The Dark Sage shoots the shit

[Joseph Tracy]

I'm pretty sure I am the chief unelected spokesperson of  the "Dark Sages" here on the P-list. 

I'm all for hope and confidence and self empowering, but you mock political activism like Occupy, Democracy Now, Howard Zinn as they speak truth in  the here and now of political and social debate and instead you celebrate the safely dead saints like KIng and offer a thousand excuses for the sold-out Obama or proposed brilliance of Ben Bernanke. The center of gravity, still pretty dense around the British monarchs,  has  indeed been moving, but moving  where the money moves- from the middle to the elite. The only way to reverse it is to reverse it, not to lie to oneself. Obama, far from marking a turning point has contributed to the non reverse money flow. 

I too celebrate the spread of ideals  like human rights and self government, and open accountable government but it is clear to me that these values are hard won and exist at this time in a deadly competition with some powerful destructive forces which include our own addictions to a lifestyle which burns too much fossil fuel  and lends military weight to ecologically and humanly destructive corporate powers. Should we give up. Have I given up? Am I asking anyone to give up? Far from it. 

You are the one questioning the laws of science and living in denial about the lack of progress on global warming, toxics, and ocean acidification as though this is not violence. As far as I am concerned the "everything is getting better" passivity you espouse is dangerous  self indulgent nonsense.  You are the one with sophomoric propaganda about "fixing the economy" but never a word about reducing military budgets. You think what you are told to think by Keynesians  like Paul Krugman who have an economic system that doesn't include the health of the biosphere. Paul is a humane voice but even his temperate and outmoded ideas are ignored as too idealistic, too socialistic. 

The fact that I am arguing with what I perceive as a false sense of progress does not mean i think that technologies, science, and Democratic ideals do not offer tremendous hope for a gentler wiser way of life. Nor do I hang around  in a bitter funk because of how I see the current human situation. I enjoy almost every day, sharing love with my wife/friend, growing food and flowers in a large garden, working-often on my own art- in a discipline I love, visiting friends, playing music, reading and laughing a lot and living in a beautiful rural acre in a beautiful town in Vermont. I want the abundance that is possible to be available for many millennia. To that end I engage in and endorse civil disobedience, speaking truth, writing letters to the editor, denouncing war criminals and liars, participating in local government through successful petitions and sometimes unsuccessful petitions, using my role as a teacher and in Friends meeting to promote nonviolence end ecological sanity. It's what a dark sage does when not spewing vile negative propaganda and shouting that the sky is falling.





 

  




  
On Aug 25, 2013, at 12:00 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> You would think it hardly necessary to remind academics that the
> transfer of power from land to financial capital, from the land in the
> country to the complex networks of the city, from the large farm to
> the large factory has involved a concomitant transfer of power away
> from those who hold titles and maintain them through personal
> allegiance, service and protection to a monarch or dictator to those
> who control labor and the exchange of goods, and that the organization
> of the workers,  and so forth, is surely progress over the rebellion
> of Spartacus.
> For the obvious fact that the center of gravity has shifted, the
> political power no longer held by kings, and lords, and dictators has
> been accomplished with a great emancipation of the individual from the
> rigid bonds of class and caste and of the dregs of religious custom
> that the Ancient Dregs sometimes questioned but in the end, almost
> always affirmed.
> 
> We have produced, along with our weapons of mass destruction and our
> damaged Earth, political organization that no longer depends on the
> “superior” authority of the sages and kings and the un-elected
> tyrants, chosen of the gods. We have constructed a political
> organization that does not reduce the free will to a sin of our
> parents, but promotes the exercise of voluntary choice.
> 
> As I listen to Dr. King speak of the gradualism that has produced the
> tragic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, an apartheid system of
> education here, still (2013), in the great City of New York, an
> incarceration rate for many that is proof that King’s dream remains
> only a dream unfulfilled, an unemployment rate, a stagnation of
> incomes even as profits set new records,  and a roughly 3% of the
> population that amasses, through our corrupted system, dominated by
> oligarchy,  more and more of the wealth…and so on down the road to
> Canary Row and to a Detroit belly-up, I am not ready to turn
> Malthusian and bang the death drum , call out Chicken Little,
> surrender to the pessimism of a sky falling into a toxic sea because,
> again, it seems hardly necessary to point out how the spread of
> political individualism, the spread of ideas founded on the idea that
> individuals may exercise free will and therefore are encouraged to
> question the laws, even the laws of science. There is progress, and
> are I say, justified hope, in the simple fact that we now think
> differently about the world, that the states are not ordained by gods,
> are not the work of a divine, often wrathful god, but the work of
> women and men who labor to satisfy their own desires, to exercise
> their free will. These are not, despite the sophomoric rants of Howard
> Zinn’s disciples, the new dark ages, or even dark decades.  Only
> ignorance, ignorance of history, and propaganda, and yes Zinnis
> propaganda, would cause one to reach such a conclusion. We do not live
> in the best of all possible worlds. Nor would we want to. But please,
> the world is less violent, more peaceful, a better place than the one
> I was born into. It was darkness when the Kennedys were murdered, when
> King was shot down. When Nixon and Vietnam….these are not dark days.
> The economy, stupid, needs fixing. We know how to fix it. That’s
> progress. We need only exercise our free will and our conscience.