Marc Estrin : Our Better Angels May Have Fled

Our better angels may have fled

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / December 6, 2010

“In each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the molding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.” -- Capt. Ahab

So they -- Pynchon's "They," the Blue and Red Meanies, visible and undisclosed -- won't renew unemplyoment benefits, want to kill 'em all, anywhere, with drones or nukes if possible, are prepared to starve out Palestinians and Caterpillar their homes, drown low-lying peasants, and assassinate or execute any whistle blowers so they can do their deeds in secret. Who are these people?

“Greedy” and “mean-spirited” are the mildest adjectives one hears describing the attitudes and projects of heads of state, their underlings, and the CEOs that drive them. And last -- but definitely not least -- the populations that applaud them.

It might be possible to assume that Mr. (and the occasional Ms.) Big and their followers have human hearts (Cheney's contraption notwithstanding), love their children as we do, and hope to pass on to them a better world. What is it, then, that drives them to propose and cheer on such callous proposals and systems?

While differing in personal details, it's likely that each actor is driven by what the Frankfurt School called the “Authoritarian Personality,” whose fundamental trait is the urgent need for, and privileging of, order. Freud, Fromm, and Reich explained the psychodynamics of weak ego structures that underlay the Authoritarian Personality, while Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed the social repression that encourage it and leave its marks on individual souls.

When Alles in Ordnung becomes the highest value, and all else seems threatening, many things follow:

1) Powerful leaders are assumed to be needed to keep society in line, secretly if necessary, and to restrict it to conventional, middle-class values. Exaggerated assertions of toughness and strength become the norm. Trickle-down theories designed to protect the powerful are understood to be in the interest of all. Though greed and lust for power may be involved, they are justified by an appeal to the general good.

2) Democracy becomes a threat and must be limited. In The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governed Ability of Democracies To the Trilateral Commission, Samuel Huntington warns about the consequences of an “excess of democracy”:

The arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited... The effective operation of the democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups... Marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively.

The need to control the unpredictability of excess democracy has guided American foreign and economic policy throughout its history. The pattern of marginalizing the general population and supporting rich or dictatorial strongmen is driven as much by a rage for order and fear of chaos as by a simple selfish need to maximize profits -- profits.

3.) Individualism becomes suspect, a negative value to be minimized or stamped out. Difference means unpredictability, and thus "bad." Fear of an unpredictable, uncontrollable Other spawns all the “-isms” which rampage today: racism, sexism, classism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia. Nature itself becomes an enemy Other to be conquered and subdued.

4) Rigid moralism of stereotypical values seems the most secure protection against anarchy. The psychosexual chaos at the core of an authoritarian personality simultaneously fascinates and repels. There is exaggerated concern with and (often hypocritical) denunciation of libidinal art and sexual “goings on.” God hates fags, don'tcha know. Don't ask, don't tell, don't be. At the same time, unconscious emotional impulses are projected outward, and the world is seen as a wild and dangerous place in which worst-case scenarios abound.

5) Fear and guilt about chaotic thoughts within and deeds without is so potentially threatening that psychic numbing becomes a typical response, with emotional dissociation from the consequences of deeds. Knee-jerk patriotism in response to moral questions is an effective defense mechanism. Yellow ribbons blindfold eyes against our corpses. The story of the Enola Gay or 9/11 must not be told. Control of information makes compassion difficult.

6) A culture of punishment follows hard upon. Offenders against official order must be heavily penalized. Dominance and submission become crucial. Pro-life and pro-death penalty attitudes flourish together. Sanctity of life is secondary: the important thing is to punish transgressors. Tender-mindedness is for bleeding heart liberals.

Thus, the Authoritarian Personality -- individual and social. While no “angry white male” leader or follower may display every trait, they are all on collective display in the current reactionary zeitgeist. To characterize them as simple greed or mean-spiritedness is to misunderstand their psychic origins, and to limit effective response.

Can there be an effective strategy in response?

Each of the characteristics above can be substantially addressed. In dealing with any particular individual, from talk show caller to senator, a crucial move might be to speak to his or her insecurity and need for order:

1) Powerful Leaders. We can emphasize the collective wisdom and surprising knowledge of larger groups, and the limitations of powerful, but narrow, leadership. We can point to the possibilities of decentralized planning and decision-making. If trickle-up energy can be recognized and honored, trickle-down economics will make less sense.

2) The Threat of Democracy. We can call on any reserve goodwill for the founding ideas of this country. In their research for Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah's group of sociologists discovered a pervasive “second language” of civic republicanism and biblical tradition flourishing alongside the seemingly dominant American language of manipulative instrumentalism. World Bank strangulation of the global poor, for example, can show up -- at least to the masses -- as profound injustice if this second language is brought forward and appealed to. Bellah's book is an important read for activists thoroughly discouraged.

3) Suspect Individualism and Dangerous Others. “New” and “different” are not negative terms in American culture. Current advertising appeals to it all the time. Ethnic music and restaurants thrive -- so why not the folks that originate them? Today's xenophobia may not be an indelible characteristic of the American psyche, but a relatively superficial effect of economic hard times. Many positive sensibilities are there to be addressed, and one can try to locate blame where it belongs -- on the power structures, not on their victims.

4) Rigid Moralism. Puritanism and profligacy have always existed in dubious battle. Hawthorne's “Maypole of Marymount” teases the most rigid among us, creating chaos within control. Understanding the inner workings of self and others is a possible key to a more peaceful order. Mitch McConnell (married to an Asian-American) may be secretly fascinated with Louisville's gay pride parade, but he has no conceptual tree on which to hang it. Can we make it okay for him and his to ponder such things, if only as examples of the human condition?

5) Patriotic Psychic Numbing. Now that the information highway has invaded the world, images of Others seep daily into consciousness. For all the "good guy/bad guy" media spin, there may be a perception of common humanity lurking under the thickest hide, kept in place only by fear. Should that hide begin to melt, psychic numbing will disappear with it and blinding patriotism might be open to fascination and even generosity. “They're just dumb, greedy sonsabitches” sells short even a right-winger's capacity for wonder.

6) The Culture of Punishment. As nuclear power, once projected as “too cheap to meter,” has priced itself out of existence, so must three-strikes prison building make its idiocy felt. When the quick fix fails -- as even a casual observer can see it must -- Americans will have to confront the contradictions of dominance. And here our egalitarian “second language” can come into play, creaking open through cognitive dissonance. If even Dick Cheney supports his daughter in her lesbianism, can angry, punishing America be all that far behind?

