Wow, this is good too

And makes the point even better, I think. I'll give you a link this time. D-Blog

Blatant (yet regretful) Self-Congratulation

Not really.

It was a good piece then, and I'm proud, as a writer, of its prescience. I actually largely understand Obama's response to the oil spill, from his point of view. And in a way he's performing an almost Rand Paulian adherence to his principles of centricity and equanimity even when raw politics is what is being asked of him. It may well even be that he has some long term strategy to use this is a stick to impose a gas tax- but even if he had, his own poor reviews will likely have stymied that before it were to leave the ground.

So what have we here? Maureen Dowd says it well today (please don't get used to hearing that from me), and I think my forewarning from the inauguration speech provides much of the underpinning for her concerns.

You can read Maureen's piece here. Mine is reprinted below:


TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2009

My Concerns About Obama


I had been looking forward to Obama's speech for some time.

He seems to understand the breadth of his mandate and the patience the people have for a reality check, and so his tone of late has been hardly as soaring as it was, say, in the mid-primaries. This is to be expected.

But to my "American" ear, the tone of today's speech was unnecessarily morbid. Perhaps 8 years of Bush and 7 seasons of West Wing have attuned me to the tenor of boundless optimism and cheer that has characterized presidential speech since the demise of Jimmy Carter. But despite my recent seasoning there was nonetheless a peculiar relish the new president seemed to have in the seriousness and pessimism that marked the first several minutes of the speech. I admit, I was taken aback.

Where was the "We can achieve, we will break through this, America shall rise again from the ashes of cynicism and cronyism. . ."? There were glimpses throughout to be sure, but it was hard for me to feel that they ever took us out of the grimness of the address enough to lift our spirits over the next horizon. Indeed this seems to be one of the rare moments when Barack appeared truly tone deaf. The national mood, fully aware of the impending doom, has been in particular good cheer lately in anticipation of the inspired leadership Barack has to offer. And amongst many of us, there was the faint hope that the soaring rhetoric of the old days might make a brief reappearance, if only to remind us that what brought us all into this guy's camp in the first place was not his cool-headed competence but his fantastical idealism.

So for me the speech was a bit of a let down. And I hate to say it, but I even sensed the slightest bit of self-satisfaction in talking down to a lazy, sloppy worldview for which the self-made man must have some real personal contempt. The overall thrust of the speech was that, yes, government will do its share, and as well as possible, but it will be you, the people who must raise yourselves up and do the extraordinary. You, the people will lead the country to better days. In your hands, in your care will be your future and the future of this country. This, I'm sure Obama imagines, is the true call of leadership- to lead people into their own power, to step out of the way and give people the opportunities to better themselves and create their own greatness.

And herein lies my concern.

Americans believe in the exceptionalism of America, but not of Americans. In general our citizens pride themselves in their ordinariness, not in their specialness. Being an "average" American is a point of pride in this country, and distaste for and mistrust of individual excellence is almost a national religion.

Obama's rise above his life's obstacles, his taking responsibility for his actions and his choices- these are the hallmarks of great men. But the electorate, indeed the country, is not made up of great men. It is rather made up of many, many small men.
The idealist in Obama has been vindicated because he, himself has done the work on his own behalf. The idealist in most people flounders because they expect their ideals to come true for free. And in many ways this is the American dream that most Americans want. They are small, anxious to evade tough decisions, and eager to pass the blame onto someone else. This is not the course to greatness that Obama has charted in his own life, but it is the course to mediocrity that most men have charted in theirs.

Many an idealist has risen to a place of power with the earnest goal of liberating people from their predicaments. Empower them, give them responsibility for their own decisions, these leaders believe, and the people will rise to the occasion. Well often as not these leaders retire realizing that if those people had really wanted to be self-empowered, they would have done it already, and that really what these people want (despite their own inner pretensions) is to be led. This is a sad moment of realization for the idealistic leader who has tirelessly toiled to manifest his own dreams in reality through perseverence, struggle, and the exercise of exceptional gifts. That the rest of the world does not relish these virtues comes as a shocking diasppointment to the leader, himself a truly great man. He may find, reflecting on his disillusionment, that his desire to save the people was an abstraction- to feel needed, wanted by the enormous masses was the deferment of the hope to be needed, wanted by anybody.

