Don’t you just love these Wall Streeters, these high-flying hedgers?
When they’re raking in billions in mortgage skullduggery, and a booming housing market makes them look like geniuses, they praise the system to the skies. Capitalism has proved its superiority. The Free Market is the system nature intended. Which is why Americans must never let socialism in any form sneak into our way of life: neither as socialized medicine, nor as handouts to the poor. Free Market medicine must be allowed to work. Though some may suffer from a "correction" here and there, this is the only medicine that ever has, or ever will produce a cure. It must be swallowed.
But then the housing market goes bad. People start to default on payments. "Subprime" loans are suddenly in the toilet, increasingly joined there by everyone, including the banks themselves. No one, not even the big boys, can get credit.
"Help," they cry. "The government must help. The Fed must help." And of course the government does, pouring billions of new currency into the system. And the Fed goes it one better, cutting interest rates despite its recent warnings about the dangers of inflation. And Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief, singing hosannas in the highest:
"The system works,"they crow. Look how we’re rebounding.
Excuse me? The system works? By bailing out the fools who pushed credit on everything with a pulse able to sign its name? By rewarding those who committed the unpardonable crime in capitalism—taking high-stakes, stupid risks? Isn’t capitalism supposed to punish precisely this kind of failure? Isn’t that what the free market is about—correcting by ruthless pruning every venture that does not turn a profit?
Well yes, but that’s when the mistakes are made by the lower classes. By the poor. By the underprivileged. When the gaffes are made by the ruling classes, however, by the brokers and bankers and CEO’s, well that’s a different story. Then the government is obliged to step in and save the system. Save those who run the system. Save those who game the system, but whose gaming is sanctioned because after all, they are the important ones, the prominent ones, the ones who own the ones who make the laws.
It is to laugh. It is to puke. It is to make one want to blow the house down, and the entire population out of its stupor. The system is rigged, folks. And all the rosy talk about free markets and our capitalist way of life—it’s all designed to keep the rubes running on the treadmill for as long as possible, while the money boys rake in the cash and salt it away in anticipation of what they know (because they’re doing all the stealing) must be the inevitable collapse.
Free market? More like a free-for-all. As long as you’re on the inside with your fingers in the till, that is.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Hard-Wired for Empathy
The dominant notion of modern economics, and hence of life itself, is that humans are basically selfish beings, interested only in advancing their own welfare. Even if altruism were to be granted, so this theory goes, it can be reduced to the same selfish dynamic: we help others only if we expect something in return, or to prop up our egos by telling ourselves how generous we are. The metaphor which sums up this attitude is the "Selfish Gene," first proposed by Richard Dawkins. To wit, we are run by our genes, and genes are designed only to reproduce more of themselves than other, competing genes. Advancing ourselves economically, usually at the expense of other competitors, is critical to this genetic race.
What follows from this is the alleged primacy of certain attitudes that benefit us in this race. Most prominent is the ability/need to ignore the welfare or feelings of others who may be affected by our striving for self-advancement. Be it businessmen who run companies or politicians who run governments, the direct effects which include killing or maiming or poisoning large numbers of people as well as the environment itself, all can comfort themselves by knowing that this is as it should be, must be. Everyone is required to look out for number one. To feel for those who may be hurt by one’s drive for dominance is to cripple one’s ability to thrive or even survive.
Since at least the Reagan era, and going back to the social Darwinists, all of this has become so self-evident as to need no proof or argument. It’s just the way it is. Just the way we are. Economics proves that we are economic beings.
Recently, however, studies by animal biologists and the results of brain imaging have begun to demonstrate that this view is partial at best, and, more likely, fundamentally wrong. Scientists are discovering that empathy for others, far from being an aberration, or the product of cultural/religious training, is built in not only to all humans, but probably all primates as well. We are empathetic and thereby altruistic not because we’ve internalized religiously-inculcated fears about everlasting punishment for the selfish, but rather because primates, and possibly many other animals, are hard-wired to have concern for the other. As Daniel Goleman puts it in his recent book, Social Intelligence (Bantam:2006), Our brain has been preset for kindness. Most of us will go to the aid of a screaming child without thinking. Our reactions happen instantly and without premeditation. As Goleman puts it, "That this flow from empathy to action occurs with such rapid automaticity hints at circuitry dedicated to this very sequence." (p. 60)
Franz deWaal is an animal biologist who has written about this propensity for empathy that we share with primates (Frans deWaal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton U Press: 2006) He argues specifically against what has been the dominant view among philosophers—to wit, that there exists between humans and all other animals a break or gap, a gap which is signaled most decisively by the fact that we humans exhibit morality, whereas animals don’t. The point has been made by philosophers and by virtually all religions: humans are special, we are the special creatures of God, and as such, fundamentally different and separate from all other life. DeWaal, contrarily, argues that morality is a trait that has evolved, and like all other evolved traits, it has its origins in other (what we call "lower") forms of life. In this case, morality is an outgrowth of empathy, and empathy has now been observed widely among primates like chimpanzees. DeWaal cites some remarkable studies and observations to prove his point.
For example:
"Wechkin et. al (1964)...found that rhesus monkeys refuse to pull a chain that delivers food to themselves if doing so shocks a companion. One monkey stopped pulling for five days, and another one for twelve days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another." (deWaal, p. 29.)
To be sure, as deWaal points out, the inhibition about hurting another monkey was greater among individuals who were familiar with each other. But the inhibition pertained even among unfamiliar individuals. Anyone who has read the famous Milgram experiments done at Yale in 1960-62 (students as "teachers" instructed to shock "learners" were quite willing to do so if they were authorized to shock their peers as part of a "learning experiment". See http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm), has to wonder if rhesus monkeys are not, in fact, more moral than humans.
DeWaal cites another observation that makes his point even more strongly. A female bonobo (a primate related to chimpanzees) was observed at an English zoo empathizing not with her own kind, but with a bird.
"One day, Kuni captured a starling. Out of fear that she might molest the stunned bird, which appeared undamaged, the keeper urged the ape to let it go...Kuni picked up the starling with one hand and climbed to the highest point of the highest tree where she wrapped her legs around the trunk so that she had both hands free to hold the bird. She then carefully unfolded its wings and spread them wide open, one wing in each hand, before throwing the bird as hard as she could towards the barrier of the enclosure. Unfortunately, it fell short and landed onto the bank of the moat where Kuni guarded it for a long time against a curious juvenile." (deWaal, p. 30)
DeWaal comments that what Kuni did was not only to empathize with another species, but conformed remarkably to what economist Adam Smith called "changing places with the sufferer." This is empathy, pure and simple. And in this case, it moves immediately to action—the attempt to help the bird fly, and then to guard it against harm.
DeWaal then cites one of Jane Goodall’s observations to the same effect:
"In some zoos, chimpanzees are kept on man-made islands surrounded by water-filled moats...Chimpanzees cannot swim and, unless they are rescued, will drown if they fall into deep water. Despite this, individuals have sometimes made heroic efforts to save companions from drowning--and were sometimes successful. One adult male lost his life as he tried to rescue a small infant whose incompetent mother had allowed it to fall into the water." (deWaal, p. 33)
DeWaal then goes on to cite a theory to account for this empathic behavior:
"...the core of the empathic capacity is a relatively simple mechanism that provides an observer (the "subject") with access to the emotional state of another (the "object") through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations." (deWaal, p. 37)
That is to say, when one animal sees another in distress, the neural and bodily representations of the first are automatically activated to match those of the second, i.e. the one in distress. The motor and autonomic systems (changes in heart rate, skin conductance, facial expression, body posture) of the two animals come into sync. As deWaal puts it:
"This activation allows the subject to get "under the skin" of the object, sharing its feelings and needs, which embodiment in turn fosters sympathy, compassion, and helping." (deWaal, p. 37)
Sympathy, compassion, and helping: are not these the essence of what we consider human, what we consider morality? This is precisely the case that deWaal makes. There exists in primates a simple "Perception-Action Mechanism which results in immediate, often unconscious state matching between individuals." According to deWaal, all higher levels of empathy (understanding the reasons for the other’s emotions; adopting the other’s perspective) build on this "hardwired basis."
It is precisely this "hardwired basis" for empathy that has been increasingly observed and isolated in the primate brain. Here we return to Goleman’s summary of recent research. In a chapter called "Neural Wi-Fi," Goleman relates the story of how brain researchers discovered, quite by accident, the phenomenon known as "mirror neurons." Neuroscientists were "mapping sensorimotor areas of monkeys’ brains by using electrodes so laser-thin they could be implanted in single brain cells, and seeing which cell lit up during a specific movement." This was remarkable enough. But, as Goleman tells it, the surprise came
"when a research assistant came back from a break eating an ice-cream cone. The scientists were astonished to see a sensorimotor cell activate as one monkey watched the assistant lift the cone to his lips. They were dumbfounded to find that a distinct set of neurons seemed to activate when the monkey merely observed another monkey--or one of the experimenters--making a given movement." (Goleman, p. 41)
These same "mirror neurons" were subsequently found in the human brain. In a 1999 study by W.D. Hutchinson and his colleagues, an electrode monitoring "a single neuron in an awake person" was observed to fire not just when "the person anticipated pain—a pinprick—but also when merely seeing someone else receive a pinprick." Goleman calls this a neural snapshot of primal empathy in action. And indeed it is. Because what these experiments are demonstrating is that human brains are hardwired to feel empathy for others even before our celebrated cerebral cortex—our thinking brain—is able to decide it would be a "moral" thing to do. As Giacomo Rizzolati, the Italian neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons has recently put it: these systems "allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not by thinking." (Giacomo Rizzolatti, in Sandra Blakeslee, "Cells that Read Minds," NY Times, 1/10/06; cited in Goleman, p. 43)
This attunement of humans, brain to brain, constitutes a literally mind-bending confirmation of the human (and primate) propensity to empathize, to resonate with the emotional or physical condition of an other. Much of the primal activity seems to take place in the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with emotions and feelings like anger and fear. If a research subject is shown a photograph of a human face expressing fear, the amygdala instantly reacts to mimic the same fear. Goleman refers to this (especially in its usual face-to-face occurrence) as "contagion" between brains:
"Moments of contagion represent a remarkable neural event: the formation between two brains of a functional link, a feedback loop that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies." (Goleman, p. 39)
This can also be described as resonance, the "sympathetic vibration" of two brains matching each other "outside our awareness." The fact that it requires no attention or intention is a testament to the sheer speed of this brain matching:
"…the amygdala spots signs of fear in someone’s face with remarkable speed, picking it up in a glimpse as quick as 33 milliseconds, and in some people even in a mere 17 milliseconds (less than 2/100ths of a second.) This quick read attests to the hyperspeed of the low road, so fast that the conscious mind remains oblivious to that perception..."(Goleman, p. 40).
