For a New Thrift. Confronting the Debt Culture: A Report to the Nation from the Commission on Thrift

Some of our colleagues are bringing increasing attention to the forces of structural violence which exercise their pernicious control through the creation of indebtedness.

The Institute for American Values and a collection of partners point out in this report, through a set of statistics and agencies not always brought together under one heading, that the collapse of mortgage lending, accelerating foreclosures, increased bankruptcy, monumental credit card and student indebtedness, widespread lottery, gambling, rental sharking, payday loan practices, when combined have an economic impact on the well-being of Americans that exceeds the impact of the cost of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. “In a recent 2008 survey, fully 58% of the public say that their incomes are falling behind the rising cost of living.” Unregulated, underreported, largely unacknowledged the paths to an economic meltdown testing the fragile nature of free market capitalism, democratic political processes, and environmental sustainability are just below the surface. An emerging focus on the intersection between militarism, materialism and race with the growing debt culture, is a field for important organizing efforts. Start your search at www.americanvalues.org. Share work you are doing in this area with others.

Afaa Michael Weaver. The Plum Flower Dance. While I have my favorite poets and follow them collection by collection, on rare occasions they have nothing new published when I am hungry for the poet, or someone simply appears in my peripheral vision with an asthetic that draws me in to explore. Such was Afaa Michael Weaver’s collection of poems published from 1985-2005. How he has eluded me I am unsure, but I do have some suspicions.

I have been struck a number of times in recent weeks at individuals being unnerved by the unspoken being spoken. It does have to do with breaking silence, but it is a silence between communities which is not held within communities. In the case of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his church on Chicago’s South Side the point is that the critique of race, U.S. policy, the issues of the marginalized and impoverished have not been ignored, they have been spoken. But much of the rest of the country has been deaf, purposefully deaf to that voice for a long time and would prefer to remain innocent of such sentiments an critique.

[I have heard similar concerns from some Iranian Americans who would prefer that there were no lifting up of the neoconservative calls to attack Iran; as if unacknowledged the threat would be less likely, rather than more.]

Weaver’s poem “Sears Roebuck” addresses the question quite powerfully for me.

Mama used the telephone to change her voice.
When she ordered something
from Sears, she got proper,
proper and strange sounding.
It wasn’t like Mama to be so fancy
‘cause she wasn’t that way
around us. I just knew
she was talking to a white person
‘cause she did the same thing
when the insurance man came.
She was like an actress,
figuring in her head this woman
she had to be for a few minutes.
I guess she did it right ‘cause
she took care of all her business.
Except it didn’t seem right to me,
to be more than one way.
Mama loved telephones, and
I grew up and found out most women
love telephones and talking.
Most men don’t have much to say,
unless they just bragging and lying.
Even then black men don’t change
as much as women do most times.
Daddy didn’t carry on on the phone
like Mama did. Matter of fact,
he didn’t have much to say noway.
He just sat around and read the paper,
but Mama would get on the line
and go through a million changes.
Still the one that bothered me most
was changing up for white folk.
I didn’t understand this English,
where it came from, where it could go,
or how Mama taught me translation.
p. 42

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Pico Iyer. The nexus of the coming summer Olympic Games and the weather catastrophes of recent months in China and Burma have opened a new window of curiosity and interest to the issues of Buddhism, Democracy, Globalization, Compassion and Spiritual leadership. Few are bettered positioned to provide insights than Iyer who met the Dalai Lama through visits with his father when a child and whose curiosity about the “East” has sustained him as a writer for decades, include frequent circlings through the presence of the Dalai Lama and Dharmasala.

The one passage that I am drawn back to repeatedly, in the face of repetitious innuendo that the Dalai Lama has political goals for an independent Tibet, is this one, which has both specific and general implications about paths to reconciliation and peace in the world:

“The Dalai Lama’s hope was to bring some of the light and clarity of the monk’s domain, “ultimate reality,” into the politician’s world of conventional reality; to be able, in effect, to stage a kind of Copernican revolution by getting us to see that the world does not revolve around the self, but the other way around. It was as if, seeing the forest through the trees, seeing the pattern and order, the possibility within the seeming chaos, he was arguing for a complete reorientation of the center of gravity in politics; while politicians squabbled about whether to paint the vehicle of society red or green, he was calling for a rewiring of the engine.

“O course we could win small victories against the Chinese, he was essentially saying to young Tibetans, as guerrillas do in Northern Ireland and Spain and Peru; but in the long term we would be losers, by squandering the respect of the world and sparking the rage of a nation two hundred times more populous than our own. Of course, we can see the Chinese as enemies, but if we do so, we are saying in effect, that we are going to spend all our lives in the midst of enemy forces; the better solution is to change how we think of the situation, perhaps by seeing that our real enemies are our own habitual tendencies toward thinking in terms of enemies. We can always see the decisive effects of action; but what underlies action, in the way of viewpoint and motivation and feeling, is where the real change has to come.” P. 226

Cancer in the Body Politic: Diagnosis and Prescription for an America in Decline. Peter D. Mott, MD. I am particularly impressed with the passion, dedication, and capacity of so many FOR members to invest themselves in research and publication at their own expense. I look forward to reviewing a number of such pieces over the summer.

As someone personally entering treatment for cancer (prostate, early detection, virtually fully curable), I was perhaps more readily drawn to Mott’s metaphor than I would have been otherwise. But our culture and times, between the aging of boomers, the advertising empire of pharmaceutical companies, and the political issues of health care, mean we are all familiar with much medical terminology, so the language works to make Mott’s case.

