Tinariwen

I just saw these guys in concert recently. What a concept - a rotating collective of Tuareg-Berber musicians from the Sahara region of northern Mali, playing traditional Bedouin music with a bit of a Santana-and-Zeppelin-inspired rock style, on traditional instruments + electric guitars and basses.

March for Occupy Boston

Take a gander at my photos from the 10/15/11 march in Boston in support of Occupy Boston. Samples below.

Propaganda

For most of my working life I've made a living as a propagandist. Propaganda is a delightful word to say out loud. It is also a scary word. It conjures images of Goebbels and Big Brother.

Another word for propaganda is advertising, also now something of a pejorative. Persuasive communication is yet another synonym. It is safe, and leaden.

Propaganda per se is morally neutral. It is based on the Latin verb propagare, which means “to propagate,” as when a horticulturalist plants or grafts a cutting. I know this fact about propaganda, and yet I have always struggled with the moral ramifications of creating it. Should not facts and logic be sufficient to win an argument or motivate action? It always was for me, or so I tell myself.

A BoingBoing guest post by Stephen Worth in January 2010 praises passion as a necessary complement to reason. In particular:

The problem with this world isn’t that there isn’t enough logic. The problem is that there isn’t enough compassion. Logic won’t cut it alone in each of our own lives either. There are a million things that make sense to do. I have a whole laundry list full of logical things to do in my own life—more than I'll ever get around to doing. Guess which ones I actually go out and do? Reason may be the reason to do things, but passion is what makes things actually happen.

Worth is right. Logic may appear to offer safe harbor for those of us who want to escape the moral dilemmas inherent in persuading people to think or do something. But logic can take you only so far in changing people’s minds (apparently not very far). This has been a very hard lesson for me to learn, and I have to continually re-learn it, which is frustrating because in other areas of my life I am not so thick-skulled. But to make history, you have to temper reason with passion. Scary.

Air Travel, Recycling, and Deciding What's Worth Doing

Air travel is, of course, terrible for the environment, especially in terms of climate change. As a guy who loves to travel, it is faintly ridiculous for me to point the finger at coal-fired power plants and other polluters, given the number of airplane trips I make in a typical year. Certainly I am on board with the economists' preferred solution, placing a price on carbon emissions via a Pigovian tax, so that polluters like me will be forced to pay for the cost of the damage that I do to the atmosphere whenever I fly, and to make less-polluting alternatives, such as trains and buses, more competitive in the marketplace.

I try not to think about this stuff when I'm lugging my recyclables out to the curb, especially on those frosty mornings when I'm about to head to the airport. Recycling is after all a relatively symbolic action when it comes to dealing with our long-term environmental challenges. I suppose it's better than nothing. On the other hand, the role that recycling plays in making people feel like they're "doing something" when they are, in fact, hardly doing anything, may end up doing more harm than good to the environment.

Green America has just released a study showing that the airlines are really bad at recycling. This is something I had noticed, and wondered about, before. It would be kind of cool if this was because the airlines were just taking the attitude, "What, you, the airline passenger, care about recycling now that you've just dumped several hundred tons of CO2 into the atmosphere? Don't make me laugh!" But as much as I wish that were the case, I kind of doubt it.

There's a constant tension, when it comes to making the world a better place, between acting in small, achievable steps, on the margin, and pushing for a root-and-branch restructuring of an entire system. As I've gotten older, I've become more oriented toward the marginal improvements, because, well, my time is starting to run out, and the graveyards are filled with men and women whose grand plans never got off the ground. But it's also possible, in some instances, that taking "small steps toward a much better world," as the blog Marginal Revolution advocates, can make us take our eyes off the ball.

One possible solution would be to divide one's time and efforts along the lines of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's investment strategy: he recommends putting 90 percent of your assets in safe, fixed-income government bonds and 10 percent in high-risk long-shot ventures. That way, you are protected from the bad "black swans" like the mortgage meltdown, while still giving 10 percent of your assets a chance to hit a home run with a positive black swan – the next Microsoft or Google.

