The Sucker Bait Called Hope

Making the best of a slow apocalypse

By Joe Bageant, Deer Hnting With Jesus
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/11/the-sucker-bait-called-hope.html

We just concluded an election in which both parties talked about hope, one more so than the other. Hope, that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force, perhaps Jesus, or modern science, or some great political leader, or other -- as yet unknown force -- will reverse our national or personal condition ... will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then ecologically: Decline and eventual collapse. There is quite a difference between hope and understanding the facts, then holding justified optimism. Hope is magical thinking, a sucker's game. Politicians the world 'round fully understand this.

Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness, learned from the cradle as it is rocked by the foot of the Capitalist consumer state. Sure we can hope for movement away from domination of the weak by the arrogant, away from ecocide and genocide toward a better world. What the hell, hope is one of the few free activities in this society. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. In fact, its delivered through television.

But the fact is that when we encounter in-the-flesh examples of any merciful movement -- even through television -- we blanch and erect a wall of denial and excuses for our refusal to support that thing. Consider how the American public and the media (is there a difference?) responded to Rachel Corrie, who willingly died under the Israeli bulldozer protecting the home of a non-partisan Palestinian village doctor. The U.S. media all but ignored her. What few of the public knew of Cory's sacrifice were at first nonplussed, then deemed it a bizarre and stupid act. But even most Americans who did know joined the Larry Kings of the world in backhandedly mocking her. Moral conviction scares the hell out of us. Hope is effortless.

Thus, hope is still the order of the day. Obama's election will keep millions of American liberals and much of the world deliriously happy for a time to come. And to some degree at least, Obama's victory is a national rejection of the phony and expensive war on terror. Which is not a step forward, but rather a partial recovery from the immense and spectral folly of our needless warmaking -- recovery of one small bit of the vast ground we have lost ... or simply the next thing to do, now that we have tortured, terrified and leveled an entire people for the hell of it. Take your pick. But at some point we will have to cease thinking like children politically, grow up and personally accept responsibility, if we are to rescue our republic from ourselves.

Meanwhile, Obama takes charge of a bankrupt nation collapsing under late stage capitalism. "Not good, say Chief Thunderthud! White man manage to fuck up even under good presidents." Right chief. Indeed, there are many destructive forces far larger and more longstanding than a president and his powers. We can start with Congress. But our planetary ecocide probably trumps Congress.

Now if you will allow me a temporary lapse into theological seizure here: When it comes to those larger forces at play, none is larger and more enduring than the spirit, regardless of whether you call its presence God, the laws of physics, eternity, the Buddhist "great void," or the governing principle of the universe. And it is mature and ever greater truth-seeking that connects us with that force -- not hoping someone else, an Obama perhaps, is connected to it, and will exercise it toward the common good.

Common good

Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings or religion, would not recognize the common good if it bit ‘em in the ass. We have no genuine concept of common good. We really don't. Toqueville observed that 170 years ago. He said that in America, no man owes another man anything. Nor is he owed by any other man. Where does that leave any movement toward the common weal requiring the cooperative efforts of more than one man?

We all know the answer -- The Gubbyment. Which leaves the common good to greaseball politicos, banking and mortgage sharks, and a private cartel of behind-the-scenes hustlers called the Fed. Nevertheless, we have lived under the myth of rugged individualism so long we think we are in charge of our destiny -- which in our utterly monetized American system, means our financial fate. No matter that we let unseen elites own and manage our hard-earned dough over quail and cognac on the 45th floor. They're of the sort who know what's best. You can tell them by their arrogance and their good looking trophy wives. And by their big limos. Americans know the superior man when they see it.

Meanwhile, thanks to the doctrine of no man owing anything to any other, this doctrine of not being our brother's keeper in any important way, we are left with the social ethic of "every man for himself. Damned all social taxes and collective effort, I'll claw down my own share, and let the devil take the hindmost. Hell, maybe I'll even end up there on the 45th floor among the quail eaters with a blonde waiting in the sack. Land of boundless opportunity, right?"

Or on a more mundane level, as countless Americans have told me, "Why should I pay for someone else's health care? Let them buy their own, just like I did."

Consequently, we've not had universal health care for the common good. We have never enjoyed the benefit of universal higher education, because collectively we cannot agree that it is in the common good for all citizens to be equally free from ignorance. We pay the price of that at every turn … in the lack of nuance in the national character, in the childlike and clichéd thinking of our electorate, in our satisfaction with a deluge of technological toys instead of meaningful work and leisure, or intellectual and spiritual substance. Nor is there assured food and shelter for the poorest among us, despite that it is in the common good that all children be raised in a secure environment … because over generations that produces an ever nobler community and nation. "Each generation better than the last," as the saying goes.

