“Part of the main plan of imperialism… is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past…What’s more truly frightening is the defacement, the mutilation, and ultimately the eradication of history…”
--- Edward Said

It would be hard to imagine any ardent advocate of the military/industrial complex not reveling in what the Super Bowl has become --- a veritable marketing orgy of violence and consumption --- advertisers spending millions per minute to pander to our desire to own more stuff while fighter jets roar overhead reminding us of how the right-to-stuff is protected. Why must a football game become a vehicle for materialism and the power that defends it? I like football, played it pretty well in high school, and still think that in spite of the performance enhancing drugs & obscene salaries, the game itself is one of the few more or less honest of our mass cultural diversions. But the integrity of the game itself drowns in the toxic soup of values being dished up.

However, I have no need to belabor what should be obvious to anyone.

Instead, something far more insidious was presented to the world minutes before the opening kick-off. A short video, 111 seconds, narrated by the actor Michael Douglas, portrayed The Journey of American History --- its culmination being Super Bowl XLV.
The video consisted of a quick series of icons, both events and people, from our history, each one meant to strike a chord of collective pride, courage, triumph or suffering. In quick succession we saw in black and white the Statue of Liberty, suffragists marching, an image from the Dust Bowl, a landing craft at D-day, John Lennon’s image on a peace poster, JFK at his inaugural saying, “Ask not….,” MLK, Jr. intoning, “I have a dream…,” Rosa Parks, the Challenger lifting off, someone pick axing the Berlin Wall, the floods of Katrina, FDR speaking, Muhammad Ali gesticulating over a downed opponent, Ronald Reagan smiling, Lindbergh, the flag raising at Iwo Jima, a similar flag raising at 9/11, Amelia Earhart, Ray Charles, the moon landing, a scene from the Depression …. I’m sure I’ve missed a few. Michael Douglas’s minimal narration began by saying that this was our journey. And after Dr. King’s image, Douglas picked up the theme of the dream, our dream & our belief in that dream. With the images of 9/11, he said that this was our darkest day…. But the flag as still there! He said, “We never give up. How could we?”

And then the video shifted to the teams in the Super Bowl. Douglas said that tonight we are united in the journey of these teams as quick images of chicken packers in Green Bay and a steel mill in Pittsburgh flashed by. Douglas said that dreaming and believing have brought us to this moment of collective celebration and that that is Our Journey.

That’s our journey? It began with the Statue of Liberty? Not with the genocide of Native Americans, slavery and the crucial assumption that nature was to be feared, conquered and exploited? If I claim that I am telling you about my journey, and tell you only the good parts, what have I told you? What have we learned about the nature of journeys?

If I tell you that my darkest day was the time I was victimized and fail to mention the time I victimized someone else, what do you think I have learned from my experience?

More importantly, the video portrayed a series of American moments and heroic people and equated them with the Super Bowl as though they are all on a continuum of social progress and equally indicative of our finest character. In the parlance of our time, it was simply a portrayal of connecting the dots: Statue of Liberty, suffragists, FDR, D-day, JFK, Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr. … Super Bowl. All on the same line, of equal weight. If this is the trail of dots we need to follow, it’s a trail that leads us deeper into the dark woods, not out of it.

Obviously the Super Bowl is an excuse to celebrate materialism and militarism. Weren’t those two of the “triplets” (the other being racism) that Dr. King identified as being the forces that were destroying the values of this country and leading us to spiritual death? Many of the dots in that time line figure one way or another in the struggle for some kind of justice. How does the Super Bowl do that? It does, but only if you consider the real triumph of this country not its democratic values but its economic system, capitalism. And you can’t tell the difference.

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King described the American Dream as consisting of the “riches of freedom and the security of justice.” The blatant message of Super Bowl is the freedom of riches and the justice of security. Very different things.

People, like many of our students today, who know little history except for the façade of history, and people, like many students today, who have not been taught to think deeply, would accept the message of Michael Douglas’s version of our journey. Without any critique, it felt good.

Who wrote that script for him?

Clearly its intent was to equate the apotheosis of violence and consumption with the struggle for social justice. Its intent was to drain the real courage and meaning of our most important and most necessary social struggles by equating them with corporate power --- corporate power being the same force that did and does impede social and economic justice. The video’s intent was to show that the behavior and interests of Halliburton are on the same moral timeline as the behavior and interests of Rosa Parks.

We generally think of imperialism, as Edward Said was when he made the comment above, as the military/economic process of one country exploiting another. Imperialism, though, is the same within a country. Propaganda and false history, combined with poor education and a corporate press, are used to subjugate people to the benefit of their own powerful elites. It stinks. It stinks in Iraq and it stinks in Wichita.

Douglas said, “We never give up. How could we?” Give up what? Fighting for justice or fighting for profit? His choice of words reminded me of another person who asked the same question. Dorothea Lange went into internment camps in the western US during WW II where our government had imprisoned Japanese Americans. She photographed what was being done to these people in the name of the freedom of security. She went to bear witness. Most Americans had no idea nor wanted to. Fear justifies most anything and denies the consequences. After being there & witnessing this crime against humanity, Dorothea Lange said, “This is what we did. How could it happen? How could we?”

What is our journey?

I know little about Michael Douglas except that he is a fine actor and that he recently survived a bout with serious throat cancer. I suspect that both of those factors made him a good choice as the narrator for this bit of dangerous propaganda. Conquering a deadly disease tends to add credibility to one’s professed integrity. But with this video he was helping to proliferate a cultural cancer that is destroying us all.

I noticed that he was sitting right behind George Bush and Condoleezza Rice in the luxury boxes.

