SPORT / Dave Zirin : What They Can’t Take from Lance Armstrong

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Survivor: Lance Armstrong. Photo by Christopher Ena / AP.

He quit the fight but not the war:
What they can’t take from Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong, and his ubiquitous Livestrong bracelets, are 21st century totems of survival and the USADA isn’t going to change that.

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / August 29, 2012

If Joe Paterno represents the greatest fall from grace in the history of sports, then many are saying that Lance Armstrong might now have won the silver.

On Thursday, Armstrong was stripped of all seven of his Tour de France cycling crowns and will be banned for life from any connection to the sport he made famous. Why? Because he withdrew his appeal against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s contention that he time and again rode steroids and performance enhancing drugs to victory.

Armstrong quit the fight against the USADA but issued a statement without contrition, accusing them of an “unconstitutional witch hunt.”

As Armstrong said in a statement,

There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, “Enough is enough.” For me, that time is now… I have been dealing with claims that I cheated and had an unfair advantage in winning my seven Tours since 1999. The toll this has taken on my family and my work for our foundation and on me leads me to where I am today — finished with this nonsense. Today I turn the page. I will no longer address this issue, regardless of the circumstances… I will commit myself to the work I began before ever winning a single Tour de France title: serving people and families affected by cancer, especially those in underserved communities.

With the swiftness of a pro cyclist going 75 miles per hour down a steep hill, the USADA acted immediately, treating Armstrong’s surrender as a legal admission of guilt. Travis Tygart, the USADA’s chief executive, spoke as if a jury of Armstrong’s peers had voted to convict, saying, “It is a sad day for all of us who love sport and athletes. It’s a heartbreaking example of win at all costs overtaking the fair and safe option. There’s no success in cheating to win.”

Tygart maintained that Armstrong didn’t give up the fight from exhaustion but because he knew that the USADA had 10 former teammates ready to testify that he was doping. Armstrong, it should be noted, made clear that no matter what any witnesses had to say, “There is zero physical evidence to support [their] outlandish and heinous claims,” Armstrong said. “The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of [drug tests] I have passed with flying colors.”

I don’t know about Armstrong’s guilt or innocence, but anyone who writes off Armstrong after the USADA ruling and thinks that he’s about to enter some sort of Paterno-Pete Rose-Barry Bond pantheon of infamy, doesn’t quite understand his appeal or why he connects so strongly with his army of fans. Of the 70 top-10 finishers in Armstrong’s seven Tour De France victories, 41 have tested positive for PEDS, Armstrong is a hell of a lot more than just number 42.

The Texas native came to public consciousness not just for beating the Pyrenees but for beating stage four cancer. In our increasingly toxic world, I don’t think a family exists that hasn’t been touched by cancer in some way. Lance Armstrong, and his ubiquitous Livestrong bracelets, are 21st century totems of survival and the USADA isn’t going to change that. Nothing ever could.

No adult male saw Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa in 1998 and thought, “Someday I’m going to hit 70 home runs.” No adult female saw Marion Jones and thought, “Someday I’ll win gold at the Olympics.” But legions of adults have watched Lance Armstrong and thought, “Someday, I’m going to beat this damn cancer.”

That’s a deeper connection than fandom or even the virtual-world of fantasy sports could ever provide. If Lance Armstrong has been able to further the connection because he’s white, photogenic, and politically connected (and did I mention white?), then to his credit he’s leveraged those advantages to raise over $500 million for cancer research and access to treatment in poor and minority communities across the United States.

Armstrong, a religious agnostic, was once asked how his belief in God helped him beat cancer, He answered, according to the great sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, “Everyone should believe in something, and I believe in surgery, chemotherapy, and my doctors.” That response in the end is why he won’t go into hiding. He won’t live in self-imposed exile. He won’t slink to the margins of U.S. society and he won’t lose his fans.

Call him a doper. Call him a cheater. Call him the dirtiest player in a sport that’s as dirty as they come. He’ll call himself the guy who keeps fighting to make sure people have the surgery, chemo, and doctors they need. For people like those in my own family who have through trials of unimaginable courage, earned the right to wear that LiveStrong rubber bracelet, that will always matter more.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the book, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Harry Targ : Van Jones on Rebuilding the Dream

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer


As election nears:
Van Jones on rebuilding the dream

Activists know that building mass movements entails a variety of cognitive and action steps. Sometimes it is useful for a skilled activist like Van Jones to provide us with a framework for discussing how to proceed.

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | August 29, 2012

[Rebuild the Dream by Van Jones (2012: Nation Books); Hardcover; 320 pp.; $25.99.]

The central argument of this book is that, to bring back hope and win change, we need more than a great president. We need a movement of millions of people, committed to fixing our democracy and rebuilding America’s economy.

In June, 2011, Van Jones, former White House advisor on Green Jobs and before that community organizer and author of The Green Collar Economy, called on progressives to organize house parties to establish a policy agenda that could serve as the basis for building a new progressive social movement. An inspiring speech to urge organizing at the grassroots level was widely distributed on the internet.

In July thousands of house parties, advertised as efforts to “Rebuild the American Dream,” were held. These were followed by electronic dialogue that led to the adoption of a “Contract for the American Dream;” a 10-point program for economic renewal. Over 300,000 Americans have endorsed the Contract, and the Rebuild the Dream coalition claims to have 600,000 members.

In some communities, including in Lafayette, Indiana, where I live and teach, local Rebuild the Dream Coalitions became the vehicle for networking among representatives of civil rights and civil liberties groups, trade unionists, defenders of women’s reproductive health, and progressive Democrats. Rallies, petition drives, and panel presentations were organized around jobs and justice, protecting Planned Parenthood, and challenges to the connection between big money and politics.

During the fall of 2011, overshadowing grassroots Dream coalition efforts, the Occupy Movement surfaced and spread all across the United States. Already dramatic fightbacks against anti-labor legislation in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana had begun. Both the activism in the Heartland and in the occupations became more visible (and perhaps more influential).

Reflecting on the possibility of continuing the construction of a mass movement to revitalize democratic institutions and the economy, Jones has written a book assessing these campaigns (including the Obama electoral campaign which preceded them). Most important he presents a conceptual scheme for helping communities decide on appropriate political programs and activities.

Before addressing future needs, Jones makes the important point that the Occupy and Dream movements and the 2008 campaign around the Obama election followed a massive anti-Iraq war movement, new developments in internet organizing, and the construction of movement-oriented think tanks and cable television programs during the first decade of the new century. He believes that social movements build on the successes and failures of those that precede them.

During the first few chapters of Jones’ book, the author discusses strengths and weaknesses of the Obama administration. Among the positive contributions of the administration Jones refers to policies that averted another Great Depression, including saving of the auto industry. Jones applauds passage of the Ledbetter Act. On the negative side Jones discusses the failure of the administration to secure passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, an inadequate economic stimulus package, and weak efforts to regulate Wall Street financial institutions.

From a social movement standpoint Jones included in his critique the successful Democratic National Committee effort to accumulate the power that had been generated at the grassroots to elect Barack Obama. Organizing for America (OFA) groups, Jones wrote, which represented grassroots mobilizations everywhere, were taken over by the formal centralized Democratic Party machinery, thus defusing the energy, passion, and willingness of activists to work for a progressive agenda.

Beyond his review and analysis of 21st century social movements and the Obama campaign, a major theoretical contribution of the book is in its conceptual scheme. By using a 2 x 2 table Jones identifies two critical dimensions of movement building.

The first, involves whether campaigns are organized around rational analysis (thorough argumentation with the use of data and the making of specific proposals) or emotional appeals (referring to emotive symbols, slogans, and inspiring artistic creations).

The second dimension involves politics as conceptualization (generating ideas) or action. Action can be about the “inside game”(bargaining and negotiation, electoral work, lobbying), or politics as an “outside game” (engaging in street heat, mass mobilizations, rallies, and civil disobedience).

Jones calls the process of identifying policies through rigorous analysis as the “head space,” rallying public support through emotions the “heart space,” lobbying, pressure group politics and elections the “inside game,” and going to the streets the “outside game.” For him the political process involves the activation of all four quadrants at different points in time; using concepts and analysis or emotional appeals applied to inside or outside forms of action.

In Jones’ words:

Sometimes the process moves in the order I have just laid out — from sober analysis and facts (Head Space), to resonant narratives that inspire support (Heart Space), to citizen participation (Outside Game), to official debate, deal making, and rule making (Inside Game). Sometimes it starts in the Heart Space with an impassioned call for change, which activists then pick up on a mass scale (Outside Game), which in turn catalyzes scholars and think tanks (Head Space), and ultimately leads to elected officials changing laws (Inside Game).

…each and every quadrant is the most important one at different stages in the process of making change (121).

The conceptual scheme offered by Van Jones may help grassroots coalitions strategize about their progressive agenda.

First, Jones is correct to argue that politics is about theoretical and policy discussion. Also, politics is about popular, accessible appeals to action. In addition, political activity concerns routinized political action, including the selection of leaders, pressuring them to act on the people’s behalf, and making them accountable. Furthermore, it is about extraordinary public action to demand that leaders defend the interests of the masses of the people (the 99 percent) or be ready to suffer punishment for their inside game decisions.

Second, grassroots organizations must decide, given their local, as well as the national, context where their energies need to be placed: developing theories and programs, generating emotive symbols to build mass support, working in elections and generating lobbying campaigns, and/or hitting the streets.

