no supper tonight

 In Massachusetts,  Steve D’Amico, (D) 4th Bristol, has introduced a bill in the House extending to microfarm (one-five acres of productive land) the same supports currently enjoyed by farms five acres and larger.  The bill gets its committee hearing  (Joint Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Agriculture) tomorrow  (June 3), 1 pm, room A2 in the Statehouse. If you’d like to comment, just show up; I’ll be there.

I just found put about this today, but cobbled together what appears below. Having just enjoyed, for the first time, homemade susage I picked up over the weekend at Codman’s Farm in Lincoln, seems the least I can do.  For our friend the pig. 

TO:  Members of the Joint Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Agriculture

FROM: Michael Horan, Stoughton (Eighth Norfolk )

RE:  Hearing on H715, An Act Relative to Small Plot Farming

DATE: June 2, 2009
Esteemed Members of the Committee:
 

Microfarming: A Growing Trend

Several months ago, I requested an application for shares in a CSA just up the road from me at the foot of the Blue Hills, Brookwood Farm. At which time I was told that they had only a dozen additional shares available—and a waiting list of 100 households! I was disappointed by the supply, but delighted at the demand. There are clearly a lot of people interested in becoming shareholders in microfarms. And there are clearly not enough of them to help fill the demand.

• CSA’s are just part of a growing trend among both producers and consumers.
  According to the 2007 USDA Census of Agriculture, microfarms are experiencing explosive growth:
• “Between 2002 and 2007, the number of farms with sales of less than $2,500 increased by 74,000.
• Census results show that the majority of U.S. farms are smaller operations: “More than 36 percent are classified as residential/lifestyle farms, with sales of less than $250,000 and operators with a primary occupation other than farming.”  (2)
• In Massachusetts, there are over 2000 farms ranging between 1-9 acres, and 2500 farms in the state gross under $2,500 annually. (3)
• In Franklin County, “the census shows, 219 of the county’s 741 farms were quite small with less than $1,000 in sales, and 183 farms showed between $1,000 and $4,999 in sales. Together, those represent 402 farms — more than half of the farms in the county.” (4)

Clearly there is a demand for niche farms. This bill will assist in satisfying that need, and thereby assist in expanding Massachusetts’ growing agricultural revenues.

Microfarming and New Business Models

These operations are also becoming players in the burgeoning locally-based business movement. b.good.burgers in Brookline, working with GreenGrowers of Jamaica Plain, have installed a “rooftop farm” atop their business, where they’re growing fresh vegetables to served along with their burgers.(6) And in an era in which the average distance food travels from its source to the American plate is around 1,500 miles, with the obvious environmental impact, this kind of new business model is set to capitalize on America’s increasing sense of environmental responsibility.

Small Farms and Food Safety

The bill also is a good one from the position of product health and safety. The recent spinach recall, episodes of tainted meat, even swine flu are related:  “The common thread among all these events is food production on a massive scale, where a single mistake or viral mutation can quickly grow to tragic proportions and threaten thousands of innocent people with sickness and death.”  (6) Microfarming exists at the opposite end of this spectrum.

Micro-farms Strengthen Communities

The value of these small-scale farms transcends economic concerns. These half- to-five-acre farming operations are also of tremendous value to urban communities. They revitalize empty, weed-strewn lots, donate large percentages of their harvest, and supply local inner-city farmers markets with fresh produce:

• The ReVision Center shelter along Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester yielded 5,300 pounds of produce last year (7)
• In whas a desolate lot behind the Boston Day and Evening Academ, students have established a small farm that distributes vegetables to students, staff, neighbors, and the Haley House (shelter) Bakery Café (8)
• The Food Project, in Boston, operates several small urban farms ranging from one-half to 1.4 acres, producing 15,000 and 18,000 lbs of food annually; in 2007, the operation  sold $21,100 worth of produce and donated another $7,300 worth of vegetables to Community Servings & Rosie’s Place. bringing in over 2600 pounds of veggies. The rooftop garden atop Boston Medical Center also donates food to the Boston Medical Center Food Pantry and helps to supply the Project’s farmer Market in Dudley Square (9)
• Brookwood Farm in Milton employs summer interns fro Boston and Milton who assist in running the farm and the farmstand in Mattapan (10)

Small Scale Farms are Part of the Revenue Stream

There are also obvious benefits to operating a small farm outside the urban corridor. Many small farms turn a profit by selling direct-to-consumer (and this trend is likely to continue to expand as “agrotourism” increases in the state). In Franklin County, “The increase in the number of farms  selling directly to customers increased by 39 percent — from 141 to 196 — higher than the 32 percent increase statewide, and total direct sales soared by 163 percent — for a total of $3.4 million — far exceeding the nationwide average of 17 percent.” (11) (Jennifer Dempsey of American Farmland Trust; regional office in Northampton).

The Right Time for this Bill

These days, books about fad diets are being replaced on best-seller lists by books devoted to the quality of the food we eat. Films ranging from “Fast Food Nation” to “Supersize Me” are playing at multiplexes. Students from a variety of disciplines are lining up to do internships at organic farms. In short, food consciousness—along with a renewed emphasis on nutrition, safety, and the environment—is at all time high. And microfarming is especially well-suited to addressing the issues that are being raised in each of these areas.

Massachusetts is experiencing a resurgence in agriculture. The stewardship exercised by the state agricultural department, working in tandem with university research and extension programs, should be coupled with the political will to ensure that all alternatives are explored and best practices encouraged … starting right in the Statehouse. This bill is an example of wise stewardship, and I urge you to support it.

Thank you for your time.

m h

 
References

1.  Census of Agriculture Shows Growing Diversity in U.S. Farming, USDA Newsroom, February 4, 2009
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?contentidonly=true&contentid=2009/02/0036.xml
 2. Census of Agriculture Shows Growing Diversity in U.S. Farming, USDA Newsroom, February 4, 2009
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?contentidonly=true&contentid=2009/02/0036.xml
  3.USDA 2007 Census of Agriculture, Massachusetts State Profile
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?contentidonly=true&contentid=2009/02/0036.xml
  4.”Farms a growing industry for county,” The Recorder, February 13, 2009
  http://www.recorder.com/story.cfm?id_no=5785233
  5.”Brookline burger-maker to offer roof-grown veggies,” Wicked Local Brookline, May 07, 2009
http://www.wickedlocal.com/brookline/archive/x1518865971/Brookline-burger-maker-to-offer-roof-grown-veggies
  6. Northeast Organic Farming Association, Massachusetts Chapter, May 2009 newsletter
http://www.nofamass.org/news/enews.php
  7.”This farm fills their spirits, too,” Boston Globe, July 27, 2008
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/07/27/this_farm_feeds_their_spirits_too/
  8. “Nourishing more than minds,” Boston Globe,  September 28, 2008
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/09/28/nourishing_more_than_minds/
  9. http://www.thefoodproject.org/agriculture/Internal1.asp?ID=97
  10. http://www.brookwoodcommunityfarm.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2&Itemid=3
  11.”Farms a growing industry for county,” The Recorder, February 13, 2009
  http://www.recorder.com/story.cfm?id_no=5785233

…And the fourth [angel] poured out his bowl upon the sun, and he was allowed to scorch mankind with fire. And mankind was scorched with great heat… And the sixth poured out his bowl upon the great river Euphrates, and dried up its waters… (Apocalypse 2:8-9, 12.)

 
That’s the Book of Revelations. I’ve just returned from a talk delivered by  Bill McKibben, who, as it turned out,  described pretty much the same thing albeit with somewhat less flamboyant imagery. But McKibben, whose books might, among weaker constitutions,  lend themselves to depression and despair, is operating in a wholly inspirational mode these days. Over the past two decades he’s written on nature; on the nature of humanity; and on the systemic and systematic disruption of the natural order and accelerating destruction of “the environment”; but following an epiphany in Bangladesh, the writer, who lives in the wilds of Vermont, and the avowed Methodist, who teaches Sunday school, and the academic, who’s on the Middlebury faculty, decided that he had no option but to turn environmental activist, and to wrench apathy and despair into action by dint of his own capacity to inspire. Affable, unprepossessing,  and direct, McKibben offered some wry assessments of his own naivete when he woke up to find  himself an organizer, but also noted, to his continued surprise, the concrete, demonstrable successes of his initial small-scale, state-focused campaigns.

