Some perspective on the carbon footprint that threatens our future

Paul Hawken's book, Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World*, puts the issue of global warming and climate change in historic perspective:
To roughly calculate the geometrical quickening of our footprint on the planet, consider that the population is 1,000 times greater today than it was 7,000 years ago. Additionally, people use 100 to 1,000 times more resources and energy than their ancestors did. In sum, the earth today withstands at least 100,000 times the impact it did in 5000 BCE. In other words, we have the same impact in five minutes than our ancestors had in one year. Expanding the equation means that we have the same impact in one year as our ancestors did in 100,000 years.(p.33-34)
And also:
Perhaps the most difficult concept to grasp about climate change is how even minute changes in CO2 levels can magnify to have such potent effects. But it is not just carbon dioxide that does damage. The large influence of small changes to our environment appears repeatedly. When tadpoles are exposed to the pesticide Atrazine at 1/30,000th of 'safe' levels, 20 percent on them become hermaphroditic and sterile adults. Infinitesimal chemical exposure during development can have a drastically different effect from that at maturity. If natural El Nino cycles of rain and drought influence annual changes in speciation in Galapagos finches, consider the myriad long-term impacts of combusting 10 trillion pounds of mercury-bearing coal every year, or overspraying farms and suburbs of California with Malathion to eliminate the Mediterranean fruit fly. The magnitude of such macro-activity creates countless micro-interactions that can't be tracked or monitored. (p.33)
It is so easy, given the headline diet to which North American citizens are exposed, to gloss over the finer details of the damage human activity is doing exponentially to our ecosystem. It is also virtually out-of-mind to bring ourselves up short with the long-term view that compares our consumption of energy and resources to our ancestors.
Perspective based on objective reliable and verifiable information is sometimes so uncomfortable and so unsettling that it cannot be digested by the public. And for every corporate lobby effort pushing back against today's announcement by President Obama that coal-fired energy producers will have to cut their toxic emissions by 32% by 2030 based on 2005 levels, grow renewable energy production by 20%, there are numerous citizen-led organizations attempting to advance the story of how the human community can change the narrative from one of potential disaster to one of credible and sustainable hope.
Quoting from William Kittredge's The Nature of Generosity** Hawken borrows the following:
A society capable of naming itself lives within its stories, inhabiting and furnishing them. We ride stories like rafts, or lay them out on the table like maps. They always, eventually, fail and have to be reinvented. The world is too complex for our forms ever to encompass for long. (p.25)
We cannot afford to permit lies and dissembling to compromise either the dimensions of our threat or the potential of our capacity to reverse that threat.
It is only through truth-telling, full disclosure and hard, courageous and repetitive confrontation with the most dangerous and threatening implications of our individual and our collective carbon footprint, based on our level of comprehension and acceptance and acknowledgement of the most penetrating details of the implications of that legacy that we will possibly see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Those in power, significantly in Canada, would prefer to keep the kind of details Hawken outlines hidden from public view, leaving that public undisturbed by a failure to take action, which is the unequivocal legacy of Harper's Conservative government for the past decade.
Unfortunately, the fact that environmental curricula for elementary and secondary students include such catch phrases as "refuse-free lunches" while admirable and worth the effort, in order to mint new generations of eco-sensitive adults, such efforts will not take hold until long after the mega-multinational corporations and governments (India and China being the two most obvious examples) have awakened to their responsibilities to clean up their acts.
For example, the International Olympic Committee's awarding the 2022 Winter Olympics to Beijing seems to turn a deaf ear, a blind eye and a hollow mind to the eco-disaster in which the athletes will have to compete. The following excerpt demonstrates that even in China, there is a growing voice of eco-sensitive activists:
Chinese environmental advocates are expressing fear that construction and snowmaking projects associated with Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics could damage one of the region’s few nature reserves, according to a new report Monday. The International Olympic Committee’s decision to select China’s bid sparked an outcry on the country’s Internet forums and social media platforms that government censors quickly silenced.
The Beijing 2022 committee’s plan for the event called for the construction of Alpine skiing courses and buildings on and near China’s Xiao Haituo Mountain in Yanqing, the proposed site of the Olympic village. Using satellite photos and IOC documents related to the proposed construction sites, critics discovered that some buildings would be placed within the Songshan National Nature Reserve, which could damage its delicate ecosystem, the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong reported. (International Business Times, August 3, 2015
It is not only the plight of refugees and the countries in which they seek to live that poses a threat to the stability of those countries or the conflicts initiated by Islamic radical extremists, or the open war between Shia and Sunni Muslims, or the potential failure of state economies facing the world. While all of these are important and starving for significant address, the upcoming UN climate conference poses an urgent deadline for world leaders to demonstrate their capacity to grapple with what we all have to frame as the greatest threat to our shared life-sustaining and global eco-system.
Are those leaders, and the people who live in their jurisdiction, up to the task?
The world is watching and putting the issue under their individual and collective scrutiny...and the political fortunes of the leaders could be at risk if they drop the ball this time, as they have done following both Kyoto and Copenhagen.

*Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, Penguin Books, 2008
**William Kittredge, The Nature of Generosity (New York, Vintage Books) p.9

Reflections on "cheating"....

