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You can get anything you want:
Thanksgiving and my yarmulke

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / November 28, 2010

Thursday, a little before noon, my phone rang. I knew at once who it was: my old friend Jeffrey Dekro (founder of The Shefa Fund, which gathered millions of dollars of Jewish money to invest in American inner cities and to reconstruct New Orleans), calling me and several other members of a long-ago, long-scattered men’s group, reminding us to turn on the radio.

For every year at noon on Thanksgiving, WXPN Radio in Philadelphia plays Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” about a Thanksgiving dinner in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1967; about obtuse cops; and about nonviolent resistance to a brutal war.

And every year, this seemingly non-Jewish set of rituals stirs in me the memory of a moment long ago when my first puzzled, uncertain explorations of the “Jewish thing” took on new power for me. And when I came to understand the power of a yarmulke.

Sharing this story has become a ritual for me. Welcome to the campfire!

In 1970, I was asked by the Chicago Eight to testify in their defense. They were leaders of the movement to oppose the Vietnam War, and they had been charged by the U.S. government (i.e. the Nixon Administration and Attorney General John Mitchell, who turned out to be a criminal himself) with conspiracy to organize riot and destruction during the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968.

I had been an alternate delegate from the District of Columbia to the Convention — elected originally as part of an anti-war, anti-racist slate to support Robert Kennedy. After he was murdered, we decided to nominate and support the chairperson of our delegation — Rev. Channing Phillips (alav hashalom), a Black minister in the Martin Luther King mold.

Our delegation made him the first Black person ever nominated for President at a major-party convention. The following spring, on the first anniversary of Dr. King’s murder, on the third night of Pesach in 1969, his church hosted the first-ever Freedom Seder.

AND — I had also spoken the first two nights of the Convention to the anti-war demonstrators at Grant Park, at their invitation, while the crowd was being menaced by Chicago police and the National Guard. The police finally did explode in violence on the third night of the Convention, when the crowd tried to march peacefully toward the Convention as it began voting on presidential candidates.

Although the main official investigation of Chicago described it as a “police riot,” the Nixon Administration decided to indict the anti-war leaders. So during the Conspiracy Trial in 1970, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, et al., figured I would be reasonably respectable (as a former delegate) and therefore relatively convincing to the jury and the national public, in testifying that the anti-war folks were not trying to organize violence but instead were the victims of police violence.

As the trial went forward, it became clear that the judge — Julius Hoffman, a Jew — was utterly subservient to the prosecution and wildly hostile to the defense. (Some of us thought he had become possessed by the dybbuk of Torquemada, head of the Inquisition. How else could a Jew behave that way? We tried to exorcise his dybbuk. It didn’t work.)

Judge Hoffman browbeat witnesses, ultimately literally gagging and binding Bobby Seale, the only Black defendant, for challenging his rulings. Dozens of his rulings against the Eight were later cited by the Court of Appeals as major legal errors, requiring reversal of all the convictions the prosecution had achieved in his court.

So when I arrived at the Federal courthouse in Chicago, I was very nervous. About the judge, much more than the prosecution or my own testimony.

The witness who was scheduled to testify right before me was Arlo Guthrie. He had sung “Alice’s Restaurant” to/with the crowd at Grant Park, and the defense wanted to show the jury that there was no incitement to violence in it.

So William Kunstler, z’l, the lawyer for the defense, asked Guthrie to sing “Alice’s Restaurant” so that the jury could get a direct sense of the event.

But Judge Hoffman stopped him: “You can’t sing in my courtroom!!”

“But,” said Kunstler, “it’s evidence of the intent of the organizers and the crowd!”

For minutes they snarled at each other. Finally, Judge Hoffman: “He can SAY what he told them, but NO SINGING.”

And then — Guthrie couldn’t do it. The song, which lasts 25 minutes, he knew by utter heart, having sung it probably more than a thousand times — but to say it without singing, he couldn’t. His memory was keyed to the melody. And maybe Judge Hoffman’s rage helped disassemble him.

So he came back to the witness room, crushed.

And I’m up next. I start trembling, trying to figure out how I can avoid falling apart.

I decide that if I wear a yarmulke, that will strengthen me to connect with a power Higher/Other than the United States and Judge Hoffman. (Up to that moment, I had never worn a yarmulke in a non-officially “religious” situation. I had written the Freedom Seder in 1969, but was in 1970 still wrestling with the question of what this weird and powerful “Jewish thing” meant in my life.)

