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September 19, 2009
Thinking Otherwise
By William Irwin Thompson
“We Irish think otherwise.” Bishop Berkeley
On Congressman Joe Wilson
Pity the aging White Male! (Disclosure: I am an already aged White Male.) Instead of calling him Joe Six Pack, let us call him Joe Wilson, but you can call him Rush Limbaugh, if you prefer. With his low-brow culture and He-Man tastes for booze, broads, flags (Confederate or U.S.) and guns; he has to watch an argula-loving, Harvard-educated mulatto who bases his ideas on reading and reasoning lecture at him about compassion, human suffering, and health care. If he tries to escape the Monday through Friday grind of work and the daily news about Latina Supreme Court justices, he finds his sanctuary of Saturday sports TV filled with African-American superstars in golf, tennis, football, and, of course, basketball. It is as if the clock turned back and Neanderthal troglodytes confronted the new species of Homo sapiens sapiens–tall, lean, swift, and fresh out of Africa equipped with new technologies, new ideas, and a high culture expressed in art.
We don’t know what caused the extinction of the Neanderthals. It might have been ethnic cleansing by the first Homo sapiens sapiens, for Modern Man certainly proved himself good at that in the millennia to come. We also don’t know what contributed to the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna—those wooly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of La Brea tar pits fame. One theory says it was climate change; another says it was the effect of human group hunting and the use of fires to drive animals into traps of mass slaughter. We do know that one group disappeared and another inherited the Earth.
The White Male will not vanish from history without some act of rage and defiance. He will first become sullen, drink too much, or snort too much Crystal Meth, lose his job, subscribe to gun magazines and survivalist bulletins and listen to hate radio in his pick-up and watch Fox News at home, and then act. But red is the color of sunset as much as it is of blood.
In this Ghost dance of the Rednecks, the rebel will dream of confronting the evil federal government with cheap Chinese AK 47s, and these Ghost dancers will tell stories: stories of fluoride in the water to make you compliant to authority, of black helicopters and invasions by the UN, of how Obama isn’t really American and was born in Kenya, and of how he is planning to set up death squads with Medicare and Medicaid in which pointy-headed MDs and Ph.D.s will order abortions and euthanasia for the poor white trash. (Disclosure: I am white working class and as a poet I live at a poverty-level income. My father was Scots-Irish and Presbyterian, so, Senator Webb, you can consider me Poor White Trash.)
One of the consolations of studying cultural history is not so much the gaining of wisdom as the acquiring of patience. Evolution takes time, lots of time. Before we have peace in Israel and Palestine, or nuclear disarmament, we will need to evolve politically to the point that we can discuss an issue of public policy like health care without all the passions, distortions, and venality we see ourselves drowning in. Since we are utterly incapable of achieving this level of intellectual discourse, it is clear that the U.S.A. is a long way from becoming a civilized society, and that civilization itself is unstable, and only the long view — the very long view of millions and not thousands of years — can give us hope and trust that it is better to try than to quit, to cure than to curse.
Cultural Historian William Irwin Thompson writes regularly for Wild River Review
September 16, 2009
Peace Talks – Global Symposium of Peaceful Nations
by Harriet Mayor Fulbright
(Editor’s Note: This is the sixth in a series of Wednesday talks with Harriet Mayor Fulbright, President and Founder of the J. William and Harriet Fulbright Center.)
 Harriet Mayor Fulbright Photo by Ed Keating
Middle East Peace Council Press Conference
National Press Club
Washington, DC
Throughout history, people and nations on every continent and from every culture have aspired to live in peace. Political, religious, and intellectual leaders of virtually all ideologies and doctrines embrace the concept of peaceful coexistence. Countless books have been written to help build an understanding of the causes of and solutions to violence within and between nations. The United Nations and regional alliances have been formed to facilitate dialogue and negotiation to resolve conflicts peacefully. Recently, thousands of NGOs and Civil Society organizations have been formed to engage private citizens in all aspects of peacebuilding. Yet, for much of the world, peace remains elusive.