Third, these four dimensions of politics — head space, heart space, inside game, and outside game — are what progressives do. But often we do not reflect on what we are doing; what “stage” in the process of movement-building we are in; and what combination of dimensions — given our resources — should be part of our plan of work.

Fourth, all grassroots groups can sit down at a planning meeting, identify the quadrants, list the activities that have been carried out in each somewhere in the country, assess the situation of the local group, and develop a program that is feasible, given resources and local context, to achieve pre-articulated progressive goals.

Activists know that building mass movements entails a variety of cognitive and action steps. Sometimes it is useful for a skilled activist like Van Jones to provide us with a framework for discussing how to proceed. Rebuild the Dream does that. It would be a good resource for study group discussion.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical — and that’s also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted on August 29, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Are Rape Jokes Funny? By Paul Krassner Abortion was still illegal in 1970. At the time, as both an underground abortion referral service and a stand-up satirist, I faced an undefined paradox. Irreverence was my only sacred cow, yet I wouldn’t allow victims to become the target of my humor. There was one particular routine I did that called for a “rape-in” of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion. But my feminist friends objected. I resisted at first, because it was such a well-intentioned joke. And then I reconsidered. Even in a joke, why should women be assaulted because men made the laws? Legislators’ wives were the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves were the oppressors, and their hypocrisy was really my target. But for me to stop doing that bit of comedy wasn’t self-censorship. Rather, it was, I rationalized, a matter of conscious evolution. * * * Now, in July 2012, more than four decades later, rape-joking triggered a widespread controversy when a woman who prefers to remain anonymous went to a comedy club, expecting to be entertained. She chose the Laugh Factory in Hollywood because Dane Cook was on the bill, but he was followed by Daniel Tosh, and she had never heard of him. In an email to her Tumblr blogger friend, she accused Tosh of saying that “rape jokes are always funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape jokes are hilarious.” She was so offended that she felt morally compelled to shout, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” Tosh paused and then seized the opportunity, responding, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” The audience laughed raucously. After all, isn’t anyone who yells at a comedian practically asking to become an immediate target? But this woman was stunned and humiliated, and she left. In the lobby, she demanded to see the manager, who apologized profusely and gave her free tickets for another night–admitting, however, that she understood if this woman never wanted to return. In her email, she concluded that, “having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophobic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place.” She added, “Please reblog and spread the word.” And indeed, it went viral. Coincidentally, on the same night that Tosh, in his signature sarcastic approach to reality, provoked the woman, Sarah Silverman was performing at Foxwords Casino and she touched upon the same taboo subject: “We need more rape jokes. We really do. Needless to say, rape, the most heinous crime imaginable, seems it’s a comic’s dream, though. It’s because it seems when you do rape jokes, that the material is so dangerous and edgy, and the truth is, it’s like the safest area to talk about in comedy ’cause who’s gonna complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape. They’re just traditionally not complainers.” Ironically, in The Aristocrats, a documentary entirely about a classic joke of the same name, Silverman complained that she was once raped by show-biz legend Joe Franklin. * * * In the fall of 1981, I booked myself for a cross-country tour, from New York to Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Los Angeles. While I was in New York, a nun was raped. When I got to Chicago, the rapist was also there. He had given himself up to the police. On stage I explained the true reason why: “He heard that the Mafia, in a rush of Christian compassion, put a $25,000 contract out on his life.” That part was true. “So now I’m asking the Mafia to use their clout to end the war in El Salvador since four nuns were raped and killed there.” They must’ve heard my request. By the time I got to Los Angeles, the Herald-Examiner was reporting that the Mafia was “probably the largest source of arms for the rebels in El Salvador.” In the spring of 1982, there was a Radical Humor Festival at New York University. That weekend, the festival sponsored an evening of radical comedy. The next day, my performance was analyzed by an unofficial women’s caucus. Robin Tyler (“I am not a lesbian comic — I am a comic who is a lesbian”) served as the spokesperson for their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to impregnate themselves by artificial insemination. Tyler explained to me, “You have to understand, some women still have a hang-up about penetration.” Well, I must have been suffering from Delayed Punchline Syndrome, because it wasn’t until I was on a plane, contemplating the notion that freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference, that I finally did respond, in absentia: “Yeah, but you have to understand, some men still feel threatened by turkey basters.” * * * Although Tosh is a consistently unapologetic performer for the sardonic material he exudes on his Comedy Central series–which features a running theme of rape jokes, even including one about his sister–for this occasion he decided to go the Twitter route: “All the out of context misquotes aside, I’d like to sincerely apologize.” He also tweeted, “The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them.” According to Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory, Tosh asked the audience, “What you guys wanna talk about?” Someone called out “Rape,” and a woman in the audience started screaming, “No, rape is painful, don’t talk about it.” Then, says Masada, “Daniel came in, and he said, ‘Well, it sounds like she’s been raped by five guys’—something like that. I didn’t hear properly. It was a comment—it wasn’t a joke at the expense of this girl.” Masada claims that she sat through the rest of Tosh’s performance, which received a standing ovation, before she complained to the manager. Fellow comedians defended Tosh with their own tweets. Dane Cook: “If you journey through this life easily offended by other peoples words I think it’s best for everyone if you just kill yourself.” Doug Stanhope: “You’re hilarious. If you ever apologize to a heckler again I will rape you.” Louis C.K.: “your show makes me laugh every time I watch it. And you have pretty eyes”–except that he wrote it after watching Tosh on TV, but before he learned about the Laugh Factory incident. Nevertheless, he was excoriated and accused of being a “rape apologist.” But C.K. himself is no stranger to sexual-assault jokes. Onstage, he has said that he’s against rape–“unless you have a reason, like you wanna fuck someone and they won’t let you, in which case what other option do you have?” Conversely, on the second episode of his series, Louie, on the FX channel, he reversed such roles. After leaving a bar with an especially aggressive woman, Laurie (played by Melissa Leo), he had inadvertently met earlier, she performs fellatio on him in her pickup truck, then insists that he in turn perform cunnilingus on her. And he refuses. So, she attacks him physically with unabashed viciousness, mounts him, and he gives in to her demand. In other words, Laurie rapes Louie. No joke. To watch this scene was positively jaw-dropping. It served as a reminder of how often comedians–and their jaded audiences–find prison-rape jokes not only to be funny, but also, as in the case of Jerry Sandusky, an act of delayed justice resulting in laughter that morphs into applause. Meanwhile, reacting to the Tosh tirade, Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, stated: “If free speech permits a comedian to suggest a woman in his audience should be gang-raped, then it certainly permits us to object, and to ask what message this sends to survivors or to perpetuators. Tosh’s comment was just one extreme example of pop culture’s dismissive treatment of sexualized violence, which desensitizes audiences to enormous human suffering. Internet outcry is encouraging, but popular media needs to push back too.” And the original blogger posted another message: “My friend and I wanted to thank everyone for there [sic] support and for getting this story out there. We just wanted everyone to know what Daniel Tosh had done and if you didn’t agree then to stop following him. My friend is surprised to have gotten any form of an apology and doesn’t wish to press any further charges against [him].” What? Press charges? Rape is a crime. Rape jokes aren’t. They are the risk of free speech. The blog concluded, “She does plan on returning to comedy shows in the future, but to see comedians that she’s seen before or to at least look up artists before going to their shows.” Wait till she finds out Dane Cook suggested that she kill herself. * * * What’s funny is always subjective but not incapable of alteration. Now, over forty years since I stopped presenting my concept about a rape-in of legislators’ wives, I have changed my mind about that decision in the process of writing this piece. I sent the first draft around to several friends, and I was particularly touched by a response from Emma Cofod, production manager at my publisher, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press: “Thank you for sharing this! I truly appreciate your thoughts here. I read about this woman’s complaint last week, and the whole event turned my stomach. What Tosh did was personally threatening, which is not OK. But even though I fall neatly into the feminist camp, I think your original joke is hilarious—within context, and coming from a comedian whose philosophy I identify with. Color me conflicted.” I think that kind of conflict is healthy. And then the other shoe of my epiphany dropped when I saw Louis C.K.’s appearance on The Daily Show. This is what he told Jon Stewart between interruptions: “If this [controversy about Tosh] is like a fight between comedians and bloggers–hyperbole and garbage comes out of those two places, just uneducated, unfettered–it’s also a fight between comedians and feminists, because they’re natural enemies, because, stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke, and on the other side, comedians can’t take criticism. Comedians are big pussies. So to one side you say, ‘If you don’t like a joke, stay out of the comedy clubs.’ To the other side you say, ‘If you don’t like criticism, stop Googling yourself every ten seconds, because nobody’s making you read it.’ It’s positive. To me, all dialogue is positive. I think you should listen. “If somebody has the opposite feeling from me, I wanna hear it so I can add to mine. I don’t wanna obliterate theirs with mine, that’s how I feel. Now, a lot of people don’t feel that way. For me, any joke about anything bad is great, that’s how I feel. Any joke about rape, a Holocaust, the Mets–aarrgghh, whatever–any joke about something bad is a positive thing. But now I’ve read some blogs during this whole that made me enlightened at things I didn’t know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women’s lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t dress a certain way, because they might–I never–-that’s part of me now that wasn’t before, and I can still enjoy the rape jokes. “But this is also about men and women, because a lot of people are trading blogs with each other, couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes — that’s what I’ve been reading in blogs — but they’re both making a classic gender mistake, because the women are saying, ‘Here’s how I feel about this,’ but they’re also saying, ‘My feelings should be everyone’s primary concern.’ Now the men are making this mistake, they’re saying, ‘Your feelings don’t matter, your feelings are wrong and your feelings are stupid.’ If you’ve ever lived with a woman, you can’t step in shit worse than that, than to tell a woman that her feelings don’t matter. So, to the men I say, ‘Listen to what the women are saying about this.’ To the women I say, “Now that we heard you, shut the fuck up for a minute, and let’s all get back together and kill the Jews.’ That’s all I have to say about it.” The audience laughed and applauded, as they did fifty years ago when Lenny Bruce ended a riff on prejudice: “Randy, it won’t matter any more even if you are colored and I’m Jewish, and even if Fritz is Japanese, and Wong is Greek, because then we’re all gonna stick together—and beat up the Polacks.” My notion of a rape-in of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them was no more to be taken literally than C.K.’s killing the Jews or Lenny’s beating up the Polacks. Rape-in was a misunderstood metaphor; a pro-choice parable that, unfortunately, has become timely again. The above article originally appeared on Reason.com. Paul Krassner publishes the infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster. Two of his books — both are expanded and updated editions — have recently been released: a collection, Pot Stories for the Soul; and his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture. All three of those items are available at paulkrassner.com.

