After the Deluge

Just as in baseball, in which three strikes at bat renders the player "out," the third consecutive defeat of the Socialist Party in France suggests that some rethinking is in order. This has been true for the entire worldwide Left since the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which the mass megamedia proclaimed as the global victory of capitalism.

The first bit of rethinking is conceptual and historical.

Socialism is not identical to Communism, nor is the reverse true. Both spring from the impulse to democratize economic decision-making, thought by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to involve a process shifting economic control -- ownership -- from the possessing few to the wage-slave many.

Socialists recognize the errors of the 1917 Revolution, launched by the misnamed "Bolsheviki" (which means "majority"), later consolidated as Communists. Lenin read Marx too mechanistically in order to justify authoritarian and violent change and a materialist dogmatism having more to do with Russian culture than Marxian political economy. Stalin transmogrified it into a system of permanent tyranny.

Still, even the half-baked socialism of the USSR and its satellites achieved many economic advances still unseen elsewhere, such as the abolition of inflation and the massive reduction of poverty.

A truer, more democratic Socialism was beginning to obtain modest triumphs in Western Europe by 1912. Even the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had been forced by socialists' victories at the ballot box to lay the foundations of social insurance programs and mass education that have ever since been a hallmark of Germany.

When a Chapinesque figure emerged in the 1920s at the head of an anti-Semitic right-wing group, even he used the word "socialist" in the name of his party, even though the real socialists were the first people he threw in jail once he was in power in 1933. "Socialist" was and remained a vote-getting word in Germany throughout the 20th century.

Socialism also swept Western Europe after World War II.

Britain's Labour hegemony, the Spanish PSOE, the Italian PSI, the German SPD and the French Party, became partners in postwar rebuilding and repeatedly won elections in which voters pushed for ever more benefits and shorter working hours and longer vacations. And let's not forget the socialist electoral dynasties in Sweden, Denmark and the Low Countries.

The application to the United States is thin. Anything Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson did in the United States pales by comparison to the European systems. Today, the Democratic Party has a loose "caucus" that rarely dares even to whisper the S-word and publicly disclaims the L-word.

In Western Europe, however, all was achieved through open, free elections, side by side with private property and large corporations.

The Thatcherite-Reaganite refrain today is that all this largesse has bankrupted Europe and that the entire socialist project for society is to blame. Like George W. Bush, the spokespersons for this view yearn for history to advance toward 1908 rather than 2008.

Yet such people deserve the Left's thanks. Their excesses are undoing confidence in the myth of capitalism as an economic perpetual motion machine. Capitalism has high social and human (not to mention ecological) costs.

The question Marx posed about a century and a half ago was not how to destroy capitalism by blunt means (aka Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc.) but how to develop capitalism to the point that it transcends itself through its inherent internal contradictions.

This means socialists must accept first that capitalism is here to stay -- until it fully develops into something else.

German 19th century theoretician and politician Eduard Bernstein suggested in 1899 something of the sort in Evolutionary Socialism. Rosa Luxembourg's Reform or Revolution? was the radical reply in 1900, although she, too, later saw the error of her ways as she watched Lenin descend to the tactics of terror.

Perhaps the telling quote I could offer from Bernstein for the present moment is this:

[...] the present social order has not been created for all eternity but is subject to the law of change, and [...] a catastrophic development with all its horrors and devastation can only be avoided if in legislation consideration is paid to changes in the conditions of production and commerce and to the evolution of the classes. And the number of those who recognise this is steadily increasing. Their influence would be much greater than it is to-day if the social democracy could find the courage to emancipate itself from a phraseology which is actually outworn and if it would make up its mind to appear what it is in reality to-day: a democratic, socialistic party of reform.

My point, and Bernstein's, is that the planks that socialists support -- among them, fair and livable wages for all, economic and social equality of the sexes and races, shared decision-making concerning the use and distribution of vital resources, elimination of all degrading conditions of living -- are widely shared by most modern citizens of the world.

The ideas of socialism do not need selling. They need to be presented in modern, simple terms, without multisyllabic dogmatisms from the mouths of St. Karl or St. Fidel.

Socialism has to

• stop allowing itself to be easily portrayed as the party of equally doled out bare necessities to become the party of shared prosperity, a prosperity that leaves no one too far behind;
• learn to demand work from workers while demanding justice from the holders of capital;
• consider revolutionary changes that are purely economic, such as employee ownership arrangements that blur class distinctions -- and ultimately promise to transcend the present quagmire of a yawning inequality through perfectly capitalist means;
• care about economic growth, productivity and profits (assuming an ever more democratic economy);
• care about winning through political means in open debate, not the force of arms;
• offer criticism of socialists who are antidemocratic.
  

Even Marx saw socialism as the child of capitalism. There is no reason the child can't learn from the parent.

What War?

According to the major news media, President Bush has vetoed a bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress that would put a deadline to end the Iraq War. Ladies and gentlemen, what war?

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on pretexts that were merely more elaborate fabrication than the staged "Polish attack" on a German border post in the late summer of 1939. Just as the invasion of Poland ushered in war, the invasion of Iraq was unquestionably an act of war.

As with 1939, in 2003 there was much hand-wringing over it in Europe. The pope pointedly said it did not meet the criteria for a "just war," a dubious concept in any case.

Just as the invasion was clearly warlike, so was the war's ending. Even Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished."

The war ended four years ago.

What the U.S. government is engaged in now is a military occupation, the justification for which is even more questionable than that for the invasion.

Using the parallel I launched at the outset here, it might be argued that Germany was, after all, formally occupied for nearly 50 years.

True, the invasions of Poland in 1939 and Iraq in 2003 were remarkably similar:

-- a major military power attacked a nation that had no reasonable chance of defending itself;

-- the victim was a minor state of recent composition (Poland had not existed for centuries prior to 1918, just as Iraq was invented by the British Foreign Office in 1931);

-- neither attacked country presented a realistic threat to the attacker;

-- the real reasons for the attacks -- other than brutish megalomania -- have remained murky and likely to be debated by historians for years to come;

-- the heads of state of each attacker had come to power through flimsy, pseudo-electoral means;

-- both heads of state embroiled their nation in a pointless "crusades" using rhetoric worthy only of the legend of Nicholas Chauvin.

Yet World War II was vastly dissimilar to the splendid little war of 2003.

There was scarcely a corner of the globe left unaffected by the six-year World War II and by its end the attacker had shed the flower of its leadership on the battlefield. By comparison, the Iraq conflict lasted months, the rest of the world managed to ignore the misdeed and the U.S. Republican elite was too busy trading oil futures to shed a drop of blood to seize Baghdad.

A new elected government has been constituted. No matter how much they may hate one another, Iraqis have demonstrated their near-unanimous desire to see U.S. troops leave.

Besides, the war is over. It has been over for four years.

Remembering the Forgotten

Instead of the self-imposed silence of blogs over the media-fabricated bathos surrounding the shooting at Virginia Tech, today I would like to dedicate my blog to the death of someone I knew, who died as part of a significant tragedy for an entire generation of an entire continent.

Her name was Constanza Paz, although I always called her Connie. I met her in 1969 in Buenos Aires when she was 17, just like me.

Back then, she was in an "Up With People" singing group, which she joined with her younger, more talented sister, who could play the guitar and sing beautifully. Connie had trouble staying on key and there wasn't an instrument whose sound she couldn't mangle; she was assigned the tambourine.

When I saw her perform, she moved around a lot, but mouthed the words.

We were thrown together in a church group that organized one of the first a folk Masses or "Misa de la Juventud" (Youth Mass) in Argentina. She was with the music committee; I was with the committee who led discussions on the topics of the gospel after the service. I was the designated contrarian: even then, my best talent was to arouse opposition -- hence debate -- in response to nearly anything I said.

For years Connie and I exchanged letters after I moved away. I always recalled her smiling and dancing and shaking her tambourine. When I spoke with her, in 1973, she made fun of many of our ideals of adolescence, the spirit of which I have never really given up, even to this day, whatever the changes in practical applications. I sensed that we were parting ways, but I never dreamed how far our paths would diverge.

Connie was taken from her home by the military regime in April 1976 and was never seen alive again.

Her aunt told me, when I ran into her by chance, that Connie's bullet-ridden body had washed ashore. Her family believed she had joined a Trotskyist guerrilla group known then as the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Army). Her body was probably one of many dumped by military torturers in the ocean, as described in the book The Flight: Confessions of a Dirty Warrior.

None of this squared with the Connie I had known, although I found out later that a few of those I knew back when later took similar paths.

Yet the Connie I knew had tender thoughts. For years we engaged in a playful exegesis of "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, especially the story of the fox, which was her favorite. You recall the one: the fox who seeks friends asks the Little Prince to tame him, else he cannot play.

Sometimes I wonder whether she would be alive today if we had been older when we met and a more solid relationship could have developed from our friendship.

