Reset

                One of the worst things about the American political scene is its fascination with gossip, scandal, and personal cults.  That was true before Trump became president, and he has ramped up the drama to unprecedented levels.  Every day is a new crisis that threatens the norms of democracy, and every news cycle is a frantic hand wringing over what went wrong today.  We can’t even remember what seemed so important three days ago.  Some of this is surely by design, but whether it’s intentional or not, the result is that we never spend any time talking about the real issues, the real political concerns that we are on a collision course with.  We should be preparing ourselves for dramatic changes on the horizon, but instead we’re playing this endless game of Duck Duck Goose with an orange clown.

                We should be preparing for the end of oil and the end of work.  We should be talking about the impact that both of these all but inevitable events are going to do to radically change our lives.  Sweden has announced that it is outlawing fossil fuels in 2020.  The EU is seriously considering banning the use of plastic in packaging.  Meanwhile, we’re trying to figure out who Trump is going to pardon next.  One of the consequences of an utterly incompetent president is that we fall further behind the rest of the world when it comes to preparing for what’s next. 

                It’s not a new thing to contemplate the end of oil.  James Ridgeway was writing about it back in the early 70’s.  What is new is that some forward- thinking nations are actually starting to plan for it.  It not only means that we have to rethink the sources of energy that we use, we also have to rethink how that shift alters economic, political and social structures that have been built around the use of fossil fuel.  Oil is a centralizing technology, and using it to generate heat and power requires a fast infrastructure of extraction and distribution.  When oil goes away, how does the new energy source both allow and require us to rethink and restructure our relationship to that infrastructure.  If we think about the military consequences of oil alone, it is clear that there are new opportunities and new challenges ahead.

                If new energy is more diffuse and more local, if it doesn’t depend on energy grids and distribution networks designed to serve the petro-chemical industry, what can we do that was hard to do before?  If everyone could ‘own’ their own energy, even if they had to buy the means to produce it, what would that mean to our patterns of settlement and trade?  The risk is that we’ll plod along thinking that tomorrow will be mostly like today and miss the chance to get out ahead of that change.  The end of oil is going to be the largest economic and social shift since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, probably even bigger than computers.

                The same thing can be said about work.  No country in the world has ever been more dominated by ‘work’ than we are.  It’s how we judge someone’s worth, their position in society, and it determines what standard of living we expect to have.  It is deeply ingrained in our cultural values of personal morality – it’s what Locke said made it ok to take someone else’s land, if you were ‘working’ it and they weren’t.  We are facing the replacement of human workers with AI, robots and computers.  There simply won’t be enough jobs for the number of people who need them.  Whenever a politician says that their goal is create more jobs, mark them off as a liar and a fool.  It ain’t happening.  What are we going to do? 

                We can’t just continue to hope that the tomorrow will be mostly like today mantra will apply to this issue.  Should we be moving to guaranteed work, as some have suggested.  Should we reprioritize work to put more emphasis on education, childcare and the environment?  It this the mechanism to redistribute wealth in a way that makes democracy sustainable?  These issues are not just cosmetic.  They are deeply structural and game changing.

                The next time you turn on the news and see Trump’s face, forget about the scandal of the day and think for a minute about what we’re not talking about.  Whatever happens to him, we’re still going to have to face and work our way through at least these issues and probably more.  Let’s spend our time thinking about what is possible instead of always focusing on what is so obviously wrong.

Rebuilding

                When I used to argue with people about what postmodernism meant, the most common complaint was that pomo undermined the ‘truth.’  My response was that ‘truth’ was already undermined and that a weak sense of truth was better than an absolute sense of truth anyway.  In other words, the critique of postmodernism has always been more descriptive than prescriptive – it merely showed what was already going on.  Now we’re in the midst of a presidency where truth has taken a sabbatical.  Trump makes up new stuff everyday that is demonstrably untrue, but he uses it to build support among his followers, who mimic everything he and Fox News put out there.  It gives Trump too much credit to say he is cleverly manipulating the system.  The real problem is that the system has been broken for a long time, and Trump is just the logical conclusion.

                The ‘norms’ that Trump is accused of breaking on a daily basis have been crumbling for a long time.  Advertising has more to do with the way most Americans construct the world than reason.  We have made a world that we want to live in and have abdicated responsibility to obtuse institutions.  It is both comical and pathetic to see reporters point out another transgression and then wait for someone to spell out what the consequences for it should be.  There no consequences.  The capitalist fantasy that we’ve constructed has no controls.  We have taken the ‘right’s’ that people in the 18^th century only dreamed of having and turned them into libertarian privileges that prevent us from ever assuming responsibility for our actions and intentions.  The right to speak freely has become the right to be freely stupid and the privilege to revel in our stupidity.