Now, that is moreover a pretty good description of the American Dream, at least as it regards fairness and justice. And halting as it has been, we have made progress in fairness and justice -- civil rights and women's suffrage being two examples. And we could have achieved more, had we been fixed upon the most fundamental sense of what is just. We did that collectively as American citizens.

But conceiving of one's self as a citizen of our republic is the poorest way to do so, given that it acknowledges us more as property of the state than of the planet. Especially considering that we have a far larger responsibility to our common planetary home than to any armed and squabbling, ambitious nation state. That we managed to overcome such obvious inequities as slavery and the oppression of women is no great accomplishment at all. Just two small acknowledgments of justness. Yet we wallow in those small expressions of human and national decency as if the advancement of humanity were all but accomplished (one more civil rights documentary rammed down my throat and I'm gonna drive over to PBS offices in D.C. and shoot out their latte machine).

At any rate, once we made these advances, we felt free to haul off and kill as much of humanity as we deemed necessary to keep the oil flowing and our capitalist masters in a permanent state of dominance and caviar flatulence. We'd banned slavery and let women vote for the same scallywags as men. Lettin' the queers get hitched however, is one we're gonna have to think over for a while Hoss, because there's still political mileage in being agin' it!

Still, despite our sorry-assed condition as a citizenry, as individuals every one of us can recognize what is just and right. In fact, when it comes to the private, inward self, it is harder to avoid fairness than it is to justify unfairness, though we manage to. Regardless of our deformation by capitalism's relentlessness, and its accompanying materialistic mediocrity, we know there's such a thing as balance, such a thing as justness, and equity for all people, however much we refuse to acknowledge it. This, thanks to the "eternal scales" inside us all. And the fulcrum of these scales, this always-present, wordless inner preference, if not action, toward just balance, is, I believe, the spirit.

A common grave

Scientists may yet reduce all human behavior, thought and emotion to neurochemistry. That's their bag -- reducing the universe to impressive displays of tinker toydom so The Discovery Channel will have grist. But the most sublime expression of humankind is nevertheless more than the sum of its parts and must be called spiritual. I don't have any lofty language to explain that. I'm as "ignernt as the next feller," as my old man used to say. Either we can feel, or can learn to feel the common soul … that essence coursing in all sentient things (and I for one, include trees, rivers, amoeba and the atmosphere in the count) and feel joy and unity in that, or we cannot. Either compassion enters our awareness and experiential reality through suffering and contemplation of the suffering of others … or it does not. Either way, it would seem incumbent upon each of us to try to bring about a world in which compassion occurs for the maximum number of our fellow men. Given that we all share a common grave, compassionate action may well be the only human action of any value. Compassion for all living things on a living planet. In that resides the equilibrium of the world.

Not that we're ever gonna see equilibrium in the world. Or even come close. The ungilded truth is that the planet, at least as regards its sustenance of mankind and thousands of other species, is irredeemably fucked. Toast. And we cannot fix it, only slow down the inevitable, and hopefully settle out at some level which, though desolate by today's standards, we are still in a breathing and shitting state of existence.

To actually grasp catastrophe on this order of magnitude leaves us numb with shock. Or sends us in search of some better notion of our destiny than Mother Nature flushing humankind down the crapper. "What the hell, bitch? Don't you know we are made in the image of God!" "Which one?" Mother Nature cackles, then reaches for the lever. "But wait, wait! I'm gonna make better consumer choices from now on."

"Oh spare me!" moans the grand dame of the trees and waters.

"Consuming was the problem, dickhead."

Nonetheless, there will be a helluva lot more consuming, this time centered around consuming "consumer alternatives," such as burning of corn in vehicles and "Going green with Monsanto!" before our folly is complete. I see that now even our dogs can "eat green," though I doubt they like it much.

Most people reading this understand that we can never again be what we once were… a civilization occupying a relative material paradise through a danse macabre of unsustainable growth through resource depletion. So no matter how much we hear about political change, no politician can save us. Because no presidential candidate can run on the promise that "If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a Second World nation in fifty years, providing we don't mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there."

Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice: Accept the truth and act upon it. We can at the very least say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. That in itself can be called embracing the spirit. It won't accomplish shit, but it is nevertheless the right thing to do. Because it's the only just thing left to do. Too late, for sure, but better than remaining a dysfunctional moral cretin. My inner scales tell me so.

As long as we are cataloguing pointless acts of moral common sense, we may as well turn off PBS's Nova for a while. Realize the limits of technology and quit looking for more techno solutions to what technology itself hath wrought. All the green energy sources and eating right cannot repair what has been irretrievably ruined. Species gluttony is nearly over and we've eaten the flesh of the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature -- though a case might be made for stupidity -- but because we took the existence of individual consciousness to mean that each of us is some unique center of the world, acquisitive and deserving of all things. One brand of this collective hallucination, although there are others, is called American exceptionalism. And we can get away with that game as long as the oil and the entertainment last. Which looks to be about another half hour.

A simple life

You might be thinking: If those are the facts and there's really little I can do, why not just indulge myself and enjoy the life I have left? Sit and order a pizza? Well, those are the facts. And most people choose to do just that. So do I sometimes. Fortunately or unfortunately, my sense of indulgence is so repulsive it scares even me back onto the path.

Living more simply is a prerequisite to right action -- but it's no solution at all. Making the world a slightly less bad place than before is fine, but no solution. The problem is too far out of hand now. "Solutions," are over too. I'm sure by now, assuming you got this far, you're thinking, Bageant, you're a negative, gin-addled old toad. So be it.

But you might also ask, "Now that you've eliminated all hope in this screed, what does one do about all this? I'm sure that what you're gonna' suggest will be unpleasant as hell, and if it involves enemas or rubber gags and leather straps, I ain't gonna play." But to humor you, I'll ask, "Do I renounce materialism or what?

My own wife asks me this shit, so I think that's a fair question. And a fair answer is: "I don't know." But I do know what has worked for me. And since we are all arguably of the same species (I have my doubts about Adam Sandler fans and Dick Cheney) obviously at the very least, consumer renunciation is called for, strivance for a genuinely simple and essential life. Which is completely impossible in this country. But we can and should try.

In the big picture though, consumerism was never the problem. Capitalism was. And it still is. Conumerism is merely the way workers are compensated for the general shittiness of their lives. It seems to have worked. Thus, my urge to get on the public address system at the NASCAR Talledaga run and scream: "You fat fuckers don't need another corndog or that fifteenth beer that has made your belly so big you haven't seen your dick in ten years."

But as historian Eugene McCarrher points out, simply telling people that they're too consumeristic, too materialistic, doesn't work. It doesn't work because it gives people the impression that the material and the spiritual are antithetical. Yet the natural material world is the only sacramental thing that exists (minus the corndogs).

Commodity fetishism

Our relationship with the physical/material world is not only holistic and ecologically interwoven… it is also the source of our spiritual essence. Which is why monolithic production, monetization, and commodity fetishism destroy our essence. We must think through that. We must look around us at its proof, and learn it for ourselves. If you don't pick up on that, you're screwed. And if you do you pick up on it, you get to fester on real questions. Such as, "How do I accept responsibility for my life?" (which I never the hell wanted in the first place…) We can ask, "How do I leave the world a little better than I found it? And the answer is, who the hell cares? Making the world a slightly less bad place than before is fine… but it's no solution. The problem is too out of hand now for that to be any kind of solution. But we should try, because we have a lot of time on our hands yet.

We can also ask ourselves: are my living actions more contributory, more effective than, say, drinking a can of Drano? Don't laugh. If we really think that through, we will be surprised how hard that is to do. Not fuck things up worse, I mean. Life really ain't sacred in and of itself. You get born, you eat, breathe and shit, and you fuck things up. You start out with a negative balance in the ole karmic account. Then you start doing serious payback without even an inklng of the total amount due. No wonder babies come into the world with a squall of protest. Theologians tell me that this is called redemption, and that it gives life meaning. Maybe so, but it sure as hell makes things harder.

