trucks to make for the Government. Times were hard, and like so many
others, we moved to California in 1945 and took part in the emergence of the
era that is now coming to an end.
I am no prophet, but it seems to me that the world
that is emerging for a new generation is quite different from my time. If we
resist it, and an unimaginative government seeks to respond to lobbies and
pressure groups to block innovation, then this new generation will suffer
greatly and it will take another twenty years and perhaps another country for
the new cultural ecology to emerge. Certainly, this transition will be easier
for Switzerland, Denmark, or Ireland than for us.
I would hazard a generalization to say that this new
cultural ecology is one of the suburbs re-clustering into small cities, with
ribbons of ecosystems replacing parking lots and added to freeways, and upscale
whole foods being produced locally by subscription farming for local markets
and artisanal restaurants rather than fast food fuel stations in strip malls.
Dead factories will be recycled into workshops for new Green technologies. On
the turn of the spiral, this would be going back to the nineteenth century on a
higher level. Don’t just think of the dark satanic mills of Manchester and
Birmingham, but think of the university town of Schiller’s Jena or Goethe’s Weimar in Germany.
To make the shift from postindustrial
civilization to an endosymbiotic biosphere of government, business, and
individuals, we need to invest directly in our citizens and not create nursing
homes of assisted living for dinosaurs like GM. The GI Bill and the Highway Act of 1956 that created the Interstate highway
system brought forth the post-Depression era of postindustrial civilization.
Once again, citizens will need scholarships to go back to colleges and stipends
to live on, and communities will need a new infrastructure of green
architectures and bacterial “living machines” for environmental
remediation. The difference between collapse and emergence is vision.
Cultural Historian William Irwin Thompson writes regularly for Wild River Review.
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November 19, 2008
Thinking Otherwise
By William Irwin Thompson
“We Irish think
otherwise.” Bishop
Berkeley
Bailing Out Detroit, November 18, 2008
Since the bailout of Wall Street did not seem to go as
planned by Congress, and the banks ended up hoarding the money instead of
re-animating the credit system, we should think twice before bailing out the
incompetent management of Detroit. New York Times columnist David Brooks is right when he says we should
allow the Schumpeterian winds of creative destruction to do their work, let the
two or three corporations declare bankruptcy, and allow new forces to buy up
their assets and retool the factories and workshops for green vehicles, wind
mills, solar collectors, and the return of suburban trains and urban street
cars to our over-stretched cities. Small cities like Zurich–where I have
lived– with its Swiss punctual system of trains, trolleys, and streetcars, and
not L.A.–where I have also lived–are the wave of the future.
Feeling Schumpeter‘s chill wind at its back, Japan invested in
innovation in automotive engineering and has given us the Toyota Prius and the
Honda Civic. GM ignored the oil crisis of the 70′s, and inspired by Papa Bush
and his first Gulf War, has given us the Hummer, the Escalade, and the Yukon. Giving
GM executives more money will not improve their thinking or imagination. Like
the Republican party handlers of a corporate mind-set who convinced McCain to
abandon his reputation for straight talk to adopt an advertising campaign based
on Joe the Plumber and attacks ads smearing centrist Obama as a terrorist, or
even worse, a socialist, these General Motors executives will use the money for
advertising their old products as Green and nature-loving. Republicans feel
that America should be a corporate oligarchy and that the helots can be made to
believe what they want them to through the power of media and advertising:
witness, Fox News. The prosecution rests its case.
But this year’s election proved that even American
stupidity has its limits and that we will not always buy frozen shit-on-a-stick
if it is labeled an organic Fudgecicle. Joe the Plumber may have gotten a book
deal by his pretending to be something other than a paid plant in the crowd,
but by the time his book comes out, it may be as wilted as last month’s arugula
at Whole Foods.
The people we should bailout are the white and blue color
workers who are out of work because of management’s incompetence. We should
provide them with the funds to go to community colleges and make up for the bad
education they had in high school to retool themselves as the new workers for a
knowledge economy.
After the destructions of the Civil War, Congress passed
the Morrill
Land Grant Act that created a whole new line of colleges. One of these was
so successful in its balance between public and private funding that it grew up
to become the world-class university of Cornell–my alma mater. Since our high
schools are, for the most part, youth reservations, we have two generations of
folks who can’t find Kansas or Canada on a map, can’t read literature, and even
though they have majored in “communications” like Sarah Palin their
avatar, can’t speak in syntactical sentences. We should address this need by
creating or funding already existing community colleges all across the land. These
should be federally funded community colleges. As these improve, the blowback
could be that our high schools might respond and begin to improve.