Bill speaking in Jamaica Plain, May 28.

Now he’s operating on the international level, promoting the work of 350.org, a popular front serving as an umbrella for the organizations, communities, and individuals globally who want—who need—to have a say in the upcoming United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen later this year. And what that say is: we need to immediately  reduce our CO2 emissions so that they constitute no more than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere. We’re currently at 388. And that number ain’t going down. McKibben noted that the multinational industrial complex is shooting for 450 ppm–with the attendant consequences, freely admitted by the proponents themselves, described in some detail below–and that for some thirty years in the future.

These are serious times. We’ve allowed an awful lot of people to take all kinds of liberties with our air, our water, our soil, with other sentient creatures,  and with relatively powerless human beings both here and abroad; and to implicitly turn what remains over to them for one last ferocious orgy of plunder will make what’s transpired till today look like Romper Room. Remember the classic cartoons featuring the white robed guy carrying a sign–”The End is Near!?”  Well: turns out his time has come.

“Environmentalism” used to be something of a luxury. It was to some degree a matter of aesthetics. The Native American shedding a single tear at litter and all that.  Well: those were the good old days. We’re talking about a whole ‘nother level here.  Ecological awareness isn’t just something for the Cambridge ladies who live in painted rooms no more.  And while changing your light bulbs and recycling your newspapers makes for a nice contribution, your individual contributions in that vein aren’t going to add up to much. (Do it anyway: we may lose the planet, but you may yet save your soul, and that’s important too.) But what will add is up is your participation in a concerted international effort to change the political will of  elected–and non-elected, for that matter–leaders around the globe.

From "As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial," a graphic novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan (Seven Stories Press, 2007; for Stephanies work, see minimumsecurity.net)

 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Hence McKibben’s current pet project, 350.org. To whom I’ll leave the science; so when you’re done here, read up on the scenarios. It’s for real. Nearly everyone’s  acknowledged the fact of “global warming” and the role played by a growth economy in spurring it on. There’s plenty of argument about what, precisely, to do about it, but aside from a few far-right cranks and their jabbering mouthpieces on FOX News, the idea is no more open to debate than is, say, evolution. Adam and Eve did not frolic with the dinosaurs. The earth is getting warmer.  It ain’t good. We are responsible. And we can stop it.

All you’re being asked to do is: Spend some time on 350.org. Educate yourself. Disseminate the site as far and as wide and often as you can–use the Net for something more than Facebook quizzes! Talk it up. Keep breast of plans in your area for the 24th. If you can, join a group doing something that day. Ot start one. It’s that simple, and it’s risk free.  It’s almost as though all you gotta do is show up. With your kids, your families, yur friends. Which doesn’t sound very strategic … but if  tens of millions of us do; and hundreds of millions do worldwide, we’re going to be hard to ignore. It’s a numbers game.  And there’s enough horsepower behind 350.org that you’re going to be hearing about it again and again. Whether there’s going to be enough firepower behind this movement to seriously challenge the forces arrayed against us … well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?

In his recent book, The Uprising, David Sirota chronicles a wide spectrum of populist trends in postmillennial America, claiming that they’re evidence of a burgeoning holistic people’s Movement. McKibben wants to tap into that, and recognizes the need to create not merely a real and pressing sense of urgency, but an equal sense of commitment, even passion, leading up to a grand international display of solidarity with the ideals of 350.org on October 24. And it’s gonna take a lotta people in a lotta places—McKibben made it clear that we are up against some seriously powerful entrenched interests with some very deep pockets. He cited Exxon as just one example, a company that made more money last year than any company ever had in human history.

But … c’mon. Sure, Exxon’s a behemoth, but when you get right down it, these corporations are run by good ol’ Americans. Folks like your next door neighbor. Except of course for the gold plated toilets, the moat, stuff like that.  So how malevolent, really, are these supposedly nefarious corporations?

Answer: extremely. By their rapacity shall ye know them, and by their numbness to the self-acknowledged consequences of the same. 

McKibben noted that the poorer countries of the world are the most likely to get screwed—as he indicated with reference to New Orleans. I’m as cynical as anyone, but even I was stunned when, googling my way  through the morass of councils and consortiums and clubs intent on having their say in Copenhagen,  I turned tonight to the web site of the Combat Climate Change organization. These are the heavyweights. As the site boasts, “At present 66 global companies including General Electric, Uniliver, Citigroup, BP, Siemens, DTEK, Rusal, Reuters, Duke Energy, China Oil & Offshore Company, Volvo, Tata Power, HP and Vattenfall have joined our initiative!”  Which should provide some hint as to just what “changes” are involved here. But as I said, even I was shocked to see, buried within the council’s “Roadmap to a Low Emitting Society,” a slide under the rubric “Adaptation.”  Which reads:

“The international climate effort aims to limit climate change, but some change is inevitable. The impact of this will be most severe in the least developed countries (see figure 9 and 10), those least able to tackle the challenge. This will be a global problem and all nations must be committed to provide their share of the resources required for adaptation.”

This is bureaucratese for “since actually addressing the problem in any halfway sane, responsible way means lower shareholder earnings–and I think you know what means for guys like you and me, Bob, when they blame us for screwing up their grandkids’ inheritance–well, seems to me  the wretched of the earth are just gonna hafta get a hell of a lot wretcheder, so plan on some heavy duty investment down the road.” I can’t think of a better illustration of what Naomi Klein has termed “disaster capitalism” than this.

As for that neutral term “impact”—well, just have a look at the Combat Climate Change’s own coldblooded–and to their minds wholly acceptable–scenario:

Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night…

I began this with a quote from the Bible  knowing full well how much the learned enjoy smirking at the fundamentalists who look earnestly to the Rapture. But the fact is, we educated folks rely as much on faith as we do on our native intelligence and learning. How many of you can know enough, are ever going to know enough, to make impartial judgments on these matters? There’s a whole lot of chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy and similar arcana to be mastered. You’re not going to manage that while keeping an eye out on Ortiz’s batting slump and the state of your 401K. So you cast your lot with the people you believe, the people you can believe in. It’s a matter of faith, faith and trust.

So. You have a choice.

You can trust people like Yankee Methodist McKibben, and partners of his like Michael Pollan, author of  The Omnivore’s Dilemma, with whom he’s just composed a letter to America’s farmers asking their support, and The Rev.  Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr, a leader of the Hip-Hop Caucus and the co-creator of the Vote Or Die! Campaign in 2004. And Vandana Shiva. Bishop Desmond Tutu. Dr James Hansen.

Or you can, uh, trust Exxon. Repeat after me, and with a straight face: “I trust Exxon to do the right thing.”

McKibben and his allies are numerous, and they are damn smart, and they have nothing to gain playing Cassandra (Oklahoma’s Senator James “we have no homosexuality in our family” Inhofe, leader of the antiwarming sect in the Senate, claims the climate change folks are “only in it for the money.” McKibben came down and gave his talk at no charge–the nominal admission fees served to benefit the good people at Bikes not Bombs). They’ve  looked at the science and said that the price is too high—that we have to cut emissions back to 350 ppm NOW. Right now. The world’s corporate leaders have looked at identical evidence and drawn similar conclusions, predicting, as their own slide showed, flooding, heat waves, drought, decreased freshwater availability, coastal flooding, reduced agricultural output, declining production from forestry and agriculture, biodiversity loss, and up to 220 million people—in Africa, mind you,–suffering from a lack of freshwater. But these upstanding civic leaders have determined that, hey, South America and Africa, and the indonesian archipelago will simply have to …”adapt.”  “Adapt!” to what? Adapt to the conditions that we are imposing upon you in the name of profit.  For once, yes, it IS actually that simple. The price for continued consumption, says Exxon—and great many other well known and equally reprehensible megacorporations—is worth it. (The Copenhagen Climate Council, a “partner” of Combat Climate Change, is looking not to reduce, but to set a target of 450 ppm by … 2050. See their “Manifesto, p. 4, downloadable here [PDF] .)