All right. But as Cheney so famously said, "So?"

These approaches to the Authoritarian Personality do seem overly optimistic in the era of our once and future Congresses. And surely social and political structures of domination are firmly in place, prejudicing events and guiding their outcomes. But Melville directs our attention to the glimmer of hope, the “unknown but still reasoning thing” behind the unreasoning mask. Far better, perhaps, to organize toward that glimmer and engage that reason then to lapse into despair, and the powerless calling of names.

But can the vestigial better angels of our nature swell the chorus of a new, more humane union? Or have badder angel systems so suffocated us, for so long, that the better angels have turned their backs, taken their leave, and fled?

Lincoln's angels must by now confront Walter Benjamin's Angel:

...an angel who seems about to take leave of something, something at which he is staring. His eyes are wide, his mouth open and his wings outspread. This is what the Angel of History must look like. His face is turned toward the past. What look to us like a chain of occurrences appears to him as one great catastrophe incessantly piling wreck upon wreck and hurling it at his feet. He would very much like to stay, to waken the dead and make whole what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing so strongly from Paradise that his wings are pinned back: he can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile before him grows. What we call progress -- that is the storm.

As the winds increase, I'm not betting on the outcome.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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BOOKS / Danny Schechter : Villains Galore! A Bankster Dozen

Bankster graphic from ANU News.
Villains galore!
Good holiday reads about
the great economic crisis

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / December 4, 2010

Back in 2007, just as the markets began their meltdown, I started writing a book I called Plunder to investigate the then emerging economic calamity. I had a well-known agent representing me, and, at that time, had published 10 books. My agent warned me that I was ahead of the curve but agreed that the subject couldn’t be timelier.

Before we were through, the manuscript went to and was returned by 30 publishers. I was told that there is only one person that a book like mine had to pass muster with, not an economist, not a book editor -- but the book buyer who handles business books for Barnes and Noble. If she/she didn’t like it, forget it. (This was before the bottom dropped out of that company that was later nearly sold.)

So much for their business savvy. I guess Plunder was too much of an anti-business book for them then.

At that point, they were looking for “How to Get Rich” books and volumes with investment advice. Since I was not offering either, my warnings of the collapse ahead were off-message. No sale. Finally, a small press, Cosimo Books put it out. Sadly, with no real advertising budget or retail support, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. It was on the money in one sense -- published just before Lehman Brothers went down.

Since then, as the crisis was acknowledged and legitimated, the subject was finally validated for the publishing world, perhaps as millions of people began asking, "What the F…? What the hell happened?"

To answer that question, a mighty stream of crisis books was commissioned and soon poured forth. Every publisher wanted one. Some authors blamed psychological factors. Others were technical to a fault and unreadable. Still, others trashed borrowers who bought homes they couldn’t afford. Many framed the problem in terms of Wall Street mistakes and miscalculations, and occasionally greed.

Wrote Satyajit Das, author of Traders, Guns & Money: “The number of books on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has reached pandemic proportions -- the World Health Organization (WHO) is investigating. With the decorum of vultures at a carcass, publishers are cashing in on the transitory interest of the masses (normally obsessed with war, scandal or reality TV shows) in the arcane minutiae of financial matters.”

Few indicted the system; fewer still focused on intentionality -- crime in the suites, the subject I explore in my film Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time and the more detailed companion book The Crime of Our Time (Disinfo).

In the meantime, I tried to keep up with the hype and a flow that is still flowing.

Here are 12 books worth reading:

1. The Pecora Investigation: Stock Exchange Practices and The Causes of the 1929 Stock Market Crash. This is the just reissued actual text of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency in the days before the Congress was bought and sold. Pecora had said “Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies.”
   
   So far, in today’s crisis, there has been only ONE real Senate hearing, by Senator Levin questioning ONE deal by Goldman Sachs who denied everything until the bank reached a $550 MILLION settlement without admitting any wrongdoing. Clearly we still need a new Pecora-like investigation, not a tepid Congressional inquiry commission


2. Matt Taibbi: Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con that is Breaking America (Spiegel & Grau). As Rolling Stone readers know, Matt is a bold reporter and brilliant stylist turning his rage into brilliant prose and giving no mercy to the Goldman Sachs gang.


3. Nomi Prims: It Takes A Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street. An elegant writer, Nomi knows the financial world up close because she’s "been there and done that" with high paying stints at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs. You can see her brilliance in my film, Plunder. Her book goes much deeper.


4. Les Leopold: The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity -- and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green). Les is a passionate and compelling writer, teacher and activist. He has been steeped in union politics and knows how to fuse analysis and agitation


5. Joseph E. Stiglitz: Free Fall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the Global Economy (Norton). Siglitz is the economist’s economist, a Nobel Prize Winner, an insider turned fierce critic of our economic crisis. He has the credentials and THE critique and a much needed global perspective.


6. Howard Davies: The Financial Crisis: Who is to Blame? (Polity). I picked this book up at my alma mater, the London School of Economics, which Davies now directs. This is straight down the middle without dismissing more radical insights. He even references my critique of media complicity.


7. Randall Lane: The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane. A colorful personal account by a gonzo editor who covered the madness for Wall Street pubs. Sample: “Historically, Wall Street has been like one giant extended High School (A boy’s High School). The jocks become trader -- large, aggressive men who succeed in the pits based on heft and testosterone. The nerds went into banking, crunching numbers and pumping out spread sheets to determine the efficacy of deals.”



8. Yves Smith: ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy, and Corrupted Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan). Yves is a rock star in the business of critical economics. A financial industry professional, she defected to the “light side” and founded the must read website, NakedCapitalism.com. This book skewers government policy, the economics “profession” and Wall Street fraudsters.


9. Steig Larsson: The Millennium Trilogy. The late Swedish journalist, turned popular writer, has produced three volumes of best-selling action thrillers with intelligent plots. I cite his work here because he and the character he created, Mikael Blomkvist, were investigative reporters in the financial realm.
   
   Larsson describes Blomkvist’s contempt for his fellow financial journalists based on morality: “His contempt for his fellow financial journalists was based on something that in his opinion was as plain as morality. The equation was simple. A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time.
   
   “The job of the financial journalist was to examine the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors, to scrutinise company boards with the same merciless zeal with which political reporters pursue the tiniest steps out of line of ministers and members of Parliament.”
   
   His books are more than storytelling. They are also a cry for more truth in media.


