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LANGUAGE AND CONFUSION I'm a big fan of George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley; you can find much of his recent writing on the website of the Rockridge Institute. Until I started reading Lakoff, I was fooled and confused by the propaganda from the Dark Side, couldn't make any sense out of politics at all, and had no hope of helping to make things better. Lakoff has explained in greater depth than anyone else just how the conservatives stole our language and what we must do to get it back.
When the facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts are ignored. -- It is a common folk theory of progressives that "the facts will set you free." If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don't work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel. An example of conservative framing is the phrase "tax relief." If you enter into a debate on that issue -- i.e., if you discuss whether or not you're in favor of tax relief -- then you've already accepted conservative terminology, and so you've already lost. You've defined taxes as something from which we might or might not need relief, and thus you've defined taxes as something obnoxious and bad; you've discarded any discussion of how taxes are a necessary responsibility for maintaining and extending our shared infrastructure. Another example is "lobbyist reform," which deflects attention from the need for congressional ethics reform and campaign finance reform. Another example of clever framing is the phrase "war on terror."
One of Lakoff's recent books explores the meaning of the word "freedom." Lakoff demonstrates that America's traditional meaning of the term has followed progressive values, but the word is being stood on its head by conservatives in recent years. The traditional meaning was freeing people from want and from fear; the new conservative meaning is freeing big corporations from all restrictions and regulations, even though this enables them to abuse people.  One of the insights of Lakoff and Waldman is this: The American people are motivated by general values (philosophy, identity, a broad narrative theme, etc.) more than by specific issues. That fact should work in the favor of progressives, because the traditional values of the American people are much closer to progressive values than to conservative values. But until recently, the progressives did not understand this, and focused their all communication on issues, leaving the discussion of values entirely in the hands of their opposition, the conservatives. For instance, Bush beat Kerry partly because Bush seemed less intellectual, a more amiable companion for sharing a beer. The conservatives depicted Kerry as being an elitist snob who would look down at common people, and thus they avoided having people consider the issues at all. The recent Republican control of Washington can be traced back to the great communicator Ronald Reagan, who magically convinced blue-collar workers that he was one of them.
For some issues, where the conservative view is so much in opposition to the public's that no positive spin on it is possible, the conservatives have resorted to Orwellian language: naming something as its opposite. For instance, the Healthy Forests Act deforests public lands, the Clear Skies Initiative increases the air pollution, and the Patriot Act takes away the liberties that our patriots have always fought for. The self-named Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, entirely untruthful, sowed doubt very effectively. I don't know where the term conservative comes from -- they certainly aren't conserving the economy, the ecosystem, or our freedoms. And when they called themselves compassionate conservatives or call the liberals "elistists," those are simply out-and-out lies, as explained in the "philosophy" section below.
I first became aware of the effect of language in shaping thought, in my own work with mathematics, a subject that is much more objective and much less prone to distortion. I think the lat great controversies of mathematics were in the late 19th century over the notion of infinity, and in the early 20th century over the Axiom of Choice; both controversies can both be traced to difficulties in language.
The destruction of truth that scares me most of all, at this point, is what I might call "bullshit fatigue." Professor Harry Frankfurt, in his little book On Bullshit, wrote that bullshit goes beyond lying. The liar pays attention to what is true and what is false, and tries to convey the latter; but the bullshitter is concerned only with veneer and not with the conveying of any particular truth or falsehood. I see a similar effect in some of Bush's speech tactics. For years, he justified his invasion of Iraq by saying "we must learn the lessons of 9/11," despite very clear evidence that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. Finally, in fall of 2006, when that argument seemed to be wearing thin, in response to a question he casually remarked "well I never said that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with those attacks." The implication was that the truth didn't even matter to him. And perhaps he is wearing down the public to the point where they are numb, and no longer concerned about the truth.Also in fall '06, Bush started using the term "Islamo-Fascist terrorists," and the corporate-owned mainstream media immediately picked this phrase up and started using it as though it were a perfectly rational phrase -- despite the fact that, as pointed out immediately by progressive pundits, this phrase by Bush doesn't make any sense at all. (Fascism is a merging of totalitarian national government with big business -- a recent tendancy of the United States, not of the Islamic guerillas, who are connected with neither a national government nor big business.) And the phrase had the desired effect: A few days later I heard some teenagers using the phrase as though they believed it made sense.
THE BIG LIE
 The biggest instance of Orwellian language is the lie about the news media, because it contains all the other lies. It is also the most frightening crisis of all: the fact that most people in our society are unaware of the crises we are facing. But when you think about it objectively for just a minute, looking past the rhetoric, you can't help noticing the contradictions: If the mainstream media really and truly were the "left wing media," they would be showing Noam Chomsky, not Bill O'Reilly. Think about why television shows so much of football and the love lives of movie stars, and so few debates about health care, the war, the national debt.
If the news media told out-and-out direct lies -- e.g., that poverty has been eradicated, that New Orleans has been dealt with properly, that the USA is winning the war in Iraq -- they probably wouldn't get away with it. Instead the news media use much more subtle forms of bias -- e.g., the newscasters present themselves as neutral, but they wholeheartedly embrace the conservatively framed language. And look carefully at how the allegedly "fair and balanced" talk shows are structured: the conservative politician is asked gentle questions about his policy and ideology, giving him an opportunity to spout his practiced rhetoric, but the more liberal or progressive politician is needled about personal matters.