 Now, once again: who am I gonna trust? And what the hell kind of world do Iwant to live in? Sheesh, reading that “plan”–endorsed by the top multinational companies–I can only ask, “what the hell kind of world do I live in?”

 
You’ll find no more clear-cut distinction between putting people or profits first. The sheer callousness of the “Combat Climate Change” consortium’s “solutions” is downright Stalinist—read that list again and consider the potential death toll. Right–“Stalinist” may be an understatement. That slide is the banality of evil incarnate, a heartless analysis of a genuine freaking apocalypse about to be wreaked upon what are already the most woebegone peoples on the earth by the angels with the seven bowls who sit atop the world’s largest corporations, created by some dessicated wonk whose spiritual ancestors did similar work for Vyacheslav Molotov–and an apocalypse that can be forestalled, but which is in their own eyes simply part of the cost of doing business. This is freaking horrible. This should cause jaw-dropping outrage on the part of anyone with even a shred of humanity left to them. This says: nothing, but nothing, shall come betwixt us and our profits.

And you know what? Nothing will without you.

Nothing is Written

There’s a disturbing connection  between the stances of Biblical fundamentalists, for whom the apocalypse is an unquestionable matter of faith, and the megacorporations, for whom it’s a foregone conclusion.  I almost prefer the fundamentalist option, because the multinationals’ willing acceptance is grounded in greed. Greed, and cynicism, in their clear belief that the rest of humanity won’t step up and say: this will not stand; we’re not going to turn the planet into a living hell for hundreds of millions of people that you might continue to reap profits that are already obscene by any rational standard. Fortunately, there’s another option, one that eludes both eschatologies, the fundamentalist bang and the corporations” whimper. Recall David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia–when Lawrence sets off to rescue a lost colleague, Omar Sharif’s character Sharif Ali admonishes him: it’s a lost cause: their compadre’s fate, his death, “is written,” he says. Lawrence undertakes a seemingly futile rescue, succeeds, and upon his return Ali can only say: ” Truly, for some men nothing is written unless THEY write it.” 

An awful lot of people are counting on you. You’re Americans. The people for whom nothing is written, remember? Your country calls the shots. And you are citizens in a democratic America. YOU call the damn shots. For once in your life, you have the chance to—well, not to put too fine a point on it, but to save the world. Like, literally. That’s not really the kind of opportunity you want to squander, is it? Especially considering the alternatives.

One again: silence, willy nilly, really does equal complicity. Show a little faith: this a cause to get on board with. Go to the web site, subscribe for updates, stay abreast of locally planned activities. McKibben himself admits that we may fail.  But look at it this way: we failed to stop a war that everyone now agrees was a tragic mistake. Because there weren’t enough of us out in the streets. If you knew then what you knew now, you would have been out there, right? Had millions and millions joined us … ehhh. We might have written a different history. Just by showing up. Well: get to 350.org, educate yourself–and this time around, fully aware of the implications, stop the apocalypse.  

The beauty of this crusade is that it transcends ideology (despite the noisy quibbling out there on the fringes of sanity). It goes beyond politics. You’re going to see churches, youth clubs, senior citizens organizations behind this movement. Think of it as akin to one of those science fiction movies in which humanity joins together to defeat the aliens. It’s also as non-hierchical as you can get–no one ’s directing anything: this is grassroots at its finest–this is DIY. We’re going to have to make an awful lot of noise on October 24 to get the coverage we’ll need to display the political power we need to challange the multinationals. But showing up, showing some small spark of creative energy, that ain’t so hard. And unlike antiwar marches and  anarchist parades and antiglobalist riots, this won’t make you any enemies; quite the opposite in fact–as  McKibben said, “no is going to scream at you for fighting climate change.

Remember:

Nothing is written unless YOU write it.
 

Tonight’s talk, delivered at The English High School in Jamaica Plain, was sponsored by BikesNotBombs, a grassroots organization located in Jamaica Plain who’ve done terrific work since 1984. Check out their web site; they’re conducting their 22nd Annual Bike-a-thon June 7th, culminating with a Green Roots Festival in JP’s Southwest Corridor Park, Stony Brook T station on the Orange Line from 12-5. See the web site for details. Will be fun. And electricity free. The two New Orleans style brass bands playing are first rate and play irresistably infectious stuff.

Here’s a short clip I shot at the talk. You may have to boost the volume–the mikes weren’t working well. Which was actually appropriate. 

And since Bill referred to it tonight, discussing environmental justice in terms of social justice genereally and the ways in which these connection sused to be perceived and articulated,  here’s Brother Marvin. Cuz ya gotta have your video. Which I can’t seem to embed.

Oh, mercy mercy me
Oh, things ain’t what they used to be
No, no
Where did all the blue sky go?
Poison is the wind that blows
From the north, east, south, and sea
Oh, mercy mercy me
Oh, things ain’t what they used to be
No, no
Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas
Fish full of mercury
Oh, mercy mercy me
Oh, things ain’t what they used to be
No, no
Radiation in the ground and in the sky
Animals and birds who live nearby are dying
Oh, mercy mercy me
Oh, things ain’t what they used to be
What about this overcrowded land?
How much more abuse from man can you stand?
My sweet Lord
My sweet Lord
My sweet Lord

The Disabilities Policy Consortium of Massachusetts  got a great turnout for  “Deaf Day at the Statehouse” to make the case to individual legislators that expenditures on deaf-related services were not only essential to a sizebable number of their (voting!) constituents, but make economic good sense as well, as well as to promote Rep. John Skibak’s House Bill 2239, mandating that health insurance companies covering MA residents cover the costs of hearing aids.

A write-up on the day and the issues will follow shortly. For now, some pics and video clips.

1. Hey, Kids, Rock and  Roll

junk food junk jobs junk drinks junk movies online pawnshops and shiny little cars backed by the brave new guarantee if you lose your income in the next year, return it to us with no impact on your credit: commercials demanding that … the audience vote for their favorite commercial.

Middlebrow AOR hits from the 1980s performed–no: staged–in front of a choreographed crowd.

“Jet fighters and helicopters, tactical weapons teams, mobile bomb labs and robots, high-tech X-ray machines and sensors, intelligence databases and hundreds of uniformed police officers.”

A trailer for a dystopic movie, something in the vein of Blade Runner, V for Vendetta, The Matrix, Mission: Impossible?

Nah. All this unreality was real enough. This was the Super Bowl. And it was watched by 97  million of us.

Now that’s a pretty sizeable sample.  About as sizeable and representative a sample of The American People as you’re ever going to get. Go to the mirror, then, boy, and tell me what you see in the glass held up by the ad execs who understand so well and so deeply the national psyche, who know how to redesign our wants, and to soothe our fears, to incite our desire and to make the bad dreams go away?  What does the magickal  wall-mounted liquid plasma flat panel looking glass reveal? A population fending off advancing age by mainlining nostalgia, imminently unemployed, pawning off  reat-grandma’s engagement ring in exchange for a down payment on a car they figure on returning within the year, grazing voraciously on sodium drenched crackers and make-believe tacos washed down with a watery cereal grain-based beverage preposterously labeled “beer,” and dulling their fears of Mullah Omar with a creepy combination of half-dressed lingerie NASCAR drivers and DreamWorks cartoon characters.

And these are the adults.

