The Fetus: A Person or Something Else Entirely?

 We're discussing abortion over at thomhartmann.com again. Here's a sampling:


D_NATURED: If you want to know what the fetus "is", ask the woman who owns it. I view it, by default, indifferently because I have already decided that I absolutely cannot be indifferent to the suffering of women. If I ever grew a pre-person inside me, I would expect the same pro-human "bias" from any other human, male of female.

Zenzoë: I'm with you on all of that, especially, "If you want to know what the fetus 'is', ask the woman who owns it."

For the woman who wants to bring a child into the world, being pregnant is worth the discomfort, the risk, the added pressures and responsibilities, the financial burden, the weight gain, the nausea, the exhaustion, the stretch marks, the hemorrhoids, the backache, and every other misery, including being kicked in the ribs every other minute.  For the woman who wants to be pregnant, her fetus is her baby, her growing and developing child whom she treasures and welcomes with her whole being.

For the woman who does not want to bring a child into the world —perhaps another child to add to an already burdened household— being pregnant conjures up any number of terrifying metaphors. I'm sure being pregnant against one's will might be tantamount to having a cancer growing within, an alien growth with the potential to bring disaster to every area of life.  This is especially true, I imagine, if her pregnancy resulted from rape, and she has been denied access to abortion. In that case, the fetus, though innocent of the crime, might reasonably be perceived and felt as Intruder, the devil's spawn, taking up residence inside one's most sacred and intimate space, and turning one's life bleak and unbearably anguished. For the woman who has not planned her pregnancy, the fetus is not a Who but a What, and that What has no potential whatsoever, other than doom.

If you think I exaggerate, remember this: We know the dreaded prospect of bringing such an unwanted pregnancy to term and suffering the fate of motherhood on those terms drives women to DIY abortion with coat hangers, or to back-alley abortionists, resulting in death, worldwide, to the tune of 68,000 annually. That some women CHOOSE to accept their unwanted pregnancy and mother the child regardless does not change the reality that tens of thousands of women each year will risk their lives to be free of an unwanted pregnancy. Pregnancy is serious business, and no man dare shame women for wanting safe, legal and easily accessed abortion.

D_NATURED:  Right, and the anti-human, pro-fetus people don't care about any of that. They only count dead fetuses. If women suffer or die from botched DIY abortions or if other actual, living babies die from lack of resources, who cares? The fetophiles are on a mindless mission to protect "the most powerless among us". No shit, they actually say things like that. There was even a pro-life commercial during the debate where such rhetoric was used.

The most powerless among us are not fetuses. Hell, fetuses aren't even among us. They are only "among" one person at all times and that is their host. We are unable to "protect" them without protecting women first. But you know that already. It is only those who believe they are the hands of god who give themselves the authority to ignore so many truths in their quest for fetal viability. In my humble (or not so humble) opinion, they should concern themselves with human viability, and population control and human rights are key to that very thing.

Notes While Clearing Out the Garage

“The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite has passed, and is irretrievable.”  —Joyce Carol Oates

I’ve been clearing out the garage this week. It’s taking longer than it should, because I keep coming across old writings and art work, and all kinds of letters from family, and notes and cards from people I haven’t thought about for years, stuff I never had the gumption to throw out before now. Every now and then I find something especially moving, a letter for example, that originally meant little to me but now sends a pang of nostalgia and longing for that person. But then I’ll find a card from some idiot I’d dated, realize who the real idiot was —me— and, with gratitude for the better angels who rescued me from that one, throw the thing in recycling. What’s the cliché? “A trip down memory lane?” That’s exactly it.

One of the papers I came across was a printout I’d made off of some website (now “not found” and author unknown), a paper on stress. I had highlighted a number of paragraphs within it, including this one:

“According to Dr. William Fry, a five-year-old laughs more than 400 times a day and an adult laughs less than 14 times per day. A child also has 18-20 different facial expressions and adults only have four (LaRoche, 1998). Children are told to ‘get serious’ and ‘stop acting foolishly,’ so by the time that they are adults, they have gradually stopped laughing.”

That’s for starters.