Still, we are not yet completely surrounded by the one big lie. The mainstream media occasionally carry a story about the massive failure of the mainstream media. And the internet is, at least temporarily, a different kind of medium altogether. Web pages are vastly less expensive to post; in effect, everyone can have his or her own printing press. Thus the internet contains a much wider variety of voices. This babel is a mixture of truth and lies, prophets and crackpots, with less slick packaging than television but also less money bias. You'll have to sort through the internet for a long time to decide who you trust and what you believe. We also have a few other independent news media, which must be treasured and used while they exist. Are the lies orchestrated? Well, it's not really a secret that the "talking points" are orchestrated, by Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and a few other conservative leaders. By agreeing on what phrases they will use, the conservatives make those phrases more influential. Do I believe there are vast secret conspiracies of power -- e.g., that the 9/11 Commission is just a coverup? I'm not sure. But I am increasingly frightened by vast conspiracies that are not secret, merely underreported -- for instance, the Project for the New American Century, the so-called Americans for Tax Reform, and the dominion theologians. You can find their websites. Those people aren't hiding what they're doing -- in fact, they're proud of it; they think it's good. I don't think it's good, as I explain later on this page. ... And there are also some things going on that are not quite secret, but on which it's hard to find detailed and reliable information -- e.g., the concentration camps that have been set up to hold us activists. The phrase "The Big Lie" came into wide use in political analysis after World War II, but the concept behind it is much older. In the literature associated with the Book of Revelations, the Antichrist is depicted as a person working for evil, but so persuasively that most believe him to be working for good. Ever since the popularization of that literature, people have accused anyone in opposition to them of being the Antichrist. It would be comforting to believe in a simple answer. But if you are honest with yourself, you know that there is no way to avoid the hard work of deciding for yourself what is true and good. To trust in someone else solely on the basis of authority would be an abdication of your responsibility for your own actions. People who know me personally might trust my motives and judgment and my favorite news sources (listed further down this page); but you, dear reader, probably don't know me. I hope you'll listen to a lot of different voices and then decide for yourself which ones ring true to you. As Buddha said, Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Alas, even that plea may sound like a liberal bias. In the religious right, the very questioning of authority is viewed as a sin; faith is prized more highly than reason. My background is mathematics; I don't yet know how to communicate with people who don't believe in reason. But I'm trying to learn.
INDIFFERENCE, BIAS, AND OUTRIGHT CONSPIRACY
How far do the lying and cheating go? And what kinds are involved?
Biased neglect and inattention to facts. There is no doubt that the present administration has been concerned only with the well-being of the rich, indifferent to the needs of other citizens, and biased in its actions, and has freely lied to conceal this fact from the (unfortunately numerous) voters who do not bother to look beyond the president's own statements. The most blatant example is that of New Orleans:
Visible action, consciously or unconsciously biased. There are other cases where bias involves more action. For example, in elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004, voters in largely Democratic districts had greater difficulty voting than those in Republican districts. Was this part of a conscious conspiracy on the part of Republican legislators, to deny votes to Democrats? Not necessarily.
Outright lying. The Downing Street Memos (and other evidence) have made it clear that the Bush administration intentionally and knowingly lied about its reasons for invading Iraq. Does this count as outright evil? That depends on your philosophy. If you believe that (i) there were some secret good reasons for invading Iraq, and (ii) the end justifies the means, then certainly it's okay to lie. Personally, I am not convinced of either of those two points. The fact that Bush is known to have lied about some things makes all of his other statements suspect. It's too bad that there have been no congressional investigations during the first 6 years of his reign. Perhaps that will change, now that we have a Democratic majority in congress. Or perhaps not; as I've mentioned earlier, many of the Democrats owe their allegiance to big money, not to progressive ideals. Hidden action. What really happened on 9/11/01 ? Perhaps we'll never know the whole story. By now we know that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it, and we know that some parts of the story are simply "omitted" from the official report. We know that some parts of the 9/11/01 story don't make a lot of sense -- impossible and peculiar phone calls from cell phones on airplanes, a hole at the Pentagon of the wrong size and shape, buildings falling straight down instead of sideways, peculiar stock market activity the day before the attacks, peculiar Air Force activities in the hours before the attacks. We know that some evidence -- videotapes, flight data recorders, etc. -- is being withheld by federal authorities, and we haven't been told why; many questions would be answered if that evidence were made available for unbiased public inspection. Loose Change 9/11 is a documentary film made -- in its first two editions, anyway -- by three young people using home video equipment plus information they found on the internet. It presents a very compelling case for the idea that the attacks of 9/11/01 were an inside job, with complicity from the U.S. military, the people who were in charge of the twin towers, and apparently the White House. Despite the compelling evidence, many people who watched "Loose Change" dismissed it as a mere conspiracy theory from tin-hat crackpots -- perhaps because of the poor production quality and the spooky background music. However, on September 24, 2006, a symposium entitled "9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out" was conducted in the auditorium of a public school in Berkeley, California. It was a presentation about a book on the subject. The speakers were the authors of the book -- three college professors, an army officer who was also a former CIA analyst, and an engineer. Why professors, and why at a school? Quoting from the beginning of their film, If our educational community cannot address this issue then it risks remaining merely "academic" in the worst sense of that term.