…BUT who—let’s look on the bright side!–also understand that better minds than theirs are working round the clock to bring us a greener, happier earth. Thanks, GE!: because of whom all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Whew! 

 Of course most ads for the most mainstream of audiences are going to push generic junk. The grand American culture, as Twain or Mencken would have told you, is built historically on two ideals: getting your hands on as much money as you can (whether via Cash4Gold or eTrade, the Super Bowl dangled gold) and finding all manner of unwholesome and unnecessary crap upon which to  to spend it on (all the other ads). But the extremes of ultra-real grimness and wild fantasy we witnessed this year speak to an unhealthy bifurcation of spirit. The more desperate the sense of the Real, the more desperate the search for its opposite. Hence the 2008 Presidential campaign. The Weapons of Mass Destuction. The Coalition of the Willing.  Bud Lime. The GoDaddy Girl. Monsters vs. Aliens.

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity…

2. And we all shine on

That line above the header is from Robinson Jeffers’ “Shine, Perishing Republic.” Which begins like this:

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:

shine, perishing republic…..

As an aside: previous editions of  The Norton Anthology of American Literature, the gold standard in university-level literature courses, and the first place I encountered him back in the 70s, included seven poems by Robinson Jeffers. The latest edition omits him entirely.

 
3. Signs o’ the times here in Stoughton

We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth.—Barack Obama, First Inaugural Address

Laid off at the beginning of the month? Tough.

A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.—William Blake, “London”

Michael cutting Ann's hair, February '09.

… I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit

 3. Signs of the Times Everywhere Damn Else: And February Made Me Shiver / With Every Paper…

…and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;

And, well, damn but if it all the papers just didn’t seem to be saying the same thing over the past few weeks. You don’t have to read too closely:

Washington is evidently seized by panic right now. I don’t know anyone who works in the White House, but I must suppose that they have learned in two weeks that these systems are absolutely tanking, that the previous way of life that everybody was so set on not apologizing for has reached the end of the line (James Howard Kunstler’s blog; see also “Wake Up, America. We’re Driving Toward Disaster,” Washington Post, 2/9).

The economic crisis has trumped bullets and bombs in the intelligence agencies’ latest assessment of threats to the United States….. National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told a Senate panel Thursday that if the crisis lasts more than two years, it could cause some nations’ governments to collapse… Blair said already the financial meltdown, which started in the United States and quickly infected other countries, has eroded confidence in American economic leadership and belief in free markets. (AP: “Official: U.S. seeing new threat in economic crisis,” Feb. 12)

What we are now seeing is the beginning of an inevitable downward adjustment in American living standards to conform with our actual place in the world. As a nation of consumers, and not producers, with little to offer to the rest of the world except raw materials, food crops, military hardware and bad films (none of which industries employ many people), we are headed to a recovery that will not feel like a recovery at all (Dave Lindorff, “The Ugly Truth,” Counterpunch 2/7).

France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe. It’s a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. Europe’s time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air. (Ian Traynor, “Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets,” The Guardian 1/31/09)

With consumers shutting their wallets and corporate revenues plunging, the business landscape may start to resemble a graveyard in 2009. Household names like Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things have already perished. And chances are, those bankruptcies were just an early warning sign of a much broader epidemic.(Rick Newman, “15 Companies That Might Not Survive 2009,” US News & World Report 2/11)

Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago. (Walden Bello, “Asia: The Coming Fury,” Foreign Policy in Focus, 2/9/09)

Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.… Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out. (Chris Hedges, “It’s Not Going to be OK,” rpt CommonDreams 2/2)

[The Argentinians] shouted, “¡Que se vayan todos!” (”All of them must go!”) and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina’s 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn’t directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model–this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism. It’s taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment. (Naomi Klein, “All of them Must Go,” naomiklein.com)

The people we trust with our money turn out to be thieves of a magnitude not known to history. Our president lies us into war, ruins damned near every institution of our government with political folly, and then retires safe from the law in the western sun. You can’t even ask the question “What the hell’s wrong with us?” because the answer requires decades of explanation. An increasing number of Americans wonder if our country will even survive and a scary proportion of those have asked the troubling follow up question as to whether we deserve to survive and have entered our final decline. (James Moore, “The End Times Chronicles,” Huffington Post, 2/11)

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement on the ongoing foreclosure crisis: “According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Moody’s economy.com claims that nearly five million families could lose their homes to foreclosure between 2009 and 2011.( Dennis Kucinich, Press release 2/11)

Sitting down here in Central America happily abusing my health, occasionally, between the hangovers and the bouts with sand fleas and mosquitoes comes an insight or two, or at least what passes for insight in my lowbrow take on life. One of these is just how damned lucky the Third World is that it cannot afford a sophisticated mental health system. By that I mean the kind in the “developed countries,” where murder and suicide rates are quintuple what they are here in this village. Not that we are without own village resources. My Garifuna buddy Eljay, was in what we would call a depressed state a few months ago, and went to a local “spirit doctor.” The wizened old spirit mojo man cured Eljay with a single utterance: “Quit smokin’ da ganja for one month.” It worked. Total cost: About $2.50 and a pound of red beans. They say the old spirit doctor also treats such things as sexual dysfunction, though I sure as hell cannot detect much evidence of dysfunction, judging from the noises in the village cabanas and under beachside palms at night.

…Matters seem especially acute of late, with the entire American anthill in turmoil as its common god, the almighty economy, waves bye-bye while being noisily sucked down the global gurgler… despite the joys of Facebook, iPod, and the consumption of some 25 million pounds of hot wings on Superbowl Sunday. A place where “normal” life includes Viagra, all the fried chicken you can stuff, round the clock televised crotch shots and HDTV as national mandate…. For Americans though, it’s an explosive issue. Because if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country… Given the economic and societal breakdown now underway and accelerating toward completion, Obama or no Obama (What is this thing of ours, this national obsession with saviors, elected or otherwise?), it’s bound to be interesting to see if they can indoctrinate, dope, counsel, and lock up or medicate the dissidence, and perhaps outright resistance that will occur. Whether the final American collapse takes four years or forty years is anybody’s guess. But it’s gonna take a passel of behavioral management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows. (Joe Bageant, “A Commodity Called Misery,” Counterpunch 2/10)

 

Concrete Blonde cover Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.” I’ve been haunted by this version for months now, can’t shake it.  Always loved Johnette, who doesn’t even begin to show what she can she do till 2:56.

 
 5. Oh, We’ve Met the Enemy, All Right

A year ago—six months, even—and you would have rolled your eyes at all this gloom-‘n-doom. Now, hmm, maybe you’re not so sure?  Gasoline prices that simply did not make any sense. All those banks: scenes right of A Wonderful Life, except instead of Jimmy Stewart paying out of his own pocket it’s Bernie Madoff springing out the back door with the loot. Layoffs so deep that state unemployment claims agencies’ phone systems are going down. E-coli on a bun, salmonella in the salted nuts, spinach—spinach for goddsake!—crawling with both.  For goddsake, we don’t need Dreamworks. The monsters are here; the aliens are among us.

And so are the nagging questions. The kind you hoped you wouldn’t lie awake asking yourself. Could it be that all this–it  wasn’t all Dick Cheney’s fault?

Those questions that you put on the backburner during those lazy hazy crazy days of summer, The Summer  of Hope, The Summer of Change:  And that no gaggle of technocrats is going to huddle at Camp David and make it all better?

The questions that mean that, yep, the fundamental rules do still apply: That these apocalyptic visions come to life– and the lifestyle being sold us over the course of the Super Bowl–are yin and yang, hatched from the same Ledean egg?

The questions we don’t wanna hear, don’t wanna ask, but that are grown so momentous now as to begin to block out the light,  the ones lemme tell you the weed and the beer and poetry, and the pawnshop and the godaddy girl can only banish for so long: Could it be that the problems are so fundamental, so systemic, that nothing less than “The Revolution of Everyday Life” is called for and that, golly, renouncing Satan, and all of his works, and all his pomps, just … might … mean … renouncing Doritos and Bud Light? And that this time, there’s really not choice in the matter?