Thus the examples cited at the outset: when we see someone in distress, the hardwired parts of our brain resonate to match that distress, and we are moved to empathy, compassion, and helpful action. As Goleman concludes, though the Media constantly bombard us with examples of selfishness, indifference to suffering, and cruelty, the actual ratio of benevolence to meanness on any given day is overwhelmingly positive.
The impact of these studies seems to me profound. It is not "natural," as we are constantly told, to be selfish, rapacious humans necessarily indifferent to the suffering caused by our drive to "have it all now." Even rhesus monkeys will refuse to accept rewards if it means causing pain to another monkey. Nor is it natural or even tolerable to the average human being to don a military outfit and execute orders to kill, maim, torture or vaporize other human beings. Doing so requires the cerebral cortex to override, blunt, and even disable the natural human tendency to empathize with another’s pain. It requires some leader or group of leaders to assure his soldiers that the other is evil, and therefore undeserving of our empathy or consideration.
From a more positive angle, brain studies cited by the Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard in his book Happiness (Little Brown: 2003), indicate that, in fact, empathy, compassion, and altruism are the source of brain activity of a type that Ricard associates with "happiness." He cites Richard Davidson’s report that,
"During meditation on compassion, most experienced meditators showed a dramatic increase in the high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves, "of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature." (Ricard, p. 191)
These gamma waves are focused in a part of the brain called the left middle frontal gyrus. Here is what Ricard, himself a former cell biologist, writes about this activity:
"Davidson’s research had already shown that this part of the brain is a focal point of positive emotions and that fluctuations in its balance are generally modest. But the data drawn from the experiments with meditators were striking. As they began meditating on compassion, an extraordinary increase of left prefrontal activity was registered. Compassion, the very act of feeling concern for other people’s well-being, appears to be one of the positive emotions, like joy and enthusiasm." (Ricard, p. 194)
What Ricard adds to the above discussion of empathy, then, is that not only are humans hardwired for empathy, but that empathy and compassion for others—which lead directly to helping others, or altruism—form the true basis for human happiness. Happiness to Ricard does not mean pleasure, usually for ourselves. For though we can gain some short-term pleasure at the expense of others, we cannot gain lasting happiness thereby. Real happiness, according to Ricard’s study of it, is literally equivalent to altruism. Which is to say, by acting on our brain’s hardwired structure to exhibit concern for the wellbeing of others, we remain true to our real, our evolved human nature. As Ricard summarizes it:
"Living in harmony with that nature sustains the joy of life, while rejecting it leads to chronic dissatisfaction." (Ricard, p. 204)
Lawrence DiStasi
(NB: my interest in empathy was sparked by Gary Olson’s splendid article, "Hard-Wired for Moral Politics: Neuroscience and Empathy," Znet, May 20, 2007. I recommend it highly for a more wide-ranging discussion of the issues sketched here. See it at www.znet.org.)
What follows from this is the alleged primacy of certain attitudes that benefit us in this race. Most prominent is the ability/need to ignore the welfare or feelings of others who may be affected by our striving for self-advancement. Be it businessmen who run companies or politicians who run governments, the direct effects which include killing or maiming or poisoning large numbers of people as well as the environment itself, all can comfort themselves by knowing that this is as it should be, must be. Everyone is required to look out for number one. To feel for those who may be hurt by one’s drive for dominance is to cripple one’s ability to thrive or even survive.
Since at least the Reagan era, and going back to the social Darwinists, all of this has become so self-evident as to need no proof or argument. It’s just the way it is. Just the way we are. Economics proves that we are economic beings.
Recently, however, studies by animal biologists and the results of brain imaging have begun to demonstrate that this view is partial at best, and, more likely, fundamentally wrong. Scientists are discovering that empathy for others, far from being an aberration, or the product of cultural/religious training, is built in not only to all humans, but probably all primates as well. We are empathetic and thereby altruistic not because we’ve internalized religiously-inculcated fears about everlasting punishment for the selfish, but rather because primates, and possibly many other animals, are hard-wired to have concern for the other. As Daniel Goleman puts it in his recent book, Social Intelligence (Bantam:2006), Our brain has been preset for kindness. Most of us will go to the aid of a screaming child without thinking. Our reactions happen instantly and without premeditation. As Goleman puts it, "That this flow from empathy to action occurs with such rapid automaticity hints at circuitry dedicated to this very sequence." (p. 60)
Franz deWaal is an animal biologist who has written about this propensity for empathy that we share with primates (Frans deWaal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton U Press: 2006) He argues specifically against what has been the dominant view among philosophers—to wit, that there exists between humans and all other animals a break or gap, a gap which is signaled most decisively by the fact that we humans exhibit morality, whereas animals don’t. The point has been made by philosophers and by virtually all religions: humans are special, we are the special creatures of God, and as such, fundamentally different and separate from all other life. DeWaal, contrarily, argues that morality is a trait that has evolved, and like all other evolved traits, it has its origins in other (what we call "lower") forms of life. In this case, morality is an outgrowth of empathy, and empathy has now been observed widely among primates like chimpanzees. DeWaal cites some remarkable studies and observations to prove his point.
For example:
"Wechkin et. al (1964)...found that rhesus monkeys refuse to pull a chain that delivers food to themselves if doing so shocks a companion. One monkey stopped pulling for five days, and another one for twelve days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another." (deWaal, p. 29.)
To be sure, as deWaal points out, the inhibition about hurting another monkey was greater among individuals who were familiar with each other. But the inhibition pertained even among unfamiliar individuals. Anyone who has read the famous Milgram experiments done at Yale in 1960-62 (students as "teachers" instructed to shock "learners" were quite willing to do so if they were authorized to shock their peers as part of a "learning experiment". See http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm), has to wonder if rhesus monkeys are not, in fact, more moral than humans.
DeWaal cites another observation that makes his point even more strongly. A female bonobo (a primate related to chimpanzees) was observed at an English zoo empathizing not with her own kind, but with a bird.
"One day, Kuni captured a starling. Out of fear that she might molest the stunned bird, which appeared undamaged, the keeper urged the ape to let it go...Kuni picked up the starling with one hand and climbed to the highest point of the highest tree where she wrapped her legs around the trunk so that she had both hands free to hold the bird. She then carefully unfolded its wings and spread them wide open, one wing in each hand, before throwing the bird as hard as she could towards the barrier of the enclosure. Unfortunately, it fell short and landed onto the bank of the moat where Kuni guarded it for a long time against a curious juvenile." (deWaal, p. 30)
DeWaal comments that what Kuni did was not only to empathize with another species, but conformed remarkably to what economist Adam Smith called "changing places with the sufferer." This is empathy, pure and simple. And in this case, it moves immediately to action—the attempt to help the bird fly, and then to guard it against harm.
DeWaal then cites one of Jane Goodall’s observations to the same effect:
"In some zoos, chimpanzees are kept on man-made islands surrounded by water-filled moats...Chimpanzees cannot swim and, unless they are rescued, will drown if they fall into deep water. Despite this, individuals have sometimes made heroic efforts to save companions from drowning--and were sometimes successful. One adult male lost his life as he tried to rescue a small infant whose incompetent mother had allowed it to fall into the water." (deWaal, p. 33)
DeWaal then goes on to cite a theory to account for this empathic behavior:
"...the core of the empathic capacity is a relatively simple mechanism that provides an observer (the "subject") with access to the emotional state of another (the "object") through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations." (deWaal, p. 37)
That is to say, when one animal sees another in distress, the neural and bodily representations of the first are automatically activated to match those of the second, i.e. the one in distress. The motor and autonomic systems (changes in heart rate, skin conductance, facial expression, body posture) of the two animals come into sync. As deWaal puts it:
"This activation allows the subject to get "under the skin" of the object, sharing its feelings and needs, which embodiment in turn fosters sympathy, compassion, and helping." (deWaal, p. 37)
Sympathy, compassion, and helping: are not these the essence of what we consider human, what we consider morality? This is precisely the case that deWaal makes. There exists in primates a simple "Perception-Action Mechanism which results in immediate, often unconscious state matching between individuals." According to deWaal, all higher levels of empathy (understanding the reasons for the other’s emotions; adopting the other’s perspective) build on this "hardwired basis."