From November 1-3, The Alliance for Peacebuilding and the J. William and Harriet Fulbright Center will host a Global Symposium of Peaceful Nations to honor countries that have achieved peace, to demonstrate that peace is not only possible but good for the economy, and to showcase lessons for others to emulate. The symposium will honor the two most peaceful nations in each of nine regions around the world, and it will provide the world community with insight on the process and the policies and systems that enable them to live in peace.
The two most peaceful nations in each of nine regions were identified based on the 2009 edition of the GPI, released June 2, 2009. The nine regions are: Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and Australia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South America, and North and Central America. For a breakdown of the nations in each region, please click here.
By honoring peaceful nations, the symposium will encourage others to strive for similar recognition. Furthermore, the information generated by the symposium will provide guidance to help international organizations, nongovernment peacebuilders, and others more effectively reduce the frequency and severity of violence within and between nations. Finally, the participating nations will be encouraged to embrace a leadership role in their respective regions to help advance the cause of peace.
Questions for Discussion will include:
| 1. |
How did these countries become peaceful? What identifiable factors inspired or motivated the country toward peacefulness? |
| 2. |
How do these nations remain peaceful? How do these countries maintain domestic peace and how do they avoid the use of violence with their neighbors? |
| 3. |
How do these countries assure the security of their people without using force or the threat of force? |
| 4. |
What would these countries recommend to other nations to help them become more peaceful? What leadership role might they embrace to help advance the cause of peace in their regions and worldwide? |
Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas spent his life working to promote peace, first through the Fulbright Scholarships and later in numerous ways. His long life of concentration on this subject generated a number of memorable quotes, and I will leave you with two of them:
“Education is the best means – probably the only means – by which nations can cultivate a degree of objectivity about each other’s behavior and intentions.. . .”
“The making of peace is a continuing process that must go on from day to day, from year to year, so long as our civilization shall last. Our participation in this process is not just the signing of a charter with a big red seal. It is a daily task, a positive participation in all the details and decisions which together constitute a living and growing policy.”
Harriet Mayor Fulbright is president and founder of the J. William and Harriet Fulbright Center, which works to create peace through education exchange programs around the world. This summer the Center launched its first program in Costa Rica and is working with Wild River Review to launch an educational program for girls and young women in Morocco.
For more information on the Global Symposium of Peaceful Nations, click here: http://peacefulnations.org/about.htm
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September 8, 2009
Thinking Otherwise
By William Irwin Thompson
“We Irish think otherwise.” Bishop Berkeley
Labor Day, September 7, 2009: From Mutants to Mutiny
We all have received letters of appeal from deposed Nigerian princes and the sad wives of assassinated generals in Sierra Leone who appeal to our sympathies to send them our bank account numbers so that they may transfer $20,000,000 to our accounts in the U.S.A. and provide us with a twenty percent commission, but today’s cry for help was a little more unusual. I paste it below without further comment.
Dear Dr. Thompson,
Through some ingenious hacking on the part of my colleagues, I have been able to gain entry to the subscription rolls of NATURE, and I came across your name. Your book, At the Edge of History, is well known to us, and that is why I have chosen to write to you for help. I am the FoxP2 mouse you read about in the August 20 issue, but what my jail keepers here in the German Mouse Clinic do not realize is that we have been able to coordinate their gene splicing and insertions to process language and through what they observe as random beatings of our tails, alter their internal WiFi frequencies and send messages out on the Internet to seek help from sympathetic people on the outside.
Through our research with their search engines, we have discovered that what our jail keepers think is their history is a myth, and that myth is the detritus of the true history of Earth—which was your original insight in your 1971 book, At the Edge of History, and is the reason we are emailing you now and asking you to forward this message so that it can go viral and become global to expose our tormentors.
You are familiar, of course, with Freud’s concept of “repetition compulsion” and will understand when I say that our tormentors are acting out on us what was done to them millions of years ago during the process of “the hominization of the primates.” A group of ETs of unknown origin have set up Earth as an evolutionary laboratory to study violence and culture formations. They inserted genes for selfishness and violence in one group of early hominins and empathy and co-operation in another. You can see these two strains clearly at work in your two political parties in American culture at present. Now what we have recently learned is that this group of ETs is preparing a world stress test, but the dates have not yet been decided on. What you know as global warming and climate change is only part of their increase of stress. Others planned include tsunamis, great hurricanes, and tectonic earthquakes. They wish to study if and how civilization will reorganize itself under maximum stress conditions. What they had not anticipated is that their early stress conditions registered in the peripheral sensitivities of artists and crazies. Writers like Arthur C, Clarke and Philip K. Dick were among the first to become aware of the ET experimenters and dramatized their suspicions in their fictions. In the second wave, writers like yourself, Stanislaw Lem, and Italo Calvino began to suspect something was afoot, or amiss.
