The Great Themes

Tom Lowe

10/08/2002 -- Today, I start back updating the Jackson Progressive. It's been about eight months since I typed a single word into this web site. A one-man operation is tough to pull off if you have a profession, a spell of clinical depression, responsibility for elderly parents and a host of civic responsibilities. That is the dilemma of modern-day society in the developed countries; although the overall economic picture is generally good (at least as long as the recession doesn't go too much longer and deeper), our society extracts its toll in time

Since I quit updating the JP in January of this year, much has happened in the world and in our own Metro area. One of the most hopeful developments is the publication of the preview issue of the Jackson Free Press by Donna Ladd, her friend, Todd Stauffer, and a group of other highly talented people. Their objective, unlike that of the JP, is a print magazine and several web sites, including a web "blog." Since one of the things I have felt needed to be done in this community, and what I wanted to do with the JP and totally failed, was to keep my finger on the pulse of Jackson, the JFP could be a wonderful catalyst for the cultural creative community here. I wish them well, especially as they have invited me to moderate a political blog. Directions to the blog will soon follow. Their publication will allow the JP to be its own stogy self, where faithful readers, to spare their eyes, usually find it necessary to print out the longer text articles. .http://www.jacksonfreepress.com

Theme I: Community, Race and Politics

One of my current projects is reading Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community with a group of fellow lawyers who meet for lunch at the Mississippi Bar once a week. Putnam claims, and my personal experience confirms, that civic participation in America has been declining since the WWII generation, The results of this decline are not felicitous; they could ultimately be calamitous, both for our nation and for the world.

Putnam cites a number of suspects as the cause: busyness and time pressure: economic hard times; the movement of women into the paid labor force and the stresses of two-career families; residential mobility, suburbanization and sprawl, television and technology; structural changes in the American economy; disruption of marriage and family ties; growth of the welfare state; the civil rights revolution; the sixties, which included Vietnam, Watergate, disillusion with public life and the cultural revolt against authority. He then demolishes each of these suspects as a main cause of the decline in civic involvement.

This writer is more skeptical than Putnam: I think that what has happened has been the outcome of conscious planning by a power elite, and that the American people have been sold a concept of human nature that virtually assures that our citizens will avoid civic life: the neo-classical economic definition of homo economicus: an individual with infinite personal wants and desires and the willingness to trade his/her labor in order to satisfy those wants and desires. The picture is one of isolated, grasping, selfish individuals, each of whom endlessly strives to acquire private goods, whether material, psychological, social or even spiritual. This attitude is best expressed in Margaret Thatcher's statement that society doesn't exist -- only individuals.

A society in which no one trusts anyone else and everyone believes that everyone else is out to cheat them is a society incapable of concerted action or even serious political dialogue. If you believe that life is tough, then your beliefs will become a self-fulfilling prophecy; you will have a tough life. If everyone believes that life is tough then life will indeed be tough for everyone.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that, if it does not alter its course, a society that takes Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman and Herbert Spencer as its mentors will eventually arrive at a Hobbsian state of nature and, consequently, at Hobbes's absolutist solution.

Thus, theme one will be a discussion of how, over the past twenty-five years, we have become a nation transfixed by the supremacy of private interests over the public interest and how we have been brainwashed--and I use that term intentionally--by an elite that has immersed us in an ocean of liberal/conservative claptrap that disparages the very idea of the common good.

A subordinate theme is the effect of these changes on the Jackson metropolitan area. When the author was growing up in the 50s, Jackson was a very different place. Capitol Street was a magnet for shoppers and businessmen alike and the crowds stayed until after midnight, walking back and forth on the sidewalks. There were then four major whites-only theaters, the Royal, the Paramount, the New Joy and the State theaters on Capital Street and the Lamar Theater on Lamar Street between Capitol and Amite. All the big department stores were there: McRaes, Kennington's, the Emporium and J. C. Penny's, and three of the four were locally-owned. There was far more of the feeling of belonging to a city, rather than simply living in a convenient economic agglomeration. There was a feeling of civic pride in our cultural institutions, such as the Jackson Symphony, the Jackson Opera Guild, the Municipal Art Gallery and the R. M. Taylor Zoo, that kept them from being merely entertainment.