Next, that first evening of dealing with garage treasures and trash I read a lovely essay in this month's The Sun magazine by Karen Vogel called, The First Year.  It was about her life on a farm in Canada with her husband and new baby boy. I hope it’s okay if I quote from it:

“A few weeks after the cows returned to the fields, it became clear that Aleksy, who was waking up to kick his mattress and practice rolling and who no longer cuddled sweetly, needed to move to his own room. The times when he could sleep next to me like a velvety hot-water bottle were gone. I frowned as my husband took apart the crib and reassembled it in the adjacent room. Aside from looking around excitedly at the new contours of the walls and becoming absorbed in an entirely new ceiling, Aleksy seemed utterly unaffected by the change. I reminded myself of how nice it would be not to have to sneak around my own room at night, to have at least one thing back the way it had been before.
    But instead of feeling like a comforting return to normal, the room without Alexsy’s crib seemed eerie and desolate. The furniture was still displaced where the crib had been, and the drapes had been taken down to use for Aleksy’s windows, so the moon poured in, bathing the walls and the carpet in its steely glow. Fred [dog], who had taken to sleeping in the den-like confines underneath the crib, wandered about before choosing a random patch of floor to lie down on. I felt as a child does for a balloon suddenly sucked away in the wind: a raw, sinking sadness. Aleksy would always change, would always move, would always be farther away.”

Then, the morning after reading the article, I woke from a complex dream, most of which I’ve lost to the fog that surrounds my dreams once I wake fully.  I can still remember parts of it, though, enough to make it relevant here.

In the dream, I am in a strange city, alone, touring, though it feels more purposeful than that as I try to remember. Somewhere along the path of this dream-adventure, I see a child of about three years outside on a sidewalk, playing by herself in front of a shop; the child appears to be lost, or unattended. I wait to see if the parents return, but they don’t, and so I decide to take her with me inside one of the buildings, a sort of mall, in hopes of finding someone who knows the child and can help.

The interior of the building is strange, naturally, with tiny rooms and complex corridors, crowded with all sorts of bizarre goings on, business and arty types going from here to there, seemingly unaware of my presence. At a certain point, after moving from room to room, I look up. I am in a long, narrow hall that has an infinitely high ceiling, and I notice that a circus of amazing, colorful objects is playing above me, objects suspended on strings or wires, objects which change, grow and expand, then contract, twirl and and dance as though imbued with living cells. It could be an underwater scene; but it’s not. It's alive, but like nothing I've known or have ever seen.

As I watch this performance playing above me, a grieving sadness moves over me and tears well up and stream down my cheeks.

I'm thinking, Why? Why do these "creatures" feel like loss?

That’s when I realize I am no longer holding the hand of the child. She is gone. I have lost her. I search in panic everywhere, moving from room to room, calling out, encountering people and situations here and there, but never finding her again.

As I woke from my dream that morning, I remembered someone in the dream coming up to me with concern for my tears. She seemed to know right away what it was all about. She said, “It’s the movement—all the changes, changes that mean loss, growth and moving forward simultaneously; it’s a message of change, a forever living change that is at once tragic, natural and right.”

It was then that I realized the grief was about my own babies too, grown now, changed, having moved on into adulthood and lives of their own, families of their own. I know they can do without me very well, thank you very much. I know it’s right and proper, but damn, it’s tough. Gradually over the years, one step at a time, I let them go. No, I can’t go back, and I’m glad to be relieved of the pressures of raising babies and small children; and yet I miss the intense, interdependent connection, the “you belong to me.” They’ve declared their independence —thank goodness— but, regardless, here I remain, Mother, even though the irretrievable remains too, in remembrance.

That’s why any day they need me is a wonderful day.

And the child in the dream was myself, my own changes, my having lost the child’s inclination to laugh 400 times a day, and being relegated to my four facial expressions— disapproving, skeptical, worried, and, well, defying all scientific expectations to the contrary, ridiculously, helplessly amused.

