Friday Reflection: Crane's Reminder, and Our Purpose

Before we get to the Friday Reflection for today, I have some links to video material that you may find worth viewing.

The first is from a very familiar source, but it may not be what you expect. Jon Stewart, aside from being a very funny man and a trenchant social observer, has an extraordinary gift for interviewing (and believe me, it's a very rare skill in today's media). Check out this interview he has with former Clinton NSA chief Zbigniew Brzezinski. Also note ZB's ominous message of the moment. Let's hope the title of his book can serve as a guide to recovery as well as a reflection on a lost opportunity.

Next is a full-length documentary on two gritty British activists who took on Mickey D's—just click the graphic above to watch. I found it via Klassy's StumbleUpon page. It's pretty inspiring.

The last is an activist video site which you may be familiar with. It's featured in our Blogroll, and its teenage author is the topic of an excellent story in the current issue of Mother Jones. The webmistress in question is young Ava Lowery, and the site is Peace Takes Courage. If you haven't seen this young lady's marvelous videos, spend some time there and watch. Then remember—according to the MoJo reporter, this teenage girl from the heart of Dixie, along with her family, has been subjected to intimidation, abuse, and even death threats. So far, nothing has stopped her. This weekend, many of us will be continuing to make the restorative sounds of dissent thanks to the information and inspiration provided by people like Ava.



Our banner quote this week may have struck a vaguely familiar chord of resonance in many of you, even if you haven't read the book since you were in junior high school. The author is Stephen Crane, and the book is of course his classic, The Red Badge of Courage.

The men groaned. The luster faded from their eyes. Their smudged countenances now expressed a profound dejection. They moved their stiffened bodies slowly, and watched in sullen mood the frantic approach of the enemy. The slaves toiling in the temple of this god began to feel rebellion at his harsh tasks.

This is from the beginning of the book's very heart, where we discover how flight becomes the journey. It begins with a wild run from danger, which transforms gradually into a somber and regenerative retreat for the novel's protagonist, who only name is "the youth". Now I'm not sure of my facts here, because it's all coming from a distant memory (and at my age, memory for anything becomes a challenge); but I believe that the setting of the novel is one of the great blood baths of Lincoln's War, Chancellorsville. One of Crane's great accomplishments in this small novel was to accurately portray both the vast scope and the horror of that battle, with considerable historical authenticity.

But of more interest is the personal human dimension of the novel. Crane spends the first 50 or so pages portraying the fighting spirit of his characters—the cultural facade of courage. Then he reveals how easily that facade implodes; panic overtakes his warriors in a single moment:

A man near him, who up to this time had been working feverishly at his rifle, suddenly stopped and ran with howls. A lad whose face had borne an expression of exalted courage, the majesty of he who dares give his life, was, at an instant, smitten abject. He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight and is suddenly made aware. There was a revelation. He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.

Perhaps back in some FOX studio, safe in the heart of the Union, some pundit or other might have described this turn in the battle as cowardice or "cutting and running." Well, that's exactly what Crane was describing: "cut and run" as in Nature overtaking social programming. He goes on throughout the rest of the book to reveal the intensity of the inner conflict between these forces—how disabling the institutional boulders of bravery and courage are to the human psyche. What terrible wars must be fought within the man who sees himself as departing from those rigid walls of cultural conditioning! What lifelong wounds are inflicted upon the soul of a man who is once condemned, by himself or others, as a coward, and what must be risked to redeem himself! This, added to the ordinary inner torment of war, breaks the human psyche into often unrecoverable and irreparable fragments. It is all happening right now.

The Iraq War has taken a psychological toll of unprecedented proportions. Stacy Bannerman focuses on this aspect of the war in a piece I found at Alternet:

Soldiers who have served -- or are serving -- in Iraq are killing themselves at higher percentages than in any other war where such figures have been tracked. According to a report recently released by the Defense Manpower Data Center, suicide accounted for over 25 percent of all noncombat Army deaths in Iraq in 2006.

Bannerman notes a similarly alarming set of statistics re. PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:

"At least 30 percent of Iraq or Afghanistan [veterans] are diagnosed with PTSD, up from 16 percent to 18 percent in 2004," said Charlie Kennedy, PTSD program director and lead psychologist at the Stratton VA Medical Center. The number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans getting treatment for PTSD at VA hospitals and counseling centers increased 87 percent from September 2005 to June 2006, and they have a backlog of 400,000 cases, including veterans from previous wars. The most conservative estimates project that roughly 250,000 Iraq war veterans will struggle with PTSD.

