If I can't dance . . .

. . . I don't want to be part of your revolution. Emma Goldman, anyway something like that, I think. Question might be, is Fredonia Heritage Day part of our revolution? I want to think so. We just did the 5th annual, November 9. You had to be there. Thanks much, Andy, for being there! Here's a taste of the dancing part. But first the other appropriate quotation:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

          –William Butler Yeats, Among School Children

(There is another appropriate poem, by Cynthia Claire Allen, that I might put up here, but I would have to get permission.)

  

Berry-picking a basic human right?

I've been reading Dmitry Orlov's latest book, The Five Stages of Collapse, and following his Club Orlov blog. Highly recommended. Today I just want to pass on some brief excerpts from his latest blog post, available at: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2013/10/communities-that-abide-finland.html

It's a guest post by Eerik Wissenz, about how Finland as a society addresses "the public good." Highly un-American, to say the least. If you are at all intrigued, go read the whole post.

Communities that abide: Finland

By every standard measure of success, Finland is a success. In international rankings of countries across many categories it is consistently near the top, which is quite a feat for a small country near the Arctic Circle with a long history of foreign occupation and domination, with little fossil fuels.

Finnish culture continuously debates the public good and the conclusions of this discussion are translated into political platforms, laws and administrative programs. . . . Some of these good decisions were made possibly millennia ago and are enshrined in the structure of the Finnish language itself, which is the bedrock of Finnish culture. One of them was the evolution of a gender-neutral language: in Finnish, there is no way to distinguish “he” from “she”; the word hän refers generically to everyone. This has helped Finland to build one of the most gender-equal societies in the world, and one of the best in terms of outcomes for women. It turns out that gender equality allows fewer artificial privileges and offers fewer opportunities for creating “old boy networks” that maintain artificial privileges while undermining the public good.

The most direct and also the most highly symbolic implementation of the logic of the public good is something that Finns call jokamiehenoikeus or “every person's rights.” . . . Very simply, the law of the land allows anyone to travel across, camp and pick berries on anyone else's land. That is, all Finnish territory is Finnish society's land. Finnish society has defended it all these years from both foreign and domestic encroachment, and has also organized and enforced an intricate system of private stewardship that attempts to safeguard it in perpetuity. In most other countries, intrinsic to the concept of private land ownership is the right to exclude others from its use and enjoyment, so strictly speaking Finland can be said to lack private land ownership. A better word to describe a tender to a piece of Finnish land that by law must remain accessible to the general public is stewardship. Quite reasonably, this law only governs open land; Finland does have private property, and actual dwellings are not covered by this law. Home owners can exclude others from their home, personal spaces adjacent to homes, but not their forests or fields they look after.

Under this law, some prerogatives are delegated to private individuals, who then act as stewards of a piece of land, generally exploiting some aspect of it for commercial gain. But such private title to a piece of land is not without society's conditions. There is a host of environmental regulations designed to keep the land intact. The level of sustainability these regulations achieve is, as ever, debatable. But the point is that society has made it clear that new regulations can be made at any time, based on the advancement of scientific understanding and social values, for it is society that still owns the land, and any member of society can venture onto it, enjoy it and use it in non-competitive ways. These explicitly include hiking, camping and picking berries (I single out picking berries because it's explicitly written into the law as a basic human right). There have been some legal cases to resolve various grey areas in the law, and these have consistently been settled in favor of the public, not the private land steward.

Impact Moments

Yesterday the Auburn UU Fellowship service was a lay-led exchange of stories, people telling about times and events that had an impact on their lives. Judy and I couldn't get to the service, but I sent a story via email that Suzanne Walker read during the service. It's about learning to get over the values and attitudes of popular culture, so I guess that's relevant to this blog. The story -- 

I played high school football. In the very early 1950s. In practice, there were head-on tackling drills. (In those days, in Florida high school ball anyway, everyone played both ways, offense and defense). There was one guy on our team I was afraid of, Jack Peachey. About my size but much tougher and meaner, a running back who ran low and loved to run over people. Lining up on the tackler side of this drill, I would always look to see where Jack Peachey was in the runner line, and make sure I didn't get matched with him, the last guy I ever wanted to have to tackle. 

One day that happened. I must have been looking over at the girls on the sidelines. Stepped up to the tackler spot, looked up and there was Jack Peachey over there facing me, getting the ball. I had to re-tie my shoelaces, stalling, trying to think of some way to avoid having to tackle Jack Peachey. Decided I had to do it. He started running and I started running toward him, he got low, I got low, and we hit head-on, helmet to helmet. Impact!

