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The average American is subjected to 3,000 commercial messages a day. If you have a good day, a half dozen people will tell you a truth worth remembering. Thus the lies win out 500 to one.

Increasingly, our lives are being run by logos rather than logos, symbols rather than reason.

Alternative weeklies

The so-called alternative weeklies , with sadly few exceptions, foster a compliant corpacool culture in which hipness is defined by one's purchases; dissent is limited to critiques of style, activism is something you do at the gym, and politics the last refuge of the hopelessly dull.

America

The four leading causes for the decline of the American republic were:

- Margaret Thatcher, who provided Ronald Reagan's with brains

- The Yale Law School, which has cursed us with everything from Clarence Thomas to Bill Clinton.

- The Harvard Business School which taught a generation of managers that they didn't have to know a damn thing about what they were managing

- The disco drum machine, which inaugurated our cultural collapse

In the end, it is not the culture from which we came but the one each of us is helping to create that will matter. It is our common fate rather than our disparate pasts that will ultimately describe, redeem, or destroy us.

America is not the answer; it is only a good place to look for the answer. America has never been perfect; it's just been a place where it was easier to fix things that were broken.

The fraud, the huckster, the salesman are not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a character that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children, run our government, and tell us what to think. They are the Enron generation, filled with postmodern versions of Willy Loman: "He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." America once made things people wanted, said things that needed to be said and fixed things, including itself, that needed fixing. Now it is out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. The problem, as Willy Loman discovered, comes "when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished."

A good way to think about the history of our country is that it has involved repeated conflict between the specifics of the soul and institutional abstractions -- between people and places on the one hand and, on the other, a succession of systems desiring to exploit, subjugate or supplant them. You can say that one of the great characteristics of Americans has been not merely opposition to a system of the moment but antipathy towards unnatural systems in general -- opposition to all systems that revoke, replace or restrain the natural rights of human beings and the natural assets of their habitats.

We should seek a cooperative commonwealth based on decency before profit, liberty before sterile order, justice before efficiency, happiness before uniformity, families before systems, communities before corporations, and people before institutions

Today almost every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government.

Those who run the country, whether in government, business or media, seldom speak of this land anymore with feeling, affection or understanding. They too often carry forth their affairs unburdened by place, history or culture -- without conscience, without country, and without any sense of the pain they have caused. America is no longer a place to serve and to love. Because they have, in the name of global glories, cut themselves off from their own land, it is becoming for them increasingly a place of danger -- a place of long, grim shadows, the sort of shadows that too often conceal a foe.

We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now."

The game plan of America's mandarins absolutely assumes a widening gap between the governed and the governing and between rich and poor, one that will have to be met by force of one sort or another. Those in power are prepared to do business with most favored nations abroad and to suppress least favored citizens at home.

One test of the state of an empire is whether a handful of angry young men with box cutters can wreck your major economic and military edifices and throw the country into total panic. One test of the state of your culture is whether you can think of much over the past few years to which you reacted by thinking "that's the best [whatever] that I've seen-heard-read in a long time." Another test is when you find yourself saying of some public figure, "I'm sure glad such people are around at a time like this."

When you can't trust your presidents of either major party, your beloved Constitution is in tatters, you have to submit to investigative fondling before flying to Des Moines, your Catholic cardinals say it's okay to bugger little boys as long as you don't do it too often and it doesn't become "notorious," a corporation thrice declared by Fortune Magazine to be the most innovative in the country turns out to be a den of thieves, the accountants who are meant to protect us from such scoundrels turn out to be co-conspirators, our lawmakers spend most of their time finding new things to prohibit, we feel we have to give kids drug tests to make sure they're safe to sing in the choir, our teachers have forgotten how to teach our children how to read, and our journalists have forgotten how to write or to tell a lie from a fact, you've got a problem and one that's not really Al-Queda's fault.

Empires and cultures are not permanent and while thinking about the possibility that ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than enduring the dangerous frustrations and failures involved in having one's contrary myth constantly butt up against reality like a boozer who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home. Instead of defending the non-existent we could turn our energies instead towards devising a new and saner existence.

Anthropology

Under the guise of studying the often rigid rules, customs, and traditions of different human communities, anthropology was actually opening a benign Pandora's box of choice, laying before the world its own wondrous variety, opportunity, and concomitant pain and joy. It was not a popular rebellion. Only one or two of my courses had more than 20 students. Years later, academics and media would discover something they called multiculturalism or diversity. They would speak of it in ponderous tones and as their discovery, and they would describe it as a problem and demand that we do something about it. Too few would notice that what we were talking about as a problem was really a gift and an opportunity and a potential source of our own happiness and freedom.

Let's go to a time and place so distant that no one knows when or where it was, a time and place whose importance is as infinite as its obscurity. The moment we are seeking is the one during which a single individual, or a small group of individuals, did something so unusual that it helped free their ilk forever from the shackles of the environment and genetics -- grabbing destiny from the tree of nature and making it human. . . On the first day of my freshman anthropology class, the professor drew an invisible evolutionary time line on the wall of the lecture hall. As we twisted in our seats the eras, periods, and epochs of musical name and mystical significance boldly circumscribed the room. Finally we came back to where the professor stood and when there was nearly no place further to go, he announced that this was the beginnings of us. We were only inches from the fire maker.

I didn't know it then, but I had joined not so much a discipline as a rebellion. Under the guise of studying the often rigid rules, customs, and traditions of different human communities, anthropology was actually opening a benign Pandora's box of choice, laying before the world its own wondrous variety, opportunity, and concomitant pain and joy. It was not a popular rebellion. Only one or two of my courses had more than 20 students. Years later, academics and media would discover something they called multiculturalism or diversity. They would speak of it in ponderous tones and as their discovery, and they would describe it as a problem and demand that we do something about it. Too few would notice that what we were talking about as a problem was really a gift and an opportunity and a potential source of our own happiness and freedom.

Not only may a culture define the four winds as persons under certain circumstances, it may also define a slave or someone from another tribe as not a person at all. Nonetheless the slave or the outsider really exist so at some level are treated as a person anyway. Hence people in such societies may trade goods with the stranger or attempt to convert the slave to Christianity even though they are not considered human. Or the society may try to quantify such anomalies as Americans did when they declared a black legally equal to three-fifths of a white person. Or it may create a hierarchy as Aristotle did when he confidently declared that "the deliberative faculty in the soul is not present at all in a slave: in a female is present but ineffective, in a child present but undeveloped." Or it may declare that "all men are created equal" but really mean only white male property owners. Or it may fight a revolution for liberty but leave women as chattel. Or the culture can painfully change such values over two centuries and still have to go repeatedly to court to fight over what was really meant by the change.

Our own culture, for all its wonders and faults, represents but a tiny fraction of the choices humans have collectively made over time and space. These choices, distant as they may be, beckon us towards possibilities lying dormant within ourselves. They also mock the self-assurance with which we run our little corner of the world. Secondly, the nature of culture is drastically changing from being something in which the individual is indoctrinated and absorbed, towards something the individual must preserve, restore or recreate in order to avoid the destruction of all culture save that of the corporate market and the political systems that support it. Finally, the strategies by which this can be accomplished depend on no small part on the imagination, passion, obstinacy, and creativity of ordinary people who refuse their consumptive assignments in the global marketplace, who develop autonomous alternatives, and who laugh when they are supposed to be saluting. The business of constructing culture is no longer an inherited and precisely defined task but a radical act demonstrating to others that they are not alone and to ourselves that we are still human.