They raised many of the same questions as those in the "Loose Change" movie, but without the spooky background music. Among the people I've spoken with who have seen this symposium, none has dismissed it as a mere conspiracy theory from tin-hat crackpots. If you're interested, you can buy a video of this symposium from http://www.911truth.org/, or watch the video for free at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3195658770053494633.
ECONOMICS
Actually, the so-called "conservatives" do not conserve anything, so that term is a misnomer. Hartmann prefers to call them simply "cons." I am tempted to call them "elitists" or "corporatists" or "feudalists," for reasons explained in various places on this page.
Some people draw a distinction between "traditional conservatives" and "the radical right," but I would be wary of that distinction. The conservatives currently at the top of government are losing popularity, and may be headed for a crash. Consequently they are now being called "extremists" or "radicals" by some other conservatives who call themselves "traditional conservatives" because they don't want to be dragged down with the crash. But I think that's a sham -- I think that the extraordinary crimes being committed by our current government are a natural outgrowth of that "traditional" conservative ideology; I'll explain that below. The conservative economic ideology is based on the myth of "the self-made man" who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps, and who doesn't need a handout or anything else from the government. But THAT MYTH IS ENTIRELY FALSE. Every businessman depends on the infrastructure -- publicly financed banks, roads, courts, police, and other services -- to protect his business. Those things are a commons in which we invest with our taxes. The multibillionaire Warren Buffett said "if you had dropped me in Bangladesh 30 years ago, I would still be impoverished, because they had no banking system and no stock market." Progressives believe that government should preserve, protect, and extend the commons, the infrastructure. Conservatives do not believe that, and while they've been in power they've done everything they can to sabotage and destroy the infrastructure. The most blatant example is that Bush decreased funding of the levees a year before Katrina struck, despite expert predictions of disaster. Electing conservatives to run your government is like hiring a chef who hates food.
 Even if "trickle down economics" worked (which it doesn't), it would be cruel and unjust. How did we become so inured to that phrase? Archbishop Hélder Câmara saidWhen I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
But "they" are unfair in making that accusation. Communism is not the only alternative to our present inhumane system. Certainly a market economy is more efficient than a centrally dictated economy, but many kinds of markets are possible. Conservatives have absolute faith in a "free market." But, as Hartmann points out, such a thing does not exist. To trade without laws would be like playing baseball without rules. Businesses are based on contracts, which are backed up by courts. Perhaps laws would be needed less if all businesses were small and personal; a shopkeeper generally will not want to mistreat his own neighbors. But such considerations have no effect on big corporations. The laws about corporations are bizarre. A corporation has the rights but not the responsibilities of a person. Instead of being governed by a conscience, a corporation is actually required by law to attempt to maximize profit for their stockholders regardless of the consequences to the community. As a result, big corporations have become psychopathic killers -- polluting our rivers and our air, poisoning our foods, and so on. There is evidence of this all around us, but conservative ideologues refuse to see it, so great is their faith in the overly simplistic notion of so-called "free" markets Probably I will revise this section a bit in the near future. I am currently reading Thom Hartmann's recent book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do About It, and I am very impressed by it. You can watch a 90-minute video of Hartmann talking about these ideas; I recommend it very highly; he is an excellent speaker. Hartmann says that a middle class and democracy cannot exist without each other, and for the last few decades the wealthy elites in power have been paying mere lip service to democracy, enriching themselves while weakening the middle class.
Since the conservatives gained control, we have seen a shrinking of the middle class, a growing of the gap between the haves and have-nots. Perhaps the plutocrats believe in what mathematicians call a zero-sum game: The only way I can gain is if you lose, and vice versa. That might make sense when you buy a cantaloupe or a car, but for a nation it is a stupid strategy -- a nation's economy should grow. It is far wiser to invest in the infrastructure, and to view the working classes -- both lower and middle -- as a vital part of that infrastructure. Even if you think that there is some justification for the corporate CEO's enormous income, that income will be diminished if society's overall wealth is diminished. And now we're heading toward an extreme case: If the economy is mismanaged badly enough -- e.g., if the CEO continues to deny peak oil, global warming, and massive pollution instead of dealing with them -- then the entire planetary economy will collapse, and the CEO and his children and grandchildren will end up with nothing. As the Cree Indians said, Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
George Lakoff's 2004 book Don't Think of an Elephant brought to progressives' attention the importance of the metaphor of family. Our families are the first place where we experience any interaction of a political nature, and so it is natural to view the nation -- either consciously or unconsciously -- as a big family, which is governed either by nurturing parents or by a strict patriarch. Seemingly unrelated issues, such as economics and civil liberties, are tied together under one style of thinking. The conservatives were the first to realize this, and they appropriated the word "values" and related phrases for themselves -- but in fact their values are not the values most Americans would choose if the matter were clarified.