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Posted on August 29, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Are Rape Jokes Funny? By Paul Krassner Abortion was still illegal in 1970. At the time, as both an underground abortion referral service and a stand-up satirist, I faced an undefined paradox. Irreverence was my only sacred cow, yet I wouldn’t allow victims to become the target of my humor. There was one particular routine I did that called for a “rape-in” of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion. But my feminist friends objected. I resisted at first, because it was such a well-intentioned joke. And then I reconsidered. Even in a joke, why should women be assaulted because men made the laws? Legislators’ wives were the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves were the oppressors, and their hypocrisy was really my target. But for me to stop doing that bit of comedy wasn’t self-censorship. Rather, it was, I rationalized, a matter of conscious evolution. * * * Now, in July 2012, more than four decades later, rape-joking triggered a widespread controversy when a woman who prefers to remain anonymous went to a comedy club, expecting to be entertained. She chose the Laugh Factory in Hollywood because Dane Cook was on the bill, but he was followed by Daniel Tosh, and she had never heard of him. In an email to her Tumblr blogger friend, she accused Tosh of saying that “rape jokes are always funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape jokes are hilarious.” She was so offended that she felt morally compelled to shout, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” Tosh paused and then seized the opportunity, responding, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” The audience laughed raucously. After all, isn’t anyone who yells at a comedian practically asking to become an immediate target? But this woman was stunned and humiliated, and she left. In the lobby, she demanded to see the manager, who apologized profusely and gave her free tickets for another night–admitting, however, that she understood if this woman never wanted to return. In her email, she concluded that, “having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophobic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place.” She added, “Please reblog and spread the word.” And indeed, it went viral. Coincidentally, on the same night that Tosh, in his signature sarcastic approach to reality, provoked the woman, Sarah Silverman was performing at Foxwords Casino and she touched upon the same taboo subject: “We need more rape jokes. We really do. Needless to say, rape, the most heinous crime imaginable, seems it’s a comic’s dream, though. It’s because it seems when you do rape jokes, that the material is so dangerous and edgy, and the truth is, it’s like the safest area to talk about in comedy ’cause who’s gonna complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape. They’re just traditionally not complainers.” Ironically, in The Aristocrats, a documentary entirely about a classic joke of the same name, Silverman complained that she was once raped by show-biz legend Joe Franklin. * * * In the fall of 1981, I booked myself for a cross-country tour, from New York to Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Los Angeles. While I was in New York, a nun was raped. When I got to Chicago, the rapist was also there. He had given himself up to the police. On stage I explained the true reason why: “He heard that the Mafia, in a rush of Christian compassion, put a $25,000 contract out on his life.” That part was true. “So now I’m asking the Mafia to use their clout to end the war in El Salvador since four nuns were raped and killed there.” They must’ve heard my request. By the time I got to Los Angeles, the Herald-Examiner was reporting that the Mafia was “probably the largest source of arms for the rebels in El Salvador.” In the spring of 1982, there was a Radical Humor Festival at New York University. That weekend, the festival sponsored an evening of radical comedy. The next day, my performance was analyzed by an unofficial women’s caucus. Robin Tyler (“I am not a lesbian comic — I am a comic who is a lesbian”) served as the spokesperson for their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to impregnate themselves by artificial insemination. Tyler explained to me, “You have to understand, some women still have a hang-up about penetration.” Well, I must have been suffering from Delayed Punchline Syndrome, because it wasn’t until I was on a plane, contemplating the notion that freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference, that I finally did respond, in absentia: “Yeah, but you have to understand, some men still feel threatened by turkey basters.” * * * Although Tosh is a consistently unapologetic performer for the sardonic material he exudes on his Comedy Central series–which features a running theme of rape jokes, even including one about his sister–for this occasion he decided to go the Twitter route: “All the out of context misquotes aside, I’d like to sincerely apologize.” He also tweeted, “The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them.” According to Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory, Tosh asked the audience, “What you guys wanna talk about?” Someone called out “Rape,” and a woman in the audience started screaming, “No, rape is painful, don’t talk about it.” Then, says Masada, “Daniel came in, and he said, ‘Well, it sounds like she’s been raped by five guys’—something like that. I didn’t hear properly. It was a comment—it wasn’t a joke at the expense of this girl.” Masada claims that she sat through the rest of Tosh’s performance, which received a standing ovation, before she complained to the manager. Fellow comedians defended Tosh with their own tweets. Dane Cook: “If you journey through this life easily offended by other peoples words I think it’s best for everyone if you just kill yourself.” Doug Stanhope: “You’re hilarious. If you ever apologize to a heckler again I will rape you.” Louis C.K.: “your show makes me laugh every time I watch it. And you have pretty eyes”–except that he wrote it after watching Tosh on TV, but before he learned about the Laugh Factory incident. Nevertheless, he was excoriated and accused of being a “rape apologist.” But C.K. himself is no stranger to sexual-assault jokes. Onstage, he has said that he’s against rape–“unless you have a reason, like you wanna fuck someone and they won’t let you, in which case what other option do you have?” Conversely, on the second episode of his series, Louie, on the FX channel, he reversed such roles. After leaving a bar with an especially aggressive woman, Laurie (played by Melissa Leo), he had inadvertently met earlier, she performs fellatio on him in her pickup truck, then insists that he in turn perform cunnilingus on her. And he refuses. So, she attacks him physically with unabashed viciousness, mounts him, and he gives in to her demand. In other words, Laurie rapes Louie. No joke. To watch this scene was positively jaw-dropping. It served as a reminder of how often comedians–and their jaded audiences–find prison-rape jokes not only to be funny, but also, as in the case of Jerry Sandusky, an act of delayed justice resulting in laughter that morphs into applause. Meanwhile, reacting to the Tosh tirade, Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, stated: “If free speech permits a comedian to suggest a woman in his audience should be gang-raped, then it certainly permits us to object, and to ask what message this sends to survivors or to perpetuators. Tosh’s comment was just one extreme example of pop culture’s dismissive treatment of sexualized violence, which desensitizes audiences to enormous human suffering. Internet outcry is encouraging, but popular media needs to push back too.” And the original blogger posted another message: “My friend and I wanted to thank everyone for there [sic] support and for getting this story out there. We just wanted everyone to know what Daniel Tosh had done and if you didn’t agree then to stop following him. My friend is surprised to have gotten any form of an apology and doesn’t wish to press any further charges against [him].” What? Press charges? Rape is a crime. Rape jokes aren’t. They are the risk of free speech. The blog concluded, “She does plan on returning to comedy shows in the future, but to see comedians that she’s seen before or to at least look up artists before going to their shows.” Wait till she finds out Dane Cook suggested that she kill herself. * * * What’s funny is always subjective but not incapable of alteration. Now, over forty years since I stopped presenting my concept about a rape-in of legislators’ wives, I have changed my mind about that decision in the process of writing this piece. I sent the first draft around to several friends, and I was particularly touched by a response from Emma Cofod, production manager at my publisher, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press: “Thank you for sharing this! I truly appreciate your thoughts here. I read about this woman’s complaint last week, and the whole event turned my stomach. What Tosh did was personally threatening, which is not OK. But even though I fall neatly into the feminist camp, I think your original joke is hilarious—within context, and coming from a comedian whose philosophy I identify with. Color me conflicted.” I think that kind of conflict is healthy. And then the other shoe of my epiphany dropped when I saw Louis C.K.’s appearance on The Daily Show. This is what he told Jon Stewart between interruptions: “If this [controversy about Tosh] is like a fight between comedians and bloggers–hyperbole and garbage comes out of those two places, just uneducated, unfettered–it’s also a fight between comedians and feminists, because they’re natural enemies, because, stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke, and on the other side, comedians can’t take criticism. Comedians are big pussies. So to one side you say, ‘If you don’t like a joke, stay out of the comedy clubs.’ To the other side you say, ‘If you don’t like criticism, stop Googling yourself every ten seconds, because nobody’s making you read it.’ It’s positive. To me, all dialogue is positive. I think you should listen. “If somebody has the opposite feeling from me, I wanna hear it so I can add to mine. I don’t wanna obliterate theirs with mine, that’s how I feel. Now, a lot of people don’t feel that way. For me, any joke about anything bad is great, that’s how I feel. Any joke about rape, a Holocaust, the Mets–aarrgghh, whatever–any joke about something bad is a positive thing. But now I’ve read some blogs during this whole that made me enlightened at things I didn’t know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women’s lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t dress a certain way, because they might–I never–-that’s part of me now that wasn’t before, and I can still enjoy the rape jokes. “But this is also about men and women, because a lot of people are trading blogs with each other, couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes — that’s what I’ve been reading in blogs — but they’re both making a classic gender mistake, because the women are saying, ‘Here’s how I feel about this,’ but they’re also saying, ‘My feelings should be everyone’s primary concern.’ Now the men are making this mistake, they’re saying, ‘Your feelings don’t matter, your feelings are wrong and your feelings are stupid.’ If you’ve ever lived with a woman, you can’t step in shit worse than that, than to tell a woman that her feelings don’t matter. So, to the men I say, ‘Listen to what the women are saying about this.’ To the women I say, “Now that we heard you, shut the fuck up for a minute, and let’s all get back together and kill the Jews.’ That’s all I have to say about it.” The audience laughed and applauded, as they did fifty years ago when Lenny Bruce ended a riff on prejudice: “Randy, it won’t matter any more even if you are colored and I’m Jewish, and even if Fritz is Japanese, and Wong is Greek, because then we’re all gonna stick together—and beat up the Polacks.” My notion of a rape-in of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them was no more to be taken literally than C.K.’s killing the Jews or Lenny’s beating up the Polacks. Rape-in was a misunderstood metaphor; a pro-choice parable that, unfortunately, has become timely again. The above article originally appeared on Reason.com. Paul Krassner publishes the infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster. Two of his books — both are expanded and updated editions — have recently been released: a collection, Pot Stories for the Soul; and his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture. All three of those items are available at paulkrassner.com.