Connie is, of course, emblematic of the thousands who disappeared under the military regime of 1976-83 in Argentina in a cowardly "war" against civilians that even the army officers described as "dirty."

Thousands more disappeared, were tortured and killed in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and El Salvador under a doctrine enunciated by one Cesar Augusto Pinochet in a 1965 article in the military journal Estrategia: seguridad nacional (national security). According to Pinochet and the officers in many military regimes of the era, the military were the anointed saviors of Western, Christian civilization against the onslaught of godless Communism.

These strong men, very virile when torturing unarmed women and youths, were in those dark years taught, encouraged and financed in the latest techniques of dictatorship and torture by the Central Intelligence Agency under the cover of a "traffic school" run by the U.S. Agency for International Development -- all supposedly in the name of "democracy."

An entire generation marred, ideals that initially were really very simple -- justice, equality, dignity for all -- became, through polarization caused in large part by the U.S. government's lack of subtlety, slogans of insurgency and counterinsurgency. All for naught: the generals are dying, their victims died, the poor still cry out to the heavens without receiving solace.

Ironically, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the proof that those men were cowards and military bumblers: the Malvinas / Falkland War, in which the torturers sent untrained boys to die, then ignominiously surrendered when their own skins were at risk.

If Connie were here, she would smile ironically, then laugh. Those tin men didn't really kill her.

The Information-free Society

Recent irking experiences as a working journalist remind me of a problem I have watched developing to the point that it has become epidemic: nearly every institution has developed a myriad of ways to stonewall reporters and, partly as a result, almost all news publishing operations have come to offer thinner, more poorly verified factoids. It's reached a point that I wonder how the average person in the street finds out anything of significance.

This is not a matter of a loss of innocence. I have long instructed new reporters not to believe government officials if they say the sun is out without first going to a window to see for themselves. Government officials lie as a matter of practice; it must be in the manual: when in doubt, lie.

In my experience covering religion, I have learned that people in religious institutions lie even more egregiously, albeit more stupidly. Professionals of religion don't understand that they can get caught lying, especially if they lie in writing. Clerics think people will be buffaloed about anything they say, so long as they use the right mumbo-jumbo.

Corporations, however, are among the most secretive, most bureaucratic institutions when it comes to information. Since the Reagan era, the private sector's art of secrecy has permeated public discourse.

Even unions, whose officials were once the brashest, most quotable figures in American society, now have layer upon layer of public relations officials to hide just how little their members get for their dues and how much high-paid union executives are in collusion with their highly paid golfing partners in business.

Time to turn shine the third-degree lamp on journalism.

In the world of print journalism, it's no longer a secret that declining portions of the American get their news by reading -- a real loss for democracy. Indeed, we all now know that the majority of people under 30 get their first-hand news from a television program devoted to satire of news, Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."

Most people do not understand the difference between the information content of a written news story and a broadcast newsflash and the consequent effect of the public shift to broadcast news, let alone the effect of learning about something from a comedic version of the news.

Allow me to explain.

An efficient reader can scan about 1,000 words in just about the time it takes to read out loud 50. Because journalistic style writing is crafted to pack as many facts as possible in few words -- wire services typically do not accept lead sentences longer than 30 words -- written journalism has it all over broadcasting when it comes to conveying facts.

This is why print reporters have traditionally called TV reporters "twinkies" (blond on the outside, fluffy on the inside.) I will never forget the twinkie who launched a press conference with the momentous question, "How do you feel about the national unemployment rate?"

But that's not all.

The broadcast news industry, because its is an expensive medium, is controlled by an ever smaller number of investors and holding companies with little real interest in delivering information of actual value and meaning to watchers. If newspapers were reluctant to investigate advertisers, imagine the pressure for broadcasting.

At least one network, Fox, has become a purveyor of all the news conservatives want to hear. I would not object quite as much if there were a counterpart with progressive news.

In England, I learned while working there, the news business has always been explicitly ideological. There is even a job title for the person in charge of protecting the "line," the sub-editor, a creature who does not exist in the U.S newsrooms.

You pick up the London Times and you know you'll get the Tory story, while you pick up the Guardian and you'll read the Lefty take. British journalists have come to regard facts as somewhat of a nuisance and the British public muddles through as it always has.

My point is that broadcast news not only does not convey too many facts, increasingly it misinforms or disinforms.

"Disinformation" (dysinformatsya in Russian) is a Soviet term used in the art of espionage for deliberately conveying false information to an adversary. The Allies used the practice in World War II to mislead the Germans into thinking the invasion of continental Europe was taking place in a variety of sites other than Normandy.

Modern disinformation is more subtle.

In a recent Fox broadcast, for example, a Chris Wallace interviewer asked Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) about the alleged "conflict of interest" in heading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee while investigating Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. When a clip of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa) voicing the charge was shown, the word "SCANDAL" was blazoned across the screen.

(The almost complete transcript -- minus the broadcast banner -- is available here.)

In the same show Chris Wallace allowed Newton Leroy Gingrich, former right-wing bomb-thrower in the House of Representatives, to explain himself concerning his calling Spanish a "ghetto language." Wallace described that bit of racism as "something of a flap."

So, according to Fox "news," when a Democrat politician is involved in -- oh, surprise! -- politics it is a "scandal" calling for resignation; when a Southern right-wing white Anglo politician from the party known to have used the famous "Southern strategy" to gain the votes of white bigoted Americans denigrates than language of an ethnic minority, that's "something of a flap" and the politician is allowed ample time, with little interruption, to explain.

This is how we come to the point at which, between stonewalling news sources, a declining general readership press (I work in the specialized trade press, which also is in decline) and a corrupted general audience broadcast media, we are left with a few wire services and the Internet.

How good are these sources? Just last week ago, I watched Reuters blare to the world through the Internet the news headlined "Women's group to stop sponsoring workplace event," leading many newspapers in the Midwest to proclaim that Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work, celebrated April 26 this year, was coming to an end.

The actual story was that this was the 15th anniversary of the event. More importantly, this year sponsors (the Ms. Foundation) were asking parents and children to text message Congress in support of legislation mandating a minimum 7 days of annual sick leave for every U.S. employee. The minor organizational future news, with which Reuters chose to lead, was that the event would henceforth be run by another organization as it had taken on a life of its own.

Never mind that 35 million parents and children participated. Let's proclaim an ending to this.

Result: Reuters eviscerated a feminist event and pushed a major labor legislative battle to the bottom of its story. They even got a woman reporter to do it!

This is the sad, sad state of information in our society. How can we expect citizens to be able to see through the web of lies and deception of businesses, churches and government in these circumstances?

We have reached the information-free society.

Blue for Elizabeth Hartman

Few pieces of music have expressed my own recurrent melancholy over the years as well as the Jerry Goldsmith score for the 1965 black-and-white film A Patch of Blue. Few actresses enfleshed the feeling of sometimes being "like a motherless child," as the spiritual has it, better than Elizabeth Hartman, who played the young and blind Selina D'Arcy.

Music, directing and acting meshed particularly well in A Patch of Blue.

The score is dominated by a soft, soft piano used in the impressionistic manner of Erik Satie and a wistful harmonica, at the time a Goldsmith score trademark, which distinctively Americanizes the sound. As Aaron Copland once remarked of his own Appalachian Spring suite while in rehearsal, Goldsmith achieved a sound that is "Amerikanisch ... the sentiment's not expressed on the face."

The director specifically chose black and white, when color was readily available. It made a point crystal clear against the backdrop of the then-growing civil rights movement.

The fresh-faced, freckled and pale Hartman was aptly chosen over Patty Duke and Hayley Mills to play a blind urban Southern adolescent girl who lives in her drunken grandfather's grimy tenement apartment with her tawdry mother (Shelley Winters). She plays her handicaps the way the music plays its sentiment, in a restrained, accepting way that is all the more touching, without ever crossing over to the cloying.

Taken to the park one day by the kindly employer for whom she strings cheap necklaces, she chances to befriend an educated professional man whom she does not realize is black (Sidney Poitier).

I won't spoil the film any further, but perhaps the premise hints at the poignancy that was brought to mind a few days ago, when I brought out the film score vintage record (yes, vinyl LP) sitting in my collection.

Then I realized that I had never again seen Hartman on the silver screen.

Hartman was nominated for the Oscar in 1966 as best actress for the performance. However, it was headliner Winters, then a veteran, who was given the film's only Oscar (the score, cinematography and setting were also nominated). Hartman's work on the film did, however, win her a Golden Globe for most promising female newcomer.

What was Hartman, who turned 22 on the year of the film, up to now?

A little bit of googling gave me a quick answer: she died on June 10, 1987, in a fall from her fifth-floor apartment in Pittsburgh, in a suspected suicide while undergoing psychiatric treatment for depression.