After all, the man capable of the self-discipline to realize his vision is himself by necessity an outcast. He can not fit in, because to fit in would mean to dilute the attainment. So as the man walks alone, he can not but dream that somewhere, some time, there will be a world, a culture that will include him. And by projecting that culture, that clique, onto the vast, anonymous masses of a country, indeed a world, he will seek redemption through their embrace.

But this is my fear for Obama. That they will not embrace him once they fully digest what he is asking of them. "You are the change you have been waiting for." If that were really the case, then they would not have needed to wait. They would have changed themselves already. That people do not want to extract from the herd, that masses of people do not want to individuate, do not want to self-actualize is a fact of history that can not be denied. It is only the man forced by his fate to become himself that is capable of the discipline, the hard work, to accomplish this worthy goal. But to expect that of others, indeed to demand that of others. . .well that is only to remind them of their own unworthiness, their own lack of discipline, their own insecurities about their gifts and their ability to achieve.

And this again is my fear for Obama: that the people will turn on him. That the mirror he holds up for them will not reflect their glory but their weakness. That the light he shines will show, in even starker relief, their flaws and their failures. That his demand to raise themselves up will be too much for those desiring only a savior- and they will revolt.

There has been for some time speculation about the specter of assassination in the tradition of promising young leaders in this country. I am no longer as concerned about this as I once was. I don't think the loony fringe will decide to take him out in the name of white supremacy or some such. My greater fear, though, is that America will grow weary of the difficult dream that Obama has for them. They will prefer to keep the outcast in his traditional role as scapegoat and shove him aside rather than face their own sins.

If this is so, then I can foresee the public's internal estrangement from the Obama ideal being cause for his leaving the stage, any assassination being the outward expression of unconscious collective will rather than petty vengeance or agenda. This will be all for the best perhaps, as Obama, arriving at such a state will be filled with disillusion beyond measure. He will know when and if he has lost the people. And he will know that his dream for them is not enough to wake them from their sleep.


Of course like all idealists, I am hoping to be wrong about this. I am hoping that Obama's own path has brought him the balance of wisdom required to seek his own fulfillment through himself and not strictly through service to an anonymous "the people." It is so easy to project one's fantasies of love, acceptance, and community onto those whom one will never personally know (and it is equally easy to accept the love of a leader whom we will never know as well). If this is Obama's course, then I am sad for the let down he will face with us and we with ourselves. But if Barack is able to use his own competence and intelligence in the service of the people, then that will be for the best of all, and finally that is all the people will require.

We must not forget that Americans were seduced more by Reagen than by Carter, more by Bush than Kerry. From our politicians, we like the dream, we like the horizon- the nuts and bolts not so much. That we get enough of in regular life. If the politicians can turn our daily grind into magic, into the myth of America, then we will work forever. If we must work to curb our own excesses (or worse, the excesses of others), then the inspiration goes missing. The last time we needed to work like this, Russia gave us the motivation. The time before that it was Hitler. They were the great causes, the great adversaries. Now it is only us. Bush tricked us for a while into believing our adversaries were the teeming swarms of anonymous Muslims, but Barack has reminded us that our true adversaries are really ourselves- and may have been all along. America no longer has any great enemy. We are at war with ourselves, with our own souls. We are at war with our own sloth, with our own greed, with our own arrogance.

Obama has already won that war within himself. It's what makes him a great man. To lead the American people to victory over their own souls. . .that will be a challenge unprecedented by any leader of any time. I wish him Godspeed.



NB: in case the eschelon machine happens upon this blog through the keywords of "assassination" and "Obama," let me make myself clear that I have no intention or desire to see such an act occur, nor would I in any way imaginable participate or encourage participation in same.

Cultural Bias, Medicine, and Hoops

We believe that allopathic medicine is the only way to treat illness. But that's just a cultural bias, it's a prejudice. It's not true. We give doctors the power to define disease and then we give them an exclusive monopoly to treat it. But intellectual cerebralization is an American cultural bias. We don't think it is a bias, we think it's truth. But the attitude that mechanical, chemical, and technological methods of treating disease are superior simply because they are mechanical, chemical, and technological reflects the American financial bias towards our own competitive advantage.