Type rest of the post here

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IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Fellow Primates / 2

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Bonobos, like chimps, show empathy, theory of mind, and targeted helping. Photo by Dan Caspersz / Bush Warriors.

Fellow primates / 2

Being related genetically to both chimps, who settle sexual issues through conflict, and bonobos, who settle conflict issues through sex, we have the capacity for both.

By Bill Meacham | The Rag Blog | August 28, 2012

Last time we talked about chimps, who can be pretty nasty. But we are genetically related to bonobos just as much as to chimps.

Among bonobos females dominate, not males; there is no deadly warfare; and they enjoy enormous amounts of sex. This may well have to do with their richer supply of food; there is far less need for competition for it. Bonobos have lots of sexual contact with each other, in all combinations of genders.

There is more of it in captivity, but frequent sexual activity has been observed in the wild as well. Females are sexually receptive for long periods of time, much longer than female chimpanzees. When different bands meet there is initial tension, but no vicious fighting; instead, individuals have sex with each other.(1)

Sex seems to be a way to defuse tension in advance of potential conflict, particularly over food. But anything, not just food, that arouses the interest of more than one bonobo at a time tends to result in sexual contact. After a flurry of sex, the apes settle down to eat or investigate whatever has piqued their interest. Bonobos are not “sex-crazed apes” as the popular press would have it. For bonobos, sex is just a natural and common part of life.

Bonobo bands are hierarchical, but the hierarchies are dominated by females, who enforce their status non-aggressively by cultivating alliances. High rank provides food for the females and their families, males included. Males derive status from their mothers. There is no competition among males for sex, as it is plentifully available.

Bonobos, like chimps, show empathy, theory of mind, and targeted helping. Once, when the two-meter moat in front of the bonobo enclosure in the San Diego zoo had been drained for cleaning, several youngsters climbed down into it. When the keepers went to turn on the valve to refill the moat with water, an old male, Kakowet, came to their window screaming and frantically waving his arms.

He knew the routine, and knew that the children were in danger (bonobos cannot swim). The keepers went to see what was wrong and rescued the youngsters.(2) Clearly, Kakowet had envisioned what was about to happen and cared enough to try to stop it. Fortunately, he succeeded.

Apart from the obvious superiority of human intellect, including language and culture, humans differ from both chimps and bonobos in reproductive strategy. Only the dominant chimp males get to reproduce, and the male sometimes enforces his own lineage through infanticide. Among bonobos all males reproduce, but there is no way to tell who is the father of any given child. Infanticide is unknown, probably for that very reason. Children are enjoyed and cared for by the whole tribe.

Humans have quite a different strategy for reproduction. We bond in pairs, creating a nuclear family that ensures resources for children, and the father is very much involved in child care: humans have high male parental investment. Sexual exclusivity ensures that every man has the potential to reproduce and that he knows which children are his.

This arrangement allows males to cooperate in groups away from the females without fear of being cuckolded. There is some plausible speculation that this arrangement is fairly recent, arising only when humans adopted the technology of agriculture.(3) Quite possibly our pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer ancestors were more like bonobos, having multiple sexual partners.

Bonobos were recognized as a separate species less than 100 years ago and began to be fully documented less than 50 years ago. Before that time, many ethologists and anthropologists believed that humans were innately violent and aggressive. Morality, it was thought, was a veneer of cooperative sociality on an underlying bestial nature.

Now that we know about bonobos, the range of human behavioral potential seems to have expanded. We recognize that we too have the capacity to live in peace and to defuse conflict proactively with pleasure. In addition, male dominance seemed a natural part of things until the discovery of bonobos; now we see that dominance by females may be equally natural.

Two things stand out from this comparison of species. First, our difference from chimps and bonobos is a matter of degree, not kind. There are few, if any, uniquely human traits that chimps or bonobos do not have to a lesser degree. We are embedded in nature and are not a species unique and special.

The one trait that seems most unique is the cultural, not biological, innovation of nuclear family pair bonding. If we think of concern for others as a fundamental building block of morality (another is a sense of fairness in reciprocity), it is clear that even morality is not a unique feature of our species but an outgrowth of capabilities that have far older evolutionary roots.

So when we observe our fellow humans jockeying and posing to gain status, or consoling each other when they are in trouble, or forgiving each other after a dispute, or throwing a party, or sharing food to build bonds and defuse tension, or being suspicious of those who are different, or vilifying an enemy, or generously giving aid to the unfortunate, or hundreds of other hominin behaviors, we should realize that these are not uniquely human practices but are instead embedded in a great chain of life that stretches back many millions of years.

Second, humans have the capacity to amplify the characteristics found in our sibling species. Humans have greater brain size and intelligence, so we can do more effectively all the things our siblings can.

Our use of tools and technologies enables us to produce food in more variety and abundance. In fact, there is some plausible speculation that learning to cook was a turning point in our evolution, as cooked food provides more calories than raw, calories that could support the growth of larger brains.(4)

Our use of language enables us to communicate more effectively and to perpetuate what we learn through culture and art. Chimps and bonobos seem to be able to conceptualize that something not happening in the present will happen later, but humans have a greatly enhanced ability to visualize and anticipate the future.

Disputes among humans often take the form of wars and feuds, but we are capable of sophisticated negotiation and diplomacy as well. And we can avoid conflict through pro-active peacemaking and compassionate communication. We are better able to cooperate with others outside our own group than chimps or bonobos.

Says Frans de Waal, “[H]umans share intergroup behavior with both chimps and bonobos. When relations between human societies are bad, they are worse than between chimps, but when they are good, they are better than between bonobos.”(5)

We humans can be more aggressive but also more peaceful, more competitive but also more cooperative. We are more flexible and have more options than our fellow creatures. We have a great variety of possible behaviors, possible ways of being. And, through our ability to anticipate the future, we have a choice as to which of these we will actualize.

Being related genetically to both chimps, who settle sexual issues through conflict, and bonobos, who settle conflict issues through sex, we have the capacity for both. Being humans, with bigger brains, much richer culture and much wider repertoire of behavior, we get to choose our strategies.

(To be continued…)

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin’s ’60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
(1) de Waal, Our Inner Ape, pp. 139-141.
(2) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 71.
(3) Ryan and Jetha, Sex At Dawn, pp. 1-15.
(4) Wrangham, Catching Fire, pp. 14, 112-114.
(5) de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 141.

References
de Waal, Frans. Our Inner Ape. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
de Waal, Frans, and Lanting, Frans. Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Ryan, Christopher, and Jetha, Cacilda. Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. New York: Harper, 2010.
Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

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Jordan Flaherty : Post-Katrina New Orleans is a Divided City

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

In the new New Orleans, privatized, voucher-financed housing, left, has replaced traditional public housing like the deserted Lafitte housing projects on the right. Photo by Gerald Herbert / AP.

A divided city:
Seven years after Katrina

in rebuilding New Orleans, the key question is not only how much change is needed, but more crucially, who should dictate that change.

By Jordan Flaherty | The Rag Blog | August 28, 2012

Seven years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a national laboratory for government reforms. But the process through which those experiments have been carried out rarely has been transparent or democratic. The results have been divisive, pitting new residents against those who grew up here, rich against poor, and white against Black.