Moving from asset allocation to time-and-energy allocation, such a strategy would mean that I put 90 percent of my time and effort into working on the margin – voting, writing letters, conversing with friends and relatives about my views, educating myself and others, attending rallies, doing electoral work, joining a mainstream political party – and 10 percent working for revolutionary change, in the mold of Jefferson and Madison, Douglass and Garrison, Anthony and Stanton, Gandhi and King. That way, given the strong likelihood that my revolutionary goals* will not be met, I will still be able to look back on my life and see that I helped push the world a little bit in the right direction.

*So what are my "revolutionary goals?" Gulp. It's been a while since I've thought about them (I'm just now coming out of a five-year period of political inactivity) and my ideas about the "ideal society" are pretty unformed at the moment. But as a starting point, I would say that the Scandinavian countries are farthest along the path that I think we ought to be on in terms of organizing an economy and society that is sustainable, equitable, free, and safe.

Who is Organizing the Unemployed?

Does anyone know if there is any organizing going on among the unemployed anywhere? I admittedly don't see all the news, but I haven't heard of anything. My hunch is that the Tea Party is grabbing most of them. Time for us progressives to wake up and start offering an alternative to Tancredo and Palin!

A couple of options off the top of my head:

(1) Check out your local Jobs with Justice chapter. If it seems like they have it on the ball, join up and encourage them to start organizing among the unemployed, if they aren't already.

(2) Check out your local MoveOn chapter. The MoveOn health care rally I attended a couple weeks ago was impressive in terms of its demographic diversity. I was out of town for the local organizing meeting this past weekend, but I've heard good things about it so far.

Any other ideas?

Radical Democracy

In response to my post a couple of days ago about Cornel West, Karlissimo del Banco asks, "How did Cornel West define 'radical democracy?'"

You know, it's funny. I'm sure he went into it on that cold night in St. Paul, but I don't remember now exactly what he said. And I've never gone back to find out. I've never even read even one of his books or articles, I don't think. All I know of the guy, really, is that he said that phrase, that he records rap albums, and that he maybe had some sort of dispute with Harvard president Larry Summers which caused him to leave Harvard, and that now he teaches at Princeton.

But after a friend posted a link to a recent story about him in the New York Times, I recalled that "radical democracy" phrase and how important it was to me. Over the past few days I've dipped my toe into Cornel-Westdom, becoming a "fan" of his on Facebook and watching a video message he recorded to Barack Obama (here's a link to the video; there is an ad at the beginning).

The video message reminded me how much I love the way the man speaks. And being his Facebook  fan means that I find out what he's thinking, and I like the way he's thinking. For example, today his Facebook message is "After watching President Obama's State of the Union Address 2010 and keeping in mind Dr. King's legacy of love tilted toward the weak, what do you feel is your responsibility as a U.S. citizen to help the American government achieve economic recovery?"

I thought it was a totally original insight. The government is weak right now, obviously not in a military sense, but in the sense that it is unable to respond to the demands of the people.

So, back to "radical democracy." Like I say, I don't know for sure what he meant by it. To me, it means that for democracy to work, we small-d democrats must be constantly acting. Constantly doing what we can to expand the voice of the people, all the people, even, or especially, those with whom we disagree.

That's why even when I have political debates with my family members, I always try to tell them to keep standing up for what they believe in, keep speaking out and acting. Because it's in that action that your ideology and beliefs are tested against reality.

Too much of "the left" takes an academic approach to politics. We seek to understand the workings of power and we try to stay up-to-date on the latest exercise of what we take to be illegitimate power. This is fine, as far as it goes. But for too many of us, me included, that is as far as it goes.

To me, "radical democracy" means that we need to cultivate in ourselves and in our political allies a bias toward action. A willingness to "Ready, Fire, Aim," which means that we try lots of different types of action and messages, we learn what works and refine them and improve them, and we discard what doesn't.

