St. Drogo's Books

The Art of Loving

2009-03-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

Foreword XIX "This book ... wants to show that love is not a sentiment which can easily be indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him. It wants to convince the reader that all his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality ... that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one's neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture where these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement."

P. 1 "Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love - yet hardly anyone thinks there is anything that needs to be learned about love. This peculiar attitude is based on several premises ... Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, or one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one's position permits. Another, used by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one's body, dress, etc ... what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal."

P. 3 "Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, or the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all he can afford to buy ... He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl - and for the woman an attractive man - are the prizes they are after. "Attractive" usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally ... the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values."

P. 4 "In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is litle reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which govern the commodity and labor market."

P. 4 "If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitiated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning, they do not know all this; in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation ... for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness."

P. 10-11 "As long as these orgiastic states are a matter of common practice in a tribe, they do not produce anxiety or guilt. To act in this way is right, and even virtuous, because it is a way shared by all, approved and demanded by the medicine men or priests, hence there is no reason to feel guilty or ashamed. It is quite different when the same solution is chosen by an individual in a culture which has left behind these common practices. Alcoholism and drug addiction are the forms which the individual chooses in a non-orgiastic culture. In contrast to those participating in the socially patterned solution, such individuals suffer from guilt feelings and remorse. While they try to escape from the separateness by taking refuge in alcohol or drugs, they feel all the more separate after the origastic experience is over, and thus are driven to take recourse to it with increasing frequency and intensity. Slightly different from this is recourse to a sexual orgiastic solution. To some extent, it is a natural and normal form of overcoming separateness, and a partial answer to the problem of isolation. But in many individuals in whom the separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcohol and drug addiction. It becomes a desparate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and it results in an ever-increasing separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human being except momentarily."

P. 13 "If I am like everybody else, if I have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas to the pattern of the group, I am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda ... if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd conformity becomes the predominant one ... people want to conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies."

P. 14 "Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideals and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority. The consensus of all serves as proof for the "correctness" of their ideas. Since there is still a need to feel some individuality, such need is satisfied with regard to minor differences; the initials on the handbag or the sweater, the name plate of the bank teller, the belonging to the Democratic as against the Republican party, to the Elks instead of the Shriners become the expression of individual differences. The advertising slogan of "it is different" shows up this pathetic need for difference, when in reality there is hardly any left."

P. 15 "Following the ideals of the Enlightenment, Socialist thinkers of various schools defined equality as abolition of exploitation, of the use of man by man ... In contemporary capitalistic society the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality one refers to the equality of automatons; of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means "sameness" rather than "oneness". It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas ... Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called "equality".

P. 17 "A third way of attaining union lies in creative activity, be it that of the artist, or the artisan. In any kind of creative work, the creating person unites himself with his material, which represents the world outside of himself ... This, however, holds true only for productive work, for work in which I plan, produce, see the result of my work. In the modern work process of a clerk, the worker on the endless belt, little is left of this uniting quality of work. The worker becomes an appendix to the machine or the bureaucratic organization. He has ceased to be he - hence no union takes place beyond that of conformity."

P. 18 "This desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion, it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction - self-destruction or destruction of others. Without love, humanity could not exist for a day."

P. 20 "In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality. Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two."

Re-Enchanting Humanity

2009-03-12T18:29:00.000-07:00

Re-Enchanting Humanity / Murray Bookchin

P. 122-123
"I make no claim that a competitive "free enterprise" economy, rendered even harsher by a highly sophisticated technology, is a desideratum - either for the aboriginal peoples or for Euro-Americans. Quite to the contrary, I argue for a way of life that is not focused on capital accumulation and profit. Nor do I favor a 'technocratic-industrial' society that centers its concerns on the privileged few. Quite to the contrary: human life is meaningless if it is not enriched by art, ideals and a spirituality that is ecological and humane.

But a way of life burdened by material insecurity and toil cannot nourish the kind of individual and social freedom that makes human life meaningful and creative - indeed, that is likely to foster a rich ecological sensibility. Materially deprived and socially underprivileged people whose bellies are empty are not likely to be much concerned with the integrity of wildlife and forests. What they need is food and a decent life before they can think of the welfare of other life-forms.

Nor can an ecological sensibility be found by trying to return to an idealized 'primitive' world. In the band and tribal societies of prehistory, humanity was almost completely at the mercy of uncontrollable natural forces and patently false and mystified visions of reality.

Like ecomystics, primitivists are shifting public attention away from the tasks of seriously remaking society along rational lines, toward dubious - and often contrived - arcadian cultural attitudes that are imputed to the long-lost past. For a humanistic vision of a future that has yet to be won, both for Native and Euro-American peoples alike, they are trying to substitute mythic notions of a pristine and primitive past that probably never existed."

P. 162
"I am not trying to guilt Mander or trade experiences with him. His technophobia is premised on a fairly well-to-do way of life, as is the technophobia of so many baby boomers of late. His deprecation of antibiotics rings hollow at a time when children underwent dangerous mastoid bone surgery for deadly ear infections and elderly people became seriously ill from even minor wounds ... There is a sickening arrogance in technophobes who, having enjoyed the fruits of the middle-class, even wealthy life-styles, condemn appliances that freed women from considerable domestic drudgery, machines that freed workers from mentally debilitiating tasks on assembly lines, and opened alternatives to starvation in lands that were once completely at the mercy of 'Mother Nature' and 'Her' many climatic vagaries.

In extolling the relative simplicity of his Bronx childhood, Mander, in fact, is extolling a culture - the Jewish immigrant middle-class way of life - that was preindustrial in many respects, that had not yet been completely penetrated by the marketplace. Its language, values, family structure, and ideals were ultimately eroded not by technology - which, in fact, its members generally prized as much as Mr. Mander did his Buick - but by the socially invasive power of capitalism and its commodity orientation.

My own mother, an Eastern European immigrant, welcomed with almost sublime ecstasy her first 'Frigidaire' and her access to washing and drying machines ... Summer vacations were hardly common among poor people who had to haggle for lower food prices."

P. 189

"It is necessary to tear off Heidigger's linguistic mask - one that hides the 'authentic' face of postmodernism generally - if we are to get to the essentials of the Heidigger-Derrida connection. The ease with which Heidigger's language permits him to engage in circular reasoning; his typically mystical recourse to 'silence' as the mode of discourse for 'conscience'; his contradictory emphasis on personalism on the one hand and the subordination of individual interests to the collective 'destiny' of the 'Volk', on the other - all can be examined only in a book-length account of Heidiggerian thought."

Our Synthetic Environment

2009-03-07T14:27:00.000-08:00

"Ecology, in my view, refers to a broad, philosophical, almost spiritual outlook toward humanity's relationship to the natural world, not merely to a scientific discipline or pragmatic technique. Environmentalism, by contrast, is a form of natural engineering that seeks to manipulate nature as mere "natural resources" with minimal pollution and public outcry. Environmentalists, such as Mr. Nixon, are not ecologists, nor do I regard serious ecologists as environmentalists." - Intro Colophon Edition, XV

"It is a bit too superficial to blame this tendency on the misbehavior, greed and moral delinquency of a few large corporations, culpable as they may be. On this score, the so-called "radical" wing of the environmentalist "movement" displays more rhetoric than insight. To the degree that Barry Commoner in The Closing Circle makes corporate misbehavior a moral problem rather than a tendency inherent in the social system itself, he may have advanced beyond his earlier rather limited technological critique of society, but he still remains far removed from the core problems of the environmental crisis. This crisis is not "somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society," as Commoner would have us believe; rather, the crisis is evidence of a marketplace nexus that equates economic survival with growth - a nexus that is perhaps best summarized by the maxim "grow or die". The environmental crisis is inherent in bourgeois society, not in a "modern, technology-based society." It is somber evidence not of an "insidious fraud" but of the very law of life of capitalism. It stems not merely from greed but from a market-oriented system in which everything is reduced to a commodity, in which everyone is reduced to a mere buyer or seller, and in which every economic dynamic centers on capital accumulation. Hence the prevailing society is inherently antiecological, not only morally delinquent. References to "frauds", "vaunted productivity", and a "modern, technology-based society", however well-intentioned the author's purpose may be, essentially serve to deflect public attention from the deeply social nature of the environmental crisis. A Nadar-ism that does not reach much beyond judicial litigation and the demand for institutional reforms replaces the historic need for basic social changes." - Intro Colophon Edition, XXXIII

"The alternatives confronting us today are not between energy shortages and scarcity, but between an irrational system of production and a society based on ecological principles, one that can amply meet rational human needs with a minimum of onerous toil. We can have all the energy we need if we use the sun and wind rather than fossil and nuclear fuels. We can have all the material amenities of life if we produce goods of lasting quality and if we rescale our needs along humanistic lines. To make these sweeping changes implies an entirely new social order in which the planet is shared communally by free people with a non-hierarchical, cooperative mentality, rather than parceled out privately as so much real estate to satisfy competitive, profit-oriented egoists." - Intro Colophon Edition, LX

"The real rot lies in the prevailing social order - an order that, by the internal logic of its commodity system and market economy, would devour the entire planet. By this logic, the society would continue to increase its output of garbage even if its population were halved. Its advertising system would be mobilized to sell us three, four or five color televisions instead of one or two. Production rates would continue to soar and the switch turned from "scarcity" to "affluence", or vice versa, depending entirely on the profitability of the commodities that were produced. Pollution would increase and so would waste ... Certainly, there is a lot that you can do if you happen to live in a reasonably enlightened rural area, if you happen to have access to land that you can garden according to your own principles, and if yo are favored with an adequate income to choose the best that you cannot produce for yourself from a rather bad lot. This will not solve all or even most of your environmental problems, and it may consume much of the free time you might otherwise devote to cultivating many of your intellectual interests," - Intro Colophon Edition, LXXI

Post-Scarcity Anarchism

2009-03-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

"Until very recently, human society developed around the brute issues posed by unavoidable material scarcity and their subjective counterpart in denial, renunciation and guilt. The great historic splits that destroyed early organic societies, dividing man from nature or man from man, had their origins in the problems of survival, in problems that involved the mere maintenance of human existence. Material scarcity provided the historic rationale for the development of the patriarchal family, private property, class domination and the state; it nourished the great divisions in hierarchical society that pitted town against country, mind against sensuousness, work against play, individual against society, and, finally, the individual against himself." - P. 9

"Neither the material "privileges" that modern capitalism seems to afford the middle classes nor its lavish wasting of resources reflects the rational, humanistic, indeed unalienated, content of a post-scarcity society. To view the word "post-scarcity" simply as meaning a large quantity of socially available goods would be as absurd as to regard a living organism simply as a large quantity of chemicals. For one thing, scarcity is more than a condition of scarce resources; the word, if it is to mean anything in human terms, must encompass the social relations and cultural apparatus that foster insecurity in the psyche. In organic societies this insecurity may be a function of the oppressive limits established by a precarious natural world; in a hierarchical society it is a function of the repressive limits established by an exploitative class structure." - P. 10-11

"Capitalism, far from affording "privileges" to the middle class, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own opression - first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus. Tyrannized as he is by every viccisitude of the bourgeoise society, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrates with insecurity. His soporifics - commodities and more commodities - are his very poison." - P. 11-12

"The very concept of "rights" is becoming suspect as the expression of a patronizing elite which bestows and denies "rights" and "privileges" to inferiors. A struggle against elitism and hierarchy as such is replacing the struggle for "rights" as the main goal. It is not *justice* any longer that is being demanded, but rather *freedom*. Moral sensibilities to abuses - even the most minor abuses by earlier standards - are reaching an acuity that would have seemed inconcievable only a few years ago." - P. 15

"In attempting to uphold scarcity, toil, poverty and subjugation against the growing potential for post-scarcity, leisure, abundance and freedom, capitalism increasingly emerges as the most irrational, indeed the most artificial, society in history. The society takes on the appearance of a totally alien (as well as alienating) force. It emerges as the "other", so to speak, of humanity's deepest desires and impulses. On an ever-greater scale, potentiality begins to determine and shape one's everyday view of actuality, until a point is reached where everything about the society - including its most "attractive" amenities - seems totally insane, the result of a massive social lunacy." - P. 15

"Dropping out" becomes a mode of dropping in - into the tenative, experimental, and as yet highly ambiguous, social relations of utopia. Taken as an end in itself, this lifestyle is not utopia; indeed, it may be woefully incomplete. Taken as a means, however, this lifestyle and the processes leading to it are indispensable in remaking the revolutionary, in awakening his sensibilities to how much must be changed if the revolution is to be complete. The lifestyle is indispensable in preserving the integrity of the revolutionary, in providing him with the psychic resources to resist the subversion of the revolutionary project by bourgeois values." - P. 16

"The traditional workers' movement will never reappear. Despite rank and file revolts, "bread and butter" issues are often too well contained by bourgeois unionism to form the basis for the old socialist type of labor union. But workers may yet form radical organizations to fight for changes in the *quality* of their lives and work - ultimately for workers' management of production. Workers will not form radical organizations until they sense the same tension between what-is and what-could-be that many young people feel today." - P. 28

"In this respect, the period in which we live closely resembles the revolutionary Enlightenment that swept through France in the eighteenth century - a period that completely reworked French consciousness and prepared the conditions for the great revolution of 1789. Then as now, the old institutions were slowly pulverized by molecular action from below long before they were toppled by mass revolutionary action. This molecular movement creates an atmosphere of general lawlessness; a growing personal day-to-day disobedience, a tendency to not "go along" with the existing system, a seemingly "petty" but nevertheless critical attempt to circumvent restriction in every facet of daily life. The society, in effect, becomes disorderly, undisciplined, Dyonisian ... Be it an angry gesture, a "riot" or a conscious change in lifestyle, an ever-increasing number of people - who have no more of a commitment to an organized revolutionary movement than they have to society itself - begin spontaneously to engage in their own defiant propaganda of the deed." - P. 49

"Thus if revolutionary thought is to be taken at all seriously, it must speak directly to the problems and forms of social management. It must open to public discussion the problems that are involved in a creative development of liberatory social forms. Although there is no theory of liberation that can replace experience, there is sufficient historical experience, and a sufficient theoretical formulation of the issues involved, to indicate what social forms are consistent with the fullest realization of personal and social freedom." - P. 143

Puzzled America

2009-03-01T07:39:00.000-08:00

Mongrels, Orphans, Bastards and Vagabonds

2009-02-28T07:38:00.000-08:00

Sedated book on Mexican history/immigration despite the title

traven jungle series

2009-02-25T14:33:00.000-08:00

The Cotton-Pickers, P. 100 "In some countries pickets are respectable, law-abiding citizens who believe in authority. They don't talk much, and when a policeman says 'Stand back! You're blocking traffic!' they move at once, as if the police paid them and not the other way around."

The Cotton-Pickers, P.

The Carreta, P. 129 - " ... His thoughts had no bias. He could attack anything whithout prejudice and without being hindered by what others before him had said or thought about it. He drew his conclusions from naked circumstance and from his own experience. He saw things and happenings not as someone else had described them, but as they were or seemed to him to be."

The Carreta, P. 130 - " ... He was an example of the wisdom of the Church in gathering its flock together while the child is still a child and takes everything literally, without the faculty of thinking for himself and separating the possible from the probable and the impossible from the symbolical. Whatever is put into a child's mind before he can think and judge remains implanted there and entwines itself as years go on with the romance of adolescence; and since the grown man does not like to vex his mother who taught him all these fairy tales, he gives his assent to them all; and growing up to become a useful member of society he looks on with all the satisfaction of sentimental reminiscence when his wife tells his own children the same stories and teaches the children to believe them. The Church thrives and prospers because, like Communism, it makes sure of the new generation in good time."

The Carreta, P. 198 - "The more poor and hunger-stricken people there are in the world the greater is the profit of all those who know how to exploit their poverty and grow rich on their labors. An empty belly and torn shirt produce the willing worker, who neither winces nor jibs, for his belly cries aloud and his body craves warmth and clothing. It is the Church that prospers, and with it all those whose rule is: Keep the people religious, for religion is our best safeguard."

The Carreta, P. 259 - "Fate is incontestable - and far more so for an Indian than for a European, who lives under the influence of many conflicting philosophies, from among which he selects the one which promises him the best return on the most harmonious existence. The Indian is not so happily situated. For him fate is the decision from which he cannot escape and against which he does not even fight."

The Carreta, P. 224 - "And when he thought all this over, he only took a stronger fancy to her. Never mind a girl's past when time presses and nothing better offers. After a while it is always found that it makes no real difference. Any woman may be the right one and any can be intolerable, whatever her past may have been. A woman is far less influenced by her past than a man by his. A man is too much inclined to be pedantic, moral, and respectable through and through, to be plagued by his conscience, and to sacrifice everything, including his wife, to his narrow-minded and strait-laced respectability. If you leave out the dessicated holy women and withering spinsters, a man is far more of an intolerable and stinking pharisee than a woman."

The Bridge In The Jungle - "Aside from the fact that philosophy actually pays if you know how to handle it right, experience has taught me that traveling educates only those who can be educated just as well by roaming around their own country. By walking thirty miles anywhere in one's own home state, the man who is open-minded will see more and learn more than a thousand others will by running round the world. A trip to a Central American jungle to watch how the Indians behave near a bridge won't make you see either the jungle or the bridge or the Indians if you believe that the civilization that you were born into is the only one that counts. Go and look around with the idea that everything you learned in school and college is wrong."

The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 2000)

2009-02-22T11:15:00.000-08:00

"Consigned to a kind of academic purgatory for the last three decades of the twentieth century, at a time when social theory had migrated from the social sciences obsessed with case studies and social “problems” to literature and philosophy where he was rarely discussed and almost never cited., C. Wright Mills was an absent presence. All sociologists, and most people in other social scientific disciplines knew his name, and in their political unconscious, recognized his salience, but were deterred by fear and careerism from following his path as a public political intellectual. Yet in the wake of scandals involving leading corporations and their Chief Executive and Financial Officers, which have become daily fare even in mainstream media, and the hegemony of corporate capital over the American state, which was widely reported in the press and television with unembarrassed approbation, Mills’s work is experiencing a small but pronounced revival." - Stanley Aronowitz

P. 4 - "The power elite are not solitary rulers. Advisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinion-makers are often the captains of their higher thought and decision. Immediately below the elite are the professional politicians of the middle level of power, in the Congress and in the pressure groups, as well as among the new and old upper classes of town and city and region. Mingling with them, in curious ways which we shall explore, are those professional celebrities who live by being continually displayed ... if such celebrities are not at the head of any dominating hierarchy, they do often have the power to distract the attention of the public or afford sensations to the masses, or, more directly, to gain the ear of those who do occupy positions of direct power."

P. 6 - "Families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and corporations and armies shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends. Religious institutions provide chaplains to the armed forces where they are used as a means of increasing the effectiveness of its morale to kill. Schools select and train men for their jobs in corporations and their specialized tasks in the armed forces. The extended family has, of course, long been broken up by the industrial revolution, and now the son and father are removed from the family, by compulsion if need be, whenever the army of the state sends out the call. And the symbols of all these lesser institutions are used to legitimate the power and the decisions of the big three."

P. 8-9 - "At the pinnacle of each the three enlarged and centralized domains, there have arisen those higher circles which make up the economic, political and military elites. At the top of the economy, among the corporate rich, there are the chief executives; at the top of the political order, the members of the political directorate; at the top of the military establishment, the elite of soldier-statesmen clustered in and around the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the upper echelon. As each of these domains has coincided with the others, as decisions tend to become total in their consequence, the leading men in each of the three domains of power - the warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate - tend to come together, to form the power elite of America."

P. 9-10 - "By the powerful we mean, of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it. No one, accordingly, can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, powerful ... Not all power, it is true, is anchored in and exercised by means of such institutions, but only within and through them can power be more or less continuous and important."

P. 12 - "The American elite entered modern history as a virtually unopposed bourgeoisie. No national bourgeoisie, before or since, has had such opportunities and advantages. Having no military neighbors, they easily occupied an isolated continent stocked with natural resources and immensely inviting to a willing labor force. A framework of power and an ideology for its justification were already at hand. Against mercantile restriction, they inherited the principle of laissez-faire; against Southern planters, they imposed the principle of industrialism. The Revolutionary War put an end to colonial pretensions to nobility, as loyalists fled the country and many states were broken up. The Jacksonian upheaval with its status revolution put an end to pretensions to monopoly of descent by the old New England families ... The tempo of the whole capitalist development made it impossible for an inherited nobility to develop and endure in America."

P. 15 - "Nowadays we must qualify the idea of the elite as composed of higher types of individuals, for the men who are selected for and shaped by the top positions have many spokesmen and advisors and make-up men who modify their self-conceptions and create their public images, as well as shape many of their decisions ... The American elite often seems less a collection of persons than of corporate entities ... even the most free-lance celebrity is usually a sort of synthetic production turned out each week by a disciplined staff which systematically ponders the effect of the easy ad-libbed gags the celebrity 'spontanteously' echoes."

P. 24 - "Nobody called for or permitted Napoleon to chase Parlement home on the 18 Brumaire, and later to transform his consulate into an emperorship. Nobody called for or permitted Adolf Hitler to proclaim himself 'Leader and Chancellor' the day President Hindenburg died, to abolish and usurp roles by merging the presidency and the chancellorship. Nobody called for or permitted Franklin D. Roosevelt to make the series of decisions that led to the entrance of the United States into World War II. It was no 'historical necessity', but a man named Truman who, with a few other men, decided to drop a bomb on Hiroshima. It was no historical necessity, but an argument within a small circle of men that defeated Admiral Radford's proposal to bomb troops before Dienbienphu. Far from being dependent upon the structure of institutions, modern elites may smash one structure and set up another in which they then enact quite different roles."

P. 32 - "The old upper-class person feels that his prestige originates in time itself ... In New England and the South, more families than in other regions are acutely conscious of family lines and old residence, and more resistant to the ascendancy of the newly rich and newly arrived ... The men and women of the old upper class generally consider money in a negative way - as something in which the new upper-class people are too closely interested ... these rich men and their women folk, the old upper class believes, were and are more interested in 'community and social' qualifications than in mere money."