                Maturana says that no act of ‘languaging’ is trivial.  Everything we do and say has consequences and we are responsible for them.  When people talk about ‘rebuilding the institutions of democracy,’ they are forgetting that without rebuilding the people in the democracy the institutions are useless.  We have gutted our educational system and turned what is left of it into a vocational wasteland.  Not even science, that supposed champion of modernity, stands a chance against a population of entitled morons.  If we want a better government, we have to be better people.  We can talk about STEM education all we want, but without an education that produces adults and not just technicians, education is not just futile, it is dangerous.  We are training people to do things without giving them the capacity or even the inclination to ask if they should do them. 

                Just as no one can eat fast food all the time and be healthy, no one can consume the constant diet of media we produce and be responsible.  We market everything to everybody, but we don’t sell a reality that is sustainable and healthy.  Even our most personal and intimate relationships are fragmented and sold off as fetishized illusions of sex and power.  This isn’t a sermon, but if we want to be a great country, we have to be better people.  We have to care about things that define our humanity and our purpose.  I’m not here to sell a version of what those should be.  We have to build them together, or the best thing that could happen to the planet is that we descend quickly and quietly into insignificance. 

                What we’re watching is not just a spectacularly bad presidency.  What we’re watching is the end of what cultural theorists have called modernity, the age of reason and science.  What fuels Trump and the 40% or so of the people who support him is the pleasure that comes from living in your own little fantasy without the guilt of thinking about what it does to others or the planet.  Trump is high on power, and the people around him are getting a contact high off that.  He might be impeached.  He might walk away.  He might not be reelected, although I wouldn’t bet on any of those.  It doesn’t matter.  He has brought us to the end of grand political and social experiment that began in the Enlightenment. 

                When religion failed to be the basis of a world after the end of Kings, we propped up reason and it’s fair haired offspring science as the new bedrock of society.  It had a nice run.  It did some good things.  Of course, it also destroyed the planet and brought us horrific wars, but let’s not quibble.  It’s over.  Who knows what’s next.  What we do know is what the end of modernity looks like:  an orange clown with a ferret for headpiece.

               

About Time

                Ever since I took a course called ‘Physics for Poets,’ I’ve read theoretical physics books and articles.  In a recent article trying to summarize some of Hawking’s work, the concept of time was discussed.  The article restated the claim that nowhere in Super String Theory does the concept of time exist.  It is not one of the 11-14 dimensions that physicists think describe the universe.  I had heard that before, but the next claim really stopped me in my tracks.  The article said time was a function of biology, that it only really exists in that realm.  If so, then ‘life’ as we understand it is primarily about time.

                It may even be fair to say that life is time, that all we mean when we say that something is alive is that it exists in time.  To exist in time means that the process of living is necessarily a transient process.  As long as we experience time, we are eventually going to die.  That may not be palatable to Silicon Valley billionaires and other egomaniacs, but biology is a process of decay.  To be human is to be limited to the dimension of time.  Time creates reflection – it’s what allows us to have a sense of process and movement.  I think time is the root of all consciousness, although the scale of time can be manifested in almost infinite ranges.

                I have written about the quandary of trying to tell what consciousness is.  It is clearly not just a human characteristic.  We have too much evidence of animals and even plants possessing what can only be called ‘conscious’ reactions.  Even brainless earthworms show the capacity to adapt to the density of the soil they are tunneling through.  Everything that experiences time experiences the process of becoming – it is part of an adaptive (what physicists would call a dissipative) system.  These systems are both conscious and overlayered with indeterminate events.  That is, unlike nonliving systems that can be closed and adequately defined by the information collected about them (theoretically it would be possible to everything about one of these systems and render it completely predictable) living systems ‘wobble.’  If you knew everything there is to know about the system up to the moment, it would still be impossible to absolutely predict what comes next.  That doesn’t mean anything can happen, because the system still has properties that define its horizon of the possible, but with those boundaries there is an element of the unknown.

                Consciousness is the expression of that process.  A poem can be written in one form but read and interpreted in multiple forms.  When we have talked about aesthetics in our tradition we have spent too much time on the form and not enough on the process.  I am becoming what I read.  The process of interaction with the world is a becoming – it is still an open question what happens next.  The kind of aesthetics that throws an army of labels out in front of the encounter hoping to normalize and neutralize it, defeats the purpose of the encounter.  As we all have experienced with any painting, poem or song that we love, every reading is a new discovery, some subtle and some radical.