These are truly alarming rates of psychiatric morbidity by any measure. But I am betting that neither Stephen Crane nor the subjects of his classic novel would have found them surprising. For like the Civil War, the Iraq War is a pointless conflict* marked by a continuous and escalating bloody mayhem in which friend and foe are often indistinguishable; and which has taken its toll limb by human limb, death by premature death.

Yesterday, the Senate failed again to commit itself to the will of the people. So more soldiers, more Iraqi civilians, will die or be maimed, physically and psychologically, by this insanity—unless we unite to tell these fat, lazy, licentious demagogues in Washington that we will not tolerate their weakness at a moment like this. That's what this weekend is all about: come and be heard.
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*The debate on the Civil War, which cost America half a million of its male youth, basically wiping out an entire generation, can be held at a more convenient time. In short, though, my position is that Lincoln could very easily have invited the South to go right ahead and secede, and then set up the appropriate blockades and trade barriers. There is obviously no way to tell, but my wager would be that the Confederate nation would not have lasted ten years on its own, and untold death and suffering would have been averted. Lincoln, at any rate, is not the demigod that is popularly sculpted in the marble and granite of our cultural conditioning programs. Nor, I suspect, would he be at all comfortable in the stone throne onto which he has been forced by the ideologues of our time.

Returning to Peace

While our mass media wet themselves in a grim hysteria over a "mastermind" who has "confessed" to every evil act conceived or committed over the past 20 years or so (and just at a time when the wraps are coming off one of the more impeachable offenses of this administration, the political firings of US attorneys ordered straight from the White House); we are preparing for another weekend of dissent to further the prospects for peace.



We should first remind ourselves of what we mean when we talk about peace; we should be very clear about what many of us will be marching for this weekend. Peace is not a negative: it is not the mere absence of war; nor is it the annihilation of one's enemies.

Peace is not silence; it is not the stagnation of mute conformity. Peace is a dance—action from a center; it is the ground upon which you stand as you push the boundaries of belief and possibility. Peace is the oxygen that gives democratic dissent its breath.

For example: China is not at war. But are the Chinese people then living in peace? If you lived there today and attempted to connect to this blog, or if you typed "Falun Gong" into a search engine, you would be hunted down and thrown into a cell where you might rot for years, if not your entire life. Is that peace?

In our own country, if you have the wrong color skin or lack a certain educational pedigree, your chances of being unemployed, ruined, and disenfranchised by your society are more than doubled, compared to the rest of your fellow citizens, even as government officials appear on television to mouth the lie of equality. You can now be detained and held without charge, trial, or the right to an attorney on the suspicion that you are an "enemy combatant," at any time the government thinks you are a hindrance to its juggernaut movement.

So, are we at peace? I would submit that if the President tomorrow ordered the immediate return of every single American soldier in Iraq, we would still not be at peace. We lost our peace when we lost our will for dissent. We relinquished peace when we mutely accepted the bland and stereotyped fearmongering of newsmen and talking heads in a television box.

The silence of conformity is the most violent and destructive form of war. It is what made the Nazi holocaust, the Stalinist purges, and all the other depredations of humanity of the last century possible. As long as we conform, we are under the most insidious and dangerous attack imaginable; as long as we are silent, we will never be at peace.

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Once again, if you're planning to be in New York for Sunday's march and would like to meet up, post a comment.

Geek Wednesday: Coming this Fall—Google Legal

Here's some advice for any young law students who may happen to pass by the blog: Web 2.0 Law is your ticket to prosperity and popularity. Just learn a little of the tech and most of the terminology: wikis, blogs, social networking, vlogs, podcasts, discussion forums, auction/shopping sites, IM, online video and TV. As of today, there's $1B at stake in the Google vs. Viacom faceoff—think those lawyers on either side aren't making a few bucks?