A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage.
--- Marilynne Robinson

What magic occurs to make an invisible person visible, visible and powerful? Well, sometimes it’s spectacular crime or titillating celebrity, but for lasting visibility, for making the shadow life that most of us lead into substance, the necessary magic is courage. Moral courage. When an ordinary person plants a simple, but abstract idea like justice, like fairness, the common good, in her own body and lets it grow, and understands what actions she must perform to nourish that abstract idea into reality, then we witness the birth of an agent of change. We see an idea become a viasible narrative because it is embodied. The embodiment becomes a story in which we can all play a part. A person does not have to have gone to Yale; she can be short and stocky, and a grandmother by the time she’s in her forties, but by an act of moral courage in the name of justice, human and environmental justice, she becomes a teacher for all of us. She becomes very tall, indeed. She demonstrates that she has taken to heart the most profound of education’s lessons --- that none of the things we cherish in life will be ours unless we act courageously, in Helen Keller’s words, “…to make good our claim on them.”

I’m talking about Judy Bonds who died two days ago in West Virginia. She was the divorced Pizza waitress who won the international Goldman Prize in 2003 for her struggles to stop the practice of Mountaintop Removal that had driven her from her family home and was destroying the natural world and the quality of life that depended on a healthy natural world in southern West Virginia. Harry Caudill called that area a “national sacrifice zone,” suggesting that somehow “we” had all agreed to desecrate and pollute certain zones in this country in the name of necessary resource extraction, profit, expanding economy and jobs --- or whatever other rationalization we use justify exploitation and destruction. What about the people who live in a national sacrifice zone? Who agrees to make them collateral damage to this economy?

Judy Bonds was targeted as one of the invisible victims for the profits of Massey Energy and for most of us to have cheap electricity. But she understood that what was happening in the Appalachians was only a symptom of the problem. She understood that an economy that defines its health by its perpetual growth at the expense of nature is inevitably very sick. Such an economy makes, finally, everywhere and everybody into a national sacrifice zone. Such an economy is at war with nature, with life, and our ultimate reality.

Judy took her anger and her spunky humor and her little body and her huge courage and threw it all into the gears of that economic machine. It didn’t grind to a halt, but her insistence on her visibility, inspired many others to join her. All the issues that are made visible by Mountaintop Removal --- the buried and polluted waterways, the destroyed habitat, the species extinctions, the sacrifice of the Appalachian forests that cleanse the atmosphere of enormous amounts carbon dioxide, the destruction of mountain culture, the baffling arrogance that claims the right to blow up the oldest mountains in the world for profit --- all these issues were brought to the attention of millions of people because of the courage of Judy Bonds. That’s a teacher.

Judy Bonds was in the sisterhood, the one that includes Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth,
Alice Paul, Emma Goldman, Rachel Carson, Kathy Kelly, Medea Benjamin, Mother Jones, Diane Wilson, Molly Ivins, Fannie Lou Hamer, Cindy Sheehan, Rachel Corrie, Jennifer Harbury, Cynthia McKinney, Ann Wright, and many, many more --- women who refuse to be intimidated by power and humiliation, women who refuse to endure oppression.

My goodness, what a calling to join those ranks! And anyone can do it.

I had the opportunity this week to preview a new documentary about Global Warming. It’s called How to Boil a Frog and is the creation of Jon Cooksey --- with a lot of help from many other people. Just being released this week ( find it at its terrific website www.howtoboilafrog.com) it’s the best, funniest, most comprehensive, least sentimental, fast passed, urgent, best teaching tool, and least condescending film I’ve seen yet on climate issues.

Jon Cooksey narrates the entire film --- all 85 minutes --- in a style that at times suggests John Cleese of Monty Python and at times the best teacher you ever had. And, while he is explaining the mechanisms of Global Warming, hilarious graphics are playing behind and around him illustrating the ideas. The pace of the film is hectic. In classrooms, I would suggest that teachers show only sections of it at a time and follow each section with discussion and further research. In fact, the many ideas in the film could easily provide curriculum for an entire year’s science class.

In the first paragraph I said the film was not condescending. What I meant was that Mr. Cooksey assumes that his audience, whether adults or children, prefers to hear the truth of the situation we are in, and that only by knowing the truth will we be able to act in time to affect our future. Toward the end of the film he says we all know that the future is going to be --- has to be --- different. If we act now we will have some say about what kind of different that will be. If we don’t, catastrophic events will decide for us.

The title of the film refers to a curious fact: a frog placed in a pot of cold water, under which the heat is gradually raised, will boil to death instead of jumping out. The analogy he is making is to humans not acting to protect themselves from the gradual heating of the planet. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to compare the frog to our governments. Some people are trying to react to the rising temperature. Governments are mired in the status quo. Why is that?

Near the beginning of How To Boil a Frog Mr. Cooksey confronts the issue that most commentators on this issue are afraid of. The issue is the economic model by which we have chosen to live, the one that demands increased profit, perpetual growth, and increased consumption as a way to determine the progress of our species. Using some funky graphs he shows how this model of straight line growth is completely at odds with nature’s model because it uses up resources faster than the earth can replenish them. The earth, as we have chosen to forget, has to be the standard of our reality. We can only live out of harmony with that reality for a short time before nature calls us back --- rudely. Global Warming. The film shows that climate change is a symptom of a set of other problems --- overpopulation, exploiting and trashing nature, vast divisions between the rich and the poor, peak oil, and the yearly production of three times as much carbon dioxide as the world can absorb. It’s a taboo in this society to denounce growth and economic recovery. Mr. Cooksey is telling us --- quite accurately --- that our economy is destroying our chance of survival.

Once the problems are identified, he then asks, “Who is going to fix it? Governments? Big corporations? Technology?” No, we will not be saved by the people who are causing the problems and profiting from them. We will be saved by ourselves. You and me. And the film then prescribes five categories of action. What’s refreshing about his solutions is again that they are not condescending. They are appropriate to the gravity of the dire predicament --- everything from direct disruptive political action to the necessary changing of our habitual behavior. He quotes Utah Phillips (one of the portraits in this collection): “The earth is not dying. The earth is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” Utah was urging all of us to directly confront the powerful people doing the damage. They don’t like to be confronted. They don’t like embarrassing news that exposes their bad behavior. It’s bad for their profit. Exposure can force change for the better.