Part of what had attracted me to anthropology in the first place was a search for a society that would find my personal traits and rituals acceptable enough for membership. Like, I suspect, many real anthropologists, I was a subculture of one looking for my lost tribe. I began this search for the lost tribe of Sams at an unusually early age thanks to the fact that my school - Germantown Friends in Philadelphia -was one of only two high schools in the country that offered a course in anthropology. And in ninth grade. At this precise moment of teenage alienation and confusion, the school offered the reverse of a Pandora's box, for when opened, anthropology freed not evil but hope and possibility, leaving locked safely inside the myth of the single, homogeneous cultural answer. In the middle of the stolid, segregated, monolithic 1950s, Howard Platt showed us a new way to look at the world. And what a wonderful world it was. Not the stultifying world of our parents, not the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, not the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of fantastic options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways. Mr. Platt did not exorcise racism, and he did not teach ethnic harmony, cultural sensitivity, the regulation of diversity, or the morality of non-prejudiced behavior. He didn't need to. He taught something far more important. Mr . Platt opened a world of variety, not for us to fear but to learn about, appreciate and enjoy. It was not a problem, but a gift.

My relationship with the fire maker, and with the creator of the stone ax, the inventor of the spear thrower, and the first potter, would never cease to be both humbling and glorious. Humbling because our true evolutionary insignificance daily mocks our pretensions. Yet also glorious because without the endless random reiteration of individual creation, choice, and imagination, we might still be shivering in the dark instead of reading a book with our feet up and wondering whether there's another beer in the fridge. We are nothing and everything, inexplicably and inseparably bundled together.

Our world is unlike any in human history - a world in which the destruction of cultural and individual variety is high on the agenda of the earth's political and business leaders; our human nature being to them not a reason for existing but just another obstacle in their path to power. The strategies by which this onslaught can be countered depend on the imagination, passion, obstinacy, and creativity of ordinary people who refuse their consumptive assignments in the global marketplace, who develop autonomous alternatives, and who laugh when they are supposed to be saluting. The business of constructing culture is no longer an inherited and precisely defined task but a radical act demonstrating to others that they are not alone and to ourselves that we are still human.

Art

Art is the serendipity that occurs when imagination meets discipline and skill. Every work of art is a challenge to the status quo because it proposes to replace a part of it.

Asperger politics

Key to the Asperger style of politics and media is the constant repetition of thought patterns and the imperviousness of the practitioners' thinking to outside fact or argument. The technical name for this is perseveration which has been defined as "the persistent repetition of a response after cessation of the causative stimuli; for example, the repetition of a correct answer to one question as the answer to succeeding questions," an almost perfect description of what regularly occurs on your average Sunday talk show. A less technical but even more generally apt definition is "continuation of something usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point."

Silently, without argument or recognition, the logic of our nation has drastically changed - from "show me" to "tell me," from experience to propaganda, from the empirical to the virtual, and from debate and discussion to addictive perseveration.

Balancing rights

Politicians and the media have taken to talking about "rights and responsibilities," as though free speech and free religion and not having cops raiding your house without a warrant were privileges we citizens only get when we're well-behaved. When politicians or journalists say that a constitutional right must be balanced by something else, they are really talking about reducing or eliminating that right. In fact, the rights listed in the Constitution are not bargaining chips, but permanent guarantees. Your constitutional rights, to borrow a phrase from the Declaration of Independence, are "unalienable."

Baseball

Baseball is among the most democratic of sports. Each player is given great freedom and specific turf to guard, but this individuality only works when all the members of a team cooperate. Baseball, Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, is unique in that the game is not restricted by either time or space -- games theoretically can go on forever as can an out-of-the-park homer. He also notes that while in other sports you might hear fan suggestions that the ref be fired, it is baseball in which the crowds cry, 'Kill the umpire!' Thus the game, like America itself, celebrates not only a deep distrust of authority and a lack of limits, but also cooperation, individuality, and community.

Beat generation

We tend to think of the 1950s as a time of unmitigated conformity, but in many ways the decade of the 60s was merely the mass movement of ideas that took root in the 50s.

It is instructive during a time in which even alienated progressives outfit themselves with mission and vision statements and speak the bureaucratic argot of their oppressors to revisit that under-missioned, under-visioned culture of what Norman Mailer called the "psychic outlaw" and "the rebel cell in our social body." What Ned Plotsky termed, "the draft dodgers of commercial civilization." Unlike today's activists they lacked a plan; unlike those of the 60s they lacked anything to plan for; what substituted for utopia and organization was the freedom to think, to speak, to move at will in a culture that thought it had adequately taken care of all such matters.

To a far great degree than rebellions that followed, the beat culture created its message by being rather than doing, rejection rather than confrontation, sensibility rather than strategy, journeys instead of movements, words and music instead of acts, and informal communities rather than formal institutions.

Blame

HOW TO AVOID BLAMING THE WRONG THING

1. Count the bodies. If something bad is happening there should be evidence of it. Besides, counting the bodies helps to order priorities.

2. Get facts before you get scared. Just because a politician or a journalist says there's a threat doesn't mean there actually is one.

3. Just because it's on TV doesn't mean it happening to you or your neighborhood. Just because it's at the top of the news doesn't mean it should be at the top of your mind.

4. Fight issues not people. Your gun-loving, anti-abortion neighbor may also oppose plans to store nuclear waste nearby. Find out. After all, most of us are right only part of the time.

5. Don't try to crush those with whom you disagree; convert them.

6.Before "they" can do you any real harm, "they" probably need money and power. If "they" don't have it, you are probably worrying about the wrong "they."

Budgets

AT TIMES, it seems that there are no governments anymore, only budget offices. As the numerologists rose in power, programs increasingly became transformed into line items. Numbers began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced to figures and policy became a matter of where one placed the decimal point.

Bush administration

WOULDN'T IT BE nice to go back to a time when presidents were only corrupt and broke into offices instead of destroying the whole republic?

While Condoleeza Rice's intent is that of an imperialist, her manner is that of an prissy third grade teacher apparently unaware that not only are most whom she scolds not in the third grade, they're not even in her school district.

A DYSFUNCTIONAL DESPOT, George III, failed to prevent the creation of the American republic, which lasted over two hundred years until a dysfunctional despot, George II, destroyed it.

Campaigns

2008

Richard Cheney says the election of Kerry-Edwards might lead to a major terrorist attack. Could be. We don't really know. What we do know is that the election of Bush-Cheney certainly did.

George Bush is consistent, but consistently wrong. John Kerry is inconsistent, which means he is occasionally right.

This would be a good year to follow the Mae West dictum: whenever faced with a choice between two evils, always pick the one you haven't tried before.

Don't think of this election as a choice between candidates but between battlefields. Would you rather spend the next four years fighting Republicans or Democrats?

Capitalism

IF THE theorists of corrupt capitalism are correct and the market tells all, they may be hard pressed to explain why Carl Fiorina is getting a $21 million severance package from Hewlett Packard. After all, the all-knowing market went up 7% on her departure.

I read that the 200 richest people in the world have a combined wealth greater than the GDP of each country in the world except for five. If we are going to have this sort of thing, it may be worthwhile thinking about reviving feudalism. At least under that system, the elite had some social responsibilities. And manners.

SOMETIMES I stand in an airport bookstore and try to figure why God decided to reveal all of life's mysteries in such a place. Why didn't God make philosophers and theologians and poets as all knowing as MBAs?

The rules of the modern marketplace recreate the brutality, unfairness, and helplessness that humans have sought to escape for most of their evolution

Center

If you ask important people in politics, think tanks or the media where they stand politically, many will say "in the center." A lot of these folks like the center because it makes them sound reasonable and moderate. It also allows them to call other people extremists or gadflies or wishful thinkers for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom of the moment. Some members of the American elite have made whole careers of being measured and cautious. They like to write somber columns asking pompous questions like "Can the Center Hold?" What they really mean is: can they hold on to their power? But even if you do find the center, it's not necessarily the best place to be. My navigation instructor at Coast Guard Officer Candidate School explained it well: "If you take a navigational fix and it places you on one side of a rock and then you take another fix and it places you on the other side of the rock -- don't split the difference." Unfortunately, it's a rule not often followed in American politics.

Even the KKK, so often cited as an example of the sort of threat the contemporary right poses, was powerful primarily because it was at the center, holding political and judicial and law enforcement office as well as hiding beneath its robes. In some towns, lynching parties were even announced in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both the Colorado governor and mayor of Denver were members of the Klan, the latter well enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport named after him.