She had told an interviewer in 1969 that Patch had the ironic effect of beating her down, as she never met similar success ever again, despite a number of roles opposite famous actors for roughly 20 years after that film. Hers was an understandable feeling in the cutthroat world of acting; perhaps it was made worse by the collapse of her marriage several years before her death.

So few people, however, have the chance to make a similar impact on such important topics at such a key historical moment. In the minds of all who watched her for just that one film, I would venture, she remains a success whose demise turns a little patch of our hearts blue.

Human Life Math

The grief-fest over 33 students in a mediocre U.S. university has overshadowed the murder of 140 men, women and children in Baghdad two days later in an open air market, not to mention the neatly tucked away story of 2 workers killed in yet another unconscionable mine collapse yesterday. Which loss of life is worth more coverage, more anguish?

In this Bush era there appears to be a formula that allots value to human lives, so that the closer they are to the centers of power and wealth, the more valuable they seem to be. Yet seen in other terms, the value could be different.

The Virginia Tech students were, after all, not likely Einsteins. In broad social and historical terms, their deaths are remarkably insignificant.

Indeed, at least some of the luxury in which the Va. Tech students lived was paid for with the blood of the people of Iraq. And if you think 3,000 dead U.S. soldiers are too much -- as I do -- consider estimates ranging from President Bush's low-ball 30,000 Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion to the 600,000 deaths calculated by a group of Johns Hopkins University scholars. (See here.)

Does anyone think the 140 killed in Baghdad two days after the Virginia Tech shooting didn't have mourning parents, relatives and friends who regarded them as typical boy- or girl-next-door to whom nothing so untoward should have happened? Where are the pages after pages after pages of maudlin lament over them? Where are the television specials?

Dirty little secret: many Americans don't think Iraqi lives count.

Truth: historically and socially, Iraqi loss of life is much more significant than that of Virginia Tech, as it is the door-hinge upon which hangs the power of a U.S. government that lied itself into what is plainly an illegal and immoral -- worse, completely unnecessary -- war.

Last but not least, the same lying government is derelict in the protection of the lives of U.S. citizens at work. Mine safety is at an all-time low. The two miners killed in a collapsed shaft are also much more significant in social terms, than the Virginia tech 33. Their deaths sound the knell of the entire U.S. workforce, their salaries left to languish, their working conditions left to deteriorate.

The society that ignores the rampant deaths in Iraq and the U.S. workforce cannot wash itself clean by a mere Supreme Court decision to ban so-called "partial birth" abortion. A society that structures itself to feed off the death of foreigners and its workforce, who are visible and tangible, cannot absolve itself from guilt by a largely symbolic attempt to save children who are unborn.

Distractions

Is it coincidence, American stupidity or are "they" really that clever? Just as the Bush Administration begins to die its richly deserved death of a thousand cuts for policies that are idiotic, arrogant and incompetently executed, up pops Don Imus and the Duke lacrosse exonerators to provide convenient circus entertainment for the masses.

There is, of course, something that makes a pseudoissue, such as the "ho-dom" of allegedly "nappy haired" athletes a biting controversy. Unlike the significance of the bombing in Baghdad's supposedly safe Green Zone or the widening gap between the middle class' stagnated household incomes and those of W's pals or the abuse of authority in firing prosecutors or ... one need only have an elementary school education to opine on Imus.

That's the real issue: the dumbing down of America.

Only a nation mired in reality television would confuse evaluating the use of rap language in sports commentary with debate within a polity of self-governed citizens. Only a duped populace would demand that privileged university athletes obtain retribution from a mentally ill woman poor and degraded enough to work as a stripper.

My concern is what it says about the future. How can a nation awash in trivial fantasy confront the real rapes and the real insults perpetrated by the present occupants of the White House?

Think I'm exaggerating? Consider the rape of Iraq, a nation that never did the United States any harm whatsoever. Or think about the insult of taking tax money that should have been preserved to pay for the retirement of the baby boom generation to give it to the richest 2 percent of the population.

I'm only scratching the surface. It's not clear to me what will happen to America, only that hope is the only thing we have left. Let's not let the media manipulators distract us from that hope.

Love, Fear, Words, Deeds

A friend I know as a truth teller writes in response to the last post, that maybe we shouldn't love everyone, since there are predators. Even more trenchantly, my correspondent questions whether people who say they love everyone can be trusted.

In my mind this raises two sets of problems in the application of the principle of love.

First, of course, is the fact that we live in a dangerous world. Turning of the other cheek is the least frequently applied of all the teachings of Jesus. In the weeks after September 11, I do not recall reminders of this teaching; instead, most pulpits dripped with words of rage and vengeance. Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the nation is still paying the price for that sort of sentiment.

Perhaps the reason why turning the other cheek doesn't work is that it's thought of in isolation from everything else. The average churchgoer may be a law-abiding citizen and behave with good manners, but this is not what the point of the challenge to love is about.

Love as described here was unstinting, disinterested merely for the reason that the loved one exists. This is not business as usual except for an hour a week in church.

This involves a whole change of perspective. Here the Buddha's surrender is meaningful. The bodhisattva (or Buddha-to-be) can love everything and everyone without fear because he or she has shed attachments and desires.

So what it there are robbers, no possession matters to the bodhisattva. So what if there are those who would harm the body, it is a passing thing. So what if someone would cause me pain, all the world is full of pain. (One of the Four Truths.)

Granted, I'm not there myself. I'm just saying that I understand why detachment makes sense. Detaching is the ultimate protection. As Janis Joplin put it: "freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Or, more conventionally, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt preached from the presidential bully pulpit in 1933: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

It seems to me, then, that we need to add one more qualifier the universal ethical principle: we are speaking of fearless love.

Secondly, when we attempt to establish this goal for our behavior, it must go beyond words. Love is a verb best performed without much fanfare.

The Sermon on the Mount says; "when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you." (Matthew 6,3-4)

"When we give, we should not be attached to the giving itself, nor take too much pride, nor brag about our giving," writes Venerable Tsang Hui in the Chinese Buddhist tradition. "Having wisdom will not give us too much conceit. Only through cultivating wisdom can we cut off our mental defilements."

Our rational mind cannot read into the thoughts and feelings of others, but it can grasp deeds. When words and deeds are at odds with each other, as my correspondent noted, it is evident.

These things are my yearnings, rather than my accomplishments.

Loving

What can one say about disinterested, unstinting love of everything and everyone other that it's a very hard value to embody? Just finding the words to describe such a love doesn't make one change to become loving in this way.

I'm still a flea-bitten observer of politics: the plainest "good morning" makes me wonder about the greeter's agenda and as much time as I devote to thinking of systemic solutions for humanity's ills, I don't much like the real individual people on the street. Can a misanthrope be loving?

The traditional paths to loving, abrahamic, dharmic and taoic, speak of some kind of inner change that leads to the adoption of a set of rules or goals.

Christianity's metanoia takes the ancient Greek term for changing one's mind, or retracting a statement, and imbues it with the notion of repentance and a continuing transformation. From the gospels' Beatitudes to early Christianity's Didache, the essentials replace the human order with a divine one and the habitual response to reality with an intentional one.

In the dharmic mode, Buddhism has it four truths and its eightfold path through which the believer reaches enlightenment, although at the core is renunciation, even of the desire for enlightenment. In the end, as Herman Hesse's novel Siddartha spells out to the Western reader, even the rules, rituals and mental structures of Buddhist teaching can stand in the way.

The Tao calls for a oneness with the flow of the universe that keeps everything in order. Out of this arise the compilation of maxims of the Tao Te Ching and the endless prescriptions of Confucianism.

Then there's the fourth traditional, non-religious set of paths, those that stem from reason, Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and more -- take your pick. Reason calls, at a minimum, for coherence between one's understanding and one's actions.

Intuitively, however, a believer or rule-follower feels quite short of a lover. I have been a believer, not a particularly good rule-follower (although I know some who are).

My experience tells me that believing and following rules falls short of utter, blissful, disinterested appreciation of others for themselves. I'm thinking of the sort of thing one tastes at a first kiss, when the other is unknown but lovely. Or the magical moment in which a child opens up for a grandparent a tiny window into wisdom.

These are moments of youth and of old age, rather than the in-between, where most of us find ourselves still.

I am left uncomfortable, where I started, which I suppose is what this realization is all about.

Like the ego-boundary shattering experience of orgasm, the mere notion that an utter love transcends everything and transforms everything yields a high. But the post-coital feeling while Lady Wisdom has her cigarette leads to wondering whether she will respect me tomorrow, and the little mental worm eats up the unstinting face of love.

Is the answer to begin with self-love, a love that radiates from one's core and slowly loses itself in others? Why do I think I must stay at that moment, that rain will never fall again, that all suffering will cease, that time will stop?

Perhaps the answer is to find one's way to integrate love into life, with its ups and downs. Easily written, harder to live out.

