Confession

1)     I have preferred to live with the God question rather than settle it.  I am comfortable with the search for God.  I  believe, like Faulkner,  the kind of God we need doesn’t exist (but of course has to).   I have neither the perspicacity of Hume nor the faith of  Bonhoeffer.  I don’t want to convert anyone.  Mum’s the word.

2)    Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake.  I want to be graced with righteousness rather than pretend I have it. I wanted to improve the world. Call me a social justice warrior (SJW), I don't consider it an insult.   I am sorry that Hopes don't magically turn into Reality.  Jesus saved the world of 2,000 years ago.  It requires  new prophets and periodic saving.  But if in fact I have been called, my destiny was to ignore it. Improving the world requires revealing the right idea at the right time. As a good meme, it is like a Youtube video going viral.  A good infection spreading hope and meaning rather than sickness and death like some plague.  This requires a special kind of idea. Today good ideas are graced with 15 minutes of fame and then forgotten so we can have new ideas.  Ideas are like fashion—they have to change.

5)    You may be surprised to hear that I have that idea.  I am not the right person to advance it and I doubt it is the right time for the Truth.  People enjoy way too many illusions to put up with the Truth. The project we need to all get to work on is managing de-globalization and fostering "local" sustainability.  Call it the new neighborhood  localism.  Centralization, International globalism and Progress are over.  It’s time for a return to a scientific feudalism. We can all keep our cozy after death illusions if we ‘ll just get to productive work here.

6)    Did I mention that the current financial system is doomed?  Thankfully, but terrifyingly true.  We are almost ready to address the problem of sustainability..  The crack up is going to be a little ragged but if we keep our eyes fixed on justice, excellence and generosity we may pull through.  We may have recently consumed enough history to refrain from many of the great failed “isms”.

7)    Small is beautiful.  Big hearted is good.  I have some apocalyptic dreams  but Madness is infectious too. 

8)    Why were hippie boomers so ready to quit the revolution?  Our parents were the greatest generation and provided the stability while we acted out but  we realized after reading Kropotkin and reflecting on austerity that the revolution would take a lot of work so we said we’ll go along  with our parent’s flawed dreams (they are paying the bills)and see what happens.   What ideals did we abandon and then to grow up and chase the almighty dollar that is currently trending toward worthlessness?  Did we think a BMW was success and the selling of a President or a bond offering was a real job?  This puzzles me.   I really thought we were special because the times required that we be special BUT we got distracted, we were seduced by success, we jettisoned our religious anchorage and now we are in Lady gaga land. Or is that LaLa land? 

9)    You will excuse me, I hope, of living a life of liberal bias.  It’s a free country. Or so they say.  I am a liberal though I prefer to say ‘progressive’ because I am more attentive to how what is happening now informs the future rather than being overly concerned with the past.  As they say, it’s just a goodbye.

10)      I am not a complete idiot so I would like to talk about my liberalism.  I came by it honestly.  I was a protestor when Vietnam was a hot war and I thought I was being  attentive to my duty because I was concerned that the war was wrong and unnecessary.  I thought to protest was the patriotic thing.  Now who was I to dispute the grand marshals of American exceptionalism; Rostow, McNamara, and Bundy?  Weren’t they Kennedy’s “brain trust”?    I thought America was too militaristic and needed to quit throwing its weight around.  I was for a 50% reduction in DOD expenditures even when the Soviets were a “threat”.  Of course, I could see the danger of nuclear war but the Soviets had a country no one wanted to live in and would do much to escape if they could.  They did not seem to be much competition for how to organize a grand and glorious State.  They seemed in fact pretty shabby.  So even in the turbulent late 70’s, America was the place to be.  Big changes were in the air and it was time to get busy on a future that included all 4 billion people on the planet.