Change

From the American revolution to the underground railroad, to the organizing of labor, to the drive for universal suffrage, to the civil rights, women's, peace and environmental movements, every significant political and social change in this country has been propelled by large numbers of highly autonomous small groups linked not by a bureaucracy or a master organization but by the mutuality of their thought, their faith and their determination. There is no reason it can not happen again.

Whatever the source, it now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance. We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a testament to our fear and lack of trust.

The reporter risking status by telling the truth, the government official risking employment by exposing the wrong, the civic leader refusing to go with the flow -- these are all essential catalysts of change. A transformation in the order of things is not the product of immaculate conception; rather it is the end of something that starts with the willingness of just a few people to do something differently. There must then come a critical second wave of others stepping out of a character long enough to help something happen -- such as the white Mississippian who spoke out for civil rights, the housewife who read Betty Friedan and became a feminist, the parents of a gay son angered by the prejudice surrounding him. But for such dynamics to work there must be space for non-conformity and places for new ideas and the chance to be left alone by those who would manipulate, commodify, or destroy our every thought.

Choice

Contemporary America actively opposes choice. Choice is repressed by a government that increasingly interferes in its citizens' personal lives; choice is manipulated by advertising and public relations; choice is distorted by mass media and the politicians it creates; it is limited by the growing homogeneity of commercial and cultural life, it is ignored by schools that prefer teaching driver ed to analytical skills, and it is suppressed by a cornucopia of illegal and legal drugs that allow one to avoid the pain and hard work of decisions -- seductive relief from what Sartre called the "vertigo of possibility."

We easily observe and deplore the absence of choice when we see it in its adolescent form -- such as in the gang -- but we are less perceptive when it happens to us, especially when it occurs incrementally and in a climate that permits the evocation of what we once were to conceal what we are truly becoming.

We are thus constantly being given false choices. The real choice is whether we can achieve a future which, singly and together, we can experience as something other than an apocalyptic, angry, authoritarian era of violence, greed, cruelty and planetary endangerment.

Once you reject such a future, the remaining choice is a commitment to people, their places and the planet. It is the almost inevitable quality of this decision -- which each of us are already making either by intent or accident -- that suggests the particular power, hope and terrible danger of our times.

It is the choice of rejecting the internal logic of a technocratic system in favor of judging things by their effects on justice, democracy, community and our ecology. It is a matter of asking the right questions -- seeking the right balance rather than the best bottom line, determining human needs rather than institutional requirements, and finding the kindest and most sensible solution rather than the quickest or most efficient. These are not just society's choices, they are ours.

Cities

We have in recent decades been so intent on making our cities neat and orderly that we have forgotten that the major contribution of the city is its explosive and random potential. Our goal has been physical order and fiscal benefits; the results have been social disorder and huge deficits. A thriving urban ecology should not just be about clean air and trees; but also about communities and economic survival, justice, decent education, security, happiness, the joy of chance, variety, and opportunity.

Cities often fail us but it is their enduring service to both shelter and venture that makes even the grimmest among them continuing magnets. Even as those who have used them well and long for their own purposes flee to the quiet, comfort, and safety of another place, the artist, the drug dealer cashing in his chips for a legal business, the ambitious new immigrant, the young college grad, the entrepreneur, move in and begin the urban story again. Free from the predetermined human and physical geography of a rural or small town community, we have a chance to design our own environment. In the end, the city, becomes not just a place but, as Brown University's Arnold Weinstein has suggested, "work being done."

We now comprehend the hazards of blithely pouring DDT over crops, slashing through treelands, or fouling the air. But we still act as thought we can, without penalty, wipe out neighborhoods, force mass migrations, rip out favorite meeting places for people, or tear down centers of communications, culture and commerce that are as important to a community as a marsh is to a flyway

One of the reasons liberals don't do better is because they use phrases like "urban sprawl" to describe the places where about half of America lives, most by some degree of choice. While there is nothing wrong with trying to encourage denser, less traffic dependent communities, it doesn't help to bad mouth all contrary communities while doing it. What is happening now is the suburban equivalent of the 1960s when liberals and urban planners disparaged inner city communities by calling them ghettos. Like Toronto planner Terry Fowler, one can speak of the importance of replacing mobility with access or of the advantages, with high fuel costs, of having more of what we need closer to where we live. People will respond to practical solutions far better than to vague goals disrespectful of their communities. The key point should not be to reach some abstract goal but to improve the life of communities affected by decades of poor urban planning. Many of these communities are already attractive places to live but suffer from transportation, shopping and energy inefficiencies. The key is to plan for the people who live there and not for the soulless desires of master plans. The next time you're tempted to use the word, just remember: it ain't sprawl, it's somebody's home.

Good urban economics would be the economics of small business, of self-generating economies, of cooperatives and of neighborhood-owned companies. It would be the economics of recycling money within the city, of making things other cities need, and of giving every resident a fair chance to make a buck.

The key to the economic revival of the older city is the development of these self-generating economies. The self-generating economy has a long history in America. Many of the country's early communities were largely self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency, however, disappeared with the concentration of industry and land ownership. In cities, one can easily find self--generating economies although we seldom recognize them as such. The explosion of the legal profession, for example, reflects in no small part the ability of lawyers to create jobs for each other. The yuppie phenomenon can be seen as a self-generating economy: yuppies creating artificial needs for other yuppies and with some selling and others buying items that fulfill these needs. The importance of such economies tends to be disregarded because they don't have the visible form of a single corporation or factory. Yet the impact can be dramatic. For example, if all of Washington's taxi drivers worked for a single company, they would form the largest firm in the city. You'd never guess it from public policy, which is far more concerned with the regulation of these activities than with the encouragement of them. They are treated more as a nuisance than an essential part of the economic life of the city. Thus, one of the few industries anyone in the city can enter without the vagaries of "personnel procedures" and without a college education is actively discouraged. . .

Citizen

THE QUESTION of whether we should give up our citizenship in favor of customerhood or being a taxpayer has never made it to the ballot. It doesn't have to. Like much political change these days, the idea has grown more by osmosis than by choice, the product of a "shared vision" among the elite, dutifully disseminated by a media that has lost much of its capacity for skepticism.

Clinton, Bill

One of the worst indictments of Clinton is that he has helped create a nation that is so pessimistic it believes Clinton is the best it can do.

Communications

IF YOU CHALLENGE the contemporary "communicator," you are likely to find the argument transformed from whatever you thought you were talking about to something quite different -- generally more abstract and grandiose. For example if you are opposed to the communicator's proposed policy on trade you may be accused of being against "change" or "fearful of new ideas" and so forth. There is an hyperbolic quality to this language that shatters one's normal sense of meaning. Simple competence is dubbed "a world-class operation," common efficiency is called "Total Quality Management," a conversation becomes "incredibly transforming," and a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals is called a "Renaissance" weekend.

"A breakdown in communications," if you listen carefully to the eleven o'clock news, is the source of all human problems viz: "Police officials blamed the accidental shooting of three orphans in a drug bust on 7th Street on a breakdown in communications." - Sam Smith.

Community

The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and the harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole.
Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.

Our own experiences with community may in large part represent something from which we have fled -- a fouled-up family, a stifling neighborhood, an oppressive religion -- rather than that which we seek. We may have declared, either consciously or unconsciously, never to go through that again. And so we look for maximum freedom and decline to make the trade-offs -- except, of course, when we are working, commuting, or buying those things that are supposed to make us free. In the end, ironically, we may find ourselves having mostly freed ourselves from voluntary associations. Those relationships, appointments, and activities required by our status, employment, or to pay for our totems of liberation, are not impeded at all by our declaration of independence; rather they sit there happily munching away at what we, with an increasing sense of nostalgia, call our "free" time.

Communities are easiest to build in times of stress or out of painful need. Impressive self-sufficient communities were constructed in New York's Harlem and Washington's Shaw in response to racial exclusion. Similarly, to many veterans, few communities can compete with the bonds created under fire. Yet wistful as such memories may be, few would really attempt to recover them by reviving segregation or going back to war.