Jon Cooksey ends the film with a vision of the future as if we have acted to transition from a global economy addicted to fossil fuels and consumption to a collection of local communities caring for each other and the earth in a sustainable way. His vision is not pie in the sky. It’s fraught with warnings. But it is neither magical nor dishonest. It’s a vision that I agree is our best hope. And I urge as many people as possible to see this film. I urge teachers to show it in schools and insist on having real discussions with students about the future, not the future which is constantly advertised to them and in reality is a mirage, but the future they must create if they want to have one at all.

Our most modern sin is that we do not love the world enough. We have exiled the holy from this realm so we can turn its mountains into money. --- Erik Reece

Sometimes we get a long ways down a road and it suddenly hits us that all our assumptions about where we are going are totally cockeyed. Ass backwards. The landscape we see around us and the directions that guy at the last gas station gave us don’t match at all. He pointed this way & that. He spoke too quickly with an accent that was hard to follow. He said things would be getting better. But there were too many lefts and rights, and his eyes were as shifty as a politician-oil executive-arms dealer. And it’s getting dark. Very dark. We have to backtrack. Where did we go wrong? It’s a long trek all the way back, back through the technological revolution and the industrial revolution, the rise and fall of civilizations, iron age, stone age, back through the struggles for personal freedom and justice, all the wars, Beethoven, Adam Smith, Einstein and Galileo, towing the Erie Canal and trekking the Silk Road, feudalism and plagues, heroes and villains, prophets and soothsayers, ice ages and droughts, migrations, mastodons, and dispersions of tribes. All that history! It goes by in a blur.

That’s OK. Spending too much time with history only increases the burden that its bloody pageant was inevitable.

Let’s begin again with the myth in the Garden of Eden amongst the whispery trees and bee-happy flowers, singing birds and leaping fish, sweet fruits and berries, mammals and reptiles. What really happened where the four rivers --- Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates --- flowed, and Man and Woman were given everything they would need if only they would obey one commandment --- that they not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good an Evil? This is the same garden where the U.S. today has waged awful war & occupation. But let’s go without weapons, without the intent to kill and control, without propaganda and fear, without the crusading righteousness of the big lie, without the necessity of hypocrisy or the need to turn a profit, without our gas tank running low. Let’s go mythically, imaginatively.

What we find is a funny mixture of creation myth and reality, true story and deceit, metaphor that helps us see who we are, and metaphor that blinds. We find a story in which a god tells an immortal man and woman to live in harmony with a bountiful garden. They disobey that one commandment, ingest the knowledge of good an evil, and stripped of their innocence and immortality, are banished to fearful lives of wandering and death.

What’s wrong with this story? A good metaphor doesn’t have to make literal sense. It can ignore the constraints of time, but it has to adhere to a truth.

What is this truth? The garden is a gift. And the garden rules. Its only condition is that one has to live in harmony with it. This is the fundamental reality beyond which there are no other realities. For all intents and purposes the garden’s system is immortal (At least for the duration of its sun.) Call the fundamental principle God, call it Spirit, call it, as Dylan Thomas did, “the force that through the green fuse drives,” it doesn’t matter. The commandment is the same. Nature says there shall be no other god but me. Nature says, “Diss me, and I’ll get in your face.”

So, what really happened is this:

Man and Woman said, We want to be in control, use this garden in any ol’ way that tickles our fancy or slices our apple! Mine it. Develop it. Flip the Bud cans out the car window. Dams, plastic bags, trophy homes, SUVs. And, somebody, please poison those damn mosquitoes that had no business being her in the first place! See this apple? We can eat it, sell it, genetically engineer it, spray it with pesticides, juggle it five ways to Sunday. WeeeHaaa!

God says, I am Nature and the law of Nature, and your way invites death.

Man and woman say, “Take a hike, God.”

What really happened in the Garden of Eden is that Man thought he could banish God.
The story we tell is that God banished man. Not true. It was the other way round. Man posited, for his convenience, that the laws of nature and the resources of nature were not connected. He separated God and Nature in the same way that he separated himself from Nature. Man, in his hubris, thought he could banish the one and continue to live in the other. As though he could gag God, stuff him in the back of a cave, and Nature would then be man’s compliant, voiceless servant. His never ending source of profit.

Man became a ventriloquist speaking for God. The voice he invented was, of necessity, opportunistic. God said, Peace! God said, War! God said, Forgiveness. God said, Vengeance! God said, Equality. God said, Some are more equal that others. God said, I’m on your side … then, now I’m not! God said, Love the Earth. God said, I created the earth for your use and benefit so, cut down the forests, blow up the mountains, internalize profits, externalize costs, exterminate species, foul the rivers, pollute the air, poison the land, drag all the fish from the sea. God said, Exploitation is progress… And man speaking for God becomes ecstatic about smiting those who stand in the way of his profit.

It was not Adam and Eve’s physical nakedness that was the source of their shame. It was their naked greed. Gentlemen, they said, Start your bulldozers.

* * * *
Last week I traveled to Syracuse to give some talks at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public affairs at Syracuse University and at the ArtRage Gallery in Syracuse where I had a show of the portraits. I was very honored to meet with Oren Lyons who is the chief of the Onondaga Nation and who will soon be one of the portraits in this project. We talked about a notion that has long been central to the legal foundation of this country --- separation of church and state. What the early proponents of this separation were thinking was that religion should be a protected, private matter of choice. And, in a pluralistic society, the ideas of any one religion should not be allowed to take precedence over another, especially when they prescribe behaviors inconsistent with fundamental, secular freedoms and equalities. One’s religious faith may enhance one’s dedication to justice, but it can not be allowed to discriminate.

In other words, most of us are lead to believe that what the framers of our political society were trying to do was establish a Constitutional democracy and to avoid a theocracy --- by any dogma, sect or religion.