So-called "educated people" are often very skilled at pointing out the flaws in someone else's idea. This is something I think they might learn in college discussion sections – "I have to say something smart so that the T.A. marks me down as having spoken." This is of course a ludicrous way to have a discussion. It does favor the guy who did manage to do all the reading, but since most grad students are not very effective discussion moderators, it also favors the glib and the sarcastic. It encourages people who are unsure to keep that uncertainty to themselves. Obviously this carries over into business meetings, which is why there is always such a danger of Groupthink.

I see this happening big-time now among my progressive allies. Obama and the Democrats are disappointing us. We spend a lot of time detailing those disappointments and making "if only Obama had done X" arguments. It seems like we are doing something productive when we do this, but we aren't really. It may be a good and necessary first step to proclaim our differences with the Obama administration, but it's not political action.

The tea-partiers, for all their ideas which we take to be strange or paranoid, are taking political action. And – surprise! – it seems to be having an effect. If the tea partiers are the only ones practicing "radical democracy," then we're going to get more tea-party-friendly public policy.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

"From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."

– Howard Zinn, You Can't Stay Neutral on a Moving Train (1994)

Whatever your political persuasion, be it left, right or center, try to "relinquish the safety of silence" whenever you see injustice. I myself have been silent too much and for too long. Or, if not silent, then cool, ironic and detached. Getting too old for that now...

Cornel West

I would have to give Dr. Cornel West some credit, or blame, for pushing me into political work. It was 1992 or 93 I think. Probably his Race Matters book tour, so whenever that came out.

Anyway, he came to St. Paul, Minnesota to speak at Hamline University. I went to see him and the place was so packed that I had to stand out in the cold and hear his speech on loudspeakers.

The phrase I remember from that speech was that we needed what he called "radical democracy." It was a concept I had never heard of, but it immediately made sense to me.

Within a year I had quit my job as an editor and was working as a dreaded "community organizer" on the North Side of Minneapolis. That led to more political work at United for a Fair Economy in Boston.

Though I'm old and grizzled now, and deeply suspicious of most political slogans, manifestoes, and ideologies, Dr. West's concept of "radical democracy" still speaks to me.

Existentialism from a Catholic Monk

Thanks go to Andrew Sullivan for posting this quotation on his blog a couple of days ago:

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself,"

- Thomas Merton, "Letter To A Young Activist"

Stepping Up to the Plate

Since last Tuesday's momentous Senate election here in Massachusetts, I've been railing at my political allies to stop focusing so much on Obama and how he's "betrayed" them. I tried to inject a dose of realpolitik and encourage them to look at the situation from the perspective of someone who simply wants to get re-elected. To direct their ire anywhere but at Obama, because there's no way he's going to do what an outraged lefty base wants him to.

Obama's announcement that he wants to freeze domestic spending for three years is not just bad economics and bad politics, as desmoinesdem ably summarizes at Bleeding Heartland. It is a punch in the gut. My gut, specifically.

But I can't let it discourage me. I have to take responsibility for my own actions. I have to turn off Jon Stewart and Colbert and drop the detached cynicism that I've lovingly nurtured since Sept. 12, 2001.

The tea-partiers have been acting for a year as I sat on my hands and laughed at them. I'm going to get off my rear end now. I hope it isn't too late. Regardless, all I can do now is take responsibility and act. For me, that will mean calling my friends and relatives and encouraging them to act. I don't relish the task. I'd rather read my new copy of The Bauhaus Group. But, as desmoinesdem noted recently in recalling the words that Miep Gies used when asked why she risked her own life to shelter Anne Frank from the Nazis: "I have no choice."