Perhaps we should all "dialogue on this" a bit? Nope. This thing we are facing, this thing we must do, is not just another topic for more "dialogue." And besides, this is a cyber monologue, and one of the nice things about the Internet is that you can't be interrupted while you're offending other people's sensibilities. In any case, regardless of who's doing the dialoging, Earth First, the Dalai Lama or the ghost of Reinhold Niebuhr, let's not kid ourselves that if we only yak some more, the world and mankind will somehow heal themselves. It's easy for the wealthy of the earth such as you and I (especially if one has an Internet connection) to want to believe that. After all, we had breakfast this morning and we not only have clean potable water to drink -- which 2.2 billion people do not -- but also shit in the stuff. The real solution -- not to the problem, which is unsolvable in the long haul, but to balancing those eternal scales inside ourselves -- begins with a more contemplative and reflective life, and the care of the soul. Both of which are necessarily thwarted by the wasteful daily busyness of our materialism and technology. Jesus did not text message his truth, and the Buddha never had a single friend on Facebook. Yet we hear their truth across millenniums. They simply practiced compassion. Only by eliminating suffering among sentient beings, do we create the spiritual soil in which peace can flourish. That takes conviction. The real stuff. It pisses me off that the Christian fundamentalists of my childhood were right about one thing -- the value of conviction -- but that's the way it is.

And as long as we are still breathing and passing water, choice remains available, even superior choice: Accepting the truth and acting upon it. Thankfully, we can do individual positive action. It starts with getting in touch with higher intelligence: Our own. After that, it's soul work.

We can, at the very least, deliver our bodies to the halls of power and say: "No more scorched babies in Iraq!" We can refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can remember and contemplate the example of Rachel Cory. Or even follow that dogged neocon mantra of "taking personal responsibility," but doing it for real. All of which can be considered voting for the spirit.

It will take an entire lifetime of commitment, and the world will continue to crumble around us even as we work. There will be not one ounce of public glory or reward during our lifetimes, not if we are doing it right. And if we turn a buck on it, we can be assured that we are playing the same game as this earth's wrecking crew. Which is called irony, I guess.

Yet the reward lies right there before us. Knowing and observing the spirit in all things... even above life itself. It is the first fearful step… the first stone on the path to liberation. Anyway, that's my take on things.

Namaste.

Get me a beer while you're up.

Obama's election will keep liberals happy

From Joe Bageant's Blog, Deer Hunting With Jesus - dispatches from America's class war.
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/12/obamas-election-will-keep-liberals-happy.html

Dear Joe,

It has been a very sobering experience to see all my "liberal" friends rolling on the floor in the throes of ecstasy over Obama's win. Miraculously, the democrats succeeded at what the republicans have been proficiently doing for quite a long time; convincing a large number of people to be ecstatic about voting against their own interests. Maybe the self destructive red neck paradigm needs to be adjusted to include shell shocked liberals.

My friends are so overjoyed about all the 'change' that is certainly coming our way that I can't bring myself to spoil their happiness with rude facts about what political interests Obama represents or how his advisers are responsible for many of the problems facing working class people. My lack of enthusiasm over his victory creates awkwardness among my peers and heightens my feeling of political alienation. After the election I had the queasy sense of being on the outside edge of a mass delusion.

What prompted me to write today was an article from Robert Scheer lamenting Obama's choices for cabinet positions. A few months back when Scheer spoke at our local library on his book tour, (about 20 people attended) he advocated voting for Obama. I asked him why anyone who cared about the Constitution, civil liberties, international law, etc., should vote for someone who didn't support any of that is his campaign. He replied, "It's the best we can do." Now it appears in his recent article that Sheer is not so enthusiastic anymore. I defiantly voted for Nader "without any illusions", but with apologies to Noam Chomsky.

So now Obama parades his lineup of economic advisers and, in the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!" But only if you've not been paying attention all along. The only surprise is how easily the democrats managed to get people all jacked up about pissing in their own beds. I am hoping that Thomas Frank will explain all this in his next book.

Sincerely,

Tomas

------

Tomas,

I know what you mean about the queasy experience of being on the outside edge of mass delusion. If you look around in the current national darkness, you will notice millions of us alongside you.

Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness. Sure we can hope. What the hell, hope is one of the few remaining free activities. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. It is delivered through television.

In the end however, hope is the junk food of the mind and soul. It is the murky, undefined belief that some unknown force, perhaps Jesus or modern science or some great political leader, or other as yet unknown force will reverse our national or personal condition will deliver us from the results of living in a perpetual state of childhood. Hope is magical thinking, a sucker's game. Politicians the world round fully understand this.

Obama's election will keep millions of American liberals and much of the world deliriously happy for some time to come. And to some degree at least, Obama's victory is a national public rejection of the phony and expensive war on terror, but not necessarily a rejection by the empire's rulers. Anyway, even that is not a step forward, but rather a partial recovery from the immense and spectral folly of our needless war making -- recovery of one small bit of the immense moral ground we have ceded. But at some point we will have to cease thinking like children politically, grow up and personally accept responsibility, if we are to rescue our republic from ourselves.