Lakoff explains that most of us have within us at least some elements of both ideologies. For instance, if you can watch and appreciate a "Star Trek" episode, with the lower officers blindly obedient to peculiar orders from their superior officers, then you understand the conservative's belief in a strong patriarchal authority.  The two philosophies are based on very different assumptions about human nature, and there is increasing evidence supporting the progressive assumptions. The notion of an "alpha male" was popular among biologists for a while, but recent studies have shown that herds actually make travel decisions by an unconscious majority rule, not by following a pack leader. And children learn better from rewards than from punishments. Here are some other consequences and variants of the conservative ideology: Fearmongering. Whenever an election rolls around, the Republicans stress the terrible dangers of foreign attack, and portray themselves as tough and hard-nosed and realistic. They claim that the Democrats are sissies who would be ineffective in war. This ploy seems to be very effective in lining up votes. Calvinism or social Darwinism. The poor are poor only because they deserve to be poor -- e.g., because they are weak, lazy, or inferior, or because God wants them to be poor. They can improve their lot only by learning to be self-reliant. Thus, any attempt to assist them not only is doomed to fail, but encourages dependency, and this is immoral. Likewise, the rich deserve to be rich. Thus, conservatives are indifferent to the lot of the poor, and they conflate atruism with greed.
Blind faith in self-serving economic theories. Conservatives see entrepreneurs as the catalysts who create wealth, and there is a grain of truth in that, but they have stretched it entirely out of proportion. They give opportunities, protections, rewards, bonuses, and tax cuts to the rich, and regulations and obstacles to everyone else, and then they call this system "free market" or "free trade." They believe that putting more power in the hands of big greedy amoral corporations somehow will solve the world's problems; they ignore the fact that the corporations are legally obligated to give their alliegiance to stockholder profits, not to public well-being. They have lost any objectivity; they will not look at the concrete evidence of the disastrous consequences their policies have had for the poor or for the ecosystem; they believe their own lies. Natural tendency toward totalitarianism and fascism. Their belief in rule by a superior few, rather than by the masses, makes conservatives want to place more and more power in the hands of the president. They do not see the point of the checks and balances system enshrined in the constitution by our nation's founding fathers. They believe that the end justifies the means; thus they discard Habeas Corpus, Posse Comitatus, and other basic protections of civil liberties.
Natural tendency toward racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of scapegoating. The elitist mindset is that we're "better" than somebody else; the leaders designate who that somebody is. The predominant scapegoat varies from one decade to another, but the mechanism is unchanging: The majority group is unified by its fear and hatred of some external enemy. Adherence to vindictive, fundamentalist religious views. The religious right in America today describes itself as "Christian," but it actually follows the teachings of Leviticus, not Jesus. Unquestioning, unreasoning faith in authorities is demanded.
What is freedom? Well, pianos are not explicitly mentioned in the bible. Some congregations take that as a reason to permit pianos in church; others take it as a reason to prohibit pianos in church. How do you feel about that? How do you feel about everything?
 In the 1960's and 1970's, during the Viet Nam war, the slogan "Make Love Not War" was popular among the antiwar activists. That slogan made a lot of sense to me then, and it still makes sense to me now. But it is less popular now. Conservatives have largely succeeded in demonizing the sentiments associated with that slogan. They want to turn something beautiful, intimate, loving, joyful into something sordid, furtive, mechanical, ugly, and ridden with guilt. We must not let them. If you find love, be joyful in it, and proud of your joy. That is a revolutionary vaccine against war.CRISIS ISSUES GLOBAL WARMING. Not if, not when, but how fast and how big. It's like a canoe being tipped: small amounts of change will be corrected by negative feedback loops, but once a certain threshold is passed, positive feedback kicks in and the change accelerates. A recent article in Mother Jones magazine lists a dozen tipping points that we've already passed. The one that I'm most familiar with is the melting of the ice over vast areas near the north and south poles. That replaces reflective white ice with dark water or land that absorbs the suns rays, thus further accelerating global warming.