And that is fine up until a point, but we have to appreciate that that bias crowds out competing viewpoints (in this case techniques for healing that are not technologically based). It's as if we were saying only white people can play basketball. That's how it was for a long time in this country, and it was a cultural bias. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but we didn't know what we were missing. Were there any Michael Jordans, Shaquil O'Neils, or LeBron Jameses back then? Not really. But because we were biased, we didn't ever have an opportunity to find out. We just didn't know what we didn't know. And it was all because of bias. How much better are we all - how much better is the sport of basketball - for these non-white players?

And how much better would be our health, how much better would be medicine if we took off our cultural blinders and allowed other viewpoints to compete fairly? This is the essence of capitalism, and it is the essence of America. We just don't always see where we don't do it. We usually think we know best - or some expert knows best - and so there are exceptions where competition shouldn't apply. We should be very leery when we see situations like that. And when we discover areas of massive waste and overweening expense, we should take that as a signal to start sniffing out where our biases are, where our short-sightedness is. In almost every event, they will be disguised as a common "good," but really they are concealing a destructive prejudice that hurts all but a very few.

Back to that coat hanger. . .and saving utopia from itself

I want to make a somewhat metaphysical comment about my analogy of legislation to "bending the coat hanger," since it is more descriptive metaphor than it at first may seem.

Firstly, in order to pull the thing straight again, you require two opposing forces - just as you do to bend it. But when these forces are in equilibrium and pulling rather than pushing, the happiest results occur.

Secondly, the process makes at least one assumption about the nature of metal: ductility. There is an *inherent property* in metals that allows them to be stretched into a wire. It is one of the properties that makes them metals and not, say, rocks. Trusting in this innate feature of metals is what gives someone the wisdom to pull rather than merely counter-push if one wants to make the coat hanger "right" again.

Thirdly, it is harder. It takes more work, more resilience, more trust in the opposing ("loyal opposition") forces to execute than simply re-bending the coat hanger. It requires a unified effort to work and thus requires the transcendence of duality (up until a point) where one realizes that without one's "foes" one can not achieve a real solution, only a crookeder wire.


All of the above is true for mankind as well. We must postulate an inherent ability, a natural ability, born in man to restore equilibrium and to "heal" after an injustice. Just as healed skin reveals no trace of the original wound, so too do all healings, when executed properly by nature "erase the stain" of sin that was the cause of the wound in the first place. (This may be extremely difficult to visualize for the allopathically oriented, but for those of us actively engaged in holistic healing, it is a daily occurrence. The experience of healing, either through fasting, or other natural models is such that there is literally no memory of the original insult in the first place. There is a sense - if there is a memory of the insult at all - that nothing was ever wrong in the first place and that at most there had been some sort of confusion-created disturbance. While such experiences are everyday occurrences in the holistic community, they nonetheless appear to be utterly miraculous when first encountered by someone raised with the double-bent coat hanger approach to healing and health.)

Finally, we must say that the experience requires work. It requires willful transcendence of division towards a unified goal. This is rarely politically expedient, and it is always riskier. But with a build-up of patience and a vision (on both sides) that the other side has valid concerns, such a transcendence is possible.

Indeed it happens rarely. . .there were moments in our history, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, when the things that divided us were surely less significant than the things that united us, and everybody felt that. These were extraordinary moments to seek common ground with those whose viewpoints oppose our own, a moment to see past our own grievances towards a collective humanity. Obviously these moments can be seized or thrown away and exploited, and it is the mark of leadership to know what to do when such a moment arrives.

The reason it is dangerous is that if the connection is missed, the "libido" required to make it falls back into the worst kind of unconsciousness and polarized bickering, since each side feel betrayed by the other and will need to wait a long time before adequate trust is restored to try again. Because in the end, if you're pulling hard on your end of the wire, you have to trust that the other side will pull back. A modicum of trust is necessary to proceed, and, in the best of circumstances, it can grow and grow until a higher order is achieved.