Notes from the "'Women's Issues' are 'Side Issues'" Thread at Thomhartmann.com

 "DITTO! If you leave, you let them win! And since when did this forum become for the purpose of wrangling with obstructionists anyway? That's why they're obstructionists: they are here to get in the way of a forum meant for a think-tank like environment for progressives, etc. to share ideas and information. What's really sad is to observe how often the obstructionists' tactic works: they know that their mere presence is enough to raise the hackles of us progressives here and make us want to take them on. And it is hard to ignore them after all: they know how to flood a thread and the board itself. So it takes some work to maintain the space, but people here (including myself), if they want to spend the effort, in my opinion need to spend more time debating which ideas are better, sussing out where we agree and disagree, how we can compromise if necessary and what kind of agenda we might look for, how to assess Obama and the democrats, which groups and individuals are doing good work, etc." —Nimblecivet

 Well, Nimblecivet, I was going to let you have the last word here, but no, I’m ba-aa-aack... :-)

Needless to say, I agree with the spirit of your comment, with its advocacy for hanging in there on behalf of the “think-tank like environment for progressives,” even though I personally often come here just to schmooze with simpaticos and defend my worldview against the not-so-simpaticos. Nevertheless, I did think it was good of you to add your “DITTO,” and encourage Ulysses to stay.

I understand Ulysses’ reaction to the rules-enforcement edict, as spelled out by Polycarp2, as much as I also understand the need for certain civil parameters, which might discourage real abuse, bullying, and the degradation of this forum away from the thinking environment you’d like to see.  But I understand, because I haven’t seen anything from any of us that would warrant banning. Instead, I’ve seen disputes that to my mind can only be categorized as either salubrious, educational, or funny, and any reactions to any nonsense always seemed warranted to me.

Seriously, though, the rules enforcement edict ruffled my sense of liberty, perhaps not as strongly as it did for Ulysses, but for sure. I don’t know how U. would speak to this, but for me it asks me to tell lies and to believe something about myself that is untrue, i.e., that I am devoid of hostility, and disgust, and aggression, and anger, and that I am only capable of confronting BS with silence, the kind of silence that I and my sex have been told is my/our only recourse in the face of injustice and wrongheaded belief.  For what is the moderated response, if not silence, when the vexation demands a merciless, unequivocal repudiation?  Speaking less formally, to be nice in the face of crap is to be stupid and enslaved twice, isn’t it?

Well, these thoughts are wasted on those who have been indoctrinated in the establishments of authority. It’s as though the concept of peace has evolved into a tyranny of quiet acquiescence.  Is that what peace is all about?  If so, I want none of it.

[Comment #1307, page 27]

The Big Lie of “The Dangerous Book for Boys”

 
What are little boys made of?
Snakes and snails
And puppy-dogs' tails,
That's what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice,
That's what little girls are made of.

Well, anyway, that’s what we heard as children a long, long time ago.  But such nonsense didn’t keep millions of little girls in America, including me, from playing in the mud, making paper-airplanes, constructing little wood boats with propellers, racing across town on our bikes, climbing tall trees, building forts and waging dirt-clod wars with all the other kids, both boys and girls.

Thankfully, given half a chance, children, just being themselves, defy the authoritarian wet dream of gender polarity (”boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and never the twain shall meet”), as naturally as birds sing; try as you might, you can no more remove the gender complexity, the humanity, from a girl, or boy, than you can take the song from a bird. Regardless, here comes “The Dangerous Book for Boys,”  to insist, yet again, on a special realm for boys, where girls dare not tread.

And don’t the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the American Enterprise Institute just love this book to pieces!  Yes they do!

But I thought we had won this battle.  Haven’t we settled this argument by now?  Apparently not.  Here we go again, where discrimination and prejudice against women and girls develops and thrives behind the bogus pretext of the celebration of boyhood, and the resurrection of the notion of adventure and fun as belonging to the exclusive domain of male children. The book, after all, is not entitled, “The Dangerous Book for Kids,” a fact that should not be glossed over, as if the word “boys” can in any way mean both boys and girls, as the word “man” used to mean both sexes in the lexicon of the patriarchy in the bad old days.  Simply put, the title of the book means what it says.  And it means to create a sharp line between the genders, just like that between the biological sexes, and to send a strong message—boys can do these things and be this way; girls cannot.