I was surprised, then, when Mr. Lyons said that Native-Americans knew the framers of the Constitution were making a terrible mistake when they separated church and state. He did not mean, though, that the U.S. should institute a Catholic, Hindu, Protestant, Islamic or Buddhist society. He meant that we should not have separated our laws, our economics, our systems of governance, education, transportation, business, food, and water from the reality of the earth and our natural spiritual relation to it. The warning of the Native-Americans was that when you try to separate your behavior from the reality of nature, you not only allow yourself to destroy nature, but also yourself. Opt off the Great Wheel, and it rolls right over you. It’s the same point I was making earlier about arrogant humans banishing God from nature. Our church is nature, and nature is our reality. Oren Lyons was saying people can choose religions affiliation, but our spiritual connection with the earth has chosen us. We can’t choose another denomination. Unless it’s a different planet. Honoring, says Mr. Lyons, through daily ceremony, our natural spiritual connection to the earth is not an act of faith, it’s a requirement of reality.

In the myth, Adam and Eve ate the apple, and were expelled from Eden and condemned to being mortal. The true significance of that moment was that humankind was demanding to be outside of and superior to the natural cycle of life. That cycle is, in effect, our immortality, all living things being recycled forever. So the myth should be interpreted that humans, in attempting to expel the Great Spirit, were expelled themselves, by their own choice, from the cycle of life --- the immortality of the garden. Humans insisted on using nature for profit but not being part of it. Native-Americans understood this. Too bad they weren’t asked to write a Preamble to the Constitution that explained how all human systems must be subservient to the reality of nature.

The good news is that the Spirit of Nature can always be invited back into the Garden. Nature is deeply wounded but not bitter. It loves life, not vengeance. If we honor our place in Nature, it will honor us.

Wendell Berry’s “Free”

“For a time/ I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

I have sometimes suggested to teachers that they ask their students to explore what Wendell Berry might mean by the use of the word “free” in this line.

I’m sure you recognize it as the last from his well known poem The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I have blithely offered that as an exercise for students, but I have not taken the time to really explore it myself. So, I ask myself, just how is Wendell Berry “free” when he rests in the grace of the world?

First, let’s say what he is not talking about. He is not talking, at least apparently, about the kinds of political freedoms that we try to grant ourselves by virtue of our means of social and economic organization. We make much of freedom of speech, equality, freedom to vote, freedom of the press and of religion. Without these freedoms how can we be free in society? We also talk about freedom from want and freedom from fear. And we make a huge deal out of the free market. And as we have seen in a recent Supreme Court Citizens United decision, there are those who think that the highest form of free speech is that which belongs to money. Giving it, essentially, the power to control all other freedoms. But Berry --- although we know he is concerned about these things because he is a social and environmental activist --- is discovering a different order of being free. This is a kind of free based in separation from human social structures.

He is free because he accepts his place in nature. He finds solace in nature’s beauty, its community, its continuity, its lack of despair. The grace of nature is in the restorative power he finds by accepting that place. But why is that? Doesn’t “free” mean no obligations, no restraints? Berry is leading us to what may be the most important understanding of our lives: our freedom is defined by our place in nature, not our separation or freedom from it. Our fundamental reality is nature. It is not that we come from it, and go back to it. The point is that we are never separate from it. If we struggle to separate ourselves from nature’s laws, we diminish our freedom and increase our grief. We also diminish our chances of living healthy lives and being able to provide healthy lives for future generations.

But there is also a connection between the freedoms of our political society and this freedom to be found in nature. If we don’t honor our relationship to nature and try to live in harmony with it, our political freedoms lead us to despair. Political and economic freedoms that separate us from nature, that seek to exploit nature’s resources, that allow the pursuit of happiness to mean the pursuit of profit at the expense of nature, are really then in the service of death, not life. Freedom to extract, exploit, pollute, degrade --- these freedoms are a death wish. All freedoms must begin with an acceptance of and a love for the biological system that gave us life. We like to think that we have evolved and instituted idealistic values in systems of freedom. But Berry is saying we don’t find true freedom there unless we first find it by accepting our place in the system that made us.

We know from his other poems that Berry is filled with despair --- for himself and his children --- in a culture that desecrates nature while calling itself a land of free people. In fact, this condition causes fear, as he says, to grow in him. It’s interesting that he has used the word “grow” which should be a healthy process. This growing despair is a perversity of nature. More like a tumor. Nature’s cycle does not grow despair. And Berry’s choice of words here is important:
“… in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be.” He is not in fear for what may happen to them, how they may be victimized. He’s in fear of what they may be complicit in, what social and economic systems that they are part of that create despair.

Free in nature means free to be part of its beauty, its necessary cycle of life and death.
It means loving the future life that will be made possible by your death. It means being free of the arrogance of false realities, their destructiveness and hypocrisy.

It might be helpful to further examine Berry’s meaning by reading Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese which we might consider a companion poem to The Peace of Wild Things.

Wild Geese

You don not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting ---
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver says we can tell each other about our despair, but meanwhile the world is going on. It is as though it broadcasts a homing signal, a flashing beacon, “…over and over announcing your place/ in the family of things.” That reminds me of Yeats in The Lake Isle of Innisfree saying, “I will arise and go now, for always night and day/ I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.”
It’s the same signal. The same message for everyone. Yeats says,

While I stand in the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep, heart’s core.

It’s a message that sounds so gentle, so loving, so unconditional, the voice of the perfect mother.
But there is a hammer… set of rules … an exclusion policy. A pitiless reshuffling of the evolutionary deck. Ours is the only species to have a conscious relationship to its own evolutionary survival. Thus our nobility, thus our despair. Is this consciousness a blessing or a curse? Both?

When Wendell Berry says that , “… For a time/ he rests in the grace of the world…,”
what does he mean? It means he is accepted. He is in some sense absolved. Perhaps absolved of human arrogance. He is part of a terrible beauty, awe, patience, part of earth’s time --- “the day-blind stars waiting with their light” --- a grand humility. And this grace means he is part of nature’s justice which must be understood if we are to understand human justice and what it means to be free.