                We can create machines that can learn without this process, but we cannot follow them into that realm.  We shouldn’t want to.  Immortality is the absence of time – which means it is the absence of life.  Embracing time is to understand timelessness.  We exist on this small band of a larger wavelength.  We help tune and direct that band with our actions because they express our consciousness.  Being in the world is being temporary.  Joy is riding on the wave of becoming.

68

                I graduated from high school in 1968.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, watching the specials on MLK and RFK.  Fifty years- ago something changed in America – more accurately, something died.  The 60’s were turbulent, with civil rights, women’s rights and the war.  New music, new movies and a new sensibility was fueling a youth culture that was developing against a backdrop of riots and violence across a broad spectrum of society.  The fact that television had saturated the American culture meant we watched Viet Nam, Selma and the riots in LA, Newark and Detroit from a new vantage point.  There was plenty of racial violence in America before the 60’s, but TV meant we all got to see Bull Conner’s police dogs and fire hoses and the state police over the bridge in Selma.  America had been to war before, but now we watched old Cronkite crouched behind sand bags while a kid from somewhere in the heartland died on the national nightly news.

                In spite of all of the violence and turmoil, it felt like we were moving forward; it felt like we were winning.  There was a sense that America was about to leave its racist and misogynist past and become something new.  There was hope.  Dr. King was hope.  Bobby was hope.  California was hope.  Heading into 68 it felt like all those things were tugging us, reluctantly and slowly to be sure, in the right direction.  When Dr. King talked about bending the moral arch of history, I felt like I could see it on the horizon.  Some of the change was trivial. Wearing bell-bottoms and paisley shirts or growing your hair long (mine was ¾ of the way to my waist) meant nothing in the long run, but it felt like it was marking a new territory.

                In 68 the wheels came off – the empire struck back.  King and Kennedy – gone.  Nixon and Wallace on the rise.  A ‘secret’ plan to end the war.  Draft lotteries and bombing in Cambodia.  Kent State were just down the road.  The political system broke in 68.  It broke in Chicago, and it broke in November when Nixon, probably the most morally ill-equipped man to be president until Trump, rallied the ‘silent majority’ and won the presidency.  George Wallace appealed to the not so subtle racism in America and heralded the beginning of a Southern shift in American politics that catapulted racism and some virulent form of Protestant patriotism to prominence.  Nixon won following Lee Atwater’s ‘southern strategy,’ turning the old southern Democrats into Republicans.

                Somewhere in that mess we lost our hope.  Somewhere in the culture, even youth culture, we went from ‘all you need is love’ to ‘fuck you.’  I think a lot of us smugly thought that the future couldn’t possibly belong to those who so represented all that was wrong in America in the first place.  Surely, we thought, we were going to continue to expand and not contract civil rights.  Surely, we would be more tolerant and more accepting of difference and diversity.  But the powers that emerged out of the carnage of 68 weren’t ready to roll over and disappear.  Helped along by an economy that tilted toward financial wealth and away from manufacturing and union labor, the gains of the 50’s and 60’s were being erased.

                Looking back on 68 from the political circus we live in today, it seems so clear that this was inevitable.  It seems so obvious that the abnormality isn’t what has happened since 68, the abnormality is what happened before.  The struggles of the 60’s are the struggles we still face today.  We have been fragmented and distracted into thinking that we don’t need unions or public schools or even public decency.  We’ve been conned into thinking that someone else would do all the hard stuff for us.  We have allowed ourselves to believe that words written by a slave owning oligarch were intended for the rest of us.

                I think we are at a crossroads of democracy, one that has little to do with Donald J. Trump.  We have been travelling this road for a long time now.  68 may have been the high point of democracy in America, not because things were so great but because the vision was so grand.  We thought victory was inevitable.   It wasn’t.  No democracy can tolerate a distribution of wealth as out of whack as ours is.  No democracy can withstand a police mentality that makes it legal to publicly execute black men.  No democracy can survive the putrid public schools we’ve created.  If we are to finally become a democracy, then we have to face the reality that America has always been an oligarchy, a political system ruled by elites for their benefit.  I think what died in 68 was the dream that the words we have all been raised to revere are as self-evident as Jefferson said they were.  

Erasing Barry

                I was just home from the hospital when my Grandmother changed my name to Barry.  I was given her husband’s middle name, Bernard, as my given name.  She didn’t like her husband much.  She had that kind of power.  I’ve grown up with the name my Grandmother invented for me.  Bernard is something I use on official documents, and I mostly only hear it when I’m in trouble.  No one calls me that.  I ran for office as Barry, and I worked long enough at my last job that they even started making out my checks to Barry. The things I’ve published have been published as Barry.   It’s a good name.  I’ve enjoyed having it.  It’s time to let it go.