Certainly, much of what we have come to think of as normal -- the huge city, the massive state university, the mega-corporation, the multi-day Phish concert with 90,000 in attendance -- is, in a historical and biological sense, not natural at all but rather human community on steroids. The business of fleeing bad, and of building good, smaller communities, with all the concomitant excitement, success, failure and ambivalence, remains key to our lives and our souls. The form changes over time -- new communities these days are often ones of belief and habit rather than of place. And, disappointing as it may seem to the producers and participants, MTV's Real World is actually a very old American story -- the story of strangers in a new place making that place theirs. Together.

Communities do things that individuals can't and things that institutions won't. From the friend who drives you home when you have had too much to drink, to farmers rebuilding a neighbor's barn after a tornado, people draw strength from others that is unavailable in isolation. And in the process, they become themselves.

Computers

It occurred to me, as I toiled away on the minutia of data retrieval, that the Luddite tradition was alive and well at Microsoft, only rather than the manufacturing equipment being the target, it is now the final product. And rather than destroying machinery in order to permit employees to retain old ways, Microsoft employees are destroying machines with delayed fuses in order to force the rest of us into new ways. They have taken the old scheme of planned obsolescence and combined it with chaos theory to create vicious and unpredictable interruptions in our lives. And because of the high volume of calls, they can't speak to us about it right now.

I know of no machine I have owned from my first Lionel train to my last car that ever displayed as many manifestations of ill health as the average computer. Further, while I have lost cars to thieves, collisions with errant cows, and old age, I have never had one crash in the totally inexplicable manner of a computer.

My wife tells me I am far too stingy about all this, but I can't get over the feeling that one of the world's richest men ought to be able to manufacture an operating system that lasts at least as long as my Plymouth minivan, which not only is happily in its seventh year but has outlasted its own brand name.

Instead, I am forced by the reverse Luddites of Microsoft to upgrade when all I want to do is just want to keep on trucking. I don't believe it is really Bill Gates' business to decide when I should improve my lot in life, and it is certainly not his privilege to do so in a totally unannounced fashion.

Congress

With the breakdown of the political parties and congressional autocracy, individual members of Congress have clearly gained independence, but they lack a concomitant growth in power. The condition can be described by analogy: if you go to a cathedral you are expected to keep the silence; if you go to a baseball stadium you may scream at will. In neither place, however, will your personal views attract much attention.

Conspiracy

Why are we allowed to have theories on every topic from the creation of the universe to who is going to win the World Series with the sole exception of wondering who in power is screwing us and how?

Cooperation

What we think of as culture and history is really a form of artificial evolution. While both cooperation and selfishness have deep roots in our genetic core, nothing in this core made inevitable the Civil War or the end of small pox, Martin Luther King or Margaret Thatcher. Human choices did that, choices that included deciding what tools, virtues, bludgeons or trickery to pull out of the overstuffed closet of humanness.

Corporations

The rise of corporations truly represented a counter-coup against the values of the American Revolution. It dramatically undermined both political and economic freedom, corrupted politicians and ransacked national assets. It replaced the feudalism of the monarchy with the feudalism of the corporation.

Corruption

1. Hit the corrupters at least as hard as the corruptees. The real danger in corruption is what the bribe buys, not the soul of the bought politician (which probably never was in that great a shape anyway).

2. The worst corruption tends to be legal, therefore hardly anyone notices it. Remember that corrupt not only means dishonest, it also means without integrity. In most jurisdictions the latter is not a violation of the law.

3. Just because the corruption is legal doesn't mean you have to accept it. Martin Luther didn't -- and so helped to reform a little church-run protection racket known as indulgences.

4. Simply because corruption is bad, don't assume all reforms are good.

5. If forced to choose between minor corruption and major incompetence, take the former. It's cheaper and easier to live with.

6. Favor corruption that is well distributed-- that gets down to the street over that which only favors a few. Thus: reform zoning policies before you worry about parking tickets.

[]

We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.

Crats

The people running America, its politics, its media and its corporations, might well be called crats, after the semantic fantail signifying members of a ruling body -- as in plutocrats, autocrats, mediacrats, technocrats, and bureaucrats, just to name a few.

Crats are characterized by their loyalty to institutional and professional procedures and values above all else. Unlike normal humans, which have to be cloned in order to be copied, crats imitate each other by choice. This is why one can gain a sense of deja vu even before completing one zapper cycle on cable TV.

Culture

A culture may define the four winds as persons under certain circumstances, it may also define a slave or someone from another tribe as not a person at all. Nonetheless the slave or the outsider really exist so at some level are treated as a person anyway. Hence people in such societies may trade goods with the stranger or attempt to convert the slave to Christianity even though they are not considered human. Or the society may try to quantify such anomalies as Americans did when they declared a black legally equal to three-fifths of a white person. Or it may create a hierarchy as Aristotle did when he confidently declared that "the deliberative faculty in the soul is not present at all in a slave: in a female is present but ineffective, in a child present but undeveloped." Or it may declare that "all men are created equal" but really mean only white male property owners. Or it may fight a revolution for liberty but leave women as chattel. Or the culture can painfully change such values over two centuries and still have to go repeatedly to court to fight over what was really meant by the change.

While the range of choices, values, and constraints among cultures is stunning in its variety, it is impossible to find a functioning society in which choices have not been made. Similarly, though individuals may reject society and even design their own micro-cultures, they are no less dependent on their decisions, whether conscious or not. To not make them is to drift aimlessly and lifelessly, pushed this way or that by others quite anxious and ready to make choices for you. Unfortunately, we receive little instruction in how to deal with this. Anthropologists, other academics, and journalists prefer to aggregate individual variety into something both grander and simpler, politely known as a culture, paradigm, ideology, or trend, or (if you don't care for the resulting generalizations) a stereotype. Thus we have little sense of what it is like to be a punk Buddhist, a Hindu convert to Unitarianism or a follower of both Confucianism as well as the Dallas Cowboys. The mere number of cultural traits and values available for adoption in a world in which the grandchildren of Margaret Mead's anthropological subjects watch MTV has engorged us with possibilities.

As we become more aware of our options - or more sophisticated, as we like to call it -- the choices we have already made, or have been made for us, may lose their allure and we can find ourselves wandering in a cultural void somewhere between the Trobriand Islands and Trenton. A detachment from one's indigenous culture can set in, a trait observable in diplomats, military personnel, international business executives, and anthropologists. It is not that they are without a culture, rather theirs becomes a culture that lacks place. This can have some odd results, such as the anthropologist's high school daughter who begged that the family at least stay in the US her senior year so she would have a room to remember as "home" when she went to college. One of the things driving such restlessness is an assumption that our own culture must inevitably be locked in combat with our own nature. In drawing this conclusion we may place inordinate emphasis on the faults of our parents, the sins of the marketplace, racism, and the "oppression of the system." This is not to say that these wrongs do not exist and need not be confronted, only that they hardly define the whole of our culture's influence on us. As Americans, for example, it tells nothing of values of pragmatism, fairness, reinvention, and freedom that have survived the worst years of our collective experience.

One response to society's assault of human variation is the creation of an "identity," around which the icons, values, and artifacts of a culture are consciously built. Identity cultures -- such as the black, lesbian or disabled "community" -- are intentionally designed to end discrimination but perhaps also are unconsciously part of a broader reaction to the threat against culture itself. Many may feel the need for an identity not merely because of prejudice against their ethnicity, but against the biggest race of all, the human one. The obvious advantage of identity culture is the protection of a group. The less obvious disadvantage is that over-emphasis on one's status, sex, or ethnicity can be just as much an obstacle to individualism as, say, loyalty to the corporate culture. It converts context into classification. When someone stands up in a meeting and says, "Speaking as a gay Jew. . ." they are defining themselves as far less than they really are.

Our culture feels like a bad craft fair where everything you see seems to have been made before, only better.