Meanwhile, Wikipedia's in trouble again, this time over a lying "professor" who falsified his credentials (now that guy's got a future in the Bush administration). And guess who else is getting into the Web 2.0 legal game? None other than our favorite literary witch, J.K. Rowling. She's after eBay for allowing crooks to hawk bogus Harry Potter merch over their site. eBay says it has no control over what people do on a free site, and it's impossible to monitor the legality of every sale. Sounds to me like the classic old alibi, viz. "I couldn't have known my cat would eat your parrot." Or more recently, the Gonzales defense: "Don't look at me, I'm just the boss—how am I supposed to know what my people are doing?"

We've been saying for a long time that fresh trends in geekery are going to help transform societies all over the world, and that's likely to come with some growing pains. The Web 2.0 legal storms are showing us some of the pain; the steady burgeoning of Linux also brings both excitement and challenge. This week, the French Parliament has joined a growing number of governments and organizations that are moving to Ubuntu Linux as their computing platform of choice. I hear Bill Gates will be countering with his own "Freedom OS" movement, with the endorsement of Bill O'Reilly. Poor old Bill and his $56B net worth: the man has never known competition, and now he's getting it up the ass and down the throat. We feel your pain, Bill.

From MS-bashing to Apple-mashing: if you were checking our links on Monday, you noticed a story about Nike continuing its decadent labor practices. This is why we have been critical of the iPod-Nike alliance from day one, and why you won't find any iPod ads in the sidebar. They're overpriced drives with a rather spotty record for endurance*; they're sold and marketed to promote a monopoly in their niche; and they are stained with the sweat of thousands of oppressed and underpaid workers from around the world. The Macintosh computer is a marvelous machine, and OS X is the most intuitive and reliable commercial OS in existence**; but Apple has gone down a corrupt path with the iPod.



While I've got my lather up, perhaps I should mention that I've been checking out some of the big social networking sites. You have to begin with MySpace, and wow, was I surprised to find out that the likes of Amber, Jessica, Stephanie, and Emma all wanted to be my friend! They all linked me to an amateur porn site, though the models in there looked pretty professional to me.

Porn—and porn is what you get at MySpace—is really fascinating for its history on the web. Porn sites have been the source of some of the truly pioneering developments in web tech and server-side sophistication. Online porn videos were a reality years before YouTube or Google Video were a twinkle in their creators' eyes; porn brought us many of the techniques now used by email marketers, spammers, and corporate advertisers; and porn was doing online fiction, proto-blogs, and discussion forums way before anyone was talking about Web 2.0. Meanwhile, their use of robust, high-capacity bandwidth servers and their optimization of complex code has always pushed the envelope of web innovation; so it's no surprise that many of the MySpace-type portals and online dating services have followed porn's lead, adopted many of its technical practices, and like MySpace, even joined forces with its leading edges.

Yep: I agree—it's offensive, often repulsive, demeaning (and dangerous) to women, and frankly, it's not much of a turn-on, really. But porn, like online gambling, is a driving force in technology, as well as being a powerful lobbying force in Washington. If you're a Congressman or a member of the press corps at the White House or Capitol Hill, and you're looking for a good time, the porn industry is there to help. And if you're a really good javascript/HTML/CSS developer looking for work, the porn sites and online casinos can pay you top dollar—even in excess of what the big corporations could pay you.

Anyway, MySpace is at the top of my list of prohibited sites as far as my daughter's concerned. Fortunately, I don't have to sweat this point too heavily: she's seen it, and says it's "really lame." And I agree. So far, once you discount the porn links, Tom's still my only friend at myspace.

Are there any good social networking sites out there? Sure there are: Friendster, where I also have an account, is still very good; though it too is opening the door a crack to the money and allure of the cultish fetishes that pervade our culture. Today on my F-ster home page, I found a Flash ad for "Brittney at Her Worst".

And if you're not looking to get laid but would rather make professional connections and form some more substantive online relationships, go over to LinkedIn, and you'll be glad you did.



One other social networking site that you might not think of as one for starters is Amazon. Shop around, post some reviews, make some connections with like-minded people, and you'll see the networking potential at amazon.

Another terrific social networking site is the Firefox extension we've highlighted here at the blog, StumbleUpon. This is a simple idea of providing users highly-rated sites within certain self-selected categories, which developed into a thriving worldwide community. This is the open source society at its online best, in my opinion: there are discussion forums that contain some lively and actually meaningful discussion; groups that bring people of common interests together; and some outstanding favorites pages, put together by ordinary web users like me and you. When I go to SU, I sometime spend an hour or more there; it's just that good. It's why we have an SU link in the footer to every post here: if you like what you've found at Daily rEv, you can click the SU link, rate the site, and let others benefit from what you've found here.