Not according to our new president, who has made it clear that all we need to do to succeed in this endeavor is to develop news ways of doing old things. Only the tactics need tweaking: “We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.”

Oh.

“Our Way of Life.”  junk food junk jobs junk drinks junk movies online pawnshops 80s pop helicopters, tactical weapons teams, mobile bomb labs and robots “If you lose your income in the next year”

Our Way of Life.

credit: The New York Times

To his credit, Obama also quoted St Paul in that same address and suggested that “we put away the things of childhood.”  Americans, being who they are, responded by slipping on one of the 125 million pairs of 3D goggles distributed free at Pepsi/SoBe Life Water and and watching the ad for “Monsters vs Aliens.”

Me, yeah, I’m pretty sure that Pogo was right. No, I’m convinced of it. It’s a hackneyed line and image by now, but it raises a troubling question. Probably the most troubling question you can ask yourself.

6. The Center Cannot Hold

Jeffers’ poem continues and concludes:

…But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught – they say –

God, when he walked on earth.

7. And where do we go from here / Which is the way that’s clear…?

An exceptionally grouchy cultural commentator by the name of Curtis White has written, among a great many other splendid things, a thin but essential tirade called The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and Total Work (PoliPoint, 2006). In which he says:

For Thoreau, when the time was out of joint, when the state had failed its own idea of itself, he felt a necessity to remove himself from it, to refuse its social order, in spite of the personal price he would have to pay for the gesture. What’s striking in the example that Thoreau offers us is how familiar his enormous and tragic sense of betrayal is. For us, too, things seem out of joint. America is not America. When the Bush-Cheney administration orchestrated a war in Iraq, many of us said, and continue to say, “not in my name.” This is the equivalent of saying “Your society is not one that I have willingly joined. You may not proceed as if I were one with you.”

This gesture of self-alienation is the first moment of disobedience. But we should see that it is not a “revolutionary” disobedience. Thoreau’s disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won’t live in your world. I will live as though your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it (106).

Thoreau's grave, shot Oct 2008 following Nader rally at Old North Bridge, Concord

(Another gentleman expressed a similar sentiment in these words: “They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service….  These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” (John16:2; 33)

I myself am tempted, here and there, to give Prof. White a call: “All that refusal, Curtis, how’s that workin’ out for you?”  Because to be honest it isn’t working that great for me. It’s a lot of work, all this “self-alienation,” and let’s just say that it doesn’t get ya invited to a whole lotta parties. Understandably so.

On the plus side, though, the resistance-’n-refusal part part is still a far cry from open rebellion and revolt with its attendant consequences: sitting home on Saturday nights beats sitting in the county jail. It really isn’t that hard. It’s just constant. You stand at the fish counter, you note that the “salmon” was “farm raised,” that it’s been injected with chemical dye to make, it, uh, salmon-colored–they have to post this kind of information now, at least in Massachusetts–and you say: “That is not `fish.’ I will not eat that shit.”  (Then, of course, you wander over to the meat case, where even greater horrors await you).

You eat something else. It doesn’t actually make you feel very smug because frankly with a nice fresh ginger, garlic and red pepper tamari marinade, it wouldn’t taste half bad, and you wanted fish. But you know that any more, it isn’t about being virtuous. It’s a matter of survival. You don’t eat the salmon of woe, you don’t bank at Bank of America, you don’t feed your kids Ritalin–not  to feel good about yourself, but because you know that what you are refusing is participation in the  inexorable environmental, political, and spiritual suicide of the republic, and god knows if you’re anything like me you have enough on your conscience as it is, you don’t need that on top it all. 

But like I said the hard part isn’t the hundreds of small daily acts of refusal. No, the hard part is learning what requires resistance.  But you’ve been around the block, you’re considered a bit of a shrewd cookie–you have a nose for what’s genuine.  And if you don’t, if you think that what  Bruce did at halftime had anything to do with rock-and-roll then for goddsake get to YouTube and look at some old clips of Patti Smith, and you think that shocking-pink slab in the fish case has anything to do with real fish then for goddsake get yourself a rod and reel and go catch a real live bass, if you think Taco Bell has any connection to Mexican food then  get the hell out of honkyhood for an evening, and if you think the godaddy girl has anything to do with, well, anything remotely real, you best start by getting the hell off the Net and staying off it, and killing your tv and burning down your library even because you’ve been living waaay too mediated a life. All of which are sound suggestions in any case, because in any case you probably are.  What ultimately requires resistance is, of course,  evil–but there’s nothing wrong with starting by refusing whatever is fake. That’ll keep us busy.

Then we can move on to batmanesque escapades combatting evil. At which point–because it gets lonely out there in refusal-land–you take the advice playwright Tony Kushner gave the grads at Smith back in the evil days of 2002, in the culmination to a hysterically funny commencement address that I still re-read for inspiration:

It’s time to stop talking. Oh it always goes like this, I start out not knowing what to say and before I know it I can’t shut up. So commence already! A million billion mazels to you and your parents and your teachers and Vassar for having done so self-evidently magnificent a job. I am certain you are aflame. Hurry hurry hurry, now now now, damn the critics and the bad reviews: the world is waiting for you! Organize. Speak the truth.

“Speak the truth” and “organize.” That sounds about right. Along with, maybe, eat the truth, watch the truth, read the truth. Not sure what the truth is? Me neither. But we all know what’s false, what’s second rate, what’s merely spectacle, what we don’t need, what’s crap.  What’s a lie. What’s in-authentic. And, really, who wants to keep on wallowing at that trough?

Post Script:

 …look around you, all around you,
Riding on a copper wave.
Do you like the world around you?
Are you ready to behave?

And the winner is, of course, the War Party.

Isn’t Change wonderful?

Making my way, slowly,  through William Greider’s account of the Federal Reserve under Carter and Reagan (Secrets of the Temple) in a possibly futile attempt to begin to understand the full naure of this, umm, “stimulus” business, I came across this passage today:

The Cold War, it was said, threatened American survival, and, therefore, defense spending must take precedence. Or, conversely, it was argued that the Soviet threat was exagerrated, that military spending was excessive and that the government’s resoures should be directed to domestic development. But, in practical terms a political consensus was fashioned between them, an implicit understanding that endured for more than three decades, through conservative and liberal regimes, under Democrats and Republicans. The government would refuse to choose between war mobilization and peacetime spending. It would do both.

***
America was the new leader of the world, building the largest arsenal ever imagined, prepositioning American troops in dozens of foreign lands. For many years, it seemed, the United States could indeed afford both war and peace at the same time.
But, in time, the failure to choose between the two caught up with the economy and the government’s balance sheet. (102-104).

Which may have added emphasis to two articles that appear on the front page of The New York Times today, not that they needed any:

“Obama to Send 17,000 More Troops to Afghanistan”: President Obama will send an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan this spring and summer in the first major military move of his presidency, White House officials said on Tuesday…..The increase would come on top of 36,000 American troops already there, making for an increase of nearly 50 percent. (Oh, and from Reuters: “The new deployments are seen as the first stage in an expected build-up from the present force of 37,000 to about 60,000.” )

“Signing Stimulus, Obama Doesn’t Rule Out More”: President Obama has not ruled out a second stimulus package, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said on Tuesday, just before Mr. Obama signed his $787 billion recovery package into law with a statement that it would “set our economy on a firmer foundation.”

The government would refuse to choose between war mobilization and peacetime spending. Greider was writing in 1987 about the economic disaster of the late 1970s. We have learned, apparently … nothing.