Education, housing, criminal justice, health care, urban planning, even our media; systemic changes have touched every aspect of life in New Orleans, often creating a template now used in other cities. A few examples:

  • In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the entire staff of the city’s public school system was fired — more than 7,500 employees lost their jobs, despite the protection of union membership and a contract. Thousands of young teachers, many affiliated with programs like Teach For America, filled the empty slots. As charters took over from traditional public schools, the city became what then-superintendent Paul Vallas called the first 100% free market public school system in the U.S.

  • Every public housing development has either been partially or entirely torn down. The housing authority now administers more than 17,000 vouchers — nearly double the pre-Katrina amount — a massive privatization of a formerly public system. During this period, rents have risen dramatically across the city.

  • The U.S. Department of Justice has spent three years in negotiations with city government over reform of the police department. The historic consent decree that came out of these negotiations mandates vast changes in nearly every aspect of the NOPD and some aspects could serve as a model for departments across the U.S. But organizations that deal with police violence, as well as the city’s independent police monitor, have filed legal challenges to the agreement, stating that they were left out of the negotiations and that as a result, the final document lacks community oversight.

  • As the city loses its daily paper, an influx of funding — including $750,000 just from George Soros’ foundation — has arrived for news websites and other online media projects. In a city that is still majority African-American, the staff of these new media ventures is almost entirely white, and often politically conservative. These funders — many of whom consider themselves progressive — rarely notice the city’s Black media, which is continuing a tradition rooted in centuries of local resistance to the dominant narrative. These were the publications that covered police violence and institutional racism when the daily paper was not interested.

There is wide agreement that most of our government services have long, deep, systemic problems. But in rebuilding New Orleans, the key question is not only how much change is needed, but more crucially, who should dictate that change.

New Orleans has become a destination for a new class of residents drawn by the allure of being able to conduct these experiments. For a while, they self-identified as YURPs (Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals). Now they are frequently known as “social entrepreneurs,” and they have wealthy and powerful allies.

Warren Buffet has invested in the redevelopment of public housing. Oprah Winfrey and the Walton family have donated to the charter schools. Attorney General Holder came to town to announce police department reforms. President Obama has visited several times, despite the fact that this state is not remotely in play for Democrats.

Many residents — especially in the Black community — have felt disenfranchised in the new New Orleans. They see the influx of college graduates who have come to start nonprofits and run our schools and redesign our neighborhoods as disaster profiteers, not saviors. “Tuskegee was an experiment. We have reason to be suspicious of experiments,” says civil rights lawyer Tracie Washington, evoking a history of racist experimentation performed on Black bodies without their consent.

You can hear it every day on WBOK, the city’s only Black-owned talk radio station, and read about it in the Louisiana Weekly, Data News, and New Orleans Tribune, the city’s Black newspapers. This new rebuilding class is seen as working in alliance with white elites to disenfranchise a shrinking Black majority. Callers and guests on WBOK point to the rapid change in political representation: Among the political offices that have shifted to white after a generation in Black hands are the mayor, police chief, district attorney, and majorities on the school board and city council.

The population is smaller and whiter and wealthier than it was seven years ago. Even neighborhoods that did not flood have smaller populations, as single college graduates replace families.

In a recent cover story in the Tribune, journalist Lovell Beaulieu compares the new rebuilding class to the genocide of Native Americans. “520 years after the Indians discovered Columbus, a similar story is unfolding,” writes Beaulieu. “New arrivals from around the United States and the world are landing here to get a piece of the action that is lucrative post-Katrina New Orleans… Black people are merely pawns in a game with little clout and few voices. Their primary role is to be the ones who get pushed out, disregarded and forgotten.”

People hear the term “blank slate,” a term often used to describe post-Katrina New Orleans — as a way of erasing the city’s long history of Black-led resistance to white supremacy. As New Orleans poet and educator Kalamu Ya Salaam has said , “it wasn’t a blank slate, it was a cemetery.” Where some new arrivals see opportunity, many residents see grave robbers. In response, those who find anything to praise in the old ways are often accused of being stuck in the past or embracing corruption.

Hurricane Isaac has demonstrated that New Orleans is still at risk from storms — although the flood protection system around the city seems to be more reliable than it was before the levees failed and 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater.

But have the systemic problems that were displayed to the world seven years ago been fixed by the radical changes the city has seen? Is reform possible without the consent of those most affected by those changes?

These are polarizing questions in the new New Orleans, and it may be years before we have an answer.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans and author of the book Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org. A version of this article appeared at MoveOn.org. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog

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Marilyn Katz : Whose Election is This Anyway?

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Is it about them? Or us? Caricatures by DonkeyHotey.

Whose election is this anyway?

It’s not about Obama or Romney. It’s about us.

By Marilyn Katz | The Rag Blog | August 28, 2012

Without Occupy, without women, without the young, no progress would have been made. And it is these forces that the Right is working to defeat.

Something strange is occurring in America. While right-wing Republicans — oligarchs and dirt-poor fundamentalists alike — are marshalling money and troops for the coming presidential elections, progressives seem stuck in some kind of existential dilemma.

Not only does the latest Washington Post poll show Republican enthusiasm for the election outpacing Democratic, at a recent dinner of long-time progressive women activists, I heard it argued that the reelection of Obama really wasn’t that important and perhaps it would be better if Romney won — so that a target of Republican ire would be removed from debate about the real issues.

On Sunday, as usual, I listened on NPR to the tirades of Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, who spend more time fulminating about what Obama hasn’t done than focusing on an intransigent and reactionary Republican congressional bloc. And when fundraising among folks who contributed time and money in the last election, I am too often met with, “I think I’ll sit this one out.”

These facts and comments are disturbing both because they portend poor outcomes for Obama and because they indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of what this election is about.

While on the surface the election — like all elections — is a contest between Romney and Obama, in fact this election, as in 2008, is not about “them” but about us — what we fought for, what we’ve gained and what we stand to win or lose.

Obama ascended to the presidency on the aspirations, energy, and efforts of millions of women, minorities, peace advocates and labor activists, who saw in an Obama victory the hope for a completion of the unrealized promise of America. Coming from the anti-war movement, environmental action groups, students, unions, churches, synagogues, mosques, and our homes, we coalesced around the Obama presidential effort and built one of the most extraordinary grassroots electoral campaigns in U.S. history.

And it is this movement, its agenda — as well as the man — that the Right has worked to impede and disempower from the very first moment.

While the Right’s pundits distract the nation by bashing Obama and belittling every one of his accomplishments, their financers and strategists have worked feverishly — both in Congress and, as importantly, in the states — to thwart the agenda and the movement.

In 2011 alone, more than 1,100 bills related to reproductive rights were introduced in state legislatures, and 92 laws restricting abortion access were passed in 24 states. Eighteen states enacted legislation restricting the right of workers to unionize. Working people are now not only faced with off-shoring but also with “off-stating”: corporations moving jobs to states with more “business-friendly” policies.

And most tellingly, under the subterfuge of “preventing voter fraud,” this year alone 38 states have introduced legislation to restrict voting rights and 14 states have passed such laws — all aimed at minorities, seniors, and the young.

Progressives, on the other hand, have waited on the sidelines (with the exception of the battle of Wisconsin), mostly watching to see what the president did and how he fared — as if the issues, struggles, and victories were not ours.

Although our reticence is certainly the result of many things — high unemployment, the disconnection of the Administration with the grass roots movement that brought Obama to the White House — I believe that the sense of disengagement and disappointment is an indication of the success that Karl Rove and other Republican strategists have had in infecting our thinking.

Each day the Right’s pundits, from Ann Coulter to Rush Limbaugh to the entire Fox News lineup, spend countless hours not only pooh-poohing Obama but also telling the nation that we were fools to believe in “hope and change.” With an incessant drumbeat of negativity, they insist that Obama is a fraud, that nothing has changed, nor can it, nor should it ever.

And we have been lulled into complacency. When, for the first time ever, a national healthcare law was passed that provided critical benefits for young people, women, and those with “pre-existing conditions,” we let the pundits lament what we didn’t get rather than celebrate what we did.

When investment in the auto industry actually worked and saved millions of jobs, we said little to laud it. When the stimulus bill yielded billions of dollars and jobs for our cities, we did little to press for its continuation.

When the Republican attempt to impose a “balanced budget” was defeated (in great part thanks to the Occupy movement), we greeted it with a yawn, although the victory was one of the clearest indications of our power and influence.

When the last troops left Iraq, we let the Right define the moment as a loss for the United States rather than the culmination of the anti-war movement’s eight-year campaign for withdrawal and the president’s making good on his commitment.

These were not only serious mistakes, but indicators of how much we have been affected by the narrative of those who would destroy both the man and the movement.

History is made by those who claim it, and we have let the Right write the history of these past four years — to our detriment and our peril. Every victory that has been won these past years is a reflection of the forces that were in play in 2008. Without Occupy, without women, without the young, no progress would have been made. And it is these forces that the Right is working — through their mantras, through the media, and through state laws — to defeat.

Our dissatisfaction with the slow pace of progress plays straight into Republican hands. The message from a well-financed opposition echoes in our ears: that hope is an illusion and change is not possible.