Jack Peachey just jumped up and pranced around. I was out cold, face down in the grass, and when I began to regain consciousness, realized I was paralyzed, numb all over.
Luckily, it was temporary. I was able to get up, actually, was just pulled up by the coach – "Come on, Jimmy, run it off, boy!" I probably had suffered at least a slight concussion and was a bit foggy in the head the rest of the day.

Impact: Realizing I was more afraid of showing fear than I was of a broken neck.

Of course I should have just quit football, right? Crazy. 

But I was the quarterback and team captain, my steady girlfriend the head cheerleader. I had a lot to lose. Or so I thought. 

Crazy indeed.

However, the experience did help me begin to question the values and attitudes of the popular culture I was growing up in. A life lesson, part of my life-long struggle to get somewhere on this side of uncrazy. 

Swords into plowshares? What is the dirty truth?

Swords into plowshares! What a beautiful thought, eh? Until we realize that the plowshares – that is, agriculture – created war. Sure, hunter-gatherer folk fought skirmishes and raided each other's territory for wives and such. But war as we have come to know it, requiring armies engaged in extended combat over large expanses and long periods of time, wasn't possible until agriculture created the surplus of food that fed the troops. 

Then we hear from Wes Jackson that over the whole 10,000 years or so, the plowshare has done more damage than the sword. Actually, conventional agriculture has a lot in common with war. It is an attack on the earth, a massacre, cutting down and uprooting trees and then turning the soil to smother unwanted plants. Weeds, we call them. Often, quite edible and nutritious plants that fed the hunter-gatherers. 

Here, I have to mention the weed that out-GMO'd Monsanto. Palmer amaranth, usually called pigweed by farmers, is one of those wild edibles that fed native Americans (and pioneer folk), but was a number one weed enemy of the farmers and the prime target of Roundup herbicide. But now pigweed has done its own genetic engineering and is immune to Roundup!

Back to just the dirty truth – what's the big problem with plowing? Answer: it causes a loss of organic matter. Carbon, that is. And it is that carbon that supports the microflora and microfauna that make soil fertile. 

Even though the names are almost identical, it may seem odd to think of soil and oil as kinfolk. Well, in their respective native habitats, each is – perhaps I should say was – essentially a vast store of energy. Carbon, that is. 

Soil, along with the trees, was just the first of Earth's carbon treasures we humans mistook for not just vast but inexhaustible "natural resources" available to satisfy our every wish, however wise or foolish.

In future posts I will talk more about the case of the fossil fuels; for now, I will just say we are definitely up against those "Limits to Growth" we poo-poohed in the Seventies.

As for the soil? I'm lazy, so all I'm offering is a passage from a recent Time article that popped up close to the top of my quick Google. I can assure you, however, that it matches well with other information I have seen from scientific sources over the last few years. Here's the sad news: 

A rough calculation of current rates of soil degradation suggests we have about 60 years of topsoil left. Some 40% of soil used for agriculture around the world is classed as either degraded or seriously degraded – the latter means that 70% of the topsoil, the layer allowing plants to grow, is gone. Because of various farming methods that strip the soil of carbon and make it less robust as well as weaker in nutrients, soil is being lost at between 10 and 40 times the rate at which it can be naturally replenished. Even the well-maintained farming land in Europe, which may look idyllic, is being lost at unsustainable rates. 

BTW, the "swords into plowshares" statue is at the United Nations headquarters in New York. 

How are we doing? – Another perspective

An email out of the blue received this morning:

Hello Dearest Jim & Judy.... dont know if you would remember me. my husband and i visited your farm about 4 years ago. i just wanted to say that i think about you guys often and hope life is treating you kind. when matt and i visited you we had a clear dream of how and who we wanted to be but were struggling to find our selves like so many others. we only visited for a short time but your sweet simple lives have truly been an inspiration to us. thank you so much for taking the time to meet two complete strangers and providing the much needed boost in the direction we so badly needed. funny how strangers can have such an impact on our lives :) thanks you guys for being the amazing people you are and unknowingly changing my life. – Tiffany

How are we doing? – The larger picture

Photo (slide) is stolen from a presentation by Dr. Jeremy Jackson at the Naval War College back in January. McClanachan was a student of his he bragged on for finding the treasure trove of 50 years of trophy fish catch photos from Key West, prizes going to the person who caught the biggest fish. Jackson is director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity & Conservation at UCSD, among other prestigious appointments. (http://cmbc.ucsd.edu/People/Faculty_and_Researchers/jackson/) The presentation, titled Ocean Apocalypse, is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMN3dTvrwY&feature=player_embedded
It's appalling. I had thought I had some idea. No, it's far worse than that.