It is precisely this "hardwired basis" for empathy that has been increasingly observed and isolated in the primate brain. Here we return to Goleman’s summary of recent research. In a chapter called "Neural Wi-Fi," Goleman relates the story of how brain researchers discovered, quite by accident, the phenomenon known as "mirror neurons." Neuroscientists were "mapping sensorimotor areas of monkeys’ brains by using electrodes so laser-thin they could be implanted in single brain cells, and seeing which cell lit up during a specific movement." This was remarkable enough. But, as Goleman tells it, the surprise came
"when a research assistant came back from a break eating an ice-cream cone. The scientists were astonished to see a sensorimotor cell activate as one monkey watched the assistant lift the cone to his lips. They were dumbfounded to find that a distinct set of neurons seemed to activate when the monkey merely observed another monkey--or one of the experimenters--making a given movement." (Goleman, p. 41)
These same "mirror neurons" were subsequently found in the human brain. In a 1999 study by W.D. Hutchinson and his colleagues, an electrode monitoring "a single neuron in an awake person" was observed to fire not just when "the person anticipated pain—a pinprick—but also when merely seeing someone else receive a pinprick." Goleman calls this a neural snapshot of primal empathy in action. And indeed it is. Because what these experiments are demonstrating is that human brains are hardwired to feel empathy for others even before our celebrated cerebral cortex—our thinking brain—is able to decide it would be a "moral" thing to do. As Giacomo Rizzolati, the Italian neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons has recently put it: these systems "allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not by thinking." (Giacomo Rizzolatti, in Sandra Blakeslee, "Cells that Read Minds," NY Times, 1/10/06; cited in Goleman, p. 43)
This attunement of humans, brain to brain, constitutes a literally mind-bending confirmation of the human (and primate) propensity to empathize, to resonate with the emotional or physical condition of an other. Much of the primal activity seems to take place in the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with emotions and feelings like anger and fear. If a research subject is shown a photograph of a human face expressing fear, the amygdala instantly reacts to mimic the same fear. Goleman refers to this (especially in its usual face-to-face occurrence) as "contagion" between brains:
"Moments of contagion represent a remarkable neural event: the formation between two brains of a functional link, a feedback loop that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies." (Goleman, p. 39)
This can also be described as resonance, the "sympathetic vibration" of two brains matching each other "outside our awareness." The fact that it requires no attention or intention is a testament to the sheer speed of this brain matching:
"…the amygdala spots signs of fear in someone’s face with remarkable speed, picking it up in a glimpse as quick as 33 milliseconds, and in some people even in a mere 17 milliseconds (less than 2/100ths of a second.) This quick read attests to the hyperspeed of the low road, so fast that the conscious mind remains oblivious to that perception..."(Goleman, p. 40).
Thus the examples cited at the outset: when we see someone in distress, the hardwired parts of our brain resonate to match that distress, and we are moved to empathy, compassion, and helpful action. As Goleman concludes, though the Media constantly bombard us with examples of selfishness, indifference to suffering, and cruelty, the actual ratio of benevolence to meanness on any given day is overwhelmingly positive.
The impact of these studies seems to me profound. It is not "natural," as we are constantly told, to be selfish, rapacious humans necessarily indifferent to the suffering caused by our drive to "have it all now." Even rhesus monkeys will refuse to accept rewards if it means causing pain to another monkey. Nor is it natural or even tolerable to the average human being to don a military outfit and execute orders to kill, maim, torture or vaporize other human beings. Doing so requires the cerebral cortex to override, blunt, and even disable the natural human tendency to empathize with another’s pain. It requires some leader or group of leaders to assure his soldiers that the other is evil, and therefore undeserving of our empathy or consideration.
From a more positive angle, brain studies cited by the Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard in his book Happiness (Little Brown: 2003), indicate that, in fact, empathy, compassion, and altruism are the source of brain activity of a type that Ricard associates with "happiness." He cites Richard Davidson’s report that,
"During meditation on compassion, most experienced meditators showed a dramatic increase in the high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves, "of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature." (Ricard, p. 191)
These gamma waves are focused in a part of the brain called the left middle frontal gyrus. Here is what Ricard, himself a former cell biologist, writes about this activity:
"Davidson’s research had already shown that this part of the brain is a focal point of positive emotions and that fluctuations in its balance are generally modest. But the data drawn from the experiments with meditators were striking. As they began meditating on compassion, an extraordinary increase of left prefrontal activity was registered. Compassion, the very act of feeling concern for other people’s well-being, appears to be one of the positive emotions, like joy and enthusiasm." (Ricard, p. 194)
What Ricard adds to the above discussion of empathy, then, is that not only are humans hardwired for empathy, but that empathy and compassion for others—which lead directly to helping others, or altruism—form the true basis for human happiness. Happiness to Ricard does not mean pleasure, usually for ourselves. For though we can gain some short-term pleasure at the expense of others, we cannot gain lasting happiness thereby. Real happiness, according to Ricard’s study of it, is literally equivalent to altruism. Which is to say, by acting on our brain’s hardwired structure to exhibit concern for the wellbeing of others, we remain true to our real, our evolved human nature. As Ricard summarizes it:
"Living in harmony with that nature sustains the joy of life, while rejecting it leads to chronic dissatisfaction." (Ricard, p. 204)
Lawrence DiStasi
(NB: my interest in empathy was sparked by Gary Olson’s splendid article, "Hard-Wired for Moral Politics: Neuroscience and Empathy," Znet, May 20, 2007. I recommend it highly for a more wide-ranging discussion of the issues sketched here. See it at www.znet.org.)
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Remember Mossadegh
One of the problems with Americans (and a boon to American governments intent on international mayhem) has always been our people’s total lack of historical memory. Thus, in the current climate of blaming everything going wrong in the Middle East on the "interference" of Iran; or the equally phony accusations that Iran is enriching uranium to build nuclear weapons; or the fallback accusation—that leaving Iraq now would pave the way for Iran to "take over" the southern half of Iraq; in this climate, Americans who remember anything remember only the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. They remember the humiliation that Iran imposed on the United States, its citizens paraded helpless before the world, its government helpless to rescue them. It is that memory that predisposes Americans to simply nod in agreement when any wild accusation is trotted out, for who could doubt that a nation controlled by fanatic "mullahs" would commit nefarious acts?
History, however, tells a different story. Iranian history, as recounted by Stephen Kinzer in his recent book Overthrow, points out that Iran in 1951 was a nation led by a democratically-elected and western-educated leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, who, as a fervent nationalist, aimed to bring his nation into the modern world. He would do this in the most open way—by nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, which had been controlled for years by British Petroleum. Accordingly, in Spring 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize its oil industry, even agreeing to compensate the British for the money they had spent constructing the oil infrastructure. But though the British had nationalized their own coal and steel industries, they considered a similar movement by a client state to be beyond the pale. It was a "breach of contractual obligations" which the former empire would do all in its power to prevent.
The first thing done, of course, was to assassinate the character of Mossadegh as "wild," "fanatical," and "gangster-like." The second was to enlist the aid of their American friends, now led by a new President, Dwight Eisenhower, with a new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. As Kinzer points out (p. 215), Dulles had a very firm view of the world and how it should be: "For us, there are two sorts of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others." Clearly, Mossadegh and Iran were "others." Kinzer provides chapter and verse of how Dulles and the CIA (headed by his brother, Allen) set about reversing the course set for Iran by Mossadegh. It was one of the most vicious, blatant and ultimately far-reaching examples of American imperial control of foreign nations on record, including the "blowback" effects we are still living with.
What the CIA under Kermit Roosevelt did was to set out to undermine and sabotage a legitimately-elected government, using every means at its disposal. First, they had to come up with a better reason to overthrow Mossadegh than nationalizing his own oil; they found it easily—he was "leading Iran toward Communism." For the US to overthrow him, therefore, was to stop the spread of Communism. Then the CIA set about the process of undermining Mossadegh’s government. As Kinzer puts it,
"Under their plan, the Americans would spend $150,000 to bribe journalists, editors, Islamic preachers, and other opinion leaders to ‘create, extend and enhance public hostility and distrust and fear of Mossadegh and his government.’ Then they would hire thugs to carry out ‘staged attacks’ on religious figures and other respected Iranians, making it seem that Mossadegh had ordered them…The plan budgeted another $11,000 per week, a great sum at that time, to bribe members of the Iranian parliament. On ‘coup day’ thousands of paid demonstrators would converge on parliament to demand that it dismiss Mossadegh….If Mossadegh resisted, military units loyal to General Zahedi (also in the pay of the CIA) would arrest him." (p. 123)
Of course, not all went exactly according to plan. Mossadegh discovered the plan and the bribes in parliament. He called a national referendum on a plan to dissolve parliament, and won. But the CIA and Kermit Roosevelt persisted. First they got the Shah of Iran to issue a decree dismissing Mossadegh, appointing General Zahedi as the new prime minister. But this plan, too, aborted when Mossadegh learned of the coup plot. When the shah heard this, he fled to Rome. Still, Kermit Roosevelt persisted in one last attempt. He muscled his Iranian agents into activating their plan to create chaos in Tehran. Gangs of paid thugs ran through the streets breaking windows, firing guns, beating strangers and shouting "Long live Mossadegh and Communism!" (p. 127.) Other thugs attacked the first ones, creating the image of civil war. Mossadegh refused to engage in street violence and sent his police simply to maintain order. Since many of his police were also in the pay of the CIA, the violence continued, and on August 19, Roosevelt sent thousands of demonstrators on a rampage, seizing Radio Tehran and setting fires. Bribed units of the army and police joined the mayhem, attacking government offices. Then, under Roosevelt’s guidance, General Zahedi drove to Radio Tehran and announced himself as the lawful prime minister under orders from the shah.
All that remained was to arrest Mohammad Mossadegh. Army tanks fired upon his house, his defenders fled, and he was arrested. Gen. Zahedi became prime minister, and the shah, still cowering in Rome, was persuaded to return and reclaim his peacock throne. The shah then tried Mossadegh for treason, imprisoned him for three years, and condemned him to permanent house arrest. He died in 1967 at the age of 85. The shah, meantime, became a staunch U.S. ally, protected for 30 years by a vicious, Mossad-trained secret police agency known as Savak.
