Four Lessons of History

"We can't change the present or the future. We can only change the past, and we do it all the time."

That's a quote from Bob Dylan's interview with Rolling Stone in the September 27 issue. Like much of Dylan's work, it can be interpreted many different ways. I take it to mean that history is often written to suit the interests of its author. That's why we need to know history; we need to protect ourselves from the warped versions of history that are used to justify destructive politics, science, religion, etc. If we don't want to repeat history's mistakes, we have to know what really happened and why. Unfortunately, our schools teach history in a boring way that reinforces the social order. It's in the interest of the elite to make learning excruciatingly dull and misleading. An ignorant public is easy to manipulate. The truth of history is fascinating, liberating and energizing.

The first lesson of history is that things haven't always been the way they are now. The second one follows from that, though not inevitably: Things don't have to be the way they are now. The third one follows more easily: The reason things are the way they are now is often arbitrary and not always in our best interest. History should explain how the current status quo came into being, because the process is never a natural evolution of institutions designed to best serve human nature. It's a struggle among competing groups who (no matter how strenuously they profess their selflessness) always privilege their own interests above all others' once they come to power. There is no enlightened historical progression in which the best system (e.g., capitalism) eventually comes to the fore. Just because capitalism is the most successful economic system right now doesn't mean it's the one best suited to meet human needs. Capitalism has many benefits, but it has also always had a regime of violence enforcing its demands.

The fourth lesson has eluded many in the modern age: Things don't always get better. We've been led to believe that our society is the fulfilment of history's destiny. All those old civilizations were just experiments laying the foundation for our society, which is the best, most just, most equitable society in history. Granted, we've made significant strides, but we have problems that never afflicted previous societies. Social isolation and alienation are endemic, and racism is a post-Columbus invention. No one dismisses the historical record of civilizational decline, but we've decided the rule that what goes up must come down no longer applies to us. Our technology has supposedly freed us from the limits that pulled our ancestors back to earth. In reality, we're subject to the same limits on natural resources; no matter how sophisticated our technologies become, we'll never be able to extract energy from alternative sources without expending much more energy than we do now pumping oil or natural gas or digging coal out of the ground. We've probably already begun our descent.

Knowledge is power, and the ability to deny knowledge to others or trick them into ignorance gives one power over them. Therefore, I strongly urge everyone to learn history, no matter how difficult it may be to find the truth. Not only do you have to fight the Man's machinations; you have to fight your own conditioned resistance to uncomfortable truths. But it's well worth the pain. (I hope.)

Back to Middle School

My annual State Fair pilgrimage was somewhat spoiled by a group of kids who looked to be in high school. (In other words, to a 30-something like myself they looked very immature and disrespectful.) I was sitting along one of the fairgrounds' main thoroughfares when I felt a pebble strike my forehead at incredible velocity. (Two notes: 1. It did not produce any pain. 2. It was slightly bigger and rougher than a pebble, but I couldn't think of a better word for it than "pebble.") I looked around, saw no signs of an assailant and didn't think much of it.

Then I noticed a tall teenage guy sneaking glances at me and smiling. The glances and smiles spread to the short guy and girls with him, accompanied by laughter. The short guy whipped a pebble into the street, reinforcing my case. They were also doing things with their smartphones, a diabolical new tool in the imagination of the tormented. I quickly found myself back in school, specifically middle school. Once again I was paralyzed by fear and humiliation. My face seemed to be reddening along with, possibly, my eyes, presaging the onset of tears.

How could I still be terrorized by teenagers? Am I not an adult with a college degree and a corporate job? I passed my academic tests with flying colors, but I'm not sure if I ever passed the Bully Test. The physical bullying I experienced never exceeded the nuisance level. It was the verbal bullying that ground my self-esteem down to a nub. I would usually just take it, sometimes attempting a timid comeback.

Like many victims of bullying, I carry a chip on my shoulder. Even 20 years after leaving middle school, the seeds of doubt about my self-worth planted back then still bear the occasional fruit. When those kids started smiling and laughing at me, my nerd rage emerged from dormancy and contemplated revenge. ("Nerd rage" is a term I first heard from stand-up Brian Posehn, whom you may know as the tall, goofily endearing guy on Mr. Show and the tall, goofily menacing guy on Just Shoot Me.) Of course, the rage limits one's mental faculties, and my vengeance was predictably unimaginative.