In a culture driven by symptoms, refusing to look either at the unseen or the unconscious, we find the  meaning of words restricted to their "empirical" and public use.
"Cheating" is a word and a behaviour written into many television dramas and movies, depicting the betrayal of one partner in a relationship by their other and the betrayal takes the form of "another man or woman". It is as if that form of cheating is the stereotype, perhaps even the archetype and conventional definition of the word "cheating." Too often, also, the act is attributed to the male of the relationship, without any regard for the conditions that may have precipitated the "affair".
In a culture both replete with sexual images and also contemptuous of any kind of intimate relationship that stretches or breaks the boundaries set centuries ago mainly by the churches and their dogmatic definitions of morality, propriety and perfection, "in God's eyes"! Surely, the churches are highly implicated in the pushback that witnesses an exponential growth, for example, in pornography, given their categorizing as evil all sexual encounters outside of marriage.
 "Recall" is a word and a behaviour describing the millions of automobiles that have been produced requiring return and repair because of some defect, some serious enough to have resulted in fatalities.
Never is the word "cheating" applied to those car companies, for their betrayal of their clients.
Similarly, we never hear the word "cheating" about an intimate relationship in which one partner lies about the behaviour of the other, misrepresenting the facts in order to seek and wreak revenge. We also never hear the word "cheating" applied to an intimate relationship in which one partner harbours a secret and vicious contempt for the other partner, yet refuses to leave the relationship for reasons of pride and public humiliation. We also never hear the word "cheating" applied to an intimate relationship in which one partner withholds sexual favours from the other, for reasons of power and control.
Similarly, physical abuse demonstrating bruises, cuts, broken bones will attract law enforcement, the courts and public contempt in a nanosecond, especially as it regards children and women. However, as a survivor of both physical and emotional abuse from my mother, while I wore long-sleeved shirts to school to cover the welts on my arms, after a beating, I never spoke of the profound and much more lasting impact of the insults to my person and character, in words that projected her own self-loathing onto my father, my sister and me.  "You are no good and you will never be any good!" are the kinds of statements that ring in one's ears, mind and spirit for decades long after their utterance and long after the person uttering them has died.
And yet, those words were never called "cheating" as they legitimately ought to have been.
"Cheating" takes other forms, in public life also.
For example, when a prospective hiring agent listens to the public "gossip" about an individual generated and perpetuated by those who are or were enemies of the candidate, and refuses to offer a position, is that not another form of subtle, undetectable and therefore cheating with impunity.
Are we not also cheated when an employer expects us to work overtime without remuneration, because 'this in an emergency' and there is no one else available, especially in employment situations in which there is no contract and no labour support?
Are we not also cheated when our high school principal writes a letter of reference that assassinates the character of the referee, in the believe and expectation that the confidentiality of that letter will never become public. Is the writer not guilty of "cheating" again with impunity. Refusing to write the letter, and telling the candidate would have been far preferable.
Are we not cheated by our grocery stores when they knowingly hike prices, to capitalize on either a bad growing season or a public spike in demand, yet these are normally called "market adjustments" in order to protect the offending corporation?
Are we not cheated by our politicians when they lie and dissemble knowingly about their own behaviour, yet we accept a journalistic qualification of such lies as "political rhetoric" thereby exonerating the offending politicians from their "cheating"?
Are we not cheated by our drug companies when the produce drugs whose impact on our bodies and our minds and our very lives has not been previously ascertained through strictly controlled clinical studies/trials, conducted by independent academic scholars who are not in the "cash-flow" stream of research grants to their respective universities? Never mind the cheating that takes place in the setting of the prices of many of the most needed drugs for the most deadly of diseases!
Are we not cheated by the religious institutions whose pews are being vacated because they have adopted moral and ethical dogmatic positions that are, in a word, incompatible with both human and the rest of nature? However, these positions are considered as "high moral standards" expected of those who chose to belong to those institutions.
Are we not being cheated by the auto industry both in the setting of prices and the monopoly, unregulated, that permits them to gouge their clients through both false advertising and false representation of vehicles? Yet we all know that these are just the "way car companies operate" in the public vernacular.
And then, is the public not being "cheated" when those in power exert completely and totally unnecessary force to subdue a potential or suspected offender? Of course, we are, and we may not even be a member of the victim's family, neighbourhood, race or gender. Nevertheless, we feel "cheated" by the abuse of power in the first instance, and also in the second or third instance when that abuse is not dealt with appropriately.
When Vladimir Putin denies any involvement in the downing of the Malaysian jet over Ukraine, and then blocks a United Nations Security Council resolution seeking to investigate the incident, the whole world, not only the families of the victims, nor the airline that owned the plane nor the Ukrainians on whose soil the plane crashed, but each person on the planet is "cheated" out of the legitimate knowledge that must accompany such incidents. Otherwise, how is the world to sustain what is commonly considered the common trust on which all human relations depend.
When the Litvenenko murder is deem to have been conducted by Russian operatives, and the Kremlin denies any involvement in the dastardly assassination, the not only is his surviving spouse "cheated" along with the British judicial inquiry process, but the whole world is "cheated" out of another important element of the "public domain of testimony and truth" on which the conduct of civilization depends.
When the United States Congress denies all prospective proposals from the White House, for example, on comprehensive immigration reform, for various and sundry excuses, when we all know that behind all of their rejections and denials of anything this president has proposed on all issues, lies the "race card" and the racism that plagues that country, then not only are those undocumented immigrants "cheated" out of what ought to be their rightful path to citizenship, but the whole world too is "cheated" out of the depth of the malaise that infects the governance of the most dominant country in the world.
And if the U.S. cannot and will not debate the agreed-upon facts, while arguing a specious case of some other replacement issue such as amnesty, or border security, or dangerous people from abroad, then what are the limits to "cheating"?
Has not "cheating" become 'the way we do business these days'?
And is that development not another of the many indications that we are complicit in our own failure to acknowledge and address the many large issues we face together.
If together, we believe that "cheating" is more beneficial than telling the truth, or arguing the reasons behind our public statements is more troublesome than telling the truth, then how are we ever to begin the journey that commits every child, every parent, every teacher and every public official to removing the protective mask of "justification" and cover-up and rationalization and "cheating" that barnacles too many of our social, educational, religious and political conversations.
As the Russian chess Master Garry Kasparov put it, "With Putin there are no rules, whereas in chess, at least we have rules."
And when there are no rules, no one is safe, and no one can live in security, no matter how many billions are spent to "protect" us from danger, no matter the source of that danger.
Let's stop cheating, as a commitment to beginning to resolve our many serious and dangerous enemies.
Like Pogo before us, "We have met the enemy and he is us!"