All this was not without consequences. As Kinzer points out, "the role of the United States in overthrowing Mossadegh and its long, uncritical embrace of the shah" led not just to unprecedented anti-Americanism in the Middle East, but eventually to the Iranian revolution, the rule of the ayatollahs, and most of our current problems. One of Kinzer’s sources (Mostafa Zahrani, World Policy Journal, Summer 2002) puts it succinctly:
"…when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the US embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran..."
The chain of consequences can be continued almost indefinitely, especially in Iraq—where the U.S., to counter Iran, supported Saddam Hussein—and in Afghanistan, where the U.S., to entrap the Soviets in "their Vietnam," supported the mujahedeen fighters and one of their rising leaders, Osama bin Laden.
Now, when we hear United States policy makers on all sides insisting that Iran is the chief villain in the Middle East, perhaps we can see our own reflection. Perhaps we can even remind ourselves that if democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh had been allowed to maintain the legitimate changes he had instituted more than 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be watching the same, and now more calamitous scenario, play out yet again.
Lawrence DiStasi
History, however, tells a different story. Iranian history, as recounted by Stephen Kinzer in his recent book Overthrow, points out that Iran in 1951 was a nation led by a democratically-elected and western-educated leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, who, as a fervent nationalist, aimed to bring his nation into the modern world. He would do this in the most open way—by nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, which had been controlled for years by British Petroleum. Accordingly, in Spring 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize its oil industry, even agreeing to compensate the British for the money they had spent constructing the oil infrastructure. But though the British had nationalized their own coal and steel industries, they considered a similar movement by a client state to be beyond the pale. It was a "breach of contractual obligations" which the former empire would do all in its power to prevent.
The first thing done, of course, was to assassinate the character of Mossadegh as "wild," "fanatical," and "gangster-like." The second was to enlist the aid of their American friends, now led by a new President, Dwight Eisenhower, with a new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. As Kinzer points out (p. 215), Dulles had a very firm view of the world and how it should be: "For us, there are two sorts of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others." Clearly, Mossadegh and Iran were "others." Kinzer provides chapter and verse of how Dulles and the CIA (headed by his brother, Allen) set about reversing the course set for Iran by Mossadegh. It was one of the most vicious, blatant and ultimately far-reaching examples of American imperial control of foreign nations on record, including the "blowback" effects we are still living with.
What the CIA under Kermit Roosevelt did was to set out to undermine and sabotage a legitimately-elected government, using every means at its disposal. First, they had to come up with a better reason to overthrow Mossadegh than nationalizing his own oil; they found it easily—he was "leading Iran toward Communism." For the US to overthrow him, therefore, was to stop the spread of Communism. Then the CIA set about the process of undermining Mossadegh’s government. As Kinzer puts it,
"Under their plan, the Americans would spend $150,000 to bribe journalists, editors, Islamic preachers, and other opinion leaders to ‘create, extend and enhance public hostility and distrust and fear of Mossadegh and his government.’ Then they would hire thugs to carry out ‘staged attacks’ on religious figures and other respected Iranians, making it seem that Mossadegh had ordered them…The plan budgeted another $11,000 per week, a great sum at that time, to bribe members of the Iranian parliament. On ‘coup day’ thousands of paid demonstrators would converge on parliament to demand that it dismiss Mossadegh….If Mossadegh resisted, military units loyal to General Zahedi (also in the pay of the CIA) would arrest him." (p. 123)
Of course, not all went exactly according to plan. Mossadegh discovered the plan and the bribes in parliament. He called a national referendum on a plan to dissolve parliament, and won. But the CIA and Kermit Roosevelt persisted. First they got the Shah of Iran to issue a decree dismissing Mossadegh, appointing General Zahedi as the new prime minister. But this plan, too, aborted when Mossadegh learned of the coup plot. When the shah heard this, he fled to Rome. Still, Kermit Roosevelt persisted in one last attempt. He muscled his Iranian agents into activating their plan to create chaos in Tehran. Gangs of paid thugs ran through the streets breaking windows, firing guns, beating strangers and shouting "Long live Mossadegh and Communism!" (p. 127.) Other thugs attacked the first ones, creating the image of civil war. Mossadegh refused to engage in street violence and sent his police simply to maintain order. Since many of his police were also in the pay of the CIA, the violence continued, and on August 19, Roosevelt sent thousands of demonstrators on a rampage, seizing Radio Tehran and setting fires. Bribed units of the army and police joined the mayhem, attacking government offices. Then, under Roosevelt’s guidance, General Zahedi drove to Radio Tehran and announced himself as the lawful prime minister under orders from the shah.
All that remained was to arrest Mohammad Mossadegh. Army tanks fired upon his house, his defenders fled, and he was arrested. Gen. Zahedi became prime minister, and the shah, still cowering in Rome, was persuaded to return and reclaim his peacock throne. The shah then tried Mossadegh for treason, imprisoned him for three years, and condemned him to permanent house arrest. He died in 1967 at the age of 85. The shah, meantime, became a staunch U.S. ally, protected for 30 years by a vicious, Mossad-trained secret police agency known as Savak.
All this was not without consequences. As Kinzer points out, "the role of the United States in overthrowing Mossadegh and its long, uncritical embrace of the shah" led not just to unprecedented anti-Americanism in the Middle East, but eventually to the Iranian revolution, the rule of the ayatollahs, and most of our current problems. One of Kinzer’s sources (Mostafa Zahrani, World Policy Journal, Summer 2002) puts it succinctly:
"…when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the US embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran..."
The chain of consequences can be continued almost indefinitely, especially in Iraq—where the U.S., to counter Iran, supported Saddam Hussein—and in Afghanistan, where the U.S., to entrap the Soviets in "their Vietnam," supported the mujahedeen fighters and one of their rising leaders, Osama bin Laden.
Now, when we hear United States policy makers on all sides insisting that Iran is the chief villain in the Middle East, perhaps we can see our own reflection. Perhaps we can even remind ourselves that if democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh had been allowed to maintain the legitimate changes he had instituted more than 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be watching the same, and now more calamitous scenario, play out yet again.
Lawrence DiStasi
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Hypocrisy in Palestine
I simply have to record my revulsion over the latest developments in Palestine. In the face of the Hamas victory over Fatah thugs supported and instigated by the United States to start a civil war, the hypocrites on every level cheer the latest moves of the U.S. and its allies—to support Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah cohorts as the "legitimate" government of the West Bank. Finally, everyone chortles, we have a legal and moderate government we can deal with. And Israel rushes to agree, and promptly frees up the tax moneys they have been illegally withholding from the Hamas government, and rains them on Fatah to dispense upon workers who have been deprived of salaries for months. And the U.S. promises billions in aid. And the European Union agrees to lift the boycott that it has maintained since the Hamas victory in 2006. And Egypt vows to close off its border with the evil Gazans. And Saudi Arabia chirps in its agreement.
And we are all expected to cheer. Hurray for the West Bank. Hurray for Fatah. Hurray for Mahmoud Abbas, the legitimate ruler. Let Hamas and those stinking Gazans rot in their miserable strip of land.
And we are of course expected to ignore the truth: that the truly legitimate government of Palestine is Hamas, elected in free and fair elections 18 months ago. The legitimate recipient of the moneys now being showered on Fatah is Hamas, the elected government of the Palestinians. And the corollary: that the only real beneficiary of the civil war promoted by the United States, and the lifting of sanctions to permanize the split between the two artificially divided segments of the Palestinian people, is Israel. Because now, it can pretend to make peace with Fatah and the West Bank, which of course must be grateful for this magnanimous dispensation of Israeli funds and approval and willingness to talk, and therefore be inclined—so the Israelis and their henchmen in the Bush Administration seem to think—to make peace on Israel’s terms. Thus permanizing the illegal settlements that make the West Bank a joke. For remember, the Israelis withdrew from their settlements in Gaza, but the West Bank is still a series of bantustans separated from Israel by the apartheid wall, which also rings dozens and dozens of illegal settlements which will be there indefinitly. And Mahmoud Abbas, that quisling, that traitor, along with the quisling Arab governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, will be inclined, so the hope no doubt goes, to agree. So that they—the "moderate" leaders—can at long last claim victory and go back to repressing their own peoples.
And all anyone with the slightest understanding of history and the vaguest notions of fairness can do is work and hope and vow that this shall never come to pass. For if it does, then what will have been ratified, what will have been sanctified is the greatest theft of land, the most vicious persecution and ethnic cleansing of a people in our time. That is what is happening here. Hamas is condemned and isolated for not "recognizing the right of Israel to exist." But to do so, as a recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor rightly maintains, leaves open the question of "which Israel?"—the 55 percent of historical Palestine recommended by the UN General Assembly in 1948? The 78 percent of historical Palestine seized by the Zionist movement in 1948? Or the 100 percent of historical Palestine occupied by Israel since June 1967? More important, there is the question of "right." This word implies not diplomatic but moral acceptance. It is to require Palestinians to accept the justice in Israel’s theft of their land, the moral right of Israel to expel 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. And finally, it is to demand that "a people who have been treated as subhumans publicly proclaim that they are subhuman." (John V. Whitbeck, "What Israel’s ‘right to exist’ means to Palestinians," Christian Science Monitor, 2/2/07)
Any government that agreed to such a "right" would have betrayed its own people. Hamas has steadfastly and rightly refused to do so. Now the U.S. and Israel, supported by the dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, hope they can goad Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah into accepting the unacceptable—at least for the West Bank. If they succeed, it will be the ultimate triumph of hypocrisy, and, simultaneously, not the beginning, but the end of any hope for Middle East peace for a very long time.