Judy has been with her daughter and five-year-old granddaughter at the beach (Gulf Shores) all the past week, coming home today. She's reporting all is well at the beach, they have been having a great time and she's so glad for the child to have "the beach experience" before this summer is gone. I'm glad too. But knowing what's ahead for that child makes me feel like crying. -- Jim

How are we doing?

I picked almost six pounds of pole beans this morning. Three small tomatoes. Most of the garden is weed jungle. Morning glories in full glory, etc. Quite a few green bells on six plants, waiting for them and waiting for them. To turn red. Basil blooming. A lone surviving squash plant making one squash, not quite big enough to pick today. Don't know what's wrong with the black turtle beans, they are taking a long long time. Sweet potato plants look pretty good. Figs are coming in, picked for breakfast this morning. Judy has already picked a bag of apples. We may have pears this year. Gosh, I haven't even looked at the Japanese persimmons!

The TREC utility bill shows we used 338 Kwh last month. Compared with 452 Kwh for the same period last year (but one more day in the current bill, makes it even better). That 114 Kwh drop is a rough approximation of what the solar system is producing. About one-fourth of our total electric bill. Is that good? Well, of course. Sort of. Maybe $15-$20 a month saving. For an investment of close to ten grand. Go figure.

But try to include in your calculations an adjustment factor that will include the true costs of electric power, not just what's on the utility bill. You know, the "indirect" but real costs, the costs of the wars and the costs of the environmental damage done by fossil fuel-generation (heck, nuclear is even worse, considering the real long-term factors), and the extra health care costs, especially from coal power, which is what most Alabama electricity is made of.

What should the adjustment factor be? I don't really know. My guess would be at least 10x.

And hey, remember, when the grid goes down, we have electric power.

I'll probably have more to say about all this in a future post, stay tuned.

Surprised by the River

Waking up this morning, I was surprised by the river. Not a literal flood, but a sudden realization, of the kind that might get described as "flooding into consciousness." Please be patient with my slowed-down and roundabout explanation . . .

Over the past couple of weeks I have been every evening at bedtime reading a chapter or two of the Tao Te Ching. I first encountered the Tao in my early teens when I began searching for alternatives to the Methodist Churchianity I was being raised in, and it has been a bedside book, off and on, ever since. The first copy I owned (I still have it) was Witter Bynner's 1944 translation, in a 1962 paperback edition. I also have a conveniently pocket-sized 1988 edition by Stephen Miller. My long-time favorite translation has been the one by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, published in 1972, and that is the edition currently on the bedside table, However, I also admire Ursula Le Guin's 1997 translation and I like her assessment of the work:

It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring. – Ursula K. Le Guin, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way

What brought the flood on was recalling as I was waking up just the last half of Chapter 32 of the Tao, that I had read just before falling asleep:

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.

There are already enough names.

One must know when to stop.

Knowing when to stop averts trouble.

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

And thinking, "That's the poem I wrote about canoeing on the South Anna River in Virginia in 1985!"

SURPRISED BY THE RIVER

written after canoeing the South Anna River
with a friend during a stay at Twin Oaks Community,
Virginia, May 10, 1985

 I was thinking of the river

as a kind of order, mountain laurel

on the right bank, blackberries

on the left, and the importance

of paddling on the right side,

the certainty of the spring

in the mountains, the finality

of the Chesapeake.

 At morning I am surprised

in the gifts of the great flowing,

this good bread, the dream-touch of hands,

the river itself returning, the wild azaleas

sliding from color to river-color,

the flavor of the blackberries rising

where the wind-shifts flash on the water,

where the thousand-year sweetness

of the river-rock runs.

Different words, same poem. Same truth? Well, you decide. 
I then went and looked up Ursula's version of Chapter 32 for comparison:

To order, to govern,

Is to begin naming;

When names proliferate

It’s time to stop.

If you know when to stop

You’re in no danger.

 The Way in the world

Is as a stream to a valley,

A river to the sea.