Despite the improved economic and social status of women and minorities, despite decades of economic progress, despite Velcro, SUVs, MTV, NASA, DVD, cell phones, and the Internet you can't raise a majority that is proud of this country. We neither enjoy our myths nor our reality. We hate our politicians, ignore our moral voices, and distrust our media. We have destroyed natural habitats, created the nation's first downwardly mobile generation, stagnated their parent's income, and removed the jobs of each to distant lands. We have created rapacious oligopolies of defense and medicine, frittered away public revenues and watched indifferently as, around the world, the homeless and the miserable pile up.

Our leaders and the media speak less and less of freedom, democracy, justice, or of their own land. Perhaps most telling, we are no longer able to react, but only to gawk.

Too be sure, many of the symbols of America remain, but they have become crude -- desperately or only commercially imitative of something that has faded. We still stand for the Star Spangled Banner, but we no longer know what to do while on our feet. We still subscribe to the morning paper but it reads like stale beer. And some of us even still vote, but expect ever less in return. Where once we failed to practice our principles, now we no longer even profess to honor them.

An awfulness is drifting over us. Too many have become obsessed with what we should ignore and ignore what we should celebrate or fear. Too many have lost the capacity for either grace or decency, preferring instead tricks and treachery.

A culture that has so lost its way and forgotten so much is not the same as a flawed society bumbling through history trying to make itself better. Worst of all, such a fallen society lays the burden of its own failure upon each of us. Just as a strong culture buoys the individual and provides a stage upon which the brave, the compassionate, and the imaginative can act, so a craven, crumbling culture makes every act of individual will that much harder.

Culture of impunity

IN A CULTURE OF IMPUIITY, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition. The culture of impunity encourages coups and cruelty, and at best practices only titular democracy. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself.

In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught.

Democracy

One can not tell how much longer America has before it gives up on democracy completely. What we can say, however, is that the road has gotten much shorter.

THE DEMOCRATIC FRANCHISE, while greatly broadened from a time when only propertied white males could vote, has lost its depth. We have, in effect, more people sharing less power. Take, for example, the New England town meeting, often cited as a model of direct democracy, in which each enfranchised resident had a voice and a vote in the proceedings of the community. By the 1990s the term's meaning had been completely turned on its head: now it is a meeting, perhaps nationally televised, in which citizens of a remote, impermeable government listen to, and are cynically manipulated by, an official or candidate. All three key elements of the original town meeting -- community, decentralized power and direct democracy -- have decayed and disappeared. Other traditional signs of a vibrant democracy have been either distorted or enfeebled. We are apathetic in our voting, removed from our representatives, regularly deceived in our discussions and ineffectual in our efforts to change our conditions.

WE CAN not be free if we can not retrieve the part of politics that once made it a natural, integral and pleasurable part of our lives, and if it now becomes so distant or so dirty or so cruel that we would rather not even think or speak about it. Someone else, to our great danger, will fill our silence.

About the most important job of a democracy -- next to serving its people -- is to make sure it stays a democracy. Forms of government don't have tenure, and governments that rely on the consent of the governed -- rather than, say, on tanks and prisons -- particularly require constant tending. As things now stand, we could easily become the first people in history to lose democracy and its constitutional freedoms simply because we have forgotten what they are about.

One of the best ways to revive democracy in our country is to make sure that every organization, church, school, or club is run according to its principles.

THE MAJOR POLITICAL struggle has become not between conservative and liberal but between ourselves and our political, economic, social and media elites. Between the toxic and the natural, the corporate and the communal, the technocratic and the human, the competitive and the cooperative, the efficient and the just, meaningless data and meaningful understanding, the destructive and the decent.

TODAY ALMOST every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government.

WHY WOULD a hard-won democracy willingly drift in such a direction? One reason is that if one is going to tolerate a growing divide between rich and poor, between those with power and those without, it is necessary to deal with the anger and alienation that results. If the traditional democratic approach -- making the system fairer -- is ruled out, then some form of oppression is required.

Democratic Party

The problem with the Democrats is that their contributors and their constituents don't agree.

I left the Democratic Party because I didn't want to be liable under the RICO statute.

Despair

The most common reaction to despair may be no more dramatic than a sense of boredom, of apathy, and indifference. In many ways, this is precisely the response our culture would prefer. It makes us ideal consumers of experience and excitement and assures that we won't interfere with the flow of goods and services by introducing novel notions of how society might be better rearranged.

To view our times as decadent and dangerous, to mistrust the government, to imagine that those in power as not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture suggests otherwise. But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer is this: despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us, there still remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its possibilities To despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut. The task is to bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves, to challenge the wrong without ending up on its casualty list.

Devolution

What works so well in the manufacture of a Ford Taurus -- efficiency of scale and mass production -- fails to work in social policy because, unlike a Taurus, humans think, cry, love, get distracted, criticize, worry or don't give a shit. Yet we keep acting as though such traits don't exist or don't matter. We have come to accept the notion that the enormous institutions of government, media, industry and academia are natural to the human condition and then wonder why they don't work better than they do. In fact, as ecological planner Ernest Callenbach pointed out, "we are medium-sized animals who naturally live in small groups -- perhaps 20 or so -- as opposed to bees or antelopes who live in very large groups. When managers or generals or architects force us into large groups, we speedily try to break them down into sub-units of comfortable size."

All of our systems appear to be on steroids. And like the drugged athlete, nature eventually pulls the plug. The institutions that have imposed a tyranny of size upon us not only fail to accomplish what they set out to do but are themselves disintegrating.

Doubt

If we had been born in a time in which the therapy for doubt was punishment, even death, we would not be in such a fix. We would thank or fear whatever gods may be and go about our business if not happily at least with certitude. But the gift of decriminalized doubt changed all that. We are now free to be wrong by our own hand, to not know -- worse, to have nothing and no one to blame.
That's why there are so many attempts to put the question marks safely back into the box, to recapture the illusion of security found in circumscribed knowledge, to shut down that fleeting moment of human existence in which at least some thought they could do the work of kings and gods, that glimpse of possibility we thought would be an endless future.

It is seductively attractive to return to certainty at whatever cost, to a time when one's every act carried its own explanation in the rules of the universe or of the system or of the village. From the Old Testament to neo-Nazism, humans have repeatedly found shelter in absolutes and there is nothing in our evolution to suggest we have lost the inclination, save during those extraordinary moments when a wanderer, a stranger, a rebel picks up some flotsam and says, "Hey, something's wrong here. . ." And those of us just standing around say, "You know, you've got something there." And we become truly human once more as we figure out for ourselves, and among ourselves, what to do about it.

No one seeks doubt, yet without it we become just one more coded creature moving through nature under perpetual instruction. Doubt is the price we pay for being able to think, play, pray and feel the way we wish, if, of course, we can decide what that is. Which is why freedom always has so many more questions than slavery. Which is why democracy is so noisy and messy and why love so often confounds us.

If we are not willing to surrender our freedom, then we must accept the hard work that holding on to it entails including the nagging sense that we may not be doing it right after all; that we may not be rewarded even if we do it right; and that we will never know whether we have or not.

Drugs

The illegal drug trade is estimated to be about the size of the legal pharmaceutical business. If you believe what you read and hear in the media, the drug trade must be the most honest business going since it never has lobbyists working Washington, it never contributes to political campaigns, it never bribes a politician, it never runs PAC ads to get its way. In fact, where politics are involved, it never seems to do anything illegal.

Ecology

Ecologist Donella Meadows pointed out that if a water lily doubling in size each day could eventually cover a pond in 30 days, half that growth would occur on the 29th day. Do you know what day it is for the climate?

A POKER PLAYER'S GUIDE TO THE ENVIRONMENT

1. Calculate the stakes as well as the odds.

2. The odds of something happening at any moment are not the same as the odds of something ever happening. In ecological calculations -- especially ones in which the downside could ruin your whole millennium -- it is the latter odds that are important.