Okay, yes—sex and gender differences do exist.  I am not blind.  Males, in general, are stronger, bigger, hairier, and tend to be more aggressive; females, in general, tend to be more petite, graceful, smooth-skinned, and gentle (I am being simplistic, of course, but you get the idea...).  But let us remind ourselves of another distinction here, that is, let us distinguish between sex and gender, at least as I understand them: Sex refers to biology, to the biological sexes of male and female, from anatomy to physiology and to genes; gender refers to a spectrum of masculinity and femininity, from highly masculine to highly feminine and an infinite range of shadings and blends of each, stretching in between those two poles of masculinity and femininity. Without getting into anomalous sex variations, hermaphrodites and the like, we have but two sexes, male and female, and that’s pretty much it.  But gender tells a different story, for it is possible to be a feminine male or a masculine female, to be a woman who could beat many men at tennis, if such matches were allowed (think Serena Williams), or target shooting, or whatever; or to be a man who loves to sew and prefers decorating to sports.  How many shadings of gender expression do we see every day, and how many ways do humans defy gender stereotypes—do I have to count them?

Do you see how insane it is—how the authors of The Dangerous Book for Boys conflate sex and gender?  They see a world of two sexes, yes, but they want those two sexes to behave as only two genders as well, and for each gender to conform to specific behaviors, but where a boy gets to enjoy a bunch of stuff all kids like —making paper airplanes, camping, carving, shooting cap guns, doing science experiments— and a girl, I assume, can just sit in the corner and look pretty, hoping for her Prince Charming to arrive and rescue her, while she cuts out paper dolls in ironic anticipation of her future identity.

But does this world view fit with reality?  Is it the truth about boys and girls?  Well, sure, we girls did enjoy the girlie stuff, like playing princess and rocking our dolls; nobody can deny it, unless you were a girl who disdained such “silliness.” But even I, who loved my dolly, also loved to swing like a monkey from branch to branch, or delighted in exploring beyond fences displaying “No Trespassing” signs; I enjoyed fishing, throwing water balloons; I carved notches in my cap gun’s grip for the number of bad guys I’d shot, supposedly. Should I have been told, “Don’t do that; that’s for boys only?”  And wouldn’t that have been a big, fat lie?  And when parents give The Dangerous Book for Boys to their sons, what message do you think their daughters will internalize, when they happen on the book and leaf through it, a book with a title that so blatantly ignores and disregards them as whole persons?  If such daughters enjoy the activities described in the book, won’t they feel, on some level, all wrong about themselves and be forced to either acquiesce in defeat or rebel in defiance?  I have to ask: Can’t we see the damage, once and for all?

Truth be told, only a few childhood activities can reasonably be designated for boys only, rationally to be listed in a Table of Contents in a book entitled, The Dangerous Book for Boys.  One would be Pissing Contests; another would be Circle Jerks...and maybe rugby. Everything else—tying knots, playing Stickball, knowledge about the world, or fossils, or building a treehouse, or any of the other things listed in the book—certainly do not pose difficulties for many girls, either of disinterest of physical challenge.

The question is, what happens to girls who get the message that within the large world of human activity, only the supposed “feminine” activities will be appropriate for them?  Moreover, what happens to boys who get the message too, the one telling them that they have powers and knowledge girls may not have, that they have an entitlement to exclude girls from these realms; or if they prefer sewing to playing violent video games, they fail as males?  What happens to us all?  For, despite the truth of my claim at the beginning of this post, that is, that children defy gender polarization, children do get the message eventually, and what we get —still, to this day— is a whole load of crap that damages the lives of women... and men, for that matter.

I do not doubt that such pressures to conform to gender stereotypes account for teen suicide to a significant degree.

I am not going to count the ways, but if you look around, you can see that this one book simply joins hands in unity and solidarity with an infinite number of gender stereotyping influences —advertising, movies, video games, children’s books, music videos, toys and toy stores— to create a solid, sexist reality out there for girls, as well as for boys. Yes, it’s true, more and more women rise above such oppression, to do and be, according to their talents and abilities. Regardless, the Glass Ceiling and discrimination in the work place —consequences of such fossilized gender prejudice learned during childhood— still exists.  And how many other girls and women face ugly, unfair obstacles throughout their schooling, before they even have a chance to fulfill whatever potential they may have? (Everyday Sexism: Evidence for Its Incidence, Nature, and Psychological Impact From Three Daily Diary Studies - Statistical Data Included 

...and how many others never get that far, but rather adopt and internalize gender stereotyping from the get-go, to end up marrying damaged guys who think domination and control over a wife, and other women as well, defines them as “real men;” or end up allowing themselves to be exploited for their “only useful talents” —because it is their “role” to please men— according to the “natural order of things,” that is, their bodies and their looks.  Or, if they cannot live up to the stereotype of a proper feminine girl, they can always have a sex change, to put an end to the discomfort and misery of being a misfit, of being “different.”