The truth is that hope is essential. The tension between what is and what should be has always been the springboard for real change. What we do matters. The choices are ours. We need to make the right ones.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. This article was also published at In These Times. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

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Ron Jacobs : Cops and Contradictions

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Demonstrators form a “human oil spill” in Burlington, VT, July 30, 2012. Photo by Sarah Harris / North Country Public Radio. Inset image below: Riot police used rubber bullets, sting ball pellets, and pepper spray against Burlington demonstraters. Image from Occupy Wall Street / Facebook.

In Asheville and Burlington:
Cops and contradictions

Contradictions between the powerful and everyone else are heightened in places like North Carolina, especially when contrasted to liberal enclaves like Vermont… However, the difference between the right wing state and the liberal one is often much smaller than one might think.

By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | August 27, 2012

BURLINGTON, Vermont — Leaving Asheville, North Carolina, the place I called home from summer 2005 through summer 2012, always provides me with a mixture of regret and relief. I love the beer, music, scenery and my friends there, but the fact that it is in the U.S. South — with its generally reactionary politics — always leaves a bitter taste.

Asheville itself is a city whose relationship to its home state is much like the relationship Austin has to Texas. It is a liberal to progressive enclave in a wasteland of Bible Belt intolerance and anti-worker policies designed to keep the workforce in a state of perpetual desperation. Low wages, no unions and bosses who can fire folks almost at will seem to be the order of the day in states like North Carolina.

The high unemployment rates in the state keep the marginally employed and those just a paycheck away from that status in a situation not much different from the slavery once commonplace there.

A friend of mine plays in a number of symphony orchestras in the region. Every summer she performs in a few pops concerts that serve as fundraisers for these ensembles. The most recent one was in a town about 50 miles east of Asheville. She described the scene to me over beer and pizza.

I pulled into the parking lot after getting lost on the back roads. The lot was filled with BMWs, Mercedes SUVs, Lexuses, and Escalades. Standing around in small groups underneath tents covered in corporate logos and set up to keep the sun away were groups of mostly older people.

The women wore light clothing that they probably paid too much for. The men, almost to a T, were dressed in white polo shirts, deck shoes, and pink Bermuda shorts. Many of the automobiles sported Romney bumper stickers and, as I walked toward the performers’ entrance to the stage area, I couldn’t help noticing the number of audience members sporting Romney campaign buttons.

The show was your standard fare: Sousa and other patriotic nonsense, show tunes and a couple edited versions of popular classical tunes. The patriotic tunes received the most applause, of course. When I got back to my car there was a Romney campaign leaflet stuck under the windshield wiper.

Contradictions between the powerful and everyone else are heightened in places like North Carolina, especially when contrasted to liberal enclaves like Vermont (where I currently reside), and the hope of progressive change seems minimal. However, the difference between the right wing state and the liberal one is often much smaller than one might think.

After I bought my airline tickets to Asheville I found out that the Northeast Governors Association (and Eastern Canadian PMs) would be holding their conference in downtown Burlington the same weekend. Like its larger parent, the U.S. Governor’s Association Conference, the northeastern conference is a weekend of political backslapping, conspiring and feasting with lots of corporate sponsorship.

The context of this year’s conference is the ongoing campaign by the energy corporation HydroQuebec to dam up Quebec’s rivers, destroy the pristine wilderness they flow through, and displace the people and wildlife living there. Another part of the context is the desire of the oil industry to ship oil from the tar sand fields in Canada through the New England states.

To top off their arrogance, Quebec Premier Charest, whose refusal to back off of tuition hikes and other changes to Quebec’s higher education system have sparked a strike and massive protest, was feted.
So, protests were planned.

Since I could not afford to change my travel dates I wished my comrades well. Imagine my surprise upon returning to Burlington and finding out that Burlington police had attacked protesters with rubber and other “non-lethal” weapons for attempting to block roads around the conference site.

Of course, in the wake of the police attack, politicians and police administrators were quick to blame the protesters for their “aggressive” tactics. Response from some segments of the community was swift. University of Vermont literature professor Nancy Welch wrote in a Facebook post regarding the police attack:

What Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling leaves out of his defense of the police assault on protestors outside the Northeast Governors Conference is that the “confrontation” and “conflict” the protestors engaged in was nonviolent.

Just as the men and women who sat in at Greensboro lunch counters and marched on Montgomery in the Civil Rights era had a conflict with Jim Crow and sought to confront it, so do the people who marched Sunday have a conflict with heads of state who push such environmentally and socially devastating projects as Tar Sands and the F-35 bombers while defunding family planning clinics, public services, and state universities.

The protestors’ confrontation took the classic Civil Rights-era forms: lying down in front of the hotel the governors were huddled up in; standing in front of the bus that was to whisk the governors away to dinner. It is sobering that police chose to respond in Bull Connor fashion by unleashing violence. Even more sobering is that our Democratic mayor and governor are championing them.

The fallout continues. The newly elected Democratic mayor of Burlington is now calling for a conversation between the city, the police and citizens. At the same time, some kind of investigation is supposedly being arranged. The likelihood is that little will change and the police will be able to do what they please when situations like that which occurred the weekend of July 29th happen again.

Earlier in this piece I wrote that political environments like that found in North Carolina tend to heighten the contradictions between the rulers and the ruled. So do actions like those undertaken by Burlington police outside the Northeast Governor’s Conference. One can only anticipate with trepidation what contradictions law enforcement in Charlotte, N.C. and Tampa, Florida will heighten when the U.S. Republicans and Democrats hold their conventions in the coming days.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator’s Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Paul Ryan, Dan Senor, and the Return of the Neocons

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Neocon spin doctor Dan Senor. Image from Getty Images. Inset below: Dan Senor, Mitt Romney, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Image from ThinkProgress.

Enter Dan Senor…
Ryan a pawn in neocon return

Dan Senor, who supplied Republicans with spin in furtherance of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and hawkish pro-Israeli forces, is the chief spokesman for a neocon circle advising Romney.

By Tom Hayden | The Rag Blog | August 27, 2012

The neoconservatives have consolidated their plan for control of U.S. foreign policy with the vice-presidential nomination of Paul Ryan.

Ryan is being briefed by Dan Senor, described mildly in The New York Times as “an expert on Israel and the Middle East.” Senor, however, is anything but expert. He was the spokesperson, or spin doctor, for the initial Coalition Provisional Authority, which occupied Iraq in 2003 with promises about democracy blooming after weapons of mass destruction were removed.

Not since Vietnam had state propaganda so completely dominated the narrative, in keeping with the Pentagon/neocon view that “the liberal media” caused the fall of Saigon.

Ever since, Senor, often with “fat briefing books under his arm,” has supplied Republicans with spin in furtherance of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and hawkish pro-Israeli forces represented by Sheldon Adelson. It was Senor who traveled with Romney to London, Israel, and Poland on his recent foreign policy tour, and it was Senor who told the traveling media that Romney would support an Israeli strike on Iran.

Senor has achieved more respectability than Bush or Dick Cheney in Washington power circles, apparently by indefatigably showing up with briefing books, by his marriage to former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, his ties to wealthy hedge-fund investors, and political connections across the Beltway.

He is the chief spokesman for a neocon circle advising Romney, one including more controversial hardliners such as Bush’s UN ambassador John Bolton. Senor’s sister, Wendy Singer, is the AIPAC representative in Israel.

Ryan’s famous budget-slashing plan for the U.S., approved twice in the House of Representatives, does not include a nickel reduction in the Pentagon budget. And while Ryan has given little-reported foreign policy speeches extolling “American exceptionalism” to the applause of neoconservatives, he has carved his reputation as a deficit-fighter on domestic budgetary issues.

Since foreign policy is likely to be a marginal issue in the campaign, a Romney-Ryan victory would mean a smooth pathway to restoration for the neocons who dominated the Bush foreign policy. Their core constituencies of fundamentalist Christians and Jews would benefit despite lack of majority support for their militarist agendas. If they go to war, it will be without a public mandate. Adding Ryan to the ticket will appeal to the constituency of Ron Paul libertarians while masking their big government militarism.

The Obama Democrats would be on solid ground arguing that Romney-Ryan represent a return to the Bush era not only on economic issues but on foreign policy as well. A Democratic attack on “the same people that caused the Great Recession” could be supplemented by a parallel warning against “the same people who fabricated our way into Iraq.” But it remains to be seen whether Obama-Biden or their Democratic surrogates will attack the neocon resurgence on any such grounds.

It is not in the Republican campaign’s interest to strongly highlight foreign policy differences with Obama. By their historic nature, the neoconservatives are elitists who tend to infiltrate foreign policy infrastructures, a pattern that began when they were followers of the venerable Trotskyist Max Shachtman as long ago as the 1930s.

They evolved to become pro-Israel Democrats in the 1960s when they migrated into the Republican Party in response to the New Left and civil rights movements. There they made a home for themselves as fierce anti-Communists and pro-Zionists despite the blunt anti-Semitism of Richard Nixon and the Fundamentalist Christian script for the Second Coming in which the Jews either convert or disappear.

They played an instrumental role in the Central American wars before their direct engagement in the Iraq War and the Bush presidency.

Their primary target today is regime change in Iran. Their primary allies are Netanyahu and Adelson. The strategy requires occasional saber rattling and Obama-bashing, but primarily waged off camera and with discretion.

Just as the Romney-Ryan campaign is a Trojan horse for the Tea Party, it also provides protective cover for the return of the neocons. Fighting Obama on deficit reductions is fine with the neocons as long as they win — and war budgets are off the table.  