3. When confronted with conflicting odds, ask what happens if each projection is wrong. Temporary job loss because of environmental restrictions may come and go, but the loss of the ozone layer is something you can have forever.

4. When confronted with conflicting odds, remember that you don't have to play the game. There are other things to do with your time -- or with the economy or with the environment -- that may produce better results. Thus, instead of playing poker you could be making love. Or instead of getting jobs from some air or water degrading activity, the same jobs could come from more benign industry such as retrofitting a whole city for solar energy.

5. Don't let anyone -- in industry, government, or the media -- define an "acceptable level of risk" for your own death or disease. They may not have the same vested interest in the right answer as you do.

6. If the stakes are too high, the game is not worth it. If you can't stand the pain, don't attempt the gain.

Economics

Economists are fundamentlists who believe in mony instead of in Jesus.

As with every society that has ever existed, our economy is not only a conglomerate, but a part of, and dependent upon, a huge number of values, rules, systems, and characteristics that comprise a culture. We can no more isolate the use of money or labor from these factors than we could declare society to be henceforth based on the free lunch.

Fortunately, economists discovered money as an organizing principle rather than, say, defecation. Otherwise we would have a really gross national product.

An era that has been devoted to the free market has simultaneously been the most intrusive in our history. In the name of a free market we have indentured ourselves to a government overflowing in other regards with contempt for personal liberty. In many ways, concepts such as the "market economy" and "monetarism" have actually gilded the lily of power they pretend to oppose. They provide a comfortable cover for what the government has really been about.

Thatcher wrapped herself in economic slogans that justified greed not only to accomplish economic ends but also to deal with gays and abortions and everything else she didn't like. In her paradigm, the free market and Victorian tyranny formed a civil union. By the time Reagan, Bush, and Clinton were through with the concept, they had created a gaping corporate exemption from common morality and decency. The market not only offered adequate justification for any act, it had replaced God as the highest source of law.

Until the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era it would have been next to impossible to find a culture that survived for long believing that the unfettered, rapacious flow of money and goods was the core of human existence. Elsewhere, to be sure, commerce had looked to bottom lines, but these had included those established by church, community, government, and tradition.

I can usually stop an eruption of Marxist rhetoric for at least a few minutes by asking the simple question: who will run the restaurants in utopia? I find few people even on the hard left who wish to eat and drink the product of collectivism for the rest of their lives.

Behind much of our angst is an economy that has separated even its own practitioners from the support, sense, discipline, and integrity that comes from blending one's ambitions and values with those of others and from knowing and accepting that in economics, as in ecology, there is still no free lunch.

Marxists and capitalists share an obsession with money and a taste for clichéd mantras about it. They also share a willingness to reduce the complexity of human existence to just a couple of choices.

Elite

We need a trial to judge all those who bear significant responsibility for the 20th century - the most murderous and ecologically destructive in human history. We could call it the war, air and fiscal crimes tribunal and we could put politicians and CEOs and major media owners in the dock with earphones like Eichmann and make them listen to the evidence of howthey killed millions of people and almost murdered the planet and made most of us far more miserable than we needed to be. Of course, we wouldn't have time to go after them one by one. We'd have to lump Wall Street investment bankers in one trial, the Council on Foreign Relations in another, and any remaining Harvard Business School or Yale Law graduates in a third. We don't need this for retribution, only for edification. So there would be no capital punishment, but rather banishment to an overseas Nike factory with a vow of perpetual silence.

Any elite that talked endlessly about the challenges of the first half of the 21st century and then forgot to put the year 2000 into their computer programs should be asked to resign.

Some day our leaders may again be as good as our firefighters.

Among the powerful, "mistakes were made" but no one has to admit that they were the ones who made them. Instead, the elite rises as one to pronounce it not the time for blame, but rather for moving forward together into the future and putting this or that "behind us." Everyone nods their heads and the foxes are allowed back into the chicken house one more time.

Like a hit and run driver, America's elite has left the scene of the accident. More and more, those who run this country have the character of wealthy, isolated strangers -- armed but afraid, intrusive yet indifferent, personally profligate but politically penurious, priggish in rhetoric yet corrupt in action. No longer does national myth connect them with the greater mass of America. Nor, any longer, does politics separate them from each other; Republicans and Democrats have become, rather than choices, degrees of the same dismal thing.

One of the greatest myths of America's elite is that it functions by logic and reason and that it is devoid of myth. In truth, elites function like other people; they choose their gods and worship them. The gods, to be sure, are different. For example, many in Washington believe fervently in the sanctity of data, the Ivy League, the New York Times op pages and the Calvinist notion that their power is an outward, visible sign of an inner, invisible grace. And some, even while professing to be without myth, spend their lives creating myths for others. We call them political consultants and ghostwriters.

The old elite, in its purest form, went to Ivy schools, practiced law or investments, and belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations. The new elite has been raised in the groves of advertising, marketing and focus groups, and is representative not of its legislative districts but of the largest trade associations. Its members speak not American but postmodern Orwellian. Listening to their rhetoric is like being trapped at table 129 -- with a bursting bladder and all the doors locked -- during a never-endng congressional dinner of the Asbestos Manufacturers Association. The members of this new elite may be different, yet by income, attitude and isolation, they are every bit as elitist as those they have expelled.

This old elite particularly prided itself in its wisdom and intelligence, but its greatest true skill was the successful circumnavigation of collective guilt. No embarrassment was too great, no crisis too unnecessary, no expense too inexplicable, and no war too unjustified, that it became ashamed. Instead, its members would rise as one to pronounce it not the time for blame, but rather for moving forward together into the future. Everyone would nod their heads and the foxes would renovate the chicken house once more.

Psychologically impervious to either misfortune or fact, this elite never felt any need for rigorous self-examination. When things got truly out of hand, as when a president was assassinated, a blue ribbon investigation would be called, producing a ritual of introspection that, almost without exception, came to conclusions that were faulty, incomplete or deliberately deceptive.

When members of the elite faltered -- a Kissinger, Helms, McNamara, Abrams and so forth -- their peers moved quickly to protect, rehabilitate and restore them to the pantheon of the wise. Given that more than ten percent of the Council on Foreign Relations -- a sort of Elks Club for the tenured elite -- is composed of journalists, it is not surprising to find the latter often serving as EMTs, reviving some beloved source suffering a momentary attack of imperfection. This service was not, of course, provided to all. For example, surgeons general from the lesser ethnic groups could not expect rehabilitation, nor could individuals whose misdeeds were personal rather than merely an abrogation of the Constitution.

Empire

Unfortunately, complex failing systems have little capacity to save themselves. In part this is because the solutions come from the same source as the problem. The public rarely questions the common provenance; official Washington and the media honor it. Even a failure as miserable as that of Vietnam had little effect on the careers of its major protagonists, those men who not only were wrong but were wrong at the cost of 50,000 American lives. They remain quoted copiously, cited as experts and transmogrified into statesmen.

Entropy

Global dumbing involves the virtually imperceptible but steady deterioration of the aggregate human mind -- as well as of its institutions -- much as the temperature of the earth is apparently rising at a rate so minuscule that scientists will be still be debating its escalation even as the waters of the Atlantic Ocean lap at the potted plants in the lobby of the Trump Plaza. In fact, global warming and global dumbing are intimately connected. Without the latter, something actually might be done before that portion of Washington below the fall line of the Potomac is totally submerged. And like global warming, global dumbing concerns itself with losses incurred by energy transfers and nature's ceaseless quest for the random equilibrium of chaos. It is, in short, the entropy of the human spirit and of the systems it has created.

In earlier times, it was possible to avoid cultural entropy by stealing energy from somewhere else. This, of course, was the foundation of slave trade, the British Empire and various new world orders of the first half of 20th century. While it still goes on, energy theft has become more difficult as the world has steadily lost its cultural, political, environmental and economic differentiation.

A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product is wasted energy. Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout.

