Eucatastrophy Reader: 2009

Blue Gold: World Water Wars

What is the name of the watershed that supplies your water? Do you know? Here is a map of the watersheds of the State where I live. You can see that I am in the Otter Creek watershed. Assume for a moment that Walmart or Microsoft or Halliburton or Enron or Monsanto Corporation bought the water rights to all the water that falls into the Otter Creek watershed. Lets say that they donated 10% of the profits they could acquire for doing so to the candidates and politicians and parties that gave them those rights. Lets say that I am not completely dependent on this company for my water.

Now let’s assume that this is a multinational company that can sublet those water rights or cart the water away to be sold somewhere else in the world where people have more money and the demand is higher.  So, if I go and complain that I do not like the price of the water I am being sold, I will be told that I can buy my water from some other company. Let’s assume that the company is run by a CEO who feels morally obligated to his own paycheck and that is determined by how happy he makes company investors who live in other parts of the world, maybe Saudi Arabia, maybe China, maybe Brazil. Investors that have no stake in whether I have enough water or not. This is a the way that oil is bought and sold.  And it is the way that water is heading.

This movie has been created to circumvent that process and to give people information and perspective that would lead them to oppose the privatization of water as a commodity. Obviously, there is a predisposition to hold suspect private companies and perhaps with good reason. Lately, many private companies have shown that the bottom line is what company CEO’s use for a conscience. Itt is part of the reason that the United States is presently in the process of privatizing the banking and healthcare economy in the U.S. People are fed up with CEO’s getting millions for what they regard as “unethical practices”.

But before we get all self righteous, we have to ask ourselves, where were those companies getting the money to pay those CEO’s to do that? And the answer is often “from the investments that we were demanding those CEO’s to make profitable for us.” And here is the rub. I began this post by asking if you know the name of your water source. I will end by asking, if you have invested money, do you know if some of those investments are going to support companies that are privatizing water?

Like the water cycle, the money that funds those companies is coming from somewhere, going somewhere, and having an effect in between.   

This video argues for more public control and less private control of essential commodities. I wonder if that is as sure a solution as the film-makers would have us believe. If you change the rules, how long will it be before the same people will be found benefitting from them?

Decisions That Shook the World

Decisions that Shook the World covers the big and controversial decisions of three U.S. Presidents. The first episode deals with Lyndon Johnson’s decisions to advocate for the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the early 1960’s. Episode two deals with Ronald Reagan’s decision to pursue an aggressive policy towards communism (particularly by developing SDI). Episode three looks at the machinations of Franklin Deleno Roosevelt as he tried to push the envelope on American war involvement in WWII. I suspect that one could go through the administrations of every President and find moments of difficult decision making. I guess what I find fascinating is how human each of these decision makers were. All three of these men mixed courage of conviction with some element of dishonesty (or delusion) in taking the country down a path they felt was for its good.

Franklin Deleno Roosevelt flirted on the edge of fascism in some respects, and was for years, not completely straight with the American people about his intentions. If you read his inaugural address closely, you will see a man that hopes democracy will work but suspects that it might not. His doubt about the American political system is only slightly veiled. “It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly equal, wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us,” he said in that speech,  

“But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But, in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis -- broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

And throughout his Presidency, when the American Congress and American people were not ready to take an action he knew needed taking, he pushed the envelope and found ways to take action and call it something else.

Each of these Presidents had to conclude that the rest of the country would, in time, come to see the world as they did. And in most cases, they were right. Johnson believed that people would come to see the way that it was treating minorities was below our dignity as a nation. Reagan believed that the Soviet Union could not survive its own bankrupt morality and he was basically right. Roosevelt believed that force would have to be used to combat Fascism and that the U.S. could not survive as an isolationist country and he was, I think, right.

I write this on the cusp of a decision by the U.S. congress to pass a transformative health care reform bill. Having no insurance, I find myself unable to fear losing it. Seeing that the government does not have the money for the benefits that it is promising, I find myself unable to hope getting it by this means.

I wonder what decisions I have to just make and stick to?

I was over at a friend's house and, as this is a friend who loves cats, and as I am not a person who understands people who love cats, and as I have a cat (long story), I spent some time t\reading some of my friend's books about cats to try and see if I could thereby improve a bit as a cat owner (or is it the cat that owns me?).