Will election writ spell the end of the Harper government?

In Canadian politics, just three or four days before the election writ is purportedly going to drop, proroguing parliament, both opposition leaders are attempting to out-charm each other, as broad-brush foils to the public’s perception of the prime minister, a mean-spirited and cynical control freak who muzzles and/or eliminates all voices that might hint that his government is not perfect.

The Prime Minister and his government (inseparable as the two headed Janus of Canadian politics are engaged in a long process of the abuse of power. To wit:

·       Smugly touting an election war chest that beats his two rivals combined, (“more Canadians support our government than either of the other two parties” chimed Conservative spokesman on CBC’s Power and Politics yesterday)...

·       dropping a combined $100 million on Toyota to update their Cambridge plant (with the government of Ontario)

·       visiting the Governor General this weekend to generate the longest election campaign in modern Canadian political history (thereby taking upmost advantage of his party’s superior vault of cash

·       sending his Finance Minister out to contradict the Governor of the Bank of Canada when he posits the view that the Canadian economy is sliding into recession (two consecutive quarters with no growth)

·       making faux headlines on the back of a “balanced budget” that is so swiss-cheese filled with holes, given the steep slide in oil prices and the government’s having put all their “eggs” in that basket

·       attempting to overshadow the testimony of former Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright at the Duffy trial in mid-August with election coverage

·       demonstrating extremely opportunistic and cynical judgement in the appointment of Duffy to the Senate as media icon to raise funds for the party and then dumping him for abusing the vague and hardly transparent Senate spending rules on ‘residency’ requirements, after Duffy himself protested to the Prime Minister himself that his ‘real residence’ was Ottawa

·       refusing ever to meet with the provincial premiers and territorial representatives to discuss anything including health care, environment, First Nations issues, or even human resource development

·       watching the resignation from his Cabinet of substantive ministers like John Baird, Peter McKay, Jim Prentice all of them in the prime of their political years

·       rotating ministers through the Environment department while persisting in denying and avoiding substantive steps to protect the environment from the toxic tar sands

·       dumping the long-form census on which all academics and social planners depend for their long-range projections

·       appointing candidates to the Supreme Court without fully complying with both the letter and the spirit of the traditional pathways

·       insulting the Supreme Court’s highest judge and thumbing his nose at the court repeatedly

·       refusing categorically to call a Royal Commission to investigate the death and disappearance of some 1100 aboriginal women, while employing the reductionistic “we do not need to look at the sociology, this is simply a criminal matter” rationalization

·       removing discretion from judges through maximum minimum sentences and building hundreds of new prison cells while rejecting the research based approach of remediation and reform of criminals

·       introducing and passing omnibus bills into the Commons thereby hiding nefarious and clearly unpopular measures that would otherwise fail the test of passage in the public interest, thereby upholding party interest above public interest

·       failing to balance personal freedom and public security in the C-51 Bill to enhance the powers of the national security apparatus while simultaneously reducing personal freedoms in the view of those who know and consider these options as part of their careers

·       bribing all parents with cheap child-care cheques weeks before the election date, thereby hoping to benefit from the manipulation of their loyalty in the voting booth

·       muzzling all civil servants from publicly discussing scientific evidence that is required for public application, having nothing to do with shaping government policy

·       emphasizing the military aspect of foreign policy to the abject abandonment of  a Canadian historic contribution to international geopolitics of mediation, negotiation and moderation and PEACEKEEPING, costing Canada a lost vote for a seat on the United Nations Security Council

·       abandoning the balanced and historic position of all previous Canadian governments (Liberal and Progressive Conservative) in the Palestine-Israel dispute, while also removing the Canadian embassy from Tehran

·       reducing the GST in another blatant attempt to bribe lower and middle class voters to support the government.

And this list is hardly complete...merely a remarkable list of taking Canada in the wrong direction, something for which Canadians will have to spend the next decade reversing, if, as polls indicate, we have the balls to throw the government out!