As always, I’m left wondering how many of  Obama supporters are planning to head to Kabul, or to send their kids to Kabul. Or was the deal “my vote, but someone else’s blood?” And if they are … I’m wondering why, precisely, it’s so important to kill and die to protect the Karzai government Obama is going to sell out soon enough–just like Kennedy did Diem. Or is it  the splendid group of warlords who make such an attractive alternative to the Taliban that they’re smitten with?

Having received your vote–thanks, America!–all the war party and its pretty figurehead require in terms of your support are your tax dollars–and your silence.  They have your dollars–in deciding that his rules about hiring lobbyists, typical of the Obama BS that made for such great speechifying,  don’t apply to to defense contractors like Raytheon, thus allowing him to place William Lynne in the Defense deputy slot, Obama made sure that the industry will continue to bleed the country like the stuck pig it is–and, thanks to the so-called stimulus, they have your children’s children’s dollars, which they are merrily raining down on giddy bankers.

But you don’t have to give them your silence.  Or any more votes, for that matter.  Alternatives exist.  I mean, unless you’re liking this latest surge. These stimuli. These Cabinet and agency appointments.

And so in honor of this latest round of American colonialism imperialism stupidity heroism,  M.I.A.:

He got Colgate on his teeth
And Reebok classics on his feet
At a factory he does Nike
And then he helps the family

Lux and Ivy

Four years ago Ann handed me two tickets and told me we were going to see The Cramps.  At what was formerly the Axis/Avalon complex behind Fenway Park, now newly reopened under the  auspices of  a national chain of sanitized, themed rock clubs.  Which surprised me, in part because we don’t see much live music no more, but also because I didn’t know Ann back in her Cramps-lovin’ days.  Fronting her own band and wielding a blue strat no less. An image that  always gives me pause.  And, too,  admittedly in no small part because of my own lack of familiarity with the band. Which was actually kind of embarassing.

Which is why, sometime into the second song, I tuned to her and asked: Where has this been my whole life?  The answer being: right under your damn radar.

It turned out to be the only time I’d see the band. Lux Interior died today.  Which is really hard to imagine, because I’d never seen anyone so downright vital on stage; not for years anyway, lean years.  The band exemplified the entire rock and roll mythos at the same time it caricatured it: hot redheaded guitarist in go-go boots (Lux’s wife Poison Ivy), semi-ironic cartoon goth iconography, vulgar entendres and calls to excess of all kinds, the crowd, up from the start and right through to the finish, the whole circus fronted by a half naked madman who led the band through downright sublime streams of irresistible rockabilly riffs.

Back in  1977, Lester Bangs followed the Clash around England,  kind of a nice little gig when you think about it, certainly better than whatever you’re doing for rent money today, a lark  that crystallized in the very long and equally brilliant review “The Clash” for NME that you definitely want to read someday and in which he writes:

The politics of rock ‘ roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives, and whether the next day they go back to work in shops or boredom or on the dole or American TV doldrums in Mom ‘n Dad’s living room nothing can cancel the reality of that night in the revivifying flames when for once if only then in your life you were blasted outside of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time, when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all.

I thought about that one the way home that night, and I thought of it again tonight when I saw the obit.  Maybe because it was that kind of show; or maybe because you knew Lux would have dug those lines, because  lightning was mother’s milk to him.

It’s sad, in a way, that the band never got the recognition it deserved, but surf/psychobilly never does.  Sufficient unto the band are the fans thereof. Video can hardly begin to capture the energy of the show, but if they were under your radar, you’ll find some clips here on this obit.  Or you can watch one of my favorites: 

Lux was 60. He and Poison Ivy were together for 37 years. And started playing together in 1975. That’s 35 years of theatre, professional musicianship, pranksterism, carnival in its very best sense. Thirty-five years of giving the people what they want, what they often enough needed. Thirty-five years of what you always thought of when you thought of rock-and-roll. 

The Bangs piece, btw, is reprinted in the first volume of his collected reviews and essays, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, ed. Greil Marcus, Vintage, 1988, pp 224-250. It’s back in print for around ten bucks new. You owe yourself.

What, asked the ads of my youth, becomes a legend most? Based on his current offering, the epic ”Che,”  Steven Soderbegh’s answer seems to be: perpetuating it.

 Before going any further, bear in mind: Soderbergh’s “Che,” currently touring art houses in the 4 /1/2 “roadshow” version as well as enjoying a simultaneous general release as two separate films (”The Argentine”/”The Guerilla”), was originally proposed by Benicio Del Toro, and was aimed exclusively at Che’s final failed, and fatal excursion into Bolivia in 1967. Soderbergh decided to add a roughly equally long treatment of the 1959 Cuban campaign (1959).  There is no coverage afforded the intervening years, when Che served as Minister of Industry and Head of the National Bank, did a world tour meeting dozens of heads of state and leftist intellectuals, went undercover to attempt to foment revolution in the Congo—and, in his most controversial role, presided over the executions of “traitors” and “counter-revolutionaries.” None, besides some newsreel-type b&W staged footage of Che addressing the UN. The film is, by intention, focused on those two episodes alone.

 Now, Soderbergh has expressed the wish that he might have made a ten hour series;  but the problems with the film have less to do with what’s left out as the treatment afforded what’s there.

  
Admittedly, the biopic is a tough genre, constrained naturally by the twin pulls of hagiography and literalism (and while it’s simple to err in either direction, erring in both simultaneously can be near-fatal). Add to that, the biopic has no difficulty distinguishing the dancer from the dance—we come away from the average biopic satisfied with the usual struggle-tragedy-redemption storyline but not notably better informed about the actual accomplishments of the subject. What, for example, do you recall having learned about boxing from “Ali,” about sexuality from “Kinsey,” about the development of country/western from “Cash?” About trigonometry from “A Beautiful Mind?”

Of course, you don’t go to the movies to learn how to deliver an uppercut or solve Fermat’s Theorem. You’re there to watch Ali choosing prison over a championship belt, Cash torn between the bottle and, well, most everything else, Kinsey abandoning his childhood faith for science. If the biopic can at least help the audience to understand the nature of the personal drama (the more traumatic the better) and, perhaps, how it was resolved, maybe that’s enough. The biopic as understood by contemporary American audiences is essentially psychological, not sociological.

 
In “Che,” Benecio Del Torres gives us the famous Alberto Korda portrait sprung to life ( great collection here btw): a fervent revolutionary most at home in the jungle. And a startingly simple man involved in a surprisingly simple uprising. Che here is decidedly uncomplicated; the depth of his complexity goes no further than the split between his sensitive-macho self, the former symbolized by various shots of the guerilla leader sitting apart from his high-spirited compadres writing in a note book, a la Subcommandante Marcos, the latter, by his insistent hectoring in regard to revolutionary discipline.  Missing: both a historical context, on one hand, and insight of a genuinely personal nature on the other. In other words, missing are both the sociological and psychological components that make a movie something more than escapist entertainment.

 
(Incidentally, like the Subcommandante, Che is more often seen smoking a pipe than the iconic Havana, at least in the jungles; throughout the film cigars are associated with urbanity. Soderbergh has paid a great attention to similar detail throughout. At one point in the second half of the film,  while Che starves in the mountains of Bolivia, we get a none-too-subtle flash of Fidel at a high-falutin’ party crowded with dignitaries, dictating a menu recipe in boisterous tones; Jon Anderson, in his essential biography, notes that “Fidel had the well fed look of a city dweller used to pampering himself. He loved food and he loved to cook it” [Anderson, 178].  This fastidiousnes attention to detail on the part of Soderbergh is to be genuinely relished).

Background exposition in “Che” is limited to a few seconds of a pre-revolutionary Fidel spouting statistics regarding the lives of Cuban peasants to a pensive Che; next thing you know, their ship is landing in Cuba; after two hours of scrounging through the hills and taking on increasingly large government forces, Che’s column is on their way to a liberated Havana. Thus endeth part the first. Wholly ignored are the questions of US involvement throughout Central and South America, the at times acrimonous involvement of Russian and Chinese agents, and, for the most part, the very tangled relationships between Castro’s rural guerillas and the various urban movements also aimed at overthrowing Batista.