Finally today, a request to our loyal readers: if you're a technophile who's looking for some cool new gear, try shopping at some of the links we have in the sidebar. Toshiba's got some kickass Wintel laptops; Apple still makes the best computers out there; Wolfgang's Vault is a marvelous site for music lovers; and Network Magic really works (I've tried it—more on that next week). Just go through the sidebar, click some links, and shop—you'll get some great stuff, and you'll be helping our blog pay its bills and pour out new content and fresh geekery.
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*Data on iPod failures are not very scientific; the survey results cited are from a popular Mac news blog that surveyed iPod users rather than examining actual products. Other reports are generally anecdotal. So the principal focus of my objection to the iPod is the Nike/abusive labor practices alliance that Apple formed with the sneaker/iPod product, and Apple's MS-like aggression in pursuing a near-monopoly.

**That said, Apple's Mac OS X is amazingly efficient. Today, the latest and probably the last update of 10.4 Tiger, 10.4.9 was released to users, and I upgraded in minutes without a hitch. The update, over 160MB, includes security fixes based mostly on the MOAB findings from January, along with performance enhancements and an upgrade to iPhoto.

We Are Small, Yet Strong

I was reading about the fellow who won the $200 million in the big Lotto jackpot last week, and it occurred to me that about 10,000 other people would have to win that same amount before they could pay for what's been spent on the Iraq War.

This is one big reason (there are many others) why this blog is sponsoring UFPJ's nationwide protest march this coming weekend. If you live in or near New York and plan to attend, post a comment if you'd like to meet someplace in the staging area between 35th and 39th Streets in Manhattan.

I'm going because I have a child who will grow up into the manufactured, profit-driven terror of our Halliburton era. I'm also going because there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people I will never know whose lives will be taken or ruined amid the perpetuation and escalation of this vortex of devastation fueled by the limitless avarice of a few old white demons and their advertising machinery.

We are small, yet strong. The fear that once froze us now has no room to cast its icy shroud, for the worst that can happen has already begun. The government of a nation conceived in liberty and equality has been overtaken by corporate tyrants and paranoid despots; the threat of a nuclear holocaust is intensifying amid the Cradle of Civilization; the Earth itself is under attack and responding in the only way it can, while Science—the god of the 20th century—freezes in horror at what it has made.

So there is no room for fear anymore. Neither is there room for the hero. The cult of heroism has contributed to the morass of death, corruption, and disorder that we now have. Activism, properly understood, is not about heroism; it is about working within one's natural abilities and influence, in the confidence that one's energy will attract its complement. Join us Sunday in New York or Washington or wherever you can get to, and you'll see what it's all about. Let this anniversary of the Iraq War be the last.

Monday with McKenna: Imagining Free Choice

Terry McKenna is back today, to touch on a theme that extends far beyond the boundaries of organized labor. For we live in a time of a corporate presidency and government-by-intimidation; the same union-busting, anti-labor, dehumanizing tactics used by the Wal-Marts and Nikes of this world are eagerly imitated in Washington—and being a U.S. attorney doesn't make you immune.

This Bushian hatred of humanity and cynicism toward any form of professional competence has reached such a demonic level of darkness that it must be ritually exorcised wherever it passes. At least that's what the Mayans think, and I can't question them there.

And now, Terry McKenna, on the Employee Free Choice Act:



This week, I want to highlight the Employee Free Choice Act. In case you haven’t heard or read about it, it’s a pro union measure that just passed in the House. If it becomes law, union organizing will become as simple as signing kids up for little league. And that sounds OK, doesn’t it? Of course, in doing so, the law also takes away from employers most of the tools* they have used over the past 30 years to prevent their employees from joining unions. As you might imagine, the White House is against it.

The bill’s intent is to reverse the decline of American unions. Is this a problem? For workers it is. For businesses, the decline has been a boon. Thus, it is an issue worth discussing. By the way, one of the reasons for the decline of unions is the decline of large-scale manufacturing. But this disappearance hardly explains all of it. As our economy manufactures lots of low wage service jobs in places like Wal-Mart and MacDonald’s, the failure of unions must be attributed to other factors.