10. And, since I try to practice the investigative protocols of journalism in this sphere, may I call your attention to the republication of one of the greatest American classics of taking on corporate power?
    
    Ida M. Tarbell may be gone but her work is not forgotten, especially her classic, two volume blistering The History of the Standard Oil Company. I was privileged to write the introduction for the Cosimo edition. She wrote this muckraking blockbuster in 1904 and remains relevant, and an example of the best of us.


11. For a left critique, try Michael Chossudovsky and Andrew Gayin Marshall, Editors: The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century (Global Research) from the Canadian-based global web site I contribute to.


12. Barry James Dyke: The Pirates of Manhattan: Systematically Plundering The American Consumer and How To protect Yourself Against It. The one financial book I saw “blurbed” by Jay Leno (Self-published).

So, this is my “cheaper by the dozen” for 2010. I am sure I have overlooked some great work so it is hardly the “end-all” and “be-all.” Many of the new financial books out there are written by journalists for leading newspapers and magazines, as well as mainstream economists, many of whom missed the crisis when they might have warned us about it.

And, while many of us wait for the promised Wikileaks take down of a major bank, many authors and journalists still fail to tackle the really essential issues.

Hopefully, some of the books I am recommending will fill some gaps in your knowledge.

["News Dissector" Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, Emmy award winning television producer, and independent filmmaker. Schechter directed Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, and a companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail. Contact him at dissector@mediachannel.org.]

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Sept. 28 interview with journalist and filmmaker Danny Schechter on Rag Radio here. To find all shows on the Rag Radio archives, go here.

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James McEnteer : Proud Heritage of Indians in South Africa

Indians first came to South Africa 150 years ago. Photo from Hindi Blog.
Indian givers:
South Africa isn't all black and white

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / December 3, 2010

KWA-ZULU NATAL, South Africa -- South Africans of Indian descent are commemorating the arrival of the first indentured Indian workers here 150 years ago. In November 1860, two ships brought nearly 700 laborers from India to Durban. By 1911 more than 150,000 indentured Indian workers had landed in South Africa. Most came to what is now the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, where more than half of them worked in the sugar cane fields.

Today about 1.5 million Indians live in South Africa, a small but influential minority comprising about three percent of the country's population. Indian South Africans have distinguished themselves in many professions, including medicine, academia, and commerce. Some have risen to Cabinet level government positions. Navanethem Pillay, a South African lawyer, university professor and judge of Indian descent has served since 2008 as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Before the British abolished slavery in 1833, some Indians had been sold into slavery along with Malays and Africans, primarily to work harvesting sugar cane in Britain's tropical colonies. The British had become addicted to the sugar that went so well with the tea from India they had adopted as a comfort ritual on their cold island, a bit of cultural colonial blowback.

Workers contracted to work for five years for whatever employer they were assigned. After five years they could re-indenture or look elsewhere for work. Workers who spent 10 years in the colony had the right to a free passage back to India, or to remain as citizens in the colony.

The British tried to regulate the conditions of indenture, but workers often lived and worked in primitive, brutal circumstances, like slaves. Isolated from legal oversight, employers abused their indentured laborers with impunity. Workers returning to India complained of the overwork, malnourishment, and squalid living conditions they had to endure. A Coolie Commission was appointed in 1872 to protect Indian immigrants, but failed to prevent abuses.

The overtly racist government and society of the time dictated where Indians could live and how they could travel within the country. Despite this discrimination and the limitations on their freedom, more than half of the indentured laborers elected to remain in South Africa. Besides the cane fields of Natal, Indians worked at the port of Durban, in hospitals, in the coal mines, or helping to build the railroads.

A momentous event for the future of Indians in South Africa, and for the future transformation of the entire nation, was the arrival in the country of a young, newly-minted Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, in 1893. Gandhi had come to represent an Indian firm on a one-year contract. Less than a week into his stay, on a train from Durban to Pretoria to attend court, Gandhi was ordered out of his first-class compartment. When he refused to leave he was ejected from the train at Pietermaritzberg and forced to spend a cold night on a station bench.

Mahatma Gandhi shortly after arriving in South Africa, in 1895. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
In his Autobiography Gandhi describes his conflicting emotions during that long night and his temptation to return immediately to India. Instead he elected to stay, despite being barred from hotels and suffering other acts of discrimination daily, including violence. Gandhi extended his stay to oppose a bill denying Indians the right to vote. He helped found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 and survived the attack of a white mob in Durban in 1897. When the government passed a law requiring registration of the Indian population in 1906, Gandhi led a mass protest, adopting non-violent resistance for the first time.

That struggle continued for seven years. Thousands of Indians were jailed, including Gandhi. Others were flogged and even shot for striking, refusing to register, or burning their registration cards. The public outcry at the government's harsh methods of repressing the peaceful Indian protesters eventually forced South African officials to compromise with Gandhi.

Inspired by the success of this Indian movement, Black African leaders formed the African National Congress in 1912 to mount a similar resistance against racist oppression of their own kind. ANC efforts against apartheid, modeled on Gandhi's non-violent principle of satyagraha, or “the force of truth,” encouraged massive peaceful disobedience of repressive laws. Ultimately, South Africa's apartheid government yielded to ANC pressure and world sanctions without the massive bloodshed many feared was inevitable.

For these reasons and others, Indian descendants of indentured laborers have the right to be proud of their forebears. ANC political leaders owe Ghandi and other Indian activists thanks for being the catalysts of their own peaceful revolution. All South Africans, regardless of race, should be grateful for the Indian contributions to their current prosperity and cultural panache.

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries. He lives in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa]

Top, Indians arriving for the first time in Durban, South Africa, exact date unknown. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Below, indentured Indians, still on the boat. Photo from SAHO.
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Bruce Melton : Catastrophic Change and Climate Blindness

Iceberg discharge is accelerating rapidly in Greenland. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
Climate blindness

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / December 2, 2010

Bruce Melton will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Dec. 3, 2010, 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. To stream Rag Radio live on the internet, go here. To listen to this interview after it is broadcast -- and to other shows on the Rag Radio archives -- go here.

[Bruce Melton sketched out some of this material in his November 28, 2010, Rag Blog article on dangerous climate change, "Climate Change and Global Economic Dysfunction."]

How do we curb emissions with the way our society has evolved? Really. I mean serious curbing; enough to prevent dangerous climate change?

When considering the answer, dangerous climate change must be clearly defined. So, what exactly is dangerous climate change?