After a few minutes of absorbing the humiliation and hatching a plan, I got up to leave. The tall guy, who I assumed was the guilty party, was standing with his back to me, holding a large, bouncy, blue ball. On my way from the scene, I came up behind him, knocked the ball out of his hands and swatted it up to the walkway around the agriculture building a few yards above us. The nerd rage probably made my swatting look undignified, but I kept a lid on my emotions the best I could. The incident ended with me walking away. I didn't hear or feel any reaction from them, which was a relief.

After I'd put some distance between us, I began to wish I'd taken the ball with me. That would've been the smoother thing to do. But I think I got my point across, and hopefully I didn't look too nerdy doing it. There's a sore spot on my wrist from hitting the guy's arm when I dislodged the ball, a reminder of something I'd much rather forget. Just writing about it brought back the fear, humiliation and self-doubt, but I wanted to get it out of my system.

My favorite comedy-rock band of all time, King Missile (I love Tenacious D, but in terms of laughs-per-minute King Missile still takes the cake.), had a song called "Wuss." The masterful John S. Hall tells us of the many indignities of being a wuss in junior high. The lyric ends with these lines:

...and even now,
Now that I'm not nearly as much of a wuss as I once was,
I still feel kind of wussy from time to time:
Residual wussiness-
The kind of thing you can never really leave behind.

I have plenty of residual wussiness left over from my school days. Luckily, the adult world does not operate by the same rules as the kid and teen worlds. It's humiliating and enraging to be reminded that I'm still vulnerable to bullying by teenagers. At least now I have the emotional security to get over it, even though it might take a few days.

So I've managed to put the experience in perspective on a personal level, but it raises a larger cultural question: How do you discipline kids you don't know? Should you even try? I think we should; after all, as the title of Hillary Clinton's book said, It Takes a Village (to raise a child, I think). But I have no idea how to do that in an effective, non-violent way. If anyone has any ideas, I encourage you to share them here.

Art for Love

Artists refine their technique for attention, in the belief that the excellence of their art justifies the feelings that inspired it. How could a crudely phrased note express true love? What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me? Friends don't do that, of course, but artists are reaching out to strangers for validation, and that requires skill.

Conspiracy Theory with Tony Sutton

Edward Abbey, the late environmentalist writer, once said, "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul." Well, the comments by Minnesota GOP party chair Tony Sutton stirred up a lot of sentiment in me, and I knew I had to write about it. I even thought of calling this essay "F*** Tony Sutton," but I figured that would be in poor taste and could jeopardize whatever chance I have of becoming a political columnist.

If you're not aware of Mr. Sutton's remarks, I suggest you check them out on MPR, although you won't get the full flavor of his venom as I did when I listened to it live and uncut. He did everything but accuse Secretary of State Mark Ritchie of serving up the Senate seat to Al Franken on a silver platter. Nick Coleman called Sutton "Tony Baloney" in his Strib column today, which I encourage everyone to read and employ as the state Republican honcho's new nickname.

My first impulse was to launch a campaign to get Mr. Sutton fired, until I realized that leaving him in his current position would probably do the GOP more harm than anything else. It's scary to think that his opinions may be common among the Republican leadership in Minnesota. In the video the two guys standing at his sides seem to agree with him; they keep nodding their heads. What's even scarier is the possibility his conspiracy theory is widely held among Minnesotans who tend to vote Republican.

Are we really that full of paranoia? Must every political setback for our side be the result of a nefarious scheme by the Other Guys, a.k.a. the Bad Guys? It's a bit difficult for me to make the argument for sanity, a la Jon Stewart, since I still believe the Supreme Court contravened Florida law in stopping the 2000 presidential recount. And I still have my doubts about Bush's 2004 "reelection."