Lawrence DiStasi
And we are all expected to cheer. Hurray for the West Bank. Hurray for Fatah. Hurray for Mahmoud Abbas, the legitimate ruler. Let Hamas and those stinking Gazans rot in their miserable strip of land.
And we are of course expected to ignore the truth: that the truly legitimate government of Palestine is Hamas, elected in free and fair elections 18 months ago. The legitimate recipient of the moneys now being showered on Fatah is Hamas, the elected government of the Palestinians. And the corollary: that the only real beneficiary of the civil war promoted by the United States, and the lifting of sanctions to permanize the split between the two artificially divided segments of the Palestinian people, is Israel. Because now, it can pretend to make peace with Fatah and the West Bank, which of course must be grateful for this magnanimous dispensation of Israeli funds and approval and willingness to talk, and therefore be inclined—so the Israelis and their henchmen in the Bush Administration seem to think—to make peace on Israel’s terms. Thus permanizing the illegal settlements that make the West Bank a joke. For remember, the Israelis withdrew from their settlements in Gaza, but the West Bank is still a series of bantustans separated from Israel by the apartheid wall, which also rings dozens and dozens of illegal settlements which will be there indefinitly. And Mahmoud Abbas, that quisling, that traitor, along with the quisling Arab governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, will be inclined, so the hope no doubt goes, to agree. So that they—the "moderate" leaders—can at long last claim victory and go back to repressing their own peoples.
And all anyone with the slightest understanding of history and the vaguest notions of fairness can do is work and hope and vow that this shall never come to pass. For if it does, then what will have been ratified, what will have been sanctified is the greatest theft of land, the most vicious persecution and ethnic cleansing of a people in our time. That is what is happening here. Hamas is condemned and isolated for not "recognizing the right of Israel to exist." But to do so, as a recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor rightly maintains, leaves open the question of "which Israel?"—the 55 percent of historical Palestine recommended by the UN General Assembly in 1948? The 78 percent of historical Palestine seized by the Zionist movement in 1948? Or the 100 percent of historical Palestine occupied by Israel since June 1967? More important, there is the question of "right." This word implies not diplomatic but moral acceptance. It is to require Palestinians to accept the justice in Israel’s theft of their land, the moral right of Israel to expel 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. And finally, it is to demand that "a people who have been treated as subhumans publicly proclaim that they are subhuman." (John V. Whitbeck, "What Israel’s ‘right to exist’ means to Palestinians," Christian Science Monitor, 2/2/07)
Any government that agreed to such a "right" would have betrayed its own people. Hamas has steadfastly and rightly refused to do so. Now the U.S. and Israel, supported by the dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, hope they can goad Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah into accepting the unacceptable—at least for the West Bank. If they succeed, it will be the ultimate triumph of hypocrisy, and, simultaneously, not the beginning, but the end of any hope for Middle East peace for a very long time.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Traitors to Their Own
Condoleeza Rice. Colin Powell. Alberto Gonzalez. John Yoo. All the neocons from Paul Wolfowitz to Irving "Scooter" Libby to Eliot Abrams to god knows how many more. Add in the Supreme Court Judges: Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, as well as—though Clinton appointed him—old "Slam Dunk" Tenet. And suddenly, after thinking that perhaps the Bush Administration does indeed represent all that’s great about America—its ethnic and racial diversity, whose best and brightest all get promoted to positions of prominence regardless of the fact that the appointers are upper class privileged white males appointing those from well beneath their class—one begins to wonder. Who are these representatives of the oppressed classes? And under what constraints and disavowals do they actually serve their White House masters? And why?
Immediately what comes to mind is that lacerating term of opprobrium, "house nigger" (originally, "house negro," from a speech by Malcolm X, "Message to the Grass Roots," delivered in Detroit on Nov. 10, 1963). In the ante-bellum South, these chosen ones were the most carefully selected of the slaves—the best and the brightest and the least threatening, at least once they had been favored with positions in the big house. The ones who had agreed to a pact with the devil: serve and be servile, and get to live another day not just as a miserable survivor, but as one of the privileged. Enjoying at least some of the southern comforts: food, warmth, clean clothing, some education, and the protections of power and the powerful. Such insider status persuaded many to swallow the humiliation that came with proximity to the master in exchange for the safety and status the position automatically conferred.
And of course, what immediately comes to mind next is the benefit for the master as well. For power, the powerful cannot exist without the collusion of the classes over whom they rule. There are always too few masters and too many slaves. Too few lords and too many serfs. Too few and too weak to rule by force alone, the lords and masters always require some of the slaves to join them in return for favors, either overtly given or covertly promised. Come with me, join my household, my estate, my company, my army as sergeant or lieutenant, as overseer or counsel or financier, and in return, when our campaign of plunder succeeds, part of the spoils shall be yours. And in the end, there may even materialize a grant of gold, or jewels, or land, yes, an estate of your own to reward you and yours, even perhaps a title to be yours and your heirs’ for as long as titles and property shall retain their meaning. Which is forever.
And so we have Condi and Colin and Alberto and John, willing and eager to do the dirty work for their white benefactor, George W. Bush, master of the Whitest House on the planet. To make the speech ominously warning of "the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud." To present to the United Nations the pack of well-rehearsed, visually-supplemented lies needed to justify an unjustified invasion. To write the legally illegal memos defining torture in such a way that torture can be applied promiscuously, universally, without any worry for, after all, "the Geneva Conventions have become quaint," relics of a more naïve time. To confirm for old Massa his megalomaniacal notion that the President of the United States is a "unitary executive," the man who alone, in a democracy, is above the law, equivalent to a king, no, more powerful than a king for the king had to submit to the Magna Carta, whereas our Massa, protected by the war powers granted him in the Ccnstitution, need not submit to anyone or any law for his power is unlimited and unlimitable. To dismiss the evidence, the intelligence from one’s own agency, and shout, when asked about evidencing Saddam’s WMD: "It’s a slam dunk." Or, when that dastardly special prosecutor gnaws ever closer to our inner circle, to fall on your sword as a good soldier must, remembering always: house niggers never do jail time.
And above all, to keep always in mind: when the dirty work is done, the land grant is at hand. Though of course in this, our democratic republic, nothing so obvious as land or gold can be proffered. The grant must be subtler: Condi knighted upward to Secretary of State; Alberto raised to the chief law enforcement office of all, Attorney General of the United States; John adorned with the plush appointment to the Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley; George crowned high with the Medal of Freedom; and Wolfie, dear Wolfie, mastermind of the war and related plans to enslave the new Middle East, Wolfie to rise like cream to the presidency of the World Bank, able, finally, to minister to his beloved underprivileged. To all of which American punditry says "Amen. All is as it should be. Who takes the heat for the Massa, deserves the rewards. It is the way of the world."
Though unstated, always, necessarily unmentionable, is the real subtext. The reward is rendered not alone in return for taking the heat, falling on the sword. The reward is rendered equally for the unavoidable betrayal of one’s class, of one’s origins. For when one thinks about it, what does Condi or Alberto or John or Colin say to their families, their friends, their compatriots below, in the old neighborhood? After all the congratulations and the pride in their success—that one of their own has "made it" and can perhaps, no must, sooner or later, throw a crumb or two from Massa’s table their way—after all that, what can these brightest of super Novae say to those they’ve left behind? For they are always there, the laggards, the "field negroes," always looming in memory, always lurking in the shadows, always ready to appear suddenly and demand at least the old grin, the old handshake. And of course, one rarely has time for that any more. After all, one must take the helicopter to Camp David, or the jet to Davos or Helsinki or Cairo, when one isn’t working 18 hour days, that is, on the latest position paper due yesterday, the latest interview or press conference needed to assure the masses that all is well, the President knows precisely what he’s doing and surely would not lie about so serious a matter as war or torture or spying on his own people. On my own people, on you, my people, whom I have certainly not forgotten and certainly do not place myself above in any way, nor—shame on you for even suggesting it—harbor contempt for, because why, why would I harbor that, allow that, think that? These custom-made suits mean nothing, these long black cars and private jets mean nothing, this well-groomed exterior is only a front and inside I’m still the same old me who knows how to get down and party with the crowd. Of course one can’t do that tonight, one has been invited by the President to his ranch, he loves to hear one play Beethoven on his piano which, he laughs, never gets touched except when one is there, this gorgeous Steinway, can you imagine, that just sits there untouched most of the time. But I’ll call, honestly honey I will first chance I get there’s a bill coming up that I’m sure…..
Yes. It is always thus. Class traitors always do the dirty work, always aspire to do the dirty work as the tried and true way of rising above the mud and muck of their origins. And the masters always have dirty work to be done, for after all, oppression goes down so much more easily when the oppressor is one of their own, because doesn’t the fact that one of you has risen give the lie to oppression to begin with, does it not offer to all of you, each and every one of you the same opportunity to one day, yes, rise up and join the club and become an instrument of oppression on your own? Of course it does. And the complainers and nay-sayers are only the green-eyed ones, the envious ones who want to tear everything and everyone down. Down to their level. It’s the way they are, everyone knows that, pay them no mind, they’re beneath you beneath your level your talents your capacities, cannot rise to the heights you have achieved and so wish only to drag you down, drag all of us down, pay them no mind. Rather, see them for what they are. The necessary cloth upon which we must work. Upon which you, now, having worked, must continue to work for they matter only as cloth, as material upon which we all up here, must work, must always work, to advance the work.