There is a disconnection between climate science and the public’s knowledge of climate change. The knowledge gap is becoming obvious to many, but to the climate scientists it is clear: there is a fundamental blindness in the vast majority of our society as to the meaning of man-caused climate change.

The disconnection itself is not easy to see without expert knowledge. The dendrochronologists have a hard enough time understanding the cryologists (tree ring scientists and ice scientists.)

Even so, the amount of important decision-making class of information being discovered is simply staggering. But the means to deliver this knowledge, to mine it out of the academic jargon and deliver it to the people, is just not there. Once this outreach issue is overcome however, and the disconnection is understood, the blindness becomes obvious.

Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
Researchers at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, after evaluating a half million water clarity observations taken from the world’s oceans over the last 100 years, have come to the conclusion that ocean primary productivity has declined 40% since 1950. Primary productivity is that nearly planetary-size mass of life that makes up the algae and plankton in our oceans -- it is the bottom of the food chain (1).

As our oceans warm, currents slow, nutrients become scarce and fewer of these creatures inhabit ocean water. These tiny and more often than not microscopic life forms use carbon dioxide to create organic material and tiny plankton shells made out of calcium carbonate, just like clams and oysters.

Once the life form that is using this organic and shell material dies, the remains drift to the ocean floor as what is called marine snow. After hundreds of thousands of years, this material accumulates enough to become limestone.

Scanning electron photography, colorized. These images are just a few of thousands of plankton that make up primary productivity in our oceans. Magnification is about 1,000 times. Photo from the Alfred Wagener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.
Primary productivity is responsible for a third to a half of all of the natural carbon dioxide sequestration on Earth, as well as a third to half of the atmospheric oxygen generation on Earth. Many things buffer impacts from the decline of this primary earth system, but tipping points likely exist. Because primary productivity is such a large planetary function, runaway greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere and runaway loss of atmospheric oxygen could be the result.

Such a large change in ocean clarity demonstrated over such a long period as has been found by these Dalhousie researchers is clearly an indicator of great change. These types of earth systems disruptions are happening across the globe with impacts that are changing Earth like it has not changed in tens and even hundreds of millions of years.

From across the globe oceanographers have been grimacing over this year's coral bleaching event that has likely been worse than during the super El Nino of '98 -- the worst bleaching event ever recorded. Overly warm, or record warm water temperatures are killing coral like mankind has never seen (2).

Large scale reef bleaching at Reunion Island in the western Indian Ocean. This type of bleaching is occurring throughout the Indian Ocean and Caribbean Sea. This year (2010) the bleaching was likely worse than anything ever recorded. Photo by John Pascal / Agence pour la Recherche et la Valorisation Marines (Aram).
The Arctic was declared functionally ice-free last summer for the first time in 14 million years in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters, or at the least, the argument was presented by one of the world’s leading Arctic sea ice scientists from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada (3, 4).

Ultra high CO2 levels in prehistory were really only a third as high as we thought. Those 3,000 ppm CO2 concentrations back in the Mesozoic hothouse were in actuality only about 1,000 ppm. This means that our 21st century CO2 projection of the worst-case scenario nearing 1,000 ppm is frighteningly close to anything our planet has seen in the last 400 million years.

When we look back in time this far, and realize that modern atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations on Earth were stabilizing during this period after green plants colonized land, the implications of this finding are profound (5). (And yes, unfortunately we are progressing along the IPCC CO2 worst-case scenario (6).)

The dead trees from the pine beetle pandemic in Yellowstone, part of a warming induced bark beetle pandemic in the Rocky Mountains, responsible for 61 million acres of dead and dieing trees, billions of trees, in an area nearly the size of New England and Pennsylvania combined, are visible on Google.

The pandemic is 10 to 20 times larger than anything ever known, is growing rapidly, and scientists fear it will spread across the entire North American continent because its only enemy is extreme cold that has not been seen in more than a decade (7, 8).

Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
October 2010 was the 308th consecutive month with an average temperature above the 20th century average (9).

The evidence in the academic literature is simply overwhelming. But virulent societal tricks have sequestered much of this knowledge. Virtually none escapes the academic literature. The reasons are many and diverse and range from vested interests and religion to the scientists simply not being trained (or willing) to communicate their discoveries to the public in language that can be understood by non-specialists.

This black knowledge hole however, is but a symptom of the disconnection. If just one fundamental definition was understood, the disconnection could simply vanish.

The public’s misunderstanding of the definition of “dangerous climate change” was emphasized to me when I was made aware of a climate survey in the October issue of Scientific American.

Question #8 of the survey, the last question, read: How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change? The response was 79.6 percent for "nothing." (10).

The word catastrophic is often interchanged with dangerous as an outcome to avoid in climate change scenarios and if anything, a catastrophe would be worse than something that is dangerous. Regardless, the terms are often considered to be of similar outcome and will be used interchangeably in the rest of this article.

Anyone following the climate science polls across the country knows that the last decade has seen an actual decline in the public’s knowledge of climate science. In a series of Gallup polls beginning in 1997, the number of poll respondents who think climate scientists are exaggerating increased more than 50 percent (to 48 percent) from 2006. Sixty-seven percent of poll respondents believe that climate change will not pose a serious threat to them in their lifetimes. This is up 16 percent from 2008 (11).

All of this increased disbelief is happening while the science itself continues to grow more and more robust. A study of nearly 1,400 climate scientists agrees that the man-caused tenets of the IPCC are valid. What’s more, of the two to three percent that do not support man-caused climate change science, 80 percent have published fewer than 20 papers, while the IPCC crowd includes only 10 percent that have published fewer than 20 papers (12).


So seeing 79.6 percent of the public say that they would do “nothing” to prevent catastrophic climate change was not, to me, a red flag. It was the key.

If the Scientific American readership could say something like this, surely they just did not understand the definition of dangerous climate change.

Following up, I found that Scientific American had removed the poll from their website. This was curious. I searched more and found an article on the Scientific American site, by the editors of Scientific American, that explained a few things. It seems that the there is one more thing that makes it difficult for the public to understand climate science.

This one more thing unfortunately, is organized deceit. The Watts Up With That website, a prominent climate change denial portal, decided that it would be a good thing to load up the Scientific American poll with opinions from Watts Up With That visitors. Watts Up created a new web page urging its visitors to complete the Scientific American survey.

Their campaign netted 30.5% of the respondents on the survey, likely skewing the results quite significantly. And in an as yet unexplained coincidence, a website called www.smalldeadanimals.com accounted for 16 percent of the survey respondents. A quick visit to this site shows that it too is obviously full of climate change unbelievers.