Unlike the leaders of the two opposition parties, I am not, and have no need to be, restrained in my expressions of contempt for the legacy of the Harper government or the Prime Minister. I am not in a position to have to mollify public opinion when the media paints this piece as “rash” “over the top” or even “extreme”.
 Like millions of other Ontarians, who had to dig ourselves out from the debacle now known as Mike Harris, I hope that Harper has so deeply convinced the electorate that pandering to fear, division and blatant and cheap bribery is a governmental diet that breeds only indigestion and gas, certainly not national nourishment and leadership. An old adage in politics as revered as “all politics is local” is the aphorism, “you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Poverty seriously depleting natural and human resources

There is a metaphor not very hidden in the CBC story about the invasion of the Lion Fish into Atlantic waters, first along the Florida Keys and now extending up and down the North and South American coasts. A predator with poisonous venom-filled spines, a voracious appetite, and a fearless approach to its prey, in order to protect the eco-systems necessary for the rest of the oceanic lives of plants and other fish, humans are now diving with spears in hand to kill them off, probably not fast enough to keep up with the new scourge.

While they will not appreciate the comparison, the Lion Fish seems to have graduated from the most highly refined and sophisticated finishing school for corporate and financial service-sector executives, preying upon the multiple eco-systems on which human beings depend. However, a significant different in the two situations is that, while there are think tanks and scholars and even some politicians who are publicly railing against the abuses of corporate and especially Wall Street abuse of power, there is merely a small band of conservationist-divers, armed with hand-spears who are killing the fish one at a time, while they also have created a culinary delicacy in Florida Keys restaurants. Will the  combination of single-handed spearing and dining delicacy produce the desired result of  eradication. These Lion fish are so fertile and hungry, that they are reproducing exponentially while growing fat on their prey.

Predator fish, voracious and propagating like rabbits along the coastline of both North and South America, now as far south as Peru, could leave the ocean floor devoid of many of the species of both flora and fauna.

A similar pattern of aggressive over-fishing on the floor of the Indian Ocean, byt starving people in Bangladesh, and on the east coast of India, in their fragile attempt both to eke out a living for their families through satisfying another  voracious appetite in Europe and America for another species of fish, frawns, is also stripping the eco system of that ocean, with barely a nod from the  wealthy whose appetite these poor fishers are filling.

One again, the difference between the Lion fish predators and the human fishers on the Indian Ocean is that, while they may have a similar impact, they are not what we would normally call predators...just poor peasants trying to survive.

Robbing the eco-system  of one or more ocean floors is only a part of the devastation that poverty, and unemployment and hopelessness wreak. Last night the BBC aired a lengthy report on the sexual exploitation of American children who have been seduced and captured by the sex trade in the U.S. At its root, according to the piece, are poverty, neglect and drugs. And according to the BBC the F.B.I. is reported to have removed some 600 children from the sex trade just in the last year. Like most serious issues, it starts, in the words of one survivor, with a simple payment of $50 to a twelve-year-old girl for a photo of her topless body. As she puts it, “$50 is big for a twelve-year-old” and then it just grows quickly until you are trapped.”

Now, if we were to present the case of the hungry fishers in India and Bangladesh to the International Monetary Fund, or the case of the children victims of the sex trade to the Koch Brothers, both the I.M.F. and Koch would quickly and defensively declare their responsibilities do not include the protection, nor the precention of these pockets of poverty. They are tasked with much “larger fish”...issues of national and international debt,  and issues of growing the dividends of their investors respectively. And the news media would hardly be expected to put these stories in the same news piece. Too complicated, too unrelated, too big a brush stroke, and lacking in both unity and coherence would be some of the editorial pushback.

Nevertheless, perhaps that is just one more reason these pieces do not have a home in a respected news organ. the issue of poverty, unemployment, drugs and neglect together have many faces and together they are related intimately, deeply and profoundly in the attitudes and behaviours of most human beings. Being poor is not a death sentence, and there are millions who are desperately and defiantly overcoming what to many seem insurmountable odds and striving to stay alive and to improve their prospects. However, when the wealthy world’s dining tables are vacuuming the fronds and the floor of the Indian Ocean, and the same wealthy appetites are gobbling the predator Lion fish in the Atlantic, is there a danger that we will once again veer towards complacency, shrug our shoulders, individually and collectively and go on about our business of making our own living.

And that is one response the world, the oceans and the fishers cannot tolerate. Not only are the wealthy nations pouring billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the same atmosphere your grandkids and mine need to survive, we are also consuming depleting resources at a speed never before even imagined, without a unified international and emergency response to the plight we are generating.

Can we also shrug our shoulders at the epidemic sexploitation of American children in cities where some of the most wealthy live, work and pay their taxes, taxes that go to investigate and to arrest and to imprison those human predators who are criminally exploiting young girls? Can we also shrug our shoulders at the millions of refugees who are piling onto transport trucks, trains and boats trying to make their way from France to the United Kingdom, having fled deplorable and life-threatening conditions in their homelands?

The world likes the response of increased security, law enforcement and punishment, but just as the United States cannot and will not deport 12 million undocumented immigrants, so too the world cannot incarcerate the millions of refugees who are threatening generous countries like Jordan, and have been taken in in large numbers by countries like Sweden, while other countries like my own, Canada, have barely accepted slightly more than 1000.

Refugees, exploited children sucked into the sex trade in poor pockets of ‘first world’ cities, exploding Lions fish, depleting fronds, and the human appetite that apparently knows no bounds. And this is especially true when people are desperate. We have become so accomplished at detailing the micro-details of each and every incident, and each and every single guilty person or gang, that we have lost sight of the gestalt of our collective habits, our collective appetites and our collective capacity and eagerness to turn a blind eye to the most uncomfortable and the most compromising theatre.