In a word, Contempt. That is what the whole system runs on. Contempt for those below, those whom one has left behind, the family and neighborhood and class one has left behind. Anyone who has risen knows this. Anyone who aspires to rise knows this, knows that the taste of personal advancement, the price of individual achievement, is always the same: betrayal and contempt. My father arrived in this country in 1914, an immigrant from the despised south of Italy, and thus despised by the America he came to as a 12-year-old boy. And he fed his fill of that scorn, somewhere along the line vowing that he would rise above it, though the path open to him was not schooling, of course, he was booted out of 6th grade for insubordination before he could take that path, so he trained as a barber, first, and then as a hairdresser, and got to a position on 5th Avenue where he strutted his stuff to the adoring glances of society matrons like Gloria Vanderbilt and stars like Gene Tierney. And it rubbed off eventually, rubbed off in scorn and contempt for the old neighborhood known as the Hollow in Bridgeport CT where he grew up, and which he forsook just as quickly as feet could carry him. In short, he took on the airs of the wealthy, pampered matrons he served. Tailor-made suits. Sulka ties. LaSalle convertibles. Like the upstairs servants lording it over those downstairs, he lorded it over his origins and cost himself part of himself in the lording for he always returned to the local bars and hangouts where he grew up, trying to re-connect himself somehow to the nameless something he had left, knowing all along it was no longer truly possible, or even nameable.
In my way, I did the same. A product of the lower middle class in a sordid industrial town, I aspired higher, and made it via scholarship to the Ivy League. A fish out of water, I took on all the accoutrements of the wealthy and the privately-schooled who were my classmates. Button-down shirts. Penny loafers. Baggy sweaters. But never inside. Because the inside accoutrements are not truly obtainable in one generation. Still, I learned to scorn the ways and preoccupations of those from whom I had come, felt I had earned the right (we always take credit for what we’ve had nothing to do with) to that flight, that betrayal, that contempt. And must, to this day, fight its recurrent eruption in my mind, my attitudes, my worldview.
That is the point here. We are all, always being trained in this contempt. In this betrayal. Those who are masters know this, know they must continually attend to this training. They know their survival depends on this training of underlings in contempt for their own, contempt for their origins, for those below from whom they derive, and who have become, relative to their ascension, "other." In a real sense, the Italian immigrants with whom my father arrived in 1914, knew this. They knew that even absent a diabolical offer, America itself would, whenever and wherever it could, train their children in contempt—for them. First by teaching those children its language, a language which they, the immigrants, would never master. And then in all the other manners and mores and customs which they, the immigrants, could not master either and so would reject and scorn in their turn: American food and American materialism and American lack of respect and American business with its concomitant heartlessness towards life and love and family. It was for this reason that my father periodically would erupt in his favorite curse, the immigrant’s curse of America: mannaggia l’America. God damn America. For at the same time that the immigrant needed, lusted after the survival and wealth that America offered, he hated the fact of his compulsion, the fact of his absolute need to beg for America to accept him which necessarily meant rejecting that from which he came, and could never stop longing for.
Constantly, then. We are constantly being trained in contempt for the "other." Which, in the end, becomes contempt for ourselves. (…To be continued.)
Lawrence DiStasi
Immediately what comes to mind is that lacerating term of opprobrium, "house nigger" (originally, "house negro," from a speech by Malcolm X, "Message to the Grass Roots," delivered in Detroit on Nov. 10, 1963). In the ante-bellum South, these chosen ones were the most carefully selected of the slaves—the best and the brightest and the least threatening, at least once they had been favored with positions in the big house. The ones who had agreed to a pact with the devil: serve and be servile, and get to live another day not just as a miserable survivor, but as one of the privileged. Enjoying at least some of the southern comforts: food, warmth, clean clothing, some education, and the protections of power and the powerful. Such insider status persuaded many to swallow the humiliation that came with proximity to the master in exchange for the safety and status the position automatically conferred.
And of course, what immediately comes to mind next is the benefit for the master as well. For power, the powerful cannot exist without the collusion of the classes over whom they rule. There are always too few masters and too many slaves. Too few lords and too many serfs. Too few and too weak to rule by force alone, the lords and masters always require some of the slaves to join them in return for favors, either overtly given or covertly promised. Come with me, join my household, my estate, my company, my army as sergeant or lieutenant, as overseer or counsel or financier, and in return, when our campaign of plunder succeeds, part of the spoils shall be yours. And in the end, there may even materialize a grant of gold, or jewels, or land, yes, an estate of your own to reward you and yours, even perhaps a title to be yours and your heirs’ for as long as titles and property shall retain their meaning. Which is forever.
And so we have Condi and Colin and Alberto and John, willing and eager to do the dirty work for their white benefactor, George W. Bush, master of the Whitest House on the planet. To make the speech ominously warning of "the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud." To present to the United Nations the pack of well-rehearsed, visually-supplemented lies needed to justify an unjustified invasion. To write the legally illegal memos defining torture in such a way that torture can be applied promiscuously, universally, without any worry for, after all, "the Geneva Conventions have become quaint," relics of a more naïve time. To confirm for old Massa his megalomaniacal notion that the President of the United States is a "unitary executive," the man who alone, in a democracy, is above the law, equivalent to a king, no, more powerful than a king for the king had to submit to the Magna Carta, whereas our Massa, protected by the war powers granted him in the Ccnstitution, need not submit to anyone or any law for his power is unlimited and unlimitable. To dismiss the evidence, the intelligence from one’s own agency, and shout, when asked about evidencing Saddam’s WMD: "It’s a slam dunk." Or, when that dastardly special prosecutor gnaws ever closer to our inner circle, to fall on your sword as a good soldier must, remembering always: house niggers never do jail time.
And above all, to keep always in mind: when the dirty work is done, the land grant is at hand. Though of course in this, our democratic republic, nothing so obvious as land or gold can be proffered. The grant must be subtler: Condi knighted upward to Secretary of State; Alberto raised to the chief law enforcement office of all, Attorney General of the United States; John adorned with the plush appointment to the Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley; George crowned high with the Medal of Freedom; and Wolfie, dear Wolfie, mastermind of the war and related plans to enslave the new Middle East, Wolfie to rise like cream to the presidency of the World Bank, able, finally, to minister to his beloved underprivileged. To all of which American punditry says "Amen. All is as it should be. Who takes the heat for the Massa, deserves the rewards. It is the way of the world."
Though unstated, always, necessarily unmentionable, is the real subtext. The reward is rendered not alone in return for taking the heat, falling on the sword. The reward is rendered equally for the unavoidable betrayal of one’s class, of one’s origins. For when one thinks about it, what does Condi or Alberto or John or Colin say to their families, their friends, their compatriots below, in the old neighborhood? After all the congratulations and the pride in their success—that one of their own has "made it" and can perhaps, no must, sooner or later, throw a crumb or two from Massa’s table their way—after all that, what can these brightest of super Novae say to those they’ve left behind? For they are always there, the laggards, the "field negroes," always looming in memory, always lurking in the shadows, always ready to appear suddenly and demand at least the old grin, the old handshake. And of course, one rarely has time for that any more. After all, one must take the helicopter to Camp David, or the jet to Davos or Helsinki or Cairo, when one isn’t working 18 hour days, that is, on the latest position paper due yesterday, the latest interview or press conference needed to assure the masses that all is well, the President knows precisely what he’s doing and surely would not lie about so serious a matter as war or torture or spying on his own people. On my own people, on you, my people, whom I have certainly not forgotten and certainly do not place myself above in any way, nor—shame on you for even suggesting it—harbor contempt for, because why, why would I harbor that, allow that, think that? These custom-made suits mean nothing, these long black cars and private jets mean nothing, this well-groomed exterior is only a front and inside I’m still the same old me who knows how to get down and party with the crowd. Of course one can’t do that tonight, one has been invited by the President to his ranch, he loves to hear one play Beethoven on his piano which, he laughs, never gets touched except when one is there, this gorgeous Steinway, can you imagine, that just sits there untouched most of the time. But I’ll call, honestly honey I will first chance I get there’s a bill coming up that I’m sure…..
Yes. It is always thus. Class traitors always do the dirty work, always aspire to do the dirty work as the tried and true way of rising above the mud and muck of their origins. And the masters always have dirty work to be done, for after all, oppression goes down so much more easily when the oppressor is one of their own, because doesn’t the fact that one of you has risen give the lie to oppression to begin with, does it not offer to all of you, each and every one of you the same opportunity to one day, yes, rise up and join the club and become an instrument of oppression on your own? Of course it does. And the complainers and nay-sayers are only the green-eyed ones, the envious ones who want to tear everything and everyone down. Down to their level. It’s the way they are, everyone knows that, pay them no mind, they’re beneath you beneath your level your talents your capacities, cannot rise to the heights you have achieved and so wish only to drag you down, drag all of us down, pay them no mind. Rather, see them for what they are. The necessary cloth upon which we must work. Upon which you, now, having worked, must continue to work for they matter only as cloth, as material upon which we all up here, must work, must always work, to advance the work.
In a word, Contempt. That is what the whole system runs on. Contempt for those below, those whom one has left behind, the family and neighborhood and class one has left behind. Anyone who has risen knows this. Anyone who aspires to rise knows this, knows that the taste of personal advancement, the price of individual achievement, is always the same: betrayal and contempt. My father arrived in this country in 1914, an immigrant from the despised south of Italy, and thus despised by the America he came to as a 12-year-old boy. And he fed his fill of that scorn, somewhere along the line vowing that he would rise above it, though the path open to him was not schooling, of course, he was booted out of 6th grade for insubordination before he could take that path, so he trained as a barber, first, and then as a hairdresser, and got to a position on 5th Avenue where he strutted his stuff to the adoring glances of society matrons like Gloria Vanderbilt and stars like Gene Tierney. And it rubbed off eventually, rubbed off in scorn and contempt for the old neighborhood known as the Hollow in Bridgeport CT where he grew up, and which he forsook just as quickly as feet could carry him. In short, he took on the airs of the wealthy, pampered matrons he served. Tailor-made suits. Sulka ties. LaSalle convertibles. Like the upstairs servants lording it over those downstairs, he lorded it over his origins and cost himself part of himself in the lording for he always returned to the local bars and hangouts where he grew up, trying to re-connect himself somehow to the nameless something he had left, knowing all along it was no longer truly possible, or even nameable.