Another key finding in the Scientific American editors’ investigation was that the number three ranked referring website was a well known climate science site by Joe Romm called Climate Progress. Referrals from this website accounted for only 2.9 percent of the respondents of the SA survey. This information tells us that this poll was definitely ruined by organized deceit emanating from a prominent climate denier website (13).

The underlying concept however, that the public has a significant misunderstanding of the science, as is shown by the Gallup polls (and many others) is still valid. The key to the blindness must be that, if the definition of “dangerous climate change” was understood, even by the climate deniers, the answer that would have been chosen for question #8 would certainly have been something other than “nothing.”


So then, what do the scientists say is the definition of dangerous climate change? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) specifically does not define dangerous climate change. They say that the definition is a value judgment that should be made by policy makers, not the IPCC. They do suggest however that the definition would include threats to our food supply, or the creation of unsustainable economic conditions.

At the European Climate Forum of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Buenos Aires in 2004, the topic of dangerous climate change was the main event. They said that dangerous climate change could include circumstances that could lead to global and unprecedented consequences, extinction of “iconic” species, loss of entire ecosystems, loss of human cultures, water resource threats, and substantial increases in mortality.

They say these dangers could include Arctic sea ice retreat, boreal forest fires, increases in frequency of drought, widespread dangers over a large region, most likely related to food security, water resources, infrastructure, or ecosystems (14).

An abrupt sea level jump would be a dangerous climate change. The last time Earth was as close to being as warm as it is today, 121,000 years ago, sea level jumped 10 feet in 100 years for 300 years in a row (about 10 meters total). The jump was likely because of collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAI), and it has been shown that the WAI is destabilizing now. (15, 16)


A sea level rise of just one foot per decade (30 mm), just an inch and three sixteenths per year, would wreak utter havoc across the planet after just a couple of years. To start with, the United States Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Department of Transportation say, in a mega report from 2009, that the threshold for regeneration of coastal barrier islands and coastal wetlands is just a quarter of an inch (seven millimeters) per year of sea level rise.

This means that sea level rise of greater than a quarter of an inch per year would either cause the disintegration of our coastal barrier islands and wetlands, or keep them from naturally regenerating after they are gone.

There are 405 barrier islands on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the U.S. totaling over 3,000 miles in length and there are 5.3 million acres of coastal wetlands. All would be destroyed.


This documented rate of sea level rise of an inch and three sixteenths per year is more than four times greater than the barrier island and wetland disintegration threshold. Our coastal defenses against storms would completely disappear, taking their trillions of dollars of weather defenses with them, not to mention the loss of one of the most productive eco regions on the planet (17).

When the beaches go, the refugees begin to flow, millions per year. Then the world’s coastal infrastructure begins to submerge. Nearly half of Earth’s industrial capacity is close to sea level.

Over the last 100 years, sea level has risen only five or six inches. Across the globe 233 million people would be displaced by 10 feet of sea level rise. This is 2.3 million climate refugees per year. The United States Geologic Survey says that a 10-meter sea level rise, something like what happened 121,000 years ago, would flood a quarter of the United States population (about 78 million Americans), and nearly 1 billion people worldwide (870 million) (18, 19, 20).

And what of the 2007 IPCC projection of about a foot of sea level rise this century? They do not take into consideration, and the IPCC scientists persistently and frequently caveat their report in the text and footnotes saying that, because too little is known, dynamical ice sheet disintegrations are not taken into consideration in the projections of sea level rise.

This rapid jump in sea level 121,000 years ago, likely caused by the disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice sheet, is just such a dynamical event that is excluded from consideration of sea level rise by the IPCC.

The Dust Bowl is to weather like megadroughts are to climate change. The dust bowl was but a small blip on the climate change screen, meaning that the 10-year long Dust Bowl was a relatively insignificant event in a discussion of climate. The Dust Bowl was a really long weather event and should be viewed in that context. Weather events are not climate. Climate is the result of weather happening over time periods of generations to centuries.

Megadroughts have reoccurred repeatedly in the prehistoric past with ample evidence that the Great Plains of North America was changed to a sea of shifting sand. They simply dwarf any drought that we as a society have experienced since long before the Industrial Revolution began.

Dangerous climate change includes megadroughts that would simply wipe out agriculture in much of North America. Megadroughts from the past were typically 10 to 30 times as long as the Dust Bowl (100 to 300 plus years) with only half as much precipitation. These extreme climate events have happened because of the “natural” variability of our climate. Warming projected for the future and the latest high-resolution climate models show that perpetual drought will settle over much of North America in a megadrought scenario similar to the past (21).

Dangerous climate change changes Earth's environment beyond the evolutionary niches of fundamental ecological services like primary productivity. When the bottom of the ocean food chain is compromised, everything on Earth is compromised. The same goes for the Great Plains changing to a sea of shifting sand.

Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
This is the fundamental blindness. Dangerous climate change is dangerous to mankind. It threatens our very existence on this planet. It can happen in a geologic instant. And it is not just a distant “future” climate change that threatens us. This fundamental blindness will not allow us to see the disconnection between the public’s knowledge and the science.

In fact, the disconnection is so large, the blindness so profound, that right now, today, we have already passed beyond the threshold of dangerous climate change. In the 1990s, this threshold was 3 degrees C. of warming or about 550 ppm CO2. The 2001 IPCC report lowered this safe threshold to 450 ppm CO2 or 2 degrees C. warming.

This gets a little complicated now, so stay with me. Before the Industrial Revolution our atmospheric CO2 concentration was 280 ppm. Today it is 387 ppm, and we know that our planet has a tipping point where glaciation begins (or ends) at the poles at 450 ppm CO2 equaling about 2 degrees warming over the preindustrial times. This is one of the fundamental reasons that climate policy treaties like the Kyoto Protocol have defined 2 degrees C. of warming as the threshold for dangerous climate change.

Since the industrial revolution, Earth has warmed 0.76 degrees C. There is also warming in the pipeline of about 0.5 degrees C that is masked in our oceans. It takes a long time for the oceans to warm. Once warmed, the heat that they have been absorbing will stay in our atmosphere. About 90 percent of the 0.5 degrees of warming in the pipeline will occur by 2100.

A significant body of climate scientists have now published academic papers showing that a 350 ppm concentration should be the threshold level for determining dangerous climate change.

What, you say? Our atmospheric CO2 concentration has already passed 350 ppm. Yes it has, and we have another half degree of warming in the pipeline. The trouble is, there is a lot more than half a degree hidden in the sky.