By increasing our investment in a knowledge economy that
is not based simply on Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, but on our community
colleges, we could begin to look to them to inspire garage innovations for new
green technologies. We could begin to focus on re-building our infrastructure
with green technology buses and light rail.
In other words, we must treat our noetic economy as one in
which creative government is a respected partner in a social ecology of
individual citizens and business organizations. In complex dynamical systems
theory, self-organization emerges through recursive loops between bottom-up and
top-down circulations. This new noetic economy is not truthfully described by
labels such as capitalist, socialist, or communist. It is time that a new
generation woke up and saw our new historical landscape. Propping up
irresponsible cocaine-driven futures traders and tranquilized Detroit
executives is a sure way to continue on the path to extinction.
Cultural Historian William Irwin
Thompson writes
regularly for Wild River Review
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Comments Off
Thinking Otherwise
By William Irwin Thompson
“We Irish think
otherwise.” Bishop
Berkeley
Bailing Out Detroit, November 18, 2008
Since the bailout of Wall Street did not seem to go as
planned by Congress, and the banks ended up hoarding the money instead of
re-animating the credit system, we should think twice before bailing out the
incompetent management of Detroit. New York Times columnist David Brooks is right when he says we should
allow the Schumpeterian winds of creative destruction to do their work, let the
two or three corporations declare bankruptcy, and allow new forces to buy up
their assets and retool the factories and workshops for green vehicles, wind
mills, solar collectors, and the return of suburban trains and urban street
cars to our over-stretched cities. Small cities like Zurich–where I have
lived– with its Swiss punctual system of trains, trolleys, and streetcars, and
not L.A.–where I have also lived–are the wave of the future.
Feeling Schumpeter‘s chill wind at its back, Japan invested in
innovation in automotive engineering and has given us the Toyota Prius and the
Honda Civic. GM ignored the oil crisis of the 70′s, and inspired by Papa Bush
and his first Gulf War, has given us the Hummer, the Escalade, and the Yukon. Giving
GM executives more money will not improve their thinking or imagination. Like
the Republican party handlers of a corporate mind-set who convinced McCain to
abandon his reputation for straight talk to adopt an advertising campaign based
on Joe the Plumber and attacks ads smearing centrist Obama as a terrorist, or
even worse, a socialist, these General Motors executives will use the money for
advertising their old products as Green and nature-loving. Republicans feel
that America should be a corporate oligarchy and that the helots can be made to
believe what they want them to through the power of media and advertising:
witness, Fox News. The prosecution rests its case.
But this year’s election proved that even American
stupidity has its limits and that we will not always buy frozen shit-on-a-stick
if it is labeled an organic Fudgecicle. Joe the Plumber may have gotten a book
deal by his pretending to be something other than a paid plant in the crowd,
but by the time his book comes out, it may be as wilted as last month’s arugula
at Whole Foods.
The people we should bailout are the white and blue color
workers who are out of work because of management’s incompetence. We should
provide them with the funds to go to community colleges and make up for the bad
education they had in high school to retool themselves as the new workers for a
knowledge economy.
After the destructions of the Civil War, Congress passed
the Morrill
Land Grant Act that created a whole new line of colleges. One of these was
so successful in its balance between public and private funding that it grew up
to become the world-class university of Cornell–my alma mater. Since our high
schools are, for the most part, youth reservations, we have two generations of
folks who can’t find Kansas or Canada on a map, can’t read literature, and even
though they have majored in “communications” like Sarah Palin their
avatar, can’t speak in syntactical sentences. We should address this need by
creating or funding already existing community colleges all across the land. These
should be federally funded community colleges. As these improve, the blowback
could be that our high schools might respond and begin to improve.
By increasing our investment in a knowledge economy that
is not based simply on Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, but on our community
colleges, we could begin to look to them to inspire garage innovations for new
green technologies. We could begin to focus on re-building our infrastructure
with green technology buses and light rail.
In other words, we must treat our noetic economy as one in
which creative government is a respected partner in a social ecology of
individual citizens and business organizations. In complex dynamical systems
theory, self-organization emerges through recursive loops between bottom-up and
top-down circulations. This new noetic economy is not truthfully described by
labels such as capitalist, socialist, or communist. It is time that a new
generation woke up and saw our new historical landscape. Propping up
irresponsible cocaine-driven futures traders and tranquilized Detroit
executives is a sure way to continue on the path to extinction.