Earth’s justice, its unalterable, basic contract, is that all life will die and immediately begin a re-cycling process into more life, beginning with tiny bacteria, the earth’s brain cells. Could we ask anything more of justice than to never be excluded from the life process? There is no 30 years to life, no death sentence, because no life form is ever excluded from life. No special privilege, no dogma, no prayers, no entitlements of one religion over another.
No need for laws, lawyers, courts, clerks, cops, judge and jury to determine who is fit to be included, be considered equal, who cast into the outer dark. It all breaks down, it all comes back.
As Mary Oliver says, “You do not have to be good.”

Nature’s grace creates no superfund sites, no plastics.

What’s just about it is its essential fairness. Every atom of every living thing will, given enough time, have the opportunity to participate in every living composition and re-composition. The grace and the justice is that you may be the wood drake resting in your beauty, the great heron feeding --- also the slug and the scorpion, the bluebird and the carpenter ant. The only ingredient that may not be transferable is ego. Who’s to say about forms of consciousness?

But make no mistake, there is one iron law. Take too much, try to live for too long out of harmony with the earth’s justice, and your species will be removed. Not your essential ingredients, your hydrogen and carbon and nitrogen and oxygen, those cannot be removed from nature’s grace, but your species.

What we tend to proudly call free in our form of political organization is based on what we presume to call a philosophical reality: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, etc.” I think nature would agree with that. All of nature’s created forms are equal. What nature did not create is profit. Nature did not create any idea of progress. Nature does not consider an amoeba inferior to a stegosaurus, a daisy inferior to a human. Nor did it create a euphemism for destruction of nature called the development of resources. Nature takes no profit. It is based in the conservation of matter. Any realities that humans create that are not part of nature’s reality will result in despair. For that reason, nature considers the Trump building, even St John the Divine, inferior to a white pine tree.

This is what Berry means when he says he comes “… into the peace of wild things/ who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” He’s not saying that animals are not conscious of the future bearing down on them and therefore they are free of worry and fear. Surely all animals fear. But they do not despair for a world disastrously skewed by their thoughtless behavior. They have no mantra like that of our corporations to “internalize the profit and externalize the cost.” What the justice of nature knows, its grace, is that profit and cost are not divisible. Separating them is an unnatural and therefore impossible exercise. Just as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “the end is inherent in the means,” so too is the cost inherent in the profit. It may seem that you are getting a great bargain with a 99 cent burger, but the loss of rain forest, species extinction, feed lot pollution, a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, hormones and antibiotics, moral disregard for the mistreatment of animals, climate change….. the real price is astronomical, beyond measuring. If we have no forethought of the grief of this cost, it is only because we have evolved a fine sense of denial.

It’s important that Wendell Berry says he rests in the grace of the world and feels this sense of being free only “for a time.” He knows his sense of responsibility, his despair, will call him back. His sense of citizenship --- probably not to any nation state, but to nature, to his community, his family. It’s not about patriotism, but love of the earth, and ultimately for ourselves. So we have to act, and act as boldly as we can.
I suspect that Wendell Berry would agree with this statement from Alice Walker:

"I have learned to accept the fact that we risk
disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every
time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world
can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to
be as noble as we think they are. And that there might
be years during which our grief is equal to, or even
greater than, our hope. The alternative, however, not
to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other
people at their best, reaching toward their fullness,
has never appealed to me."

Or, we should let Mr. Berry say it himself:

From Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2003

III Look Out

Come to the window, look out and see
the valley turning green in remembrance
of all the springs past and to come, the woods
perfecting the immortal patience
the leaves that are the work of all time,
the sycamore whose white limbs shed
the history of a man's life with their old bark,
the river under the morning's breath quivering
like the touched skin of a horse, and you will see
also the shadow cast upon it by fire, the war
that lights its way by burning the earth.

Come to your windows, people of the world,
look out at whatever you see wherever you are,
and you will see dancing upon it that shadow.
You will see that your place, wherever it is,
your house, your garden, your shop, your forest, your
farm,
bears the shadow of its destruction by war
which is the economy of greed which is plunder
which is the economy of wrath which is fire.
The Lords of War sell the earth to buy fire,
they sell the water and the air of life to buy fire.
They are little men grown great by willingness
to drive whatever exists into its perfect absence.
Their intention to destroy any place is solidly
founded
upon their willingness to destroy every place.

Every household of the world is at their mercy,
the households of the farmer and the otter and the owl
are at their mercy. They have no mercy.
Having hate, they can have no mercy.
Their greed is the hatred of mercy.
Their pockets jingle with the small change of the
poor.
Their power is their willingness to destroy
everything for knowledge which is money
which is power which is victory
which is ashes sown by the wind.

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go out into the streets, go into the fields, go into
the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is Money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.

When President Obama announced recently the end of the combat mission for US soldiers in Iraq and presented it as a triumph for both the US and Iraq, I thought back to when I began painting the portraits. It was January 2002, 15 months before the invasion, when the decibel level of fear and propaganda, righteous war-mongering, was already deafening. Weapons of mass destruction! al-Qaeda in Iraq! Saddam Hussein’s complicity with 9/11! Iraqi nuclear weapons! Mushroom clouds! Lies ricocheting around America’s hollow, Halliburton supported media skull with a tooth-rattling roar. Lies unchallenged by our “free” press because the press was obsessed with tactics for defeating an enemy whose strength had to be inflated like a balloon to make it seem like the world’s biggest war machine had to pop something. All those ex-generals, all heavily invested in corporations that profit from war, trotting from station to station like trained dogs to promote the coming violence. Hard to tell what scent they were on --- blood or profit? Voices challenging the lies were banned from the major media. Anyone who tried to talk about oil, empire, and control of the Mid-East as reasons for war was ignored, marginalized, called a traitor.