Atmospheric aerosols are masking the warming. They occur mostly in the form of smog, significantly in the form of what is called the Asian Brown Cloud (a massive smog bank that covers much of Asia and can blow far out into the Pacific and can even be recognized in the U.S. when conditions are right.) There is so much smog in the developing world, and it is so good at cooling our atmosphere, that a full 1.0 degree C of warming is hidden because the smog cools Earth (22).

As these developing nations continue to develop, they will likely bring their air pollution under control similarly to what happened in the U.S. after the end of World War II. It was during this period that air pollution due to rapid growth and industrialization created tremendous smog problems across the country.

Environmental regulations were rapidly ramped up the 1970s when the big pollution laws were created which led to significant reductions in air pollution emissions that cause smog. The developing nations across the world, responsible for the 1 degree C. of warming, will likely remove their warming masks by the end of the century. This leaves us with:

Warming already = 0.76 degrees C.
Warming in the pipeline (90%) = 0.45 degrees C.
Hidden warming = 1.00 degrees
Total warming by 2100 = 2.21 degrees C.

One more important CO2 math thing: This 2.2 degrees C. of warming has been based on stabilizing CO2 at 2005 levels of 383 ppm. If CO2 goes higher, and it will not likely stop going higher for several decades, there will be more warming. And at the rate that we are increasing CO2 (remember, faster than the worst-case scenario) there will be a lot more CO2 emitted before we begin to bring things under control.

So if you are beginning to think the 350 ppm CO2 dangerous climate change threshold is a little high, you are not alone. The latest work done on the threshold comes from the University of California, Santa Barbara. This work (Morrigan 2010) suggests that 300 ppm CO2 is more appropriate as a threshold above which we can expect dangerous climate change.

So the short story says we need to actively begin removing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, not just reducing emissions. Most would say that this is a tall order and we are likely doomed.

Realistically, we have a few years yet. The great thermal mass of the oceans slows climate change by decades to even a generation or more. We have a second chance in effect, at least if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet can hold on. Surprisingly, the costs will likely not be more than one to two percent of GDP. At least, this is what Lord Nicholas Sterns says.

Lord Stern’s groundbreaking 700-page global economic analysis of climate change (2006) not only says that the costs will be relatively benign but adds that there will quite likely be benefits that far outweigh the costs. Lord Stern was the UK’s Chief Economist under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

I am also certain that there are plenty of sequestration technologies in the developing and proving stages that can feasibly do the job, including clean coal... if, we act really soon. Our society has the capacity for tremendously large accomplishments on short order. World War II, The moonshot, The Manhattan Project, the Great Wall of China, the pyramids, and the U.S Interstate Highways System, all are indicators that we can handle large projects quickly, even on borrowed money.

Things are bad now. They are much worse than the public understands because of the disconnected climate blindness and they are getting worse faster than expected. In simple terms, we need to start spending money on our environment like we have recently spent it on institutions that are too big to fail.

[Bruce Melton is a registered professional engineer, environmental researcher, trained outreach specialist, and environmental filmmaker. He has been translating and interpreting scholarly science publications for two decades. His main mission is filming and reporting on the impacts of climate changes happening now, unknown to the greater portion of society. Austin, Texas is his home. His writing and films are on his website.]

• See previous articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.

References:

1) Primary productivity declined 40% since 1950… Boyce et. al., Global Phytoplankton decline over the past century, Nature, July 2010. Press Release: Phytoplankton in retreat, Dalhouse University.
2) Worst bleaching event ever recorded...

• Worst coral death strikes at SE Asia, October 2010, Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies,
  http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/regionalbleaching.html
• Eakin, et. al., Caribbean Coral reefs in Crisis - Record Thermal Stress, Bleaching and Mortality in 2005, PLOS, November 2010.
  http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013969

3) Functionally ice free… Barber et. al., Perennial pack ice in the southern Beaufort Sea was not as it appeared in the summer of 2009, Geophysical Research Letters, December 2009.
http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2009/2009GL041434.shtml
News Release: University of Manitoba, Canada.
4) 14 million years… Perovich and Richter-Menge, Loss of Sea Ice in the Arctic, US Army Engineering Research Center, Cold Regions Research and Engineering, 2009.
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.marine.010908.163805
5) Mesozoic CO2 1,000 ppm, not 3,000 ppm… Breecker, et. al., Atmospheric CO2 concentrations during ancient greenhouse climates were similar to those predicted for A.D. 2100, PNAS, October 2009.
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/2/576.full.pdf+html
6) Worst-case Scenario… Raupach and Canadell, Carbon and the Anthropocene, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, August 2010.
7) Beetle kill in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem seen from Google… Link
8) Ten to 20 times greater, concerns of continent wide outbreak… Bentz, et. al., Climate Change and Bark Beetles of the western United States and Canada: Direct and indirect effects, Bioscience, September 2010.
9) 308th consecutive month above average…
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global
10) Scientific American Climate Survey results: link
11) Gallup, Americans Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop, March 11, 2010… link
12) Ninety-seven to ninety-eight percent of scientists agree… Anderegg, et. al., Expert Credibility in climate change, PNAS April 2010.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.full.pdf+html
13) Scientific American investigation of Watts Up website slam of their survey… http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=do-80-percent-of-scientific-america-2010-11-17
14) At the European Climate Forum… What is Dangerous Climate Change? Initial Results of a Symposium on Key Vulnerable Regions Climate change and Article 2 of the UNFCCC, Buenos Aires, December 14, 2004.
http://www.european-climate-forum.net/fileadmin/ecf-documents/publications/articles-and-papers/what-is-dangerous-climate-change.pdf
15) Sea level rise of over 10 feet in 100 years… Blanchon, et. al., Rapid sea level rise and reef back stepping at the close of the last interglacial highstand, Nature, April 2009.
16) West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse may have already begun… Katz and Worster, Stability of ice sheet grounding lines, Proceedings of the Royal Society, January 2010.
http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/01/13/rspa.2009.0434.short?rss=1
17) Barrier island and coastal wetland regeneration threshold of 7 mm per year…US Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration and Department of Transportation Report, U.S. Climate Change Science Program Coastal Sensitivity to Sea Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region, November 2009.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-1/final-report/
18) 233 million climate change refugees from 10 feet of sea level rise… Risk of Rising Sea Level to Population and Land Area, EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, February 2007.
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/prwaylen/GEO2200ARTICLES/Part2/hydrologic/Sea%20level%20rise.pdf
19) Ten meters of sea level rise would displace 78 million Americans… http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/
20) Nearly one billion people live within 10 meters… United States Geologic Survey, Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS) http://cegis.usgs.gov/sea_level_rise.html
21) Continental scale desertification…

• deMenocal, et. al., Coherent high and low latitude variability during the Holocene warm period, Science, June 2000.
• Cook, et. al., Long Term Aridity Changes in the Western United States, Science 306, 1015, 2004.
• Miao, et. al., High resolution proxy record of Holocene climate from a loess section in Southwest Nebraska, Paleoclimatology, September 2006.
• Cook, et. al., North American Drought: Reconstructions, Causes, and Consequences, Earth Science Reviews, March 200.
• Broecker and Kunzig, Fixing Climate, Three Books Publishing, 2008.