We experience this every day as capitalists, only we tend to trust absolutely in the low road rather than the high road, which is, perhaps, why it takes longer to reach our goals than visionary utopianists would like. But trusting in another's self interest, in the end, works, and, in economics it is more a question of maintaining that larger trust through the necessary missteps and relocations. The danger many economists felt at the height of the meltdown was that this trust would be lost forever and we would be back to bending wires long into the future.

Fortunately (imho), the protectionist impulses to rebend, or indeed to snap the wire were adequately resisted. This marks the 2008 calamity as a true test of the economic relationship gains that were made during the 90s/00s. We have proven, in a way, that those bonds - while clearly too frothy - are nonetheless secure enough to hold our financial system through whatever difficulties lie ahead.

Perhaps we require such "testing" again for our will to reconcile politically as well. Virulent polarization mixed with just a little bit of trust gives enormous power to undo wrongs. It is the Libertarian contribution to the debate, and it is mine personally- to address the underlying motives of each side's irrational claims such that we can, at least momentarily, glimpse that they are indeed sane underneath it all. Holding the vision of a common humanity is the goal of the middle. And to use the powerful, electrical forces of he electoral polarity for the benefit of all will be its greatest blessing.

Continuing conversation. . .

[with MC re: Rand Paul & Civil Rights]


Philosophically, I look at legislation (and most things) the way I look at a coat hanger: Once you bend it in one direction, you can't just bend it back in the other direction and pretend that makes it straight. It just makes it bent in two places, which to my mind, makes it twice as crooked.

The holist in me, the raw foodist in me, and the libertarian in me prefers a process of unwinding rather than winding tighter and piling imperfection on top of imperfection - with the risk of ossification at each juncture.

The thing, to be fully and finally resolved, must be *un"wound. And the more layers we put on top of the original sin, the harder and more protracted the unwinding becomes.

In the case of unjust laws, such as Jim Crow, simply pulling those laws is what makes sense to me. If the feds were to make legislation, legislation forbidding the passage of unjust (and pretty clearly unconstitutional) laws to me is better than creating new laws that compel any particular action by anybody.

This sounds simplistic, and perhaps things had gotten so far along that more was required than simply un-injusticizing the south and letting the proper equilibrium set in. Many raw foodists experience this kind of problem- they "pull" the problem by eliminating toxic foods, but their bodies are still so toxic from years (and generations) of chemical ingestion that a more proactive effort is required- intentional detoxification, in this case.

But in the process of actively intervening to accelerate the organic cleansing process (by means of herbs or enemas), one does not lose sight of the fact that the ultimate goal is to release the poison organically, not to enshrine it and build monuments to its evil. This is akin to what I had mentioned before about hewing to the ideal wherever and whenever possible while dealing with the accumulated mess of reality along the way. To get mired only in the back and forth karma of history is to create unending monstrosities that have no end - like the civil rights struggle in America, which is far from over and indeed may never be.

Your argument that slavery is also economically sound is an argument I take to heart. But at some level I must disagree. I do not, as many of my generation do, equate sweatshop labor with slavery (though I do equate cubicle work with it). And replacing slave labor with sweatshop labor - no matter how deplorable the conditions - is ultimately economically more sound since it creates, over time, a new class of consumers who will eventually feed into and invest in the global economy, thus benefiting everybody on earth.

Slavery is a dead end. It is zero-sum economics, since it deprives the economy of potential consumers and taxpayers. It needed to be enforced through violence, because it relied on inherent racism to maintain- that blacks were incapable of making reasoned choices, etc., and therefore are better to the world as chattel than as economic participants. The racism had to be institutionally maintained, otherwise it would reveal the obvious benefits to market and government by having more purchasers and taxpayers. (Incidentally, this is one of the pillars of my ongoing crusade for youth suffrage and the repeal of "child labor laws," that by ageist bigotry, we deprive ourselves of valuable economic and creative resources. There are other pillars as well, but this would be the one to win over economists.)


The deeper the problem the deeper the penetrating into underlying causes must be. Slavery has been around forever, and, as the posted bills in the East Village remind me, didn't end in 1865. It is an immortal archetype that must be dealt with as forthrightly as possible. Free markets, I think, do the best job, as they do for most things when bestial tribal prejudices are involved.