Documentary writers and film-makers, to their credit, help to expose those issues that do not make it to the front pages of our papers, or the headlines of our tv newscasts. Yet, we continue to demand too little of our political leaders; we continue to walk barely conscious, perhaps even unconscious as a protection from having to come face to face with the garbage dump we are leaving behind everywhere. And we have enough food to feed everyone, and we have the resources and the creativity and ingenuity to put everyone to work with dignity, and thereby to generate clean environments ....and we continue to do so little that it seems pathetic, especially when compared with our capacity, our technology and our growing data base on needs and the various interventions to meet those needs.

Where have the adults gone?

What is the fascination that we humans seem to share about larger than life individuals? Are we playing out our own unconscious, or perhaps tragically even denied, insecurity as perpetual orphans, wandering around looking to be rescued? A British psychiatrist, Bolby, through his work with children, writes about what he conceives as a fundamental and universal human dilemma: that we all suffer a monumental loss, separation, abandonment, alienation, early in our lives, and spend the remainder of our time on the planet attempting to mend the rupture.
If there is even a kernel of validity in the theory, then there is a potential to unify humans of all colours, languages and cultures, if we are prepared to acknowledge our shared pa in. On the other hand, there is also the potential that, without recognizing our pain, we enter into a world view that seeks out and even depends on a figure, father or mother, to 'be there for us' when others simply went AWOL.
We are all participants in a global experiment that includes our "audience" role in a public drama, each day, the script for which may seem to be written by those names and faces we see on our television screens, yet all the while, our "role" in the writing of that script can never be overemphasized. If we are embued with a kind of hard wiring that begins with separation, alienation, loss, then we will seek out figures with whom we can and do identify, those voices, faces, and personas whose energy gives expression to those basic feelings, thoughts, ideas, and even attitudes that we believe we lack the opportunity to express, in a loud and effective manner. Our shared frustration with those in power finds release in the manner and voice of a public figure who exposes his or her own frustration, thereby relieving us of the danger and risk of so doing. We live, too often, vicariously, through our projections onto whichever figures we choose. And our choices are not completely rational, deliberate or predictable.
The marketing fraternity digs deeply into our pain, our fears, our losses and our inadequacies for the sole purpose of painting pictures of products and services that purport to fill those gaps in our lives. "Drink this lager, and you will have an army of loyal friends who share your good taste for lager."
"Drive this car, and you will have the status that only this brand can give you."
"Apply this cream, and your skin will be so radiant and attractive that both men and women will want to emulate your 'image'."
"Invest with our company, and you will be cutting through the bafflegab that surrounds all the other investment pitches, because we have the best, the most credible and the most proven analysts of a supersonic global market."
Companies, like individual people running for office, carve out their perception of their unique "offering" and then buy writers and artists and composers to create the background 'set' for the selling of that offering. After being exposed to decades of manipulation, by companies shilling their brand, and politicians cunningly 'telling their story', like all overfed and bored and cynical consumers, our role has shifted from consumers who rush to the circus of a "Barnum and Bailey" barker who just arrived in town to skim our pocket change with cheap thrills and then move on to the next "sucker" town, to a more demanding and discerning consumer/audience who seeks a more substantive offering than another cheap thrill to fill the pain of our separation and alienation.
Nevertheless, there are many whose need for attention, any kind of attention, especially the kind of attention that purports to speak their language, and hold their views, regardless of how simplistic or distorted from reality those views are, like moths drawn to a light bulb, fly to the incandescence of any light, in numbers dependent more on the degree of incandescence than on the substance of the offering. A shooting star from the skies will find millions at their telescopes in the middle of the night, taking in the light show. A new planet, like Hebron 452, will generate public commentary, especially given the potential that it might house 'life' in some form similar to the life on earth. All of the 'lone-wolf' shooters in schools, churches, movie houses will generate more moths of media granting them a few minutes of infamy, even if posthumously, that they believed they were starved of in their lives.
And those "media moths" will be motivated by the research that demonstrates that there are millions of other 'moths' in living rooms, bars and rec-rooms, feeding on the words and the images of the first-line moths presenting the images on the television. Outside of the mainstream market, infested with those paid shillers, unpaid, and often obscure artists attempt to paint a picture that is not dependent on the acclaim and the dollars that comprise the drum-beat of the consumer marketplace. Like Arthur Miller, through his 1950 Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy, Death of a Salesman, these writers see behind the public 'show' into the private lives of people like Willy Loman, whose life as a salesman has foundered on the rocks of reality, depression,, loneliness and alienation, not only from his own self, but also from his wife and sons. Penetrating the hollowness of the public pursuit of status, Miller illustrates its cumulative impact in the suicide of Willy.
And although that play is now half a century old, the alienation, separation and loss of individual lives is still playing an active role in the public drama that unfolds daily through the public media. And the reasons for the alienation, separation and loss are both the same as they always were, and somewhat different. Similar, in the fact that families are more fragmented and cut-off from each other given a universal attachment and fascination to tech devices that take them away to fragmented conversations with  friends when they might be having face-to-face encounters with other family members. Even President Obama has had to ban cell phones from the dinner table, and lay on the reasonable expectation that his family talk to each other. And different in that the culture has become so violent, disrespectful and annoying rendering many public encounters offensive. At the gas bar this week, for example, I watched as several drivers strolled through their gas-up, and their pay-up and their window wash in a deliberately casual and isolated manner (as if they were the only ones seeking gas) while many others watched and waited in line. When I commented to the attendant that I was a little offended, he replied instantly, "So are we offended with the drivers around here...and the problem is that no body cares any more!"
And like abandoned orphans, we feel our original pain again, even at the gas pump.
And that pain wants a pill....and it seeks a pill in whatever form it can find.
And, if the pain is strong enough, the pill we seek may well be more dangerous than the pain itself.
And that's where the larger-than-life offering from a company, or a politician takes on a new kind of significance.
We can all see around North America, buildings around which thousands of cars are parked...these buildings include casinos, shopping malls and athletic stadia. People are attempting to satisfy appetites that apparently are not satiated, as these scenes continue to play themselves out. On a smaller scale, bars and pubs are filled with people talking about the 'talking heads' they are watching on the television, and gaming rooms are filled with those engaged in a virtual reality, one they call more real than the one the mainstream considers real, given the games' cut-to-the-chase presentation of conflict, strategy, tactics and winning/losing.
Carole Pearson, in her The Hero Within, wrote in the 1990's that the American culture was dominated by the Victim (Women) and the Warrior (Men) and that her hope was that both would find their  Wanderer, and transition to their Magician. In 2015, one could reasonable speculate that the Orphan, and the Innocent are more prominent in American culture, and the dependence on the 'great figure' as the answer/rescuer/protector has grown rather than declined. Many women have found their Warrior voice, and men have started to explore their victim through their acknowledgement of their emotional pain, heretofore repressed and hidden from public view. However, the regression into a shared adolescence, one that includes both the Innocent and the Orphan, by both genders, perhaps for different reasons (women because their needs have not been met by the Feminist Agenda, their shared warrior, and men because their wandering is still misconstrued as weakness by many) seems more prominent.
Angry disillusionment, disenchantment, and narcissistic rebellion against all institutions, all collective decisions 'in the public good' seem to be echoed and amplified by raucous and offensive drama and political rhetoric that could be summed in the growth of extreme sports, as the epitome of the recovery and rise of the individual, in an ironically failed attempt to regain personal power and authenticity. Little wonder that we have become deadened emotionally to the bombs and the bullets and the refugees and the starving and are fascinated by inconsequential and ephermeral conflicts like that between "The Donald" the all the other presidential candidates.
When we believe we have been abandoned, isolated and victimized by a system over which we have no influence, we revert to our early patterns, and regress into archetypes we still need to developmentally transition from their negative to their positive attributes, and even to seek new ways of being adult, confident and willing to participate, so that the public square and the public good are once again supported by the best of our angels, and not those in need of the nano-second of public adulation.
We are, after all, capable of being more and different than abandoned adolescents at the latest rock concert, in our public lives.