22) We have already passed the threshold of dangerous climate change…

• Morrigan_2010_Target Atmospheric GHG Concentrations Why Humanity Should Aim for 350 ppm CO2e University of Cal Santa Barbara.
  http://www.global.ucsb.edu/climateproject/papers/
• Ramanthan, On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the Untied States of America, 2008.
  http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.full.pdf+html
• Hansen et. al., Target Atmospheric CO2 Where Should Humanity Aim Open Atmospheric Science Journal, NASA, November 2008.
• http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html

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Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test

The original "Furthur," the magic bus of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, on the road. Photo from NoFurthur.
Paying Larry McMurtry a visit:
The Merry Pranksters' last acid test

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / December 1, 2010

HOUSTON -- In the heat of a July Houston morning in 1964, residents of the quiet Southampton neighborhood woke up to find a strangely painted school bus parked in front of an unassuming two-story brick house in the middle of the block.

The vintage 1939 International Harvester with its passengers of “Merry Pranksters” drove half way across the United States and was now parked in front of the house of novelist and Rice University professor, Larry McMurtry. The Southampton neighbors would learn that the brightly painted bus whose destination plate read “FURTHUR,” with two u's, was filled with strangely acting and even stranger looking people from California.

The leader of the Merry Pranksters was author Ken Kesey, whose novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, had just been published that summer. Their cross-country road trip to New York City was in part a celebration to commemorate the publication of his second novel, as well as the fulfillment of a request by his publisher for a personal appearance and an excuse to visit the World’s Fair taking place in the borough of Queens.

Fueled by the then-legal hallucinogenic drug LSD, Kesey and the Pranksters stopped in Houston along the way to visit McMurtry, who Kesey knew from their days at Stanford.

McMurtry lived with his 2-year-old son, James, on the oak-lined street near Rice University, where he taught undergraduate English.

Larry McMurtry and son, James, 1964. Photo from The Magic Bus.
McMurtry was also experiencing success in his life during this time. His inaugural novel, Horseman, Pass By, had been adapted into a screenplay and released as the feature-length movie, Hud, staring Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas, the previous year.

“I remember walking down Quenby Street one afternoon and seeing the school bus parked in front of the McMurtry’s house,” said Kentucky-based artist Joan Wilhoit. “It was very atypical and pretty damn psychedelic with lots of colors. The Pranksters were very accommodating and invited us on the bus. They were very different, sort of proto-hippies, and I remember they painted their sneakers with Day-Glo paint. My parents befriended them and brought old clothes and hand-me-downs to those who needed it. My parents weren’t rude like some of the other neighbors were.”

Wilhoit, who was nine at the time, remembers that not all the neighbors were as welcoming as her parents and that some made sarcastic remarks about the Pranksters.

“’Do you have a bathroom on that bus?’ I remember one our neighbors asking the Pranksters through the school bus window,” the former Houstonian recounted. “I also remember hearing about the ‘naked girl’ and I thought it was the strangest thing how the police were called and how she had to be admitted to a psych ward of some Houston hospital.”

“Stark Naked,” as she was referred to in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the novel that chronicled the exploits of Kesey and the Pranksters in the 1960s, was a bus passenger apparently “tripping” throughout her bus ride to Houston, who discarded her clothing in favor of a blanket that she wore for the duration of the journey. Upon her arrival in Houston, she experienced an episode of “lysergically-induced” psychosis, and confused McMurtry’s toddler son with her own estranged child, “Frankie.”

"Stark Naked" (aka "The Beauty Witch") wore nothing but a blanket. Photo from The Magic Bus.
Three years later, the brightly painted bus was parked once again in front of McMurtry’s house on the oak-lined street near Rice Village. Kesey and the Pranksters returned to Houston in March 1967 to visit their old friend and to conduct what is purported to have been the last “acid test.” The social experiment was staged in the dining room of Brown College, a residential facility on the campus of Rice University, with McMurtry acting as faculty sponsor.

“I would have been 14 years old when they returned,” said Pricilla Boston (nee Ebersole), an employee of the department of state health services in Austin and the mother of two teen-aged sons.

I remember getting off the school bus from junior high one afternoon and seeing that the painted bus was parked in front of Mr. McMurtry’s house again. It was immensely colorful and there was no missing it, that’s for sure. All the kids in the neighborhood used to play street games at night a lot and it was almost like there was another set of kids in the neighborhood.

They had a youthful, fun vibe about them. I remember this one skinny guy in particular who would interact with us; he was younger than the others and he showed us the inside of the bus. He once asked us to go home and look in our parents’ medicine cabinet to see if they had any bottles of pills and bring them to him. I was asking myself "Why would he want those?"

Boston recounted following the skinny Prankster’s instructions and looking in her parent’s cabinet. “I don’t remember whether I brought him anything or not,” she said, “I just remember having a sense of what I was doing as being a little bit naughty.”

Although Kesey’s arrival and the ensuing acid test were promoted as a “concert” in the March 9 issue of the Rice Thresher, the campus student newspaper, this non-event turned out to be an acid test in name only. The promise of a reenactment of the “tests” conducted in California between 1965 and 1966 never materialized. Absent was the liquid light show, the live, amplified rock music, the pulsating strobe lights and movie projector images on the walls.

Also conspicuously absent was the mass dispensation and ingestion of psychotropic drugs by the Rice student body and other “assorted weirdos” in attendance. Instead, the Pranksters indulged the more than 200 attendees with a “madcap improvisation” of toy dart-gun fights, human dog piles, deep breathing demonstrations by Kesey himself, and rides on the “magic bus” around the Rice campus.