Thou Shalt Love

My assertion of absolutes does not have the purpose of proposing a deity, but rather to provide a foundation for the ethics I see necessary to the survival of humanity in the 21st century. In so doing, and in no small part thanks to Tom Head's comment, I stumbled upon George Edward Moore's Principia Ethica, in which the author proposes two possible instances of the absolute "good" without relying on an overarching deity to ground them.

The heading of this essay gives away the one that interests me today: disinterested, unstinting love of everything and everyone.

Earlier, in my criticism of the pope's sole encyclical letter so far, Deus Caritas Est (see here), I attempted to do battle against the classic Western boxes into which love is put, in order to diminish it. The pope's cry that God is love (per the encyclical's title) claims love for the Judaeo-Christian deity, with all that implies.

Other authors focus on a typology of love -- of family, of friends, of romance and altruism -- focused on to whom and in what manner love is dispensed. In the West we do not even like to think of these loves jumbled up in, for example, romantic love of kin or altruistic love of friends; we have a strong taboo against incest and a free market interpretation of friendship that requires mutuality.

Indeed, in my journeys in the middle-aged world of dating I have discovered many people's lists of qualifications and their a priori model of the "Right" mate; and given the industry with which they construct the image of what they want, they might as well be perusing consumer magazines to prepare for shopping for detergent.

They say they want love, but they don't; they want a human object that performs certain functions and fulfills certain needs and they want to seal the deal with a contract commonly known as marriage, or maybe something more ambiguous, such as cohabitation. A little honesty with oneself about this might spare everyone a great deal of wasted time and anguish.

So much for what love is not. As to what love is, as an absolute ethical good, I think it is best described as an emotional appreciation of others and other things for themselves that leads to disinterested caring.

Let's break this down.

Appreciation involves a recognition of the quality, value, significance, or magnitude of another or another thing, resulting in a favorable judgment or opinion -- including the aesthetic -- of whom or what we are perceiving in this way, a gratitude for the existence of such a person or thing and a assignment of rising value or price to the person or thing over time. Note the combination of awareness, esteem, gratitude and rising valuation.

Love begins in the emotions and this appreciation is emotional. We feel love. We feel awareness, esteem, gratitude and our feeling cascades into a stronger stream of appreciation as we continue to love.

For it to be an absolute good, love must be directed at all people and things -- even beggars and cockroaches -- and it must be directed at them for who or what they are, independently of their usefulness to us, or the way they fit into the criteria for judgment we have employed before becoming aware of them.

Finally, while love begins as emotion, it fulfills itself in a continuing action -- this need not be a Western laundry list of tasks, but may include the action to be, as in "don't just do something, sit there."

Absolutely

Everything is relative, especially incest. Minus the admittedly lame humor, this seems to be the motto of most people in contemporary society. I beg to differ.

What most people mean applies to anything more or less controversial: morals, politics, religion, most of all truth. The notion, which stems from the humanism of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation alike, is that human beings are, individually, the arbiters of everything.

The almighty I knows what is right and wrong, what political party governs best, what God is like and what is true. This is based on the epistemological fallacy of the day: I can know everything and I am always right, for me at least.

False! Mistaken! Wrong-o, moosebreath!

I do not and cannot know everything. Knowing everything that human beings can observe empirically and prove scientifically has not been possible for any single human being since about the time of Demosthenes. In ancient Greece it was possible to hold in one brain all human knowledge. Today there are idiot savants who can hold a preponderance of human knowledge in their brains, but they can't do much with it of any use.

I am not always right. Much for the same reason, people cannot have the correct answers to every possible question. We just don't know.

Besides, many things remain unknown. Things that count: Does God exist? What's God like? (Yes, I know the one about the astronaut who told the Pentagon She was Black.) How did the universe begin? How large is the universe? Are there other intelligent sentient beings out there? What's the telephone number of an honest, cheap plumber?

Also, observation and empirical facts do not necessarily equal the truth. Human perception is fallible and limited; facts are dependent on context (I'm told, for example, that gravity does not work the way you would expect at the quantum level.)

Intuition and nonlinear thinking may capture ineffable instances of truths that are not observable, measurable, much less communicable.

Despite all this, I would contend that there is truth, a grand unifying truth that explains everything. We just don't know it.

At least, it's pretty clear that if there is truth, it is absolutely true; it is true everywhere, for everyone, in every context. Truth is the absolute, universal, incontestable statement about everything that transcends contextual and perception limits.

Its opposite is not truth. It may be falsehood, error, a lie.

Anything less than truth, by degree, omission or approximation, is not truth. Anything that is true for me, but not for you, is not truth; it may be a fact, a hunch, a strong feeling, an opinion. Not truth.

I don't know the truth. Not knowing the truth, I have no grounds to try to bash in your face simply because your idea of morals, politics, religion and truth differ from mine. It might be a good idea to be tolerant of one another.

But that doesn't make your idea or mine true. Much less both true. One of us is closer to the truth (probably me, since this is my blog).

Both of us cannot assert that our opposed and incompatible ideas are equally true, although we may deserve equal respect when we spout our nonsense. (By "our," to paraphrase Steve Martin, I mean "your.")

"Everything is relative" is an absolute statement. If it were a relative statement, compliant with the idea that everything is relative, it would be false.

If everything is relative, then the idea that everything is relative must itself be relative, meaning -- for example -- that everything might be relative for me, but not for you.

Everything cannot be relative. Only incest, Thanksgiving dinners, gifts of underwear, people one cannot divorce despite one's most earnest wishes, the price of postage stamps and a few other things.

Light on the Other Side

What if there really is a light on the other side of the river ... ? That's the thought that lingers after sharing what Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler confessed was his first night in Washington, D.C., on March 10.

The question comes from Drexler's hit song “Al Otro Lado del Rio” (On the Other Side of the River) from the film The Motorcycle Diaries, which in 2005 became the first Spanish language song ever to win an Oscar.

You may also recall the pitiful way the Academy Award event's television producers shot themselves in the foot by refusing Drexler the chance to perform the song, opting instead for a substandard performance by bigger names Carlos Santana and – hold on to your hat, Zorro! – Antonio Banderas.

The visiting Latin American artist combines pre-Columbian beats and computer generated sound with the strumming of his guitar. In his performance at the Lisner Auditorium I even saw him at one point flip his guitar and sing into the box.

For this particular song, however, he chose only traditional syncopation, his guitar and his balladeer's voice, a tenor just slightly reminiscent of Paul Simon as a young singer yet imbued with a beguiling intimacy: he is sighing his words only for you.

Certainly, “Al Otro Lado” was a perfect coda to the film's retelling of the young Ernesto “Che” Guevara's motorcycle hegira with lifelong friend Alberto Granado from Argentina to Peru, some time before their respective appointments with history.

In the film, the song is a fade on a fade on a fade, the sort of thing that abounds in Drexler's music.

What in 1952 was the prosaic takeoff of a lumbering cargo DC-3 from a distant airfield in a South American jungle gets telescoped to the North American present of 2000-and-something with a voiceover reminiscence performed by the actor who plays Granado, the Argentine Rodrigo de la Serna, actually related to Che in real life.

Then comes the fade-in of the wrinkled face of the real Granado.

Finally you hear Drexler: Clavo mi remo en el agua / llevo tu remo en el mio (I nail my oar in the water / carrying your oar in mine). Creo que he visto una luz / al otro lado del rio. (I think I've seen a light / on the other side of the river.)

For me, it was the recap of a lifetime: I was alive, just barely, the actual day depicted in the film; but in my own early years I did travel the first segment of Che and Granado's route, from Buenos Aires to the Andean village of Bariloche. Two-and-a-half days by train, I took it in both directions several times.

The first two hours you were in the suburbs and exurbs of the big city. Then the open country started; now its starts a couple of hours later, encroached upon by the metropolitan octopus that is home to a third of Argentina's population.

It was also the land in which I often went camping. A flat, verdant and endless land, the so-called "humid" pampa. Back then it still had a few rivers one had to ford on foot, or in a boat, or in a raft -- as in the movie.

At night the pampa I remember was a countryside lit only by the constellation of the Southern Cross. A light at ground level was a miracle -- or a mirage. Creo que he visto una luz ...

Yet I'd guess Drexler thought up this line looking out on the Rio de la Plata, an estuary that at its widest puts 138 miles of sweet, potable water between its Uruguayan and Argentine shores. From Buenos Aires, built near the river delta from which the waterway opens, it would take a very clear winter night when ships were at harbor to see a little twinkling miles away: Colonia, Uruguay.

Drexler's hometown perch in Montevideo is almost at the teeth of the river's mouth, where the river meets the Atlantic. If he thought he saw a light, at nearly 140 miles' distance, I'd say he imagined it.