I began painting truth tellers as a personal act of resistance and defiance and a means of maintaining some measure of self-esteem. How hypocritical and duplicitous was our country! How sad to have one’s perception of one’s worth bound up with national identity. But this war was being promoted to protect me and you, thousands of people were going to be murdered (most of them civilians) to protect me and you, young patriotic American men and women would die and be grievously wounded to protect me and you. What a profound betrayal of the notion of democracy and the rule of law was being carried out in your name and mine. And if you can imagine a country’s wealth as a great forest of possibility, ours was being clear-cut for a war revelers’, blood soaked bonfire …. not for housing, healthcare, education, alternative energy, and alleviating poverty. A net of fear was thrown over this country and the majority of people were swept up like a panicked school of minnows. Gleefully. Free fish were criticized for failing to conform to the culture of fear.

The proposition that the US is now leaving Iraq is preposterous. As preposterous as the absurd reasons given for the war. But the first is the necessary condition of the second. The war was not to protect America and not to free Iraqis from an evil dictator. Our government, that is, our taxes, have built there the largest embassy in the world and many “enduring” bases to protect the real reasons for the war. The shameful and ludicrous demand that it’s time for Iraqis to finally take responsibility for their own security is obscene. Iraqis didn’t ask for this war, didn’t beg for America to destroy all their infrastructure, power stations, water treatment plants, kill 1 million plus civilians, create more than 4 million refugees, poison the country with Depleted Uranium, foster ethnic and religious animosity, further malnourish their children, leave the entire country in a state of traumatic stress and give control of their oil to foreign countries.

It seems Iraqis can’t police themselves and don’t understand how to be grateful! Or, how to be thankful for indefinite colonization.

It’s like the teenage drug addict who storms into his little brother’s room, rips it to shreds looking for a little loose change, and then says, “Now I’m going to sit right here and wait till you clean up this mess you just caused by hiding your money.”

Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a former colonel in the US Army who has been very critical of both the Iraq (his son was killed in Iraq) and Afghan wars, recently said:

"The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?"

The first commander he refers to is Bush, the second Obama. I have a problem with the characterization of George Bush as a true believer, a president who was convinced he was morally right to engage in pre-emptive war. If Bush’s zeal for war --- part born again “Christian” crusader, part neo-con ideologue, part oil imperialist, part Dick Cheney puppet --- makes him a misguided, true believer, then what are we to make of his understanding of his position as leader of a democratic republic? What are we to make of his oath to defend the Constitution?
He was a president ( appointed, not elected, by the way) guilty of lying to creat war, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, guilty of ordering torture and a host of subversions of the Constitution. I have the greatest respect for Mr. Bacevich, but Bush was not a true-believer. He was a true disbeliever in our democracy and law. And he was on purpose. Contempt is too good for a president who lies to create war. Give me prosecution. Our contempt is righteous, but puny and ineffectual. Bush’s contempt for democracy, life, and law was enormous and changed the history of the world, sinking us further into brutality, ethnic and religious hatred, inequality, corporatization, and avoidance of humanity’s great crises.

And because President Obama has refused to acknowledge those intentional crimes and not disavow the true reasons for the Iraq invasion, not just the wars but the crimes become his, too.

YES! Article/ Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits

“The most alarming sign of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.” --- Wendell Berry

I did not want to paint these portraits. Over 25 years I had built up a career as a surrealist painter – enough of a career to pay my bills, work full time, and, it seemed to me, fulfill my obligation to society as an artist. It was an obligation I defined in terms of exploration into the mysteries and ambiguities of the human predicament. I had never painted a portrait.

Then September 11, 2001… then a war launched not against the perpetrators of the crime but against the country of Afghanistan where they ( Saudis and Egyptians) had some training bases… then the blatant and purposely false reasons promoted by our government for the pre-emptive war on Iraq. My sense of obligation as an artist changed.
I could not live with myself unless I used what I do best to expose the lies, to try to tell an honest history, to provide role models --- not of the myths of U.S. exceptionalism, but of citizens who struggled for justice --- and to provide hope by offering stories of courage. I wanted to reclaim my own freedom in the way Utah Phillips once put it: “The degree to which you resist injustice is the degree to which you are free.”

However, I had no idea yet of the portrait series. Mired in anger, grief, cynicism and shame, it seemed that those were the feelings I needed to express in art. But where do those feelings most often lead except to more of the same? How to use those feelings to do something positive? I ended up being guided by shame --- a very isolating and debilitating emotion. I thought --- why do I spend so much time agonizing over my shame for this country? Why don’t I surround myself with people who make me feel proud, people who have insisted that this country live up to its own professed ideals about inalienable rights, equality and justice? Why don’t I invoke their spirits by painting their portraits? The portraits became my way of using negative emotions in the service of positive, anger in the service of love.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. I was fed up with the stories of U.S. entitlement --- the greatest democracy on earth, the most blessed by God, the most powerful, its people the most virtuous. Why all this arrogance? Why no humility? Why do we think these things are true? Do we do our children any favor by teaching them to become actors in this pageant of superiority? Implicit in the myths of our exceptionalism is still the story of Manifest Destiny, that our virtue entitles and justifies our actions no matter how despicable in terms of cost to other people and environments. It’s a myth that says because it’s our might, it is right. It says my country right or wrong because my country is never wrong. Manifest Destiny justifies and makes a positive ethic of collateral damage.

At the same moment that I got the idea to paint the portraits, I knew that the words of the subjects had to on their portraits. The statements being made about various forms of justice had to be literally spelled out. These aren’t just people in paintings looking at you. They are people imploring you to listen and act. I scratched the words into the surface of the paintings rather than painted them on as a metaphor about commitment.