P. 89 - "'Power for power's sake' is psychologically based on prestige gratification. But Veblen laughed so hard and so consistently at the servants and the dogs and the women and the sports of the elite that he failed to see that their military, economic and political activity is not at all funny. In short, he did not succeed in relating a view of their power over armies and factories to what he believed, quite rightly, to be their funny business. He was, in my view, not quite serious enough about their status because he did not see its full and intricate importance to power. He saw 'the kept classes' and 'the underlying population', but in his time, he could not really understand the prestige of the power elite."

P. 95 - "Two general explanations for the fact of the very rich - now and in the past - are widely available. The first, of muckraker origin, was best stated by Gustavus Myers, whose work is a gigantic gloss in pedantic detail on Balzac's assertion that behind every great fortune there lies a crime. The robber barons, as the tycoons of the post-Civil-War era came to be called, descended upon the investing public much as a swarm of women might descend on a bargain basement on Saturday morning. They exploited natural resources, waged economic wars amongst themselves, entered into combinations, made private capital out of the public domain, and used any and every method to achieve their ends. They made agreements with railroads for rebates; they purchased newspapers and bought editors; they killed off competing and independent businesses, and employed lawyers of skill and statesmen of repute to sustain their rights and secure their privileges ... It is better, so the image runs, to take one dime from each of ten million people at the point of a corporation than $100,000 from each of ten banks at the points of a gun. It is also safer."

P. 99-100 - "The general facts, however, are clear: the very rich have used existing laws, they have circumvented and violated existing laws, and they have had laws created and enforced for their direct benefit ... the very rich could use the device of the corporation to juggle many ventures at once and to speculate with other peoples money. As the 'trust' was outlawed, the holding company law made it legal by other means for one corporation to own stock in another. Soon, the formation and financing of holding companies offered the easiest way to get rich quickly that had ever legally existed in the United States."

P. 100 - "In understanding the private appropriations of the very rich, we must also bear in mind that the private industrial development of the United States has been much underwritten by gifts out of the people's domain. State, local and federal governments have given land free to railroads, paid for the cost of shipbuilding ... Much more free land has been given to businesses than to small independent homesteaders ... if the taxpayers had not paid, out of their own labor, for a paved road system, Henry Ford's astuteness and thrift would not have enabled him to become a billionaire out of the automobile industry."

P. 102 - " ... But the first really great fortunes were developed during the economic transformation of the Civil War era, and out of the decisive corruptions that seem to be a part of all American wars. A rural, commercial capitalism was then transformed into an industrial economy, within the legal framework of the tariff, the National Banking Act of 1863 and, in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment, which by later interpretations sanctified the corporate revolution. During this shift in the political framework and economic base, the first generation of the very rich came to possess units of wealth that dwarfed any that had previously been appropriated. Not only were the peaks of the money pyramid higher, but the base of the upper levels was apparently broader. By 1892, one survey revealed the existence of at least 4,046 American millionaires ... We shall take this generation, which came to full maturity in the 'nineties, as the first generation of the very rich. But we shall use it merely as a bench mark for the two following generations, the second coming to maturity about 1925, and the third, in the middle years of the twentieth century ... 275 American men and women, each of whom has possessed a minimum of about $30 million."

P. 130 - "It is not characteristic of American executives to read books, except books on 'management' and mysteries; ... top executives almost never read drama, great fiction, the philosophers, the poets. Those who do venture into this area ... are definitely sports of the executive type, looked upon by their colleagues with mingled awe and incredulity. Executive circles do not overlap much with those of artistic or literary interest."

P. 164 - "As for the happiness of the rich, that is a matter that can be neither proved nor disproved. Still, we must remember that the American rich are winners within a society in which money and money-values are the supreme stakes. If the rich are not happy it is because none of us are happy. Moreover, to believe that they are unhappy would probably be un-American. For if they are not happy, then the very terms of success in America, the very aspirations of all sound men, lead to ashes rather than fruit ... We simply must believe that the American rich are happy, else our confidence in the whole endeavor might be shaken. For all of the possible values of human society, one and one only is truly sovereign, truly universal, truly and completely acceptable goal of man in America. That goal is money, and let there be no sour grapes about it from the losers."

P. 169 - "In general, however, the ideology of the executives, as members of the corporate rich, is conservatism without any ideology. They are conservative, if for no other reason than that they feel themselves to be part of a fraternity of the successful. They are without ideology because they feel themselves to be 'practical' men ... more and more of the corporate executives have entered government directly; and the result has been a virtually new political economy at the apex of which we find those who represent the corporate rich."

P. 240 - "No intellectually qualified personnel for a genuine bureaucracy can be provided if the Civil Service is kept in a political state of apprehension; for that selects mediocrities and trains them for unreflective conformity."

P. 248 - "The prime focus of the theory of balance is the Congress of the United States, and its leading actors are the Congressmen. Yet as social types, these 96 Senators and 435 Representatives are not representative of the rank and file citizens. They represent those who have been successful in entrepreneurial and professional endeavors. Older men, they are of the privileged white, native-born of native parents, Protestant Americans. They are college graduates and they are at least solid, upper-middle class in income and status. On the average, they have no experience of wage or lower-salaried work. They are, in short, in and of the new and old upper classes of local society."

P. 262 - "Alongside the old middle class - increasingly invested within the state machinery - and the new middle class - born without independent political shape and developed in such a way as never to achieve it - a new political force came into the political arena of the 'thirties: the force of organized labor. For a brief time, it seemed that labor would become a power-bloc independent of corporation and state but operating upon and against them. After becoming dependent on the governmental system, however, the labor unions suffered rapid decline in power and now have little part in major national decisions. The United States now has no labor leaders who carry any weight of consequence in decisions of importance to the political outsiders now in charge of the visible government."

P. 274 - "In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the political order, that clue is the decline of politics as genuine and public debate of alternative decisions - with nationally responsible and policy-coherent parties and with autonomous organizations connecting the lower and middle levels of power with the top levels of decision. America is now in considerable part more a formal political democracy than a democratic social structure, and even the formal political mechanics are weak."

P. 277-278 - "The simple Marxian view makes the big economic man the real holder of power; the simple liberal view makes the big political man chief of the power system; and there are some who would view the warlords as virtual dictators. Each of these is an oversimplified view. It is to avoid them that we use the term 'power elite' rather than 'ruling class' ... Its members exist all over the country, and it is a coalition of generals in the roles of corporation executives, of politicians masquerading as admirals, of corporation executives acting like politicians, of civil servants who become majors, of vice-admirals who are also the assistants to a cabinet officer, who is himself, by the way, really a member of the managerial elite ... The power elite today involves the often uneasy coincidence of economic, military and political power."

P. 289 - "The inner core of the power elite also includes men of the higher legal and financial type from the great law factories and investment firms, who are almost professional go-betweens of economic, political and military affairs, and who thus act to unify the power elite. The corporation lawyer and the investment banker perform the functions of the 'go-between' effectively and powerfully. By the nature of their work, they transcend the narrower milieu of any one industry, and accordingly are in a position to speak and act for the corporate world or at least sizable sectors of it. The corporation lawyer is a key link between the economic and military and political areas; the investment banker is a key organizer and unifier of the corporate world and a person well versed in spending the huge amounts of money the American military establishment now ponders. When you get a lawyer who handles the legal work of investment bankers you get a key member of the power elite."

P. 294 - "It is not that the elite 'believe in' a compact elite behind the scenes and a mass down below. It is not put in that language. It is just that the people are of necessity confused and must, like trusting children, place all the new world of foreign policy and strategy and executive action in the hands of experts. It is just that everyone knows that somebody has got to run the show, and that somebody usually does. Others do not really care anyway, and besides, they do not know how. So the gap between the two types gets wider."

P. 315 - "But the media, as now organized and operated, are even more than a major cause of the transformation of America into a mass society. They are also among the most important of those increased means of power now at the disposal of elites of wealth and power; moreover, some of the higher agents of those media are themselves either among the elites or very important among their servants. Alongside or just below the elite, there is the propagandist, the publicity expert, the public-relations man, who would control the very formation of public opinion in order to be able to include it as one more pacified item in calculations of effective power, increased prestige, more secure wealth."

P. 317 - "Manipulation becomes a problem wherever men have power that is concentrated and willful but do not have the authority, or when, for any reason, they do not wish to use their power openly. Then the powerful seek to rule without showing their powerfulness. They want to rule, secretly, as it were, without publicized legitimation ... Authority formally resides 'in the people', but the power of initiation is in fact held by small circles of men. This is why the standard strategy of manipulation is to make it appear that the people, or at least a large group of them, 'really made the decision'. That is why even when the authority is available, men with access to it may still prefer the secret, quieter ways of manipulation."

P. 320 - "The structural trends of modern society and the manipulative character of its communication technique come to a point of coincidence in the mass society, which is largely a metropolitan society. The growth of the metropolis, segregating men and women into narrow routines and environments, causes them to lose any firm sense of their integrity as a public. The members of publics in smaller communities know each other more or less fully, because they meet in several aspects of the total life routine. The members of masses in a metropolitan society know one another only as fractions in a specialized milieux ... Prejudgment and stereotype flourish when people meet in such ways. The human reality of others does not, cannot, come through."

P. 322 - "On the one hand, there is the increased scale and centralization of the structure of decision; and, on the other, the increasingly narrow sorting out of men into milieux. From both sides, there is the increased dependence upon the formal media of communication, including those of education itself. But the man in the mass does not gain a transcending view from these media; instead he gets his experience stereotyped, and then he gets sunk further by that experience. He cannot detach himself in order to observe, much less to evaluate, what he is experiencing, much less what he is not experiencing. Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, he is accompanied through his life-experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing monologue. He has no projects of his own: he fulfills the routines that exist ... he drifts, he fulfills habits, his behavior a result of a planless mixture of the confused standards and the uncriticized expectations that he has taken over from others whom he no longer really knows or trusts, if indeed he ever really did"

P. 326 - "Those who grope for ideologies with which to explain their conservative mood ... feel that they have somehow been tricked by liberalism, progressivism, radicalism and they are a little frightened. What many of them want, it would seem, is a society of classic conservatism. Conservatism in its classic form is of course traditionalism become self-conscious and elaborated, argumentative and rationalized. It also involves some 'natural aristocracy'. Sooner or later all those who relax the grand tension of human rationality must take up the neo-Burkian defense of a traditional elite, for in the end, such an elite is the major premise of a genuinely conservative ideology."

American Furies (Beacon Press, 2008)

2009-02-19T11:12:00.000-08:00

A good companion book to The Perpetual Prisoner Machine and Prison Nation, American Furies takes an updated look at the American penal system and what is so wrong with it.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Secret History Of The American Empire

2009-02-16T10:55:00.000-08:00

These two books from John Perkins, self-described 'economic hit man' for the CIA who propped up dictatorships in foreign countries who were favorable to U.S. business interests, are among the more controversial released in recent years.

The Underground History of American Education

2009-02-13T10:15:00.000-08:00

by John Taylor Gatto

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

The Rape of Nanking (Penguin, 1997)

2009-02-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

A record of one of the most unfortunate chapters in human history, and often very hard to read, The Rape of Nanking is yet very important both as documentation of a massive crime that a nation would rather bury and deny, and a reminder of the extremes that a militarized and dehumanized group of people are capable of.

P. 3-4 "Americans think of World War II as beginning on December 7, 1941, when Japanese carrier-based airplanes attacked Pearl Harbor. Europeans date it from September 1, 1939, and the blitzkrieg assault on Poland by Hitler's Luftwaffe and Panzer divisions. Africans see an even earlier beginning, the invasion of Abyssinia by Mussolini in 1935. Yet Asians must trace the war's beginnings all the way back to Japan's first steps toward the military domination of East Asia - the occupations of Manchuria in 1931."

P. 6-7 "Yet the Rape of Nanking remains an obscure incident. Unlike the atomic explosions in Japan or the Jewish holocaust in Europe, the horrors of the massacre at Nanking remain virtually unknown to people outside Asia. The massacre remains neglected in most of the historical literature published in the United States. A thorough examination of secondary-school history textbooks in the United States revealed that only a few even mention the Rape of Nanking. And almost none of the comprehensive, or 'definitive', histories of World War II read by the American public discusses the Nanking massacre in great detail."

P. 54 "Many find it difficult to reconcile the barbarism of Nanking with the exquisite politeness and good manners for which the Japanese are renowned. But certain military experts believe that these two seemingly seperate behaviors are in reality intertwined. They point to the awesome status of the ancient samurai, who for centuries possessed the power to lop off the head of a peasant if he failed to give the warrior a polite answer to his questions."

P. 217 "Some Japanese scholars believe that the horrors of the Rape of Nanking and other outrages of the Sino-Japanese War were caused by a phenomenon called 'the transfer of oppression'. According to Tanaka Yuki ... the modern Japanese army had great potential for brutality from the moment of its creation for two reasons: the arbitrary and cruel treatment that the military inflicted on its own officers and soldiers, and the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, in which status was dictated by proximity to the emperor. Before the invasion of Nanking, the Japanese military had subjected its own soldiers to endless humiliation ... Using Orwellian terminology, the routine of striking Japanese soldiers, or 'bentatsu', was termed an 'act of love' by the officers, and the violent discipline of the Japanese navy through 'tekken sensai', or 'the iron fist', was often called 'ai-no-muchi', or 'whip of love'."

Far Tortuga (Vintage Books, 1988)

2009-02-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

"Far Tortuga" seems to have its narrative located at some point just within the warp of things as they are. From its opening moment, with daybreak over the Windward Passage, the reader senses that the narrative itself is the recapitulation of a cosmic process, as though the author has sought to link his storytelling with the eye of creation." - New York Times

The Unsettling Of America (Sierra Club Books, 2004)

2009-02-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

"Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction." - Amazon

The Idea Of A Local Economy - Wendell Berry

2009-02-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

http://briarpatchnetwork.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/the-idea-of-a-local-economy-wendell-berry/

Wilderness Letter - Wallace Stegner

2009-01-28T10:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.wilderness.org/OurIssues/Wilderness/wildernessletter.cfm

All Poems of Robinson Jeffers

2009-01-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.poemhunter.com/robinson-jeffers/

Concrete Island (Picador, 2001)

2009-01-22T10:26:00.000-08:00

"Ballard's novels are complex, obsessive, frequently poetic, and always disquieting chronicles of nature rebelling against humans, of the survival of barbarism in a world of mechanical efficiency, of ethropy, anomie, breakdown, ruin . . . The blasted landscapes that his characters inhabit are both external settings and states of mind."—Luc Sante

The Brass Check (U. of Illinois Press, 2002)

2009-01-19T16:19:00.000-08:00

"In this systematic critique of the structural basis of U.S. media -- arguably the first one ever published -- Upton Sinclair writes that "American journalism is a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor." Likening journalists to prostitutes, the title of the book refers to a chit that was issued to patrons of urban brothels of the era. Fueled by mounting disdain for newspapers run by business tycoons and conservative editors, Sinclair self-published The Brass Check in the years after The Jungle had made him a household name. Despite Sinclair's claim that this was his most important book, it was dismissed by critics and shunned by reviewers. Yet it sold over 150,000 copies and enjoyed numerous printings. A substantial introduction to this paperback edition by Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott asserts the book's importance as a cornerstone critique of commercial journalism and a priceless resource for understanding the political turbulence of the Progressive Era." - Amazon

Open Letter to Lincoln Steffens issue - "Such is the picture of a magazine "run on a personal basis". And see what it means to you, the reader, who depend upon such a magazine for the thoughts you think...here I am, making what Steffens declares is the best criticism of his work. It is accepted and paid for ... a date is set to give it to you ... but an ignorant and childish old pack-peddler (Peter Collier) steps in and with one wave of his hand sweeps it out of your sight."

"I had made a remark about "The Jungle" which was found amusing - that "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach". It is a fact that I had not been nearly so interested in the "condemned meat industry" as in something else. To me the diseased meat graft had been only one of a hundred varieties of graft which I saw in that inferno of exploitation. My main concern had been for the fate of the workers and I realized with bitterness that I had been made into a "celebrity" not because the public cared anything about the sufferings of these workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef"

Fake Packingtown reforms, labor issues not addressed (newsmen did not run coverage of them), Sinclair's attempts to draw attention to them suppressed

"Here is one of the five continents of the world, perhaps the richest of the five in natural resources. As far back as history, anthropology and even zoology can trace, these natural resources have been the object of competitive struggle. For the past 400 years this struggle has been ordained by the laws and sanctified by the religions of man. "Each for himself" we say "and the devil take the hindmost". "Dog eat dog" we say. "Do others or they will do you" ... "Business is business" ... "Money talks" ... "The Almighty Dollar". So, by a thousand native witticisms, we Americans make clear our attitude toward the natural resources of the continent.

As a result of four centuries of this attitude, ordained by laws and sanctified by religion, it has come about that at the beginning of the twentieth century the massed control of the wealth of America lies in the hands of perhaps a score of powerful individuals. We in America speak of steel kings and coal barons ... and think perhaps we are using metaphors; but the simple fact is that the men to whom we refer occupy in the world of industry precisely the same position and fill precisely the same roles as were filled in the political world by King Lewis, who said "I am the State".

This power of concentrated wealth which rules America is known by many names. It is "Wall Street", it is "Big Business", it is "The Trusts". It is the "System" of Lincoln Steffens, the "Invisible Government" of Woodrow Wilson, the "Empire of Business" of Andrew Carnegie, the "Plutocracy" of the populists. It has been made the theme of so much stump-oratory that in cultured circles it is considered good form to speak of it in quotation marks, with a playful and skeptical implication; but the simple fact is that this power has controlled American public life since the Civil War and is greater at this hour than ever before in our history.

The one difference between the Empire of Business and the Empire of Louis is that the former exists side-by-side with a political democracy. To keep this political democracy subservient to its ends, the industrial autocracy maintains and subsidizes two rival political machines, and every now and then stages an elaborate sham-battle, contributing millions of dollars to the campaign funds of both sides...The people take interest in this sham-battle - but all sensible men understand that whichever way the contest is decided, business will be business and money will continue to talk."

A Personal Jesus (Synergy International, 2007)

2009-01-16T16:13:00.000-08:00

"A "Personal Jesus" takes the life of Jesus as Upton Sinclair imagines him to be. Sinclair breaks up this novel into 3 sections- youth, mission and spirit. Again, he delves into religon and leaves his usual path of politics - but are not religions - Christianity, Judism and Islam political? A good question throughout history and especially in our modern times. As Sinclair says in the preface "the story of Jesus cannot be told without controversy, for controversy is the very essence of it". As a reviewer said, "Sinclair was a giant and this novel comes close to who Jesus was as a person than any scholarly account. And this is the magic of Sinclair". Religous believers and political activist should read this novel to get a glimpse of where Sinclair is coming from." - Amazon.com

Notes:

* Rechabites / Kenites / Cainites - migratory workers known as harashim - wandered and performed carpentry, masonry, dental, medical services for food - also Nazarites - "Survived as free men in a world of slaughter and enslavement" - sheltered everyone who came to them

* Modern nomads - Slubbim, or Sleb (Syria and Arabia)

* "Visionaries came - men who believed God would speak to them in lonely places, rather than in the wicked towns"

* Jesus (Yeshu) may have had kyphosis - distortion of the spine due to malnutrition and strain (basically hunchbacked) - small, dark skinned, sparse hair, black beard, frail

* Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah - The old wild prophets Mahalaleel taught Yeshu of

* "Nazareth was a poor town and never had any sort of distinction. Yeshu had been born there (the inn was crowded, that night they stayed in a stable.) Marya pointed out the manger to Yeshu. The information did not surprise or trouble him, for to him a stable was a pleasant place, with the warm smell of animals; as clean and proper a place for a babe as any he knew."

* Genesis - there's no scroll that dates back that far - no such in Jerusalem as it was burned and razed by the Babylonians

* Most of the Benjaminites and Ephraimites writings were taken away by the Assyrians. Judah elevated itself so that all glory shone upon them, and all people of Israel were called Jews instead of Israelites.

* Rechabites were rebels against the corrupted system of Jewish law and tradition. Religious life consisted of the disputes of two rival sects of priests and scribes, one the Pharisees and the other the Sadducees, which in reality were political parties striving for office, power and wealth.

* On Jesus' years of teaching - "We do not know the year of his birth ... death. All that we have is a set of records, put down long afterwards, based upon tradition. The texts are highly suspect and every statement must be critically examined, every word must be studied with care. All that an honest man can do is make an estimate of probability, and remind you of this as he goes along."

* "The statement that he was born in Bethlehem I take to be a legend, created in order to fit him into an old prophecy that the Messiah would come from there (Micah 5:2)"

* "Casting out unclean spirits" = psychiatric care of mentally ill (example of schizophrenic Sally)

* "Forgive us our debts" changed to "Forgive us our trespasses" for the sake of the business world

* Preaching in Galilee was no big deal to the Romans and Jews; Jerusalem got him killed

* "If he was in fact God, he could have thought of a thousand better ways to reform and change mankind than to come down to earth disguised as a man and be crucified. It seems to me that it was rather hard on the poor Jews and Romans, who didn't know that he was God, and thought him a disturber of the peace and a false leader of the people. It seems to me it was all the harder because both God and Jesus must have known that the scheme wasn't going to work, but on the contrary promote religious wars in which millions of human beings would be slaughtered."

* Peter - the "rock" passage probably made up and inserted later - Jesus had no intention of founding a church (Section 10, Mission)

* The forces which have destroyed every civilization - luxury among the rich and discontent among the poor

* "The disciples in those early days "had all things common". They had made the discovery that this was inevitable if you really meant to follow Jesus; it was impossible to keep love for your brethren in your soul if at the same time you were trying to sell them goods at a profit."

* "It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks" - Saul

* Peter - taken up as first of Popes by the Holy Catholic Church - given the keys to heaven due to a false text inserted in the Gospel

* Peter vs Paul - Paul's writings suppressed for more than a hundred years, he dies a prisoner in Rome

* "But Peter's Church rises and thrives and puts down all the heretics. The bigger it becomes the more firmly it relies upon priestcraft and the more corruptions it develops. Rites and ceremonies are invented and they become full of magical power. Texts are written down and become the Word of God. Churches by the thousand are raised, crucifixes by millions are carved and blessed and worshipped. It is the Holy Catholic Church, and it's motto is semper eadem which means "always the same"."