Looking at the underlying roots of racism is an important step, and it is something we refuse to do. Our PC university style "racism is just ignorance" is vacuous and insipid. (It does, however reflect the ineffectiveness of simply bending the coat hanger back to straight by creating a permanent class of anti-anti-black people rather than just "people" as they claim they are.)

Racism is rooted mostly in economic/sexual scarcity models, the remedy for which has always been greater market liberalization. Pulling ourselves out of our localized biases is the modern impulse that is most uncomfortable to animallian stasis- it is the definitive characteristic that makes us human and non-animal. Open markets offend every primitive instinct (CF: AFL/CIO) and yet their benefit to the larger family of humanity is indisputable. Isn't that the larger point for those seeking to abolish racism?

One point that is seldom made (besides the point that racism is much more virulent in non-white, non-American populations throughout the world - as I discovered being a distinct minority as a white boy at Juilliard) is that there are potentially intractable problems with black-white racism:

Firstly, the psychologically inclined would suggest that racism is merely the projection of one's tribal shadow elements onto another: We are hard working (thus suppressing our inherent laziness), *they* are lazy (thus acting out our laziness for us). In a holistic world, this happens all over the place. PIGS countries are famous for their laziness and hedonism (thus repressing their own rigor and productivity) and scoff at the anal retentiveness of their northern comcontinentiots.

Joseph Campbell makes this point well in "Hero with 1000 Faces," in an effort, perhaps, to dilute some of the idealism we moderns have towards Amerindians. They all had cultural norms and required "others" to act out the shadow or unlived life of their own culture. Gradually, through (presumably) economic union, we begin to retract some of those projections and recognize a picture of a larger human than the tribal one. Eventually, we come to be able to see our foibles with humor and learn to appreciate the complimentary aspects of other cultures (as well as their own foibles). And eventually, we learn to integrate the healthier aspects of other cultures and shed our own misguided biases. Thus we become more and more complete within ourselves. And in doing so, we become closer to being one people, thereby recognizing the truth of the religious calling that God loves us *all* (not just the industrious ones and not just the hedonistic ones, etc.) and loves all (parts) of us.

It is a beautiful thing.

In the case of white-black racism, as I was saying, this is more difficult than normal. In the dream language, the psyche expresses the deeply repressed/consciously rejected aspects of oneself literally as dark-skinned people (I have experienced this numerous times myself in dream and journeywork), and in seeing an "other" who looks exactly like our internal picture of our own evil, a rejectionary stance is almost inevitable. Psychologcailly speaking, it would only be by reintegrating our rejected parts that we could end racism, by having no more negative projections on which to hang on others. That's a tall order, but it's identical to the order to form a human family as I indicated in the previous full paragraph.

Incidentally, as proof of this psychological theory, we have only to look at black culture as the perfect antithesis to white culture: In white culture, skinniness in women is valuable, in black, fatness is valuable (both almost to a comic extent). In white culture, unassuming dress is considered appropriate, in black culture blatant ostentation is de rigeur. Violence, sexuality, and overt masculinity are intolerable. In black culture, violence is normal, as is free expression of sexuality, etc. Thugs, hos, bitches, and gangsters are all classic Venus/Mars shadow projections of the dominant (white) cultural attitudes towards these archetypes. Attitudes towards physicality vs. intellectualism are perfectly complimentary, etc. etc. That each represents the distorted shadow of the other could not be more obvious. (It has been brought to my attention, though my research is sparse, that black dreamers may see "ghosts" or shadow figures in the reverse, as white figures, but I am not so sure.)

At any rate, this natural occurrence in dreams is a monkey wrench in race relations I don't expect to hear much about. But by legislating to try to control surface behavior, we make it harder and harder for this truth to bubble up to the surface and be dealt with honestly. Command and control, to my mind, is as ill-advised culturally as it is economically, because it drives the hidden root causes of our problems farther from consciousness and deeper into the shadows, thus making them almost impossible to resolve until they explode (and nothing happens then).