Electing someone else to do it looks good on paper. But no politician can campaign on the facts. Why hell, that might not sound hopefull enough to sustain America's cupcake and bunny voters. Take the ecology and the depletion of worldresources, the collapsing planet. No presidential candidate can run on the promise that "If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a second world nation in fifty years, providing we don't mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there."

Hope is a particular vice of the liberal solar power electric car set. I suggest they turn off PBS's Nova for a while. Realize the limits of technology and quit looking for more techno solutions to what technology itself hath wrought. All the green energy sources and eating right cannot repair what has been irretrievably ruined. Species gluttony is nearly over and we've eaten the flesh of the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature -- though a case might be made for stupidity -- but because we took the existence of individual consciousness to mean that each of us is some unique center of the world, acquisitive and deserving of all things -- $700 latte machines, $90 a night dog hotels, hard-on drugs in the bedrooms of Brentwood in place of anti-malarial drugs in African villages (though at age 62, I am sorely tempted by the promise of a four-hour boner.) One brand of this collective hallucination, although there are others, is called American exceptionalism. Liberals are as guilty of that as conservatives, simply because they partake of the American Lifestyle. We can get away with that game as long as the oil and the entertainment last. Which looks to be about another half hour.

There is quite a difference between hope and understanding the facts, then holding justified optimism. It will take quite a while for liberals wake up and meet the new boss -- same as the old boss, yada yada. Hell, most of them have not figured out Bill Clinton yet. But when and if it does happen, I wanna be in California, the land of compulsory Oprah style optimism, and where so many childish souls nurse at the ever flowing tit of hope. It's gonna be the biggest squalling diaper change in history.

In art and labor,

Joe

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Day of the Citizen

A Great Day, Nine Years, Three or Four Centuries
The Jubilant Birth of the Obama Era
By Rebecca Solnit

Citizenship is a passionate joy at times, and this is one of those times. You can feel it. Tuesday the world changed. It was a great day. Monday it rained hard for the first time this season and on Election Day, everything in San Francisco was washed clean. I went on a long run past several polling places up in the hills around my home and saw lines of working people waiting to vote and contented-looking citizens walking around with their "I Voted" stickers in the sun and mud.

People have again found one of their -- our -- most buried and powerful desires: to make a better world together. I ran across an online collection of photographs of people crying in public, so moved by what is happening in this country, and I cried a little myself last weekend and choked up again when my local paper ran a story on a woman who'd crossed the country 40 years ago for Martin Luther King's funeral and left her polling place Tuesday singing hallelujah, amazed like so many older people that she'd lived to see the day.

You can argue against Barack Obama. I would myself, on the grounds that electoral politics are inherently flawed, corrosive, disempowering. My leftist friends, already cranky about him, warn me that I will be disappointed, but I'm not sure I will, because my expectations are realistic. I love his style, but he's not my messiah.

Who he is is so much better than we had any right to expect in a country left to the jackals for so long, even if he's just a pretty gifted liberal Democrat with an uncanny ability to see beyond the binaries and describe what might lie there.

What he is, in all his hyphenated hybridity, is a sign of a new world being born -- not, certainly, the "another world is possible" of the anti-globalization movement, but another world of mingling and crossing borders, of making new ethnicities out of love across old divides. He is a living invitation to come in from the cold for a lot of those who have been left out for decades, for centuries.

He's my age exactly, born that summer the Berlin Wall went up, and I recognize him, a man from the in-between. And I recognize my country's ability to surprise itself and the world as well by being great, just when our monstrousness seemed utterly inescapable.

His day picks up from many that have come before. It's the first great lurch forward for racial justice since the 1960s, that era of the Civil Rights Movement. But it pick ups as well from the 1860s, from the unfinished promise of Abraham Lincoln -- the promise over which a great and bloody Civil War was, in part, fought -- to undo what that great president called the "original sin" of our country that goes back three centuries and more: race-based slavery.

Obama does not cancel out or heal the legacies of racism, but in becoming the most powerful man in the world he signifies that the game has indeed changed, not just ground to a halt partway to justice and equality. The inner-city kids I see in my neighborhood and the murderous racists I've encountered recently in New Orleans are both going to think about their place in the world and their rights differently from this day forward. And that matters immensely, whatever the man being voted into power today does, or does not, achieve.