Cat Talk by "Cat Therapist" Carole C. Wilbourn, is a book about someone who loves her cats with more enthusiasm than I have ever been loved by anyone (perhaps including my own mother). IT is a book that aims to help me understand the sources of my cat's rage, depression, anxiety, happiness, hunger, boredom, and amorousness.

"A cat spends most of its life gratifying its basic needs and thereby making himself happy. You may have noticed that a cat's first commitment is to himself. Therefore he is mainly concerned with pleasing himself. If this pleasure should simultaneously please you, you might call it a coincidence or even a gift. A cat has innately solved one of the most important mysteries of life by using all his energy to make himself happy."

This explains why I am constantly catching my cat reading Ayn Rand novels.

The Tribe of Tiger

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

The second book I read (my cat, Jigsaw will be impressed) was The Tribe of the Tiger: Cats and their Culture by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, another cat lover who has broadened the Cat Talk lady's appreciation of cats to include many of the cats who would be delighted to eat her. It was interesting but I shall not take the time here to recount the entire book, which looks into cat culture with all the interest of an anthropologist. I did find the chapter on cat pairing processes of significant interest. Large cats like lions are, as you know, perfectly happy with polygamous family relationships that leave the dominant males in charge of several females and the not-so-dominant males scrounging around, hiding their pee, and trying not to seem threatening to anyone until they find some deserted borderland to live out their bachelorhood.

I tend to feel sorry for all the silver-medal and bronze medal males actually. It seems mean of nature to curse cats with bell curve challenges to singleness and loneliness. Laws of the jungle I guess.

Anyway, that's all you will be reading from me on cats for some time. 

So Goes the Nation

So Goes the Nation is a fascinating look at all levels of a political campaign and what makes a campaign in a democratic country successful and what makes it fail. It presents the views of people who function a as master tacticians in “the art of political war” and it focuses on the people down in the precincts and neighborhoods who zealously give up months of their lives to make an impact. What comes out of the reports at all these levels is the essential importance of having a candidate with likable qualities who can maintain a message in the face of the temptation to get sidetracked.

You can target people who vote or you can target the people who get people to vote. You can spend your time defining yourself or you can spend your time defining your opponent. You can give different messages to different focus groups within the populace who care about different things or you can find what unifies most of them and give the same message to everyone. You can talk about the many issues that most people are uncertain about or you can talk about the one or two issues that they are certain about. You can come across like you are above people, smarter than they are. Or you can come across like you are pretty much like them. You have to ask yourself, “Do people want someone who understands them and who they are – and hope that person is as smart as they can be? Or do they want someone smarter than them who they hope is as much like them as they can be?”

On that issue, much depends.

I think this is a documentary that will benefit Civics teachers all over the country. If it doesn’t, it should.

Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse

Sylvain Cypel

It is safe to say that I was reading, learning about, and studying the history of the Middle East before I was doing anything of the kind for my own country. It is safe to say that, growing up, I was given more exposure to the history of the Middle East than I was to the history of my own State. And yet gaining new perspectives and insights never satisfies me to the extent that I am not interested in another. Over the years, I have read a good number of attempts to explain the history of this region, particularly the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Over that time period, I had never made an attempt to see what the conflict looks like from a European perspective so this past week, I have been reading (and have just finished) Sylvain Cypel’s 500 page book Walled (2006). Cypel is a French Jew who lived in Israel for some 12 years and serves as a journalist for the French paper, La Monde.

I think it fair to say that Cypel’s Jewishness helped to give him access to many of the sources he needed to write the book but did not interfere with his ability to get a “French” perspective on its subject. No doubt, many conservative American readers will hear that the author is French and say “uh-oh” and I think this is unfortunate. Agree or disagree with him, he has offered a worthwhile and honest insider yet outsider perspective on the impasse in Israeli and Palestinian societies. There are sixteen chapters and a conclusion. Fourteen chapters are critical of a large portion of Israeli society that Cypel believes practices either beginner, intermediate, or advanced denial. Two chapters are critical of those portions of Palestinian/Arab society that do the same. I suspect that this is the ratio that would qualify it as a European perspective.