The Dangerous Book for Boys poses dangers, for sure, but not the kind we need to adopt as a society.  I am not into banning books, but at least let’s not applaud —and purchase— what ought to be ignored, if not condemned entirely.

Damage of gender stereotyping— links:
http://www.sociology.org/media-studies/care-bears-vs-transformers-gender...
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/seco...
http://www.catalyst.org/press-release/71/damned-or-doomed-catalyst-study...
http://worldsavvy.org/monitor/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&...
http://www.management-issues.com/2006/8/24/research/gender-stereotypes-b...
Dangerous Book for Boys:
http://www.now.org/issues/education/070809op-ed.html
http://www.blogher.com/dangerous-post-gender-stereotyped-kids-products
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/12/we-are-brains-before-beauty-girls-scien...
Re-imagining masculinity:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/09/20/why-we-need-to-reimagin...

Comments to this blog post can be found here: The Big Lie of The Dangerous Book for Boys @ Thom Hartmann's forum.

Brave New Lawn: An Emblem of the American Dream Dies Hard

I grew up in the 50’s in the suburban neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley—North Hollywood, Panorama City, Woodland Hills— where lawns were as ubiquitous as the tract homes they adorned, or the dog poop in the clover. Something like that.

Anyway, the fact of lawns was not something I questioned as a kid, except to grumble when it was my turn to mow the grass. Pushing and pulling our reluctant, rusty lawn mower over stubborn, overgrown clumps of grass was not something I wanted to do on a Saturday, and neither was scraping dog poop off the wheels. But that every house had a lawn, and every person clean air and plentiful water, made water and clean air invisible as issues, as concerns. We never gave it a thought; we played on our lawns, that’s all, trading cards, playing Simon Says, cowboys and Indians, or horsie—rearing, bucking, grazing green grass like real horses.

Everything happened on the lawn: Our male dog, Buck the Airedale, got stuck for an hour in my uncle’s female dog, Leesha the Boxer, while she investigated the lawn, nose in the grass, oblivious of her panting caboose, while I ran to the adults, sounding the alarm about Buck’s predicament, and while the adults worked hard at ignoring me. Buck also —there’s so much Bucklore— raised his leg behind my girlfriend’s clueless brother and took a piss on his pants (now a real-estate attorney), while we sat in the grass and giggled; I smoked a cigar I found there, a cigar my step-father had lost during one of his meandering, upside-down treks across the lawn in hand-stand mode, and I smoked it until nausea put a stop to my smoking days, once and for all.

Still, as I remember one neighborhood in Van Nuys, our lawns were never kid heaven, compared to the vacant lot down the street. Well, it wasn’t really vacant; in fact it was overgrown with tall trees, bushes, and, best of all, hip-high (on a kid) grass, which we yanked up and out of the ground for our dirt-clod wars and for weaving into the sides and tops of our forts, for privacy. Of course, this was before homeowner associations, when nobody cared if there was a neglected plot in the neighborhood; it was also before these days of paranoia, TV addiction and video games, when children could disappear for hours and nobody worried, when children actually played outside. (In my neighborhood now, I rarely see children playing outside, though children do live here.) It was the vacant lot, with its nooks and crannies, paths, jungle terrain, forts and faraway feeling that did the trick, allowing for stories to emerge—plot, character, adventure, places for childhood imagination, where all things were possible.

That is to say, children and other living things do not need lawns.

Now, here comes today: Unclean air, water a finite, contaminated resource; gasoline is finite too, and dirty, as we have come to understand. The price of gasoline shocks us all, ruins some. We buy carbon-dependent food from supermarkets, or from small, family-owned markets, or even local farmer’s markets, but many folks haven’t tasted a real, home-grown tomato in years, if ever; the price of organic produce burns. Meanwhile, the weight of our excesses, our selfishness and greed, suffocates life on the planet. Despite these realities, lawns are as ubiquitous as ever—no matter the upkeep, no matter they require an egregious amount of water, gasoline to run power mowers, Round-up to kill the weeds and other unwanted things like birds, insects and human beings (cancer), fertilizers, so the green grass can grow all around, all around, so the green grass can grow all around. No matter that this miraculous soil is capable of growing everything yet is allowed to grow only one thing—grass.