Yet seen as a commentary on the decades of Che's historical life and the firestorm he set off, in what Washington strategists today call an “asymmetric conflict,” with thousands tortured, made to disappear and die, the song feels iconic.

Like Che, I was once shocked by Latin American scenes similar to those in the film. I just didn't think violence would change anything.

Let's not kid ourselves. The song is a Hollywood artifact. Drexler has even gone the extra mile of inserting the Christ-figure allusion, often made by some of Che, in the notion of not merely dipping one's oar in pursuit of a light, but nailing it.

So which is it, mirage or miracle? Is it possible any more that there is a light out there far on the other side? Hasn't it been doused out of sight with new cities, lively commerce, cleverly developed new injustices?

All this confronted me as I stepped out of the concert and back into the modern, globalized world.

How do I sum up the reason my eyes well up on the verge of tears? Drexler provides a soothing, hope-filled answer to explain the crossing of the river:

Sobre todo – he sings -- creo que no todo esta perdido. (Above all, I think, not all is lost.)

Ethics and Values

Someone who may cease regarding me as a friend was offended by my admittedly imprudent comment concerning what I observed was this person's lack of ethics, which I expressed -- with some imprecision -- as "values." Because I think this is a crucial issue of our times, I'd like to review this, as a self-clarification and an exposition that I think is missing in our society.

First, I need to distinguish between value, values and ethics.

A value is the result of a comparison: X is more worthy than Y. There are economic values (thing X is worth Y amount of work, represented as money), aesthetic values (the looks of blonde X are more valuable than those of brunette Y), behavioral values (I like doing action X more than action Y) and so forth. These are all largely subjective, arbitrary, malleable and impermanent. Values lend themselves to collective persuasion, either through coercion or through seduction of various levels and degrees, as is the case in dictatorships, advertising and fashions enforced by peer pressure.

Everyone has values. They represent some of the limits we place on behavior due to social convention, ranging from manners to law.

Ethics, on the other hand, is the branch of philosophy that studies human behavior, its concepts, its norms and its application. At one level, we explain what ethics are. At another we propose what is virtuous and what is not. At yet another level we attempt to apply or derive principles from questions about certain human behavior: Is abortion moral? What are human rights and how do we determine them?

In our society, the majority is not ethical. Many people derive ethical values from their inherited religion. Some people merely observe group behavior and christen what is conventional as ethical. Most people, in the end, rely on their own will to decide what is ethical.

It is this latter point that concerns me today. We have gotten to the point that most folks think that they must canonize whatever they do as moral and good, regardless of its consistency with any other kind of thinking. In this, my friend is like the majority. This is not ethical thinking, this is self-indulgence disguised as "ethical" by way of setting oneself up as one's own judge and jury -- without an external or internal code to which the court must hew.

In the last half century, it seems, we went from inherited, external and absolute systems of ethics to their displacement by allegedly higher internal, situational ethics that in the end became one long paean to the self -- anything goes if I feel good about it and since I should be good to myself and my precious self-esteem, it turns out that anything can be made to feel good.

No one is ever guilty of anything; even politicians who claim "family values" (but divorce often or are caught in flagrante delicto) will go so far as to assert responsibility but avoid having to give the required response, the payment due for the wrong done.

I find this problematic, yet when I assert it I get in trouble. I am called self-righteous, priggish.

People don't like to be asked to consider what ethical standards there, much less to weigh submitting to them, whether it feels good or not, whether it is legal, fashionable or acceptable.

Let's examine an example that is close enough without being uncomfortable for too many people today.

There was a time in living memory in which certain prejudices were acceptable, some forms of it were enforced by law, in some circles some form of prejudice was acceptable. Jews called African Americans Schwartze with disdain; the Irish called Italian Americans "wops"; people knew of lifelong bachelors who never married or lived with roommates of the same sex and whispered about them; a woman's place was in the kitchen; and, of course, no white Southerner wanted his daughter to marry a Negro or a Catholic.

All these ideas could be expressed more or less openly -- although the politest people did it behind the backs of the victims. Now they can't. Conservatives call the change in norms "political correctness"; they would like to go back, to "conserve" the ethos of prejudice.

In fact, prejudice hasn't disappeared. Jews whisper Schwartze and it has been reported that a black actor on the set of television's Grey's Anatomy called another actor, who is apparently homosexual, a "faggot."

Now, to ethics. Is prejudice wrong? Why? Was it always wrong or is it merely wrong since 1964? Are most of us guilty of this wrongdoing (in thought, word or deed)? Do we deceive ourselves by thinking that we are not, only to surprise ourselves when we blurt out something not quite as ridiculous as "macaca," but close? What ought we to do to assume reponsibility and give the required response for our actions?

Or is it that if I feel it's OK, I'm entitled to act, speak and think in a prejudiced way?

True confession here: I am prejudiced. One of my prejudices is against British people. I deplore so much of what the British Empire did and find the British so obnoxiously arrogant, that I rarely cut Brits much slack even though I admire many things that are of British origin. It's just the people I can't stand.

Granted, I tell myself that a large part of British arrogance, imperialism and general obnoxiousness is compensation for living in a small island with terrible weather, for being stripped of humanity in childhood by parents who care for pets more than for their children (go to England and you'll see plenty of fat pets and plenty of underfed children). It's a sense of inferiority disguised as somethings else.

Pity the poor Brits. They are racists because deep down they hate themselves. They are obnoxious because they are shy. They conquered everywhere because who the hell wants to stay somewhere you get soaked every day of the year. They started the slave trade from Africa because they knew their own workers were whiny shirkers whose skin was too sallow and bodies too infirm from their benighted climate to be any good at sturdy physical work.

So it's not really fair of me to prejudge every Brit I come across. Not really kind not to look for explanations and excuse. I should think of them as I think of the Spaniards: valiant, stubbornly principled, religious to a fault, life loving. Or is that a prejudice, too?

How does one confront the ethical wrong of prejudice? How does one, having admitted (with a little fun) that one is wrong, take a different course?

It seems to me that merely passing a law (the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and adopting a new fashion (political correctness) hasn't worked. Prejudice abounds. Racism abounds: witness the Bush Administration on Katrina.

Here is the core of ethics: a principle that makes us all uncomfortable because it describes ways in which all of us could improve. Whether we like it or not.

An ethical principle survives the excuse of upbringing, suffering, anything other than lack of awareness -- which ends when we've named and recognized our behavior in the damning principle.

The Bloscars

Ever since Chani (aka Thailand Gal) handed me the Thinking Blogger Award at the virtual ceremony on her blog I've been beating my brains out to fulfill the condition. She was wearing a long white dress at the virtual podium. In the hall the whole blogging industry was there in stunning dresses and black tie.

Her terms? That I find five other bloggers to reward similarly. My problem? I blog but I don't really participate in the "blogosphere."

I'm a new boy on the block, although in the fourth year (which in Internet time is what ... four centuries?). Not so long ago a faux chick blogger.

I suppose I think of blog posts in terms of the only other opinion form I know: an op-ed column. I've written a few of those for newspapers and news syndicates.

And I have a touch for choosing things that don't have commercial successes. I was a die-hard WordStar user. I didn't buy a CD player in the 80s and 90s because I was convinced they would go the way of 8-track tapes. I also predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions.

Call it the Midas curse, rather than touch.

So I looked at blogs I'd bookmarked: nutgroist, muhammad and me, langa blog. Guess what? They've all stopped posting new material. Advice to bloggers: don't get noticed by me.

Then there are two racy ones I've dabbled in: girl with the one-track mind and suburban sex blog. The saucy British "Girl" is now a publishing sensation (she says ... I'm not aware of her book, but then I'm not aware of much that is merely a fad). "Suburban" has gone back to doing what he does with his wife -- without telling the world.

There's also Daily Kos, on the correct side of the political fence, but commercial.

A neighbor has several fairly scientific blogs -- thinking, yes, but what do I know? I can barely understand what this uberbrain writes about.

One person I cyberknow, Mayou, blogs in French. She has convinced me that my French is much worse than I thought. So how am I to assess whether the blog is worthy?

Finally, I am left with Thailand Gal herself (can one award the awarder?) and Head Reactivated by my cyberfriend Tom Head. Imagine being a doctoral level academic in religious studies and philosophy, but living stuck in Jackson, Mississippi.

This man can discuss Whitehead until the cows come home ... and he does, watching them mosey in from them thar hills. Call me a snobby New Yorker, but I couldn't do it. Nor can I match the depth of his expertise in his fields.

Tom is also a limpid writer, earnest and, from what I can see, someone who seems to have credibly integrated the values for which he speaks.

Without further ado, let me award to him the well-deserved Thinking Blogger Award, so I can get out of this tux.

Baby Boom Bull

It is a story written for my generation, the boomers.

You've seen the commercial. Dennis Hopper appears on the beach telling us dreams don't retire. Then comes the sales pitch from a company that sells "financial planning." It turns out that there are complaints filed in many states concerning what these planners do with your money, but that's not my concern here today.