I am against heroes generally, and I grieved to see how deferentially people invested their hopes in Howard Dean nationally in 2004, and in Matt Gonzalez in my local mayor's race the year before. The movements that invoked them were, in both cases, so much better than the men. The people who made up those great populist groundswells, as far as I'm concerned, mistook those men -- little more than hood ornaments -- for the engines powering their movements. And the movements died out when the men went nowhere. Had each of them won, their followers would have given them their power and hoped for the best, rather than keeping it and moving past them.

I thought we were entering an era where we would do without heroes, but we have been given a hero, which is a bit like being given a chainsaw or a credit card: you have to be careful how you use it.

This moment of joy will subside, and those who expected Obama to be flawless or to keep inspiring them forever and a day may be disappointed. Still, his strength is that he speaks the language of community organizers, of "si, se puede," and that, at least for a while, he may spread rather than consolidate power.

When you come down to it though, that's our responsibility, not his. His responsibility is to preside over a nation that must shrink from empire, on economic as well as moral grounds, from the mad consumptive prosperity of the postwar era, and from the profligate environmental destruction that went with it. Perhaps he will be our Gorbachev, a man with the boldness to yield and reduce.

Four Milestones to This Moment

This is a great day that picks up from so many moments that came before. Think of Obama as a new star that lets us pick out all sorts of constellations of history.

We're just short of the ninth anniversary of the first of what now seem like five extraordinary moments in a decade that historians a century hence may consider far more turbulent and transformative than the 1960s. I was there in Seattle on November 30, 1999, when a network of grassroots activists from around the world shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial summit and said that the future was not going to be shaped solely by corporations, capital, and governments; it belonged to us. And so it did: the WTO and many of the other institutions with plans to strengthen corporate control and power have crashed and burned since then; Latin America has swung far to the left; and finally, of course, in the past few months, neoliberalism and free-market religious fervor bankrupted themselves -- and nearly everyone else.

That moment in 1999 was an extraordinary one for popular power. It changed the world in ways no one expected. The year 2008 looks nothing like anything any of us imagined -- for better and worse. And we got here on a sprint across three more strange milestones.

Few would normally include 9/11 among uplifting moments, but I've been writing about disasters for the past four years and part of what prompted me to do so was the extraordinary emotion of that week in 2001. We were suddenly citizens. We felt connected, urgent, purposeful, immersed in public life, eager to do something, fully alive in the face of tragedy, as we often feel in such times. Fear, blind patriotism, and malevolent anti-Arab/Islamic sentiment were subsidiary emotions in that moment, but the overriding sentiment was heroic and civic.

That was the real threat to the Bush administration, not al-Qaeda, and they did a fairly masterful job of squelching it overall, though outliers and pockets of insurrection survived. These would include Tomdispatch.com, the wonderful site I've been writing for these last five years, founded by Tom Engelhardt's outrage over the 9/11 news and the need to offer a more thoughtful version of that moment in history.

Recently, he wrote, "When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the ‘commander-in-chief' of a ‘wartime' country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting ‘central theaters' of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them -- the "home front" where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods." And smothered a moment when a better nation might have been born.

That surge of idealistic passion and solidarity mostly failed, but I saw in those days that people wanted to be something better, something more committed, something more altruistic. The avenues through which to realize such possibilities were mostly blocked then, or remained invisible to so many of us.

A third extraordinary moment came on February 15, 2003, when a worldwide passion against the invasion of Iraq, supposedly justified by 9/11, led tens of millions to march in protest on every continent. The war went forward anyway, despite the constraints an angry citizenry was able to place on it. Thanks to its marketing of 9/11, the Bush administration had carte blanche to do pretty much what it wanted, at least as far as a docile Congress and an intimidated Senate were concerned, if not an increasingly hostile world. So that third moment, staggering in itself, achieved little. And the fourth was a tragedy as well as a rallying cry.

On August 30, 2005, Hurricane Katrina broke the administration's mandate, revealing its callousness, indifference, and incompetence to all those who had not yet recognized them in the conduct of an occupation that was already turning into a nightmare of murder and sectarian warfare at close quarters. But Hurricane Katrina revealed something more important. The people of New Orleans, the mostly poor, mostly dark ones left behind in a "mandatory" evacuation run in a style as laissez-faire as any neoliberalist could ever dream of, were demonized by the media and those in charge, from Mayor Ray Nagin to top Bush officials; and yet so many Americans responded not just with rage and grief, but out of a desire to be with the very people who were suffering most, to care for them, and to share with them. Within perhaps a week, 200,000 volunteers had offered beds in their homes to the displaced; in the years since, uncounted hundreds of thousands of volunteers have gone to New Orleans to lend a hand.