Cultural Historian William Irwin
Thompson writes
regularly for Wild River Review
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Comments Off
November 18, 2008
Can
Good Government Give us Back our Lives?
By Bill Gaston
For this over-caffeinated
political junkie, and I’m sure for millions of others, one of the salutary
effects of Barack Obama’s victory two weeks ago has been the joy of getting our
lives back.
Conservative blogger and fervent
Obama backer Andrew Sullivan
has written of the “immense, slackening relief” at the demise of the
Bush-Cheney regime.
Also breathing a deep sigh of
relief was Paul Krugman. The liberal economist woke up the morning after the
election, and on his blog bid adieu
to an era dominated by “monsters.” Monsters with names like
Gingrich, DeLay, Cheney, Bush.
crawl back under that
rock
Count me down as one of those
ready to take a chill pill: time to pry myself away from the bottomless abyss
of political blogs, and take that long run, or read that long-promised book to
my eight-year old daughter.
With Obama’s victory, comes the
unmistakable sense that adults are back in charge, and political obsession can
now take a back seat.
With these monsters now defanged
and banished to the darkness, can we begin to reclaim the “better angels of our
nature”? Perhaps so. One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers expresses — much better
than I can — how “good government can give us back our lives.”…
One…point I don’t think is being made enough: one
of the pleasures of the week is that it holds out the promise of not having to
be obsessed with politics. It is unnatural, it seems to me, to have to care
passionately every day about the workings of the central government: only in
totalitarian societies, where a knock on the door may come at any time, or in
authoritarian ones, where each sneeze of the King has to be analyzed for its
potential consequence, does there exist a need to keep the government of the
country forever in the forefront of your mind.
One of the blessings of liberal democracy, in
theory, is that we delegate the common fate to the most able, intelligent and
motivated people among us, and, though we keep an eye on them and make them
subject to recall and revision, we can cede our trust to them to do a more or
less decent and able job most of the time. We trust them. For the first
time in years, we can say now: the government is in the hands of skillful
people with a sense of the real; we can live our lives in front of our
eyes without worrying that some horror is happening behind our backs. It would
be a mistake, I think, for us all to carry on past the election and into the
New Year with the same level of obsessive attention that this year, and the
years before, have forced on us. Good government gives us back our lives.
Bill Gaston is an analyst with
the New York City government, a former editor at Institutional Investor
Magazine, and a freelance writer on political and economic affairs. Bill
received his BA from George Washington University, and MA from Columbia
University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
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Can
Good Government Give us Back our Lives?
By Bill Gaston
For this over-caffeinated
political junkie, and I’m sure for millions of others, one of the salutary
effects of Barack Obama’s victory two weeks ago has been the joy of getting our
lives back.
Conservative blogger and fervent
Obama backer Andrew Sullivan
has written of the “immense, slackening relief” at the demise of the
Bush-Cheney regime.
Also breathing a deep sigh of
relief was Paul Krugman. The liberal economist woke up the morning after the
election, and on his blog bid adieu
to an era dominated by “monsters.” Monsters with names like
Gingrich, DeLay, Cheney, Bush.
crawl back under that
rock
Count me down as one of those
ready to take a chill pill: time to pry myself away from the bottomless abyss
of political blogs, and take that long run, or read that long-promised book to
my eight-year old daughter.
With Obama’s victory, comes the
unmistakable sense that adults are back in charge, and political obsession can
now take a back seat.
With these monsters now defanged
and banished to the darkness, can we begin to reclaim the “better angels of our
nature”? Perhaps so. One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers expresses — much better
than I can — how “good government can give us back our lives.”…
One…point I don’t think is being made enough: one
of the pleasures of the week is that it holds out the promise of not having to
be obsessed with politics. It is unnatural, it seems to me, to have to care
passionately every day about the workings of the central government: only in
totalitarian societies, where a knock on the door may come at any time, or in
authoritarian ones, where each sneeze of the King has to be analyzed for its
potential consequence, does there exist a need to keep the government of the
country forever in the forefront of your mind.
One of the blessings of liberal democracy, in
theory, is that we delegate the common fate to the most able, intelligent and
motivated people among us, and, though we keep an eye on them and make them
subject to recall and revision, we can cede our trust to them to do a more or
less decent and able job most of the time. We trust them. For the first
time in years, we can say now: the government is in the hands of skillful
people with a sense of the real; we can live our lives in front of our
eyes without worrying that some horror is happening behind our backs. It would
be a mistake, I think, for us all to carry on past the election and into the
New Year with the same level of obsessive attention that this year, and the
years before, have forced on us. Good government gives us back our lives.