* Christian propagandists modified the Sibylline books

* Greek word for betrayer of the truth - Sophist

* "You can see from Peter's teachings which I have quoted, how he was the one best fitted to win. Submission was needed, and he had ordained it; fear was needed, and he could inspire it, because he had the power to send his opponents to hell. Converts were made among the rich, and that made the new faith respectable. It proved to be an excellent faith from their point of view, because it taught the poor obedience and submission; it concentrated their attention upon heaven, and left this world to the powerful who already had it. Much later there was a celibate clergy, which meant that the church could become really rich. There were monasteries and nunnerys as early as the fourth century."

* Josephus - Testimonium - Jesus was ugly (Lentulus's bullshit version is the "beautified" one common in today's paintings)

* From Wikipedia - "The letter of Lentulus is certainly apocryphal: there never was a Governor of Jerusalem; no Procurator of Judea is known to have been called Lentulus, a Roman governor would not have addressed the Senate in the way represented, but the emperor; a Roman writer would not have employed the expressions, "prophet of truth", "sons of men", "Jesus Christ". The former two are Hebrew idioms, the third is taken from the New Testament. The letter, therefore, shows us a description of Jesus such as Christian piety conceived him."

* Act of Pilate (report of crucifixion) destroyed - Josephus's Halosis containing a detailed account, but it has been doctored by Christian copyists; see Eisler

* "Both Easter and Christmas are the oldest dates in the world; they were celebrated in all the religions of antiquity ... Christmas is the time of winter solstice, when the sun god having almost disappeared comes back to bless mankind. As for Easter, that is the vernal equinox, Springtime, when fertility rites are called for to continue the cycle of life." (Mithras and Bacchus)

* "Yet Jesus lives ... Men read his inspiring words, they make note of his selfless life and his pitiful death. The idea of a God of love becomes real to them, and it kindles a fire in their souls. They are moved to follow his example, and all over the world the struggle against entrenched evil goes on. It goes on inside the churches, to bring them into accord with his plain and simple teachings. It goes on outside the churches, with men who have learned to do as Jesus did, to pray in secret and tell no man about it. It goes on in the hearts of those who call themselves atheists - for they battle in the name of truth, and their battle is a part of the working of the spirit. "By their fruits ye shall know them", Jesus said; and if a man has a field full of weeds he has to plough them up before he can plant the good seed. The superstitions and follies which the churches believe and teach are surely weeds, and bring the very idea of religion into disrepute among thinking people."

The Profits of Religion

2009-01-13T16:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16470

"In this book, Sinclair attacks institutionalized religion as a “source of income to parasites, and the natural ally of every form of oppression and exploitation.” - Wikipedia

"This book is a study of Supernaturalism from a new point of view -- as a Source of Income and a Shield to Privilege. I have searched the libraries through, and no one has done it before. If you read it, you will see that it needed to be done. It has meant twenty-five years of thought and a year of investigation. It contains the facts.

I publish the book myself, so that it may be available at the lowest possible price. I am giving my time and energy, in return for one thing which you may give me -- the joy of speaking a true word and getting it heard.

The present volume is the first of a series, which will do for Education, Journalism and Literature what has here been done for the Church: the four volumes making a work of revolutionary criticism, an Economic Interpretation of Culture under the general title of "The Dead Hand.""

"The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I mean to impugn the sincerity of all who preach the supremacy of the soul. No; I admit the honesty of the heroes and madmen of history. All I ask of the preacher is that he shall make an effort to practice his doctrine. Let him be tormented like Don Quixote; let him go mad like Nietzsche; let him stand upon a pillar and be devoured by worms like Simeon Stylites -- on these terms I grant to any dreamer the right to hold himself above economic science."

"It is the fate of many abstract words to be used in two senses, one good and the other bad. Morality means the will to righteousness, or it means Anthony Comstock; democracy means the rule of the people, or it means Tammany Hall. And so it is with the word "Religion". In its true sense Religion is the most fundamental of the soul's impulses, the impassioned love of life, the feeling of its preciousness, the desire to foster and further it. In that sense every thinking man must be religious; in that sense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing force, the very nature of our being. In that sense I have no thought of assailing it, I would make clear that I hold it beyond assailment."

"When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness -- that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.

Men imagined supernatural powers such as they could comprehend. If the lightning god destroyed a hut, obviously it must be because the owner of the hut had given offense; so the owner must placate the god, using those means which would be effective in the quarrels of men -- presents of roast meats and honey and fresh fruits, of wine and gold and jewels and women, accompanied by friendly words and gestures of submission. And when in spite of all things the natural evil did not cease, when the people continued to die of pestilence, then came the opportunity for hysterical or ambitious persons to discover new ways of penetrating the mind of the god. There would be dreamers of dreams and seers of visions and hearers of voices; readers of the entrails of beasts and interpreters of the flight of birds; there would be burning bushes and stone tablets on mountain-tops, and inspired words dictated to aged disciples on lonely islands. There would arise special castes of men and women, learned in these sacred matters; and these priestly castes would naturally emphasize the importance of their calling, would hold themselves aloof from the common herd, endowed with special powers and entitled to special privileges. They would interpret the oracles in ways favorable to themselves and their order; they would proclaim themselves friends and confidants of the god, walking with him in the night-time, receiving his messengers and angels, acting as his deputies in forgiving offenses, in dealing punishments and in receiving gifts. They would become makers of laws and moral codes. They would wear special costumes to distinguish them, they would go through elaborate ceremonies to impress their followers, employing all sensuous effects, architecture and sculpture and painting, music and poetry and dancing, candles and incense and bells and gongs"

"There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of "true believers"; each damns all the others, with more or less heartiness -- and each is a mighty fortress of Graft."

"Or consider Henry Savage Landor's account of Thibet:

In Lhassa and many other sacred places fanatical pilgrims make circumambulations, sometimes for miles and miles, and for days together, covering the entire distance lying flat upon their bodies.... From the ceiling of the temple hang hundreds of long strips, katas, offered by pilgrims to the temple, and becoming so many flying prayers when hung up -- for mechanical praying in every way is prominent in Thibet.... Thus instead of having to learn by heart long and varied prayers, all you have to do is to stuff the entire prayer-book into a prayer-wheel, and revolve it while repeating as fast as you can four words meaning, "O God, the gem emerging from the lotus-flower.". . . . The attention of the pilgrims is directed to a large box, or often a big bowl, where they may deposit whatever offerings they can spare, and it must be said that their religious ideas are so strongly developed that they will dispose of a considerable portion of their money in this fashion.... The Lamas are very clever in many ways, and have a great hold over the entire country. They are ninety per cent of them unscrupulous scamps, depraved in every way and given to every sort of vice. So are the women Lamas. They live and sponge on the credulity and ignorance of the crowds; it is to maintain this ignorance, upon which their luxurious life depends, that foreign influence of every kind is strictly kept out of the country."

"Many years ago I remember talking with an English army officer, asking how he could feel sure of his soldiers in case of labor strikes; did it never occur to him that the men had relatives among the workers, and might some time refuse to shoot them? His answer was that he was aware of it, the military had worked out its technique with care. He would never think of ordering his men to fire upon a mob in cold blood; he would first start the spell of discipline to work, he would march them round the block, and get them in the swing, get their blood moving to military music; then, when he gave the order, in they would go. I have never forgotten the gesture, the animation with which he illustrated their going -- I could hear the grunting of bayonets in the flesh of men. The social system prevailing in England has made necessary the perfecting of such military technique; also, you discover, English piety has made necessary the providing of a religious sanction for it. After the job has been done. and the bayonets have been wiped clean, the company is marched to church, and the officer kneels in his family pew, and the privates kneel with the parlor-maids, and the clergyman raises his hands to heaven and intones: "We bless thy Holy Name, that it hath pleased Thee to appease the seditious tumults which have been lately raised up among us!""

"The bodies -- and the minds; the rot of the latter being the cause of the former. All over England in that year of 1910, in thousands of schools, rich and poor, and in the greatest centres of learning, men like Dean Goode were teaching boys dead languages and dead sciences and dead arts; sending them out to life with no more conception of the modern world than a monk of the Middle Ages; sending them out with minds, made hard and inflexible, ignorant of science, indifferent to progress, contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight, this terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and disciplined by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The awful muddle that was in England during the first two years of the war has not yet been told in print; but thousands know it, and some day it will be written, and it will finish forever the prestige of the British ruling caste. They rushed off an expedition to Gallipoli, and somebody forgot the water-supply, and at one time they had ninety-five thousand cases of dysentery!

They always "muddle through", they tell you; that is the motto of their ruling caste. But this time they did not "muddle through" -- they had to come to America for help. As I write, our Congress is voting billions and tens of billions of dollars, and a million of the best of our young manhood are being taken from their homes -- because in 1910 the mind of England was occupied with Dean Goode "On Eucharist", and the ten volumes of Gibson's "Preservative"."

"King Henry did not follow this suggestion precisely, but he took away the property of the religious orders for the expenses of his many wives and mistresses, and forced the clergy in England to forswear obedience to the Pope and make his royal self their spiritual head. This was the beginning of the Anglican Church, as distinguished from the Catholic; a beginning of which the Anglican clergy are not so proud as they would like to be. When I was a boy, they taught me what they called "church history", and when they came to Henry the Eighth they used him as an illustration of the fact that the Lord is sometimes wont to choose evil men to carry out His righteous purposes. They did not explain why the Lord should do this confusing thing, nor just how you were to know, when you saw something being done by a murderous adulterer, whether it was the will of the Lord or of Satan; nor did they go into details as to the motives which the Lord had been at pains to provide, so as to induce his royal agent to found the Anglican Church. For such details you have to consult another set of authorities -- the victims of the plundering."

"In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the labor of children nine years of age to fourteen
hours a day. This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church, whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B. C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing economic order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, worshipper of the gods".... so begins the oldest legal code which has come down to us, from 2250 B. C.; and the coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the same thesis. The duty of submission, not merely to divinely chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen Manufacturer, is implicit in the church's every ceremony, and explicit in many of its creeds. In the Litany the people petition for increase of grace to hear meekly Thy Word"; and here is this "Word," as little children are made to learn it by heart. If there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics, I do not know where to find it."

"And so of course all magnates and managers of industry who have messes to be cleaned up, human garbage-heaps to be carted away quickly and without fuss, turn to the Catholic Church for this service, no matter what their personal religious beliefs or lack of beliefs may be. Somewhere in the neighborhood of every steel-mill, every coal-mine or other place of industrial danger, you will find a Catholic hospital, with its slave-sisters and attendants. Once when I was "muck-raking" near Pittsburgh, I went to one of these places to ask information as to the frequency of industrial accidents and the fate of the victims. The "Mother Superior" received me with a look of polite dismay. "These concerns pay us!" she said. "You must see that as a matter of business it would not do for us to talk about them."

Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law. And precisely as it is with the work of nursing and almsgiving, so it is with the work of vote-getting, the elaborate system of policemen and saloon-keepers and ward-heelers which the Catholic machine controls. This industry of vote-getting is a comparatively new one; but the Church has been handling the masses for so many centuries that she quickly learned this new way of "democracy," and has established her supremacy over all rivals. She has the schools for training the children, the confessional for controlling the women; she has the intellectual machinery, the purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has the supreme advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host really believe what she teaches; they do not have to listen to table-rappings and flounder through swamps of automatic writings in order to bolster their hope of the survival of personality after death! "

"This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue, made the most determined efforts to prevent the spread of radical thought. Because the popular magazines were opposing the plundering of the country, a bill was introduced into Congress to put them out of business by a prohibitive postal tax; the President himself devoted all his power to forcing the passage of this bill. At the same time the Socialist press was handicapped by every sort of persecution. I was at that time in intimate touch with the "Appeal to Reason", and I know that scarcely a month passed that the Post Office Department did not invent some new "regulation" especially designed to limit its circulation. I recall one occasion when I met the editor on his way to Washington with a trunkful of letters from subscribers who complained that their postmasters refused to deliver the paper to them; and later on this same editor was prosecuted by a Catholic Attorney General and sentenced to prison for seeking to awaken the people concerning the Moyer-Haywood case.

From my personal knowledge I can say that under the administration of President Taft the Roman Catholic Church and the Secret Service of the Federal Government worked hand in hand for the undermining of the radical movement in America. Catholic lecturers toured the country, pouring into the ears of the public vile slanders about the private morality of Socialists; while at the same time government detectives, paid out of public funds, spent their time seeking evidence for these Catholic lecturers to use. I know one man, a radical labor-leader, whose morals happened to approach those of the average capitalist politician, and who was prevented by threats of exposure and scandal from accepting the Socialist nomination for President. I know a dozen others who were shadowed and spied upon; I know one case -- myself -- a man who was asking a divorce from his wife, and whose mail was opened for months.

This subject is one on which I naturally speak with extreme reluctance. I will only say that my opponent in the suit made no charge of misconduct against me; but those in control of our political police evidently thought it likely that a man who was not living with his wife might have something to hide; so for months my every move was watched and all my mail intercepted. In such a case one might at first suspect one's private opponent; but it soon became evident that this net was cast too wide for any private agency. Not merely was my own mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friends -- people residing in places as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about this matter: "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." My answer was that a study of many labor cases had taught me the methods of the
agent provocateur. He is quite willing to take real evidence if he can find it; but if not, he has familiarized himself with the affairs of his victim, and can make evidence which will be convincing when exploited by the yellow press. In my own case, the matter was not brought to a test, for I went abroad to live; when I made my next attack on Big Business, the Taft administration had been repudiated at the polls, and the Secret Service of the government was no longer at the disposal of the Catholic machine.

Today the Catholic Church is firmly established and everywhere recognized as one of the main pillars of American capitalism. It has some fifteen thousand churches, fourteen million communicants, and property valued at half a billion dollars. Upon this property it pays no taxes, municipal, state or national; which means, quite obviously, that you and I, who do not go to church, but who do pay taxes, furnish the public costs of Catholicism. We pay to have streets paved and lighted and cleaned in front of Catholic churches; we pay to have thieves kept away from them, fires put out in them, records preserved for them -- all the services of civilization given to them gratis, and this in a land whose constitution provides that Congress (which includes all state and municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no law respecting a religious establishment." When war is declared, and our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks and friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are "ministers of religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have the status of "conscientious objectors." We do not teach "religion"; we only teach justice and humanity, decency and truth."

"It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any large American city dares to attack the emoluments of the Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the ecclesiastical machine. As I write, they are making a new Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that graft-ridden city herald it as an important social event. Each paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd's crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool's cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city with a pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer -- one of those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West "rodeo" one day, and a society elopement the next, and a G. O. P. convention the next; and always with his picture, one inch square, at the head of his effusion. He takes in the Catholic festivity; and does it phaze him? It does not! He is a newspaper man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the assignment and write like the devil."

"The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic Exploitation. From that standpoint the various Protestant sects are better than the Catholic, but not much better. The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon an Inspired Word; but since this Word is the entire literary product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry, drama and fiction of a whole people for something like a thousand years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to prove anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to do. The "Holy Book" being full of polygamy, slavery, rape and wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the direct orders of God, it was a very simple matter for the Protestant Slavers to construct a Bible defense of their system.

They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most dangerous form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and see what men have done with his little joke about the face of Caesar on the Roman coin, I think he would drop dead. As for Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up; when he ordered, "Servants obey your masters," he meant exactly what he said. The Roman official stamp which he put upon the gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers from the Reformation on. "

"In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were suffering the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself knew about it, he had denounced the princely robbers and the priestly land-exploiters with that picturesque violence of which he was a master. But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever is done about it -- until at last the miserable peasants attempted to organize and win their own rights. Their demands do not seem to us so very criminal as we read them today; the privilege of electing their own pastors, the abolition of villeinage, the right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reduction of exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor, and -- that universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia, England, Mexico or sixteenth century Germany -- the restoration to the village of lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hear nothing of slaves asserting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline sociology: If they really wished to follow Christ, they would drop the sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with spiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist without inequalities, etc.

And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon them and denounced them to the princes; he issued proclamations which might have been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to the police-force of his "City of Brotherly Love": "One cannot answer a rebel with reason, but the best answer is to hit him with the fist until blood flows from the nose." He issued a letter: "Against the Murderous and Thieving Mob of Peasants," which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin, Fifth Avenue Pastor of Standard Oil: "The ass needs to be beaten, and the populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand. God knew this well, and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's tail, but a sword." He implored these rulers, after the fashion of Methodist Chancellor Day of the University of Syracuse: "Do not be troubled about the severity of their repression, for it will save many souls." With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes set to work, and slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable wretches; they completely aborted the social hopes of the Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of wage-slavery and militarism for four centuries."

"As a result of Luther's treason to humanity, his church became the state church of Prussia, and Bible-worship and Devil-terror played their part, along with the Mass and the Confessional, in building up the Junker dream. A court official -- the Oberhofprediger -- was set up, and from that time on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer, but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said: "If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocular approval how he kept them from thinking:

He recognizes the uses of Religion; takes a good deal of pains with his Preaching Clergy; will suggest texts to them; and
for the rest expects to be obeyed by them, as by his Sergeants and Corporals. Indeed, the reverend men feel themselves to be a body of Spiritual Sergeants, Corporals, and Captains, to whom obedience is the rule, and discontent a thing not to be indulged in by any means.

So the soldiers stayed in the ranks, and Frederick raided Silesia and Poland. His successors ordered all the Protestant sects into one, so that they might be more easily controlled; from which time the Lutheran Church has been a department of the Prussian state, in some cases a branch of the municipal authority.

In 1848, when the people of various German states demanded their liberty, it was an ultra-pious king of Prussia who sent his troops and shot them down -- precisely as Luther had advised to shoot down the peasants. At this time the future maker of the German Empire rose in the Landtag and made his bow before the world; a young Prussian land-magnate, Otto von Bismarck by name, he shook his fist in the face of the new German liberalism, and incidentally of the new German infidelity:

Christianity is the solid basis of Prussia; and no state erected upon any other foundation can permanently exist."

" It is a cheap way to gain applause in these days, to denounce the Prussian system; my only purpose is to show that Bible-worship, precisely as saint-worship or totem-worship, delivers the worshipper up to the Slavers. This truth has held in America, precisely as in Prussia. During the middle of the last century there was fought out a mighty issue in our free republic; and what was the part played in this struggle by the Bible-cults? Hear the testimony of William Lloyd Garrison: "American Christianity is the main pillar of American slavery." Hear Parker Pillsbury: "We had almost to abolish the Church before we could reach the dreadful institution at all."

In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly, which represented the churches of the South as well as of the North, passed by a unanimous vote a resolution to the effect that "Slavery is utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But in a generation the views of the entire South, including the Presbyterian Church, had changed entirely. What was the reason? Had the "law of God" been altered? Had some new "revelation" been handed down? Nothing of the kind; it was merely that a Yankee by the name of Eli Whitney had perfected a machine to take the seeds out of short staple cotton. The cotton crop of the South increased from four thousand bales in 1791 to four hundred and fifty thousand in 1820 and five million, four hundred thousand in 1860.
There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empire depended upon slaves. According to the custom of monarchs since the dawn of history, he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he wanted was right and holy. From one end of the South to the other the pulpits rang with the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to servants shall he be to his brethren." The learned Bishop Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery", gave the standard interpretation of this text:

The Almighty, forseeing the total degredation of the Negro race, ordained them to servitude or slavery under the descendants of Shem and Japheth, doubtless because he judged it to be their fittest condition.

I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from defenses of the "peculiar institution" in the name of Jesus Christ -- and not only from the South, but from the North. For it must be understood that leading families of Massachusetts and New York owed their power to Slavery; their fathers had brought molasses from New Orleans and made it into rum, and taken it to the coast of Africa to be exchanged for slaves for the Southern planters. And after this trade was outlawed, the slave-grown cotton had still to be shipped to the North and spun; so the traders of the North must have divine sanction for the Fugitive Slave law. Here is the Bishop of Vermont declaring: "The slavery of the negro race appears to me to be fully authorized both in the Old and New Testaments." Here in the "True Presbyterian", of New York, giving the decision of a clerical man of the world: "There is no debasement in it. It might have existed in Paradise, and it may continue through the Millenium."

And when the slave-holding oligarchy of the South rose in arms against those who presumed to interfere with this divine institution, the men of God of the South called down blessings upon their armies in words which, with the proper change of names, might have been spoken in Berlin in August, 1914."

"A four years' war was fought in America, a million men were killed and half a continent was devastated, in order to abolish chattel slavery and put wage slavery in its place. I have made a thorough study of both these industrial systems, and I freely admit that there is one respect in which the lot of the wage slave is better than that of the chattel slave. The wage slave is free to think; and by squeezing a few drops of blood from his starving body, he may possess himself of machinery for the distribution of his ideas. Taking his chances of the policeman's club and the jail, he may found revolutionary organizations, and so he has the candle of hope to light him to his death-bed. But excepting this consideration, and taking the circumstances of the wage slave from the material point of view alone, I hold it beyond question that the average lot of the chattel slave of 1860 was preferable to that of the modern slave of the Beef Trust, the Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust. It was the Southern master's real concern, his business interest, that the chattel slave should be kept physically sound; but it is nobody's business to care anything about the wage slave. The children of the chattel slave were valuable property, and so they got plenty to eat, and a happy outdoor life, and medical attention if they fell ill. But the children of the sweat-shop or the cotton-mill or the canning-factory are raised in a city slum, and never know what it is to have enough to eat, never know a feeling of security or rest --"

"Next comes a gentleman with the musical name of Wallace Wattles, who tells in one pamphlet "How to Be a Genius", and in another pamphlet "How to Get What you Want". The thing for you to do is --

Saturate your mentality through and through with the knowledge that YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO..... Look upon the peanut-stand merely as the beginning of the department store, and make it grow; you can.

And Mr. Wattles wattles on, in an ecstasy of acquisitiveness:

Hold this consciousness and say with deep, earnest feeling: I CAN succeed! All that is possible to any one is possible to me. I AM success. I do succeed, for I am full of the Power of Success.

Imagine, if you please, a poor devil chained in the treadmill of the capitalist system -- a "soda-jerker", a "counter-jumper", a book-keeper for the Steel Trust. His chances of rising in life are one in ten thousand; but he comes to the Metaphysical Library, and pays the price of his dinner for a pamphlet by Henry Harrison Brown, who was first a Unitarian clergyman, and then an extra-high Bootstrap-lifter in San Francisco, an Honorary Vice-President of the International New Nonsense Alliance. Mr. Brown will tell our soda-jerker or counter-jumper exactly how to elevate himself by mental machinery. All calculations of probabilities are delusions of the senses; if you have faith, you can move, not merely mountains, but Riker-Hegeman's, Macy's, or the Steel Trust. "How to Promote Yourself " is the title of one of Mr. Brown's pamphlets, in which he explains that --

Your wants are impressed on the Divine Mind only by your faith. A doubt cuts the connection.