Outrage over the racism of that moment, as well as over the brutality of poverty and deprivation revealed then, awoke in so many a painful idealism and a yearning to be a better nation, as well as a realization of just how much remained to be done in New Orleans -- and elsewhere. Some say that Obama's rise came in part from the widespread realization that the wounds of racism were still bleeding, that our country desperately needed to change more. (This was, of course, a white realization; I doubt most people of color were soothed by what progress had been made over the previous half-century.).

Katrina was terrible, but the desires it awoke were the same ones blooming today -- the desire to do the truly meaningful work, the work of making a better world and better selves, as well as the desire to find common ground, to live in the open space of idealism and possibility. One of the most moving things to me this week is the realization that racism has been a grief also carried somewhere deep within by many of us who are not its victims. This is where so many of our tears came from, as we saw that that grief might be lifted for a moment, maybe even reduced in this new era.

A Brother in Hope

I began writing about hope in the grimmest days of the millennium, after the war in Iraq had been launched and most of the antiwar activists around me felt utterly defeated, not just in this one endeavor, but in any sense that history, and the power that comes with it, could be ours. I began writing about hope to convince them that people have, again and again, had just that power, and have made history, and will make it again.

My hope came not only out of specific stories I had lived through, or even dug up as a historian, but out of a deeper sense of the sheer unpredictability of history, the darkness out of which hope emerges. No one foresaw that five years after George W. Bush stood, seemingly infinitely triumphant, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, he would be slinking off history's stage in ignominy and an antiwar candidate would be taking his place. Not antiwar enough, but far beyond what most hoped for a few years ago.

It's been a wild nine years.

I wrote to Barack Obama Monday night when I decided to send him a copy of Hope in the Dark, my book that came out of the invasion of Iraq and the despair around me. After all, he is my brother in hopefulness. I said to my future president (I was hopeful enough to have called the election early): "My hope resided in the countless stories I had witnessed or researched of popular power -- but also resided in the unpredictable and ever-changing nature of history, politics, and popular imagination, the darkness I wanted to redeem from negativity and cast as something numinous instead. Heaven knows you are as unlikely a thing as ever happened in this country, though like any great change we will come to see it or you as inevitable and reread the muddled history of the United States as leading to this moment. But right now, it's still breathtaking."

Today, like yesterday, like tomorrow, is a great day. Remember them. And remember whatever joy, tears, or amazement they have brought you, and don't let go of them. They are the candles you get to bring with you in the darkness in which we will need to look for hope again, and to keep moving onward.

There is no stopping now. The wild mare history has us on her back.

Rebecca Solnit's next book about the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster will be out just in time for the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The latest language in which Hope in the Dark was published is Greek; the publisher distributed it from his motorbike when a national strike shut down Athens and then just gave it away to the marchers.

Copyright 2008 Rebecca Solni

Will Obama Bring "Only Technical" Changes to Iraq?

Found this at Alternet. Gotta say, there will be many more articles, commentaries and essays regarding our being forced once again into having to choose the lesser of two evils, this time with the added bonus of that minor evil being a minority. When will the system be transformed to better reflect that which we pay lip service to constantly - True Democracy?--Pete

By Raed Jarrar, Raed in the Middle

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/106226/

I didn't find this in the English media, but Arab media (including Al-Jazeera) reported today:

Iraqi Presidency Council said in its first reaction to Barack Obama winning the U.S. presidential election: there is only one U.S. policy in Iraq, and the changes that may occur during Obama's time "would be only technical."

As you've heard already, Obama picked congressman Rahm Emanuel to become the White House's chief of staff. Mr. Emanuel, an Israeli citizen who has served in the Israeli Army (he denies both), was the only one out of Illinois' nine congressmen who voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2002.

I know that the confetti has not settled down yet, but I think it's time already to ask the Obama-Biden campaign some questions about their foreign policy plans, especially regarding the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and regarding ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

I did not vote for Obama or donate to his campaign, but I'll send him a couple of questions anyway. For those of you who have donated your money or time to support Obama, or have voted for him, I think it's your personal responsibility to contact him. You can send your questions to the campaign by clicking here.

Here is the question I've sent:

Dear President-elect Obama

I am writing to congratulate you for your landslide victory yesterday.