The chapters follow the path of analyzing and treating pathologies (in Part I Approach, Symptoms, Signs of illness, Diagnosis, and in Part II Treatment, Prescription, Follow-up visit). Mott, a doctor with a strong predisposition to analyzing and treating social and political ills, is a good writer. He also keeps the pamphlet brief , under 100 pages.

Most importantly Mott grounds his message in specific cases. This is a prescription for starting small and growing. Using Rochester as his long-term home town, and Latin America as his strongest interest area, Mott sets out a treatment plan that can be replicated anywhere. Call it a medical/political primer.

No matter where you are in engaging in local organizing, Cancer in the Body Politic is a helpful resource in your kit bag. Use it for study guides in FOR Chapters and other local groups, at churches or house meetings. Order copies from EPICA 1470 Irving Street, or from Peter himself (he’s suggested six dollars a copy) at interconnect_mott@frontiernet.net, or contact me at mjohnson@forusa.org.

Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect. This is a voice from the beyond; a collection of speeches, stories, sketches of Vonnegut’s on war and peace, never before published. That Vonnegut survived the fire bombing of Dresden, but was required to clean up after it, as a prisoner of war certainly offers a contextual frame for his contributions to literature and his lifelong, self-proclaimed “disgust with civilization.” With good reason, and much evidence to support his case.

Some of these pieces are set in the past, fictionalized reflections on his experiences in World War II. Some are contemporary including his last piece of writing, a speech for delivery in Indianapolis delivered posthumously by his son Mark, who edited the collection. And some broaching science fiction, set as they are in the future, or out of time. The title piece “Armageddon in Retrospect” is an example of the latter and describes a program to capture the Devil in a contraption located in the shadows of Schenectady (i.e. of General Electric for whom Vonnegut served as a writer for a period when younger). It is a silly piece of “intelligent playfulness” which satirizes enormous expenditures on futile projects (star war defense systems), recognizes the power of apocalyptic religious culture (the rapture), and still leaves us knowing that there is an evil in the world which we must more proactively confront; whether its source is human nature, original sin, or pathologies of power. Vonnegut gives us pause even from the beyond.

Russell Banks, Dreaming Up America. A novelist I have long admired and enjoyed reading makes a bold and stunning entry into the field of political analysis and progressive prophetic voice. The text is a series of commentary on classic American films, collected for a French audience, initially, and now issued as a collection of essays rather than a script. Two extended quotations may whet your appetite enough to acquire a copy for yourself, read, and pass on to others.

“Ultimately – and it gets tricky here – the path to the American Dream has become a tortured path. It has led to our building an empire. The small engine of one person’s dream of starting over has somehow morphed into the mighty engine of Manifest Destiny, or empire. From that point of view, it may be a psychotic dream, no less powerful for that – more powerful, rather, but unhealthy, an expression of dysfunction and disease. It is psychotic, in a way, to think that you can start your life over, that there’s no such thing as the past. It’s a kind of madness to think you can always improve your life, financially, economically, generation after generation, with each generation succeeding further, and not recognizing that this is simply an impossibility, one that ultimately, inevitably, like any Ponzi scheme, will lead to failure. And the economic demands and expectations that back this distorted dream are always going to be in conflict with the ideals of democracy. They demand and expect one person to trample on another. This conflicts with the democratic ideals in our sacred documents and in our hearts.” P. 45

Reflecting on Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which appeared as a film within a year of publication, Banks (whose books also quickly become movies, e.g. Afflication) opens a critique of capitalism which ultimately becomes a suggestion that a move to isolationism would, at least kill, fewer people.

“In the 1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, democracy and capitalism got married. This is something I remember clearly. They were no longer just comptaoble, they were seen to be the same, a single blended unit, inseparable. It was called Free Market Democracy. Of course now it’s become the official guiding ideology of America, and it is spoken of as if it were always the case, as if written into the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. But the first time we heard it articulated and expressed as a virtue was by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and then it became the new American ideal. Now it’s how we justify conquest, how we justify economic exploitation, how we justify invasion and occupation.” P. 57

That reminds me of a program in Jerusalem I attended a few years ago. After hearing a critique of a review of a UN Commission on Human Rights, someone in the audience asked the American professor, lawyer, commissioner, to define Democracy. In addition to the separation of powers, the rule of law, the presence of a free press, an electoral process, she included as a qualification of Democracy that it created an environment hospitable to U.S. based capitalism. Banks has fleshed out her answer for me very powerfully.

Category: Prophetic Voices

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke. I made reference in an earlier blog to Baker’s enormously powerful accumulation of chronologically complied excerpts from press clippings, memoranda, diaries, radio messages, and other memorabilia over the twelve months from Germany’s invasions of May 1940 and the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. It is an extremely effective reminder that the American public can be led piece by piece to a willful capitulation to political power and persuasion.

Last night in Manhattan, Miriam Pemberton and William D. Hartung launched the publication of their newly edited collection Lesson from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War with a panel discussion at NYU. Panelists included contributors Frances FitzGerald, Jeffrey Laurenti and Aziz Huq, three of the nineteen contributors. A question at the end asked each how likely they felt an attack on Iran was before the end of the current Administration. I was struck that the range of predictions has changed very little from those offered by Tom Hayden and Daniel Ellsburg at last summer’s Our Way Home Reunion; basically from 25% to 75% likely.

We only need read Baker to understand how relentlessly consistent and predictable is the rhetoric and intention of at least some key and powerful voices to lead us down that road. The panel last night urged us all to continue to speak up, loudly and publicly, against this prospect. This then is one more peep. Please spread the word.