Life will not continue as we know it. In essence, we are moving to a different planet. Earth will be altered so greatly that it's hard to imagine. Within years (it's not yet clear how many),
PEAK OIL. This is another little-known disaster headed our way, perhaps slightly smaller than global warming but perhaps destroying our lives sooner. In the 1970's the United States passed its "peak oil" point -- i.e., we had taken so much oil out of the ground that extraction started getting harder despite improving technology; the rate of extraction from oil fields in the USA has diminished steadily since the 1970's. Consequently, it has become US policy to import oil from other countries, by propping up cooperative governments and overthrowing uncooperative ones (irrespective of democracy or dictatorship). But now the entire world is coming to peak oil, and we can't import it from some other planet. Those high prices at the gas pumps are not temporary. Higher prices make new oil exploration and new sources more feasible, so the rising prices and the exhaustion of supply will be gradual, not sudden. But many of the new sources of oil are extremely dirty and cause enormous damage to an environment that we've already abused greatly. Immediate massive research would ameliorate the problem somewhat, but instead we get denials and delays. For more information, I suggest the radio interview with James Kunstler, followed by the movie The End of Suburbia and the website Post Carbon Institute. If I haven't caught your attention yet, just think about that title -- "the end of suburbia." Our entire economy -- roads, homes, workplaces, shopping places, etc. -- is structured around the availability of cheap oil. We based all our long-term investments on a short-term arrangement! I have to admit, my crystal ball is a little cloudy on the peak oil issue. There may be some technological fixes in the works. Progress is finally being made on cheap solar panels, And the first fusion nuclear reactor will go online in 2007 in South Korea (but designed by Americans). That's not fission -- which works with highly toxic heavy materials like uranium and plutonium -- but fusion, which just works on nuclear interactions of hydrogen and helium. Fusion is much more powerful than fission, so it may give us a cheap, clean source of energy. And then hydrogen fuel cells would be a cheap way of transporting the energy, so that we can run cars on it. It's just barely conceivable that these new technologies could solve the peak oil problem. But I think that may make the global warming problem even worse, by converting small amounts of matter into large amounts of energy on a planet that is already overheating from overuse of energy. CORPORATE OWNERSHIP OF THE MEDIA. A few big corporations, owned by a wealthy families, now own most of the mainstream news media -- the newspapers, radio, and televison stations. So just a few people are now determining what most people see as truth. They're not letting through very much information about global warming or our other big problems. Some relevant websites are FreePress, Stop Big Media, SourceWatch, Global Echo, Media Matters, Democracy Now, and (locally) Radio Free Nashville. SPIRITUAL MALAISE. Michael Lerner, author of the book The Left Hand of God, has diagnosed a problem that most progressives have been unaware of until recently. America is a very religious country, and most Americans have a great thirst for spirituality in their lives -- for a feeling of belonging to something bigger than themselves. Lacking that spirituality, Americans have become disheartened and apathetic. It took me a while to start understanding this problem, because I don't know religious terminology very well. I finally was awakened to it by something I saw on the Freeway Blogger's website. One of the popular signs for Freeway Blogging is the slogan "The War is a Lie" -- that's concise and to the point; it's short enough to fit on a sign easily. But in one of the blogger's photos, that sign is accompanied by a second sign that says "And you know it." When I read that second sign, I felt sick to my stomach, because it hints at something that I didn't want to admit to myself at first: Most people in our society are at least half aware that they're being lied to, but they don't want to think about that. They don't have the courage or other resources to face up to it, and so instead they are just swallowing the lies. They are trapped by the mainstream media's presentation. And caring about it would hurt too much, so they have turned off their caring. This is the "doublethink" of Orwell's 1984. Americans will fill their need for spirituality any way they can. Until recently, progressives have overlooked and neglected this need, and so for years conservatives have had free reign in framing religious issues. In recent years they have been stepping up their efforts to replace the constitution with fundamentalist theocracy. (A recent radio interview of Michelle Goldberg is frighteningly informative about this development.) And they've been cynically playing the religious people for suckers; this is explained in the recent book by David Kuo, who worked for Bush for two years. In the last year or so, progressive visionaries have begun to understand this, and to counter the Republicans' vengeful, exclusionary god of Leviticus with the loving, caring god of Jesus and Hillel. It's not a new religion -- they've just got a different reading of the same old sacred texts. See particularly Street Prophets (a spinoff of Daily Kos) and the Network of Spiritual Progressives (begun by Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God). From a more secular perspective, Lakoff himself actually is addressing much the same issues -- i.e., finding the heart, and speaking from it. But progressives have gotten a late start on this matter, and may have a hard time catching up. And the part of this that scares me the most is that some of the fundamentalists do not want to make the world a better place. They actually would welcome a cataclysm such as global warming, because they see that as a necessary precondition for the return of Christ. And I don't see any way to reason with them about this. Why work for a better future on earth when you can go to heaven instead? Alienation of labor. Many Americans feel their jobs are meaningless, and recently I have begun to experience this myself. But actually, my job itself has not changed at all; what has changed is the significance I attach to that job. People experience their work as meaningful if, through that work, they feel participation in a meaningful community. Back when I believed in the consensus trance, I felt that the world was on the right track and getting better every day, and I saw my teaching as a way of sharing with others the beauty of mathematics; it was a work of love. It transcended national boundaries; I have received thank-you notes from far-off lands for my expository work. But since my awakening I have become more aware of the rift between the haves and have-nots, and I see that my work efforts have only been bolstering the lives of an elite. For instance, the Living Income for Vanderbilt Employees campaign has made me aware that even the people who share my daily life are not all invited to share its bounty. What kind of community is that? ABOUT ELECTIONSOverthrowing the money party. Some people, on seeing the terms "progressive" and "conservative," might jump to the assumption that I am talking about Democrats and Republicans. That is not correct. The Republicans are indeed conservative, but a substantial number of our elected Democratic politicians are conservative too. I want to cleanse the Democratic party (or abandon it altogether and strengthen the Green Party).