I wonder why we need to tell ourselves stories that set us apart from the rest of mankind, stories of power and domination. It seems to me that our nobility as a people has been discovered --- and continues to be --- through the courageous insistence of our own people that our country fulfill its own promise. Not in how we subdue others, but in how we subdue our own worst tendencies to racism, sexism, classism, and environmental degradation. Our revolution did not end in 1787. Because, at the signing of the Constitution, we did not free the slaves, give political rights to freed African-Americans, Native-Americans, women, the disabled, or poor whites, our revolution was just beginning. I decided to paint portraits of some of the people who had fought to extend rights to everyone. It was a story not about America being its own reward, but about a reward continually needing to be earned.

I do not want to paint celebrities. Nor do my subjects desire to be perceived as such. Celebrities are people the culture idolizes for their disproportionate wealth, power and fame --- people made huge so that the rest of us can feel small and unworthy. My intent was the opposite, to portray real, ordinary people whose persistence and courage changed their own lives and provided role models of all of us. “Without courage,” William Sloane Coffin said, “there are no other virtues.” Any person, adult or child, acting with courage for justice, becomes a teacher, becomes a light in the darkness, encourages all of us to become our own lights. Just as fear is infectious, so is courage. Think of Sojourner Truth, the illiterate ex-slave, who became one of the greatest leaders for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Today we remember and admire her, not her rich white owner. Which one do we think of when we want to understand the meaning of America? It’s not about celebrity, social status, money or privilege. It’s about courage. Ordinary courage. Colonel Ann Wright’s resignation from the diplomatic corps in protest of the illegal invasion of Iraq was not to make herself a celebrity. She resigned to better defend the Constitution that she had sworn to protect. She had not sworn to protect illegal policies of elected leaders who betrayed the Constitution. Her resignation took a lot of courage. Think of Rachel Carson, dying with cancer, refusing to be intimidated by the chemical companies who were using all of their power to humiliate and discredit her when she exposed how their chemicals were poisoning the natural world. What a debt we owe her courage!

Painting the portraits of people such as these has given me the opportunity to tell their stories to children and adults. Their stories both authenticate the experience of people in unjust situations now and show them the way forward. And in teaching how to struggle against injustice, we also must teach about why there is so much injustice.
Slavery continued after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, after the recognition of inalienable rights and the necessity of democracy being built on equality. Why is that? We discover that enlightened, otherwise idealistic people, will sometimes fail to live up to their own ideals when their source of profit and power is lodged in the old evils. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” He also said, “Find out what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong that will be imposed on them.” For me, those two quotes explain all we need to know about the interests of power and the necessity of citizenship.

When I began painting, I had a goal of 50 portraits. I never expected to reach it. I also expected that no one would care what I did, whether I reached that goal or not. I envisioned a stack of portraits in my attic that made me feel better. Now there are 150 portraits. They travel to schools, colleges, libraries, museums, and community centers all over the country. Painting time is now a luxury because of my schedule talking, teaching, and giving workshops. I teach about history, ethics, and citizenship. I would not classify my decision to give up my former artistic career to paint these portraits as an act of courage, but I would call it an act of defiance, of resistance, of refusal to accept a lie as a patriotic reason for war, of refusal to accept that a country that allows a presidential election to be stolen is the greatest democracy on earth. The portraits are an affirmation that only persistent courage and citizenship maintain our ideals. If we want to define the destiny of this country, but more properly, the human enterprise, as a movement toward enlightenment and justice, we have to accept the responsibility of making that happen.

I felt a great sense of freedom when I began to paint the portraits --- the same sense of freedom that is available to anyone who chooses to act for a good cause. That freedom was magnified by another decision --- made before I had painted even the first portrait --- that I would give away the entire collection. I knew I would be painting people who had in effect donated their time on earth --- often risking, and giving, their lives --- so that this country might be more equal, just and honest. My effort had to be a metaphor for those lives. Knowing that I would not sell the portraits freed me to say whatever I thought to be true. Before I began painting the portraits I felt blessed to be part of an exciting artistic community. The portraits have allowed me to be part of a community of people struggling to fulfill the promise of our ideals. Anyone can choose to be part of this community and be welcomed into it.

We are often told that time may alleviate grief. That’s true. But time will not rectify injustice. People have to do that. A government will not often correct injustice unless forced to by its people. When the people do not act to protect their rights and futures, time allows privilege and power to entrench and rigidify the status quo.

Marion Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fund, said, “What’s wrong with our children? Adults telling children be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children not to be violent while marketing and glorifying violence. I believe adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.” I have repeated that quote to students of all ages all over this country and have yet to find a student who disagreed with it. What most students have not thought about is why it is true --- that our society, when forced to choose between care for its children and exploiting them for profit, often chooses profit but can’t admit it. That situation will not change until the people demand that it change and until teachers have the courage to teach the truth about our history, that democracy is made possible not by capitalism but by citizenship.

Painting the portraits has been an enormous education for me. I did not know my own history, nor did I understand the forces that drive it --- backwards & forwards --- until I began this process. As its pain and injustice are oppressive, so, too, its joy and courage in the struggle for justice are inspiring. Cynicism about hypocrisy and corruption seems a rational response to our situation today until one studies the life of John Lewis, Alice Paul, Diane Wilson, Bill McKibben, Dahr Jamail, Lily Yeh or so many others. It’s daunting to oppose the forces that prefer war, daunting to oppose the forces that prefer economic hierarchy, daunting to oppose corporate media and the control that corporations have on the political process, but it’s also exhilarating. And it’s right.

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. --- Terry Tempest Williams

I spent the first week of March in Davenport, Iowa in residence at St. Ambrose University. Davenport, one of the Quad cities ( along with Moline, Rock Island, and Bettendorf), boasts a first class art museum, the Figge, featuring great paintings by Max Beckmann, Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn, and Grant Wood. I went to the Figge twice, but not to see the big name artists.

