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"Seeing Reality" - iii

 

It is the dearest wish of the wind from above that we, the wind from below, become simple extensions of machines, relinquishing the ability to even imagine wanting influence over the qualities of our physical environments.

 

[See Blog 47, The 4 Ruses (Pt. 3) and "Becoming The Function".]

 

The ancestors have called our attention repeatedly to the fact that we are being molded to be like machines, rather than the other way around. That the great ‘all’ of us, our majesty and mystery, is reduced, by our attachment to ‘things,’ to simple logic formulas, is continuously contradicted by our bodies, by our remembered “wildness.”


Youth, fresh from that river of mystery most readily cleave to resistance. Those of us adults who are awake have a responsibility to support them, to validate their intuitive responses to an inhuman system, support their gaining the information, skills and knowledge that they need to become even more powerful, more effective, ‘counters.’


We can support them with our material resources – our homes, help and subsidies – but we also support them when we validate the reality of “wildness,” of “freedom” – by being personally willing to embrace the “fuck-it factor.”

 

** “…to the degree to which the share of labor in the material process of production declines, intellectual skills and capabilities become social and political factors…"

To the degree to which organized labor operates in defense of the status quo, and to the degree to which the share of labor in the material process of production declines, intellectual skills and capabilities become social and political factors. Today, the organized refusal to cooperate of the scientists, mathematicians, technicians, industrial psychologists and public opinion pollsters may well accomplish what a strike, even a large-scale strike, can no longer accomplish but once accomplished, namely, the beginning of the reversal, the preparation of the ground for political action. That the idea appears utterly unrealistic does not reduce the political responsibility involved in the position and function of the intellectual in contemporary industrial society. The intellectual refusal may find support in another catalyst, the instinctual refusal among the youth in protest. It is their lives which are at stake, and if not their lives, their mental health and their capacity to function as unmutilated humans. Their protest will continue because it is a biological necessity. (Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. xxv)

Now I think of the “fuck-it factor” as akin to Marcuse’s “refusal.” It’s a buoyancy, an affirmative presence that’s finally called upon after years of suppression. And although it usually seems to be a spur of the moment thing, it’s actually been bubbling under the surface of apparent containment for years. But when it appears it happens so suddenly it seems like alchemy.


The shock, when it does, can be both liberating and terrifying (like wide open Jaws out of the blue still water) – depending on your point of view. Of course, after the fact, we nod and say, “well, of course, it should have been obvious, given that freedom is the inherent nature of all things.”


So when Tim DeChristopher suddenly decided to intervene and block the despoliation of precious wilderness lands in Utah, he’d been preparing himself for years for that moment, whether he knew it or not. *


Rosa Parks had studied with Myles Horton at his Highlander School and had forged a fully formed fury by the time she settled solidly in her seat.


Rachel Corrie had been pondering courage literally her whole life.


Resistance, freedom, the call of the wild, bubbles up from a deep underground spring common to us all.


Though it’s hideous that a youth perished on the altar of “civilization’s” conceit, there was something grounding, essential, conveyed when the four-year old Siberian tiger Tatiana issued her reality check, her memo, to the arrogant bosses of the San Francisco Zoo – and to us all. Something exhilarating when (in a tale from the racetrack I heard last summer) a horse refuses to go into the starting gate, throws off her jockey, and full-out flies, sun aflash on her back, racing down the track, the delecstasy of running the only stimulus required. I bet she’d been wanting to do that forever – to run the race, feel the wind in her face, with no asshole on her back.


It’s thrilling when a being refuses her assigned role in the script; exhilarating, paradigm-shifting, when the lie that we are thoroughly controlled, contained, domesticated, trained, is exposed.


For instance, a year ago, here where I live, a container ship “rammed a Bay Bridge tower…and dumped…bunker fuel into the bay:”

Emergency officials more than doubled the number of ships and cleanup workers attacking the massive oil spill throughout the Bay Area – while hundreds of frustrated citizens who tried to help were turned away from contaminated beaches and so-called training sessions…
Twenty of the boats are skimmers – specially rigged craft that skim oil up from the water – from private contractors hired by the company that owns the Cosco Busan container ship that rammed a Bay Bridge tower last week and dumped 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay. The other 40 boats are volunteer fishermen, recreational sailors and local agency craft that are patrolling to direct cleanup efforts, Eng said.
Beth Brown of San Francisco said she and her boyfriend spent about 15 minutes cleaning Baker Beach on Saturday morning, filling a couple of plastic bags with oily clumps. Then a park ranger and a cop appeared, told her the beach was closed and threatened them with arrest.
"I want to do what they want us to do but, right now, they want us to do nothing," Brown said. "And I can't do nothing." (San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 2007)

In essence, she was saying to them: “I want to be a good citizen, but I refuse to be a fool” (“…I refused to be a fool dancing on the strings held by all of those big shots”), because it’s a fool who ignores the earth speaking in and through them.