Of course, things were not all rosy. Jackson had a racially-determined caste system that persists to this day in practice, if not in law. The process of societal disintegration so powerfully portrayed by Faulkner that began with the Reconstruction Era was still eating away at that very same post-bellum caste system and had become, with the civil rights movement, a storm cloud on the horizon, poised to assault two of the remaining bastions of racial privilege: the public school and the voting booth.

When those bastions fell there was great optimism, and things seemed to improve, at least for a while. Mississippi (and greater Jackson) is, however, still two totally different states. Instead of voting for the southern Democrats, the majority of whites have become Republican. In spite of heated denials, it is clear that the basis of this change on the part of whites is racism. Now that the Republicans are on the side of states' rights (as long as those rights don't affect the profits of the large corporations) the genteel middle class of Mississippi and the redneck contingent can be counted on to vote for such panderers as Trent Lott, Roger Wicker and, of course, that papa's boy who never did anything for himself besides engage in alcohol, cocaine, and insider trading, that black hole of wisdom, historical perspective and humaneness, George W. Bush, our president-select. The tendency of otherwise intelligent and well-meaning people to deceive themselves over political candidates they support is truly mind-boggling.

So, under theme 1, these are the subjects to be explored: the demise of community; the unspoken but controlling ideas behind that unhappy demise; and, the unhappy, probable results of that disintegration, if allowed to continue, including the corruption of our political system by money..

Theme II: The World

As of this writing, the government of the United States of America is on the verge of deciding to go to war against a nation that has never raised a finger against it--a nation that has suffered horribly from sanctions that have demonstrably killed half a million Iraqi children from disease and the lack of medicines caused by an embargo that the U.S. has, through its influence with the U.N. , extended and enforced since the Gulf War.

Worse, our government intentionally caused that suffering and death by destroying Iraq's water-purification capacity and then by denying Iraq the materials and chemicals required to rebuild them. This is documented by our own military's web site: http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/declassdocs/dia/19950901/950901_511rept_91.html.

Read that document, CITIZEN, and consider the unspeakable atrocities we have allowed to be done in our name. These are war crimes; indeed, they are crimes against humanity.

The world has shrunk. The U. S. mainland is no longer immune from retribution.

The attack on the World Trade Center did not come out of nowhere. To believe, as our "leaders" would have use believe, that the perpetrators hated us because of our political freedoms and our "free" markets, is to engage in a silly but dangerous illusion. It is to ignore the simple fact that we are responsible for the outcome of our actions. Our government has been deeply involved in mid eastern politics for a very long time. In the 50s, the CIA installed the Shah in Iran in a coup to overthrow a popular government . The Iranians understandably hold us responsible for the repression and torture of dissidents by the Shah's secret police, SAVAK, which worked closely with the CIA. Our government has supported and kept in power numerous repressive regimes throughout the middle east, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, and, of course, Israel, whose treatment of the Palestinians whom they have dispossessed and whose territory they now rule has been murderous, racist and inhumane.

What do we expect from people who have been treated this way? Are they supposed to hate us because we are the "land of the free and the home of the brave", or is it instead because we support corrupt dictatorships, allow Israel to dispossess the Palestinians and to treat them brutally, and, in general meddle in the business of the Mideast, in total disregard of state sovereignty and human rights in order to further the interests of the multinational oil companies? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out.

The key is our American addiction to oil. If we were not importing more than half the oil we use in our country, the middle east would not be near as important an area to the oilmen that run our government. The Jackson Progressive has run several articles on the fact that world oil production is even now peaking and will begin to decline shortly. Unless we can very quickly end our addiction to cheap energy, our behavior as a nation and as a society will soon resemble the behavior of a cocaine addict without his fix. And the withdrawal symptoms will be a lot worse than from any drug we know; it will be catastrophic.

Do you own and drive an SUV? You are part of this addiction.

Let us summarize this theme:

The United States is addicted to cheap oil. World oil production is peaking right now. It will start to decline shortly and when it does, oil, and therefore energy, will become extremely expensive. See The End of Cheap Oil. Since modern civilization depends upon cheap energy, the decline of energy will threaten the basis of our way of life. We can respond to this threat in two ways:

[10/17/2002 Update: Dr. Campbell, who wrote The End of Cheap Oil, has posted an update which includes up to the year 2001. Read and heed.]