As for Che himself, he is a cypher from the start, and his actions, while re-imagined with an admirable if stiffening literalism, seem to lack motive. He is delivered in raw, unprocessed form, sprung fully blown from Fidel’s fantasies beclad in olive drab and famous beret. Four hours later, I felt that I had learned very little about the Cuban revolution, and even less about Che the man.

Soderbergh’s Che does manifest different behaviors. Not too many—what this actually pretty much means is that when Che isn’t healing people, he’s shooting them. He does spend a good portion of the film putting his medical doctor’s skills to work, treating compadres and the local campesinos alike, some scenes maybe a tad too reminiscent of a hirsute Jesus healing the blind. True, though, by all accounts, Che treated the peasants with the kind of respect wholly lacking in most rebel brigades, and demanded the same highly scrupulous behavior from the men and women in his command. But: at the same time, he could be downright reptilian. Missing from the movie is the episode that transpired in Cuba when Che’s companion Eutomio Guerra was revealed as a traitor, Fidel condemned him to death, and Che shot him. It’s Che’s own recounting in his diary—a far cry from the tediously overembellished account he later published—that’s striking:

The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutomio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 [caliber] pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn’t get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: `Yank it off, boy, what does it matter ….’ I did so and his possessions were now mine. We slept badly, wet and I with something of asthma.
(John Lee Anderson, Che: A Revolutionary Life, Grove Press, 1997, p. 237)

Soderbergh, who clearly tries to avoid the extremes of hagiography and of debunking literalism, walks a middle distance from each. And in doing so misses both the man and the drama. Because Che’s virtues and vices didn’t somehow blend or cancel each other out—Che was a man of extremes, a man of extreme compassion and of extreme violence. The flaw at the heart of Soderbergh’s movie is the lack of any explicit or even implicit tension between the cold-blooded executioner for whom a bullet through the temporal lobe is a matter of defusing an awkward situation and the rebel angel barnstorming through the countryside at once combating the forces of injustice and healing the sick. 

Of course, it was Che himself who instituted the practice of  portraying himself as one-dimensional: an exemplar of “the new socialist man” he prophesied in “Socialism and the New Man.”

“It must be said with all sincerity that in a true revolution, to which one gives himself completely, from which one expects no material compensation, the task of the vanguard revolutionary is both magnificent and anguishing. This is perhaps one of the greatest dramas of a leader: he must combine an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decisions without flinching one muscle … They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the places where ordinary men put their love into practice.” (Anderson, 617)

And that’s what Soderbergh has put on film—Che’s public, idealized self. As the director has said, “There wasn’t a single person who used the word ‘warm’ when they described him… This one guy had a great quote—he said, ‘You had to love him for free.’ That’s why, based on what I read and the people I talked to, the movie feels like him—a little bit distant and, you know, tough.”

 
But what’s missing is the “anguish” Che himself referred to above; and Che himself was right about one thing–that tension really is the stuff of “great drama.”  And a great oppportunity shunned. In an unguarded moment, Che once explained to his boon companion Alberto that “I live like someone torn in two, twenty-four hours a day, completely torn in two, and I haven’t got anybody to tell it to. Even if I did, they would never believe me.” (Anderson, 608)

Well, we might, if anyone would make the attempt. Soderbergh quite consciously resists any opportunity to do the same, and, true,  he does so with a purpose. During the Cuban campaign, Che casually mentions to his future wife that he has a wife and children in Mexico; that’s the first, and the last, we shall hear of it, and the most we see or hear of his future marriage and children is a fleeting segment before he flies off to make revolution in Bolivia. This is a conscious effect on Soderbergh’s part, and to some extent it work: we are meant to recognize, by omission, that these “small doses of daily affection” were not permitted to interfere with the “cold, unflinching” dedication to revolution. The rest of Che’s story, the intimate story, is, as the French say, briller par son absence: brilliant in its absence, symbolic in its lack. But if film is going to aspire to the status of art, if it’s going to transcend the bland literalism of the rolling camera, needs to go further than that; and Soderbergh’s iconographic treatment never dares tread in the direction of explanation or interpretation. 

This is the trouble with literalism.  Che, who held his personal cards very close to the chest, didn’t go on at length about his personal feelings. So when Soderbergh says, well, he wasn’t warm, and he was tough, he’s suggesting that his responsibility ends there, with the literal. I’ve incorporated what I’ve been told about Che, most of it’s documentable, and that’s that. And that is an achievement in its own right, make no mistake. But it means that  “Che” succeeds at newsreel-style documentary, but fails to enlighten in any significant way.  The film accepts him, sui generis, as a model of “the new socialist man.” I suppose it delivers on it’s  promise: we do indeed get “Che.”  But we learn nothing of Ernesto Guavera, nothing of the anguish, nothing of a man who lived “torn in two, twenty four hours a day, completely torn in two.” And that’s the real story, and in an age in which the citizens of superpowers once again tremble before the asymmetric strategies of shadowy fanatics, it’s an important one.

 
The paradox that was Che is borne out–if never genuinely resolved–throughout the corpus of his extant writing and speeches.. The man who declared that “”At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love” and “”The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth” was also able to write to his father “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing,” to instruct his kangaroo courts that “We don’t need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him. A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate,” and to stiffen his own resolve by writing in his early diaries that “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”

The paradox wasn’t  resolved in “The Motorcycle Diaries,” and I don’t feel it was resolved in Jon Lee Anderson’s magisterial biography. But an infinitely more interesting, and enlightening,—and entertaining—movie might have used Che’s own “anguish” as a  jumping off point rather than holding fast to the increasingly tedious literalism which makes the second half of the film a bit of a chore.

In the best biographical adaptations, both literalism and hagiography are scorned in favor of a freewheeling approach that makes the subject exemplary rather than heroic: Peter Schaffer’s “Amadeus,” for example, is a tragicomic meditation on the relationship between art and sanity, the nature of creation, or, at least, on artists and ambition. It helps, of course, that the treatment was festooned with all the trappings of a full-blown costume drama, and that most people who saw “Amadeus” had no previous notion whatsoever about the life and times of Herr Mozart, and that the intervening centuries between his death and Schaffer/Milos Forman’s collaboration had created an idol—the divine Mozart, who, to cite Mozart’s own line in the play about the operatic gods of his time, “shits marble”—nicely situated for postmodern de-pedestalling. In any case, Schaffer’s “Amadeus,”like Shaw’s “St Joan,” or Osborne’s “Luther,” eschewed a simple chronological unfolding in order to deal with the larger dilemmas posed by such incorrigible characters.

And Soderbergh’s is very fertile, topical ground, for exactly that, as the world once again struggles with what it cannot comprehend: the unyielding fanatic. Americans certainly didn’t understand Che. Actually, as his biographer Jon Lee Anderson points out, neither did most South Americans:

“The Communist consciousness which he had attained was still an elusive, abstract, and even unwanted state of being for many people, even those who believed themselves to be Socialist and happily echoed his shout of `Freedom or Death.’ The willingness to sacrifice material comforts and even life itself for the cause was a state of mind Che might have achieved, but most other men and women had not, and they probably had very little interest in trying.”

“Reality,” says Anderson wryly, “was at variance with Che’s philosophy” (606).  

And American’s don’t understand suicide bombers, either. There are two questions applicable to both 60s communist rebels and today’s intractable Islamists:

What kind of ideology can inspire a person with such zeal, that martyrdom itself is not simply welcome but actively pursued?;

And what type of personality is that so willingly responds to its call?

And the ancillary questions: what are the ethics and politics (and strategies) of spreading ideology beyond one’s own shores? Why do so many revolutions end in terror?

And maybe most fundamental: at what point, in the eyes of the fanatic, do people forfeit their sacerdotal natures and become as means to ends?