So where is the debate on this important issue? That there is none is the problem. And there’s the rub. Not everything wrong in America can be tied to George Bush or the Republicans. In fact, our polity is unable to grapple with most of our problems. Thus, our polity is FUBAR.

And note, I am not pro-union, nor am I anti-union. Unions brought middle class prosperity to American workers after WW2. But as the dynamics of the world economy changed, American unions were unable to recognize the need for change and became an albatross around industry’s neck.

In the absence of honest discussion, I’ll take the stage with my platform. Here are the issues as I see them:

1. The average worker has little power in a negotiation with his employer.
2. Benefits for workers create explosive future liabilities for employers. Even more so for older and retired workers.
3. Young new hires do not need a living wage, but as they approach age 30, they do.
4. All workers need a health insurance plan and a retirement savings plan.

So what has this to do with unions? Nothing or everything. The American system chose to rely upon employers to provide #4 and as a result, we end up with #2. Unions solve #1, but when they secure #3 and #4, they help create #2.

And then we have the dislocations caused by global trade, outsourcing and immigration. So, for American laborers who hope for #3 and #4, they may be competing against illegal immigrants who are willing to live packed into a shabby rooming house, and paid almost nothing. For more on that, check out Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times. Just think of a drywaller, or house painter who formerly earned a fair wage, and who now finds his trade full of low paid former Mexican peasants. In fact, it’s hard to find a non-Hispanic drywaller or house painter, except at the very highest end of the trade.

If the new law passes, we can expect aggressive efforts to unionize, and if successful, we should see a real challenge to the Wal-Mart business model. But then we can expect to see even more of #2.

The alternative is to scrap the employer benefits model. This is starting to filter into a lot of discussions, but as we can see from President Bush’s health care proposal, we don’t always see good ideas coming along with it. Here’s my:

A. Implement a single payor health plan, funded by employer contributions and a monthly premium for all employees and retirees. Premiums for employers and workers will be uniform across all industries and all ages;
B. Mandate that all employers fund a 401 k with at least a 3% match for all employees and consultants (even if paid via a 1099);
C. Mandate a living hourly wage minimum for all workers age 30 and over. I’d pick $15 per hour.

And that’s it.

Oh, there should be no need to change the union rules if we do this, because workers would be well protected. But if we don’t, then we should pass the new law, and hope for the best.
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*Re the tools employers use to stop unions, I’ve seen this in my own workplace. Some 14 years and two employers ago I was engaged in a three day simulation of a union organizing campaign. We were line-managers in the claims operation of a large insurer. We were first lectured on labor law, then assigned roles and made to act out an attempt to sign up workers (I had a simple part as a claim examiner). In our roles, we attended union organizing meetings, and then company meetings designed to program us against the union. Then we voted. The sessions were so intense that one of the pretend union organizers almost had a break down.

The bottom line here is that in the current system, employers have learned how to exploit labor law to their advantage. The NLRB-sponsored election timeline gives the employer a distinct advantage in breaking a union organizing effort. For workers who don’t have a saleable skill (and that is typical of most workers who would benefit from a union) they are scared to death of losing the job they have. Both sides play hardball, with the workers in the middle. It’s no wonder that unions lose most elections.

—T. McKenna
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If you've read this far, then perhaps you're finding something worthwhile here; and for that we're very grateful. You can further help us to pay rent to our host and manage other costs associated with the blog by visiting our advertisers through the links in the sidebar, and making purchases from there. We promise to make every effort to post ads from companies and for products that reflect the values that we endorse (and attempt to practice) here at Daily rEvolution. In any event, you can also be assured that we will not be muted by our advertising: we will remain just as critical of Apple or Microsoft, for example, even (or perhaps I should say "especially") now that we're carrying ads for the Apple store and for PCs featuring the MS Vista operating system.

In this context, I am often reminded of what Socrates meant when he described himself as a "gadfly" to the Athenian state: he understood that he was actually helping his society this way. In the same way, to be a gadfly to corporate America is to help it to become better, more responsive to human needs and planetary values. As the Bushies and their lapdog media have shown us, any idiot can sit in the choir and sing the tune that's played by power; but it takes creativity and compassion to make the music of dissent—the healing dissonance from which all true growth arises.