Bill Gaston is an analyst with
the New York City government, a former editor at Institutional Investor
Magazine, and a freelance writer on political and economic affairs. Bill
received his BA from George Washington University, and MA from Columbia
University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
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November 12, 2008
A Different Kind of
Shareholder
by
Kim Nagy
NOTE:
I wanted to update a recent blog I wrote about community supported agriculture
due to a reader’s request for more information. Never heard of community
supported agriculture? Don’t worry, neither had I before I started looking for
less expensive ways to get fresh organic food. Since I’m not an ambitious
gardener myself and have limited space, sharing the risks and benefits of food production
with local farmers made a whole lot of sense. And while the subject might not
make headlines, as food prices go up, supporting local farmers and sustainable
agriculture will only grow in importance.
From
May to November, I kind of feel like Christmas comes around once a week. That’s
because I’m a shareholder at Honey Brook Organic Farm (honeybrookorganicfarm.com) in New Jersey, the largest
CSA initiative of its kind in the U.S. It’s not just the delicious food that I
could never afford at Whole Foods, the variety of colorful organic vegetables
that makes me feel like a kid in a candy shop. The cost comparisons are too
dramatic to be ignored.
Take
a look at this chart above =
The
cost of membership comes out to about $20 a week, and let’s just say that I
could spend that in about two minutes in my favorite produce section.
But
money saved aside, it’s also the sense of peace that floods through me (and
isn’t that another kind of currency?) when I finally get to the farm at the end
of every hectic Monday (our pick-up day). In the heat of the summer, it is
still sweaty at 7, but as the sun sets a soft pink against wide open fields, we
pick snap dragons and zinnias, tomatoes and green beans, and I relax in my
focus on one task–picking, picking, picking–with the scent of soil and fresh
herbs all around us. I’ve been taking my daughter here since the first year of
her life, I’ve seen her gorge on fresh picked raspberries, cherry tomatoes,
crunchy green and red peppers and she is now convinced that fresh organic green
beans are among her favorite foods (of course ice cream is up there too).
By
autumn, we head to the farm much earlier and a fresh chill (along with
butternut squash and sunflowers) replaces the mid summer humidity. I watch my
fellow shareholders walk by with their baskets and cloth bags full of produce
(in October, there is broccoli, parsley swiss chard, carrots, lettuce, green
beans, kale and cilantro) but there is not a wallet or credit card in sight.
That’s because we all had to invest in the farm almost a year ago. As with any
investment, it’s true there is risk, say if a crop or a number of crops fail.
But the farm is very well managed and during my four years of membership, I
know I am not alone when I say that I wouldn’t trade my investment in my local
farm for the world. In fact, there is a waiting list every year for new members
hoping to join.
Michael
Pollan wrote an open letter to the U.S. presidential candidates in the New York
Times Magazine a few weeks back www.nytimes.com 10/12/08 magazine in which he warned the then
US presidential candidates (President Elect Barack Obama will now face this
formidable issue along with so many others) that food itself is fast becoming a
national security issue, and that what once looked like one key to
progress–cheap food production–might ultimately be a very bad long term
investment. Pollan connects decades of food production (that shifted from
polyculture to monoculture) to major health problems, climate change, and
over-reliance on fossil fuels. We also need to think about the health
hazards for so many agricultural workers. These are problems that we ignore to
our peril.
“This,
in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited
– designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to
do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused
is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are
creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may
actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people
are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not
only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its
healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the
industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food –
organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this
suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on
the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of
reform.”
That’s
where we come in. Contact your local farm or look up your local CSA. No matter
what your political persuasion, if there seems one lesson in the last few
months, it is that we shortchange future generations when we try to get more
for less. We shortchange ourselves when we live beyond our means and forget that
which ultimately matters most: Food, shelter, friends, family, and community.
There is more than one kind of investment and I’d like to argue, even more
kinds of wealth.
All
I can say is, I know where I am investing again next year.
NOTE: For a guide to local CSA’s. www.localharvest.org
Incorrigible collector of ideas, Kim Nagy serves as
Commissioning Editor for Wild River Review. In between scoping out writing talent,
new articles, interviews and creating new series, she is a poet, professional writer,
and dedicated reader who has interviewed a number of leading thinkers,
including historian James
McPherson, playwright Emily Mann, and
philosopher Alain
de Botton.