It's not what Republicans or sanity advocates want to hear, but the situations are different. The Supreme Court included in their Bush v. Gore opinion the proviso that the decision could not be used as precedent, casting doubt on its legal validity. The hijinks in Florida, from butterfly ballots to hanging chads to Miami's rent-a-riot, turned the election from high drama to tragic farce. In 2004, Ohio experienced many similar irregularities with the strategically positioned Kenneth Blackwell, honorary co-chair of the state's Bush campaign, overseeing the election as secretary of state.

By contrast, the Franken-Coleman recount was a model of propriety. Mark Ritchie, the DFL secretary of state, presided over an even-handed, thorough process to guarantee that every legal vote was counted correctly. Many Republican-appointed judges ruled on the recount before it was unanimously endorsed by the Minnesota Supreme Court. The idea that our election bears any resemblance to the charade in Florida in 2000 or the question mark of Ohio in 2004 is absurd and insulting to the people who toiled to insure the legitimacy of our democracy.

There have been plenty of stolen elections in U.S. history. Besides what I consider to be dubious presidential elections in 2000 and 2004, there was JFK's narrow victory in 1960 that may have been assisted by LBJ's political machine in Texas and Mayor Daley's skulduggery in Chicago. But the only evidence Tony Sutton has that the Franken-Coleman election was fixed is his dissatisfaction with the outcome. Calling it a conspiracy theory would be an insult to the meticulously-constructed crackpot schemes Jesse Ventura showcases on his television program. Mr. Baloney is really just suffering from a severe case of sour grapes. Let's hope it's not contagious.

The Right Isn't Totally Wrong (Just Mostly)

I know I compared the Tea Party and Glenn Beck to the Nazis the other day, but that doesn't mean I think they're genocidally wrong about everything. They're right to oppose the bailouts, although they seem to think that the bailouts were meant to give government greater control over private enterprise. Members of Congress have said they were told by (Bush's) Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that, if they didn't vote for the first bailout immediately, the economy would collapse. I think the politicians were trying to save the economy, but they refused to attach strings to the money, due to either their faith in laissez-faire capitalism or their being so deeply tucked into the pockets of Big Business they can't see $#!+.

They should've demanded that the bailed-out financial institutions cease the risky behavior that precipitated the crisis. Instead, we're stuck with too-big-to-fail banks that are now even bigger after gobbling up a bunch of little banks that didn't get government handouts to help them through the crisis. As if that weren't enough to induce vomiting, the TBTF banks are still playing fast and loose with their money, secure in the belief that the government will bail them out the next time they go belly up.

No matter how much I loathe the idea of bailing out corporations, the economic devastation that could've resulted from doing nothing was scary enough to bring me around to George W. Bush's point of view, a monumental feat. Of course, the way the money was distributed left much to be desired. Rather than letting the companies use it to buy out the competition, the government could've paid off all those subprime mortgages. The banks then could've wiped the toxic assets off their balance sheets, and the homeowners could've kept their homes.

But the bailouts did achieve their stated goal: The economy didn't go into freefall. Unfortunately, all we got for our $42 billion (officially, the amount that hasn't been paid back) was the elitist oxymoron of a "jobless recovery." It's a recovery only for the financial industry, whose government-favored goliaths enjoyed a record-breaking rebound from the Great Recession. The rest of us have to deal with the lingering symptoms of unemployment and foreclosures, which don't seem to disturb the Wizards of Wall Street in their glass towers.

Besides redistributing wealth to the wealthy, the bailouts were misguided in another crucial way. They were predicated on the assumption that continued economic growth is good and, with correct government policy, inevitable. If our leaders knew the folly of infinite economic growth as it relates to resource depletion and environmental degradation, they would've used the bailouts to begin a managed contraction of our economy.

As it stands now, we've left Nature to manage the contraction, and, the more we rage against her limits, the more precipitous and chaotic our decline will be. It's possible that more bailouts will be passed by Congress and signed by the President as the economy lurches from crisis to crisis. But, given the extreme unpopularity of the bailouts and the emergence of a well-endowed, right-wing movement dedicated to their rejection, I doubt it. The only saving grace might be to attach meaningful strings to the money, and I don't see the free-market acolytes on the Right going for that.