Fortunately there is no evidence that global dumbing has entered the human gene pool. Nature, before people began fiddling with it, handled the problem rather neatly by regularly killing off the entropic and giving birth to new life and energy. I find considerable comfort in the fact that I have never seen a small child facilitate anything nor one enamored of process in any form. Instead, they like to make things, do things, laugh and sing. Thus I strongly suspect that we have just taught ourselves to be dumb and, however difficult, it remains possible to re-educate ourselves, even if it means going back to kindergarten to learn how.

If global dumbing is not halted, we may wake up one morning and find that no one in this country knows how to make anything anymore. We may discover our dearest friends and relatives in a catatonic state before the TV and the device won't even be on. When we call for help we may find that 911 has become an endless loop voice mail system from which one can never disconnect. We may even, some day, elect a hologram as president -- and we'll be too dumb to realize it.

Ethnicity

It is hard to imagine a non-discriminatory, unprejudiced society in which race and sex matter much. Yet in our efforts to reach that goal, our society and its institutions constantly send the conflicting message that they are extremely important.

Many attempts to eradicate racism from our society have been based on the notion that those who harbor prejudice towards others are abnormal and social deviants. Further, we often describe these "deviants" only in terms of their overt antipathies -- they are "anti-Semitic" or guilty of "hate." In fact, once you have determined yourself to be human and others less so, you need not hate them any more than you need despise the fish you eat for dinner. This is why those who participate in genocide can do so with such calm -- they have defined their targets as outside of humanity.

What if, instead, we were to start with the unhappy truth that humans have always had a hard time dealing with other peoples, and that much ethnic and sexual antagonism stems not from hate so much as from cultural narcissism? Then our repertoire of solutions might tilt more towards education and mediation and away from being self-righteous multi-cultural missionaries converting yahoos in the wilds of the soul. We could turn towards something more akin to what Andrew Young once described as a sense of "no fault justice." We might begin to consider seriously Martin Luther King's admonition to his colleagues that among their dreams should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.

Just by dint of exposure to TV, it is virtually impossible to live in America and not have absorbed aspects of other cultures. We all, in effect, belong to a part-culture, which is to say that our ethnicity is somewhat defined by its relationship to, and borrowing from, other cultures. There are almost no pure anythings in America anymore. The sooner we accept and enjoy this, the better off we'll be.

Remember that everyone is an ethnic something. There are no unethnic Americans.

In the end, how well we get along will be decided not by our cultural differences but by the significance we place upon them. We may all be creatures of our own culture, but we are also all free to determine just what that means. Most important, the future is the one culture -- for better or worse -- we will all inevitably share and all help to make. We are, each of us, brothers and sisters in the tribe of tomorrow.

Evolution

Let's go to a time and place so distant that no one knows when or where it was, a time and place whose importance is as infinite as its obscurity. The moment we are seeking is the one during which a single individual, or a small group of individuals, did something so unusual that it helped free their ilk forever from the shackles of the environment and genetics -- grabbing destiny from the tree of nature and making it human. This extraordinary coup against the unknown was the simple taming of fire, the stealing of light and heat from a cryptic, tyrannical universe, transforming it into a matter of personal choice. No subsequent human event would be more important yet the names and descriptions of the suspects are still unknown.

On the first day of my freshman anthropology class, the professor drew an invisible evolutionary time line on the wall of the lecture hall. As we twisted in our seats the eras, periods, and epochs of musical name and mystical significance boldly circumscribed the room. Finally we came back to where the professor stood and when there was nearly no place further to go, he announced that this was the beginnings of us. We were only inches from the fire maker.

Existentialism

The existential spirit, its willingness to struggle in the dark to serve truth rather than power, to seek the hat trick of integrity, passion and rebellion, is peculiarly suited to our times. We need no more town meetings, no more expertise, no more public interest activists playing technocratic chess with government bureaucrats, no more changes in paragraph 324B of an ineffectual law, no more talking heads. We need to think the unthinkable even when the possible is undoable, the ideal is unimaginable, when power overwhelms truth, when compulsion replaces choice. We need to lift our eyes from the bottom line unto the hills, from the screen to the sky, from the adjacent to the hazy horizon.

Experts

All expertise is filtered through the prejudices, beliefs, culture and presumptions of those who possess it. For example, one reason it is so difficult to get economic policies that benefit ordinary people is because ordinary people can't afford to hire an economist. Corporations and governments can.

Fascism

WHY IS IT safer to say "fuck" than to say "fascism?" One of the curiosities of post-cold-war rhetoric is that we no longer have a term for those who practice ideologies antithetical to democracy. Current American foreign policy seems aimed at turning incompetent communists into competent fascists. One American politician once put it this way: "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." Would such a radical be allowed on Sunday morning talk shows today? Probably not, even though his name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Facts

Facts have became obsolete. They are at best a filler between arguments on TV about what really matters -- perception and image. Facts are background noise at a news conference, multi-colored jimmies on scoops of policy and just plain annoying in private conversation.

Faith

WHAT this country needs is more people of faith: faith in the Constitution, in democracy, in fairness, and in common sense.

IT HAS been wisely said that "hope don't pay the cable," and faith is too often just another drug, producing hallucinogenic visions of a flawless future. This is not to reject either, but rather to return them to their rightful role, that of planting seeds of possibility rather than sowing false prospects.

Fear

Making some people afraid of other people is one of the best ways to control all of them.

While the reach of modern media should make us all more cosmopolitan, it often doesn't work like that. This is in part because of what we choose to watch and in part because what is chosen for us to see. TV's typical view of the outside world is of a place rife with danger. Talk shows and programs like Cops can make it feel like you're under siege. CNN constantly scans the world for new battlegrounds. Before television, you got most of the bad news from your own town and neighborhood. Now you can get bad news from any part of the globe, any time of day or night. It's hard not to worry.

Fifties

They called my generation the "silent" one, the one America skipped in moving from George Bush to Bill Clinton. Maybe some of us were quiet because we were trying to figure out how to avoid becoming the man in the gray flannel suit or part of the lonely crowd. The struggle, we thought, was about individuality and no one spoke of movements. Our cultural heroes didn't organize anything. They hit the road. Our goal wasn't to overthrow the establishment, someone would say a decade later, but to make it irrelevant. Or, like Miles Davis in concert, play with your back to it. In the 1960s, when we were in our 30s, we were told that we already were too old to be trusted. It wasn't really true; in many ways the 60s was just the mass movement of something that had started in the 50s with our coffee houses, music and conscious political apathy.

Some of us made Humphrey Bogart an anti-hero in part, I think, because we already suspected that America was our own Casablanca, a place of seductive illusions and baroque deceptions, where nothing was at it appeared. After all, we had been taught that if we crawled under our desks, we would be safe from The Bomb. Even our teachers lied to us. Bogie knew how to live in a time of lies.

I would like to apologize on behalf of my generation. Even members of Confederacy had the grace to secede from the union; my generation has remained within like a deadly virus, subverting it, shaming it, screwing it, stealing from it, and finally strangling it. It will likely be known as the worst generation - the one that brought the First American Republic down - unmatched in the damage it has done to the Constitution, the environment, and a two century struggle to create a society democratic and decent in its politics, economics, and social concourse. To be sure, when we were young we were, as we said then, somethin' else. We launched the civil rights, women's, gay, and environmental movements, not to mention creating some memorable music before descending into disco. Soon other things started to go downhill rapidly. We became not only the generation that invented the phrase, 'never trust anyone over thirty,' we proved it.

First American Republic

The collapse of the First American Republic has been due to four major factors:

- Margaret Thatcher, personal brain coach to Ronald Reagan, who started America's disintegration. Reagan wasn't bright enough to do it without her.

- The Harvard Business School, which taught its students that you didn't have to know anything about what you were managing and which turned the once ridiculed Organization Man into a sex symbol.

- The Yale Law School which produced such decadent figures as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas.