She is currently writing a book called The
Triple Goddess Trials, based on her Wild River Review column of the same
name. In it, she explores every stage of women’s lives through the
timeless insights of myth.
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November 10, 2008
by Gene Patrick
I still remember it to this day. I remember an injustice about to be committed in front of my very eyes. And I remember how there was no way in Hell I was going to stand there and let it happen… no matter what the consequences.
A co-worker was bent over a composing board and was working her fingernail underneath a copy block. “We’re going to have to fill this space,” she says as the curled corner of the waxed text began to pull away from the page.
We have to get this edition to press tonight… and the gears in my mind automatically start turning and processing the problem of how we’re going to fill this empty space. “Is there something wrong with the story?”
“Yeah…. These are good kids, friends of my daughter,” she says of the story about members of the high school football team cited with underage drinking at a house party. “We can’t run this.”
“Are you serious?” In my incredulity, I forget that I’m just a minimum wage employee of this small-town weekly newspaper as I challenge a colleague who was much farther up the food chain in this organization than I was.
“You pull that story… I quit.” I take a stand. There is an implied threat that if I walk out the door, that the odds of this finished edition going to press on time have grown slimmer.
The edition went to press intact.
I believed, and I still do, that the job of the press is to just report. It’s not up to a journalist to pick and choose what stories (or what parts of the story) that the people get to see… or how they see it. The responsibility of the media is to lay out the facts… not to protect those they like, and certainly not to engage as a benign propaganda engine for a political point-of-view.
And that’s what I believe is exactly what the media has done with this election cycle. I believe that the members of the mainstream media manipulated public perception in order to benefit one particular presidential candidate. I believe that a specific narrative was developed with a desired outcome.
I completely understand the resistance to the old canard about the “liberal media establishment.” The notion that there is a hidden cabal of left-wingers working for the cause of global socialism is patently silly. But, there is certainly a mindset in the media.
Recently, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of 2,412 stories from mainstream media outlets during the final six weeks of the campaign.
The results: While the candidates are receiving equal amounts of coverage, 59% of stories about McCain were “decidedly negative in nature,” while only 14% were positive.
Obama hasn’t exactly been fawned over by media, but the coverage statistically has been more evenhanded, with 36% of stories clearly positive, 35% neutral or mixed, and 29% negative.
The authors note that the most positive stories on Obama were about politics, rather than policy — stories like polling, the electoral map, and tactics.
And the Washington Post Ombudsman even conceded that coverage was biased toward Barack Obama as well…
“Post reporters, photographers and editors — like most of the national news media — found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic.”
The news is the first draft of history… and there are a lot of members of the press who want to be the first at writing that history. We are all impatient to get working on the next chapter of the Great American Story, and it’s not often that events unfold that are picture-perfect moments in that story.
History is replete with inevitable events and firsts: such as the election of the first African American as the President of the United States… as will be with the first Woman… and the first Asian American… and the first So-On-and-So-Forth. That’s America. We are a melting pot with a rich diversity of the great people that are the citizens of this great nation. And these firsts will continue to happen as the ingredients of this pot continue to simmer together and further evolve the blend of seasonings and flavors that is America.
This is a great story. This story is a dream come true. The great and inspirational dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. has now come that much closer to realization. We want to be on the mountaintop. We want America to redeem herself.
I can’t think of a better Hollywood ending for this story… than for a African-American man to throw off the yoke of the specter of slavery and generations of racism and rise to be the most powerful man in the world. The prospect of a JFK-style sense of new beginning, hope, and promise is a Hell of a lot more interesting to write about than another old white guy being handed the mantle of power.
I’m not saying that the results would have been different if there was even-handed coverage. John McCain ran a lousy campaign… strategy was reactive rather than proactive. He was reduced to reminding the people what they were voting against, rather than definitively giving them something to vote for. The campaign may have used a different playbook if the playing field were a little more level. It just would have been better for the country if there were more of a fairer fight.
What we have today is the journalistic equivalent of a fireman setting fires, just so he can put them out for the sheer adrenaline rush. This is an incredible story and should have written itself… it didn’t need a nudge.
The fact is that no one should get to shape the coverage and tell the stories that they want to, simply because they are the stories they want to tell. That’s what fiction is for. Just don’t hand it to us as news.
Gene Patrick is a writer and an American Dreamer.
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