Again, different words trying to snare the same elusive truth. But perhaps an even better fit with my poem-snare. Though I could not in 1985 have read her 1997 version. I especially like Ursula's far more crafty and better nuanced last three lines.

The Price of The Prize

19 cents a gallon! That’s my earliest recollection of the price of gasoline, probably in 1951 when I turned 16 and got a driver’s license. What a prize, eh?

The word prize comes to mind because thinking about the price of gasoline for me always brings up the title of Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1990 book on the oil industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.

That is, oil = money = power. And that’s power in both senses, power to run the machine and power over those who have less oil, money and power.

I mentioned in an earlier post the struggle for the prize between Japan and the U.S., the U.S. having blocked Japan’s access to sources of the prize in Southeast Asia, provoking the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. The Japanese lost out in their quest for the prize, and by late July in 1945, the battleship Nagato, Admiral Yamamoto’s Pearl Harbor task force flagship, lay helplessly out of fuel at the main base of the Imperial Japanese Navy in Yokosuka. (There’s more to this story, involving why the Yokosuka naval base became after WWII and to this day still is a U.S. naval base, home port to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington, CVN-73, but I don’t want to go into it now.)

Then there is Nazi Germany in World War II, with lots of coal but no oil. In those days, European countries either imported oil from the U.S. or got it from oilfields around Baku, Azerbaijan. Which was Russian territory. So when the war started, Germany’s oil imports stopped. Germany built twelve huge coal gasification plants turning coal into diesel and aviation fuel. It worked, at least for a while. But coal, valuable as it is, is more like the booby prize of energy when compared to oil. It soaks up way too much energy, manpower and money to produce not really enough of those precious fluid fuels so easily produced from the Grand Prize, Oil.

Take a look at this short film clip (on YouTube) from World War II showing Hitler with his generals at a party, it might have been Hitler’s birthday, but it certainly was about the prize. The cake is decorated with a chocolate outline of Azerbaijan and lettering saying (in German) “Caspian Sea.” A piece of the cake, with “Baku” spelled out in chocolate, is offered to Hitler. Separate historical sources report that Hitler was announcing the launch of the southern campaign against Russia and said to his generals at the time, “If we don’t take Baku, the war is lost.”

They didn’t take Baku. Or Stalingrad. Or Moscow. They lost the war. Because they didn’t win “the prize?” I think at least partly.

What is for sure is that war is a large part of the price of the prize. Just not necessarily included in the price of the gasoline at the pump, but for sure in the taxes we pay and the ballooning public debt no one will ever be able to pay, so what will happen when . . . .

In today’s dollars, my 19-cents per gallon gasoline of 1951 would be priced at about $1.70. That’s “adjusted for inflation.” But the current actual price of gasoline at the pump in these parts is about $3.29. Close to twice what you would expect if inflation was the only factor involved. Yes, I know, “they” will charge us whatever they can get. And the “free” market fluctuates sometimes wildly. But there is also a physical fact to reckon with. That 1951 oil was cheap at the pump largely because it was cheap to get out of the ground. That is, cheaper both in money and in the energy required to get it out of the ground. Nowadays, it doesn’t even come out of the ground. It comes out of fracked shale, tar sands and the bottoms of oceans. Hard to get.

So the price of the prize goes up and up at the pump because of inflation (think profits to bankers and financial speculators) and because it just gets harder and harder to get at. And the price we pay in lost blood and treasure in wars getting and defending the prize goes on and on.

And then there is the price – really, the cost, that is, the consequences – of continuing to take what used to be a Grand Prize out of the ground, the shale, the tar sands and the ocean bottoms and consuming all of it. Bringing on ourselves the curse of catastrophic climate change.

You may have noticed I said “consuming all of it,” rather than what you might have expected, “burning all of it.” The more general term, consuming, is exactly right here. One way or another, The Prize gets converted into products we consume, not just fuel we burn. Along the way, over the past couple of hundred years, turning us into mere consumers, which we had never been before.

And along with all those wonderful plastic and chemical products we poison ourselves with, The Prize provides the food products we eat. A particular eye-opener for me about this was Richard Manning’s article, “The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq,” in Harper’s, February 2004. His 2005 book is titled Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization.

I will have more to say on this.