Just inside the entrance was hanging a tapestry triptych by John Nava, a contemporary artist from Santa Barbara. (http://www.johnnava.com/JNS%202006/Neo-Icons/trip.html) Together the three tapestries are ten feet high and 20 feet wide. Each one portrays the same blond, blue eyed, pigtailed young girl in an identical pose. Her expression is haunting --- sober, challenging, mature, impassive, profound. Her stare, as deep and forceful as an indictment, is hard to hold. Long after you look away, you know that she hasn’t. Beside some minor color variations from one tapestry to another, the only difference is the words on the salmon colored tee-shirt she wears. The name of the work is W Haiku. The “W” refers to President George Bush. The “Haiku” is a Japanese style poem that John Nava has constructed from Bush’s words. The girl’s tee-shirt on the left says, “I say bring’em on.” The middle says, “One heckuva job, Brownie.” The right, “Mission Accomplished.” Together they follow the 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable haiku format.

For those of you young enough to not remember the context of the words, let me explain:
By July 2003, after the first months of the US attack on Iraq had seemed easy, the Iraqi resistance picked up. Bush, with what seemed arrogant and insensitive bravado ( He wasn’t going to be in danger of Improvised Explosive Devices!), said, “Bring’em on!”
Following that statement the war became much more brutal and there were thousands of American casualties. In August 2005, a couple of days after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, and our government did next to nothing to rescue and feed thousands of trapped residents ( mostly poor African-Americans), Bush complimented Mike Brown, the director of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for a job well done. Bush’s nickname for Mike was “Brownie.” And on May 1, 2003, less than six weeks after the attack on Iraq, Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.” Now, seven years later, the war and the occupation continue.

What moved me deeply about Mr. Nava’s tapestries was how he had employed this young girl to indict adults for allowing these events to have become our history. More importantly, her history. The ironic point that he is making is that history is not simply a tee-shirt that can be pulled off at the end of the day & thrown in a corner. It is not a tee-shirt that she can choose to wear to advertiser her favorite singer or funniest slogan. It’s a tee-shirt she cannot take off. And her life is forever changed for that reason.

She wears the burden of a history that had been propagandized, manipulated by lies not mistakes, and was the result of cynical policies and people who cared not a whit for its victims, including her. She is the victim of a history that was not inevitable. A vigilant press and responsible citizens could have written it differently. I suspect that Bush and Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld, and all the rest of them, had cynical contempt for the American people they pretended to revere. Why shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t a people who allow themselves to be so easily led by fear and lies be held in contempt? And mustn’t they have held democracy in similar contempt? Why respect a system so easily manipulated? Wasn’t this the system whose legislative and judicial branches sanctified the stolen election of 2000?

The girl in the tee-shirts has in effect been branded. Not her body. Her destiny. Her tee-shirt has shaped her, not the other way around. Her life choices, the money available for her schools, the ability of her government to combat climate change and provide health care, explore alternative energies, and subsidize whole host of social programs, all changed because her government chose an unnecessary war for empire and resources, chose to go trillions of dollars into debt and become a country permanently at war. For lies. Her ability to be safe in the world is changed. Her self esteem as an American is changed. An essential hypocrisy will always be a bad taste in her mouth. She will forever question the wisdom and courage of adults who allowed this history to be made. A history manufactured from lies becomes fact.

Curiously, though, Bush’s statements have some profound truth in them. It’s easy to scoff at Bush for declaring “Mission Accomplished” when the war had barely begun. But he was right. If the mission was to dupe the people & start preemptive war, he succeeded. Once the soldiers were there, it didn’t matter how long it took or how many Iraqis and Americans died. The US was not going to abandon its 14 permanent bases in Mid-East oilfields & the biggest embassy in the world. The oil cronies, the Pentagon, the war profiteers had the last laugh. The little girl in the tee-shirt pays the price. The mission was accomplished. Democracy was successfully subverted. A new reality was in place. Shiites and Sunnis can go on killing each other forever. It makes no difference.

And Brownie did do a heckuva job. Thousands of poor blacks were removed --- dead & alive – from New Orleans as a result of incompetence, neglect, and corruption. Never to return. Gentrification by shock doctrine. The poor, dehydrated victims of the storm were successfully portrayed as criminals as they broke into stores to obtain bottled water ---enemies of property and the white middle class. Recovery would be a boondoggle for some of the same corporations making fortunes from Iraq. Government would be reduced to a hapless doll that could be drowned in the bathtub as some of the neo-cons had prophesized. Ironically the process would be helped by a flood. The government & the people drown together. But the spigot never stops gushing money for the Pentagon and the wars.

In the Mississippi River, on Arsenal Island, the largest government weapons facility in our hemisphere, right across from the Figge Art Museum where I was looking at this artwork, 25 million dollars is being spent to build another weapons factory at the same time that the local school departments are cutting teachers and staff. Should I say exploding teachers and staff? But, can't the teachers be re-trained to make bombs? The kids, too?

And when Bush said, “Bring’em on,” no matter how stupid, callous, or arrogant it may have sounded, that statement and the intensification of the war that followed, helped to shift the US to a permanently militaristic society --- and unending and unendable War on Terror. In a funny way the War on Terror is the Pentagon’s answer to the perpetual motion machine. Outrage precipitates outrage. Our drones and missiles for their IEDs and suicide bombers. Terror for terror. So, bring’em on again! Remember to ask the question, who profits?

What would redeem this girl? What could break the hold of those words on her, break the cycle of terror? What would prove to her that we adults are not drones ourselves, heartless robots whose primary appetite is for profit and comfort and whatever collateral damage is necessary? Because, finally, being complicit in an immoral system, and acting as though we have no ability to alter it, turns us all into robots. Drones. Invisible god-like appetites high in the air throwing missile lightning bolts to continue our consumption and dominance.

What would redeem her? Accountability. Prosecution of the war criminals. If we can’t do that, we have the same contempt for democracy and our Constitution as Bush, Cheney and Rove. The inability to prosecute the worst of our criminals, to really name their crimes, is our fatal flaw as a people. That inability enables the neglect of all our other moral obligations to our children.

The look on the girl’s face is deadly serious, but not angry, not judgmental. It simply asks, “Why do I have to wear this shirt?”

She doesn’t.