(My only investment advice is to consider why the people who invest your money are called "brokers.")

No, the point of the sermon today is that we're full of bull, we boomers.

We think we're never going to die. At an age decades beyond that at which -- we once insisted imperiously -- people could not be trusted, we still think we're still young.

Half of us have become clever opportunists, in one way or another lent our support to the odd war here and there, built our nest eggs alongside the gurus of insider trading, told ourselves that we were not really betraying our ideals as we sold out. The other half of us stayed in the movements through Reaganian darkness, the slick Clintonian centrist con, the gilded-age Bush rape of the world, watching the world of our dreams vanish before beginning.

This was not the way it was supposed to turn out.

So here we are, 50-ish, kids flown the coop or about to, spouse or partner gone. So we have choices, if we are lucky, if our sellout or agitprop didn't catch up with us.

Science tells us we could live to 100. Ye gods!

A trip abroad, a new relationship won't change anything, certainly not a new car. Maybe it's time to start that one last meaningful life project, whatever it is.

Maybe it's time to put the bull out to pasture.

Dream Letter to God

Since I doubt You,
Your existence,
most of all Your churchmen
and the thousand propagandists
who seem so sure they've got You locked up
in their Bahbles,
You're entitled to doubt Me.

Since there still isn't much to show for
My existence;
those of My advocates who've done wrong,
I'm either unaware of it,
have cut them off,
or simply don't care.

Much like You,
who seem so uncaring
about wrongdoing
in Your name.
So we're even:
I'll let you off the hook for
Your indifference; You
can forgive mine.

Ripples

Someone told me recently that I am unaware of the ripples I leave in the hearts and minds of others. Perhaps this Saturday afternoon, listening to a Mozart clarinet concerto, is the time to take stock of the ripples one sends out and the ones from which one comes.

We cannot live alone. Inescapably. No human infant would survive the first year without someone's care. We are all part of a chain.

We can, yes, live on our own -- provided we have a vast society around us. Someone somewhere is making sure the electricity is turned on and the water runs and even that the bus on which we commute is sent on its merry way on time.

I have been amazed about this since childhood.

Perhaps that's what it means to be a native New Yorker: to realize that someone had to get up to send off that garbage truck that wakes you up.

Similarly, someone -- parents -- had to have you and nurture you. We are in the nurturing chain. We are not islands, we are social animals.

We need to be mindful that we cannot live alone for long and thus respect all who nurture us -- which turns out to be all humanity.

My morning coffee was planted, grown and harvested thousands of miles away, in Colombia, Central America, Africa. The sugar I pour into it was cut by workers in the Dominican Republic or Jamaica.

The rubber in the tires of the bus that takes me to work might come from Thailand, Sri Lanka or Vietnam. The diesel fuel came from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. The bus was made in Detroit.

Most of my computer at work was manufactured in Malaysia. The paper is probably from Canada. The ink we use might come from China.

I have the whole world in my palm, at my grasp -- every day.

Then there are the ripples I send out. The ripples that come from my working to repay all the work that brings all these things to me.

Also, the work to improve the working conditions of those who make my life possible. Someone said it better many years ago:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

-- Robert F. Kennedy, Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966

Each time I act to echo back the nurture I receive, I send forth ripples of hope and love. Ripples of this kind, sent by all of us, could change the world.

A New Aesthetic

It all began with a comment passed from mouth to mouth: several Argentines, to a pair of Brazilians, to an American woman, to me. As the journalistic jargon would have it, well-informed observers (one imagines little men standing on a hill scanning the horizon with binoculars) affirm that the cosmetic surgery in greatest demand in Argentina is breast reduction.

You read right: reduction.

The lollobrigidian augmentation is a thing of the past, according to the Feminine Party spokespersons. (Incidentally, my adjective -- also passé -- was once rumored to have been accepted by the French Academy to describe hilly terrain.)

These days the thing is to have bosoms no larger than an American champagne glass (see image).

Another correspondent adds:

I heard this from a transvestite leader: those who in the ´90s got silicone implants regret it today. They envy the young transvestites, who rarely even try to enlarge their breasts because, according to them, the masculine market (their clients in prostitution) demands adolescent breasts. Note that transvestites try to emulate the women that men desire.

Are we facing a new human aesthetic in the 21st century? If so, it is anti-rubenesque, transsexual and multiracial.

The gamine look, typical of the postwar French street waifs, with its slim, often boyish, sexually teasing appeal, is valued for women. Tom Wolfe calls them "boys with breasts" in A Man in Full. For the man, there's the hairless, or hair plucked, slim but not muscular look. The preferred skin is cafe au lait or Asian; the favored face is clean of obvious ethnic characteristics or, at a minimum, it hints at a cultural blend.

The desired character of women is now decisive and lively; the men calm and easy-going.

Think of Angeline Jolie's full and luscious lips or Halle Berry's prim and European pout or the transcultural look of Keanu Reeves, who in The Matrix played Neo, the new man.

The new aesthetic proposes, as I see it, the perspective of a generation that has seen neither war, nor hunger, nor pestilence, nor death. Today's young adults of around 25 began to become aware when the world was already cybernetic; in their adolescence they glided seamlessly into an Internet newly opened to non-academic users.

It's the L'Auberge Espagnole generation: thriving, open to everything, pluralist. To them, traditionally masculine and feminine roles are intermingled, because to the extent possible they share the common human task for the first time. The races, colors, nationalities, creeds, are all part of a quilt, humanity in fusion.

Perhaps this is the generation addressed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill), possible president of the United States, or by Paul David Hewson (better known as Bono) in his humanitarian hegira in Africa, or by Danish novelist Peter Høeg, who Smilla's Sense of Snow playfully fused the humanities and mathematics.

Even though this trio does not belong to the new generation, they seem to express the new zeitgeist, just as The Beatles did in 1964 for the postwar Baby Boom generation that was really made up of their younger siblings.

Every aesthetic has its significance: the equilibrium of the Renaissance after medieval chaos; Baroque tension through the wars of the religion and the breakup of the European consensus; the theocratic escape of Gothic style as compensation for the loss of Greco-Roman culture caused by the onslaught of illiterate Teutonic hordes; the European absolute monarchs' excess, expressed in Rococo; and so on and so forth.

At the moment we see in this aesthetic an ethnic and cultural fusion, pansexualism and possibility. For the moment, it inspires optimism.

An Embrace for the Ages

In this cold northern hemisphere night, I am warmed by an image from a new archeological find in Italy of an unknown, 5,000-year-old couple locked in an embrace not far from the home of Romeo and Juliet. Our common humanity unites us across the millennia.

Supplied by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italian Cultural Ministry), the picture depicts the Neolithic age skeletons of a couple found in Valdaro-S.Giorgio near Mantua, about 25 miles from Verona.

As a university student, I once delighted in learning that the oldest extant manuscript, written in Sanskrit, was a recipe for making beer. Our ancestors, I then felt, had their priorities straight.

Tonight, I am touched by an ancient unknown couple. Like them, the thought of an empty bed is unappealing. They and I aspire to the warmth of another person, someone of the opposite sex, someone cuddly, someone into whose eyes one might plunge.

We are so hauntingly similar in revelry and romance.

Elena Menotti, the chief archeologist at the site, told reporters it was "extraordinary." Such a find is rare, perhaps unique. They are really hugging and they died young, as their intact teeth show.

Perhaps they were the real Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers from long, long ago. We think sometimes that we invented love to the tune of the Beatles. We didn't. Maybe they did.

Whatever the case, the secret of life seems encased in that embrace. The greatest human joy is drawn from the urge to merge, to spawn; we, their children, are alive thanks to such an entwining.

All of life, that all-too-brief moment in which we awaken to awareness, from infancy through childhood and adolescence, to upright adult maturity, seems directed toward that coupling with another, after which we slowly nod off through senescence back into the sheath of gray unknowing whence we came.

This Mantuan couple has preserved the core for the ages, a monument to being in the fullest, most human sense.

The Revolution Will Be Blogged

We interrupt this philosophical blogging to state that the smoking gun of the invasion of Iraq has finally been found, adding to the millions of reasons for people to come demonstrate against war in Washington next Saturday.

Why, after all, did President Bush send U.S. troops into the Iraq misadventure? We've all known it had to be something bad. But what?

Some people said it was a psychological flaw of some kind. He felt emasculated by Osama bin Laden and had to prove he was a man somehow. Putting a president on the couch, popular a pastime as it may have become since Richard Nixon, doesn't work. That fact of the matter is that most of us don't know Dubya well enough to psychologize him. Those who do aren't telling.

Other people put it in terms of a Greek tragedy: Bush the Younger avenging Bush the Elder against their nemesis, the evil Saddam Hussein. This doesn't hold water, especially since it's well known by now that George H. W. Bush with Dubya about Iraq; Bush I stopped at the border, where Bush II was imprudent enough to tread.