Michael Pollen:

“Need I point out that such an approach to “nature” is not likely to be environmentally sound? Lately we have begun to recognize that we are poisoning ourselves with our lawns, which receive, on average, more pesticide and herbicide per acre than just about any crop grown in this country. Suits fly against the national lawn-care companies, and interest is kindled in “organic” methods of lawn care. But the problem is larger than this.” http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/why-mow-the-case-against-lawns/

But what of my little city here in dry North County San Diego, Escondido? Sure, the city has a water conservation web site, offers rebates, presentations to elementary schools in the area on all things relating to water; they had a “California-Friendly-Landscape” contest, a Water-Awareness Poster Contest, a Free Home-Water/Energy Savings contest, workshops, events, and they even have water-use Rules and Regulations, which they don’t really police, given budget cut-backs. But, obviously, they’re trying. Right?

So why is it, when I drive around town, I see greenbelt dividers on city streets and roads planted in grass —lush, green grass— and plenty of green lawns on business properties; then we have the parks and golf courses, still green as ever?

Seems like a disconnect to me, especially when alternatives exist to ease the burden on mother nature’s resources. Regardless, the lawn endures, as if to dig up a lawn and replace it with a rock garden is tantamount to stomping on the American flag. We must have our lawns, or die, apparently.

Aware of the downside to lawns but unwilling to lose the look, some choose the fake lawn as an alternative, imagining they’re doing something good for the environment, perhaps not realizing the facts:

“Whether fake grass is made of recycled or virgin materials, its manufacturing is a very energy intensive process, during which greenhouse gases are emitted. Natural grass is often accused of necessitating high quantities of fertilizing and gas-mowing, two activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions, but according to a research conducted by Berkeley's Laboratory For Manufacturing And Sustainability, artificial turf releases more greenhouse gases in its production, transportation and processing than the maintenance of natural turf.”

Time to replace replace the old symbols with new ones. Front yards planted in vegetables or designed with rocks and native plants tell a better story about us than lawns. I realize it’s not the BIG ISSUE, but it counts. Every little step counts.

If the Corporation is a Person, What Kind of Person Is It?

“The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.” —Elie Wiesel



First, who ARE those “natural,” real people behind corporations?

In a speech to Congress on September 9, 2009, President Barack Obama made the
following remark: “Insurance executives don't do this because they are bad people. They do it because it’s profitable.”

Um...what? I mean, we’ve all heard plenty of remarks by politicians that don’t pass the BS test, but that one has to be among the worst. When he said it, I couldn’t help wondering about Mr. Obama’s moral compass—so, let’s see...injury to others is okay, as long as the injury happens within the context of profit-making? In this society, certain people can escape a designation as “bad people,” if profit is involved?

Amazed, I had to ask— when did making a profit become a justification for acts —criminal neglect, overt disregard for safety, dishonest, exploitive or unfair practices— that injure American citizens and the environment? Could that work for crystal meth producers too? Putting aside the illegal bit, what could possibly be wrong with people who produce this product and indirectly injure others? If it were legal, there’d be no reason to judge the makers and distributors of the drug—hey, they aren’t bad people; they’re just trying to make a profit!

Hello? How does that work, where the essential immorality of corporate crime in the guise of free enterprise, that is, bad people doing bad things to innocent people, cannot be acknowledged? Obviously, it doesn’t work, except in the upside-down world of the “free” market, where those who make profits at the expense of others are thought to be “amoral,” not immoral, i.e., bad people. And, what does that say about us that we cannot at least hold these people accountable, not only just as we hold common criminals accountable, by exacting criminal penalties —jail— but even minimally in the way we judge their character?

We are allowed to judge character, aren’t we? Martin Luther King:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

...judged by the content of their character, but judged, nevertheless.