PS -- Just to help nail down the connection between war and oil, here's a photo of President Franklin Roosevelt meeting with Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud on board the cruiser USS Quincy in February of 1945. Result: a secret agreement in which the U.S. would provide Saudi Arabia military security – military assistance, training and a military base at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia – in exchange for secure access to supplies of oil. Saudi Arabia was at that time not yet a major producer of oil, but the discoveries had been made and top planners in the US government were eager to get control over as much of that prize as they could, wherever it was found. Possible blowback: most of the supposed 9/11 attackers were Saudis who did not like American presence in or influence over Saudi Arabia.

Our Pequod cruise – to what end?

Not that long ago, we attended a public meeting held at a marina on West Point Lake. The area was in severe drought and we looked out that day from the deck of the marina at boats sitting in mud. The meeting focused on water level management in the Chattahoochee River, “controlled by policy decisions of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regarding releases from dams along the river.” The speaker, representing an association of lakeside property and business owners concerned about “recreation opportunities,” used blunter language: “The problem is not rainfall. The problem is the Corps! And now Florida has played the endangered species card, those mussels it says are in trouble. I say we are the top of the food chain, and it’s our needs that need to be considered first of all.” A woman in the group spoke up then: “Nuke ‘em! Just nuke the goddam mussels!”     

Well . . .

When I started this blog I did not think I would be talking much about sailing. But here I go off to sea again. This time it’s 1851 and the ship is the fictional but too terribly true to life – and death – American whaler the Pequod, out of Herman Melville’s great American novel, Moby Dick.

What put me on this tack was coming upon an essay by prophet-for-our-times Chris Hedges titled “We Are All Aboard the Pequod.” It’s on TruthDig:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_aboard_the_pequod_20130707/
As a recovering former college English (and American lit) teacher I recognized the reference in the title to Melville’s novel, and I even recalled the fact Hedges points out about the ship’s name being that of a native American people “exterminated by the Puritans and their native American allies in 1638.”

Those Puritans would be John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony I wrote about in my Fourth of July post, carrying on the business of founding their “city upon a hill” society in a new and perilous land. Just eight years after getting their instructions from Winthrop on becoming “A Model of Christian Charity,” they joined with other New England Puritan colonies and the native American Mohegan and Narragansett peoples in what was called “The Pequot War.”  

Accounts of the Pequot War by the victors portrayed it as a “just war” carried out in self-defense and justified by their entitlement to avenge wrongs done to them by the Pequots. What it seems really to have been about was control of the fur trade with Europe.

I remarked in my first, Fourth of July post that the Puritans did not own slaves. I think that’s generally true. Note, however, that these Puritan Owners and Masters shipped hundreds of captured Pequots off to Bermuda to be sold as slaves.

So. The theme of this history, all sermonizing aside, is exploitation of the “natural resources” of the New World (and not just animal furs but when convenient the native human beings too) for profit.

Fastforward 200 or so years to Herman Melville’s era and we see in Moby Dick

an account of such exploitation carried to industrial and global scale. It’s difficult to imagine now, but in Melville’s time the American whaler was a cutting-edge technological marvel of a machine (read all about that in the novel). And whaling was something like the mid-nineteenth century equivalent of the twentieth century petroleum industry in terms of its importance for wealth creation and contributing to industrial development. The significant difference being that whale oil was not used as a motor fuel. Back then, coal powered the machines. The internal combustion engine that would need liquid fuel had not been invented. But it was whale oil that lubricated the early industrial machines, as well as providing the finest lamplight and candles. Innumerable whale by-products (think whalebone corsets for the ladies) made the industry even more profitable.  Globally, 19^th century whaling was already pushing some whale species toward extinction; so petroleum advocates are fond of declaring that the oil industry “saved the whales.”

Hedges quotes a passage showing Melville’s awareness of all this. Looking around New Bedford, home port for about 400 of the 700 American whaling ships hunting whales across the globe, the novel’s narrator muses:  “Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”

English majors (or American lit majors) are familiar with the view that Moby Dick is a critique of the American capitalist enterprise, with the skipper of the Pequod, Captain Ahab, a caricature of the 19^th century “captain of industry.” I don’t think, however, I have ever seen a judgment as extreme as Hedges’ –

“The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. . . . Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod. . . . The ship’s 30-man crew—there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod’s destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.”

“Limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels . . . “ Including limitless assertion of global economic and military control . . . .

Hedges notes that after the attacks of 9/11, Edward Said saw the parallel with Moby Dick and wrote in the London newspaper The Observer:

Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funneled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict.