Cypel argues throughout that the primary engine of the conflict resides in colliding entitlements that arise out of colliding historical narratives. Typically, conflicts arise in our lives when we do not share similar viewpoints on history with the people who we must make unified decisions with . A certain amount of discrepancy can be tolerated, say the amount that you might see in the viewing of a Cezanne still-life with its various bowls and pieces of fruit all drawn from slightly different positions. Dysfunctionally unsolvable conflicts arise when the discrepancies between historical narratives reach “Picassoian” proportions. If you read the dueling narratives side by side (as for example in the textbook written by six Jewish and six Palestinian historians, Learning Each Other’s Historical Narratives (2003)), you will see why there is a seemingly irreconcilable conflict.

Once people chose the sources of their historical knowledge, they have chosen much more than that. Once they chose the historians they will rely on for their understanding of the present, they have chosen the limits of the spectrum of choices open to them in the future. There are fewer places on the planet that have more volume and divergence when it comes to historical narrative than the Arab-Israeli conflict. Cypel has insisted that neither the official Israeli narrative nor the official Hamas narrative can be trusted and therein lies his French perspective.

The scary thing for me I guess is that generations of people are being educated with completely different narratives of what happened. And when they are given the same set of facts, they are being educated to weigh different facts as having more importance. Sixty years later, fewer and fewer people were actually there and thus, the secondary “history” (i.e. the narrative of events as opposed to the events themselves) is what those who are taught those narratives perceive as reality. What happened is no longer what happened. What happened is “the story” - with its things exaggerated and things left out - Its things emphasized and its things de-emphasized – this is what serves as though it were the same as experience.

And if these vicarious “experiences” of events are repeated often enough – no matter how partially accurate, they are believed. And once believed, it must therefore stand that the other side’s narrative is a lie (and not just a “tampered with historical memory”. And thus a conflict of differing perceptions becomes a conflict between good (our side based on our story) and evil (their side based on their story).

One could almost read Cypel’s conclusion about what he thinks needs to happen (He believes that the Israeli’s should immediately evacuate the West Bank, settlers, soldiers, and all) and draw the inferences of the narrative he believes. Many Israelis will say that he is the one in denial (if he thinks that a potentially nuclear armed Iran is a portent of the peaceful intentions of Islamic opposition to the Israeli State). He is arguing that Israelis are in denial if they think that the Arab world, the Islamic world, or the world at large is going to tolerate their acquisition of the West Bank indefinitely – either all at once or gradually. The fact is that there are too many powers in the world that have aspirations to take their neighbors’ land right now and any international acceptance of one such land grab would be open invitation to many more.

Everyone knows that the League of Nations did nothing about Japan’s acquisition of Manchuria in the 1930’s and that this sent a direct message to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and every other two bit conqueror in the world. And everyone knows that had there been a League of Nations in the 19^th Century, it would have done nothing about American acquisitions of the American West or British Acquisitions in the Middle East and India or French Acquisitions in North Africa and Lebanon and Syria, etc. etc. etc.

I concur with Cypel in this: Human wars are almost always fought over fears more than realities. And human fears are often the result of narratives that universalize a version of a traumatic past, applying the justifiable fear of a certain group of people in a certain time to all people at all times.

I will certainly keep Mr. Cypel’s perspectives in mind as I try to teach students the various ways that one has to choose from when viewing this continually fascinating and evolving conflict.

Question for comment: Do you ever pick up works of history that set out to challenge the one you grew up with? Why or why not?  

Deadline

Illinois Governor George H. Ryan had a decision to make. It involved 167 death row inmates in Illinois. Two and a half days before going out of office as governor, he commuted the sentences of all those that Illinois courts had determined deserved death.

Deadline (2004) is a documentary that traces the emotional, legal, and ethical debate that lead up to that decision. Few documentaries that I have seen take an ethical issue out of the abstract like this one does. Governor Ryan insisted that the system by which accused murderers are determined to be guilty and determined to be worthy of death was broken and that he was simply refusing to allow it to be used any more. He insisted that the Illinois legislature had an obligation to fix that system in such a way that citizens could henceforth trust that it did not and could not get a wrongful conviction.

You can read yourself how many of the victims’ families felt here. I cannot imagine how discouraged the State’s prosecuting attorneys and courts felt about his lack of confidence in their work. “Why,” I found myself asking, “would God give us the power to make such decisions without the omniscience to make them?” It’s like giving a child a chainsaw. Throughout this movie you could see how people - the accused, the victims’ families, the courts, the wardens, the executioners, and the public were being hurt by this power given without the wisdom requisite to use it.