So I guess I don't really think that government inaction is the point, but zenlike government "awareness" might be. Rather than reflexively "correcting" everything by rebending the legislative coat hanger, a judicious patience followed by surgical undoing is more likely to offer real solutions. Now whether politicians really want real solutions or not is another story (how many pols owe their careers to the tenuousness of Roe?). But as someone who strives for a semblance of inner and outer peace, resolution through dissolution is the only thing that really delivers and leaves the mind tranquil enough to imagine a new future for us all. And I like that. Maybe I can get it to fit on my business card. . .
D

The Revolution Might Be Televised, but you'll never see it. . .

Well, this, I think, is a real problem.

As boring as it is, the prospect of a cyber attack should be truly terrifying. Probably because it doesn't call on bravery and courage to wage, it doesn't capture our imagination the way that Top Gun style warfare does. There is no valor in a keystroke, and the thought of being rendered impotent by some dastardly Estonian's Javascript skills is too much for most folks to handle.

But the real danger of a cyber threat is that there are so many different kinds of them that it's hard to pinpoint what it would look like. It could be anything. And the worst danger is likely not from the attackers themselves but from our own selves. Even a temporary loss of civilizational infrastructure could devolve US culture to Lord of the Flies style savagery. We are a culture that has been coddled so long, has been wholly reliant on techno-comforts to do our thinking, our planning, and even our relaxing, that its sudden disappearance might leave us alone with only our atrophied instincts to protect us from the elements and ourselves.

Is this a serious problem? It might be. Depends on the nature of an attack. Shutting down power grids for a while might push all of us to the limit. Stymying bank databases might not. But a clever attacker would try us out in all sorts of ways. Civilization, we are told, is a thin veneer covering the basest of Hobbesian impulses. Even its temporary apocalypse might release the beast in all of us.

So we'll see.

Am I making too much of this? Possibly. But I think Clarke is right that it might take a Pearl Harbor attack to wake us up. Of course if none of us has TV, we might never know it happened. . .

Continuing discussion of Rand Paul

Copied from a private email with MC.


Well, I'm not all the way into the Paul thing, but I think he did a poor job of getting himself out of a difficult sitch with the Maddow interview. As a Libertarian, one would be just as appalled by institutionalized Jim Crow Laws as laws meant to counteract them. Why not just pull the laws and let the culture deal with the problem on the culture's terms rather than having cultural preferences (for blacks, whites, or anybody else) institutionalized and dictated by government. I think that's a fairly easy case to make.
But because the body politic views issues in a binary way - left vs. right - if you pose any position that is not squarely in one camp or the other, you are dumped into the 'other' and labeled a "racist" or a "pinko" or whatever else for the sin of having a nuanced (and, to my mind, forward thinking and useful) point of view.
It won't be easy to argue the libertarian position before a polarized nation (if that is indeed what Rand is trying to do), as I have experienced many a time. The point of the position is that it resolves the conflicts and puts the onus on society and culture to deal with its problems creatively, and that's too much for most people to trust in. Do I sound like a victim of my own idealism yet? I think the best one can do is hold the idealism where it belongs - in the intellectual stratosphere - and hew to it wherever possible and as much as possible while acknowledging that as one descends nearer and nearer to the less rarified ether of reality that compromises and imperfections must be swallowed gracefully with the view that they will eventually be digested into something that comes closer to the idealistic vision.
This is, in any event, the alchemical path. And paradoxically, the more willing one is to embrace the prima materia of realistic imperfections, the sooner one can get on with the business of perfecting them. Because in their elegant embrace we can be free enough not to lose site of the vision while we work on the denser matter. But by letting the necessary compromises pile up under the rug by ignoring them in favor of easy idealism, we make the day of reckoning, when it comes, that much more painful.
But in a 100 member body, having one or two guys fiercely locked into the abstract idealism might actually strike the right balance between gross politics and pristine intellectual purity. Time will tell, and so will the Uranus ingress. Looking forward to both, if we're not eaten alive by man-made bacteria in the interim. . .D

Comments

So. It has come to my attention that some of you have been trying to comment on my blogs, but the bureaucratic red tape of signing in/registering dissuaded you. You have my deepest sympathies and understanding.

Now that the problem has come to my attention, I have taken steps to correct it, and now anyone - anyone - can comment on these blogs. Have at, go to, but please try to have no less tact than I display here on a day to day basis- which should give you plenty of latitude in your commentary.