American political theatre: entertaining but hardly inspiring

The American political theatre never fails to entertain. Today, and for the foreseeable future, we have the spectacle of one of the most articulate, sophisticated, intellectually gifted and accomplished president, Barack Obama, relaxing with his family in Central Park, an art museum and a Broadway play on the weekend. After leading his country into an historic agreement over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, opening diplomatic relations with Cuba following a half-century freeze, opening up the potential of prison and sentencing reform through another historic visit to an Oklahoma prison, another first for any American president, and watching the American economy begin to rebound from the “mat” it faced in 2008-9 when he took office, Obama is marching to a legacy worthy of his person and presidency, through the highly appropriate “end-run” around Congress.

On the other side of the stage, the Americans (and the rest of the world) are being treated to The Donald’s (Trump) bloviating parade to the top of the opinion polls among the platoon of potential and declared candidates for the White House allegedly espousing a different political ideology. Denigrating former presidential candidate John McCain for being imprisoned, “I like those who are not imprisoned!” Trump knew would lob an incendiary device into the campaign backrooms of his competitors. Defending the “crazies” in Arizona, thousands who showed up for one of his political diabtribes, and were dubbed “crazies” by that same McCain, Trump also knew would generate public sympathy among the masses.

And of course, the  media, loving the “show” much more than the substance of a debate on issues, playing to its “base” motive for ratings, is delighted to record and replay comments like “unfit to be commander in chief,” and “jackass” and “a disgrace to the Republican party” from Trump’s rivals....adding the predictable rhetorical fuel to an already burgeoning swamp fire of much more heat than light.

Here is another edition of the classic “class war” pitting the self-appointed sophisticates like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and potentially Marco Rubio, against the deliberately unpolished, unsophisticated and unrehearsed and deliberately manipulative Trump, on the Republican side, while on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is showing his colours as a “one-trick” pony attempting to reduced the inequality gap while being shouted down by those who find his record on race relations hollow (whether that charge is warranted or not) and Hillary Clinton keeps to her script as the “youngest female ever elected to the White House”.

Along with the media, Trump has others in his supporting cast including Senator Ted Cruz, the evangelical Cuban-Canadian, who apparently earned high praise for his intellectual heft from his Harvard Law professor, Allan Dershowitz, and a bankroll that could and just might sink his opponents, in the long run, if he chooses to stay in the race. Adding to his supporting cast, of course, is the chorus of angry, disenchanted, inarticulate yet highly explosive mass of voters who are disgusted with the bowel obstruction that has plagued Congress for the past eight years, and who are struggling with low incomes, or even no incomes, in a recovery that has favoured the very wealthy at the expense of the many.