I am very concerned about the Iraqi government's announcement today that your administrations' policy in Iraq will continue to be the same one adopted by the Bush administration, and that any changes that may occur during your time "would be only technical."

Do you agree with this statement, or are you still committed to ending the U.S. occupation like you have promised during the campaign?

Thank you.

Raed Jarrar is an Iraqi architect who writes the Raed In The Middle blog and contributes to numerous others.

Open letter to Barack Obama

Symbolism alone will not bring change

I have watched with keen interest and renewed hope as your campaign has mobilized millions of Americans behind your message of changing a political system that serves a small economic elite at the expense of the peoples of the United States and the world. Your election as president of the United States, where slaves and Indians were long considered less than human under the law, will undoubtedly constitute a historic moment in race relations in the United States.

Yet symbolism alone will not bring about change. Our young people, Black and Native alike, suffer from police brutality and racial profiling, underfunded schools, and discrimination in employment and housing. I sincerely hope your campaign will inspire some hope among our youth to struggle for a better future. I am, however, concerned that your recent statement on the Sean Bell verdict, in which the New York police officers who fired 50 shots at a young man on the eve of his wedding were acquitted of criminal charges, displays a rather myopic view of the law. Until the law is harnessed to protect the victims of state violence and racism, it will serve as an instrument of repression, just as the slave codes functioned to sustain and legitimize an inhuman institution.

As I can testify from experience, the legal institutions of this nation are far from racial and political neutrality. When judges align with the repressive actions and policies of the executive branch, injustice is rationalized and cloaked in judicial platitudes.

As you may know, I have now served more than three decades of my life as a political prisoner of the federal government for a crime I did not commit. I have served more time than the maximum sentence under the guidelines under which I was sentenced, yet my parole is continually denied (on the rare occasions when I am afforded a hearing) because I refuse to falsely confess.

Amnesty International, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, my Guatemalan sister Rigoberta Menchu, and many of your friends and supporters have recognized me as a political prisoner and called for my immediate release. Millions of people around the world view me as a symbol of injustice against the Indigenous peoples of this land, and I have no doubt that I will go down in history as one of a long line of victims of U.S. government repression, along with Sacco and Vanzetti, the Haymarket Square martyrs, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, and others targeted for their political beliefs. But neither I nor my people can afford to wait for history to rectify the crimes of the past.

As a member of the American Indian Movement, I came to the Pine Ridge Oglala reservation to defend the traditional people there from human rights violations carried out by tribal police and goon squads backed by the FBI and the highest offices of the federal government. Our symbolic occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 inspired Indians across the Americas to struggle for their freedom and treaty rights, but it was also met by a fierce federal siege and a wave of violent repression on Pine Ridge.

In 1974, AIM leader Russell Means campaigned for tribal chairman while being tried by the federal government for his role at Wounded Knee. Although Means was barred from the reservation by decree of the U.S.-client regime of Richard Wilson, he won the popular vote, only to be denied office by extensive vote fraud and control of the electoral mechanisms. Wilson’s goons proceeded to shoot up pro-Means villages such as Wanblee and terrorize traditional supporters throughout the reservation, killing at least 60 people between 1973 and 1975.

It is long past time for a congressional investigation to examine the degree of federal complicity in the violent counterinsurgency that followed the occupation of Wounded Knee. The tragic shootout that led to the deaths of two FBI agents and one Native man also led not only to my false conviction, but also the termination of the Church Committee, which was investigating abuses by federal intelligence and law enforcement agents, before it could hold hearings on FBI infiltration of AIM. Despite decades of attempts by my attorneys to obtain government documents related to my case, the FBI continues to withhold thousands of documents that might tend to exonerate me or reveal compromising evidence of judicial collusion with the prosecution.

I truly believe the truth will set me free, but it will also signify a symbolic break from America’s undeclared war on Indigenous peoples. I hope and pray that you possess the courage and integrity to seek out the truth and the wisdom to recognize the inherent right of all peoples to self-determination, as acknowledged by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. While your statements on federal Indian policy sound promising, your vision of “one America” has an ominous ring for Native peoples struggling to define their own national visions. If freed from colonial constraints and external intervention, Indigenous nations might well serve as functioning models of the freedom and democracy to which the United States aspires.

Yours in the struggle.

Until freedom is won,

Leonard Peltier
# 89637-132 U.S.P. Lewisburg, P.O. Box 1000, Lewisburg, PA USA 17837