Facing reality means that we have to face the fact that we live in a system formed for the precise purpose of pounding us into passivity. It doesn’t want us to become large. It doesn’t want us to challenge authority. It doesn’t want us to think for ourselves – on the contrary. But it is critical, for all the reasons already discussed, that we begin to do so, that we develop our innate gifts and our ability to be powerful. The plans of ‘Power’ for us are not benign. Now is the time for a general awakening. Each time we listen to, and act on, the earth’s voice, her protected longing for us, we grow stronger for the day when we are ready to confront ‘Power.’

 

Back in the summer of 2008, when progressives were sweating the 2008 presidential election, a local Pacifica radio programmer, Kris Welch, rebroadcast a 2002 interview she’d conducted with John McCain. In response to callers’ comments about the Middle East he said that he agreed with Plato that, “citizens will choose totalitarianism over chaos.” Bush, as President, frequently joked that, “if this were a dictatorship this would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” And…

Back in 1964 Ronald Reagan started telling a story he repeated many times on the long road to the White House. It was about how the masses ruin democracy by sucking dry the nation. …In one tape-recorded speech in 1965, Reagan said: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government…democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship.” (David Cay Johnston, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With The Bill), p. 24-5)

My favorite Bush-slip came from his 2007 State of the Union address in which he said, “chaos is the greatest ally we have in this struggle.”


And Kris Welch again, just now, on her radio show Living Room, brought her listeners another interesting interview, with director Don Goldmacher, about his film, Heist. * In it he said that the Wall Street Gang is destroying our standard of living: “It’s going to go down anyway, but if the financial structure fails, it will plummet.”


Resulting in…“chaos,” perhaps?


In which case, unless we’ve kept ‘consciousness’ in our pocket, available for ready access, and precepts on our lips with the will to prove them, what do you suppose will happen? Haven’t we been shown the answer to that question repeatedly? Without consciousness, all too easily we can be manipulated into turning on each other. Suddenly a neighbor, who still has a nice house, a car, plenty of food, but who refuses to share, will receive the full force of popular fury long before it occurs to the people that she or he is a puppet, just like everyone else. And by then the damage will have been done.

 

Knowing as we do how dearly the podrunks love categorization, coercion and control, looking around us, seeing the existing pattern of slotting people, and their nations, into “core,” and “periphery,” “knowledge workers,” or “production workers,” it’s pretty easy to guess what their long-term plans are.

…production workers in the United States and other high-wage countries were advised to stop working with things and learn how to work with ideas or people. A progressive former U.S. secretary of labor regularly celebrated the shift of the U.S. economy away from mass production to “symbolic analysis.” Everyone in the United States (and by implication, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other high-wage industrial economies) was to become a computer programmer, or perhaps a lawyer. (Rick Baldoz, Charles Koeber, Philip Kraft, The Critical Study of Work, 2001, p. 4)

These words were written in a different era of course. Today the labor movement, and the left in general, is pressing for the return to the U.S. of a significant manufacturing base to build “the real economy,” instead of continuing to inflate the speculative fantasies of Wall Street. And if the pay scales of those proposed new manufacturing jobs are pegged to the Chinese standard, the podrunks might concede the point.

Two years after it bought Mr. Coffee in 1998, the Sunbeam Corporation shifted production from Cleveland, Ohio, where workers who make electric appliances earned more than $21 an hour, to Matamoros, Mexico, where they averaged $2.36. Three years after that, the company moved Mr. Coffee production to China, where they can hire labor at 47 cents an hour. (Jeff Faux, The Global Class War, 2006, p. 137)

The current fight in the polity over the Employee Free Choice Act is ultimately a battle over where to set that base wage standard. The last thing podrunks want is well-fed and well-read American “manual labor” getting all frisky and full of itself again. They saw this in the fifties and sixties in America and vowed never to let it happen again. And while they probably would prefer a neat organization of the world itself into white-skinned Northern “symbolic analysts,” and dark-skinned Southern “grunts,” climate change, peak oil, peak water, and the extension of democracy in the global South, will require maintaining a significant “grunterage” within the bowels of the “knowledge economy” itself. In which case they intend not to give an inch of the ground of their Control to “the grunts or their designated drivers.”


But trends clearly in evidence – automation job elimination, incarceration before education, illness before wellness, withdrawal of the safety net, gentrification segregation, monopolization of information – suggest that existing gaps in access to the goodies will only get worse. Shrinking resources due to the podrunks’ over-zealous consumption of the planet, their privatizing what should have been our common treasures, have locked these tendencies in place. Trying to rebuild a manufacturing base in such circumstances brings to mind those over-worked deck chairs on the Titanic, if not the one about our bandaged vampire with the gleam in his eye.


Come the wet-ass hour, do we really want vampires in the captaincy, deciding what our world will look like and how we will live?


Even if President Obama is able to rein in the podrunks politically, this Titanic called “the consequences of raping the planet” will take decades to turn, if it can be turned at all, leaving the extreme right-wing nut-cases plenty of time to experiment with their “extra-political” power plays, which you can bet they’re cooking up in oceans as we speak.