A second pamphlet, which we are told is now in its thirtieth edition, bears the thrilling title of "Dollars Want Me!" In it Mr. Brown lays claim to being a pioneer:

I believe that this little monograph is the first utterance of the thought that each individual has the ability so to radiate his mental forces that he can cause the Dollars to feel him, love him, seek him, and thus draw at will all things needed for his unfoldment from the universal supply.

"What are Dollars?" asks our author; and answers:

Dollars are manifestations of the One Infinite Substance as you are, but, unlike you, they are not Self-Conscious. They have no power till you give them power. Make them feel this through your thought-vibrations as you feel the importance of your work. They will then come to you to be used.

"What is Poverty?" Mr. Brown asks, and answers himself:

Poverty is a mental condition. It can be cured only by the Affirmation of Power to cure: I am a part of the One, and, in the One, I possess all! Affirm this and patiently wait for the manifestation. You have sown the thought seed.

And our author goes on to hand out packages of these thought-seeds -- "Affirmations" as they are called, in the jargon of the New Conjuring:

I desire a deep consciousness of financial freedom.
I desire that the flow of prosperity become equalized.
I desire a greater consciousness of my power to attract the dollar.
The Indwelling Power cares for my purse.
I own whatever I desire.

If the symbolism of the Episcopal Church is of the palace, and that of the non-conformist sects of the counting-house, that of the International New Nonsense Alliance is of Wall Street and the "ticker". What is your rating in the Spiritual Bradstreet?" asks William Morris Nichols in the publication of the " `Now' Folk", San Francisco:

Is it low or high? Is your credit with the Bank of the Universe good or poor? If you draw a spiritual draft are you sure of its being honored?

If you can answer that last question affirmatively, you are on the road to become a Master in Spiritual Financiering.

Have you an account with the First (and only) Bank of Spirit? If not, then you should at once open one therewith. For no one can afford to keep less than a large deposit of spiritual funds with that Bank.

And how do you proceed to open your account? It is very simple:

Intend the mind in the direction indicated by your desire. Seek for the Light and Guidance by which you may open up the way for your Spiritual Substance, which governs material supply, to reach you and make you as rich as you ought to be, in freedom and happiness. All this you can, and when in earnest, will do.

I turn over the advertisements of this publication of the " `Now' Folk". One offers "The Business Side of New Thought." Another offers "The Books Without an If", with your money back IF you are not satisfied!

Another offers land in Bolivia for two dollars an acre. Another quotes Shakespeare: " 'Tis the mind that makes the body rich." Another offers two copies of the "Phrenological Era" for ten cents.

There is apparently no delusion of any age or clime which cannot find dupes among the readers of this New Nonsense. One notice commands:

Stop! A Revelation! A Book has been written entitled "Strands of Gold" or "From Darkness into Light!"

Another announces:

The Most Wonderful Book of the Ages: The Acquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, Transcribed from the Book of God's Remembrance, the Akashic Records.

And here is an advertisement published in Mr. Atkinson's paper:

Numerology: the Universal Adjuster! Do you know: What you appear to be to others? What you really are? What you want to be? What would overcome your present and future difficulties? Write to X, Philosopher. You will receive full particulars of his personal work which is dedicated to your service. No problem is too big or too small for Numerology. Understanding awaits you.

And looking in the body of the magazine, you find this Philosopher imparting some of this Understanding. Would you like, for example, to understand why America entered the War? Nothing easier. The vowels of the Words United States of America are uieaeoaeia, which are numbered 2951561591, which added make 45, or 4 plus 5 equals 9. You might not at first see what that has to do with the War -- until the Philosopher points out that "9 in the number of completion, indicating
the end of a cosmic cycle." That, of course, explains everything.

And here is a work on what you perhaps thought to be a dead science, Astrology. It is called "Lucky Hours for Everybody: A True System of Planetary Hours by Prof. John B. Early. Price One Dollar." It teaches you things like this:

Saturn's negative hours are especially good for all matters relating to gold-mining..... The Sun negative rules the emerald, the musical note D sharp, and the number four. The lunar hours are a good time to deal in public commodities, and to hire servants of both sexes.....

A recent lady visitor informed me that she had made several vain attempts to transact important business in the hours ruled by Jupiter, usually held to be fortunate, while she was nearly always fortunate in what she began in the hours ruled by Saturn. Upon investigation I found her name was ruled by the Sun negative, and that she had Capricorn with Saturn therein as her ascendant at birth, which explains.

And finally, here is a London "scientist", reported in the "Weekly Unity" of Kansas City, who proves his mental power over two-horse power oil engines which fail to act. "Going a little apart, he came back in a few minutes and said: `The engine is all right now and will work satisfactorily.' and without any further difficulty it did." We are told how Dr. Rawson gave a demonstration of his method to a newspaper reporter the other day. Fixing his gaze as though looking into space, he apparently became absorbed in deep contemplation and said aloud: "There is no danger; man is surrounded by divine love; there is no matter; all is spirit and manifestation of spirit."

You might at first find difficulty in believing what can be accomplished by "demonstrations" such as this; not merely are two-horse power oil engines made to work, but the whole gigantic machine of Prussian militarism is prevented from working. You may recall how Arthur Machen's magazine story of the Angels of Mons was taken up and made into a Catholic legend over-night; now here is a New-Nonsense legend, complete and perfect, going the rounds of our Nonsense magazines:

London, Dec. 14. -- Shell-proof and bullet-proof soldiers have been discovered on the European battle-fronts. Heroes with "charmed lives" are being made every day, according to Frederick L. Rawson, a London scientist, who insists he has found the miraculous way by which they are developed. He calls it "audible treatment". "Practical utilization of the powers of God by right thinking," is the agency through which Dr. Rawson declares he can so treat a man that he will not be harmed when hundreds of men are being shot dead beside him. This amazing treatment includes a new type of prayer. It is being administered to hundreds of men audibly, and to hundreds more by letter. Nothing since the war began has aroused so much talk of modern miracles as have many of the statements of Dr. Rawson.......

At the taking of a wood there were five hundred yards of "No Man's Land" to be crossed. Our troops could not get across. Then Capt. -- -- -- -- , who practices this method of prayer, treated them for an hour before they started, and not a man was knocked out. He was the only officer left out of eighty in his brigade. He simply held onto the fact that man is spiritual and perfect and could not be touched. A bullet fired from a revolver only five yards away hit him over the chest, tore his shirt and went out at the shoulder. But it never penetrated his chest. He was frequently in a hail of shells and bullets which did not touch him."

"But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise or no less a person than the Emperor himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off

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laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion. How complete and swift was his success you may judge from the fact that fifty years later we find the Emperor Valentinian compelled to pass an edict limiting the donations of emotional females to the church in Rome!

From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this book, the chief of the enemies of social progress. From the days of Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and Caesar have been one, and the Church has been the shield and armor of predatory economic might. With only one qualification to be noted: that the Church has never been able to suppress entirely the memory of her proletarian Founder. She has done her best, of course; we have seen how her scholars twist his words out of their sense, and the Catholic Church even goes so far as to keep to the use of a dead language, so that her victims may not hear the words of Jesus in a form they can understand.

And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has given life to Christianity, which enables it to keep its hold on the hearts of men today, is precisely

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this new wine of faith and fervor which has been poured into it by generation after generation of poor men who live like Jesus as outcasts, and die like Jesus as criminals, and are revered like Jesus as founders and saints. The greatest of the early Church fathers were bitterly fought by the Church authorities of their own time. St. Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of office, exiled and practically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted by the Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor Theodosius; St. Cyprian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was exiled and finally martyred. In the same way, most of the heretics whom the Holy Inquisition tortured and burned were proletarian rebels; the saints whom the Church reveres, the founders of the orders which gave it life for century after century, were men who sought to return to the example of the carpenter's son. Let us hear a Christian scholar on this point, Prof. Rauschenbusch:

The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by democratic and communistic ideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest doctrinal reformer before the reformation; but his eyes, too, were first opened to the doctrinal errors of the Roman Church by joining in a great national and patriotic movement against the alien domination and extortion of the Church. The Bohemian revolt made famous by the name of John Huss, was quite as much political and social as religious. Savonarola was a great democrat as well as a religious prophet. In his famous interview with the dying Lorenzo de Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting absolution. Of the man he demanded a living faith in God's mercy. Of the millionaire he demanded restitution of his ill-gotten wealth. Of the political usurper he demanded the restoration of the liberties of the people of Florence. It is significant that the dying sinner found it easy to assent to the first, hard to assent to the second, and impossible to concede the last."

"The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old Testament point of view. Just as the prophets of the nineteenth century thundered against the "Christian" employers of Lancashire, and told them their houses were cemented with the blood of little children, so Isaiah cries against his generation: "Your governing classes companion with thieves; behold you build up Sion with blood." Their ceremonial and their Sabbath keeping are an abomination to God. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you. Your hands are full of blood." The poor man is robbed. The rich exact usury. "Woe unto you that lay house to house and field to field, that ye may dwell alone in the midst of the land." "Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doing from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be blood-colored, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword."

"In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant and henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon. Every church is necessarily a money machine, holding and administering property. And it is not alone the Catholic Church which is in politics, seeking favors from the state -- the exemption of church property from taxation, exemption of ministers from military service, free transportation for them and their families on the railroads, the control of charity and education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday -- so on through a long list. As the churches have to be built with money, you find that in them the rich possess the control and demand the deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the churches, as everywhere else in the world, and the social revolution is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in industry.

It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers are proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working class, and knows what working people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes for his class instead of for his pope. In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are defying their bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religious movement for an Irish Republic.

What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection to the exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing his job. And if you could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you would find that precisely the same force is keeping many of them slaves to Tradition. They are educated men, and thousands of them must resent the dilemma which compels them to be either fools or hypocrites. They have caught enough of the spirit of their time not to enjoy having to pose as miracle-mongers, rain-makers and witch-doctors; they would like to say frankly that they do not believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale, and even that they are dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other demigods. But they are part of a machine, and the old men and the rich men who run the machine have laid down the law. Those who find themselves tempted to think, remember suddenly that they have wives and children; they have only one profession, they have been unfitted for any other by a life-time of study of dead things, as well as by the practice of altruism."

"For twenty years I have been haunted by the dream that I might some day be my own publisher. I was waiting till I could afford the luxury; but many a man has put off a bold action till he died, so I am publishing this book without being able to afford it.

The reason is that I do not want to be a writer for the rich. I want to be read by working-boys and girls, and by poor students.

I offer the book at a low price. In the hope of tempting you to go out and get your friends to read it, I have made a price in quantities which will allow no profit at all. A margin has been figured to cover postage, stationery, circulars, and the cost of a clerical assistant; but nothing for interest on capital, which is a gift, nor for the rent of an office, which is my home, nor for the services of manager and press agent, which is myself.

You have read the book, and its fate is yours to decide. If it seems worth while, pass it on to some on else. If you can afford it, order a number of copies and give them away. If you can't afford it, give your time and be a book-agent. "

The Goose-Step (Economy Bookshop, 1923)

2009-01-07T14:29:00.000-08:00

With this entry in the Dead Hand series, Upton Sinclair once again predates later books that would draw much more attention than his would - this time developing his theory of American college education, demonstrating how it was inspired by the Prussian system of hierarchical education under Kaiser Wilhelm, and how corporate interests used that system to shape American minds to use in their system of economic dominance. This is nearly an identical theory to the one John Taylor Gatto would put forth 70 years later in The Underground History Of American Education, as well as Jeff Schmidt in his book Disciplined Minds.

P. 19 - "Interlocking directorates" are "the device whereby three great banks in New York, with two trust companies under their control, manage the financial affairs and direct the policies of a hundred and twelve key corporations of America. The three banks are J. P. Morgan and Company, the First National Bank, and the National City Bank; and the two trust companies are the Guaranty and the Equitable. Their directors sit upon the boards of the corporations, sometimes several on each board, and their orders are obeyed because they control credit, which is the life-blood of our business world."

P. 247 - "I talked with another professor at Chicago, who does not want his name used. I asked him what he thought about the status of his profession, and he gave the best description of academic freedom in America that I have yet come upon. He said, 'We are good cows; we stand quietly in our stanchions, and give down our milk at regular hours. We are free, because we have no desire to do anything but what we are told we ought to do. And we die of premature senility.'"

Mammonart (Hyperion Press, 1975)

2009-01-04T14:18:00.000-08:00

Mammonart is another member of Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" series and, as he put it, "An interpretation of the arts from the point of view of the class struggle". The "great" artists here have their pockets turned out, from Homer all the way up to Sinclair's contemporaries Jack London and Anatole France. Sinclair's ultimate thesis is that all art is propaganda, but some types of propaganda are useful in the class struggle and some are not, and much of history is devoted to the art that glorifies the upper class - ground that would be later covered in a much more popular book by John Berger (Ways of Seeing).

Mutual Aid : A Factor Of Evolution

2009-01-01T12:36:00.000-08:00

"Unhappily, these remarks, which might have become the basis of most fruitful researches, were overshadowed by the masses of facts gathered for the purpose of illustrating the consequences of a real competition for life. Besides, Darwin never attempted to submit to a closer investigation the relative importance of the two aspects under which the struggle for existence appears in the animal world, and he never wrote the work he proposed to write upon the natural checks to over-multiplication, although that work would have been the crucial test for appreciating the real purport of individual struggle. Nay, on the very pages just mentioned, amidst data disproving the narrow Malthusian conception of struggle, the old Malthusian leaven reappeared -- namely, in Darwin's remarks as to the alleged inconveniences of maintaining the "weak in mind and body" in our civilized societies (ch. v). As if thousands of weak-bodied and infirm poets, scientists, inventors, and reformers, together with other thousands of so-called "fools" and "weak-minded enthusiasts," were not the most precious weapons used by humanity in its struggle for existence by intellectual and moral arms, which Darwin himself emphasized in those same chapters of Descent of Man."

"But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy."

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/kropotkin/mutaidcontents.html

The Monkey Wrench Gang (Harper, 2006)

2008-12-29T12:36:00.000-08:00

"Edward Abbey (1927-1989) is a touchstone for anyone involved in the radical environmental movement. Abbey, who looks like the product of a union between William James and John Muir, churned out numerous books and essays concerning the American Southwest and its wondrous natural beauty. His best known work is this novel, "The Monkey Wrench Gang," a fictional tale about four nature lovers who decide to wage relentless war against America's manic desire to spread the industrial system into every corner of the country." - Jeffrey Leach

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=SzVKF5634aUC&dq=%22the+monkey+wrench+gang%22&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=y0G4b8-kgX&sig=hycKn5tSHvy6KDvJSYjd4MfYtg8&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#PPA12-IA3,M1

We (Modern Library, 2006)

2008-12-26T12:35:00.000-08:00

“[Zamyatin’s] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism– human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself–makes [We] superior to Huxley’s [Brave New World].”
–George Orwell

http://crispytomato.net/zamyatin_we.txt

Catch-22 (Simon & Schuster, 1999)

2008-12-22T12:34:00.000-08:00

"There was a time when reading Joseph Heller's classic satire on the murderous insanity of war was nothing less than a rite of passage. Echoes of Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier who was too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament, could be heard throughout the counterculture. As a result, it's impossible not to consider Catch-22 to be something of a period piece. But 40 years on, the novel's undiminished strength is its looking-glass logic. Again and again, Heller's characters demonstrate that what is commonly held to be good, is bad; what is sensible, is nonsense." - Amazon

"As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy."

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

"It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."

"To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else."

Rashomon (Penguin, 2006)

2008-12-19T12:34:00.000-08:00

"In a Grove" is an early modernist short story consisting of seven varying accounts of the murder of a samurai, Kanazawa no Takehiro, whose corpse has been found in a bamboo forest near Kyoto. Each section simultaneously clarifies and obfuscates what the reader knows about the murder, eventually creating a complex and contradictory vision of events that brings into question humanity's ability or willingness to perceive and transmit objective truth." - Wikipedia

The Omnivore's Dilemma (Penguin, 2007)

2008-12-16T12:33:00.000-08:00

" ... examines what he calls "our national eating disorder" (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets.Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted.This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota." - Pamela Kaufman

The Worst Years Of Our Lives (Harper Collins, 1991)

2008-12-13T12:33:00.000-08:00

"Ehrenreich ( Fear of Falling et al.) here reprints a selection of her elegantly satirical essays that were originally published in Ms , Mother Jones and other journals during the past decade, articles in which she skewers political figures and others for causing a decay in human values. A strong sense of the ridiculous informs Ehrenreich's attack on those she judges guilty: phony evangelists, moneyed pollutors and developers, Wall Street bandits, officials heedless of the poor. There are pieces on Nancy Reagan's memoir My Turn and on Oliver North as warrior prince of the secret government. The book will have its critics, but Ehrenreich could also promote healthy rebellions in her role as someone who doesn't suffer fools at all, let alone grudgingly." - Reed Business Information

Fast Food Nation (Harper, 2005)

2008-12-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

"In this fascinating sociocultural report, Schlosser digs into the deeper meaning of Burger King, Auggie's, The Chicken Shack, Jack-in-the-Box, Little Caesar's and myriad other examples of fast food in America. Frequently using McDonald's as a template, Schlosser, an Atlantic Monthly correspondent, explains how the development of fast-food restaurants has led to the standardization of American culture, widespread obesity, urban sprawl and more. In a perky, reportorial voice, Adamson tells of the history, economics, day-to-day dealings and broad and often negative cultural implications of franchised burger joints and pizza factories, delivering impressive snippets of information (e.g., two-thirds of America's fast-food restaurant employees are teenagers; Willard Scott posed as the first Ronald McDonald until higher-ups decided Scott was too round to represent a healthy restaurant like McDonald's). According to Schlosser, most visits to fast-food restaurants are the culinary equivalent of "impulse buys," i.e., someone is driving by and pulls over for a Big Mac. But anyone listening to this audiobook on a car trip and realizing that the Chicken McNugget turned "a bird that once had to be carved at a table" into "a manufactured, value-added product" will think twice about stopping for a snack at the highway rest stop." - Publishers Weekly

Sweet Thursday (Penguin, 2008)

2008-12-07T12:32:00.000-08:00

“ An emphatic and clear-cut statement of Steinbeck’s greatest theme: the common bonds of humanity and love which make goodness and happiness possible.”
—The New Republic

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Penguin, 1999)

2008-12-04T12:32:00.000-08:00

"In the introduction to the novel, Robert Faggen places this seminal novel in its proper context, arguing that this book incorporates several themes of the 1950's: the Cold War, the plight of the Native Americans, the reliance on psychiatry as a cure all for social problems, and the vestigial remnants of McCarthyism. Even if you could care less about how Kesey's book fits into American cultural history, you could hardly fail to miss the overarching theme of his novel: the tensions between the individual and the state, between those trapped in an industrial society and those who wish to live in freedom." - Jeffrey Leach

http://books.google.com/books?id=R1avIGuqvuMC&dq=one+flew+over+the+cuckoo's+nest+excerpts&pg=PP1&ots=xh95PdzoBr&sig=51ijQ1pOI-o4H73NGS8mHmxuXVI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

It Can't Happen Here (NAL Trade, 2005)

2008-12-01T12:30:00.000-08:00

"Surprisingly, Sinclair Lewis' darkly humorous tale of a fascist takeover in the US, "It Can't Happen Here," is not merely out-of-print, but also quite hard to find. As dated as it is (1935), its themes will be quite familiar to Americans today. It starts with the highly contested election of an oafish yet strangely charismatic president, who talks like a "reformer" but is really in the pocket of big business, who claims to be a home-spun "humanist," while appealing to religious extremists, and who speaks of "liberating" women and minorities, as he gradually strips them of all their rights. One character, when describing him, says, "I can't tell if he's a crook or a religious fanatic." After he becomes elected, he puts the media - at that time, radio and newspapers - under the supervision of the military and slowly begins buying up or closing down media outlets. William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his times, directs his newspapers to heap unqualified praise upon the president and his policies, and gradually comes to develop a special relationship with the government. The president, taking advantage of an economic crisis, strong-arms Congress into signing blank checks over to the military and passing stringent and possibly unconstitutional laws, e.g. punishing universities when they don't permit military recruiting or are not vociferous enough in their approval of his policies. Eventually, he takes advantage of the crisis to convene military tribunals for civilians, and denounce all of his detractors as unpatriotic and possibly treasonous. I'll stop here, as I don't want to ruin the story -- I can imagine that you can see where all this is going." - Charles Häberl

"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? . . . Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? . . . Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition--shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor--no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade--only of adults--right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

"Doremus discovered that neither he nor any other small citizen had been hearing one hundredth of what was going on in America. Windrip & Co. had, like Hitler and Mussolini, discovered that a modern state can, by the triple process of controlling every item in the press, breaking up at the start any association which might become dangerous, and keeping all the machine guns, artillery, armored automobiles, and aeroplanes in the hands of the government, dominate the complex contemporary population better than had ever been done in medieval days, when rebellious peasantry were armed only with pitchforks and good-will, but the State was not armed much better."

"Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the "Corpos," which nickname was generally used. By ill-natured people the Corpos were called "the Corpses." But they were not at all corpse-like. That description would more correctly, and increasingly, have applied to their enemies."