- The Kennedy School of Government which has allowed the Harvard faculty to foul up American domestic politics much as it did our foreign policy during the Vietnam era. The mechanism is a subtle one, It serves as a sort of covert Jonestown where potentially rebellious activists are enticed to Cambridge by grants in order to drink intellectual Kool-Aid and never again truly threaten the establishment. Fortunately, the Kennedy School was not around when Frederic Douglass, Eugene Debs, Ralph Nader, and Martin Luther King were getting started, so America actually made progress in its first two centuries or so.

Fixing things

1. Fix your country or your community, not the "system."

2. Don't say you can't beat city hall until you've tried. And then tried again, using a new idea.

3. Think of new solutions, not new rules.

4. Don't make it uncomfortable for others to offer new ideas.

5. Don't worry about political labels. Be ahead rather than left or right.

6. Don't blame the weak for trouble caused by the strong.

7. Don't do the same thing over and over again -- and expect anything different to happen.

8. Think laterally. Imagine the solution you want and then figure out how to get there. Experiment.

9. Don't be afraid of making mistakes along the way.

10. Use your experts and not theirs. If you can't find an expert, become one yourself.

Food

I believe in a modified version of the end-of-history theory, namely that most good combinations of foods have already been discovered. Thus ordering mahi-mahi baked in blueberry jam with a sawdust glaze is probably not a good idea.

Freedom

We are clearly in a post-constitutional era; the end of the First American Republic. Depending on what day it is we think of its replacement variously - ranging from an adhocracy to proto-fascism. But one does not need to know the end of the story to know that we headed at a rapid pace away from the extraordinary principles of American democracy towards the dark hole of power with impunity.

Every time an American decides that it is too dangerous to exercise a freedom, that freedom is diminished. The first rule of staying free is to act free.

The most necessary work of anyone who wishes to be free themselves is to protect the freedom of everyone around them.

Free markets

On Wall Street there are plenty of free lunches but no free markets. Generally speaking, the smaller the business the more it resembles the great myths of capitalism. If you want to find out what free enterprise is really about talk to a street vendor and not a Fortune 500 executive.

One of the reasons a free market is so hard to come by is because it has never existed.

Free thinker

As far as the government and the media are concerned, the world's fourth largest belief system doesn't exist. By one count, In number of adherents it's behind Christianity, Islam and Buddhism but ahead of Hinduism. Globally it's 85% the size of Catholicism and in America just a little smaller than Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Lutherans put together. Perhaps most astoundingly, given today's politics, in the U.S. it is roughly the size of the Southern Baptist congregation. Another count puts it in third place with Buddhism a distant 6th. Its leaders, however, are not invited to open Senate sessions. Our politicians do not quote them and our news shows do not interview them. And while it is a sin, if not a crime, to be anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic, disparaging this faith is not only permitted, it is publicly encouraged. The media acts as though it doesn't exist. You'd need an exceptional lawyer to sue your employer for ridiculing your belief in it. Its adherents are repeatedly and explicitly excluded from the category of "people of faith" even though they are among the most steadfast and well-grounded in their beliefs. Finally, if one of its major figures dies, you will probably not read about it, let alone find the president, two ex-presidents and a couple of network anchors flying off for the service. So completely is this belief system excluded from our national consciousness that we do not even have a name for it. So let's give it one: shafarism - standing for secularism, humanism, atheism, free thought, agnosticism, and rationalism. Shafars are 850 million people around the globe and at least 20 million at home who are ignored, insulted, or commonly considered less worthy than those who adhere to faiths based on mythology and folklore rather than on logic, empiricism, verifiable history, and science.

Mythologies - religious and secular - have often made humans better and, at times, saved them in ways that rationality simply couldn't. They have prevented suicides, preserved families, rescued drunks, and helped others climb mountains. But that is not the issue. The issue is whether religious faith should be allowed to intrude with impunity in such secular areas as politics or science and still claim the protection of reverence and law. Once Southern Baptists, Catholics, Jews or Muslims enter the political arena, they are no more entitled to special protection or regulated rhetoric than a Democrat or a Republican.

We need both faith and doubt, myth and science, but this yin and yang can not work if only faith and myth are allowed to sing in public places. We need to celebrate not just Christmas and Hanukah but the daily faith of the Seventh Day Agnostic and of the free thinker. The existentialist needs to be treated as respectfully as the evangelical, the skeptic as well as the fundamentalist. And we need to hear the wise words of secular philosophers as well as those of Jesus Christ. Before unexamined religious faith causes more death and misery we should at least allow doubt, logic, and secular solutions to sit at the table and raise their voice.

French

ON THIS BASTILLE DAY, a thank you to the much maligned French. They helped us win our best war - the Revolution - and tried mightily to keep us out of two of our worst - Vietnam and Iraq.

Future

We may not have an awful lot of time left. The cynical cruelties of those who lead us are not subsiding. The media has failed us, much of the church remains silent, and the intelligentsia willingly conspires with those in power. In such a time we must find allies not only among ourselves but among strangers, in unlikely ways and in unlikely places. And above all, we must each in our own way avoid the surrender of silence.

How we move from values to action and thence to influence is hard to conceive, but it may help to remember that each honest heart is a political organization in waiting. If it remains silent out of fear, lethargy, or embarrassment, it becomes another locked-up vote for the status quo. All over this country people are being abused by those in power. Their stories must be told and those who tell them must say that these stories are bad stories, even if this is the only power they possess. Movements are, at their core, just people discovering that they think the same thing and finally getting the courage to say it and do something together.

If we accept the apparently inevitable - that is, the future as marketed to us by the media and our leaders -- than we become merely the audience for our own demise. Our society today teaches us in so many ways that matters are preordained: you can't have a pay raise because it will cause inflation, you are entitled to run the country because you went to Yale, you are shiftless because you are poor; there is nothing you can do to change what you see on TV. Campaign finance reform is hopeless. You may not act in a moral fashion because you will look foolish; you may not take action because you might offend someone; and you may not govern -- you may only balance the budget. . .

And what if we follow this advice and these messages? If you and I do nothing, say nothing, risk nothing, then current trends will probably continue in which case we can expect over the next decade or so: More corruption, a wealthier and more isolated upper class, more homelessness, increased militarization, a growth in censorship, less privacy, further loss of constitutional protections, a decline in the standard of living, fewer corporations owning more media, greatly increased traffic jams, more waits for services and entertainment, more illness from toxic chemicals, more influence by drug lords, more climatic instability, fewer beaches, more violence, more segregation, more propaganda, less responsive government, less power for legislatures, more for bureaucrats, less truth, less space, less democracy, less happiness. . . .

But what if, on the other hand, we recognize that the future of our society and our planet will in large part simply represent the aggregate of human choices made between now and then? Then we can stop being passive spectators and become actors -- even more, we start to rewrite the play. We can become the hope we are looking for.

But we are not strong enough to be our own hope, you say. Then tell me how often has positive social or political change ever come about thanks to the beneficence, wisdom and imagination of those in power. Now tell me when it has come about thanks to the persistence of small, committed, weak groups of people willing to fail over long periods of time until that rare, wonderful moment when the dam of oppression, obstinacy and obtuseness finally cracks and those in power finally accept what the people have been saying all along.

The key to both a better future and our own continuous faith in one is the constant, conscious exercise of choice even in the face of absurdity, uncertainty and daunting odds. We are constantly led, coaxed and ordered away from such a practice. We are taught to respect power rather than conscience, the grand rather than the good, the acquisition rather than the discovery. The green glasses rather than our own unimpeded vision. Oz rather than Kansas.

Any effort on behalf of human or ecological justice and wisdom demands real courage rather than false optimism, and responsibility even in times of utter madness, even in times when decadence outpolls decency, even in times when responsibility itself is ridiculed as the archaic behavior of the weak and naive.

There is far more to this than personal witness. In fact, it is when we learn to share our witness with others -- in politics, in music, in rebellion, in conversation, in love -- that what starts as singular testimony can end in mass transformation. Here then is the real possibility: that we are building something important even if it remains invisible to us. And here then is the real story: that even without the hope that such a thing is really happening there is nothing better for us to do than to act as if it is -- or cou

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