Of course, let's not forget that Dubya himself isn't making the task of guessing his intentions easy. W is fiendishly clever and he isn't afraid to look stupid to fool his adversaries.

To gauge the intentions of heads of state, one must look at who benefits by a given move and what are the effects and examine their cogency with the leader's goals.

Why did Nixon go to China? To buy his way out of Vietnam.

Why did Reagan begin his 1980 presidential election campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., the site of 1964 murders of three civil rights activists? To wink to the Southern racists whose votes he was courting.

Why has George W. Bush and his Republican Party, the historical standard-bearer of balanced budgets, run up the largest budget deficits ever? To destabilize, and if possible collapse, the financial foundation of all programs devoted to social and economic insurance for middle- and low-income Americans.

So now, fellow analysts, what looks like a plausible explanation for an invasion of a country not even Bush really believed posed a real threat?

Just before Christmas I began to get a glimmer of an answer from an article in Der Spiegel Online, Will Iraq's Oil Blessing Become a Curse? concerning a draft law that would allow foreign companies to keep 75 percent of all revenues extracted from Iraq over 10 years. "By negotiating deals while Iraq is unstable," wrote Joshua Gallu in Berlin, "companies could lock in a risk premium that may be much lower five or ten years from now."

Big Oil sounds a plausible reason. It meshes with Bush's background. It make sense in a world with the diminishing available reserves, of which Iraq has the fourth largest reserves in the world, 112 gigabarrels.

So here it is: Bush sent troops to Iraq to create the circumstances that would allow Western oil companies to lock in huge oil reserves at a bargain price. Bargain, that is, for oil CEOs and board members, who will no doubt give themselves megabonuses as they gouge the public -- and steadfastly block the way to alternative fuels.

Moreover, all the usual suspects are locked in on the deal. The International Monetary Fund is holding creditors at bay, only if Iraq approves this law.

The Iraqi unions oppose the law. The Kurdish regional authority not only opposes it, it's been signing its own agreements.

Maybe that's what the sectarian warfare is about? Not Allah, but oil ahhhs?

Bush wants desperately to change the topic now that 70 percent of Americans oppose his Iraq policy. But let's not let him. Especially now that we need not guess what this has all been about.

Monday Morning Angst or ...?

Few disappointments in life compare to waking up Monday morning with the prospect that the escape of the past two days from one's labor, much as one may love one's work, is over.

In Western societies, at least, since the 3rd century Christian sabbatarianism has given us one day off, the day known as the Day of the Sun in ancient Egyptian astrology. Clergy rebaptized it as the day of the son (of the deity), Sunday, a day of worship.

Saturday, the original Sabbath, was added as a day of rest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to trade unions rather than religiosity. Thus was born the weekend.

Note the shift from the sabbatical impulse to the weekend of recreation. One was about setting a time for Someone Else, the other is about setting aside time to re-create, or remake, oneself.

In the so-called Protestant work ethic the insistence is on work as the means to "salvation" (Arbeit Macht Frei, work shall make you free, proclaimed a slogan on the gates of several nazi concentration camps). In a more Dionysian and perhaps more humane perspective on human activity, we accept that we become tired from ordered work, particularly that which mostly benefits someone else, and need to replenish ourselves with joy.

Let's ask ourselves the defining question: Do we live to work or do we work to live?

(If I work hard, is it because it fulfills me in some way or is it for a joyless reason? Are the goods and services I get as the fruits of labor really sources of joy to me or are they what I think I am expected to have? Do I own them or do they own me?)

Remember: no matter how many lives you are counting on based on what clergy tell you, you have only one life in the here and now.

Make your time here count for something. Take as many steps as you can beyond the place at which you first gained awareness of yourself and the world.

Even if you expect to find the proverbial 72 virgins in the afterlife, what makes you think that the first time done 72 times in the great thereafter is any better than the first time done here, just once, in the back seat of a Dodge? Besides, who's to say that the 72 virgins won't be surly ruler-wielding Catholic nuns ? (Imagine Allah saying, "Ha, ha, fooled ya, Al Qaeda!")

Seriously, folks, remember to laugh. That's a cosmic order!

Others and Ourselves

In the 2001 film The Others, Nicole Kidman plays a woman who lives with her two light-sensitive children in a beautiful house on the isle of Jersey awaiting the return of her husband, a soldier away in the Second World War. The house seems strangely haunted until the viewer begins to see everything from the point of view of the haunters.

An inversion of a similar sort is needed to take the next step in this series of meditations toward an ethic. We have seen, in the last post, the conflict between how we see ourselves from within and how we are seen from the outside.

The problem with my self-perception is that I cannot see all of myself, even physically. I'm told that elephants, when shown a mirror begin to inspect themselves thoroughly to gain a view of parts they never are able to see otherwise.

The problem with mass thinking is best seen in context. Groups of adolescents, from male gangs to female cliques, tend to enforce among members a uniform style of clothes, speech patterns and behavior subject to the whim of the alpha male or female, precisely at that point of personal development when individual self-image is weakest and most malleable. The result is often antisocial, self-destructive behavior that ruins lives.

In the adult world we have the world of fashion, which tyrannizes how people, although mostly women heed it, must look and what they must wear.

We also have William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), in which such individuals were collectively described as

"people only work for The Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions."

They remind me of Catholic priests; which brings me to the third possibility, the therapist.

The problem with the therapist -- in past ages priests and shamans, oracles and seers -- is that they are not without their own agenda that may be quite distinct from our own goals. The priests and shamans were, like artisans and scribes, dependent on the king's bounty and pleasure, as they did not produce their own sustenance, nor exercise brawn to protect the realm.

The therapist today is freer but still vulnerable to pecuniary corruption -- it's very handy to draw that fee every week for years on end from patients supposedly never quite ready to fend for themselves. Therapists are also subject to the fashions of their profession and, on the whole, are society's ultimate organization men, wielding the power to lock people up. (Speaking of power, let's not forget Aristotle's thinking on power and potential.)

Nonetheless, in the ideal, the therapist is a trained and experienced observer. As a journalist, also a trained an experienced observer, I often hear people say they can get information themselves. Journalism isn't mere information retrieval, but sifting through what's misleading, erroneous or misleading, to arrive at some preliminary, first-draft of what might possibly may have happened.

Something similar might be said of the ideal therapist. This is someone whom we vest with the potential to help us discern who we really are and what we really want to do and be in our lives. The point is not, should not be, the therapist, but the therapeutic process.

Its essence was captured by an old joke: How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

At heart, it is not the therapist who lays out a picture of our selves, but rather we who pick up insights from the therapist's active listening and rejigger the picture we had. Who we are and who we are seen as, taken in this context, interact with each other. The therapist need not be a credentialed specialist. A good person will do, as will a good book.

All we really need is an active "mirror" that allows us to see ourselves as we are seen and that leaves us free to transform ourselves to what we would like to be or become. To develop a true image of ourselves, we need to interact with some one or some thing, an Other, who offers glimmers of what we appear to be.

In times past our forebears made of the Other a god, or at least a powerful intermediary, ceding independence largely because they saw themselves as powerless kites in the winds of Fate. Today, I think, things are different.

The Others may well be inside us, challenging us, showing us what we do not wish to see but need to, or it may be another, on the outside, summoned by the inner voice. As in the movie, it may turn out that we are the Others.

Alice and the Mirror

Just as I had polished off the notion of making one's own true images, convinced that I am a peace-loving wisdom seeker, an acquaintance declared my temperament fearsome and my responses oversensitive. Are we the way we see ourselves from the inside or the way others see us from the outside? Which image of ourselves is the true one, valid and overriding?

There seemed to be many answers.

My initial response is that only I know what I am thinking on the inside as I commit thoughts to words, in writing or speech, or as I commit my being to action. Hence, the image I form of myself from the inside is the True Self, it is who I really am.

A friend replies, to the contrary, that I don't really know what I am. My intentions are hidden from myself by genetic predispositions, the unconscious and plain self-delusion. The best judges of who I am are those who observe my behavior. If five people judge me from the outside to be X, even though I protest with interior self-knowledge that I am really Y, I am really X.

Another voice says: neither, the true self can only be found by a therapist. The source is, you guessed, a therapist (not mine; I have none, although some think I should). Let's replace "therapist" with someone whom we vest with the potential to help us discern who we really are and what we really want to do and be in our lives.

Three options. Three doors. Which is right?

Happy Birthday, Dr. King!

When my older son was three, in the dark night of Reaganomics, I took him to the 20th anniversary rally commemorating the 1963 March on Washington. On the fringes, a vendor was selling tapes of the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Over the years my son listened to them over and over again. My son's favorite was Dr. King's emphatic, gospel preacher's "If I had sneezed ..." litany, which we heard repeated in a child's voice at the dinner table often, as excerpted below.