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. This article was also published at Tom Hayden’s Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Kate Braun : Celebrate the Blue Moon with Sea Water

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Fast and Flurrious.

Moon Musings:
Full Moon/Blue Moon
(August 31, 2012)

By Kate Braun | The Rag Blog | August 27, 2012

“If they say the moon is blue / We must believe that it is true” — 1500’s proverb

Lady Moon is in Pisces, a Mutable Feminine Water sign, for this Full Moon, and the day, Friday, Frigga’s day, is adding to the abounding feminine energies. The second Full Moon in the month of August, it is called a Blue Moon because of the rarity of seeing two full moons in one calendar month. There is no particular metaphysical significance to a Blue Moon, no reason to give it more emphasis than any other Full Moon.

Named the Piscary or Wort Moon, this Full Moon is a good time to celebrate your accomplishments since the most recent New Moon, a good time to move energy forward toward goals to be achieved by the next New Moon, a good time to keep positive energy moving through and around you.

Feminine energies are nurturing, loving, supporting, encouraging, respecting. I recommend that your magickal workings focus on these positive qualities. Prepare yourself in advance by deciding what topics you find it best to focus your intent upon. The possibilities include: artistic endeavors, health and fitness, knowledge, change and decisions, money, motivation, protection, self-improvement.

Sea water is an important part of Full Moon magick. Sea salt dissolved in tap water is an acceptable substitute. The sea salt should be thoroughly dissolved and the water should then be charged in advance of your celebration.

The simplest way to charge water is to put it in a glass container and let the container of water sit in sunlight or moonlight for 8–12 hours. If your water is being charged outside, be sure to cover the container to keep bugs/leaves/dust out. If it is not convenient to charge the water outside, you may place the container in advance of your celebration on a window ledge for the appropriate time.

One use of the charged water is to invoke Matron Goddesses such as Aphrodite and Cerridwen to assist you in your efforts. You may do this by sprinkling some charged water to the East, South, West, and North, calling on the Matron Goddess of your choice at each direction.

Pour some charged water over your bare feet if you are able to celebrate outdoors under the light of the Full Moon. If you celebrate indoors, spritz yourself from head to toe with charged water, being sure to include the soles of your bare feet. Put charged water into an atomizer or mister for this purpose.

Any leftover charged water should not be saved but returned to the earth. Using it to water houseplants, shrubbery, or trees is said to give extra positive energy to the plant.

[Kate Braun‘s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com. Read more of Kate Braun’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Roger Baker : Converging Global Crises and Why We Deny Them

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon from Belonging Las Vegas.

Converging global crises
and why we deny them

It is the system itself that is unsustainable, but the public tends to interpret the problem as being a function of bad leadership.

By Roger Baker | The Rag Blog | August 23, 2012

[First of a series.]

Why crises are converging

The evidence has become quite persuasive that humans are bumping into interrelated natural limits to growth that spell big trouble no matter what we do. We appear to be in the grip of multiple interrelated crises that are converging into an overall crisis.

What do I mean by converging crises? The situation we now see ourselves in is one where the problems posed by the natural global limits on growth are so intertwined that, if we try to deal with any one problem individually, it tends to make the other problems worse.

For example, global warming is merging with peak oil as a major threat. This is because it will necessarily take a lot of oil to deal with either global warming, or a growing shortage of cheap oil itself. The growing list of simultaneous crises we face involves peak fossil fuel, peak food production, water shortages, a stalled global economy, species extinction, and a rising global population.

Compare the situation now with 50 years ago, when none of the five crises listed below seemed too hard to deal with. A steadily rising population and its per capita impact are at the heart of our problems. The 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, used models that tried to project trends to roughly quantify global growth limits.

Richard Heinberg’s recent book, The End of Growth, is centered on fossil fuel energy limits that mean that our main policy option going forward will be using our current economic output differently, and hopefully more wisely. The various emerging and interacting limits to growth mean that we will need to learn to be happier with less, to abandon consumerism, and to make a major transition toward working together in the current decade.

The list of converging, interacting crises that we face will certainly have to deal with global warming as a central problem. The nature of the problems we face and their interactions have become like a contracting net that surrounds us. The situation is deceptive and conducive to denial because, like a net, it seems to offer a little room to maneuver in any given direction.

What the public sees on TV and reads in the newspaper is largely comprised of descriptions of the symptoms of problems, frequently calling for more spending as the best solution. In this way, whether or not we want to solve our problems is made into a political choice. Dealing honestly and straightforwardly with the deeper causes of a cluster of interacting problems is much more difficult and disturbing.

Global warming or peak oil by itself would require a unified consensus and focused national effort, similar to winning WWII, to deal with adequately. From the standpoint of global warming, based on the climate science, the future looks either bleak, very bleak, or somewhere in between. Adding a list of other serious problems can hardly improve this situation.

It is the system itself that is unsustainable, but the public tends to interpret the problem as being a function of bad leadership. The polls leave no doubt that our polarized and dysfunctional federal government is unpopular; Congress is now ranked as less popular than the United States going Communist.

There is little public agreement on what to do. Many believe that we have lost our way as a nation, and they see things getting worse. A prevailing hope is that some politicians will know how to create jobs (didn’t FDR get us out of the Great Depression?). By electing the right politician, the economy might recover, and that could give us enough money to solve our other problems.

Now let us switch over to what science is telling us. The long-term problems we now face are said to be serious enough to threaten global human survival. It has now been a full 20 years since a majority of the world’s Nobel Prize winning scientists cosigned the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.”

More recently, top scientists have become even more urgent in their warnings that the limits of nature are taking us to a tipping point — a point at which the limits we face will lead to a rapid deterioration of our situation regardless of our policies. Here is an Ecoshock Radio link to the situation, introduced by Prince Charles.

A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation. UC Berkeley professor Tony Barnosky explains how an increasing human population, coupled with climate change, could irreversibly alter Earth’s ecosystem.

If you a prefer a scary but still science-based energy limits and global warming scenario, this video clip is worth pondering. There is a chance that we have already reached a global warming tipping point where positive feedback effects like polar methane release take over.

This interview with a long time futurist, Jorgen Randers, suggests that we might possibly have 40 years of something resembling a normal life yet to come. He is still pessimistic about what will happen beyond then, primarily because of global warming.

The two main barriers he sees are the relentlessly expansionist nature of capitalism, and democracy itself, with its preference to favor short-run policies.

James Howard Kunstler is an excellent writer with an uncommon grasp of energy economics, and a good sense for how the end of growth is likely to interact with U.S. culture and politics. His 2005 book, The Long Emergency, described converging natural limits centered on peaking oil. His new book, Too Much Magic, is an update written to debunk the seductive dream that some kind of new technology will save us, and allow economic growth to continue as it always has in the past.

Kunstler describes the delusional thinking surrounding the slow unraveling of American life, since our energy problems argue that we face a long and unwelcome future of economic contraction.

Al Gore was warning the nation of global warming in his 2000 election, but he was defeated by a president stubbornly in denial of natural limits to continuing growth. Since then, as a nation, we have led the world in global warming denial. A well-established and well-funded right wing media effort has been organized to deny that there are any limits to growth, and to oppose environmentalist concerns that are deemed to be harmful to profits.

Let us look briefly at five converging and interacting factors that I see as the most threatening. Each has its own timing and economics and dynamics.

  1. Scientific denial as a well-funded, primarily Republican political war serves mainly to prevent public opinion from being mobilized into policy change to rationally deal with the other crises. Policy change to deal with global warming was seen as a big threat to many existing oil-addictive industries. The current investments have been highly profitable, at least for a few.

    Global warming denial propaganda has worked well for the past decade, but especially in the last year things have been changing. Climate change is causing heat waves, forest fires, and droughts to an alarming degree, developments that have strongly shifted public opinion toward acceptance. However the denial efforts continue at a high level and have been broadened to include peak oil.

  2. Global population growth is slow at about 1.1% globally, but it tends to drive all the other crisis factors by steadily increasing food requirements. We are almost certainly at peak per capita food already. Food shortages play out as food cost increases. These are a powerful cause of riots and political turmoil and instability in the countries that cannot afford to buy food.

  3. Global warming and climate change are part of a slowly developing crisis that has taken many decades to develop. It comes with a built in latency factor that is expected to about double the apparent effects, but these effects have now gotten to the point of causing catastrophic droughts, floods, and food failures.

  4. Peak oil is another slowly developing crisis, which will probably end soon with a rude awakening. The cheap conventional oil already peaked in 2005.The addition of much more expensive non-conventional oil has kept the world on a plateau, but the price is still high enough to trigger a global economic crisis and prevent recovery. The “cornucopian” denial-of-any-limits lobby has discovered peak oil and is busily denying it.

  5. An impossible debt burden is a predictable consequence of an expansionist economic system, unable to expand any further in a finite world. If finance capital is unregulated it will try to extend more credit than can possibly be repaid. Capitalism has always been prone to periodic credit crises — termed the capitalist business cycle — which, in an era of expansion, can be relieved by using Keynesian stimulus.

    Since continuing growth is impossible without cheap oil, the global economy is headed toward the mother of all global economic crises. Even the best political and economic policy can only delay the crash.

Next time we’ll take a closer look at this short list of converging crises.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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Devon G. Peña : The Commodity Form Goes Molecular

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Cyborg. Artist unknown. Image (and inset images below) from Environmental and Food Justice.