Trump’s recipe of “more jobs than any other candidate,” more push-back to China and Iran and North Korea than any other candidate,” “more Latino voters than any other candidate come election time,” played against the background of his many “deals” (many of which went South, by the way) offer a diet of “fast food” in an economy in which only the sharks survive. Whether the American people want a shark in the White House, that is an admitted and gloating and hubristic and inflated shark, when compared with the highly restrained political ambitions of the mainstream candidates on both sides, is still an open question. They certainly know, even if they do not read the papers, or watch the television, or follow the thousands of nuanced blogs and columnists, that the world is a very dangerous and unfriendly place. They also know that the Pentagon is not and will never again be the sole source of American or even western power. They know that Obama’s rarefied and homiletic paragraphs of analysis and defence of his policies float high over their heads. They buy some of the “macho” simplifications of the Donald, as a prescription like all their other drugs, to potentially relieve their pain. And, even if the relief is only for a moment, like most addicts, that is sufficient to attract their attention.

As the representative for Netflix explained yesterday on CBC Newsworld, in defending his company’s casual approach to the millions who are pirating his company’s service, “we just want to develop an army of addicts to our service”, the marketing world has an insatiable appetite for “addicts” to whatever it is attempting to sell, and to some significant extent, each candidate wants a frenzied band of “addicts” to their candidacy. Whether he is selling a reality television show, or cleaning up from the mess his loud mouth has generated through the abandonment of major corporate accounts, Trump is Horatio Alger on steroids.

Trump knows the inside of this world better and more immediately than any of his opponents on both sides. Not only is the uber deal-maker, he is also the creation of the world of the unfettered capitalism of which his deals are the ultimate consummation. He openly and readily admits that he “gives money to everybody” including Hillary Clinton, because that is how the system works. When he needs some political influence, no matter whether a Republican or a Democrat, local, state or federal, he has already paved the way for whatever political favour he needs. So not only does he “play the game”, he also openly tells the world, “that is what’s wrong with the system!” He knows how to play while simultaneously despising the game. He once favoured a woman’s right to choose, but now tells an interviewer he is pro-life. He raised funds for McCain’s presidential bid in 2008, and how tells the world he is not a war hero because he was captured.

Calling his closest opponent, Jeb Bush, “out of touch” (whatever that means), Trump seems to play all the rhetorical cards in the deck whenever and wherever he feels drawn to a particular expression. Spontaneous might be one word for his stump portrait; however, is it really spontaneity, or extreme contempt for the political process, linked to a bank vault in his name? He knows just how crass and tarnished politics has become; he also knows that in order to even contend for the nomination in the Republican Party, he has to generated excitement, crowds, media attention, and perhaps sometime, even consider some serious policy proposals. He has not openly espoused a federally financed campaign law, that would remove the tsunami of cash from donors who, like him, seek political favours. Of course, even such a law would not prevent him from underwriting his own campaign.

As an archetype of the American financial culture, Trump is, to most people merely an “object” to be toyed with, permitted a gig as entertainer, and as the stir-stick in the cocktail, an agent of mixing up the political cocktail currently on offer.

Not surprising that he has “never asked God to forgive him” given his inordinate hubris that blinds him to anything in his life requiring the forgiveness of a deity. Depicting Mexicans as drug addicts, and rapists, (contrary to the facts which never seem to impede his voluble steam-rolling tongue,) and denigrating McCain’s war hero status, calling his opponents losers, while telling audiences he “likes Obama” speaks to the strategy of a candidate whose strong-man image plays with the emotions of his audiences, including the media whom he counts on for their co-dependent role in his epic charade, “enhancing his brand” as some would put it. But this is no Ross Perrot on steroids; nor is it Ralph Nader on opiates; nor it is Teddy Roosevelt in a suit and pseudo toupe (that really is his hair!). Barkers like television ‘host’ Geraldo Rivera, or Glenn Beck, are names that come to mind, each with his own persona, and it is the persona that Trump is “trumpeting”.

The Persona, as Jung saw it, is a Mask, a cover-up for the ego of the person, and when the ego and mask remain undifferentiated, Jung called that enantiodromia. Whether or not Trump has separated his ‘persona’ from his ‘ego’ in clinical or technical terms, the world is now his fixated audience, (although hardly addicted), and the duration of his “15 minutes of fame” will depend on his Shadow, that part of his unconscious that will ultimately rear its less than endearing head/voice and the world will wonder what happened. Right now, the world struggles to discern who Trump really is, given that authenticity is still in the mix of voter motivation.

However, the “reality television” meme has so consumed the American public, that prior to robots taking over, we may have to endure a transition into a Pinocchio/Gepetto duet playing in an auditorium near everyone, confusing and toying with his audience starved for some inexpensive stage show, in the hinterland, now that Broadway ticket prices have soared beyond the average voter’s pocket book.  Jeff Dunham’s puppets are another evocation of The Donald, given their extreme red-neck observations, regardless of their physical image, or perhaps it is really the other-way-round: The Donald has taken his cues from the Dunham puppets.

It is also a meme in American pop culture, that extreme fame resides in a “single-name” identity: Cher, Madonna, Mantle, Elvis, Hillary...and Donald has even blown that meme apart, adding his regal “The” to his persona. Is he a sign of the complete atrophy of the American huckster culture or a foreshadowing of the future of Brave New World, when the people are so ‘drugged’ into unconscious that they no longer care?