Over Yonder – Steve Earle

The warden said he'd mail my letter
The chaplain's waitin' by the door
Tonight we'll cross the yard together
Then they can't hurt me anymore.

Question for Comment: Do you have a position on the ethics of the death penalty? What events and influences have created or modified it?

I think I like reading books written by authors who would get into huge arguments if I put them in a room with some of the other authors of books I read. Yesterday and today I have been reading just such a book on the historiography behind the Arab-Israeli conflict. And then my son came along and introduced me to a book he is reading and so while he was doing his homework like a dutiful student, I read his book. And it was an interesting one.

Candor

Pam Bachorz

Candor is a story about a boy, Oscar Banks, whose father has created a utopian society (dystopian to the boy) in which subliminal messaging that plays below consciousness throughout the community renders everyone who comes to live there (parents, knowingly; kids unknowingly) into perfect citizens of a perfect community. Everyone acts on cue and the cue is programmed into the messaging system that plays in the background of everyone’s lives 24/7/365. Oscar Banks is the one doing the programming and thus Candor, the name of the community, is really a human creation of his molding intention - with one exception. The teenage, Oscar has secretly figured out what none of the other teens or children knows: citizens of Candor are literally being brainwashed into their utopian existence. And he has figured out how to program his own messages into the system and over-ride the message’s power in his own perceptual and volitional life. And for those of his peers who have the money to pay, he reveals the secret and helps them to regain their autonomy.

Suffice it to say it is an interesting look at an age old question: Are we who we are? Or are we who we are programmed to be? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of knowing that we have the power to program ourselves?

The book got my son and I into an interesting conversation about adolescent novels that concern the question of “Concept of Self” and we were able to list and discuss a half a dozen of them before he had to get to bed and rested fro school tomorrow. It is impossible for me to keep up with him these days as he reads approximately 3-4 novels a week (with a school librarian to help him find them) but the conversation was engaging none-the-less. Skyler mentioned books like Feed, Grendel, Neuromancer, and a short story that he recommended to me a few months ago entitled Learning to Be Me. All of these stories deal with the fascinating question of whether our identity consists of the person that we are programmed to be or if we are the person that decides how we will program ourselves or allow ourselves to be programmed (use the word “socialized” instead of “programmed” if you wish.) I am sure Skyler could list a half dozen more books that kids have to read on the subject and that thought led me to think that it would be interesting to put together a workshop on the subject of “concept of self creation” as seen in modern adolescent fiction.

Another project for my rainy days perhaps.

Question for Comment: How much control do you feel that you have over the basic set of beliefs that govern the way that you live your life?

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, … and Spring is a rather aesthetically beautiful attempt to illustrate some of the principle teachings of the Buddhist perspective on life. Unfortunately, there is a tad too much R-rated material in the “Summer” section to use the film in its entirety in a high school class on world religions, but on the whole, it would make a great point of departure for discussions about the core teachings of Buddhism/Hinduism. Through the course of the movie, concepts like ahimsa (respect for life), dharma, karma, non-attachment, meditation, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the cyclical view of history are all beautifully portrayed.

In the opening scene, a young boy, the “monk apprentice,” ties a pebble to a small fish, and then to a frog and a snake. His Buddhist master oversees, and, during the night, ties a rock to the young boy. In the morning, he is instructed to go free the three living things that he has harmed in this way, and with millstone tied to his back, the boy trudges off. “If one of them has died,” says the Master, “you will always carry that stone in your heart.”

And in some respects, this boys does carry his karmic penalty throughout his life.

In the second episode (Summer) the boy is an adolescent and is depicted entering a sexual relationship with a young woman who has come to find healing in the powers of the Lake and its Buddhist saint. The old monk is not ignorant of what is going on behind his back and finds that the relationship may even be healing in a way to the young woman but he clearly sees the dangers of attachment that are interfering with his apprentice’s Buddhist “non-attachment” exercises. “Lust awakens the desire to possess,” he says, “And that awakens the intent to murder.”