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301001h.html

A Modest Proposal

2008-11-29T12:31:00.000-08:00

by Johnathan Swift

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

Gulliver's Travels (Penguin, 2003)

2008-11-26T12:31:00.000-08:00

"Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with the petty, diminutive Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony." - Amazon Editorial Review

100 Ways Of Seeing An Unequal World (Zed Books, 2001)

2008-11-23T14:09:00.000-08:00

"100 Ways of Seeing an Unequal World actually offers 123 perspectives on world inequality, each consisting of a two-page presentation with a graph or graphs on the left and explanation and interpretation on the right. The topics covered range across production, income and trade, demographics and health, agriculture, environment, refugees and repression. Sutcliffe pays special attention to regional (rather than just international) and gender inequalities, and attempts to set comparisons in a historical perspective. Some of the graphs take traditional forms, such as maps with different shadings, while others use less familiar formats, for example radial graphs allowing presentation of different figures. They are mostly clear and effective, though the restriction to black and white is limiting." - Danny Yee

Bartleby the Scrivener

2008-11-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.bartleby.com/129/

The Trial (Shcocken, 1999)

2008-11-17T14:08:00.000-08:00

"The story of The Trial's publication is almost as fascinating as the novel itself. Kafka intended his parable of alienation in a mysterious bureaucracy to be burned, along with the rest of his diaries and manuscripts, after his death in 1924. Yet his friend Max Brod pressed forward to prepare The Trial and the rest of his papers for publication. When the Nazis came to power, publication of Jewish writers such as Kafka was forbidden; Kafka's writings, many of which have distinctively Jewish themes, did not find a broad audience until after World War II. (Hannah Arendt once observed that although "during his lifetime he could not make a decent living, [Kafka] will now keep generations of intellectuals both gainfully employed and well-fed.") Among the current crop of Kafka heirs is Breon Mitchell, the translator of this edition of The Trial. Rather than tidying up Kafka's unconventional grammar and punctuation (as previous translators have done), Mitchell captures the loose, uneasy, even uncomfortable constructions of Kafka's original story. His translation technique is the only way to convey the comedy and confusion of this narrative, in which Josef K., "without having done anything truly wrong," is arrested, tried, convicted and executed--on a charge that is never disclosed to him." -- Michael Joseph Gross

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7849

Inventing A Nation (Yale University Press, 2003)

2008-11-14T14:07:00.000-08:00

"Much of Vidal's contempt for contemporary America may originate in his admiration of how the Founding Fathers handled human nature. At least the founders, Vidal seems to say in this sinuous essay, were not hypocrites disclaiming interest in power; rather, they made an honest attempt in the original Constitution to restrain what they saw as politicians' inevitable appetites for ambition and avarice. Long fascinated with the behind-the-scenes aspects of politics in the 1780s and 1790s, Vidal muses on Alexander Hamilton's machinations against John Adams and analyzes similar political sleights of hand by Jefferson, Aaron Burr, John Marshall, and James Madison. Along with these characteristically brilliant and acerbic reflections on power and personality, Vidal offers a generally positive portrayal of Washington, taking time to note how the Father of His Country looked with his wooden teeth. This entertaining and enlightening reappraisal of the founders is a must for buffs of American civilization and its discontents." - Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

Ishmael (Bantam, 1995)

2008-11-11T14:07:00.000-08:00

" ... The trick is to get outside the cultural mind-set of Western culture, the Taker culture, which permeates "civilized" societies all over the world, of whatever race, religion, language, or other idiosyncrasies. The Taker culture, as expressed in Ishmael , is based upon the fundamental premise that the world was made for man. If you accept that premise, which our culture most certainly does, than it follows that the Earth "belongs to us and we can do what we damn well please with it." This, of course, is the mythology of our culture, so embedded that we don't even perceive it as a "myth" but perceive rather as an inherent truth that never even needs to be mentioned, much less defended. The dominant myth of anthropocentrism is expressed in the tacit assumption of Western culture that the end of man is to grow "forever" and dominate the Earth with his technological marvels and sheer numbers. "You hear this fifty times a day... Man is conquering the deserts, man is conquering the oceans, man is conquering the atom, man is conquering the elements, man is conquering outer space," Ishmael tells us. "The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it." As a result, mankind is trying to live in a way that is plainly not sustainable over the long run. What Ishmael successfully points out is that this viewpoint is not the only possible one to take in human life and culture, and that in fact there are cultures - dubbed by Ishmael as Leaver cultures - which have enacted a different story. The dominant mythology of anthropocentrism isn't necessary to be human, it is only happens to be ingrained in a culture "which casts mankind as the enemy of the world." - Harold Wood, Jr.

An Enemy of the People (Dover Thrift, 1999)

2008-11-08T14:07:00.000-08:00

"The townspeople - eagerly awaiting the prosperity that the baths are believed will bring - refuse to accept Stockmann's claims, as his friends and allies, who had explicitly given support for his campaign, turn against him en masse. He is taunted and denounced as a lunatic, an "Enemy of the People." In a scathing rebuke of both the Victorian notion of community and the principles of democracy, Dr. Stockmann proclaims that in matters of right and wrong, the individual is superior to the multitude, which is easily led by self-advancing demagogues. Stockmann sums up Ibsen's denunciation of the masses, with the memorable quote "...the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone." - Wikipedia

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/aeotp10.txt

Yakuza (University of California Press, 2003)

2008-11-05T14:06:00.000-08:00

"Known for their striking full-body tattoos and severed fingertips, Japan's gangsters comprise a criminal class eighty thousand strong--more than four times the size of the American Mafia. Despite their criminal nature, the yakuza are accepted by fellow Japanese to a degree guaranteed to shock most Westerners. Here is the first book to reveal the extraordinary reach of Japan's Mafia. Originally published in 1986, Yakuza was so controversial in Japan that it could not be published there for five years. But in the West it has long served as the standard reference on Japanese organized crime, inspiring novels, screenplays, and criminal investigations. David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro spent nearly two decades conducting hundreds of interviews with everyone from street-level hoodlums and police to Japan's most powerful godfathers. The result is a searing indictment of corruption in the world's second-largest economy. This updated, expanded, and thoroughly revised edition of Yakuza tells the full story of Japan's remarkable crime syndicates, from their feudal start as bands of medieval outlaws to their emergence as billion-dollar investors in real estate, big business, art, and more". - Amazon

Media Control (Open Media, 2002)

2008-11-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

P. 11 - "... the first modern government propaganda operation ... was under the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform "Peace Without Victory." That was right in the middle of the World War I. The population was extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. The Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world. That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. Right at that time and after the war the same techniques were used to whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of the press and freedom of political thought. There was very strong support from the media, from the business establishment, which in fact organized, pushed much of this work, and it was, in general, a great success.
Among those who participated actively and enthusiastically in Wilson's war were the progressive intellectuals, people of the John Dewey circle, who took great pride, as you can see from their own writings at the time, in having shown that what they called the "more intelligent members of the community," namely, themselves, were able to drive a reluctant population into a war by terrifying them and eliciting jingoist fanaticism. The means that were used were extensive. For example, there was a good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns, Belgian babies with their arms torn off, all sorts of awful things that you still read in history books. Much of it was invented by the British propaganda ministry, whose own commitment at the time, as they put it in their secret deliberations, was "to direct the thought of most of the world." But more crucially they wanted to control the thought of the more intelligent members of the community in the United States, who would then disseminate the propaganda that they were concocting and convert the pacifistic country to wartime hysteria. That worked. It worked very well. And it taught a lesson: State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day."

P. 14 - "Now there are two "functions" in a democracy: The specialized class, the responsible men, carry out the executive function, which means they do the thinking and planning and understand the common interests. Then, there is the bewildered herd, and they have a function in democracy too. Their function in a democracy, he said, is to be "spectators," not participants in action. But they have more of a function r than that, because it's a democracy. Occasionally they are allowed to lend their weight to one or another member of the specialized class. In other words, they're allowed to say, "We want you to be our leader" or "We want you to be our leader." That's because it's a democracy and not a totalitarian state. That's called an election. But once they've lent their weight to one or another member of the specialized class they're supposed to sink back and become spectators of action, but not participants. That's in a properly functioning democracy. And there's a logic behind it. There's even a kind of compelling moral principle behind it. The compelling moral principle is that the mass of the public are just too stupid to be able to understand things. If they try to participate in managing their own affairs, they're just going to cause trouble. Therefore, it would be immoral and improper to permit them to do this. We have to tame the bewildered herd, not allow the bewildered herd to rage and trample and destroy things. It's pretty much the same logic that says that it would be improper to let a three-year-old run across the street. You don't give a three-year-old that kind of freedom because the three-year-old doesn't know how to handle that freedom. Correspondingly, you don't allow the bewildered herd to become participants in action. They'll just cause trouble. So we need something to tame the bewildered herd, and that something is this new revolution in the art of democracy: the manufacture of consent. The media, the schools, and popular culture have to be divided. For the political class and the decision makers they have to provide them some tolerable sense of reality, although they also have to instill the proper beliefs. Just remember, there is an unstated premise here. The unstated premise-and even the responsible men have to disguise this from themselves-has to do with the question of how they get into the position where they have the authority to make decisions. The way they do that, of course, is by serving people with real power. The people with real power are the ones who own the society, which is a pretty narrow group. If the specialized class can come along and say, I can serve your interests, then they'll be part of the executive group. You've got to keep that quiet. That means they have to have instilled in them the beliefs and doctrines that will serve the interests of private power. Unless they can master that skill, they're not part of the specialized class. So we have one kind of educational system directed to the responsible men, the specialized class. They have to be deeply indoctrinated in the values and interests of private power and the state-corporate nexus that represents it. If they can achieve that, then they can be part of the specialized class. The rest of the bewildered herd basically just have to be distracted. Turn their attention to something else. Keep them out of trouble. Make sure that they remain at most spectators of action, occasionally lending their weight to one or another of the real leaders, who they may select among."

P. 16 - "This point of view has been developed by lots of other people. In fact, it's pretty conventional. For example, the leading theologian and foreign policy critic Reinhold Niebuhr, sometimes called "the theologian of the establishment," the guru of George Kennan and the Kennedy intellectuals, put it that rationality is a very narrowly restricted skill. Only a small number of people have it. Most people are guided by just emotion and impulse. Those of us who have rationality have to create "necessary illusions" and emotionally potent "oversimplifications" to keep the naive simpletons more or less on course. This became a substantial part of contemporary political science. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Harold Lasswell, the founder of the modern field of communications and one of the leading American political scientists, explained that we should not succumb to "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests." Because they're not. We're the best judges of the public interests. Therefore, just out of ordinary morality, we have to make sure that they don't have an opportunity to act on the basis of their misjudgments. In what is nowadays called a totalitarian state, or a military state, it's easy. You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, and if they get out of line you smash them over the head. But as society has become more free and democratic, you lose that capacity. Therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear. Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. That's wise and good because, again, the common interests elude the bewildered herd. They can't figure them out."

P. 22 - "That's the point. The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don't want people to think about that issue. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about. So you have people arguing about support for the troops? "Of course I don't not support them. " Then you've won. That's like Americanism and harmony. We're all together, empty slogans, let's join in, let's make sure we don't have these bad people around to disrupt our harmony with their talk about class struggle, rights and that sort of business."

P. 28 - "That's one conception of democracy. In fact, going back to the business community, the last legal victory for labor really was 1935, the Wagner Act. After the war came, the unions declined as did a very rich working class culture that was associated with the unions. That was destroyed. We moved to a business-run society at a remarkable level. This is the only state-capitalist industrial society which doesn't have even the normal social contract that you find in comparable societies. Outside of South Africa, I guess, this is the only industrial society that doesn't have national health care. There's no general commitment to even minimal standards of survival for the parts of the population who can't follow those rules and gain things for themselves individually. Unions are virtually nonexistent. Other forms of popular structure are virtually nonexistent. There are no political parties or organizations. It's a long way toward the ideal, at least structurally. The media are a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn't even bother voting because it looks meaningless. They're marginalized and properly distracted. At least that's the goal. The leading figure in the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, actually came out of the Creel Commission. He was part of it, learned his lessons there and went on to develop what he called the "engineering of consent," which he described as "the essence of democracy. " The people who are able to engineer consent are the ones who have the resources and the power to do it-the business community-and that's who you work for."

P. 33 - "Voters in the 1984 "Reagan landslide," by about three to two, hoped that his policies would not be enacted. If you take particular programs, like armaments, cutting back on social spending, etc., almost every one of them was overwhelmingly opposed by the public. But as long as people are marginalized and distracted and have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments, people who said that they prefer social spending to military spending, who gave that answer on polls, as people overwhelmingly did, assumed that they were the only people with that crazy idea in their heads. They never heard it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. Therefore, if you do think it and you answer it in a poll, you just assume that you're sort of weird. Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl."

The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin, 2002)

2008-10-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

"Controversial, even shocking, when it was written, the work continues to be so even today ... because it poses fundamental questions about justice, the ownership and stewardship of the land, the role of government, power, and the very foundations of capitalist society" - Nancy Paul

"One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the West. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I'm alone and I am bewildered. In the night one family camps in a ditch and other family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here's the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate — "we lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from his first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing; "I have a little food" plus "I have none". If from this problem the sum is "we have a little food", the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two-men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mothers blanket — take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning — from "I" to "we".

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we"."

Desert Solitaire (Touchstone, 1990)

2008-10-27T14:04:00.000-07:00

"Like a ride on a bucking bronco . . . rough, tough, combative. The author is a rebel and an eloquent loner. His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book . . . set down in a lean, racing prose, in a close-knit style of power and beauty."-- The New York Times Book Review

"Wilderness. The word itself is music. Wilderness, wilderness . . . We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination."

"But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need--if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us--if only we were worthy of it."

"Even if the reservation could attract and sustain large- scale industry heavy or light, which it cannot, what have the Navajos to gain by becoming factory hands, lab technicians and office clerks? The Navajos are people, not personnel; nothing in their nature or tradition has prepared them to adapt to the regimentation of application forms and time clock. To force them into the machine would require a Procrustean mutilation of their basic humanity. Consciously or unconsciously, the typical Navajo senses this unfortunate truth, resists the compulsory miseducation offered by the Bureau, hangs on to his malnourished horses and cannibalized automobiles, works when he feels like it and quits when he has enough money for a party or the down payment on a new pickup. He fulfills other obligations by getting his wife and kids installed securely on the public welfare rolls. Are we to condemn him for this? Caught in a no-man's land between two worlds the Navajo takes what advantage he can of the white man's system--the radio, the pickup truck, the welfare--while clinging to the liberty and dignity of his old way of life. Such a man would rather lie drunk in the gutters of Gallup, New Mexico, a disgrace to his tribe and his race, than button on a clean white shirt and spend the best part of his life inside an air- conditioned office building with windows that cannot be opened. Even if he wanted to join the American middle class (and some Indians do wish to join and have done so) the average Navajo suffers from a handicap more severe than skin color, the language barrier or insufficient education: his acquisitive instinct is poorly developed. He lacks the drive to get ahead of his fellows or to figure out ways and means of profiting from other people's labor. Coming from a tradition which honors sharing and mutual aid above private interest, the Navajo thinks it somehow immoral for one man to prosper while his neighbors go without. . . . Among these people a liberal hospitality is taken for granted and selfishness regarded with horror. Shackled by such primitive attitudes, is it any wonder that the Navajos have not yet been able to get in step with the rest of us?"

"No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs -- anything -- but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly."

"Teamwork, that's what made America what it is today. Teamwork and initiative. The survey crew had done their job; I would do mine. For about five miles I followed the course of their survey back toward headquarters, and as I went I pulled up each little wooden stake and threw it away, and cut all the bright ribbons from the bushes and hid them under a rock. A futile effort, in the long run, but it made me feel good. Then I went home to the trailer, taking a shortcut over the bluffs."

"A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it's there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis."

This may seem, at the moment, like a fantastic thesis. Yet history demonstrates that personal liberty is a rare and precious thing, that all societies tend toward the absolute until attack from without or collapse from within breaks up the social machine and makes freedom and innovation again possible. Technology adds a new dimension to the process by providing modern despots with instruments far more efficient than any available to their classical counterparts. Surely it is no accident that the most thorough of tyrannies appeared in Europe's most thoroughly scientific and industrialized nation. If we allow our own country to become as densely populated, overdeveloped and technically unified as modern Germany we may face a similar fate.

The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with the technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism. Rural insurrections can then be suppressed only by bombing and burning villages and countryside so thoroughly that the mass of the population is forced to take refuge in the cities, there the people are then policed and if necessary starved into submission. The city, which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp. This is one of the significant discoveries of contemporary political science.

How does this theory apply to the present and future of the famous United States of North America? Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people -- the following preparations would be essential:

1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste.

2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment.

3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations.

4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals.

5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority.

6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order.

7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns.

8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots."

"Culture, we agreed, means the way of life of any given human society considered as a whole. It is an anthropological term referring always to specific, identifiable societies localized in history and place, and includes all aspects of such organizations - their economy, their art, their religion. The U.S.A., for example, is not a civilization but a culture, as is the U.S.S.R., and both are essentially industrial cultures, the former in the mode of monopoly capitalism, the latter in the mode of state socialism; if they seem to be competing against each other it is not because they are different but because they are basically so much alike; and the more they compete the more alike they become: MERGING TRAFFIC AHEAD. Civilization on the other hand, while undoubtedly a product of various historical cultures, and as a category one which overlaps what we label culture, is by no means identical with culture. Cultures can exist with little or no trace of civilization; and usually do; but civilization while dependent upon culture for its sustenance, as the mind depends upon the body, is a semi-independent entity, precious and fragile, drawn through history by the finest threads of art and idea, a process or series of events without formal structure or clear location in time and space. It is the conscious forefront of evolution, the brotherhood of great souls and the comradeship of intellect, a corpus mysticum, The Invisible Republic open to all who wish to participate, a democratic aristocracy based not on power or institutions but on isolated men - Lao-Tse, Chuang-Tse, Guatama, Diogenes, Euripides, Socrates, Jesus, Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, Paine and Jefferson, Blake and Burns and Beethoven, John Brown and Henry Thoreau, Whitman, Tolstoy, Emerson, Mark Twain, Rabelais and Villon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Spartacus, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, Lucretius and Pope John XXIII, and ten thousand other poets, revolutionaries and independent spirits, both famous and forgotten, alive and dead, whose heroism gives to human life on earth its adventure, glory and significance."

The White Rose (Synergy International, 2007)

2008-10-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

One of Traven's more obscure books, but one of his best, The White Rose chronicles the life of a communal farm, and what happens to it when big business interests looking to drill oil on it insist on having the land. Written about Mexico near the turn of the previous century, its criticisms are still valid in most parts of the world today.

"We all are poor people, and we delight in the machine, in the airplane, the radio precisely because we have lost our attachment to the soil. This loss leaves us apathetic and distracted. That's why we need gasoline - to anesthetize us, to make us insensible of our loss, of our pain, gasoline that deludes us with speed so that we can flee all the quicker from ourselves and the needs of the heart."

"No king, no president, no group of capitalists, will hatch a war without justifying it on the grounds that it serves the common good and cannot be avoided for this or that reason, and that the nation's standing in the eyes of other peoples, hence honor, requires the war. Without a moral justification no war is begun. And finding a good excuse is the first task of those who think a war is needed. The more believable the excuse, the surer the result in all actions requiring the co-operation or toleration of other men."

Down And Out In Paris And London (Harvest Books, 1972)

2008-10-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

Orwell's tale of working 17-hour days as a dishwasher (plongeur) in Paris, and starving as a bookstore assistant (and then a tramp living in a shelter) in London, is a marvelous read, and is worth it if only for the fact that T.S. Eliot pointedly rejected it's publication.

"At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning."

http://www.george-orwell.org/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London/index.html

The Man Who Planted Trees

2008-10-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

http://home.infomaniak.ch/arboretum/Man_Tree.htm

The Jungle (See Sharp Press, 2003)

2008-10-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

Upton Sinclair said about his book, ""I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach." The primary intention of his book was to call attention to labor abuses, which it did to some degree, but the greater (and more unintentional) effect was to tighten up safety and cleanliness standards in meat packing plants. Either way it is a classic piece of muckraking and a must-read for any American.

"Here is a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances, immorality is exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it is under the system of chattel slavery."

"In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power."

War Is A Racket (Feral House, 2003)

2008-10-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

War Is A Racket is a rare testimonial from a U.S. general who, as he puts it, "made the world safe for business interests", which grew out of his response to being approached by those same business interests to head a fascist coup to take over America (he turned the plotters in to the House Un-American Activities Committee).

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows."

"There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making. Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?"

"Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars. It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people -- who do not profit."

"Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people -- didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn't much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent. Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump -- or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year! Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad."

"A few profit -- and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation -- it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted -- to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get. Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches! Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds. Why shouldn't they? They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are! Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else."

Good-bye Chunky Rice (Pantheon, 2006)

2008-10-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

Bittersweet story of love, loneliness and growing up, in graphic novel form. Good for all ages.

The Little Prince (Harvest Books, 2000)

2008-10-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

"The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence. Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one--a heartfelt exposition of sadness and solitude, which never turns into Peter Pan-style treacle. Such delicacy of tone can present real headaches for a translator, and in her 1943 translation, Katherine Woods sometimes wandered off the mark, giving the text a slightly wooden or didactic accent. Happily, Richard Howard (who did a fine nip-and-tuck job on Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma in 1999) has streamlined and simplified to wonderful effect. The result is a new and improved version of an indestructible classic, which also restores the original artwork to full color. "Trying to be witty," we're told at one point, "leads to lying, more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful." -- James Marcus

"If you were to say to the grown-ups: "I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof," they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: "I saw a house that cost $20,000." Then they would exclaim: "Oh, what a pretty house that is!"

http://wikilivres.info/wiki/index.php/The_Little_Prince

Letters from the Earth (NuVision Publications, 2008)

2008-10-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of historical evidence to indicate that Samuel Clemens was a repressed man, never truly communicating the depths of his disillusion with society, and was henpecked by his wife into acting the court jester that the upper classes loved and rewarded him for being. Near the end of his life, with his wife dead and gone, the truth finally started to come out with this biting criticism and satire of religion and general human hypocrisy.

from Satan's Letter - "This is a strange place, and extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at is worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God." This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it. Moreover -- if I may put another strain upon you -- he thinks he is the Creator's pet. He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance. I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven!"

from Letter XI - "Human history in all ages is red with blood, and bitter with hate, and stained with cruelties; but not since Biblical times have these features been without a limit of some kind. Even the Church, which is credited with having spilt more innocent blood, since the beginning of its supremacy, than all the political wars put together have spilt, has observed a limit. A sort of limit. But you notice that when the Lord God of Heaven and Earth, adored Father of Man, goes to war, there is no limit. He is totally without mercy -- he, who is called the Fountain of Mercy. He slays, slays, slays! All the men, all the beasts, all the boys, all the babies; also all the women and all the girls, except those that have not been deflowered."

http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/twain/letearth.htm

Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited (Harper Perennial, 2005)

2008-10-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

Like all the famous dystopia novels, Huxley's world did not come to pass verbatim, but you can see elements of it that have manifested themselves in reality - a Soma-taking public concerned wholly with self-pleasure, the increased alienation and breakdown of family and community, focus on consumption as the purpose of life, and a general "televized" populace largely disconnected from the world and uncaring about what is going on around them.