I’m sure Mr. Obama has met insurance executives and corporate CEOs and perhaps found them to be charming and intelligent. But let’s be reminded of what the Canadian psychologist Robert Hare has brought to our understanding of human psychology, a check list of personality and behavior traits common to psychopaths. I do believe these traits are not only common to criminal psychopaths, but also to professional sociopaths in business, academia and politics:

superficial charm
grandiose ego
conning or manipulativeness
pathological lying
lack of remorse or guilt
lack of empathy
failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions.

I am far from being the first to point out that these are traits fostered and nurtured in America. Dare I say, Americans love a sociopath? “He’s got power and wealth—what a winner!”

And who ARE those not-so-natural, corporate “persons?”

So, if the corporation is a person, what kind of person is it? How many legs does it have? Does it have one head, two heads, or is it a monstrous, multi-headed person, where for each head cut off it grows two more, like the Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology? Does it, like the Hydra, have a poisonous breath so virulent even its tracks are deadly? I’m afraid that’s about it, in some cases.

Surely, the Supreme Court has created a monster, this corporate person, which has profit at the top of its hierarchy of values, a monster with superficial charm, and all the other character traits on Hare’s list, including the failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions. But what else does it say about the character of that Learnaean Hydra that it values profit above all? What kind of person puts cold cash as a value above the lives of others, above the health of other species and the planet, above all?

In my opinion, the distinguishing characteristic of the profit-obsessed, corporate “person” (an entity made up of real people) from natural, actual persons, is one important thing: deep indifference.

Deep indifference corresponds with “lack of remorse or guilt, lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions” on the Hare check list, but it goes beyond those human characteristics. It is something wholly alien from natural persons. Unlike the failures of natural people in denial of their humanity, or even actively engaging in hatred, the monster corporation’s indifference is wholly disconnected from human feeling: The corporate Hydra is capable of deep indifference, because it is built to be a non-human entity with no other purpose than profit and power. Its managers and CEOs, trained to spite their own humanity and that of others, devote themselves to the purpose of the monster, as mindless converts to the cult of “free” enterprise.

Question: Why not apply enhanced legal penalties to corporate criminals for indifference to the suffering of others?

If we as a society ever evolve to reject the notion that profit-making absolves corporations and their owners of moral and legal culpability for the damage done in the course of their self-interested ambitions, will we allow indifference toward the suffering of others as grounds for the attachment of enhanced penalties for their crimes? Can we say corporate criminals commit crimes of indifference, and, thus, their crimes are as equally deserving of our disgust as are so-called hate crimes?



(Illustration by Zenzoë)

Slouching Toward Extinction Now, Waking up Wise Tomorrow

"...The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...

...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" —William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), THE SECOND COMING

Despite everything, millions of Americans still thrill to Obama’s silky chords of rhetoric every time he stands at the podium. From there they are taken on a heady ride, where style supplants substance and all’s right with the world.

The problem is, it’s going to take more than lip-service to effect a change that will turn this empire back into a democratic republic and the planet back to health. Campaign rhetoric, while the planet parboils at 392ppm CO2, is not enough to get the job done. Mother Earth does not care about the insincere blatherings of politicians, or what your charismatic leader promises to care about while crossing his fingers behind his back.

No. It’s going to take more than business as usual. For one thing, ordinary people will have to get damn angry enough to demand responsible government, and demand it in loud, kvetching, furious, complaining tones.

The women who fought for the vote did not wait for an Obama, nor did they worry about being labeled as extremists, or radicals, or commies, or socialists, or threats to the all-American, patriarchal family. Nor did they feel they needed to couch their demands in nice, lady-like, diplomatic terms, to avoid seeming like angry hussies, which I’m sure they were called. Instead, their Declaration of Sentiments has a list of seventeen complaints, each beginning with “He has”, and so forth, a list of human rights abuses done for so long by men against women that anger had to be the only proper tone of their declaration.

Today we face equal and worse threats to human rights, democracy, economic security, and, most troubling, the very life of the Earth. You would think the people would wake up and take to the streets. But no. We are too well-schooled in the life of denial and distraction, and badly schooled in civics. As well, we have been long-conditioned to the uselessness of acting out. Our recent Democratic and Republican Conventions were witness to gross violations of First Amendment protections, where protesters were caged in “free speech zones,” out of sight and mind of those the protesters would petition for a redress of grievances; but, where protesters managed to get closer to exercise their Constitutional rights, SWAT police cornered them, fired pepper-spray, pepper balls, rubber bullets at them, injuring many.