During the Fall episode of the movie, the young prodigal monk returns having murdered his wife (she had cheated on him). The old monk instructs him to carve out the Heart Sutra in Chinese on the planks of the floating monastery. The words of the Heart Sutra remind him that life is an illusion and that it was a mistake to think anything worth killing for. See below for a translation I found on the internet.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, meditating deeply on Perfection of Wisdom, saw clearly that the five aspects of human existence are empty, and so released himself from suffering.  Answering the monk Sariputra, he said this:

Body is nothing more than emptiness,
emptiness is nothing more than body.
The body is exactly empty,
and emptiness is exactly body.

The other four aspects of human existence --
feeling, thought, will, and consciousness --
are likewise nothing more than emptiness,
and emptiness nothing more than they.

All things are empty:
Nothing is born, nothing dies,
nothing is pure, nothing is stained,
nothing increases and nothing decreases.

So, in emptiness, there is no body,
no feeling, no thought,
no will, no consciousness.
There are no eyes, no ears,
no nose, no tongue,
no body, no mind.
There is no seeing, no hearing,
no smelling, no tasting,
no touching, no imagining.
There is nothing seen, nor heard,
nor smelled, nor tasted,
nor touched, nor imagined.

There is no ignorance,
and no end to ignorance.
There is no old age and death,
and no end to old age and death.
There is no suffering, no cause of suffering,
no end to suffering, no path to follow.
There is no attainment of wisdom,
and no wisdom to attain.

The Bodhisattvas rely on the Perfection of Wisdom,
and so with no delusions,
they feel no fear,
and have Nirvana here and now.

All the Buddhas,
past, present, and future,
rely on the Perfection of Wisdom,
and live in full enlightenment.

The Perfection of Wisdom is the greatest mantra.
It is the clearest mantra,
the highest mantra,
the mantra that removes all suffering.

This is truth that cannot be doubted.
Say it so:

Gaté,
gaté,
paragaté, parasamgaté.
Bodhi!
Svaha!

Which means...

Gone,
gone,
gone over,
gone fully over.
Awakened!
So be it!

Interestingly, none of the Buddhists in the movie have names. Only two non-Buddhist police officers have names, perhaps indicative of the fact that Buddhism leans in the direction of de-emphasizing the individual existence. The director of the movie I, I am given to understand, is actually a Christian. And his previous movies are not exercises in Buddhist Enlightenment whatsoever. The last scenes of the movie include images of the young monk’s return to the Lake and his attempt to pursue a regimen of martial arts instruction and it would be hard to place this movie in the same category as The Cup for authenticity throughout.

Never-the-less, it has moments of sheer beauty and moments where you find yourself seeing the value of the Buddhist world view.

Question for Comment: Do you still spend spiritual, emotional, or psychic energy trying to resolve the issues of your childhood?

 “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.” Martin Luther King, A Time to Break the Silence

Literature from the "Axis of Evil": Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations

Literature from the Axis of Evil is an anthology of literature (short story and poetry) from places that have been officially declared enemies of the United States. It includes stories from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Cuba and includes the stories of dissidents as well as supporters of these various regimes. Houshang Moradi-Kermani’s The Vice Principle makes use of a childhood story about censorship and repression in an Iranian school to speak to the wider issue of freedom of speech in Iranian society. Kang Kwi-mi’s A Tale of Music and Lim Hwa-won’s The Fifth Photograph are panegyrics to Kim Jon Il and the Communist State. Sadly, in North Korea, people do not seem to be allowed to write anything that does not exalt the Communist State and its leader in specific. But nevertheless these stories help us to understand the people who are given these stories to read and nothing else.

Hana Mina’s On the Sacks tells of a coming of age experience of a young boy in Syria.  Kamel al-Maghur’s The Soldier’s Plumes tells the story of the transfer of power that took place in Libya as the Italians were replaced by the British during WWII. Coffee and Water and The Sweetest Tea with the Most Beautiful Woman in the World bring us into contact with the pain and suffering of a Sudanese exile, Tarek Eltayeb.

A brief selection from Hwangjini by Hon Seok-jong reminds us that even in North Korea, people know what love at first sight feels like.  

These were the pieces that I particularly appreciated.

Each country receives a brief introduction with an explanation of the state of literary achievement and a brief history of significant authors not included in the anthology that would be worth pursuing.

My hat is off to WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS, the organization that assembled this worthy and worthwhile attempt to disassemble the walls between us. I could not read this work without thinking about Robert Frost’s character in Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.