In my way, I did the same. A product of the lower middle class in a sordid industrial town, I aspired higher, and made it via scholarship to the Ivy League. A fish out of water, I took on all the accoutrements of the wealthy and the privately-schooled who were my classmates. Button-down shirts. Penny loafers. Baggy sweaters. But never inside. Because the inside accoutrements are not truly obtainable in one generation. Still, I learned to scorn the ways and preoccupations of those from whom I had come, felt I had earned the right (we always take credit for what we’ve had nothing to do with) to that flight, that betrayal, that contempt. And must, to this day, fight its recurrent eruption in my mind, my attitudes, my worldview.
That is the point here. We are all, always being trained in this contempt. In this betrayal. Those who are masters know this, know they must continually attend to this training. They know their survival depends on this training of underlings in contempt for their own, contempt for their origins, for those below from whom they derive, and who have become, relative to their ascension, "other." In a real sense, the Italian immigrants with whom my father arrived in 1914, knew this. They knew that even absent a diabolical offer, America itself would, whenever and wherever it could, train their children in contempt—for them. First by teaching those children its language, a language which they, the immigrants, would never master. And then in all the other manners and mores and customs which they, the immigrants, could not master either and so would reject and scorn in their turn: American food and American materialism and American lack of respect and American business with its concomitant heartlessness towards life and love and family. It was for this reason that my father periodically would erupt in his favorite curse, the immigrant’s curse of America: mannaggia l’America. God damn America. For at the same time that the immigrant needed, lusted after the survival and wealth that America offered, he hated the fact of his compulsion, the fact of his absolute need to beg for America to accept him which necessarily meant rejecting that from which he came, and could never stop longing for.
Constantly, then. We are constantly being trained in contempt for the "other." Which, in the end, becomes contempt for ourselves. (…To be continued.)
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
It Can't Happen Here, II
I have written before about the creeping fascism that the Bush Administration’s manipulation of voting in both the 2000 and 2004 elections represents. The point there was that if we can’t throw the bums out via the ballot box, there is no recourse to citizens of a democracy, ergo, no democracy.
The Frontline documentary, Spying on the Homefront, that aired last night (May 15) on Public Broadcasting added another dimension to this notion of creeping fascism. The documentary, written by one of the great reporters of our time, Hedrick Smith, detailed how the Patriot Act made it possible for this administration, especially the FBI and the NSA, to spy on Americans in contravention of the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment, that is, guarantees to every American the right to be safe from government searches and seizures in his/her home and person. In order to breach that privacy, the government must get a search warrant, granted by a judge, which requires a specific cause to justify the search—i.e. that a crime has been or is about to be committed. Absent that probable cause, the government cannot make the search.
In 1978, Congress added a loophole for enforcement agencies seeking to spy on foreign powers or agents. It set up a FISA court to which government agencies could appeal when they felt the need to spy on such foreign operations. The FISA law allows government agencies to conduct electronic searches both with and without warrants. To surveill with a warrant the FISA court must find probable cause that the target is a "foreign power" or an "agent of a foreign power." Most notably, if the surveillance pertains to US persons, the surveillance must meet certain "minimization requirements," i.e. the government must justify itself. To surveill without a warrant, the President can authorize spying for a year, provided it is only "for foreign intelligence information…and there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." In short, the safeguards against spying on all persons living in the United States (not only citizens, note) stands. To do otherwise, the government must justify its case to a judge.
The problem for the Bush Administration is that it does not ever want to go to court to justify its spying. It simply insists on arrogating to itself the power, in the person of the President as putative Commander in Chief (the President is not Commander in Chief of the nation, by the way; he is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces only during a declared war), to spy on anyone, foreigner or citizen, anywhere, in the US or outside it, at any time, no matter what. It knows that if it has to get a judge’s permission to do such spying, it will have to show probable cause. It does not want to do that—presumably because much of the time it cannot. What it insists on—and has practiced since 2002 as revealed in December of 2005—is the ability to record all communications, which it can then troll through to find out if anyone is doing or saying anything it considers suspect or dangerous to national security, or itself. The exponential growth of electronic communications, and the corresponding growth of computer programs to monitor and inspect those communications, has given it the ability to do such mass data mining, all without the knowledge of those involved.
That’s what Spying on the Homefront portrayed. Focusing on the alleged threat to major cities like Las Vegas in 2004, the documentary showed how the FBI sought and received the records of everyone, mostly U.S. citizens, staying in Las Vegas for the New Year holiday. It then scanned those records via computer programs to determine if anyone in that blanket search matched its database of suspected terrorists, or those in any way connected to terrorists. Hedrick Smith interviewed one couple, in Las Vegas to be married, regarding those searches. They were outraged, not only because they had been watched during their marriage, but also because the husband—a computer expert—knew that the FBI’s claim to have destroyed all the records obtained in Las Vegas was a lie: they would in fact persist in some database indefinitely. Worse, the government announced after the fact that the alleged security threat to Las Vegas had been a mistake: someone misinterpreted their data, itself no doubt derived from previous spying.
Spying on the Homefront also interviewed the ATT worker who discovered the secret office set up in ATT headquarters in San Francisco, apparently to record all records that come through ATT—phone calls, emails, and every other form of communication facilitated by the communications giant. Reports indicate that Verizon and Bell South, among others, have also handed over their records.
The coda to this story is the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, by assistant Attorney General James Comey. It concerned an episode in 2003 at a hospital where then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was recovering from gall bladder surgery and Comey was acting AG. At that time, the Bush Administration was expanding its NSA search procedures to include spying on Americans. Comey had been instructed by AG Ashcroft—no civil libertarian by the way—to refuse to give Justice Department approval to the Administration’s plans. Comey then found out about a cynical end run being attempted by the White House: the President sent Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-counsel Alberto Gonzalez to Ashcroft’s hospital room, in an attempt to browbeat the ailing Attorney General into giving his approval for their secret wiretapping program. Comey arrived in time to brief Ashcroft, who then, even in his weakened state, bellowed his disapproval and refusal to the White House team. Still the White House persisted, and only after Comey threatened to resign rather than sign off on the program did the White House agree to a compromise proposal--though even this did not stop their later-to-be-revealed secret surveillance of American citizens in clear violation of FISA.
One other interview in the documentary is worth mention. The notorious John Yoo served as White House counsel during Bush’s first term. When asked if the NSA spying didn’t violate the law, Yoo stated matter of factly that "there is a higher law" than FISA and the 4th Amerndment. No, he did not mean God’s Law. Yoo meant the President’s authority as Commander in Chief. According to this now-professor of jurisprudence, the President’s authority, detailed in the Constitution, cannot be abridged by any law. When Hedrick Smith asked if he really meant that the 4th Amendment—the core of English law for a thousand years, i.e. the right of citizens to be safe in their homes from illegal searches and seizures, the violations of which led the American colonists to revolt against the King of England and declare American independence—could be violated by the President, Yoo maintained that indeed it could. In other words, according to this criminal enabler, the President is above the law, possessed of dictatorial powers over his subjects. He can and has ordered surveillance of anyone, of everyone, under the justification of what he has decreed to be a virtually endless war on terror.
What this means is that every American, no matter who or where or why, has now, and for the foreseeable future, effectively become suspect. His every communication is open to the Federal government to spy on, record, examine, and use however it wishes in its alleged attempts to find terrorists.
A government that can search its citizens regardless of what they do; a government that secretly authorizes such searches in clear violation of the laws designed specifically to prevent them; a government that raises itself to the level of a monarch or a dictator—that government has become a tyranny. Any distinction between it and other governments it condemns and targets as anti-democratic dictatorships is a distinction in name only. For a democracy means the people have the ultimate power. A democracy means the people have the right to be safe in their homes and possessions from unwarranted government intrusion. When that safety and privacy have been rendered moot, democracy has been rendered moot as well.
Lawrence DiStasi
The Frontline documentary, Spying on the Homefront, that aired last night (May 15) on Public Broadcasting added another dimension to this notion of creeping fascism. The documentary, written by one of the great reporters of our time, Hedrick Smith, detailed how the Patriot Act made it possible for this administration, especially the FBI and the NSA, to spy on Americans in contravention of the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment, that is, guarantees to every American the right to be safe from government searches and seizures in his/her home and person. In order to breach that privacy, the government must get a search warrant, granted by a judge, which requires a specific cause to justify the search—i.e. that a crime has been or is about to be committed. Absent that probable cause, the government cannot make the search.
In 1978, Congress added a loophole for enforcement agencies seeking to spy on foreign powers or agents. It set up a FISA court to which government agencies could appeal when they felt the need to spy on such foreign operations. The FISA law allows government agencies to conduct electronic searches both with and without warrants. To surveill with a warrant the FISA court must find probable cause that the target is a "foreign power" or an "agent of a foreign power." Most notably, if the surveillance pertains to US persons, the surveillance must meet certain "minimization requirements," i.e. the government must justify itself. To surveill without a warrant, the President can authorize spying for a year, provided it is only "for foreign intelligence information…and there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." In short, the safeguards against spying on all persons living in the United States (not only citizens, note) stands. To do otherwise, the government must justify its case to a judge.