As Neil Postman put it - "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."

Chapter 1 - "And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue— liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."

Chapter 3 - "Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games."

The Mask of Sanity (?, 1982)

2008-09-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

First written in 1941 by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity is a theory of how the psychopathic mind works as a result of numerous interviews with incarcerated psycopaths. The book exposes psycopaths as being far from stereotypically "crazy", but in actuality quite charming, personable and mentally sharp, only they work toward nothing but causing suffering to both themselves and others. The original edition is no longer available, but an expanded version was published in 1982.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/07/the_mask_of_sanity.html

Prison Nation (Routledge, 2002)

2008-09-26T13:58:00.000-07:00

Prison Nation is a sort of literary anthology, covering similar themes to what is seen in The Perpetual Prisoner Machine. In a series of short essays, writers such as George Winslow, Noam Chomsky, Alex Friedman and Mumia Abu-Jamal explore the prison-industrial complex, expose the abuses regularly occuring in prisons, and take on the idea that "corrections" as they stand are actually correcting much of anything.

P 23 - "The government's resources and power so dramatically outweigh those of the accused that prosecutors, rather than scrutinizing their own behavior to guard against abuses of power, habitually focus only on their win-loss record and its political consequences."

P 58 - "The so-called drug war started in the 1980s and it was aimed directly at the black population. None of this has anything to do with drugs. It has to do with controlling and criminalizing dangerous populations ... Poor black males are criminalized the most by the drug war ... What about the population that is declining in earnings and jobs? They're frightened. The more you can increase the fear of drugs and crime and welfare mothers and immigrants and aliens and poverty and all sorts of things, the more you control people. Make them hate each other. Be frightened of each other and think that the other is stealing from them. If you do that then you control people. And that's just what the drug war does."

P 121 - "For all these employers (TWA, AT&T, Starbucks, Honda, Microsoft and Toys 'R Us), what's so attractive about using prison labor is precisely that it undoes everything that union members - and their parents and grandparents before them - have fought so hard to achieve."

P 137 - "Whether private versus public prisons are 'better' is largely immaterial and irrelevant. It is like comparing rotten oranges to rotten apples from the prisoner's perspective. But, at least in public prisons, when prisoners are raped due to inadequate staffing, transport vans burst into flames killing the occupants due to poor maintenance, or prisoners are held past their release dates, no one can say prison officials did so to line their own pockets and personally profit from the misery of others. With private prisons, most shortcomings can be traced to a conscious decision to enhance the company's bottom line. After all, the purpose of private prison companies is to make money for their owners, and not to promote public safety, rehabilitate prisoners, protect the public, or ensure a safe working environment for their staff or the safekeeping of their charges. If that happens it is a mere by-product of the goal of making money."

http://books.google.com/books?id=P3o1RdcJlmYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=prison+nation&sig=ACfU3U2beCYwjwgg958zzuioZdb49zuvYA

The Corporation (Free Press, 2004)

2008-09-23T12:51:00.000-07:00

Joel Bakan's book compares corporate behavior to that of a sociopath, and finds that given the legal mandate of the corporation - to infinitely expand in order to make profit for the shareholders - it can actually function no other way, and if a corporate leader tries to change it, they will inevitably have to be removed. A fascinating look at the dominant financial power in the world today.

p. 5 "Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to become the world's dominant economic institution. Today, corporations govern our lives. They determine what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we work, and what we do. We are inescapably surrounded by their culture, iconography, and ideology. And, like the church and monarchy in other times, they posture as infallible and omnipotent, glorifying themselves in imposing buildings and elaborate displays. Increasingly, corporations dictate the decisions of their supposed overseers in government and control domains of society once firmly embedded within the public sphere. The corporation's dramatic rise to dominance is one of the remarkable events of modern history"

p. 14 " ... with most meaningful constraints on mergers and acquisitions gone, a large number of small and medium-size corporations were very quickly absorbed into a small number of very large ones - 1,800 corporations were consolidated into 157 between 1898 and 1904. In less than a decade the U.S. economy had been transformed from one in which individually owned enterprises competed freely amongst themselves into one dominated by a relatively few huge corporations, each owned by many shareholders. The era of corporate capitalism had begun."

p. 18 "By the end of World War I, some of America's leading corporations ... were busily crafting images of themselves as benevolent and socially responsible. 'New Capitalism', the term used to describe the trend, softened corporations' images with promises of good corporate citizenship and practices of better wages and working conditions. As citizens demanded that governments rein in corporate power and while labor militancy was rife, with returning World War I veterans, having risked their lives as soldiers, insisting upon better treatment as workers, proponents of the New Capitalism sought to demonstrate that corporations could be good without the coercive push of governments and unions."

p. 20 "Despite corporate leaders claims that they were capable of regulating themselves, in 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New Deal, a package of regulatory reforms designed to restore economic health by, among other things, curbing the powers and freedoms of corporations. As the first systematic attempt to regulate corporations and the foundation of the modern regulatory state, the New Deal was reviled by many business leaders at the time and even prompted a small group of them to plot a coup to overthrow Roosevelt's administration ... The spirit of the New Deal, along with many of its regulatory regimes, nevertheless prevailed. For fifty years following its creation, through World War II, the postwar era, and the 1960s and 1970s, the growing power of corporations was offset, at least in part, by continued expansion of government regulation, trade unions, and social programs. Then, much as steam engines and railways had combined with new laws and ideologies to create the corporate behemoth one hundred years earlier, a new convergence of technology, law, and ideology - economic globalization - reversed the trend toward greater regulatory control of corporations and vaulted the corporation to unprecedented power and influence."

p 34-35 "Friedman thinks that corporations are good for society and that too much government is bad. He recoils, however, at the idea that corporations should try to do good for society. 'A corporation is the property of its stockholders,' he told me. 'Its interests are the interests of its stockholders.' ... There is but one 'social responsibility' for corporate executives, Friedman believes: they must make as much money as possible for their shareholders. This is a moral imperative. Executives who choose social and environmental goals over profits - who try to act morally - are, i fact, immoral. There is, however, one instance when corporate social responsibility can be tolerated, according to Friedman - when it is insincere."

p 45 "Unlike a refusal to drill on the coastal plain, BP's green initiatives to date have been relatively inexpensive, designed to enhance performance and yield short- and long-term benefits that outweigh their costs. BP met its commitment to implement the Kyoto Protocol's standards, for example, at no net cost to itself. Other BP programs, such as solar-powered gas stations, school programs, and urban clean air initiatives have similarly helped the company bolster its green image at little cost. The benefits to BP of these initiatives are obvious. As Browne says, they create a corporate image that serves as a source of competitive advantage over other companies, giving consumers of oil and gas a greener alternative."

p 47-48 "Pfizer can write off the free drugs as charitable donations and thus save itself money at tax time ... Doctors Without Borders estimates that U.S. taxpayers spend four times as much money to donate fluconazole to South Africa through tax benefits to drug companies as they would to send the drugs to South Africans through aid programs (assuming companies sold the drugs to governments at reduced prices) ... when Doctors Without Borders set up its trachoma treatment program in the African country of Mali, it said "No, thank you" to Pfizer's offer of free Zithromax. Instead it imported, and paid for, a generic version of the drug. Thus, the organization's Rachel Cohen explained, "If Pfizer decides one day to just leave the country or do away with its program or cut back for some reason ... we can ensure the drug remains available for the people that need it in the country."

p 55 "The managers who do these things are not monsters, Roddick says. They may be kind and caring people ... Yet ... they compartmentalize their lives. They are allowed, often compelled, by the corporation's culture to disassociate themselves from their own values - the corporation, according to Roddick, 'stops people from having a sense of empathy with the human condition ... The language of business is not the language of the soul or the language of humanity ... It is fashioning a schizophrenia in many of us."

p 57-58 "The corporation itself may not so easily escape the psychopath diagnosis, however ... it ... is singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context. Not surprisingly, then, when we asked Dr. Hare to apply his diagnostic checklist of psychopathic traits to the corporation's institutional character, he found there was a close match. The corporation is *irresponsible*, Dr. Hare said, because "in an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is put at risk." Corporations try to "*manipulate* everything, including public opinion, and they are *grandiose*, always insisting "that we're number one, we're the best." A *lack of empathy* and *asocial tendencies* are also key characteristics of the corporation, says Hare - "their behavior indicates they don't really concern themselves with their victims"; and corporations often *refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions* and are *unable to feel remorse*: "if they get caught breaking the law, they pay big fines and they ... continue doing what they did before anyway. And in fact in many cases the fines and the penalties paid by the organization are trivial compared to the profits that they rake in."

p 66-67 "Kernaghan struck gold on one of his garbage dump forays when, in the Dominican Republic, he found copies of Nike's internal pricing documents in a box that had been left by one of the garbage trucks ... Their purpose was to maximize the amount of profit that could be wrung out of the girls and young women who sew garments for Nike in developing-world sweatshops ... 8 cents worth of labor for a shirt Nike sells in the United States for $22.99. 'The science of exploitation' is how Kernaghan describes the pricing documents. Their cold calculations, he says, mask the suffering and misery of the work they demand. The typical factory Kernaghan visits in a country such as Honduras or Nicaragua, China or Bangladesh, is surrounded by barbed wire. Behind its locked doors, mainly young women workers are supervised by guards who beat and humiliate them on the slightest pretext and who fire them if a forced pregnancy test comes back positive."

p 69 "The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit. That is its only legitimate mandate. From that perspective, Wendy Diaz, and the millions of other workers across the globe who are driven by poverty and starvation to work in dreadful conditions for shocking wages, are not human beings so much as human 'resources'. To the morally blind corporation, they are tools to generate as much profit as possible."

p 72 "We're all sinners" says Anderson today of his position as a corporate chief. "Someday people like me will end up in jail."

p 74-75 "Despite the Fair Labor Standards Act's clear injunctions against them, sweatshops exist in North America, and every one of them is a fire disaster waiting to happen ... Sixty-five percent of all apparel operations in New York City are sweatshops. Fifty thousand workers. Forty-five hundred factories out of seven thousand ... Los Angeles is no better. The southern end of the city houses America's, and perhaps the world's, largest concentration of garment sweatshops, staffed by some one hundred and sixty thousand workers, many of them illegal, and thus powerless, immigrants."

p 87 "After a brief exchange of pleasantries, MacGuire told Butler he had been sent by a group of businessmen to ask the general to raise an army, seize the White House, and install himself as fascist dictator of the United States. Many business leaders at the time found fascism attractive, especially when they compared it to the 'class hatred ... preached from the White House' as Herbert Hoover characterized Roosevelt's New Deal. Benito, Mussolini and Hitler had slashed the public debt, curbed inflation, driven down wages, and taken control of the trade unions ... Roosevelt, on the other hand, had turned traitor to his class"

p 111 "It was one of the worst things I've seen in my lifetime." Carlton Brown, a normally unflappable commodities broker, was deeply troubled by what he had seen on September 11, 2001. "All I could think about was getting them the hell out," he says. "Before the building collapsed, all we were thinking was, let's get those clients out" - out of the gold market, that is. Brown was mainly concerned about clients who might get trapped in the gold market, which he knew would close once the World Trade Center towers collapsed. When the airplanes hit the towers, says Brown, "the first thing you thought about was 'Well, how much is gold up?'" Fortunately, he says, "in the next couple of days we got them all out ... everybody doubled their money." September 11 "was a blessing in disguise, devastating, you know, crushing, heart-shattering. But ... for my clients that were in the gold market, they all made money," he says. "In devastation there is opportunity. It's all about creating wealth."

p 121-122 "The fate of entire corporate empires could depend upon marketers' abilities to get children to nag their parents effectively. "With McDonalds," for example, says Hughes, "parents wouldn't be going there unless their child nags." Chuck E. Cheese's? "Oh my goodness," says Hughes. "It's so noisy, and there's so many kids. Why would I want to spend two hours there?"

p 128 "Corporations have even infiltrated school curricula with curriculum kits, usually offered to schools for free, that promote their products (such as the school program on nutrition sponsored by McDonalds that uses a Big Mac to illustrate the four food groups); and their perspectives (such as Proctor & Gamble's classroom Decision Earth program, which states that 'clear-cutting removes all trees ... to create new habitats for wildlife. P&G uses this economically and environmentally sound method because it most closely mimics nature's own processes. Clear cutting also opens the floor to sunshine, thus stimulating growth and providing food for animals."

p 139 "Yet history humbles the dominant institutions. Great empires, the church, monarchy, the Communist parties of Eastern Europe were all overthrown, diminished, or absorbed into new orders. It is unlikely that the corporation will be the first dominant institution to defy history. It has failed to solve, and has indeed worsened, some of the world's most pressing problems: poverty, war, environmental destruction, ill health."

p 152 "More generally, the democratic system as a whole ill serves its animating ideals. Broad public participation in self-government is absent, as people's participation is limited to occasional voting, and close to half the population does not even do that; politicians are unduly pressured and influenced by corporate money and increasingly deprived of meaningful decision-making powers, as deregulation and privatization roll back government's domain; the public sphere is shrinking, and social inequality is rampant. Despite all of this, however, as Chomsky states, "Whatever one thinks of governments, they're to some extent publicly accountable, to a limited extent. Corporations are to a zero extent ... One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power."

The Skeptic's Dictionary

2008-09-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

The Skeptic's Dictionary is a compendium of tall tales, folk beliefs, urban legends and other non-fact-based beliefs, up to and including religions, and its job is to point out the factual contradictions and non-facts these social constructs are based on. Very interesting reading.

In The Absence Of The Sacred (Sierra Club Books, 1991)

2008-09-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

Author Jerry Mander started out writing two books - one about the decimation of Indian culture, the other about how television shapes society - and soon found out they were really about the same thing.

p. 3 - "I only began to glimpse the problem during the 1960s when I saw how excited our society became about the presumed potentials of television ... A kind of war developed for access to this powerful new instrument that spoke pictures into the brains of the whole population, but the outcome was predetermined. We should have realized it was a foregone conclusion that TV technology would inevitably be controlled by corporations, the government and the military. Because of the technology's geographic scale, its cost, the astounding power of its imagery, and its ability to homogenize thought, behavior and culture, large corporations found television uniquely efficient for ingraining a way of life that served (and still serves) their interests."

p. 6 - "According to Cultural Survival, the Boston-based human rights organization, there are at least 3,000 native nations in the world today that continue to function within the boundaries of the 200-odd countries that assert sovereignty over them. Many wars that our media describe as 'civil wars' or 'guerilla insurgencies' are actually attempts by tribal nations to free themselves of the domination of larger nation-states. In Guatemala, it's the Mayans. In Burma, it's the Karens. In the Amazon, it's the Yanomamo and the Xingu, among others. In Micronesia, it's the Belauans. In Indonesia, it's the peoples of Irian Jaya."

p. 20 - "By the time I was thirteen or fourteen I became obsessed with the possibility of nuclear war. I kept imagining nuclear explosions with my family being ripped apart. What a stupid situation. Here I was at the beginning of my life and already the thought of annihilation was foremost in my mind. A tremendous amount of my emotional and intellectual attention revolved around how to live my life, given the existence of this one piece of technology. Worst of all, no one seemed able to talk about it - not my school, not my family, not the media. It was a profound technological experience shared by everyone in the United States and in most other parts of the world, but each person went through it alone."

p. 22 - "Ronald Reagan was the voice of the General Electric ad campaigns of that era. Years later, when he was president, Reagan employed the same kind of optimistic, expectant rhetoric. Hearing him speak of the wonderful things his Star Wars scheme would achieve, I heard the same style and many of the same words from the commercial imagery of the post-WWII period. In fact, Reagan's success may be explained in part by his connection to that optimistic time; everyone who is over thirty today grew up with that rhetoric ringing in his or her ears. It was cheerful, it created positive imagery, and it came at a time when amazing things really did seem possible."

p. 22 - "The new value system that was sold in the forties and fifties was designed to fuel the most massive expansion of the U.S. industrial and marketing sectors in history. The 'American way of life' became an advertising theme; it drew an explicit equation between how much you consumed and how American you were."

p. 26 - "As for leisure, I believe that what passes for leisure in our society is actually time-filling: watching television or buying things ... people such as Ivan Illich have said that if you include the time needed to earn money to pay for and repair all the expensive 'time-saving' gadgets in our lives, modern technology actually deprives us of time."

p. 35 - "What's more, the new machines actually do what they promise to do, leaving us feeling pleased and impressed. It is not until much later, after a technology has been around for awhile ... that societies ... begin to realize that a Faustian bargain has been made."

p. 35-36 "A prime example is nuclear energy, which cannot possibly move society in a democratic direction, but *will* move society in an autocratic direction. Because it is so expensive and dangerous, nuclear energy must be under the direct control of centralized financial, government and military institutions ... The existence of nuclear energy, and nuclear weaponry, in turn requires the existence of what Ralph Nader calls a new 'priesthood' - a technical and military elite capable of guarding nuclear waste products for the approximately 250,000 years that they remain dangerous. So if some future society, tiring of the present path ... should determine to move ... toward an agrarian society, it would be impossible. The technical elite would need to remain, if only to deal with the various wastes left behind. So it is fair to say that nuclear technology inherently steers society toward greater political and financial centralization, and greater militarization."

p. 40 "... our minds were being channeled and simplified to match the channeled and simplified physical environment - suburbs, malls, freeways, high-rise buildings - that also characterized the period (and continue to do so today) ... As a result people would become more passive, less able to deal with nuance and complexity, less able to read or create. People would get 'dumber', and have less understanding of world events even within an exploding information environment ... a new kind of leader would emerge from this process, one who fit the parameters of the medium, and who understood its language: simple, assertive, without history or context, with style superior to content. A few years later, Ronald Reagan became the personification of that prediction."

p. 56 "The utopian vision of a work-free society, in which machines do most of the work while all the humans relax, could only be realized if the economic benefits of automation and computerization were somehow shared by the workers. It would take a revolution to make this happen. For in capitalist society, the benefits are disproportionately alloted to the people who own the machines."

p. 73 " ... it is a simple fact that if there were no computers, the process of engaging in war would be much more drawn out, with a lot more time for human beings to change their minds or seek alternatives. It is only because computers exist that a virtually automatic, instant worldwide war, involving total annihilation, even enters the realm of possibility. So, can we say that computers are to blame?"

p. 92 "Ronald Reagan called MX missiles 'peacekeepers'. He said that lowering taxes on the wealthy benefited the poor, and he unabashedly claimed that massive rearming was the way to disarm. A few years later, George Bush said 'the last best chance for peace' was to declare war against Iraq, and then said 'the goal of the war is peace'. All these statements qualify as advanced 'doublespeak'. Reagan and Bush also understood the important Orwellian lesson in focusing public hatred on the repeated images of the enemy ... Reagan used Khomeni, then Khadafy, then Ortega. Bush used ... Willie Horton, then Manuel Noriega, then Saddam Hussein."

p. 93 "As with other news in the past, television's ability to deliver has been highly overrated. From the first day of the war, when CNN's Baghdad correspondents reported the bombing in the city, TV delivered very little in the way of actual war footage. This was partly due to Pentagon censorship, which prohibited reporters from going into the field except under controlled conditions, prohibited images of American dead or of body bags, permitted only scant contact with outside sources, and censored all military communiques. Reporters were essentially confined to official versions of the story."

p. 94 "Television was essentially an instrument of official policy during the first weeks of the war ... The high point was probably the 1991 Super Bowl, which was indistinguishable from a multimedia pro-war extravaganza."

p. 121 "We usually become aware of corporate behavior only when a flagrant transgression is reported in the news: the dumping of toxic wastes, the releasing of pollutants, the suppression of research regarding health effects of various products ... Even when we hear such news, our tendency is to respond as if the behaviors described stem from people within the corporate structure ... Seeing corporate behavior as rooted in the people who work within them is like believing that the problems of television are attributable solely to its program content. With corporations, as with television, the basic problems are actually structural ... inherent in the forms and rules by which these entitites are compelled to operate."

p. 122 - "Corporate 'culture' has become the virtual definition of American life, to be defended at all costs, even militarily. When Secretary of State George Schultz said in 1985 that in Nicaragua and El Salvador 'we are fighting for our way of life', it was the threat of collectivism to free enterprise and commodity culture that motivated his remarks. Conversely, when our leaders celebrate the new 'freedom' of Eastern Europe, they are really celebrating free enterprise and the market economy."

p. 125 - "The First Amendment was originally intended to protect personal speech, in a century when the only media consisted of single news-sheets, handbills and books. The net result of expanding First Amendment protection to corporate speech is that $100 billion worth of advertising from a relative handful of sources gets to dominate public perception, free from nearly all government attempts at regulation."

p. 133 - "All corporate profit is obtained by a simple formula: Profit equals the difference between the amount paid to an employee and the economic value of the employee's output, and/or the difference between the amount paid for raw materials used in production (including costs of processing) and the ultimate sales price of the processed raw materials. Karl Marx was right: A worker is not compensated for the full value of his or her labor; neither is the raw material supplier. The owners of the capital skim off part of the value as profit. Profit is based on underpayment ... the arrangement is inherently imbalanced. The owner of the capital - the corporation or the bank - always obtains additional benefit. While the worker makes a wage, the owner of the capital gets the benefit of the worker's labor, plus the surplus profit the worker produces, which is then reinvested to produce yet more surplus ... Profit is based on paying less than actual value for workers and resources. This is called exploitation."

p. 135 - "As for native societies, which celebrate an utterly nonmaterial relationship to life, the planet, and the spirit ... they are regarded as inferior and unenlightened. Backwards. We are told they envy the choices we have. To the degree these societies continue to exist, they represent a threat to the homogenization of worldwide markets and culture. Corporate society works hard to retrain such people in attitudes and values appropriate to corporate goals. But in the underdeveloped parts of the world, where corporations are just arriving, the ideological retraining process is just getting underway ... Most of this activity is funded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as agencies such as U.S. AID, the Inter-American Bank, and the Asian-American Bank, all of which serve multinational corporate enterprise."