What we're left with is the probability of a swift, chaotic collapse of the economy in the near future. The people who would be presiding over that situation range from those who think capitalism occasionally needs no-strings-attached handouts and a little regulation (Democrats) to those who think capitalism works best with no handouts and no regulation (most of the GOP and all of the Tea Party). I really don't think they have the knowledge to deal with such a contingency. Barring the ecological enlightenment of our federal government, they will keep trying to grow the economy, which will have the rather ironic effect of digging us deeper into a pit of poverty.

Weimar Days

Back in April, I saw the recording artist Ke$ha perform one of her chart-toppers on a rerun of Saturday Night Live. The spectacle resembled a musical number from Cabaret, even though she and her backup dancers were dressed and acted like robots from space. This insubstantial pop starlet appeared to be attempting some obtuse political statement with her absurdly overblown stage show featuring two U.S. flags, one draped over the mic stand and the other lining the underside of her cape.

I've fallen far behind the music scene these days, but Ke$ha seems to be a cut-rate composite of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, the Taylor Dane to their Madonna. It's astonishing to me, a child of the '80s and '90s, that a pop star of her slim caliber would try such ambitious social commentary. Of course, I wasn't around for the late '60s or early '70s, but there seem to be disturbing parallels between our era and the Weimar Republic, which produced an abundance of politically-conscious art.

Glenn Beck's rally to restore America's "honor" is Exhibit A in this theory. The Right has been thoroughly enraged by Obama's "global apology tour," his speeches overseas that expressed a teensy bit of regret over the recent conduct of U.S. foreign policy. They feel that he's dishonoring the glorious, righteous wars we've been waging in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, more than that, he's suggesting that America is capable of making mistakes when it comes to war. Such self-criticism rattles one of the pillars of their world, American exceptionalism. This is the belief that America is "the shining city on the hill" (in Reagan's words) chosen by God to spread Truth, Justice and the American Way.

They can't imagine that, as far as our foreign policy is concerned, the U.S.A. may be nothing more than the latest in a long line of empires that use war merely to aggrandize their power. The only moral distinction between us and previous empires is the lengths to which we'll go to rationalize mass murder. Our forerunners were comfortable with conquest. We must convince ourselves that our way of life is threatened before we can bomb Third World peasants with a clean conscience.

The Nazis had a similar version of German history. It denied or rationalized the crimes Germany had committed in World War I and led the Nazis to believe that the Fatherland had been betrayed and disgraced by its leaders when they accepted responsibility and punishment for starting the war. German exceptionalism convinced the Nazis they should rule the world and exterminate all non-Aryans. Of course, most American exceptionalists do not desire global dominion. But, if you claim the right to destroy a country that poses no threat to your own (like Iran), what's the difference?

The other red flag thrown up by the Beck rally was its co-opting of the civil rights movement. Beck calls himself and his Tea Party pals the true inheritors of that movement, a claim whose absurdity transcends both comedy and gobsmackery. They are the most sheltered and privileged demographic in history. It recalls the twisted logic of the Nazis insisting that Christian Germans were oppressed by Jews, a minority that had known centuries of subjugation in Europe.

I know I'm guilty of the cliche of comparing my political adversaries to the Nazis, but the similarities are too striking to ignore. And, as I'm sure we've all heard, knowing history is the best way to avoid repeating it. Of course, if you erase the unpleasant parts, you might be inclined to repeat it.

Mickey hits the Big Time!

On Saturday I was interviewed by KMO for his C-Realm Podcast. The subject was my blog post, "The Doomer's Course," which was published on Energy Bulletin. You can listen to the podcast here. KMO starts by reading my essay, which takes a while, and my interview follows that. I probably should've reread my essay before the interview. I wrote it a month before and hadn't looked at it since then. If I wanna make it on the podcast circuit, "preparation" will hafta be the name of my game ;^)

Interestingly, KMO is working at The Farm Ecovillage Training Center in Summertown, TN, the same place I went in 2005 for a two-week permaculture course shortly after learning about Peak Oil and collapsing into an insomnia-fueled emotional breakdown. For me, the healing began there, so I have extremely fond memories of the place.