I will look forward to reading it.

D-Blog

Original Libertarian Theme Song

Finally found this online. John Goodman, in the original Big River Cast.

Open Letter to the Vegans

Dear Vegans,

Stop hating.

Love,
The Animals

The first rule of politics is that nobody cares about your rage. Nobody. Politics is not based on morality but rather on the ease of the flow of emotions. And nothing is easier to do than to write somebody off as a crackpot or a rager. Coming off as a rager gives people (in their mind) license to ignore everything you say because they don't like you. It gives them license to throw the baby out with your bathwater. And that is a shame. Not for them - because, remember, they don't care - but for you and whatever cause you believe in.

Nothing incenses me more than the horrific treatment of the helpless. Animals, children. . .you name it. It is maddening. But that madness remains my madness until somebody else decides to share in it. And most people have enough to be mad about in their lives without taking on my madness as well - no matter how righteous that madness may be.

In a moral arena, there would be room to discuss this, but in a political arena, the fight is already lost. The other person has used their free will to move on - to whatever they feel like - The Cosby Show, Online betting, Oprah- whatever. You have just lost your audience without lifting a finger. And when you lose your audience - in politics - you lose your power, your power to make a change in the world.

This is an ugly truth. Nobody likes it. Even the people who are ignoring you don't like it. They have their causes that they get angry about, and they don't get it either when normal people dismiss them as whack-jobs because they think schools should hand out condoms or partial-birth abortions should be banned or whatever. But if you want to make a difference and change the world, you have to engage with enough "other" people to tilt the world along lines that you would prefer. And since you are in the minority, that is going to take some effort, some persuasion, some patience, and a whole lot of self-discipline.


I met my first vegan while I was in college. It was a music school, and everyone was, as a rule, pretty liberal. But out of 150 students in our little school, there was only one vegan (which is actually fairly representative of the population as a whole).

Well let me just say that as interesting as I found her ideas, this girl was an absolute bitch. Forget about self-righteous, forget about condescending, forget about being a rager. . .she was just maddening and annoying to be around. And the thought went through my head - and it went through the heads of everyone else who knew her - "I am never becoming a vegan."

Some 10 years later, when I became a vegan - almost overnight, as it turned out - I thought of my old college acquaintance. And in the moment I made the switch, I told myself consciously that I am doing this not because of her but in spite of her. In fact I made the point to say to myself that I am doing this for the sake of my own personal health and explicitly *not* for the sake of the animals.

Now, I did not not care about the animals. But I made certain that that wouldn't be my motivation, since I did not want to build my health on a foundation of anger. And, of course, the more I ate vegan, the more I cared about the animals I wasn't eating, and the more horrified I became at the way animals are treated in our world. But I refused to put that at the centerpiece of my philosophy, partly for political reasons, and partly to maintain a distance - both for myself and others - from vegans like the girl I went to college with.


Now it is true that life should not just be a popularity contest, and it takes character to hold unpopular views. But we have to remember that politics in a democracy *is* a popularity contest. In fact, that's the point, because the person who is the most popular wins. And the person who wins is the one who can make the changes he or she wants to make.

So if we want to make a difference, if we want to win people over to our cause, the worst way we can do that is to alienate them. They don't have to love us at first, but they at least have to not hate us. And most skilled politicians can take it from there.


Now there is an important point here that needs to be made about radical movements. In my heart, I don't believe veganism to be a radical movement at all, but one that is wholly normal, rational, and exceedingly healthy. But in reference to the world we live in, it is statistically, anyway, a "fringe" movement that most people would consider highly radical. And here I have to say this: radical movements can attract a certain kind of person that is more concerned with the radicalism of the movement than with the movement's success.

To take a current example from an objective standpoint, we can look at the Republican Party.

There is a radical wing of that party (led these days primarily by Sarah Palin) that is sticking to its guns and alienating not only their natural opponents (Liberals) but their natural allies (other Republicans). In New York, they recently succeeded in ousting a moderate Republican candidate in favor of a more radical candidate with the result that their party had no chance of winning at all.