And I want to thank God, once more,
for allowing me to be here with you.

Audience: Yes sir

You know, several years ago I was in New York City
autographing the first book that I had written.
And while sitting there autographing books,
a demented black woman came up.
The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"
And I was looking down writing and I said, "Yes."

The next minute I felt something beating on my chest.
Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman.
I was rushed to Harlem Hospital.
It was a dark Saturday afternoon.
And that blade had gone through, and the X rays revealed
that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery.
And once that's punctured you're drowned in your own blood;
that's the end of you.

Yes sir

It came out in the New York Times the next morning
that if I had merely sneezed, I would have died.

Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation,
after my chest had been opened and the blade had been taken out,
to move around in the wheelchair in the hospital.
They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in,
and from all over the states and the world kind letters came in.
I read a few, but one of them I will never forget.
I had received one from the president and the vice president;
I've forgotten what those telegrams said.
I'd received a visit and a letter from the governor of New York,
but I've forgotten what that letter said.

Yes

But there was another letter

All right

that came from a little girl,
a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School.
And I looked at that letter and I'll never forget it. It said simply,

"Dear Dr. King:
I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School."
She said, "While it should not matter,
I would like to mention that I'm a white girl.
I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering.
And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died.
And I'm simply writing you to say
that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

Yes [applause]

And I want to say tonight,

[applause]

I want to say tonight that I, too, am happy that I didn't sneeze.
Because if I had sneezed,

All right

I wouldn't have been around here in 1960,

Well

when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters.
And I knew that as they were sitting in,
they were really standing up

Yes sir

for the best in the American dream
and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy,
which were dug deep by the founding fathers
in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

If I had sneezed,

Yes

I wouldn't have been around here in 1961,
when we decided to take a ride for freedom
and ended segregation in interstate travel.

All right

If I had sneezed,

Yes

I wouldn't have been around here in 1962,
when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up.
And whenever men and women straighten their backs up,
they are going somewhere,
because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.

If I had sneezed,

[applause]

if I had sneezed,
I wouldn't have been here in 1963,

All right

when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama,
aroused the conscience of this nation
and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.

If I had sneezed,
I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August,
to try to tell America about a dream that I had had.

Yes

If I had sneezed,

applause

I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama,
to see the great movement there.

If I had sneezed,
I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally
around those brothers and sisters who are suffering.

Yes

I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

And they were telling me.

[applause]

Now it doesn't matter now.

Go ahead

It really doesn't matter what happens now.

I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane
- there were six of us -
the pilot said over the public address system:
"We are sorry for the delay,
but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane.
And to be sure that all of the bags were checked,
and to be sure that nothing would be wrong on the plane,
we had to check out everything carefully.
And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."

And then I got into Memphis.
And some began to say the threats,
or talk about the threats that were out,

Yeah

or what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.

Well, I don't know what will happen now;
We've got some difficult days ahead.

Amen

But it really doesn't matter with me now,
because I've been to the mountaintop.

Yeah [applause]

And I don't mind.

[applause continues]

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life
- longevity has its place.
But I'm not concerned about that now.
I just want to do God's will.

Yeah

And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain.

Go ahead

And I've looked over,

Yes sir

and I've seen the Promised Land.

Go ahead

I may not get there with you.

Go ahead

But I want you to know tonight,

Yes

that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.

[applause] Go ahead. Go ahead.

And so I'm happy tonight;
I'm not worried about anything;
I'm not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

-- Delivered 3 April 1968, Memphis, Tennessee.
This turned out to be Dr. King's last full-fledged speech.

Timely Poem

Peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

Make True Images

We have seen that loving ourselves is not an automatic free pass to indulgence and bacchanalia. Alcohol abuse can ruin the liver, wanton sex can kill, overeating can make us obese and diabetic, and so forth. Nor is self-love a door to solipsism; self-delusion is as dangerous as self-abuse.

Who is in the mirror? Is it an image of my father or mother? Is it a person older or younger, handsomer or uglier than the one in my dreams? Can I agree with myself which image is truly me?

Making true images of oneself is a task of a lifetime.

We can be proud only of the true selves we are, with commendable traits, as well as drawbacks. Not "proud to be [put nationality, local identity, race, sex here]," nor "embarrassed to [same categories]." Not what I was born but who I am.

Who am I? Am I a son, a father, a husband? Am I a professional, an employee, a business leader? Am I the guy sitting in the back of the bus reading a novel? Am I all of these? More?

Am I capable of revealing what I know about who I am without fear or concern for the opinion of others? To be who I am simply because that is who I am?

Have I come to believe the false images of myself that I have made to deceive others? If so, I am in trouble.

Interrupted Solitude

Prompted by e-mail list discussions concerning my last post, I have realized that, although the human condition is at heart solitary, we have the option, in a world of 6 billion inhabitants, to choose an interruption.

That is to say, although the links idealized by religion and popular sentimentality are a mirage, there are benefits to gaining access to human intercourse (yes, gutterminds, in that sense, too). In the world of individuals, as in that of nations, we sail in international waters, we journey in a moral jungle in which survival remains always a struggle.

After all, interrupted solitude is merely that.

Relationships, much like relations between the nations, are based on compacts if conflict is to be averted -- this includes those encounters that do not surpass exchanges as lacking in intimacy as one might have with one's mail carrier. There's a protocol, commercial agreements of coincidences, treaties, etc.

At heart we return to what's been said here, so long as we can exercise our sovereignty we are sovereign beings, different, solitary. We have the option to interrupt solitude and whenever we do we expose ourselves to the consequences.

The important thing is not to fall into the delusion that the abundance of people that may surround us at one point or another, due to the accident of large families, or because we belong to a union, or for whatever reason, constitutes an inexorably independent reality, a vectorial sum that exceeds the total of the individuals.

The society and laws that we accept, or have been forced to accept, are perishable. Community or society does not exist. It is a temporary mirage. Sure, it's the mirage of life, the brief period in which we acquire awareness, we squander it, then return to eternal sleep.

When one holds up these realities for all to see, the common response is a protest that is actually the fear of death. We need to have the valor to see things as they are to be who we are and, at a minimum, to enjoy the profligacy of life.

We Are Alone

The world is not here for me; I am alone.

No one came to my bedside to bring tea, nor did I go to anyone else's, when dusk came upon the damned cold that is circulating in this city and that everyone has caught.

Saturday morning at 7 I have no one with whom to discuss the worry that wakes me up.

After a day of rambling by the library or the movies I find I have not exchanged a word with anyone.

Most people bore me, and I bore them. Increasingly, what interests them most are unappetizing details of their medical conditions. To be fair, what interests me most is my economic future.

Toting up my donations and volunteer work, it becomes crystal clear to me that the real motivation is to feel noble and good about myself.

We are alone. No one will look after us. Conversely, let's be frank, unless we are paid, in psychic or somatic currency, we will not look after anyone else.

Altruism or Egotism?

The question springs from an answer to an earlier log. To my correspondent's proposal that the very idea of ethics “requires in an essential way the bond with another,” I reply that regarding such bonds I remain agnostic.

Let me clarify that I am not proposing a philosophical egotism in the style of Ayn Rand -- nor much less a Milton-Friedmanesque political economy. Absolutely not.

The point of departure is myself merely because I am the unique constant to myself. The other, male and female, can always go off merrily skipping away in verdant pastures … I'm one that I have left.

The right to satisfy my needs, however, does not imply a justification of oppression of the he, she and all of you who are not me. It merely means a certain hierarchy of needs.

My correspondent does not stop with altruism, but instead raises the matter of self-awareness (or conscience) in philosophical terms. The questions prompt me to imagine a whole series of Descartes thinking in their attics in Paris, London, Florence, and deriving from such thought patterns of knowledge that are impossible to collate or to compare. Then there are the problems of error and the surprise, which arise from outside the self.

This strikes me as attempting to know too much. What I propose is much simpler: that the task of developing a scheme by which it is evident what I must do and what I must not needs to begin with a healthy respect towards myself. To love to myself passionately.

The gospel says it: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt. 22:39). But how shall I love my neighbor as myself if I do not love myself first?

Let's be clear about this: it's not an idea that began with or is unique to Jesus or Christianity. The Hebrew scripture already taught it (Lev. 19:18), as did Confucius five centuries before Jesus, Mohammed in its last speech, the Vedas in India, Gautama Buddha in his second truth, et cetera, et cetera.

The idea is a commonplace, almost an archetype.

The difference I propose lies in the place of precedence. Instead of denying myself in pursuit of heavens, salvations and nirvanas, I propose fulfilling myself first. Loving oneself enthusiastically, without thinking about another one, dividing oneself, holding back, until my self overflows with love and from this a love of others is born.