And do we really believe in the ability of our politicians to detach themselves, come that soggy time, from their backroom buddies and club-mates? How have they performed on that score so far? Do you believe in magic? Do you truly think their hearts will change fundamentally when the system hasn’t?


Our elected “leaders” cannot do this thing that needs to be done. But they will resist like hell when we step up and propose ourselves as the ones to do it.

And we grunts, many of us, will resist as well, resist even the notion that we are all “grunts” – to the podrunks. Which means that those of us who do see reality will have to start now to challenge the division work and begin embracing our culture work. We have to start now reconstructing our lives around our values, our reconceived values – our oppositional value-system.


We have to live our values, not just think them.


Because, critical as it is to control the thoughts that we allow to occupy our bodies, thoughts alone, unlived, unconsciously cycles the Thinker back to Mind-Worship, and that is a value at odds with wholeness and wholism.


A renunciation of Mind-Worship means a re-valuation of the Power of the Hand. With our hands we grow our own food. With our hands we make our own clothes. With our hands we build our own homes. With our hands we milk our own sheep. With our hands we mill our own wheat. With our hands we shuck our own corn. With our hands we toot our own horn (Yay Wind From Below!) – figuratively and literally, because with our hands we make our own beats. And with our hands we make music in the streets. Or dirt paths, whatever.


Living our values is akin to becoming those loving beings that Fromm described in The Art of Loving – surely one of the most important books of our time – a practice that requires “discipline, concentration and patience throughout every phase of one’s life.”


Wholism.

 

We have been controlled by many techniques, but, as Naomi Klein has pointed out, perhaps the most important way has been by pulling us off-center, keeping us off-balance, uncertain, insecure and worried. If you don’t have the basics, it’s hard to think about much else – like about what kind of world we really want. But it is precisely this latter question that is ‘for us,’ as Studs said, right now. Human matters.


In order to get to the future we want, as opposed to the one the podrunks want for us, we have to make planning our priority. We have to create a plan based in our values and then live it, even when, or especially when, we’re shaken up and something is trying to push us off-center.


Once I studied martial arts and the teacher explained one of the stances, kenpo, with the analogy of gripping the floor of the subway train as it rounds a curve or changes speed. “Rotate your feet to the outside edges, keep your back straight, bend your knees slightly and sink into the stance so that you’re centered.”

 

*** “The Plan” is our kenpo stance."

“The Plan” is our kenpo stance. When they throw some new destabilization scheme at us, we return to our basics: the precepts that guide action:

Live simply,
Help each other,
Don’t buy anything
but the least you have to.
And whatever we use
We get from friends.
We’ll be forming the crew
that builds the NEW.
No more settling
for less than what we want.

Fundamentally, it’s about all of us tuning ourselves to the same question, to this one question: “what world do we want?” Folding our actions together, to that question – the very one the podrunks least want us to take responsibility for. But it is we who literally make the world we live in, with our hands, who must now begin conceptualizing the shape of the new world that will be fit for life. It is we who suffer the consequences of the big decisions, who must now start to make them.


So in times when we’re most stressed, we return to kenpo stance, we come together and review our precepts: “don’t buy anything but the least you have to;” “buy from friends, not from corporations,” corporations only want to kick us to the curb like trash; “form a group” with others in your neighborhood that agree to a campaign of mutual aid, both for each other, and for the broader community.


We have to prepare ourselves now for the crises they will throw at us – destroying that which makes us feel more hopeful, food shortages, agent provocateurs, plans to poison our air and water, policies that attempt to divide us.


In our Plan, there are the things we agree to do in a crisis, and the things we agree to do every day. But every thing we do, every positive action, every thought, leads out, out the door and on to better things.


Your crew is not your tribe. Your community is not your culture. But that don’t matter. They are the folks you work with to get the job done because you’re in the same place at the same time, just like the construction workers who find themselves all together at a job site. You’ll find your tribe later. But now there’s a job to do and you have to help.


We have to see both short and long, from above and on the ground, laterally, diagonally, and every which way, all at once.

We need strategies; we need a plan.
We need approaches; we need a path.
We need steps we can follow,
And a view of the end;
We need patience to get there,
And a place to begin –

You have to have sound footing if you’re gonna jump.

 

– recognizing that each person’s “start-point” is when and where he / she – you / me – decides to start. That could be today, a year from today, or five years from today; it could mean embracing one strategy or many at once. It all depends on where you are right now.

Little by little
we whittle and whittle
away the death-worship,
the denial of meaning,
returning to reverence,
to spiral renewal,
to springs out of winters,
and to all things communal.

 

 

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 5

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)

 

 

 

 

*  The December 22, 2008 Democracy Now! featured Tim DeChristopher, a Utah student who stood up to Bush administration plans to allow oil and gas industry desecration of Utah’s wilderness legacy.

 

* The March 13, 2009 Living Room. The film itself can be viewed at: www.Heist-themovie.com