                It’s not that I plan on returning to my given name, like some last- ditch attempt to gain respectability.  Bernard is just a legal symbol to me; I don’t identify with it at all.  I want to erase my name because after working my whole life to accomplish something, I realize now – hopefully not too late – that the only way I can learn what’s next is to leave the identity I’ve created behind.  The good and the bad.  I feel like I’m at the cusp of the experience at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism where the pilgrim has to turn away from the world and their accomplishments and wonders as a begging monk in search of Enlightenment.  I’m not going that far.  I guess I’m like the believer who prays all night to move the mountain but isn’t surprised when it’s still there in the morning.  What I identify with is the realization that what we know is more of an obstacle than an asset at some point to learning something new.

                We live in a culture saturated with individual identity.  It’s inconceivable to us that our self is an illusion.  I am not, finally, any of the things that make up my identity.  Only by letting go of that can I create a space for wisdom – which I think is a different kind of learning than the kind I’ve been practicing.  I do not want an identity.  It doesn’t matter any more what kind of impression or perception other people have, and it doesn’t matter what I think of my identity either.  I probably have a lot to apologize for, but I have nothing to defend.  I’m not for or against anything anymore.  The world still matters to me, but I think the only way I can change anything is to let go of the changes I’ve been trying to make.

                I’ve written on this blog that human knowledge is understanding the expanse and the limitations of being human.  I do not want to be immortal.  I have no need to be right.  My sense is that the next thing I have to learn in my life cycle isn’t logical, empirical or discursive.  It isn’t personal.  This will be very hard for me, because I’ve practiced hard to be all those things.  To understand the limits of being human is to open up to the possibility of beyond human.  If were going to survive our intelligence isn’t going to be artificial, it’s going to be cosmic.  I’m working on it.

                I’ll still answer if you call.  I still eat lunch, walk and play pickleball.  I will probably still write.  Maybe only poetry (if that happens I promise to have the good sense not to share it with you).   I doubt you’ll notice a difference – at least at first.  But I’m trying to be still. I’m trying to be empty.   I’m trying to be open and not judge things so fast.  I’m trying not participate in our cultural ADHD.  Maybe there won’t be anything there.  Maybe you just reach the end of the dock and step off into nothing.  But maybe there is something I can learn by erasing my identity and trying a new way.

Losing My Religion 

                There are a lot of things wrong about the way we think about the world.  There are a lot of things that prevent us from evolving a more embodied and grounded way of interacting with one another.  But one of the biggest is religion, at least the kind of religion that we have developed in our culture.  I don’t mean to suggest that spirituality or belief is wrong, just the formation of churches and congregations that are really nothing more than tribal enforcers of purity and exclusion.  Religion has done more to eat away at our politics and civility than anything else.  To top it off, the religions that are most adamant about their superiority are the ones who are least likely to actually follow any of the major concepts they supposedly adhere to.

                I was raised by a Catholic mother in a small town dominated by a Baptist church.  My father’s family belonged to a particularly virulent and illiterate branch of Protestant Christianity.  None of this had anything to do with God, at least as far as I could tell.  It was all about adults arguing about who was right and who was saved.  My Grandmother frequently told me I was going to Hell.  I got to the point where it was hard to take any of it seriously anymore.  The Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, transformed a loose affiliation of ‘christian’ practices that were multiple and diverse into dogma.  When the Reformation came as a political and economic struggle cloaked in theology, 500,000 people were killed in six months – most of them probably killed by neighbors and relatives.

                We live in an age dominated by religious conflict.  We live in a country where politics has been perversely focused on ‘religion.’  Too much of American Protestant and Evangelical thought is a strange mix of capitalism, patriotism and an Old Testament oriented Christianity.  It has little to do with an historically accurate or inclusive approach to the Gospel.   When ‘Godfearing’ Evangelicals can excuse and rationalize Trump, what is left to salvage of this mess?  We argue and militarize differences in theology that seem minute and arcane to the rest of the world.  The rest of the world is busy killing each other over the transmission of the Prophet’s message.  Eight-year old girls are raped and murdered as part of a religious caste conflict.  Can’t we just agree that whatever it was that started us on this path, it’s been an absolute failure?