The Public Campaign Action Fund is one organization working for publicly financed political campaigns. Making the Democratic Party more progressive. This involves campaigning before the primaries, to try to give the nominations to progressive candidates. In many cases this involves taking the nominations away from incumbents. That's something which many party loyalists have been loathe to do because they fear this will lower the chances of getting someone in their party elected. Consequently, we've seen this action happen rarely. But in 2006 we did see Ned Lamont wrest from Joe Lieberman the Democratic nomination for senator. Admittedly, Lieberman then won as an independent, but that doesn't mean we should give up. We need more candidates like Lamont in the future. Working in this direction are people like Daily Kos and Democracy for America. If you look carefully you can sort out which candidates are progressive and which are really in the "money party"; see for instance Sirota's article on this. Jeff Faux calls it "the Party of Davos." The Democratic and Republican parties are both complicit in great corruption in the past, and at present the Democrats in office are almost as corrupt as the Republicans; I hope they can be cleaned up. Supporting a third party. Some progressives have given up on the Democratic Party, and have turned to a third party. At present I think that the Green Party has the strongest progressive presence. Admittedly, the Green Party is still fairly small, and growing it large enough to make it influential will not be easy. But even when they do not expect to win, Green Party candidates serve the very useful purpose of making their ideas heard. In the long run, third parties can affect the ideologies of the two major parties. Making the Democrats more progressive or strengthening the Greens -- are these goals at cross purposes? Not really. In fact, to a large extent we accomplish them the same way: Just promote progressive philosophy and ideology. It doesn't really depend on the party. To a small extent, that also increases the likelihood of making the Republicans more progressive. But Waldman actually cautions against trying to make the Republicans more progressive; he recommends attacking their moderates more than their extremists. His strategy is that if we can eliminate their moderates, we make it more obvious just how pro-corporate and anti-people the Republican Party is, and thus we make it easier to defeat that party entirely. Of course, when election season rolls around, one eventually does have to choose between Democrats and Greens. That gets to be a complicated issue. Here are some election day strategies to consider:
Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This is a system of balloting used in a few places in the world, and many people have begun to advocate using it in the United States. In this system, you indicate who is your first choice candidate, your second choice, and so on. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, then the candidate running last is eliminated, and the votes that went to him or her are instead given to the second choices selected by those voters -- and so on. Here is a link to a more detailed explanation, and a campaign for IRV. IRV would be especially helpful to the third parties, because voters would no longer have to feel they were "wasting" their votes on such a party. The Green Party has advocated IRV rather strongly. Another departure from the two-party system would be proportional representation, used in many countries in Europe. Unlike the winner-take-all system used in the USA, proportional representation means that if your party gets 37% of the popular vote in some region, then your party gets 37% of the representatives for that region. As a result, candidates from many parties get elected, and often no one party has a clear majority; then the parties must form coalitions after the election. This system is not presently being advocated very strongly by any large groups in the USA, as far as I know. Position pledges. Before the 2006 election, we saw various pledges that voters could sign -- e.g., that they would promise to vote only for a candidate who supported a quick end to the war, or to vote only for a candidate who supported impeaching Bush. Of course, these pledges are not binding -- no one follows you into the voting booth to see whether you obeyed your promise -- and so some voters broke their promises and reverted to other election-day strategies. But the pledges still have some effect in making opinions heard. If such pledges are signed early enough in the election season, they might actually influence some candidates. Untampered elections. Joseph Stalin said "those who cast votes decide nothing. Those who count votes decide everything." There is plenty of evidence indicating that the presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 were stolen -- i.e., that the amount of vote fraud was greater than the margin between the two candidates. (One of the clearest presentations of this story is in the book Fooled Again by Mark Crispin Miller.) And the situation has been made even worse by the increasing widespread use of electronic voting machines; these are more easily tampered with than the paper ballots ever were. Some organizations working for untampered elections are Election Justice and Gathering to Save Our Democracy. End gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the drawing of congressional districts along very arbitrary borderlines that guarantee an incumbent will have a strong majority in his or her district -- thus preserving the rule by that incumbent. This means it's very hard to defeat incumbents, so they cease to feel much accountability to the voters. It also means that they only need to appeal to their own party (to keep the nomination), and so they tend to become more extreme. The one exception is Iowa, which took the redistricting process out of political hands; that's the only state where incumbents are seriously at risk. We need more states like Iowa -- perhaps through changes in state constitutions, or perhaps an amendment to the federal constitution. And we need to dump the incumbents, in most cases. my favorite NEWS resourcesMy very first choice for progressive news analysis is Alternet, which is well written, fairly complete, and not overly sensational. I skim it every day on my cellphone, along with parts of Huffington Post and some other blogs.