p. 137 - "Now that we see the inherent direction of corporate activity, we must abandon the idea that corporations can reform themselves, or that a new generation of executive managers can be re-educated. We must also abandon the assumption that the form of the structure is 'neutral'. To ask corporate executives to behave in a morally defensible manner is absurd. Corporations, and the people within them, are not subject to moral behavior. They are following a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors. To ask corporations to behave otherwise is like asking an army to adopt pacifism. Form is content."

p. 156 - "For if there is a single word to describe EPCOT Center, I would say it's 'control'. The whole place is a visionary, futuristic projection of a utopian, computerized, technological police state, where human behavior is as predefined as the perfect grass lawns. It is a logical extension of the corporate vision that has been steadily evolving for decades."

p. 157 - " ... when they try to build those space utopias ... After all the money has been spent on the space program, and all the peoples of the world have been sold on it, and all the idealized controlled environments created, and all the corporate visions realized, the whole damn thing will end up functioning with the efficiency of, say, the subway or the phone company. It will work sometimes, but not always. To me this was cause for optimism: The grass always will grow up through the cracks. Nature probably will survive even if people do not. Total control never works."

p. 165 - "Of course, very few scientists ever believe themselves to be engaged in something harmful. The opposite is true ... The problem is that the media often presents these self-serving observations without offering equal time to alternative arguments. On the rare occasion when the media *does* present opposing views, there is then no public mechanism to act on the issues."

p. 214 - "Many authors, notably Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley, have stated that Western societies fear, hate, destroy and also revere Indians, precisely because they express the parts of our personal and cultural psyches that we must suppress in order to function in the world as we do ... If our society suddenly believed it was sacreligious to remove minerals from the earth, or to buy and sell land, our society would evaporate. Nor could it exist if Americans believed in an economic life organized along steady-state, collective-subsistence forms, as most Indian societies are. Therefore it is logical, normal and self-protective for Americans to find the philosophical, political and economic modes of Indian culture inappropriate and foolish."

p. 229 - "Speaking specifically of North American Indian societies, Clastres adds: "One is confronted by a vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would be called power (chiefs) are actually without power; where the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchical subordination, where no relationship of command-obedience is in force. This is the major difference of the Indian world, making it possible to speak of the American tribes as a homogenous universe despite the extreme diversity of cultures moving within it."

p. 267 - "To the people living at Big Mountain, and to all traditional Hopi and Navajo, these tribal councils are as alien as George Bush is to a Micronesian islander. In traditional Hopi and Navajo government systems there was no such thing as 'tribal councils' or any central government authority. The traditional people don't recognize the authority of these councils; instead they say the councils are artificial inventions of U.S. policy. What's really going on, say the natives, is that the U.S. and the puppet councils want to kick people off the land to make way for large-scale ranching, coal strip-mining, and uranium exploration."

p. 377 - "In explaining why it was necessary to send half a million troops and to mobilize the entire industrial world against Saddam Hussein, George Bush initially suggested that the interruption of the flow of oil, or the rise in its price, 'threatens our way of life' and 'the new world order'. This latter phrase was at first greeted with puzzlement, so Bush changed the emphasis to 'naked aggression, 'stopping another Hitler', and 'restoring the legitimate government of Kuwait.' But President Bush had already demonstrated in Panama that he was comfortable with aggression. Comparing Saddam to Hitler obviously trivialized Hitler. And calling the Kuwaiti royal family 'legitimate' rulers, when they were arbitrarily installed by British colonialists only a few decades earlier, was simply farcical. No, George Bush had it right in the first place. He *was* fighting for a new world economic order."

p. 379 - "The term 'market economics' is the catchall pop phrase that is commonly used to describe the present economic trend, but the term is wildly imprecise. The only places on the planet where a market economy truly functions now are places such as Flint, Michigan or Houston, Texas, where thousands of workers have lost their jobs because free-enterprise capital has moved to Korea, or Thailand, or Poland; or else where a small manufacturer is crushed by a multinational's larger resources; or else where an energy conglomerate invades some great wilderness to seek oil or gas; or else where the last great rainforests, protected only by ancient forest tribes, are assaulted by Western-style development. 'Market economy' is really only a public-relations term to conceal the larger global picture: the forced abandonment of local controls on development, trade, prices or lifestyle in favor of the new centrally planned economy, supervised by banks and corporations and enforced by the U.S. military."

p. 380 - "Finally, the Persian Gulf crisis revealed one more critical, hidden truth about the new economic order: It is extremely vulnerable. The mere threat to slow the flow of just one key resource, such as oil, sets the entire technological system reeling like a creature whose air supply is choked off."

p. 382 - "Living as we do now, using the resources we do, following the inherent drives of a commodity-oriented technological society, we are doomed to fail. The signs of failure are already vivid and rampant in the environment, within our social systems, and in our desperate international behavior. Still worse than the failure of this society would be its success, which would bring on something infinitely more awful: that space-bubble EPCOT-type existence and beyond that, a postbiological 'utopia'. The intrinsic logic of technological society is leading in that direction; we are already well down the road. In pursuit of this terrible technotopian dream, we inevitably chew up the societies that have already warned that this path could not work, and that want to be left out of our mad fantasies. Worst of all, these are the very people who are best equipped to help us out of our fix, if only we'd let them be and listen to what they say."

God Is Not Great : How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Books, 2006)

2008-09-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

Hitchens' indictment of religion - not just Christianity and Islam, but nearly everything else there is - asks, among other things, "Is religion child abuse?" Those forcibly inculcated by repressive religions will likely feel it has been far too long since that question was taken up seriously. The only real issue with the book is that Hitchens is speaking over the heads of most of the audience that would be well-served by this book; packed with literary references and sometimes using dense and roundabout prose, it is mostly aimed at educated people who have probably already opened up their own questions about faith. Still a worthwhile read, however.

Nickel and Dimed

2008-09-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

Comfortably upper-middle-class writer Ehrenreich takes a crack at voluntarily entering the low-wage "unskilled" workforce, attempting to live entirely off the salaries of whatever jobs she can get, and quickly makes a discovery that we all could have told her beforehand - it really sucks down here. The book is a bit less strong than it could be given Ehrenreich's cluelessness going into the situation, but it is still a damning testimony (and strongly on the side of the workers) against the system of wage slavery upon which America is built.

Abbey's Road (Penguin, 1979)

2008-09-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

Ed Abbey, roughneck author of the West, here mixes a personal narrative from adventures in Australia with ruminations and essays on the march of technocratic civilization and the death of the wilderness.

P. XVII - "Tom Wolfe's fabulous fables of American life complement nicely the current rash of full page and double page ads (tax deductible, no doubt) by corporate executives exhorting us to support tax 'reform' laws that will enable the rich to become still richer. As a sycophant to the wealthy and powerful, Tom Wolfe has no peer but William Buckley."

P. XIX - "A very good New York author once told me that whereas he was a small frog in a big puddle I was a big frog in a small puddle. How characteristic of the New Yorker to think of grim little Manhattan as the big puddle, of the American West as a small puddle."

P. XXIII - "We write in order to share, for one thing - to share ideas, discoveries, emotions. Alone, we are close to nothing. In prolonged solitude, as I've discovered, we come very close to nothingness. Too close for comfort. Through the art of language ... we communicate to others what would be intolerable to bear alone. We write as well in order to record the truth, to unfold the folded lie, to bear witness to the future of what we have known in the present, and to keep the record straight. We write, most importantly, to defend the diversity and freedom of humankind from those forces in our modern techno-industrial culture that would reduce us all, if we let them, to the status of things, objects, raw material, personnel; to the rank of subjects. One other truism. Writers write for the pleasure of it. For the sheer ecstasy of the creative moment, the creative act."

P. 35 - "For instance. Even the humblest Australian working bloke - a janitor, a shop clerk, a stenographer - gets at least a four-week vacation his or her first year on the job. With longer vacations later. The American custom of chaining working people to their jobs for fifty weeks out of every year seems to Australians barbarous, even cruel. As indeed it is."

P. 85-86 - "By bringing in our own food we will not be competing with the natives for something to eat, will not be helping to force up the price of local foods. The rico tourist may think, when he pays the extravagant bill at a Mexican restaurant, that he is at least contributing to the welfare of the workers in the local economy. False. A few will benefit, but the majority, deriving no income whatsoever from the tourist racket, find they are paying higher prices for their daily tortillas. 'Turismo' is always and everywhere a dubious, fraudulent, distasteful, and in the long run, degrading business, enriching a few, doing the rest more harm than good."

P. 123-125 - "The mad scientist, once only a comic figure in a specialized branch of fiction, has now come luridly to life in a hundred thousand forms. Together with his co-workers in big government, big industry, and the military, he dominates our lives. United, they will tyrannize the planet ... the busy men with white smocks and clipboards who are planning our future ... And you, of course, are never consulted on the matter ... the engineers and technicians have no interest in our personal preferences except as data to be tabulated and attitudes to be manipulated ... And in the evening, after a fruitful day in the nausea-gas lab, the innocent scientist goes home to the arms of his wife and children ... Political and military leaders win the publicity, but the fantastic crimes they have committed against humanity in this century were made possible for them by the achievements of our scientists and technologists."

P. 126 - "Einstein is reputed to have said, near the end of his career, that he would have rather been a great shoemaker than what he was, a great mathematician. We may take this statement as his confession of participatory guilt in the making of the modern nightmare."

P. 141 - "I believe humanity made a serious mistake when our ancestors gave up the hunting and gathering life for agriculture and towns. That's when they invented the slave, the serf, the master, the commissar, the bureaucrat, the capitalist and the five-star general ... Nothing but trouble and grief ever since, with a few comforts thrown in here and there, now and then, like bourbon and ice cubes and free beer on the Fourth of July, mainly to stretch out the misery."

P. 157 - "As for Smokey the Cop and all his friends - those jolly policemen of various types - state, federal, secret, private, uniformed, plainclothes, foreign and domestic - I stay away from them. I also avoid muggers, rapists, hijackers, terrorists, politicians, murderers and other lunatics. And for precisely the same reason."

P. 160 - "Nothing but the standard country-western stuff from a big city in the East called Nashville. Music to hammer out fenders by at the Shade Tree Body Shop. Music to vomit by after a shift in the copper pits. Take this job and shove it."

Bird In The Bush (New Directions, 1955) & World Outside The Window (New Directions, 1987)

2008-09-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

P VII Bird - "These essays are all jobs, except the one on Buber which I wrote to organize my own relationship to a thinker who has had a major influence on me ... I think Lawrence a very great poet indeed, but rather a disgusting man, afraid of wildcats, red Indians, and children, who deliberately wrote erotic novels and then got up and lef the room in a blushing rage when somebody told a dirty joke. There is a lot of bullshit in Lawrence, Miller, or Patchen - but their enemies are my enemies."

P VIII Bird - "Everybody has a lot of fakery in his makeup. When it is personal it is all right. A man can be forgiven for being a snarf, a vegetarian, or a frequenter of astrologists. He cannot be forgiven for being a parson or a social worker or a professor. No truck with the Social Lie. Why not? Not because it makes you a partner in mass murder, which it does, but because it reduces all action to frivolity."

P IX Bird - "However, I will not take those would-be allies which Madison Avenue has carefully manufactured and is now trying to foist on me. If the only significant revolt against what the French call the 'hallucination publicitaire' is heroin and Zen Buddhism nobody will ever be able to escape from the lot of this tenth-rate Russian movie called 'The Collapse of Capitalist Civilization' onto which somehow we all seem to have wandered."

P X Bird - "... Because art is a weapon. After millions of well-aimed blows, someday perhaps it will break the stone heart of the mindless cacodemon called Things As They Are. Everything else has failed."

P. 8 Bird - " T.S. Eliot told us all so many times that he has no emotion, that he never writes of personal experience. The truth is that his poetry is so personal that you can reconstruct his whole inner life, his whole personal history, from it. It is as embarassingly intimate as the revelations of the analyst's couch."

P. 12 Bird - "As human beings grow more remote from one another, they become more like things than persons to each other ... First alienation from comradeship in the struggle with nature, then alienation from each other, finally self-alienation. A great deal of our communication is not with persons at all. It might just as well be a machine to which we say 'Pass the butter'. What we want is the butter."

P. 14 Bird - "... Baudelaire had all sorts of idiotic ideas about how and why he wrote. But more than any other poet for two hundred years he communicated. He defined and gave expression to all the dilemmas of modern man, caught in the cruel dynamic of an acquisitive and continually disintegrating society, a society which had suddenly abandoned satisfactions which went back to the beginning of human communities in the Neolithic Age. Baudelaire, at first sight, painted the entire portrait of modern man, urban and self-alienated. He speaks directly to each of us like a twin brother. And yet Baudelaire was hardly aware of the magnitude of his accomplishment - he had such foolish ideas when he tried to explain himself."

P. 14-15 Bird - "Blake ... saw the whole picture of the oncoming nineteenth-century civilization with its dark Satanic mills. He wanted none of it, but he came to grips with it."

P. 16 Bird - "It so happens that until modern times few poets were 'pure poets' in George Moore's sense - completely disinterested in anything but personal communication. Most poetry in the Western world is corrupted with rhetoric and manipulation ... with program and exposition, and the actual poetry, the living speech of person to person, has been a by-product. The felicities of Dante are such by-products, of an embittered politician rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies and preaching an already outworn philosophy and cosmology and an ugly, vindictive, and cruel religion."

P. 18 Bird - "The thing that endures, that gives value to life, is comradeship, loyalty, bravery, magnanimity, love, the relations of men in direct communication with each other, personally, as persons, committed to each other. From this comes the beauty of life, its tragedy and its meaning, and from nowhere else."

P. 87-88 Bird - "Here, if anywhere in America, was the focus of a purely indigienous agrarian anarchist-socialism. I have run hounds, swapped lies, and drunk tiger piss with men who would have been happy fighting with Makhno. Unruly, utterly skeptical, absolutely fearless, bawdy free-thinkers - very different indeed from the originals of the term 'square' - the square-headed agrarian Progressives of the northern Middlewest."

P. 99 Bird - "The majority of American poets have acquiesced in the judgement of the predatory society. They do not exist as far as it is concerned. They make their living in a land of make-believe, as servants of a hoax for children. They are employees of the fog factories - the universities. They help make the fog. Behind their screen the universities fulfill their social purposes. They turn out bureaucrats, perpetuate the juridicial lie, embroider the costumes of the delusion of participation, and as of late, in departments never penetrated by the humanities staff, turn out atom, hydrogen and cobalt bombers - genocidists is the word."

P. 100 Bird - "The official spokesmen of the Official Revolution have not chosen to stand in the place Patchen stands. Read Upton Sinclair's anthology, 'The Cry For Justice' and any anthology of pseudo-proletarian literature of the Thirties. The contrast is shocking. From Patrick Magill to the young Sandburg and Lindsay, Oppenheim and Lola Ridge, the poets of the earlier day had an integrity, a moral earnestness, which overrode their occasional corniness and gave them a substance of things hoped for, an evidence of things not seen, which has vanished from the work of the approved poets of bureaucratic salvation. 'Change the world' indeed, but from what to what?"

P. 109-110 Bird - "So today we have large sections of our most literate population voluntarily adopting the religious behavior and beliefs of more primitive communities for purely pragmatic, psychologistic, personal reasons. The assumption is that this is a kind of sumbolic behavior by which greater spiritual insight into reality ... and finally true realization of the self will follow. The fact that there is not the slightest statistical evidence for this assumption does not matter. The fact that the entire Judeo-Christian-Muslim period in human history has been an episode of unparalleled personal and social psychosis and intentional barbarity is beside the point. People have Hannukah lights in the window or Christmas trees at the winter solstice and take Communion at Easter or make a Seder on Pesach because the society in which they live provides them with no valid life aim and robs them of all conviction of personal integrity. All 'neo' religions are cults of desperation in a time of human self-alienation and social disintegration."

P. 114 Bird - "He is so polite, this man with the most beautiful beard since von Hugel. He is so nice to Carl Jung. He picks his way so nicely, so kindly through and over the 'disjecta membra' of that beached whale, the chubby corpse of Mme. Blavatsky, which is the gnostic theosophy of Jung, and even after Jung answers him in a half-cocked polemic full of pleas about the 'science of psychology' from one of the most unscientific minds of all time, Buber so gently points out that the controversy is beneath the level of a second-year student in a good theological seminary - any time in the past fifteen hundred years. He does this, of course, purely by implication. Jung, I am sure, was completely unaware that he was thoroughly told off."

P. 115 Bird - "Max Weber long ago pointed out that the use of a transcendental ideology to justify the betrayals and compromises of politics and economics is the essential social falsehood. The oncoming war is not going to be fought on either side from any sort of values whatsoever, and anyone who says so is a liar or a dupe. We have finally reached a point where the very conditions under which they operate expose the fiction of politics and economics for what they are."

P.140 Bird - "Early in life Buber turned away from what he considered the self-obliterative mysticism of the East. But he was wrong. Taoism is not self-obliterative. In a sense it is not even mysticism. It is rather just a quiet and fairly accurate assessment of the facts."

P. 162 Bird - "That is why you can never base an educational system on the 'Hundred Best Books'. A hundred of the truest insights into life as it is would destroy any educational system and its society along with it."

P. 179 Bird - "Hardy could say to himself: 'Today I am going to be a Wiltshire yeoman ... writing a poem to my girl ... with the gnawed stub of a pencil', and he could make it very convincing. But Lawrence really was the educated son of a coal miner, sitting under a tree that had once been part of Sherwood Forest, in a village that was rapidly becoming part of a world-wide, disemboweled hell, writing hard, painful poems, to girls who had been carefully taught the art of unlove."

P. 198-199 Bird - "Every year there is less, but in Lawrence's day there was still something of the primeval Mexico - at the great feast in Oaxaca, in the life of the peasants in the remote villages, in the Indian communities in the back country."

P. 201-202 Bird - "All men have to die, and one would think a sane man would want to take that fact into account, at least a little. But our whole civilization is a conspiracy to pretend that it isn't going to happen - and this, in an age when death has become more horrible, more senseless, less at the will of the individual than ever before. Modern man is terribly afraid of sex, of pain, of evil, of death ... Men and women torture each other to death in the bedroom, just as the dying dinosaurs gnawed on each other as they copulated in the chilling marshes. Anything but the facts of life. Today you can take a doctor's degree in medicine or engineering and never learn how to have intercourse with a woman or repair a car. Human self-alienation, Marx called it."

P. 48 World - "Much of the best popular fiction deals with the world of the utterly disaffiliated. Burlesque and carnival people, hipsters, handicappers and hop heads, wanted men on the lam, an expendable squad of soldiers being expended, anyone who by definition is divorced from society and cannot afford to believe even an iota of the Social Lie - these are the favorite characters of modern postwar fiction"

P. 62-63 - "Literature is work. Art is work. And work, said St. Benedict, is prayer. There are at least three Zen Buddhists to be found in every public toilet in every city over 250,000 in the U.S.A. after ten at night. 'You just dig it, man. You just let it happen. It just busts in your head like shit in your bloodstream, you dig?' ... Have these poor disheveled children any idea of the work, years and years of it, that goes to the perfecting of a Japanese swordsman, a judo expert, one of the admirals that pulled off Pearl Harbor, a monk in a Zendo, or any other recognized exponent of the philosophy of Boddhidarma? No. 'Like that's all for squares, man.'"

P. 76 - "Be very careful you don't become what Madison Avenue wants every artist to be - a wild man."

P. 197 - "Hemingway was certainly a thoroughly conventional personality. Anyone who could sit for five minutes in Harry's Bar or spend a weekend in that hotel on Torcello is indisputably a square. His tough guy code was bluster and bullying, he was the model and idol of a generation of junior executives, especially the type Yale Man or Time editor, but he had talent and a certain tragic feeling."

P. 262 - "It only took a year for that caricature of Big Business and the Big Business ethic - Organized Vice - to take over the Hippies; and the movement itself, by the pressure of idle youngsters of the upper middle class, was turned into a craze for the conspicuous expenditure of senseless commodities - beads, couch cover serapes, and worn-out squirrel skin chubbies."

White-Collar Sweatshop (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001)

2008-09-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

A great companion book to Disciplined Minds. Though it is largely preaching to the choir, and repeats a lot of things that everyone already knew, this book is valuable as both a documentation of the new "dark Satanic mills" created by modern mega-corporations, and as a potential instigation to rebellion against these workplace injustices.

Bad Samaritans (Bloomsbury Press, 2008)

2008-08-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

Bad Samaritans is perhaps not quite as radical as the subtitle might lead one to believe, but it is a rare critique of globalization from the perspective of an economist trained and vested in the globalist circles. It's a bit of a light read at 200 pages, but an interesting look at a topic usually approached from a humanist and emotional perspective.

P. 15-16 "The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction. The Korean government did not vanquish the market as the communist states did. However, it did not have blind faith in the free market either. While it took the markets seriously, it often recognized that they needed to be corrected through policy intervention ... Now, if it was only Korea that became rich through such 'heretical' policies, the free-market gurus might be able to dismiss it as merely the exception that proves the rule ... however ... practically all of today's developed countries, including Britain and the U.S., the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against the orthodoxy of neo-liberal economics."

P. 104 - "Few would now dispute that communism failed as an economic system. But it is a huge leap of logic to go from that conclusion to the proposition that state-owned enterprises do not work ... For a while, it was as if the whole ex-communist world was hypnotized by the mantra, 'private good, public bad', reminiscent of ... Animal Farm. Privatization of SOEs has also been a centrepiece of the neo-liberal agenda that the Bad Samaritans have imposed on most developing countries in the past quarter of a century."

P. 158 - "Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor."

P. 180 - "Having once dismissed political factors as minor details that should not get in the way of good economics, neo-liberals have recently become very interested in them. The reason is obvious - their economic programme for developing countries as implemented by the Unholy Trinity of the IMF, World Bank and WTO has had spectacular failures (just think of Argentina in the 1990s) and very few successes. Because it is unthinkable to the Bad Samaritans that free trade, privatization and the rest of their policies could be wrong, the 'explanation' for policy failure is increasingly found in non-policy factors, such as politics and culture."

For Your Own Good (The Noonday Press, 1990)

2008-08-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

Alice Miller's exploration into the culture of child-beating as an accepted parenting technique in Germany in the early part of the century unearths not only important psychological insights into how childhood abuse translates into dysfunctional adult behavior, but also explores compelling parallels between the extremely abusive home life of Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party.