Benjamin Britten: the more violent the society, the more violent will the individual be...(Opera "Peter Grimes")

 In Benjamin Britten’s Opera, Peter Grimes, the composer develops the theme of the struggle between the individual and the society. One of the more cogent and penetrating insights of this intersection, according to Britten, is that the more violent the society, the more violent will the individual be.

While the last few decades may not top the charts for violence, there is clearly a more ubiquitous and incessant dissemination of the violence humans are perpetrating on one another. And like the bursting bubble of 2008-9, first in the housing market in the U.S., the conditions in which these acts of violence occur have changed. They are no longer isolated and manageable. They are no longer mere incidents, or even accidents, although those continue. They are no longer able to be remediated by a single agent. They spill over borders, political ideologies, languages, time zones and other economies.

We have engaged in a run-away global economy, in which the corporations have a distinct advantage over the various governments charged with responsibility for public policy including regulation of the corporations, for cleaning up the messes (frequently initiated by the bankers and financial markets) when the collective centrifuge blows apart. It is a lot easier and compelling to remove a dictator, for example, than to replace that dictator with a level of governance, laws, and social policies that take care of the needs of the people who live in that country. Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Yemen, are some of the nations in which chaos, violence, and the complete fraying of the social fabric have replaced the dangers and threats once posed by the dictators, many of whom were “allies” of the west, and the news out of those places was mainly “settled” and predictable.

Today, the various theatres of violence, failed states, migrant refugees and instability are ripe opportunities for forces never before even contemplated let alone planned for. And once having left a deep deposit of military hardware in their abandoned fighting fields, the United States is experiencing, and the world is witnessing, the slaughter those weapons inflict in the hands of the terrorists. Just as Donald Rumsfeld, envoy of then president Ronald Reagan, conveyed “weapons of mass destruction” to Saddam Hussein in the mid-eighties, so too has the world’s military super power (albeit indirectly) fueled the current violence in the Middle East. And one of the things about this period of history is that such complicity is now out in the open for all to see and to contemplate and to measure.

And, caught in the vortex of its own “power” the United States is continuing to ship arms not only to other nations, along with Russia, but it has engaged in a massive sale of weapons inside its homeland. When the arsenal of power is dependent on the gun (not exclusively) then that arsenal is already participating in its own demise. Devising preventive techniques to  block the acquisition of arms from “undesireables” at home, while expanding the international shipment of bigger and more explosives around the world is a bi-polarity that is simply and utterly unsustainable. The hornets’ nest of political voices that perpetuate the dependence on the bullet, both at home and around the world, and the culture in which that nest lives and even grows, is one that would find any restrictions on the development and sale of those arms repugnant. Little boys, and increasingly little girls, in such a culture, will come to believe and act upon the notion that violence is a remedy for whatever blocks their individual and narcissistic paths. Exporting violence, as a way of life and a means of sustaining its balance of payments, merely enhances the opportunities of those who would seek to deploy violence in their own little worlds, in whatever country they may exist.

The NRA, the proliferation of arms for all law enforcement including school guards, the dissemination of the argument of self-defence backed by a weapon, in the purse, under the pillow, in the glove box, in the  brief case, and yes even in the college classrooms and the sanctuaries of churches and the absolute contempt for any push-back from even the parents of lost children in Sandy Hook, for example, cripples both the spirit of the nation of the United States, and the capacity of the rest of the civilized world to give that  country the kind of respect it could enjoy, if it were deliberately and openly to put curbs on its dependence of the bullet.

Of course, there is significant evidence that the United States also provides generous amounts of support for worthwhile causes, like the fight against AIDS in Africa, and many other such examples. And that generosity of spirit must not be denigrated. However, linked to both the addiction to corporate profits of its main corporate citizens, and to the delusion that military power is the guarantor of national and personal security, this generosity can be and is only tarnished and reduced significantly.

Even the language of its political discourse is infused with killing, wiping out the enemy, fatal blows to the enemies, (in the rhetorical sense) as examples of potential leaders who might occupy the White House. Not only does this language and weapon-infested culture bespeak a neurotic masculinity so frightened of losing control as well as dominance, it also entraps successive generations of young men who are innocently and naively emulating their fathers and grandfathers.

The male individual who does not subscribe to the “win-at-all-costs” formula, even if it means obliterating the enemy, is far too often dubbed “girlish” or worse, “gay” or even worse, “fag”....And when we combine the ‘first-and-last resort’ to weapons in all conflicts in the U.S. with the emasculation through poverty, unemployment and hopelessness of the people of both genders who have barely enough money to survive, the American society demonstrates its commitment to violence and the individual is its victim.

In yesterday’s column in Truthdig.com, Chris Hedges call  all Americans Greeks, reduced to the serfdom of the masses dependent on the miserly bail-out of the rich and the powerful. Americans, however, may consider Greeks to be at least on the leading edge of the bail-outs, for we all know that after the ensuing bail-outs that will be required to “reconcile” the $1.3 trillion in state debt, there will be empty vaults under the control of the wealthy and the powerful for those still in line.

While the violence continues on the battle fields, on the oceans and through the air, behind those horrific scenes, big powers are engaged in an interminable campaign of manufacturing, marketing and exporting weapons of all kinds around the world. Weapons in the hands of the hopeless regardless of their ethnicity, ideology or religion, still constitutes a dangerous marriage.

And remember Britten’s linkage: the more violent the society, the more violent will be the individual in that society.