The problem for the Bush Administration is that it does not ever want to go to court to justify its spying. It simply insists on arrogating to itself the power, in the person of the President as putative Commander in Chief (the President is not Commander in Chief of the nation, by the way; he is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces only during a declared war), to spy on anyone, foreigner or citizen, anywhere, in the US or outside it, at any time, no matter what. It knows that if it has to get a judge’s permission to do such spying, it will have to show probable cause. It does not want to do that—presumably because much of the time it cannot. What it insists on—and has practiced since 2002 as revealed in December of 2005—is the ability to record all communications, which it can then troll through to find out if anyone is doing or saying anything it considers suspect or dangerous to national security, or itself. The exponential growth of electronic communications, and the corresponding growth of computer programs to monitor and inspect those communications, has given it the ability to do such mass data mining, all without the knowledge of those involved.
That’s what Spying on the Homefront portrayed. Focusing on the alleged threat to major cities like Las Vegas in 2004, the documentary showed how the FBI sought and received the records of everyone, mostly U.S. citizens, staying in Las Vegas for the New Year holiday. It then scanned those records via computer programs to determine if anyone in that blanket search matched its database of suspected terrorists, or those in any way connected to terrorists. Hedrick Smith interviewed one couple, in Las Vegas to be married, regarding those searches. They were outraged, not only because they had been watched during their marriage, but also because the husband—a computer expert—knew that the FBI’s claim to have destroyed all the records obtained in Las Vegas was a lie: they would in fact persist in some database indefinitely. Worse, the government announced after the fact that the alleged security threat to Las Vegas had been a mistake: someone misinterpreted their data, itself no doubt derived from previous spying.
Spying on the Homefront also interviewed the ATT worker who discovered the secret office set up in ATT headquarters in San Francisco, apparently to record all records that come through ATT—phone calls, emails, and every other form of communication facilitated by the communications giant. Reports indicate that Verizon and Bell South, among others, have also handed over their records.
The coda to this story is the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, by assistant Attorney General James Comey. It concerned an episode in 2003 at a hospital where then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was recovering from gall bladder surgery and Comey was acting AG. At that time, the Bush Administration was expanding its NSA search procedures to include spying on Americans. Comey had been instructed by AG Ashcroft—no civil libertarian by the way—to refuse to give Justice Department approval to the Administration’s plans. Comey then found out about a cynical end run being attempted by the White House: the President sent Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-counsel Alberto Gonzalez to Ashcroft’s hospital room, in an attempt to browbeat the ailing Attorney General into giving his approval for their secret wiretapping program. Comey arrived in time to brief Ashcroft, who then, even in his weakened state, bellowed his disapproval and refusal to the White House team. Still the White House persisted, and only after Comey threatened to resign rather than sign off on the program did the White House agree to a compromise proposal--though even this did not stop their later-to-be-revealed secret surveillance of American citizens in clear violation of FISA.
One other interview in the documentary is worth mention. The notorious John Yoo served as White House counsel during Bush’s first term. When asked if the NSA spying didn’t violate the law, Yoo stated matter of factly that "there is a higher law" than FISA and the 4th Amerndment. No, he did not mean God’s Law. Yoo meant the President’s authority as Commander in Chief. According to this now-professor of jurisprudence, the President’s authority, detailed in the Constitution, cannot be abridged by any law. When Hedrick Smith asked if he really meant that the 4th Amendment—the core of English law for a thousand years, i.e. the right of citizens to be safe in their homes from illegal searches and seizures, the violations of which led the American colonists to revolt against the King of England and declare American independence—could be violated by the President, Yoo maintained that indeed it could. In other words, according to this criminal enabler, the President is above the law, possessed of dictatorial powers over his subjects. He can and has ordered surveillance of anyone, of everyone, under the justification of what he has decreed to be a virtually endless war on terror.
What this means is that every American, no matter who or where or why, has now, and for the foreseeable future, effectively become suspect. His every communication is open to the Federal government to spy on, record, examine, and use however it wishes in its alleged attempts to find terrorists.
A government that can search its citizens regardless of what they do; a government that secretly authorizes such searches in clear violation of the laws designed specifically to prevent them; a government that raises itself to the level of a monarch or a dictator—that government has become a tyranny. Any distinction between it and other governments it condemns and targets as anti-democratic dictatorships is a distinction in name only. For a democracy means the people have the ultimate power. A democracy means the people have the right to be safe in their homes and possessions from unwarranted government intrusion. When that safety and privacy have been rendered moot, democracy has been rendered moot as well.
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Monstrosity
Monstrosity. The monstrous. I’ve been thinking about them lately. Entities whose growth runs riot, beyond all rational or irrational bounds, to the point where they outrun the ability of nature to contain or tolerate them.
We have many monsters in our time; in fact, this may be the age of monsters. The United States as an empire without the opposition of the Soviet Union to balance or contain it (or its "free" economic system). Until 2006, the Republican Party, as exemplified by the Bushies, without the constraint of a viable Democratic Party to curb its unprecedented abuses of power. Israel, the sole nuclear power in the Middle East yet still claiming to be under seige, to justify its attempts to destroy an entire people, an entire region. Wal Mart, the retailer with buying and selling and hiring practices so ruthless that no Sears, much less local retailers, can compete with it. Microsoft, whose stolen operating system has become so integral to the manufacture of PCs that none any longer even question its hegemony. And of course our revered human species, now at 6 billion and growing, whose triumph over every predator and dominance of every ecosystem now threatens the survival of all life on earth, including its own.
In each of these cases, the success of the species or business or political or national entity runs so thoroughly amok that, like the dinosaurs, it leads to monstrosity. And as with the dinosaurs, nature or the universe at some point responds, and strikes back at so monstrous an imbalance. For that is what monstrosity is: imbalance. The lack of a predator, of a competitor, of a legal constraint, of an inhibitory factor which normally balances growth in a natural system, which indeed defines natural systems. All natural systems thrive on this inhibition vs. growth dance. The ancient Taoists imaged the idea as the yin/yang figure: where black exactly balances white, where one curve exactly balances the equal and opposite other. Where this inhibitory factor is temporarily lacking, on the other hand, monstrosity arises. And you have growth without limit, domination without limit, the crowding out of all other attempts to grow or be or survive.
Until, that is, enough is enough. Until, that is, nature responds with tiny counterbalancing factors, little revolts, small denials of hegemony, miniscule organisms that grow in the shadows of monstrosity too small to be noticed. Until they strike. This response, this natural restoration can be cruel and indifferent in the extreme. It can be a worldwide bacteria or virus, an Aids epidemic, a shift in the climate, a sudden rise in an opportunistic population which says no, which optimizes itself by preying on the wealth and size of monstrosity, which initiates terror in the night. And when it comes, as come it must, monstrosity must collapse of its own weight, a weight which allows it to be surprised, knocked off balance, rendered helpless to respond quickly enough, precisely enough.
Now, at this moment, the signs are growing that monstrosity, the monstrosities mentioned above and others not even thought of, are reaching critical mass. The planet is gathering its destructive responses. The universe is gathering its miniscule minions. Which is at it should be. For nature not only abhors a vacuum, it harbors a repugnance for monstrosity, which it must, in the end, retard, reverse, cause to collapse of its own weight, and disappear. Whereupon all the little entities which have been crushed beneath it for so long can rise, and dance upon its putrefying, recycling, unwept-for corpse.
Lawrence DiStasi
We have many monsters in our time; in fact, this may be the age of monsters. The United States as an empire without the opposition of the Soviet Union to balance or contain it (or its "free" economic system). Until 2006, the Republican Party, as exemplified by the Bushies, without the constraint of a viable Democratic Party to curb its unprecedented abuses of power. Israel, the sole nuclear power in the Middle East yet still claiming to be under seige, to justify its attempts to destroy an entire people, an entire region. Wal Mart, the retailer with buying and selling and hiring practices so ruthless that no Sears, much less local retailers, can compete with it. Microsoft, whose stolen operating system has become so integral to the manufacture of PCs that none any longer even question its hegemony. And of course our revered human species, now at 6 billion and growing, whose triumph over every predator and dominance of every ecosystem now threatens the survival of all life on earth, including its own.
In each of these cases, the success of the species or business or political or national entity runs so thoroughly amok that, like the dinosaurs, it leads to monstrosity. And as with the dinosaurs, nature or the universe at some point responds, and strikes back at so monstrous an imbalance. For that is what monstrosity is: imbalance. The lack of a predator, of a competitor, of a legal constraint, of an inhibitory factor which normally balances growth in a natural system, which indeed defines natural systems. All natural systems thrive on this inhibition vs. growth dance. The ancient Taoists imaged the idea as the yin/yang figure: where black exactly balances white, where one curve exactly balances the equal and opposite other. Where this inhibitory factor is temporarily lacking, on the other hand, monstrosity arises. And you have growth without limit, domination without limit, the crowding out of all other attempts to grow or be or survive.
Until, that is, enough is enough. Until, that is, nature responds with tiny counterbalancing factors, little revolts, small denials of hegemony, miniscule organisms that grow in the shadows of monstrosity too small to be noticed. Until they strike. This response, this natural restoration can be cruel and indifferent in the extreme. It can be a worldwide bacteria or virus, an Aids epidemic, a shift in the climate, a sudden rise in an opportunistic population which says no, which optimizes itself by preying on the wealth and size of monstrosity, which initiates terror in the night. And when it comes, as come it must, monstrosity must collapse of its own weight, a weight which allows it to be surprised, knocked off balance, rendered helpless to respond quickly enough, precisely enough.
Now, at this moment, the signs are growing that monstrosity, the monstrosities mentioned above and others not even thought of, are reaching critical mass. The planet is gathering its destructive responses. The universe is gathering its miniscule minions. Which is at it should be. For nature not only abhors a vacuum, it harbors a repugnance for monstrosity, which it must, in the end, retard, reverse, cause to collapse of its own weight, and disappear. Whereupon all the little entities which have been crushed beneath it for so long can rise, and dance upon its putrefying, recycling, unwept-for corpse.
Lawrence DiStasi
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