Capitalism and synthetic biology:
The commodity form goes molecular

By Devon G. Peña | The Rag Blog | August 22, 2012

“We’re moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.” — J. Craig Venter, JCV

“Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora.” — Freeman Dyson, Theoretical physicist

“Scientists are making strands of DNA that have never existed, so there is nothing to compare them to. There are no agreed mechanisms for safety, no policies.” — Jim Thomas, ETC Group

[Part 1 of 4.]

While many of us continue to worry about the effects of genetically-engineered organisms (GEOs) in our foods, there is another looming threat on the horizon that has not yet received the attention it deserves. The advent of commercialized synthetic biology (SB) poses new social, legal, economic, and ecological dilemmas the likes of which we have never really had to confront, even with the bewildering array of problems associated with agricultural transgenics.

What is synthetic biology? In a word: God. Or, humans playing at God, anyway. By inventing new life forms, manufacturing artificial biological organisms, synthetic biologists are really acting as Creators of life; or so they think.

The definition of synthetic biology is itself hotly debated, but a 2009 article in The New Yorker by Michael Specter provides a richly textured one that I believe captures the most significant qualities of this new interdisciplinary applied engineering field. According to Specter, synthetic biology combines the elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology in order to “assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world” in accordance with human needs.

This is not rocket science.

The principles are really as simple as ABC; well, actually the technology is a matter of rearranging ACGT — the four nucleic acid bases that make up DNA. The “A” stands for Adenine and pairs with the “T” which stands for Thymine. The “C” stands for Cytosine and pairs with the “G,” Guanine. These four nucleic acids are bound together in a nearly infinite double helix set of reiterations that constitute the genetic code, or DNA, of living organisms.

While not complicated in principle, synthetic biology is exceptionally tedious and very time consuming. So, it requires an inordinate amount of super-computing capacity to crunch the possible reiterations in the genome sequences of a living creature.

The approach championed by J. Craig Venter and his colleagues is basically a type of “subtraction” of genes. A June 2005 report in The Wall Street Journal summed it up this way:

The project to create an artificial cell dates back to 1995, when Dr. Venter led the first team to sequence all the DNA of a living organism, Haemophilus influenzae. The decoded germ had 1,800 genes, yet M[ycolplasma] genitalium, the second bacterium studied by Dr. Venter’s research group, proved to have fewer than one-third as many. “That started the whole thinking of, ‘How small can it be? What is the minimal definition of life?’” says Dr. Venter. “If we can’t answer that question, we can’t pretend to understand what life is.”…

For practical applications as well, a minimalist genome would be a helpful starting point because the bacteria wouldn’t have any unneeded parts, saving their energy for whatever process they’re being used for… Dr. Venter and a collaborator, Clyde Hutchison, began systematically disabling M. genitalium’s DNA a piece at a time, looking for colonies that could still grow despite the missing parts. From 517 genes, they pared the genome down to a must-have list of between 265 and 350… Drs. Venter and Smith concluded the only way to test the viability of a minimal genetic life form would be to build one. [Brackets added]

According to Specter’s New Yorker article, Venter and his team had by the end of 2008 “pieced together thousands of chemically synthesized fragments of DNA and assembled a new version of the organism.” Specter continues to elaborate how Venter and his team produced the entire genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, the results of which were published in the journal Science in May 2010.

In his interview with Specter, Venter waxed poetic about how “It should be possible to assemble any combination of synthetic and natural DNA segments in any desired order.” It is this type of arrogant explication that has so many ethcists concerned.

Regardless, Venter recently succeeded in transplanting the artificial chromosome into the walls of a undifferentiated cell and then “rebooted” the resulting structure in a sort of Frankenstein-style reanimation. The organism was then able to replicate its own DNA — becoming the first truly artificial organism. The organism has been dubbed “Synthia.”

This is a strange turn because until now most systems biologists have thought that what makes a given set of chemical associations a living system is the principle of self-organization or what the Greeks called autopoiesis. Here, the principle is turned on its head with the scientist organizing the chemical associations and determining the conditions and processes under which the synthetic organism will replicate itself and therefore at least mimic autopoietic processes.

The promise Venter is making is nothing short of saving the world by repackaging these artifical life forms depending on customer needs or commercial uses. His corporation, Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) is proposing that it might produce specific cancer-fighting drugs or perhaps an airborne bacterium reprogrammed to digest carbon in the atmosphere. See? Venter only wants to save the planet!

These promises to save the world are front and center on the company website that asks us to celebrate the coming synthetic utopia in which bioengineered organisms will replace coal with clean bioenergy and even allow us to convert greenhouse gases into life-saving vaccines. In the words of the company itself:

J. Craig Venter and his teams have discovered more than 20 million genes to date and view these as the design components of the future. SGI is designing, synthesizing and assembling genes, synthetic chromosomes and even whole genomes to produce clean energy, bio-chemicals and other high value products directly from carbon dioxide, plant biomass and coal.

Image from Synthetic Genomics

Synth-Ethics, or Synthia you ain’t the finest thing…

One might wonder why this story also ended up on the pages of the WSJ instead of just the scientific journals. The answer is as simple as “C,” as in Capitalism. Public sector scientists have long viewed Venter as an opportunist who takes technologies developed by investments of the public sector to serve the aims of a for-profit corporate agenda; this happened with sequencing of the human genome and is now happening with the development of synthetic organisms.

Be that as it may, the current corporate development of synthetic life forms by Venter and his investors is entirely a for-profit venture, albeit with the inevitable “Trust us, we are going to save the planet” type of hubris that we have heard from every single previous capitalist-inspired panacea of the past 50 years: From numerical control and computers to robotics; and from biotechnology to nanotechnology and now synthetic biology.

None of these saved the world, ended hunger, or resolved the climate crisis; none ended disease, poverty, or war; none made agriculture more sustainable or equitable. These technologies did make a few investors very wealthy indeed and extended the life of capitalism beyond its moribund Fordist organizational forms of the 1950s.

This has not stopped Venter from trying to peddle a new panacea, based on the cheap promises of his first synthetic life form, with has the way too cute name of “Synthia.” Remember the lyrics from a Bruce Springsteen song called “Cynthia?” With apologies to The Boss, I have to rewrite these:

Synthia, when you come creeping out
You’re an inspirin’ sight
Synthia, under the electron microscope
You don’t smile, but that’s alright

Well now you ain’t the finest thing I’ll never have
Well, baby, it ain’t so bad,
Yeah, there ain’t a banker in this whole town
Who’ll say you ain’t fine
Well you make us rich, honey, when we sell you
To see sump’n’so good, in a world gone bad
There’s still Synthia, oh yeah.

The objections to synthetic biology are more serious than these justifiable complaints about the opportunistic exploitation of social sector investments to advance a private neoliberal agenda and profit making.

Serious analysts and ethicists have launched wide-ranging criticisms of synthetic biology that merit lengthy discussion. In the coming weeks, I will be addressing a selection of the nine most pressing issues of current concern to ethicists, environmental scientists, indigenous communities, and advocates of sustainability, social justice, and equity. These include:

  1. Environmental implications and risks
  2. Food regulation
  3. Biomedical applications
  4. Cosmetics regulations
  5. Intellectual property
  6. Bio-informatics
  7. Occupational health
  8. Implications for human and ecosystem rights guarantees
  9. Trade and global justice.

Suffice it for now, as a matter of introducing this topic to my readers and followers, that there is (1) an excess of hubris by scientists who are also entrepreneurs with a lot to lose if their inventions and investments fail to pan out as imagined; (2) there is also a great deal of arrogance on the part of synthetic biologists who think they can just start snipping and snapping the pieces of the biological puzzle together without truly understanding gene-protein and gene-environment relationships and interactions; and (3) there is no predictive ecology or risk model for the assessment of the risks associated with SB.

The failure to abide by the Precautionary Principle in the past gave us the still-unfolding wreckage of social, economic, ecological, and health problems of commercial agricultural biotechnology and especially transgenic substances in our food supplies. We have an opportunity to prevent a repetition of this mistake and must act now to apply the precautionary principle to the entire domain of synthetic biology.

There should be no commercialization or environmental release of SB organisms until all the scientific evidence on risks has been gathered and evaluated. If the risks are determined to be too great, then the commercial release of synthetic organisms must be completely banned.

This is not a radical proposal. What is radical is the arrogant idea that scientists-cum-capitalists can pretend to have invented masterpieces, like so many colorful gems of genetic art, that they can just release on the rest of us without our consent.

Freeman Dyson is completely wrong when he imagines that “Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.” But he is right about one thing: Many of these will not be masterpieces. No, they will be monstrosities, and once released there is no way to call them back into the confined spaces of the lab or to erase the biological damage and evolutionary havoc they will have unleashed.

It is not a personal thing, like some fashion trend, to unleash a synthetic bacterium on the entire planet, affecting all organisms, whether they wish to be affected or not. That is not personal freedom; it is biological totalitarianism. It is the worst sort of panacea since it carries within it the poison core of a biological Chernobyl while pretending to be our planetary savior served-up by an elitist and avarice-driven few over a powerless, non-consenting multitude.

[A lifelong activist in the environmental justice and resilient agriculture movements, Devon G. Peña is a Professor of American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He blogs at Environmental and Food Justice.]

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