P. 7 - "If there is absolutely no possibility of reacting appropriately to hurt, humiliation and coercion, then these experiences cannot be integrated into the personality; the feelings they evoke are repressed, and the need to articulate them remains unsatisfied, without any hope of being fulfilled. It is this lack of hope of ever being able to express repressed traumata by means of relevant feelings that most often causes severe psychological problems. We already know that neuroses are a result of repression, not of events themselves. I shall try to demonstrate that neuroses are not the only tragic consequence of repression."

P. 72 - "When non-Germans watched Adolf Hitler's appearances in newsreels, they were never able to understand the adulation he was given or the number of votes he received in 1933. It was easy for them to see through his human weaknesses, his artificial pose of self-assurance, his specious arguments; for them, it was not as though he were their father. For the Germans, however, it was much more difficult. A child cannot acknowledge the negative sides of his or her father, and yet these are stored up somewhere in the child's psyche, for the adult will then be attracted by precisely these negative, disavowed sides in the father substitutes he or she encounters."

P. 106 - "The greatest cruelty that can be inflicted on children is to refuse to let them express their anger and suffering except at the risk of losing their parents' love and affection. The anger stemming from early childhood is stored up in the unconscious, and since it basically represents a healthy, vital source of energy, an equal amount of energy must be expended in order to repress it. An upbringing that succeeds in sparing the parents at the expense of the child's vitality sometimes leads to suicide or extreme drug addiction, which is a form of suicide."

P. 133 - "The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our life. And we often impose our most agonizing suffering upon ourselves. We can never escape the tormentor within ourselves, who is often disguised as a pedagogue ... Cruel enslavement of the body and exploitation of the will are the result. Drug addiction begins with an attempt to escape parental control and to refuse to perform, but the repetition compulsion ultimately leads the addict to a constant concern with having to come up with large sums of money ... a quite 'bourgeois' form of enslavement."

P. 194 - "Hitler flattered the 'German, Germanic' woman because he needed her homage, her vote, and her other services ... N. Bromberg (1971) has written about Hitler's sexual habits: " ... the only way in which he could get full sexual satisfaction was to watch a young woman as she squatted over his head and urinated or defecated in his face."

http://nospank.net/fyog.htm

My Ishmael (Bantam, 1997)

2008-08-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

The Human Comedy (Dell, 1996)

2008-08-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

This coming-of-age story written by Saroyan in the 1940s is human in a way that similar modern stories just can't ever seem to figure out how to be. Reading more like poetry than prose quite often, this is required reading for anyone with a soul.

Animal Farm (Signet, 2004)

2008-08-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

Animal Farm seems like a very socially safe denouncement of the hypocrisy and evils of Stalinist communism now, but at the time of it's publication just after WWII, it was actually quite controversial. At the time, Stalin was everyone's darling for his involvement in the war. Animal Farm shows how a revolution by farm animals to drive out their selfish master Jones and take control of the farm production for themselves almost immediately becomes a new and even worse dictatorship under clever but selfish leadership.

P. 10 - "Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself."

P. 139 - "No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

All Quiet On The Western Front (Ballantine, 1996)

2008-08-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

A group of German boys are pressured by their schoolmaster, as well as nearly everyone else around them, to join the army and fight in World War I. Not even sure what it is they are fighting for, they experience death and horror drawn directly from author Remarque's WWI experiences, where he was wounded on five seperate occasions. You often see this book called the "greatest war novel of all time", but really it is one of the greatest anti-war novels ever written.

P. 204 - "Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started. 'Mostly by one country badly offending another', answers Albert with a slight air of superiority. Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. 'A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat.' 'Are you really as stupid as all that, or just pulling my leg?' growls Kropp. 'I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other -' 'Then I haven't any business here at all' replies Tjaden. 'I don't feel myself offended'. 'Well let me tell you' says Albert sourly, 'it doesn't apply to tramps like you'. 'Then I can be going home right away' says Tjaden, and we all laugh. 'Ach, man! He means the people as a whole, the State -' exclaims Muller. 'State, State' - Tjaden snaps his fingers contemptuously. 'Gendarmes, police, taxes, that's your State; - if that's what you are talking about, no, thank you.'"

P. 205 - "True, but just you consider, almost all of us are simple folk. And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks. Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers."

P. 223 - "The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: 'Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if only you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - Forgive me, comrade, how could you be my enemy?"

The Cry For Justice (Barricade, 1996)

2008-08-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

This massive anthology of writing on the theme of social justice was originally collected by Upton Sinclair, and contains poetry, prose excerpts and even the full text of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" to close things out.

Johnny Got His Gun (Bantam, 1970)

2008-08-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

This book should be mandatory reading for anyone thinking about enlisting in any army, ever - and also for any politician.

The 1970 Bantam paperback contains an introduction by Dalton Trumbo, originally written in 1959, then updated in 1970 with his thoughts on the Vietnam war.

So You Want To Live In Hawai'i, 2nd Ed. (Barefoot Publishing, 2005)

2008-08-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

This unusually frank and thorough book on life in Hawai'i looks at racial issues, real costs of living, politics, job availability, military assignments, schools, child care, retirement and senior concerns, how to move, which island to choose, even romance on the islands, from the eyes of an experienced resident as written for a newbie contemplating a move there. It could probably stand to be updated once more to reflect the impact of recent spikes in fuel and food costs on the island, but as it stands it is an excellent resource for learning about the "real" Hawaii before jumping in.

Orwell - A Collection Of Essays (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1981)

2008-08-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

Aside from his interesting writing, the writer who called himself George Orwell led an interesting life - growing up in an abusive boarding school, living as a government agent in India, bumming in Paris and London, and voluntarily fighting in the Spanish Civil War against the Fascists, amongs other things. His essays meander over these topics and others, from his personal experience, to his thoughts on language, even a review of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and critiques of Kipling and Gandhi. Essential reading for the Orwell fan, and anyone concerned with social justice.

To Afghanistan and Back (NBM Publishing, 2002)

2008-07-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

Described by Time magazine as "an astringent alternative to government press releases and the network news", To Afghanistan and Back is a graphic travelogue of journalist Ted Rall's visit to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 and during the Northern Alliance and American war against the Taliban. Among the realities discovered by Rall, largely unreported by the major news networks, were that the USAF was carpet-bombing cities, Northern Alliance towns were something akin to Mad Max where you could have anyone killed for a few hundred dollars with no repercussions, and the Northern Alliance and Taliban switched sides back and forth so frequently that they were virtually the same army. Eye-opening reading, this is the sort of investigative reporting that corporate-owned major networks do not have the stomach for anymore.

Cannery Row (Penguin, 2002)

2008-07-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

Another great fable-like story from Steinbeck, this one also set in Monterey but featuring a whole different set of characters.

P ? - "It has always seemed strange to me," said Doc. "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."

"Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?" said Richard Frost.

"Oh, but it isn't a matter of hunger. It's something quite different. The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous - but not quite. Everywhere in the world there are Mack and the boys. I've seen them in an ice-cream seller in Mexico and in an Aleut in Alaska. You know how they tried to give me a party and it went wrong. But they wanted to give me a party. That was their impulse."

The Man Who Was Don Quixote

2008-07-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting look at the life of Miguel de Cervantes, who lived an adventurous life nearly as interesting as that of his famous fictional creation.

How Animals Have Sex

2008-07-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

I think it's worth it for the cover alone, but this is actually a humorous and fascinating look into a subject you might be surprisingly interested in.

Tortilla Flat (Penguin, 1977)

2008-07-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

I think of Tortilla Flat as a truly Buddhist book. One of Steinbeck's early novels, and a sort of parody of Arthurian legends, it follows the adventures and misadventures (mostly misadventures) of a group of wine-loving Spanish/Indian paisanos in Monterey, California. More than any other story I have read it captures the essence of living in the moment, valuing friends and companions over all, and not being owned and burdened by possessions.

Principia Discordia

2008-07-13T17:41:00.000-07:00

This is the greatest schizophrenic's notebook ever to be published as a mass-market paperback.

1984 (New American Library, 1961)

2008-07-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

"Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime--in 1984, George Orwell created a whole vocabulary of words concerning totalitarian control that have since passed into our common vocabulary. More importantly, he has portrayed a chillingly credible dystopia. In our deeply anxious world, the seeds of unthinking conformity are everywhere in evidence; and Big Brother is always looking for his chance." -- Daniel Hintzsche

Walden and Civil Disobedience (New American Library, 1999)

2008-07-10T15:29:00.000-07:00

Frankly, Walden has it's share of verbal diarrhea and underdeveloped thought, but the overall message of voluntarily simplicity, limited state power and the benefits of solitude is one of the most powerful in the English language. As an added bonus, Civil Disobedience can be said to be the original inspiration of nonviolent resistance movements and is also a must read.

Money Writes (Native American Books, 1931)

2008-07-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

This entry in Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" series focuses on literature - everything from Homer to Shakespeare and Sinclair's contemporaries, taking the same "turn out the pockets" approach of his other books in the series. It is filled with zingers for writers who support and glorify the rich and the elite, and praise for representatives of working people and the downtrodden. It is perhaps the most honest and useful book of literary criticism ever written.

Li Po and Tu Fu (Penguin, 1973)

2008-07-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

As the back cover says -

"Li Po, a legendary carouser, was an itinerant poet who is unsurpassed in the scope of his fanciful imagination and who soars to sublime heights in his descriptions of natural scenes and powerful emotions. He has been called 'the immortal of poets'. Tu Fu is a more popular poet. His experiences of civil war imbue his work with great compassion and earthy reality, shot through with humor and desolation, as he views everyday life with an artist's insight. Together these two poets of the T'ang dynasty cover the whole spectrum of human life and feeling, and are often appropriately referred to as one poet, 'Li-Tu'."

Li Po and Tu Fu are two of China's greatest poets, and probably the most recognized in the Western world, but picking up a translated book of their poetry cold can lead to confusion for many new readers. This volume by Penguin doesn't contain many actual poems, but serves as a great introduction before reading them, to understand the structure of their poetry and the cultural contexts and references. It also delves in to the relationship between the two. Great starting point for beginners, or for those who have tried these poets in the past but just didn't quite get them.

The McDonaldization of Society (Pine Forge Press, 2000)

2008-07-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

The McDonaldization of Society is a sociological study, but not a dry and jargon-filled one. It examines the effect that the success of McDonalds has had on numerous aspects of society, and how McDonaldization, with it's rationalized processes, is being incorporated into almost every other human endeavor.

The Relevance of Rexroth (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1991)

2008-06-30T14:15:00.000-07:00

The Relevance of Rexroth is the best introduction to Kenneth Rexroth I have seen. It's a tiny little book that shouldn't cost you more than a dollar or two, but it provides a succinct overview of Rexroth's poetry, essays and criticism and the unique spirit in them that is worth getting to know.

Disciplined Minds (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001)

2008-06-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

Disciplined Minds, "a critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives", focuses on graduate school and compares it to a cult or similar system of indoctrination, with the overall goal being not so much the education of the participant in technical skills, as the education of the participant in a flexible mindset that allows them to become the "endlessly pliable man", able to identify and conform immediately to the ideology of an employer. Though it's a bit bogged down towards the middle by Schmidt's personal axe-grinding in the realm of post-grad physics, the conclusion comparing schools to Robert J. Lifton's classic list of cult traits, and the suggestion to use a military survive-and-resist manual for POWs to make it through school, are worth the trip on their own.

Armed Madhouse (Plume, 2007)

2008-06-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

Getting his start as an investigator of corporate economic malfeasance, Greg Palast has brought to investigative reporting what he calls his "Sam Spade" style - following the evidence, the money, and always asking "Who benefits?". His approach leads to conclusions about the real motivations behind the Iraq War (it's about the oil, but spiking the price rather than seizing the last of it), and the overall program of class warfare that American-based wealthy elites are waging both at home and abroad. Packed with factual evidence and documents leaked to Palast and the BBC from insiders in the government and the world's moss powerful companies, Armed Madhouse is a must-read and a must-think-about.

The Kidnapped Saint and Other Stories (Lawrence Hill, 1991)

2008-06-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Kidnapped Saint is a collection of ten very short stories from throughout Traven's life, as well as the first seven chapters of The White Rose (which had not yet been translated at the time of this book's publication). Don't let the length dissuade you, as this is an excellent collection up to Traven's usual standard and worth reading for anyone who enjoys him.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Hill and Wang, 1984)

2008-06-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

John Huston's 1948 movie adaptation is much better known than the original novel upon which it is based (which came twenty years before the film). The movie is mostly faithful to the novel, but even though it is a great work of film, what cannot come through is Traven's sharp social commentary or dark comedy in his writing. The book is a definite must-read, even if you think the movie can't be topped.

The Perpetual Prisoner Machine (Basic Books, 2000)

2008-06-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

Joel Dyer's book examines the frightening way in which the increasingly privatized prison system in America, with it's profit motive to have as many people incarcerated as possible, has through various factors become a self-perpetuating system (or machine) that guarantees not only heightened recidivism but increased incarcerations.

In Search Of Enemies : A CIA Story

2008-06-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

In Search of Enemies : A CIA Story

John Stockwell was the head of the CIA Angola Task Force during their covert operations in that country in 1975. His previous experiences in Vietnam combined with what he experienced in Angola led him to resign from the CIA and write this expose of the agency. In 1980, Stockwell said "if the Soviet Union were to disappear off the face of the map, the United States would quickly seek out new enemies to justify its own military-industrial complex", and his words have certainly proved to be prophetic with our endless all-consuming "War On Terror". In his book on Angola, he paints the picture of a thoroughly corrupt (yet often incompetent and mistake-prone) agency that blows absolute wads of taxpayer money with little to no real oversight, lies to Congress and manipulates information in order to start an unnecessary war, and hires mercenaries who commit battlefield atrocities, amongst other things. Because Stockwell refused to submit the book to the CIA prior to it's printing for censorship, they successfully sued him for the royalties and now own the rights to any copies sold of it. Thus, it is highly recommended that you either buy pre-owned, pick it up from a local library, or view excerpts from it online.

SHAM (Three Rivers Press, 2006)

2008-06-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

SHAM is Steve Salerno's expose of the Self Help And Actualization (get it?) Movement, which he succinctly describes as " ... an enterprise wherein people holding the thinnest of credentials diagnose in basically normal people symptoms of inflated or invented maladies, so that they may implement remedies that have never been proven to work". Up for investigation are such luminaries of the field as Tony Robbins, Tommy Lasorda, Laura Schlesinger, and Dr. Phil McGraw, as well as the numerous "twelve step" programs fathered by Alcoholics Anonymous. The book winds up with an out-of-place attack on the American educational system that, while raising some valid points, also comes across as tangential and a bit of a pet peeve clumsily hammered in where it doesn't really fit. Most of the book's focus takes on the millionaire "self help gurus", however, and these sections are delightful reading, and a much-needed investigation of a multimillion dollar industry essentially based on misdirection and manipulation.

The Tale of Genji

2008-06-09T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Tale of Genji is kind of like the Sex and the City of 11th century Japan - long, rambling, focused on relationships and the lives of upper-class women, and frequently very boring. Why care at all about it, then? It is widely considered to be the first real novel that mankind has produced, and is a detailed look into an ancient historical period written from firsthand experience.

Egawa Tatsuya's "Genji Monogatari" might be more successful at keeping you awake, given the inclusion of "H-scenes" (cartoon sex) alongside the classic text (graphically illustrating what was only implied in the original writing). Unfortunately, Amazon does not seem to carry it, and I have yet to find a reliable source (there is no translation to English, though I have found that it originally ran in a Japanese magazine called Ultra Jump).

Fear : The History of a Political Idea (Oxford University Press, 2006)

2008-06-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

Corey Robin's book examines something rarely if ever mentioned in the mass media - how fear is orchestrated to direct society, particularly in the political sphere. Robinson examines the history of fear in politics through the writings of Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, and how fear manifests itself today in the workplace, the media and in Washington.

The Death Ship (Lawrence Hill Books, 1991)

2008-06-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

Picture a darker version of Moby Dick, more focused on class struggle, and you have The Death Ship. Possibly enigmatic anarchist author B. Traven's finest novel, and at the very least his most popular, this is the story of a sailor who becomes an unperson in every European nation when he loses his sailing card and passport, and can find a home only on the smuggling ship Yorricke working under brutal conditions for nearly no pay. An excellent blend of free-wheeling adventure story with a critique of the hard realities of life at the bottom of industrialized capitalist society, and the insanity that governmental bureaucracy is capable of.

City of Darkness : Life In Kowloon Walled City (Watermark, 1999)

2008-03-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

For over forty years Kowloon existed in a grey and lawless zone; neither China or Britain would take full responsibility for it, and it became a fascinating quasi-anarchist development where gangs, prostitution and drugs lived side-by-side with regular families living regular lives, all set inside of giant high-rise buildings owned by no one and constantly developed and added onto by their residents.

City of Darkness documents this unusual and fascinating society in a series of high-quality photographs taken just before the Walled City's destruction in 1989, and interviews with the people who lived there.

Ain't Nobodys Business If You Do (Mary Books, 1996)

2008-02-24T17:41:00.000-08:00

Peter McWilliams’ book is based around a simple proposition - in a reasonable society, any adult should be able to do what they please with their person and property, provided it doesn’t harm the person and property of another. That isn’t necessarily the way of things in the United States, however, which at the time of this book’s writing was spending tens of billions in tax dollars to investigate, prosecute and detain people for so called “consensual crimes”. McWilliams argument that the government should stop attempting to protect grown adults from themselves expends 248 pages alone pointing out the numerous ways in which consensual crime laws fail society, then more closely examines the most frequently prosecuted consensual crimes - gambling, drugs, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, unconventional religious practices, assisted suicide, tranvestism, public drunkenness, loitering, vagrancy, even seat belt and motorcycle helmet laws.

The author was prompted to write this book as an HIV and cancer patient who used medical marijuana to suppress nausea and ease pain, and was raided by the DEA for running a publishing house that printed books advocating the use of marijuana for medical purposes. Sadly and tragically, four years after writing this book, he would die at home of asphyxiation on his own vomit after a fit of nausea. The book is backed by personal fire and zeal, and is well written and researched - peppered with humor and easy to read, yet bringing some very compelling arguments against the legislation of religious morality.

The Goslings

2008-01-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

After taking on American colleges in The Goose-Step, Upton Sinclair turned his attentions to the American grade schools in follow-up The Goslings.

P. 2 - "The intellectual tone of the community is set by a great newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, created by an unscrupulous accumulator of money. The Times has now grown enormously wealthy, but it still carries on in it's founders spirit of hatred and calumny. It boasts of being the largest newspaper in the world - meaning that it prints the most advertisements. You pay ten cents for the Sunday edition, and have two or three pages of Associated Press dispatches with the life censored out of them; after that, you grope your way through a wilderness of commercialism. I stop and wonder, how can I give the reader an idea of the intellectual garbage upon which our Southern California population is fed. I pick up this morning's paper, and find a cartoon on the front page, our daily hymn of hate against Soviet Russia; the cartoon is labeled in large letters: 'Out of the Fryingpansky into the Fireovitch'. As the naturalist Agassiz could construct a whole animal from a piece of fossil bone, so you may comprehend a culture from that piece of wit."

P. 4 - "Also, we have Hollywood; Hollywood the world's greatest honey pot, with it's thousands of beautiful golden bees swarming noisily; Hollywood, where youth and gaiety grow rotten before they grow ripe. If you say that Hollywood is not America, I answer that you only have to wait. Hollywood is young America."

p. 22 - "The theme of this book is the schools - public schools and private schools, primary and grammar and high schools; and now I have to carry out my promise, to show you that this same Black Hand of Southern California controls our board of education, putting its own representatives thereon; that it controls our school funds, wasting them in graft; that it controls our teachers, browbeating them and underpaying them and denying them their rights as citizens; that it controls our children, drilling them, suppressing them, putting poison thoughts into their minds - so that they come out perfect little bigots, prepared to hate, and to tar and feather those people that try to apply real Americanism to America, and to protect the rights of the poor as well as the rich. In other words, what the Black Hand wants is to turn out a generation of children who will stand for all the infamies I have just narrated, and will regard them as right and necessary and patriotic actions, and the men who perpetrate them as courageous public officials and high-minded patriots."

P. 26 "It is the thesis of the businessmen who run our educational system that the schools are factories, and the children raw material, to be turned out thoroughly standardized, of the same size and shape, like biscuits or sausages. To these businessmen the teachers are servants, or 'hands', whose duty is the same as in any other factory - to obey orders, and to mind their business, and be respectful to their superiors. Whenever by any chance teachers dare to have ideas of their own, or especially to ask for higher wages, these teachers are treated precisely as we have seen labor unions treated by the Black Hand of Southern California."

P. 54 - from The Schools of Mammon - "What becomes of the children under this regime of the Black Hand? I have spoken with scores of teachers, and their testimony is unanimous, that the children's minds are on anything in the world but study. I chose the great 'L.A. High' because that is where the children of the rich attend. One parent, a woman of refinement and sense, has tried to keep the tastes of her daughter simple and wholesome, but she tells me it is impossible, as home influence counts for nothing against the overwhelming collective power of the mass. The child comes home, thrilled with excitement, telling of what the other girls have, and she must have what they have, or her happiness is ruined. It is all money; their ideal is the spending of money, their standard is what things cost. I know a lad, who tells me gravely that the fellows can't have anything to do with girls these days; they have no interest in you but for the money you spend on them, and unless you are rich you cannot 'go the pace'. About this school you will see the automobiles parked for blocks; and of course the youngsters who drive these cars are the social leaders, they run the school affairs, and they get the girls ... How can the teachers combat such forces? There is only one way, and that is by making the studies interesting, by taking up live topics, which awaken the initiative of the students, and reveal to them the delights of thinking. Several teachers have tried to do this, and the stories of what happened to them are amusing; but unfortunately I cannot tell the stories, because each would identify a teacher, and no teacher dares to take that risk!"

P. 109 - "San Francisco has a long and picturesque history of graft. Its Big Business is in the hands of descendants of gamblers and hold-up men, who have run its affairs in that spirit. Everything has been for sale, including the leaders of the exploited working class. The old line union leaders of San Francisco were, and to a great extent still are, agents made use of by business men against their business rivals. "