11)       In my mind America needed to address the essential contradictions of capitalism, the problem of “externalities”, the problem of valuing the resources we all are dependent on, and then of course planning for energy and resource limits.  These concerns appeared in books like Limits to Growth or Small is Beautiful and at Conferences like the Club of Rome. These issues had been brought to common awareness on the first Earth Day and now we were working through them politically. But some pissed Iranians sowed the whirlwind—removing the high minded Carter and sticking us with Avuncular Reagan. The 70’s were turbulent and we were ready to birth a revolution.  We knew Capitalism was unconsciously selfish.  The inattentive and poor were going to be victimized. They thought the system cared about justice and fairness.  Yes, it was gloriously productive BUT it had big failures.  The hippies pointed it out but were unable  (and unwilling) to actually follow through on revolution. So, I think the criticism was unfocused, lazy and selfish, we wanted a so-called Clinton “third way” that would not require too much of a sacrifice. No, the unfortunate truth is that we wanted to do well by doing good and that is a vicious illusion.  One or the other:  sacrificial responsibility or the sell out.  Genial Reagan aggravated MY worldview because he was ancient history, unable to understand(grok) the present, much less the future.  He was the pretender of the greatest generation—an actor not a thinker. And he was senile! He was stuck on the whole American exceptionalism thing and unable to comprehend that the rest of the world HAD a world view.  In short, it was all about US and our glorious future was just a riff on our world saving past.   It was the feel good politics of the stupid—we were facing all these modern, critical issues and he was trying to return to the 50’s.  Who would speak for the necessary organization of the future?  So our country was misdirected in the 80’s from the recognized problems of the 70’s and forced to try a return to Mayberry  while building the biggest f***** army on the planet.  We had  neighbors that were reluctant to listen to us so we took a stick to Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama and let everyone know the Monroe Doctrine now applied to the whole world once Russia took a powder.  WE were the end of history.  Now that we were the sole superpower it was time to shuck the Miss Congeniality shtik  and get the whole world shaped up to our satisfaction.  One thing I don’t blame us for is the ridiculous idea of a united states of Europe with its own currency. Conspiracy theorists can dial up the trilateral commission, the Ford Foundation, or the Bilderburg group for the grand plan but in my mind the Europeans shot themselves in their own foot.   I met a German journalist in 1991 talking about the "new Europe".  I could not imagine the Germans and the Italians with the same money. 

      As you may have heard it was libertarian Karl Hess who advanced the pithy idea that liberals think everybody else is stupid and conservatives think everybody else is lazy.  Ok guilty.  It only makes sense to work hard at something that has a prayer of working.  We are deep deep into stupidity at this point. We have an idiot in chief determined to play Tony the Tiger making everything "Great!" The European project will last about as long as my professional career.  Then people will go back to being who they are. 

12)      So OUR biggest idea for the last 20 years has been “show me the money”.  We learned to just make it up and then promptly forgot it’s supposed to be a measure of value, not permission to pillage.  Value!  What an outmoded concept!   It’s OK, we thought, everyone has money now instead of lives of value.  But the rich desired to be Icarus and fly not only up to the sun but to the other suns called stars and they needed everybody else’s  money to do that.  So they demoted them to Marx’s Industrial Reserve Army and piled up the money so they could escape Earth’s gravitational field and enjoy the incredible lightness of being.

13)      Today the dispensation of rewards is a trust fund for the favored and a lottery for the rest.  The hard work road to success is still there with a lot of nasty surprises.  Often it is take a number and wait to be called—or not. 

14)      The curmudgeon camp is in the slums of intellectualism and that is where I live.   What is to be done?  How often the question is asked and there is no answer until you have done it

15)      The fairy tale that began for me watching Bambi on the big screen and Dorothy on the yellow brick road is just about over.  If all you need is love then fairy tales are the only true stories.     The truth is in fairy tales.  Who couldn’t go on and on about the human truths in King Midas? or Rumpelstiltskin?  What about the man and his wife by the sea that caught a magic fish and asked for more and more until the fish got angry and returned them to their original poor condition?   You realize of course that it is going to happen to all of us?  Oil is getting more expensive and fracking is called scraping the bottom of the barrel. 

17)      Everyone knows that the game is musical chairs for keeps. The fix is in.  When they take a chair, someone gets ejected from the middle class and gets to go away and play sink or swim(or make up their own game), which I would recommend you think about before you are given your pink slip from the American dream.