Conservative Democrats and Republicans in Congress ...not to mention the FBI... categorize progressive activists as “extremists,” “radicals,” “persons of interest,” possible terrorists. The media ignore them. Barack Obama treats them with affable condescension, unperturbed and unmoved. Last April in San Francisco at $5,000-a-plate breakfast fundraiser, when protesters interrupted Obama’s speech, singing a song and holding up signs that read “Free Bradley Manning,“ Obama said, ““That was a nice song. You guys have much better voices than I. Thank you very much.” Then he turned back to his speech with, “Where was I?” adding, “Now there’s an example of creativity.”

Well, Obama can afford to feel secure. He is solidly established as the “velvet glove on the iron fist” of empire, as some have aptly noted. He does not have to resort to crude asides as did the former White House Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, who famously described the progressive base of the Democratic Party as “fuck'n retards.”

And so we get the same ol’ same ol’ crap—politicians posing as sweet-talking progressives, likening themselves and their supporters to heroes of the past, “liberals” who then make a sharp turn to the right, as soon as they’ve nailed the election. Thus, nothing changes, and here we go again, but this time slouching toward extinction.

It’s a puzzlement, this seemingly hopeless situation, but it’s also damn scary. MLK may have felt the “fierce urgency of now,” but it was nothing compared to this. You may think there’s time to “show up,” effect a slow take-over of the Democratic Party by progressives and turn this thing around, but there’s not. Thus, I refuse to pretend: I am going to remember that fears for the planet, disgust about over-population, or anger over our ever-growing list of political, economic and social ills, is not a sign of depression or yet another new psychological disorder (“Post Perky Negativity Disorder”?) needing the latest pill. Instead, perhaps it’s a sign we’re gaining in courage and losing our slouch.

Waking Up to Wisdom:

As science has it, learning —change— sometimes happens in a most mysterious way—by epiphany.

In Harper’s Magazine’s August 2011 Findings section, we find this nugget: “...babies learn language not through gradual habituation but in epiphanies.”

Imagine it—no need for rote memorization, for flash cards, for the stern nun looming with punishing ruler in hand...no sir. Baby brains, instead, absorb, leap ahead, then, lo and behold, they’ve got it.

I believe growth by epiphany is not limited to baby development. Is it not our constant enabler throughout life? I certainly can identify important epiphanies in my own life, and lesser epiphanies, those near-imperceptible growth spurts, allowing skills to proceed toward mastery, or at least competency, where trying too hard had never worked.

This may also work for entire societies. Others have noted it. They named it collective epiphany. Thus, someday, when a series of events converge in the midst of chaos, the American people will suddenly comprehend what is being done to them and their world, and who is doing it. When the catastrophes of empire, or tyranny, or plain ol’ incompetent governing, produce enough intolerable misery, the people’s consciousness just might take a leap. Then all it will take is one galvanizing event, and —flash!— the change we’ve been waiting for will no longer be a cliché, but a reality.

It’s an old story—death and resurrection.

Certainly, the Arab Spring, was initiated by epiphany, yes?

One question for me becomes, however, whether localized rebellion would be sufficiently profound for us, where the issue of global climate change must be addressed along with our pet projects of civic and political life? We don’t want to dawdle at door knobs, while the planet fades on a stretcher in the emergency room, or we could be facing not an American Spring, but a worldwide sizzling summer that has no end.

Thus, the sort of epiphany we need is a sudden change of our collective mind-set, one not limited to progressives, but one including those powers-that-be we love to blame for everything, one where, suddenly, masculinist ideology gives way to a balanced approach, blending both masculine and feminine ideals, where suddenly no other choice is possible but sustainable living, where all things cruel (war profiteering, industrial farming), stupidly dangerous (nuclear power, off-shore drilling, fracking), or selfish, wasteful, and immoral become impossible, because to choose them is to choose extinction: resurrection denied.

Under the radar, the signs appear:

If Ray Anderson, CEO and “recovering plunderer,” could manage it, why not the others?

And this: “Why The Insurance Industry Gets Climate Change”

“We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.” —Jean Houston