Of course, a committed ideologue will argue that individuals become most fully actualized at the moment they are negated, as they see themselves as nothing but  means to a greater end. It’s an old theological concept common to a plethora of creeds easily adapted to the needs of twentieth century ideologues of any stripe who need, well, bodies.  Atman becomes Brahman, Guatama becomes Buddha, Che becomes the Revolution, as Abdullah  becomes Jihad.  (Which may or not be a fine thing, depending on motive and outcome—we celebrate our own revolutionist Nathan Hale, who regretted upon his execution that he had but one life to give for is country, but shudder at the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade). The most chilling thing of course is the moment at which the fanatic, having achieved that state, determines that others are but means to an end as well. It’s a critical moment in individual consciousness with, these days, global consequences. It’s the stuff of drama, it’s the stuff of everyday life  nowadays, and it was certainly a critical moment for Che. Che himself would have identified it, perhaps, as the moment at which, wounded, he reached for his weapons rather than his medical kit, a moment which he, ever attendant to the legend, spoke of reverentially afterwards: but  what circumstances and what innate factors led, with what degree of inevitability, to that moment?

 
We assume, in Che’s case, that it was firsthand acquaintance with the hardship of the suffering peasants—the gist “The Motorcycle Diaries”—that began to move him (as opposed to Fidel’s rather dispassionate recitation) along that long road from awareness to consciousness to ideology to action most extreme, as well as familiarity with the perpetrators of injustice. Che, 1952 (diary entry): “”The person who wrote these notes died the day he stepped back on Argentine soil …Wandering around our ‘America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought.” Hence the compassion. As for the hatred? Remember, Che, in one of his less compassionate moments, exclaimed that he was in favor of nuclear strikes on America—this remark, unpardonable under any circumstances, is comprehensible only in light of the sufferings of the Guatamalean people, and the wholesale stripping of their basic human rights via direct American fiat, as witnessed firsthand. Che again, Guatamala, 1954:” “Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit Company, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.” And in 1960:

Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger, and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefication provoked by continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland (“On Revolutionary Medicine, “1960)

But all that is missing.  Late in the film, there are indications that the Americans are in fact assisting, on the ground, with Che’s apprehension in Bolivia, but the fact that his eventual interrogator, Felix Rodriguez, is a CIA operative isn’t made as clear it could be. US meddling, invasions, coups, assassinations in Latin and South America are never so much as mentioned aside from being hinted in brief dramatizations of Che at the UN. In fact, the only real enemies in the movie are Cuban and later Bolivian soldiers. The former are entirely inept; led by colonels right out of Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” they are generally shown being shot, blown up, running away, or surrendering. The Bolivian troops of Part 2  appear as ants, masses of soldiers methodically working their way through the brush until they eventually come upon a wounded Che. But both are treated with the same degree of interest as the stock Germans in WW2 films were. Faceless uniforms.  

Then again, maybe it was something else that drove Che to these extremes. There are plenty of physicians affiliated with Doctors Without Borders who never lay down the syringe and take up the AK-47, just as there are “rebel” thugs making up sizeable elements in all revolutionary cadres for whom material gain, power, and cheap thrills are the sole impetus to action. What else then? Something the artists and biographers, the hagiographers and the detractors, have overlooked? Orson Wells solved the tremendous mystery that was Kane in the final frames of “Citizen Kane,” providing a single visual clue for the reader that eluded the charcaters in the film itself who were  trying to decipher the riddle underlying the rise and fall of the Great Man. But not here.  “Che” provides only the facts; the director didn’t attempt to provide a vision. Ehhh. The facts I get can online.

Which is not—after all that!—reason to avoid the film. Go see it! Because it really is a solid if extremely narrow and ahistorical account of the Cuban revolution, as seen from the rural regions. The battle scenes are gritty. Soderbergh’s patient pacing of the battle of Santa Clara, a drawn out segment capturing the tactical problems of urban warfare, is truly commendable, creating the sense that the success of the revolution came down to specifics like removing a sniper from a church tower in a central plaza. The sheer privation Che willing endured (or sought—but that’s another theme for the psychological treatment) is made all too obvious. And the cinematography is impressive throughout (look elsewhere for appraisals of Soderbergh’s use of the novel Red One wide-angle technology).

And while it doesn’t to my mind bother trying to answer the forty-year old questions about Che, it might, at least, serve to provoke questions. Or to help in some small way to keep alive a certain memory, one unhappily fading in light of the new clash of civilizations–first world versus the Muslims, neoliberal global capital  versus third-world religious fundamentalists—or in Benjamin Barber’s phrase, “Jihad versus McWorld”—one without, apparently, a lot of room for international socialism in the mix. 

So maybe in closing it’s worth pointing out that in 2007, Aleida Guevera, Che’s daughter and a physician herself, traveled to Iran to take part in a conference called “Che Like Chamran” (a reference to a deceased colleague of Khomeini).  Haj Saaed Ghasemi, a keynote speaker (and “Coordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom”), noted in his opening address that “The people of Cuba, Fidel (Castro) and Che Guevara were never socialists or communists. Fidel has several times admitted that he and Che and the people of Cuba hated the Soviets for all they had done,” that  “today, Communism, as predicted by [Ayatollah Khomeini], has joined history’s dustbin, and the only path to salvation lies alongside the justice-seeking unitarian religious movements,” and that were Che alive today, he’d be fighting alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Ms Guevera was having none of it. Departing from her prepared remarks, she began by noting that Cuba remains today a proud Socialist state, and followed up by noting that “My father never talked about God. He never met God. My father knew there was no absolute truth.” Her contingent was quickly whisked away, and only an abbreviated version of her remarks were disseminated in the official media (the Tehran Marxists students meanwhile published their own version).

Advocacy of socialism is a crime in the Islamic republic (note to Chavez and Morales). Punishable by—yeah, you guessed it. Meanwhile, In the United States, a presidential candidate took his cue from a plumber in damning “socialism”: “You see, [Obama] believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism” –as did his halfwit running mate Palin: “At a rally Friday in West Chester, Ohio, where one banner in the crowd read, `Obama is a Socialist/Marxist,’ Palin said, `Joe suggested that that sounded a little bit like socialism.’”

So, yeah, all in all—”Che” could have better. But yeah, all in all Soderbergh has done the world a favor: we need all the Che we can get.

For Che: Nathalie Cordone, “Hasta Siempre Che Guavara” (trans. lyrics):

From Tufts University Medical Center (Chinatown):

Watching this with medical students and faculty was interesting: the line from the Inaugaration speech that drew instinctive applause from this particular gathering was “we shall restore Science to its rightful place.”  They did not cheer the line about “the wholesale redistibution of land and the dispersal of the gentry.”     

More of Boston today:

Obama’s long-term success–not the political success of his administration, but its ultimate effect on the floundering ship of state–will depend on how far from the mainstream he can run.  Whic is probably gonna be not very. But he seems to be a genuinely good man and an exceptionally smart one and one with a degree of what I guess is called character, and the country seems to ready to respond to him, and he’s probably about good as we can expect, and following a series of presidents missing sanity (Nixon), authority (Carter), compassion (Reagan), sincerity (Clinton), intelligence/self-awareness/humility/ (Bush 2), that may well be saying something.

But it was another very bad day for money. I don’t know enough about money to know whether anyone knows enough about money to really understand what can be done. Especially when the markets may well be behaving exactly as they are supposed to be, only now maybe they aren’t acting in America’s best interests all the time. A conundrum for capitalists, that.

In any case it was lots more fun when other stuff mattered, like stem cell research and gay weddings and intelligent design. Even the war made sense–it was obviously wrong. And on that Obama can issue imperial edicts:  “redeploy all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months.”  Or, “Redeploy them to Afghanistan; bid them raze Kabul, yeah, burn it to cinders; for the sight of it offends me, and the remembrance of it causeth me grief.”

Try that on Wall St.