I first learned of Lakoff when I saw his presentation on BookTV, which runs every weekend. But you've got to pick and choose -- BookTV is "balanced," which means it is about 1/3 topnotch analysis, 1/3 propaganda from the Dark Side, and 1/3 apolitical stuff. Nowadays I generally study the BookTV website on Friday to sort through the presentations for the coming weekend; I google any unfamiliar authors to see whether I want to watch them. Besides Lakoff, I've seen some great presentations by Mark Crispin Miller, Geoffrey Faux, Howard Zinn, and (not political) Karen Armstrong and Ray Kurzweil. I try to catch every new episode of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert; their wit makes the bad news bearable. Also on teevee and at the movies: I've seen some great documentary movies on the Sundance television channel, and (locally, here in Nashville) at the Belcourt Theater and occasionally at the Green Hills cinema. Among the few progressive magazines that I've tried, my favorites are Utne, Seed, and Mother Jones -- admittedly, in part because they have good graphics. The Nation, The Progressive and Harper's have good analyses but graphically they are much less exciting. The main news programs on NPR attempt to uncover some of the facts, and so they are slightly farther to the left than the mainstream media. For instance, they deliver the message that war is suffering and death, not flags and parades. More progressive on NPR are some of the interviews done by Terry Gross on her program "Fresh Air." All her interviews from recent years are available for free download as streaming audio, though the calendar interface doesn't help you sort through them very easily. I've mentioned a few of my favorite political interviews elsewhere on this page. (I've also enjoyed some of her nonpolitical interviews -- e.g., I'm a fan of Leonard Cohen.) You can get radio farther to the left. The local stations WRVU (Vanderbilt University) and WRFN (low-power Radio Free Nashville) have some progressive programs. Both these stations are also available on the internet; so too are Pacifica Radio and Air America. Pacifica is the home of Democracy Now, which is an hour of streaming audio every weekday. It's a bit faster paced than radio NPR, which makes it good background for aerobics. But I cannot recommend it for beginners -- they will think it comes from a different planet, it presents a perspective so totally disjoint from that of our mainstream news. Noam Chomsky is no stranger here, and many of the people interviewed are not Americans. ... Here are a few more progressive radio/web broadcasts. Have you signed a petition yet today? Check out The Petition Site and PetitionOnline. And have you signed this impeachment petition yet? ... It took me a while to understand the real purpose of some of the petitions. After all, a petition that is in the form of a letter saying "Dear President Bush, we think you should do this" or "Dear Senator Frist, we think you should do that" is not going to have any direct effect -- those people don't care at all what we think. But if the people running the petition are properly organized, they keep a count of how many people have signed. They can go to the press and say, "see, this huge number of people signed our petition, which this politician is ignoring." That makes the politician look bad in the eyes of an even larger number of people, and may either influence the politician, or influence subsequent elections. Want more blogs and other miscellaneous progressive links? There's a huge (but unannotated) list of them at Common Dreams. Another good list is at Code Pink. I have to admit that my list is a bit weak on local organizations; until recently I only paid attention to national issues. Some of the best local portal pages (i.e., lists of links) are those arranged by Nashville Peace and Justice Center, Tying Nashville Together, Democracy for TN, Irregular States TN, TN Green Party, TN Independent Media Center, TN Guerilla Women, Church St. Freedom Press, Liberadio, TN Alliance for Progress, Nashville Progressives Calendar. I'm actually the webmaster of those last two. This "scrapbook" only describes the media events, not all the meetings I've been attending and petitions I've signed. The scrapbook is mostly for my own vanity, but maybe it will also give me a little charisma, which might attract some students. I'd like to get more young people to think about the ideas on this web page. My awakening in politics really began around April 2006; before that I was just part of the Great Sleeping Masses. After my awakening, at first I tried to keep photos of all my rallies in this scrapbook, but after a while I gave up -- both because there were too many rallies, because I didn't get photos at all of them, and because not all the photos are equally interesting. So I'll just include a few highlights here. Why rally? Beginners might not understand the purpose of our demonstrations. When we carry signs that say "Mr. Frist, stop persecuting gays," we do not actually expect Frist to pay any attention at all. At least, not directly. He's already made up his mind to certain prejudices, after all. And when Cindy Sheehan camped outside Bush's vacation home, in Crawford, Texas, and asked him to meet with her to discuss the war, she did not actually expect him to. But if we can get a large enough crowd, perhaps we'll get our pictures in the newspaper, and perhaps the newspaper will tell a little of our story. And then perhaps a few curious people will look at our websites, and see more of our story. We want our side of the story to be heard by more people. And then perhaps more people will join our side, and eventually we will be numerous enough to pressure Frist and Bush, or to evict them from office altogether. So the real purpose of a rally is to attract media attention. (And also to have some fun -- after all, if we're going to promote life as a preferable alternative to war, we may as well enjoy it.) We encourage people to bring interesting and colorful signs, costumes, musical instruments, puppets, and for the kids let's bring along balloons and face paints.  May 11, 2006 - protesting against Laura Bush's presentation on Senior Day at Vanderbilt. This was my first rally. We were on the local broadcast news for a couple of minutes that night -- on all the local stations, but the only one that made me look good was WRKN. Here's the news clip: www.wkrn.com/node/22432. Thanks to Al for the photo. The strange-looking yellow garment is a raincoat, but the photo doesn't show the rain. ... So far, there has been no reprisal from Vanderbilt (my employer). In fact, they haven't commented at all; I don't think they even noticed. Vanderbilt is fairly liberal about a lot of things -- for instance, they are affiliated with the First Amendment Center. I was surprised that Vanderbilt invited Mrs. Bush. Vanderbilt is a pretty good place to work, and I consider myself lucky to have that job. -- This date was in some sense my political rebirth -- aside from a couple of meetings I attended, this was my first political activity in about 30 years.