“The great Kesey affair was an absolute dud,” reported the Houston Post on March 21. “Some of the kids hissed while he [Kesey] read some kind of incantation, and others just left talking about what a drag it was.”

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]


Merry Pranksters in the news, 1964. Top, in Houston, and below, in Springfield, Ohio.
Prankster Hermit and the original bus. Photo from Lysergic Pranksters in Texas.
Top, Ken Kesey with restored bus, by then renamed "Further" with an "e". Below, the 1939 International Harvester, before restoration, at the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, after being stored in the swamp for 15 years. Photo by Jeff Barnard / AP
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Mariann G. Wizard : Grinch Winning in 'War on Christmas'

Santa gets busted. This particular holiday pat-down took place in Akron, Ohio in 1978. But we're just saying... Image © Bettmann / CORBIS.
Carnivores, male hookers, and the Grinch
make advances in 'War on Christmas'

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / December 1, 2010

Thanksgiving came early this year, and a lot of non-traditional groups have had more reason than usual to be thankful. Among these, male sex workers are the big winners, but hey, babe, let’s take it slow!

Anti-family carnivorous loners got a boost from none other than advice columnist “Dear Abby,” who has for the last several years been impersonated by one Jeanne Phillips, daughter of the column’s kinder, gentler, founder. Asked by “Turkey Eater in Texas” whether one was under any obligation to respect the wishes of a brother and two nieces for vegan Thanksgiving fare, Phillips gave a resounding slap to family values, advising that the renegade relatives be told to “bring something they will enjoy or make other plans.”

Wonderfully grumpy, especially since including vegan dishes in our holiday fare might be easier than making them “traditionally”: simply leave the milk, butter, cheese, sheep-derived marshmallows, and lard out of the vegetable dishes when preparing them. Put butter and cheese on the table for people to use as they choose. Substitute vegetable oil for the swine fat.

Would it kill you to cut down a bit on the cholesterol during the holidays, Turkey Eater? You can have your turkey and ham on the table; the vegans don’t have to eat it, but omnivores shouldn’t have to clog their arteries, either. And, at the risk of revealing truly radical tendencies, couldn’t somebody make dessert with a non-sugar sweetener? Or will insulin be served with the coffee?


Kickoff of Grinchfest

Of course, Thanksgiving marked the official beginning of the annual “War on Christmas” season of national schizophrenia, when newscasters and columnists decry supposed threats to the pagan/Christian holiday. Grinches will grin to hear that this year network and cable television channels will present 160 holiday specials, not counting holiday episodes of almost every regular series, and ubiquitous holiday greetings from athletes and sportscasters during virtually every sports event from now through the New Year. (Think about all those advertising dollars, kids, and this phony “war” makes a lot more sense, like the once-secret U.S. attack on the “USS Maine”!)

How does this phethora of pablum gratify the anti-Santa contingent, you ask? Well, look at the odds: most of those 160 holiday specials, and most of the series holiday episodes, concern Christmas, not Hannukkah or Diwali or Yule. And in most -- really I don’t know of anywhere this isn’t the case -- Christmas is threatened, and must be saved by some unlikely hero or heroine: a freaky reindeer, a dog who thinks she’s a reindeer, folks who sing carols when their presents have been stolen.

Hey, it’s just a matter of time until one of these losers loses, and Christmas is defeated once and for all! So far, the closest to a real cartoon victory in the War on Christmas may be Futurama’s Robot Santa episodes, with a wise-cracking metal maniac delivering murder and mayhem to good and bad kids alike.

The huge variety of Christmas foes seen in the annual television glut is worth noting. From Central Park Rangers and low Christmas spirit in Will Farrell’s “Elf,” to miserly Scrooge in the Dickens classic, to Winter itself against misfit toys and talking snowmen; talk about a broad united front! And this year, the still-plummeting economy may at last deprive Santa’s media defenders of their most reliable weapon for saving Christmases Past: unrestrained consumer spending.


The holiday season and the sexually deviant

Now, as promised: the best news this holiday season is surely for the sexually deviant and/or adventuresome among us.

First, everyone has been salivating over the Transportation Safety Authority’s (TSA) official new gropings! I almost ran out and booked the first flight going anywhere! This fellow Tyson in California who got all upset by the prospect of someone touching his “junk” is clearly a terrible prude.

What will happen, you think, when a passenger moans in ecstasy while having her breasts diddled for contraband? Could one be aroused beyond the point of self-control by being felt up in the middle of a busy airport? In photos of the new pat-down procedure, TSA employees are seen kneeling or bending to probe groins and buttocks with rubber-gloved digits. Oh-baby-oh-baby!

Some irate travelers plugged for a national “opt-out” day to slow airport security lines and mess up everyone’s holiday travels, and a part of me wanted to go with that, but another part is like, “No, man, let’s have a big love-in on Concourse 3!”

(Mostly male) pilots have been excused from radiating full-body scanners and pat-downs, through the efforts of their union. (Mostly female) flight attendants have not, and are crying double standard. And they’re partly right, but may not win the point. Pilots, the argument goes, can intentionally crash a plane anytime they want, so are unlikely to carry explosives in their underpants.

The TSA even lets pilots pack heat in the cockpit, as a last defense against in-flight terrorists. Flight attendants aren’t usually in a position to crash a plane, and don’t have permission to carry guns in the air. I figure they’re going to get stuck in the scanner lines with the paying customers.

And male sex workers have the most to be thankful for, following Pope Benedict’s approval of their using condoms to prevent AIDS. The startling announcement was received with wild expressions of renewed religious fervor among Italy’s devout male prostitutes, for whom contraception is usually not an issue.

Here, too, a double standard may appear to apply, as female prostitutes did not receive similar dispensation from His Holiness. Clearly, however, their spiritual interest in preventing AIDS infection from a diseased client is pre-empted by their spiritual duty to bear his child, should God will that they receive that infection instead of, or in addition to, the modern plague.

Can the day be far ahead when the Vatican will allow pedophile priests to use condoms while molesting choir boys, as a “first step in assuming moral responsibility”? But for heterosexual couplings of any age or condition, fuggeddaboudit!


And in a final travel note

If you’re traveling this holiday season, The Rag Blog hopes you’ll remember that everyone else on the highway is a homicidal drunk who is sexting Grandma while speeding blindly up your tailpipe. Don’t trust anybody over or under 30! And if you really pig out, try to spend a few hours after dinner with people who can recognize a heart attack. You can probably help save Christmas without falling under the sleigh.

[Mariann Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. And, we might add, a world class cut-up.]

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