Captain Ahab declares the whale, innocent victim of Ahab’s previous attempt to kill him, to be a demonic malevolent creature out to kill Ahab. Just so anyone’s attempt to resist or strike back at the American Empire is seen as an unprovoked and utterly evil act. I’m reminded here of the “unprovoked” and “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Does the actual history not matter at all? That the two empires, Japan and the U.S., were engaged in a struggle for control over Western Pacific “natural resources” – especially oil and rubber in Southeast Asia. And that the U.S. had imposed a virtual embargo on these resources going to Japan. So that in late 1941 the Imperial Japanese Navy was basically “running on empty.” So Japan’s forced choice was between giving up being an empire and striking back against the opponent. No, doesn’t matter.

I read recently a remark by Richard Heinberg to the effect that “too many of us can more readily imagine the end of the world than we can imagine the end of air conditioning.”

In our air-conditioned and homeland-securitized American way of life, we cannot hear the birds’ songs. To keep our “air-conditioning” going, we will risk the end of the world as humans have known it, birds and mussels and all.

Nuke ‘em!

What do you hear?

This morning Judy and I listened to Krista Tippet's On Being interview with Gordon Hempton (http://www.onbeing.org/program/last-quiet-places/4557) titled "The Last Quiet Places." Hempton has spent his life pursuing "the sounds of silence," traveling the world in search of places not polluted by human-created noise. Highly recommended. Hempton suggests taking a pre-schooler with you into the woods, as far away from town and highway noise as possible, and the child, who has not yet been taught to listen selectively only for what might be important or for what we want to hear , will help you get past your own learned acoustic filters to hear the actual sounds of nature. Also the child will help you get in touch with Being Here Now, understanding that "getting there" is not as important as squatting in the path and absorbing the presence that is here and now.

Relevance to The Slowdown Dirty Truth? Hempton reports that scientists studying the evolutionary engineering of the human ear conclude that the human acoustic sensing equipment is not specifically tuned to the frequency range of human speech, which many had assumed. Instead, the human ear is most sensitive to sounds in the 2.5 to 5.0 kilohertz range – birdsong. Likely explanation: In our evolutionary history, bird songs would have been perhaps the best indicator of what was going on in our habitat. Could be important for survival.

I think "Silent Spring." We lost touch a long time ago.

Coincidentally, I have recently been waking up just before dawn. Lying in bed, I have listened to the mostly silent night, and beginning just before dawn the increasingly compelling sounds of birds greeting the new day.

By the time the chorus is in full sway, most of these bird songs come from our close neighbor's chickens. His wife reports that sitting in their house, he can hear what she cannot. He can tell from their songs what is going on with them, whether all is peaceful or they are having squabbles, or if there is a threat by a predator.

Most of the time during the day I simply don't hear the chickens at all. I just tune them out. My loss?

Listening to the Krista Tippett program also took me back to an experience I had in the 1970s, hiking the Appalachian Trail in north Georgia with a close friend and my two oldest sons. It took me about ten years, but I was finally able to at least come close to describing or evoking the experience in a poem, which was published in the Southern Humanities Review in 1985. It was the last poem I ever published. Something like this:

Camping Among Ferns

At the end of a long day spent crossing broken rock,
talking of its hardness, we make our camp among ferns,
talking . . . talking . . . 

And then begin to listen –

the campfire

circling ferns

wind on the mountain

Still, we are surprised by the silence
pouring out of the high darkness

Surprised by our own yawning,
the remembering that comes to us a moment before sleep
and the forgetting

Our exhalation now not quite sound
only air moving over cutting edges
toward ferns flowing up the mountain shoulder.

Fourth of July, 2013

Was this nation founded on Christian principles?

Given what I've said in "about this blog," it may seem odd that my first post begins with such a question. I beg for your patience with my sometimes slowed-down and round-about ways. Let me invoke the big book of Lessons Learned from Sailing – You cannot sail directly upwind. Accept limitations. Set your course and trim your sails in accordance with the actual conditions you face.

I have never heard anyone in these parts actually, seriously ask that question, Was the United States founded on Christian principles? Everyone seems to think they know the answer. What I hear is usually some variation on "Can you believe he doesn't know or has forgotten that this nation was founded on Christian principles?" The common assumption is that the United States was, is and always should be a nation founded on, acting out of and in accordance with "Christian principles."