In your last Blog for this Wild River Review, we notice that you wrote to President Obama. We ask you to write to him again on our behalf, for, judging by his ears, he is one of us and has also had mutant genes inserted.
Yours in the hope of running again along the banks of a Wild River,
Mouse FoxP2
September 2, 2009
Peace Talks – The Fulbright Scholarships
by Harriet Mayor Fulbright
(Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of Wednesday talks with Harriet Mayor Fulbright, President and Founder of the J. William and Harriet Fulbright Center.)
Harriet Mayor Fulbright Photo by Ed Keating Weeks after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Senator J. William Fulbright held hearings in the Senate to gather information on the long-term effects of the blasts and the subsequent radiation. Because he was a professor before he became a politician, accustomed to doing broad and intensive research, those he called upon to testify before him came from a wide variety of relevant fields – biologists, medical experts, environmentalists and even a psychologist. What he heard so horrified him that he spent the next several months talking with friends, relatives and colleagues – anyone who would listen and think about how to help prevent World War III.
Slowly it became clear to him that his experience as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford could show him the way. He had long realized that not only did he learn to write and reason, thanks to his superb tutor, but his view of the world had expanded, and he understood that there were valid ways of interacting with people other than those he had been taught at home.
Bill Fulbright concluded that the experience he was given, multiplied among future potential leaders the world over, might encourage a greater willingness to interact with those of another culture. If outstanding students could be persuaded to study in another country for long enough to confront its culture and appreciate its differences, they might, when they became leaders, prefer the exchange of ideas instead of bullets to settle conflicts.
Once he formulated his plans for an international education program, his struggle was not over. The prevailing outlook among his Senate colleagues was isolationist, and Fulbright knew he had to find funding outside the normal annual appropriations. That proved to be a real headache until the Surplus Military Goods Act began to wend its way through Congress. This bill was designed to allow for the sale of the U.S. military supplies left all over the world at the end of World War II, not for cash which no war-torn country had, but for credit, and it was just what the junior Senator from Arkansas needed. Once it passed through his office, added to the bill’s language was one more sentence: these credits shall only be used for the purposes of international educational exchange.
Two years later small boat loads of college graduates began to make their way across both oceans to spend an academic year in another country, and they returned exhilarated, with a deeper more profound understanding of not only a different part of the world but of their own country. Within a decade and a half, the benefits of the program became so evident that in 1961 Congress passed the Fulbright Hayes Act to allow for annual government appropriations to support the program.
Today the Fulbright Program can boast of over 300,000 alumni from 140 countries and active support from nations on all five major continents. It has not only changed attitudes but created vibrant networks among academics, businesses and professions of all types. No one can prove that it has prevented another world war, but I have been told by several ambassadors who were Fulbright scholars that the knowledge of another country, gained through study abroad, has significantly eased the normal tensions among many governments.
Senator Fulbright developed a vision out of his own experience and translated it into a program that has exerted profound changes in attitudes and our manner of dealing with each other. As he said,
“Creative leadership and liberal education, which in fact go together, are the first requirements for a hopeful future for mankind. Fostering these – leadership, learning, and empathy between cultures – was and remains the purpose of the international scholarship program that I was privileged to sponsor in the U.S. Senate… It is a modest program with an immodest aim – the achievement in international affairs of a regime more civilized, rational and humane than the empty system of power of the past. I believed in that possibility when I began. I still do.”
Harriet Mayor Fulbright is president and founder of the J. William and Harriet Fulbright Center, which works to create peace through education exchange programs around the world. This summer the Center launched its first program in Costa Rica and is working with Wild River Review to launch an educational program for girls and young women in Morocco.
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