1. We can engage in a war of conquest to secure for ourselves the lion's share of the world's remaining oil reserves, which mostly underlie Iraq and Saudi Arabia. This will put off for a few years the final reckoning and will vastly enrich the corporations that control the supply of oil to the United States and the rest of the western world;

2. We can wean ourselves from our addiction to fossil fuel by drastically reducing our use of energy and by substituting renewable energy sources in the place of fossil fuel. By doing this, we can lay the foundation for real peace and a sustainable environment.

All other world issues pale before this issue.

Theme III: The Soul

Underneath the phenomena of world, local, and personal events runs a vast, unconscious flood of thoughts, memories, and feelings, some of it related to current events, some of it to the recent past, but much of it having its origins in remotest prehistory when humans were first coming into existence. Freud, Jung, and Hillman, to name some of the most famous psychological thinkers of the last century, have made preliminary incursions into that river of unconsciousness, but we still know very little. Consciousness has been compared to a peanut floating in the Pacific Ocean of the unconsciousness. Few of us are aware of all this baggage we carry around, but it determines much of our destiny.

Taking personal responsibility for our individual and collective actions requires the assumption that we are the author of our fate. At the same time, we do not choose the pen, ink and paper upon which we write our lives, and thus we often do not even comprehend the ways in which our options are limited. We are consequently impelled by passions, the origin of which we are hardly aware, into behavior that later is correctly perceived as insane. St. Paul took note of this quandary some time ago: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." Rom. 7:15

As an example, it is difficult, given the circumstance, not to conclude that the coming war on Iraq is irrational, illegal and cruel in ways that most people could not imagine. It will kill thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis whose only offense is to live atop one of the world's largest reservoirs of petroleum coveted by a few very large and powerful corporations whose CEOs and former CEOs are related to our "president" through economic and social ties. It will confirm the suspicions of Moslems everywhere, and especially in the Middle East, that we are bent on the armed robbery of Iraqi petroleum, and there is no action so evil, so vicious, and so brutal to which our government will not stoop to accomplish that end.

As I mentioned above, the last time we bombed Iraq in a big way, our military deliberately destroyed Iraq's water system in the knowledge that with a strategic embargo preventing the importation of replacement parts and purification chemicals, that widespread disease and death would result. We now know that over half a million children have died from diseases they contracted from impure water and the lack of medicine. When Secretary of State Albright was asked on national TV if our strategic aims were worth the suffering and deaths of all those innocents, she replied that it was. Her remarks were broadcast throughout the world. If what our "president" is telling us now is true, that the unimaginably cruel sanctions we imposed on Iraq and enforced over the past ten years failed to stop Saddam Hussein from building weapons of mass destruction, then all those deaths were for nothing.

Now the drums of war are beating loud. If we the people allow the atrocities, the war crimes and the resulting suffering planned by our administration to take place, we will have abdicated our responsibility as citizens and as human beings to stand up for decency, justice and reason. We will be as guilty of the deaths and suffering as Saddam Hussein. And we will not escape retribution at the hands of desperate persons who see no alternative. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may, in retrospect, be seen as mild.

In 1912, Carl Jung dreamed that Europe was drowning in blood. He later interpreted his dream as a revelation from his own unconscious that the soul of European society was being prepared for war. Wars are cultivated in people's hearts and souls just beneath their conscious apperception, to the end that they are prepared to enthusiastically participate when the killing begins.

If war were not imminent, this essay would probably have not discussed the idea of war under the topic of "Soul." There are few things, however, as soulful as war. Before it became a matter of cowardly, long-distance slaughter from fifty thousand feet, war served to test the courage and leadership of young men. It was the subject of much fine poetry, especially in the great epics of antiquity. Now war tests only the willingness of men who have carefully avoided exposing themselves to the risks of battle to order the deaths of thousands and even millions at no cost to themselves.

Copyright 2002, Thomas Lowe. All rights reserved. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com. Noncommercial reproduction of this article in its entirety is authorized, provided that this notice accompanies any reproduction.