Haiti Earthquake Relief Links

Harry Smith, a good friend and the best shortstop the Loan Sharks have ever had, sends along this message with links to reputable organizations now on the ground in Haiti, along with a request to call the White House regarding Haitian nationals who are now living in the U.S.:

Even though the full extent of the death and injury toll from the earthquake that struck Haiti is not yet known, estimates are coming in that thousands of people have been killed and up to 3 million people have been affected.  Here are a few things you can do immediately to help:

1. Donate money to trustworthy international development/aid organizations. Clothing, food, etc. donations are good, but money is better, because it helps not only with the immediate crisis situation, but also for the long-term, more difficult work of reconstruction.
 

Partners in Health You can make a donation to support the temporary field hospitals they have set up.

Other donation sites:

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

Oxfam America

Grassroots International

2.  Call the White House (202-456-1111) or the Department of Homeland Security / Janet Napolitano and urge them to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitians who are in the U.S.

TPS does not need legislative approval and the executive branch has the authority to grant it. TPS is there precisely for this type of tragedy. TPS protects people from being deported to a ravaged region due to civil war and/or natural disaster, and it gives people a temporary working permit so they can work in the U.S. in peace. In 1998, Nicaraguans and Hondurans were granted TPS in the wake of Hurricane Mitch. In 2001, Salvadorans were granted TPS due to earthquakes. So there is no reason why the Obama Administration should not do the same for our Haitian brothers and sisters.

Thanks
Harry Smith

I donated $25 to Partners in Health, a great organization co-founded by Boston doctor Paul Farmer.

Irrational Exuberance

I've been commenting on a post over at Eve's Apple about "irrational exuberance" at liberal non-profits. They say there's too much of it and it's lulling people into a false sense of security. I say, point taken, but don't give up on persuading the blinkered rather than insulting them. It's a great blog and a good discussion.

Rationalization of the Month: A Corollary

Regarding my post a few days ago about my new Rationalization of the Month ("Politics is too important to be done as a career"), I would like to add a bit of explication and a corollary.

What I mean by "Politics is too important to be done as a career" is that I had gotten to the point in my job at a political organization that the day-to-day stuff that goes with having any sort of job was getting in the way of the actual execution of my political work. In other words, the job was too time-consuming.

This is in no way an indictment of this particular organization. On the contrary, I was there in one capacity or another for nearly nine years and for most of that time I felt pretty productive and like I was making a positive contribution to the world.

But now I am able to choose whatever political actions I want, without having to make sure they align with the goals of the organization. And, since I'm not going to an office 40 hours a week, I find I have more energy for political work.

Related to all this is the corollary:

Politics is too enjoyable to be done as a career.

No job, no matter how perfect, is a bowl of cherries all the time. By de-linking career and political work, I find it much easier to take enjoyment in the political work.

I own a few hand-made wool sweaters that were knitted and given to me by a knitter I know. Sometimes I will get compliments on one of these sweaters, and I say that it was knitted by hand by a friend. Sometimes people will then say, "Ooh, do you think she would knit a sweater for me if I paid her?" And I say, "No, I've asked her about that, and she said that knitting for money would take all the fun out of it."

At this point in my life, that's how I feel about politics. Doing politics for money takes all the fun out of it.

Rationalization of the Month

For the first two months of my Year Off, beginning in February, I felt pretty illegitimate. I didn't do much of anything. I told people I was letting my mind empty out, which was true. But I still felt a bit guilty not going to my job at a political organization every day.

I later realized that the problem was that I did not have an operative rationalization, a reason for doing the things that one does all day. Common work-related rationalizations include: I work to make money to pay my bills. I work to make money to buy status symbols. I work now so that someday I can retire and do the things I really want to do. For me, my rationalization was I work in politics because I want to affect the outcome of events.

Our trip to New Zealand in April was good because it was a 24-hour-a-day project and possessed its own rationalization: See things.

Then, in June, right about the time I began to really embrace my free time, I was delivered of a new rationalization to keep me going as a non-member of the labor force:

Politics is too important to be done as a career.

This was my Rationalization of the Month for June, and it looks to be holding strong for July.