                Identity politics has followed the same dead- end vision of religion, devolving all too frequently in a trial of who is most pure.  My Grandmother would have said they are all going to Hell.  We live in a world that demands we see a bigger affiliation.  Hate groups and separatists are gaining power precisely because they are united by hate in a way the majority of more tolerant souls are not.  None of us has an identity that is sustainable outside of a coalition of people who support us but are not like us. I don’t have to go to your church, believe the same things or identify the same way you do to be a good person.  We have to find a way to get beyond the barriers of identity, not because the identities aren’t true, but because we need a broader, larger community to honor and protect them.

                I feel that the only way for me to reclaim any sense of the spiritual in the world is to lose my religion.  It’s easy for me at this point to set aside the obvious markers of religion; a church, a country an ethnicity.  But I want to go farther than that.  I want to reclaim a sense of becoming as opposed to a sense of belonging to a category or tribe.  I feel like the only way to reclaim what I have lost in all these conflicts is to try and be part of something bigger.  Being old helps.  I’m not as valuable a team member as I once was.  I wear the cloak of elderly invisibility most days – just another old fart in a donut shop, trying to pay with cash instead of credit.  The moment is filled with distraction and anxiety, but the thing that calls us forward is larger that all of this.  I am part of something that is still asking me to try and understand it on its own terms.  Something that keeps reminding me that there is a lot I don’t know.  Maybe we just need to return to the spirits before religion.  We need to listen to the wind.  We need to reacquaint ourselves with the stars.  

               

Game On

                Fifty years-ago Dr. King was shot.  The next morning, I was in Flint at a speech competition when the State Police came into the basement at St. Matt’s and escorted us out of the city during the riots.  Two months later it was Bobby Kennedy, and a few months after that the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  It felt like everything was falling apart, like the next news flash would send us over the edge.  The civil rights protests and the protests against the war, the opposition to Nixon and the emergence of the movements for women and sexual identity made it feel like we were fighting back and winning.  It felt like we had turned a corner and were never going back, that the George Wallaces were in final retreat. It felt like the battle was over.  But it wasn’t.

                Looking back, it feels like all we did was pick the low hanging fruit and call it a day.  The evil we protested against never really went away.  We never followed through, so now we are at this juncture again, the one where we have to decide how to respond to the part of the American psyche that is permeated with misogyny and racism, with hate and violence, and is once again in power.  It doesn’t seem important to me to ask how it happened.  All that really matters is how we respond.  During Watergate, the Republican party was still a party with respect for America and the Constitution.  It no longer is.  We have to decide which direction we will take as a nation.

                Trump is waking up to the realization that the walls are closing in.  Like any infantile tyrant he will now follow his rage and his worst instincts and advisors.  He will bring in John Bolton.  If we don’t love him, he will attack.  He will continue to sell out the interests of the country to appease Putin.  He is more dangerous now than he has ever been.  He knows he is entering the final phase of a failed presidency, and he has no intention of going quietly.  He will be more erratic and more impulsive as time goes on.

                The Republicans will not help.  A few may be moved by the treasonous way Trump appeases Russia, but everything else he does, they approve of.  They don’t believe in fixing the multiple problems with our elections, because if our elections were really free and fair they would be out of power.  They have manipulated the system so that the minority is in power, and they are using that power to dismantle any part of the government that doesn’t serve their craven interests.  They will not protect the environment.  They will not protect school children.  They will not impeach Trump.

                In 68, the sense of urgency was palpable.  We all knew that the moment demanded something new.  Maybe the kids from Parkland, the womens marches, and the progressive and diverse group of people running for office are signs of a new urgency.  Maybe.  What seems clear to me now looking back on the events of 68 is that it isn’t enough to win the battle.  Throwing Trump out will certainly help, but it won’t get to the root of the problem.  The low hanging fruit isn’t enough.  We have to face who we are.  We have to face how exceptionally destructive and duplicitous we’ve been as a nation.  We have to deal with racism and misogyny and a host of other deeply rooted fears and hatreds that drive our politics.

                I’m reminded of an Ursula Le Guinn story where a wizard is attacked by an evil wizard who has killed off all the other local wizards.  He eventually defeats the evil wizard and sends him to the underworld, but to complete his task he leaves the world of the living to stand guard over his grave to make sure he never returns.  Trump is what happens when the evil wizard is merely left for dead instead of finally defeated.  Each iteration of the Trumpish parts of our national psyche is more and more dangerous and more and more vile.  The forces that brought Trump to power are not going to go quietly.  They will have to be defeated.  It may turn violent – we have a tendency to do that.  This time we have to play for keeps – play to the end.  I hope that fifty years from now one of those beautiful kids from Parkland isn’t sitting by a window thinking about how they missed the chance to do it right.  Game on.