I ask, which Christian principles? How interpreted? And how acted on?

Without pretending that this is all there is to say on this subject it, I want to point to two groups of "founders" of our nation, both coming across the seas (we're sailing again, here), but one coming from Europe and bringing Christian principles with them and the other coming from Africa and adopting those Christian principles after they get to the new world (but with a difference, as we'll see). These are not founders in the sense of writing a declaration of independence or drafting a constitution; but their influence on American history has been massive (again, in different ways). 

I.

Representing the first group there is one person and one text I would single out as having extraordinary influence over the whole course of American history: John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered (probably) on the good ship Arbella as his group of Puritans embarked on their journey to "New England." http://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html

The sermon is a remarkable intellectual achievement, worth reading in its entirety – while imagining Winthrop's Puritans aboard the Arbella at sea listening intently as their leader "set the course" for them, explaining what they must do to carry out their intent to establish a new society in a perilous new world. Parts of the sermon have been quoted by almost every American president. It was for many years required reading in schools. Here's a key passage, toward the end of the sermon, outlining the rewards to come – if the group is successful in adhering to Winthrop's "model” of Christianity:

The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

It has been the “city upon a hill” metaphor that has been found especially useful by presidential speechwriters and all bloviators expounding on Our Great Country. The metaphor comes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. But note that nothing else in this passage echoes Jesus’s sermon. Instead of love for enemies, we have victory in war over enemies (with God on our side, commanding blessings on us).

The theme is one of victorious domination by force. Is this a Christian principle?

In Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” sermon we see perhaps the first formulation of what has come to be known as American Exceptionalism (you could google it). The idea that the U.S. is a God-blessed exceptional “city upon a hill” unfolds across a spectrum that includes some positives, birthplace of democracy and all men created equal (or progress toward all people equal), for examples; and extends to our being exempt from being judged by international law, justified in throwing our military weight across the globe in thousands of bases in foreign countries, and having the right to assassinate anyone we judge to be an enemy anywhere in the world.

II.

If we have any consciousness of those other “founders” of our nation, hearing Winthrop use the word “plantations” has to ring with some significance. The Puritan founders did not have slaves (only indentured servants), but they certainly came to the new world (already “occupied” by native peoples) intending to be Owners and Masters. The last paragraph of Winthrop’s sermon emphasizes possession: If the Puritan founders are faithful to their God, “the Lord God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it.” If unfaithful, “we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.”

Our African founders sailed across that vast sea in somewhat different circumstances. They did not come to "possess" the land. They were possessions.  Slaves. Of course I call them “founders” not in the usual sense but in recognition that their labor made it possible for all those plantations to survive and flourish and created a large part of the wealth of the country. 

They largely adopted Christianity, but with a difference, seeing salvation as liberation, deliverance from slavery. They identified with the Judaeo part of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with the people of Israel escaping their Egyptian bondage. You could say that they invented the first version of “liberation theology.” So their theme was freedom, not domination. But they also took the message of the New Testament seriously. Here’s Frederick Douglass: “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land.”

Adopting that “pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity” and making it the foundation of a mass movement for liberation had to wait until Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived on the national scene. King enlisted Gandhi, Thoreau, and Tolstoy in the civil rights campaign, but his theme of nonviolence was rooted first of all in the Sermon on the Mount, on the commandment of love even for enemies: “I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

King’s influence is now diminished, but he brought to the forefront of national political consciousness and put into practice on a mass basis for the first time in American history the Christian principle of love for enemies, of nonviolence.

III.

I want to be fair to John Winthrop. I do think his sermon has on balance had negative effects on American history, but that’s a matter of what people over generations chose to make of his “model,” and not necessarily what John Winthrop himself would have liked to see happen. It’s not that Winthrop didn’t subscribe to the Sermon on the Mount. Here’s a beautiful passage from his sermon showing (to me) his good side:

“The only way to avoid this shipwreck [of the wrath of God on an unfaithful people], and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”

IV.

Nevertheless. Although John Winthrop earnestly promoted the Christian principle of love among his own people, the Puritans he led, he saw them as being entitled and justified to take possession of land that was not theirs and to dominate and exploit that land and its native peoples for their own purposes. And that idea, taking off and taking over, the refusal to accept limitations, always wanting – and deserving – more and more, is what has had too strong influence on American history.

Which is why I think all this is relevant for a blog titled “The Slowdown Dirty Truth.” True? Well, your call.