 June 2, 2006 - protest against Wal-Mart. This one was fun: We dressed up in haz-mat (hazardous materials) suits for dramatic effect. That's me handing out leaflets to cars passing by. You can look at the website posted by the "Bureau of Worker Health." That site includes a subpage with several more photos of our group. We were on news channels 2 and 5.
  June 3, 2006 - the annual Nashville Pride Parade. It used to be the "Gay Pride Parade," but it's not just for gays any more. Here's a photo of me sitting at the Nashville Peace & Justice Center's booth. You may not be able to make it out, because the photo is so small, but that's a peace symbol around my neck. Around this time I started wearing it everywhere. Think of it as being like a religious symbol. It took me a while to get used to it -- at first I felt that I was taking an "in your face" attitude toward the world, but I've changed my mind about that; now I just wonder why I don't see more people wearing them. ... At first I was wearing it very tight around my neck, to keep it high enough to be visible; but that was uncomfortable; so after a few months I replaced it with a much larger medallion that I have hanging down over the middle of my chest, outside my shirt. Also, some of the time I've begun wearing slogan buttons like the one shown here. The holder is made of plastic, and snaps open so that you can insert any paper circle you like; you can change it every week according to your mood. You can buy the holder at a nearby store or order one online. The trick is to get the circle printed out just the right size, but you can download mine if you like it. Some of my other inserts say "SILENCE IS COMPLICITY" and "VOTING IS NOT ENOUGH".  Later we began a system of also handing out cards that advertise the calendar. June 5, 2006. - A bunch of us stood in front of Bill Frist's office, protesting against his support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
 Aug 30 -- When we heard that Bush was coming to town for a fundraiser dinner for Bob Corker, a bunch of us decided this was too good an opportunity to pass up; we started planning a rally. During the days leading up to the rally, we distributed hundreds of leaflets; I did a lot of that myself -- attaching them to telephone poles, handing them to people, and leaving little piles of them in a couple of local cafes. The leaflet was mostly designed by Eliz; she came up with the clever name "NO LIARS WELCOME Banquet and Roadside Rally." -- When the day arrived, the weather was perfect: clear skies, and not too hot; I think the high was about 80 degrees. I wore my Fascism S**** tee shirt. I don't get to wear that very often -- I think the sentiment expressed on the front and the information on the back are very true, but they are so far away from how most of our society currently views reality that I am usually embarrassed to wear it. Today, however, I wasn't embarrassed by that shirt at all. Thanks to Karen and Al for the photos. -- There were several hundred people attending. We were stretched out along West End Avenue. Food Not Bombs showed up and gave us a free dinner. A few dozen Bush-Corker supporters showed up with their signs and their crowd mingled with ours -- they couldn't help it, the sidewalk space between fence and street was very narrow. Interestingly, the two groups shared the space with little rancor; a few people even managed some dialogue. -- I left a little early, to attend another meeting, but I'm sorry I missed the end. I've heard that at the end, some young anarchists showed up, made the demonstration much more colorful, and "seized the street," whatever that means. I wish I'd seen that.
 Sept 11 -- We had a screening of the documentary film Loose Change 9/11 (2nd edition) at the Peace and Justice Center. I was amazed. See my comments, earlier on this page, under "Conspiracy." ... I have a new design for my button; see picture at right. We've had a lengthy discussion on the Peace Coalition listserv, trying to come up with a slogan that we can all get behind, but I don't think it's going to happen -- we're in agreement on our goals but not on our expressive styles. I chose the word "lie" in my slogan because it's nice and short, and well suited for a button, but Tim had a valid criticism of it: What if they start a war without lying about it? The real reason we're opposed to the current killing is not so much because it was justified by lies, but because we do not accept the real reasons that the war was begun -- jingoism, imperialism, greed, etc. Tim says protesting against those is more important than protesting against lying. I have to agree with that, but I'd like to believe that if someone actually gave those reasons for starting a war, the American public wouldn't go along with it. At any rate, those words are too long to fit on a button.
 Here's a fun photo that I got at the National Conference on Media Reform, January 12-14, 2007, in Memphis, TN. Actually, the photo is only distantly related to the conference. The photo is of me clowning around with The Chain Gang, a group of puppets produced by the progressive Backbone Campaign. That campaign was one of many who had a booth in the exhibition area at the conference. ... The issue of Media Reform is an important one, maybe the most important one of all that we are facing today, since it contains our ability to communicate about all the other issues. See "the big lie," discussed earlier on this web page. ... The conference was great. I have to admit that I know too little about media, and so much of the conference was wasted on me, but I did learn a little. And it felt wonderful to be surrounded by thousands of other progressives. There was an excitement, an energy, like nothing I can remember. Bill Moyers commented on it in his opening speech. Sure, you can exchange ideas by email, but that's nothing like the feeling you get by having thousands of people together, united by a shared vision. Moyers said that this was a feeling that "they"d don't want us to know about, but the founding fathers did -- that's why the constitution guaranteed the freedom to assemble.
 On January 26, the Living Wage campaign at Vanderbilt had a candlelight vigil, march, and s |