There is a kind of purity of doctrine amongst these types that believes that holding on to their "truth" is more important than winning. In its way, it is a highly moral position to take. But the political results (politics being non-moral by nature) are pre-ordained: they will always fail. Many will view this failure as a sign of their purity, and so they welcome it as a kind of proof of their devotion, the way some Muslims maintain scars (zabiba) on their foreheads to show how sincerely they pray each day.

And indeed, there can be a kind of ecstatic self-immolation that comes with maintaining one's righteousness even in defeat. It is a kind of religious experience for the faithful to throw up their hands at their loss and pray for vengeance against the evil sinners who defeated them.

But it won't save a single animal.


And that is the point. That is what we must remember as vegans. That is, as the economists put it, "the bottom line."


And, my friends, for decades now, we have failed miserably in this pursuit. So much have we failed, in fact, that we are not even starting from a neutral place with the public. We are starting at a huge deficit even before we put on our first "Animal Rights" button.

Decades of throwing "blood" on fur coats, of persecuting medical practitioners for their experiments, and all manner of cockeyed schemes have made vegans a joke long before they are able to plead their case. And we have no one to blame but ourselves. Because the sad thing is, most people really agree with us anyway. They are heartbroken and torn, but ultimately resigned, about what happens to the animals they are eating. They have seen those slaughterhouse videos, and they are disgusted. But they don't think there is any way to change any of that, so they look for ways to put it out of their minds.

Banging on these peoples' doors with your anger reminds them of things they feel they can do nothing about. This is not helpful. Worse, it suggests to them that they are less humane than you are, less caring than you are, and therefore inferior to you. And it gives them every excuse they need to write you off - and veganism with you.

When you bring your self-righteousness to these people, they feel that you perceive them as less than human. They perceive that you don't recognize that they care too, but that they don't know how to make a difference.

And the truth is- neither do you. You are both in the same boat. You want to make a difference, but you're not- not like this. If you turn three friends vegan while they're in college but alienate 10,000 strangers in a publicity stunt, then you don't know how to make a difference any more than Ronald McDonald.

But if you can start from a place of understanding, then there is more hope of building a coalition with the majority population that is disgusted by animal cruelty but feels powerless to do anything about it. If you can view their decisions to block out animal rights as a *sane* one and not an immoral one, then you have a better chance of winning a friend and a supporter. But first you have to admit that you don't really know how to change things yet. First you have to find a way to deal with the anger, to learn that shouting through a megaphone feels good for an afternoon, but that no animals were saved by that alone, and in some cases, many more were killed, because you gave meat-eaters one more excuse to ignore you.


Your anger is righteous. It is just. And it is humane. It is a human response to an inhuman ordeal.

But anger is cheap. Anybody can do it.

Finding solutions through work and patience is difficult. It is a schlog, as are all things in politics, and it is not for everybody. For people who care enough to put in this kind of work, there is an endless life mission ahead of you. For the people who just like to throw rocks at other people, you had best sit this one out if you care about animals. As perverse as it sounds, you would do better to share a chicken leg with a meat eater and talk about how hard it is to think about where this meat came from than to throw blood on him while you eat your tofurkey and scoff. This is a political fact. It is not a happy one, indeed, it is somewhat grim. But you have to continue to ask yourself- why am I doing this? Do I want to make a difference? *Am* I making a difference? And if not, why not?


This kind of questioning is not cheap; it is not easy. It is the work of the disciplined and patient mind, of one which can care enough to put off cheap results until real results can be achieved. There are not many people in "fringe" movements of any kind who are willing to do this, and for those who are, it is incumbent upon you to "police your own." Contain the rage in your group that you know is causing more harm than good. Channel their efforts, or perhaps just tell them to stay home. . .or you can even send them over to Sarah Palin!

The fight for animal rights is a heartbreaker- day after day. It is an uphill climb that seems like it may never end. It is no wonder that most people prefer to just turn the other way. But those people are human just like you. Maybe it's worth seeing what they are thinking. Because we can not do it alone, and without those people on our side - people who really want to be on our side - we can not achieve what we want to for the other species we share the planet with. But with a little courage, a little reflection, and a broader vision, we may just find solutions that will benefit all of us who live here on Earth.

D-Blog