So I tell Kunstler I want to wear a yarmulke, and he says — “No problem.” Somewhere I find a simple black unobtrusive skullcap, and when I go to be sworn in, I put it on.

For the oath (which I did as an affirmation, as indicated by much of Jewish tradition), no problem.

Then Kunstler asks me the first question for the defense, and the Judge interrupts. “Take off your hat, sir,” he says.

Kunstler erupts. “This man is an Orthodox Jew, and you want… etc etc etc.” I am moaning to myself, “Please, Bill, one thing I know I’m not is an Orthodox Jew.” But how can I undermine the defense attorney? So I keep my mouth shut.

Judge Hoffman also erupts: “That hat shows disrespect for the United States and this Honorable Court!” he shouts.

“Yeah,” I think to myself, “that’s sort-of true. Disrespect for him, absolutely. For the United States, not disrespect exactly, but much more respect for Something Else. That’s the point!”

They keep yelling, and I start watching the prosecutor — and I realize that he is watching the jury. There is one Jewish juror. What is this juror thinking?

Finally, the prosecutor addresses the judge: “Your Honor, the United States certainly understands and agrees with your concern, but we also feel that in the interests of justice, it might be best simply for the trial to go forward.”

And the judge took orders!! He shut up, and the rest of my testimony was quiet and orderly.

It took me another year or so to start wearing some sort of hat all the time.

For years, it was a Tevye cap. For years, and some of the time now, a beret. Sometimes a rainbow kippah. Sometimes in a rough winter, an amazing tall Tibetan hat with earflaps and wool trimming that I found in a Tibetan Buddhist harvest festival that came right during Sukkot (when else??!!).

And whatever its shape, the hat continues to mean to me that there is a Higher, Deeper Truth in the world than any judge, any Attorney General, any President, or any Pharaoh.

It’s my — our — “Alice’s Restaurant.” Or maybe “Alice’s Restaurant” is Arlo’s yarmulke. If you want to watch and hear Arlo singing the song, click here: here. [Or play video, below.]

Why listen to it? Not just nostalgia or historical curiosity about the long-gone ‘60s. Here we are, so many years later, in the midst of another brutal, unwinnable war, in the midst of many other restrictions on our civil liberties, in the midst of other judges who bow down to super-wealth and super-power, in the midst of damage to our earth we couldn’t even imagine in 1967. It’s not just judges we need to go Beyond. It’s Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Banking, the bullies of Talk Radio, all the Big Guns.

Beyond them. We all need a hat, a song, a “men’s group” — something that renews our inner sense of the Unity Beyond. And laughter.

Blessings of shalom, salaam, peace

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Catherine Bralavsky and Joseph Rowe with be Thorne Dreyer’s guests this Friday, Nov. 26, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on Rag Radio. They will celebrate the musical and mystical traditions of the Mediterranean — from ancient Judaism and Paganism, to medieval Christianity and Islam — with discussion and performance of ancient and original music and reading of poetic and narrative texts. They will sing, chant, play musical instruments (such as the oud, dulcimer, Tibetan bowls, Indian tampura, and African mbira), recite text – and we will discuss their work and the traditions they celebrate.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / November 24, 2010

Turkey AND Ham everyone! Excess carbon for all!

How do we curb emissions with the way our society has evolved? Really. I mean serious curbing; enough to prevent dangerous climate change?

Do you realize that ocean primary productivity has declined 40% since 1950? Or that, this year’s coral bleaching was worse than during the super El Nino of ’98? Or that, the Arctic was declared functionally ice free last summer for the first time in 14 million years?

Or that, the ultra high CO2 levels in prehistory were really only half as high as we thought, meaning we are a lot closer to the extreme paleohothouse environment than we thought? Or that, the dead trees from the pine beetle pandemic in Yellowstone are visible on Google and that the pandemic has begun its transition to the boreal forest in Alberta?

Or that, October 2010 was the 308th consecutive month with an average temperature above the 20th century average?

Unless we quickly find the ability to develop the magic sequestration machine, we are indeed relegated to experience dangerous climate change at least in our children’s lifetimes. By dangerous climate change, I mean the traditional scientific definition. Not, apparently, what 80 percent of Americans think.

What I mean is this: a climate change that creates global economic dysfunction. I mean what the scientists mean when they talk about dangerous climate change, A shift of our functional climate that results in significant sea level rise — dislocating hundreds of millions, maybe billions. This is the standard scientific definition of dangerous climate change that results in global ecoregime change that kills hundreds of millions with famine.

It doesn’t take long to change a grassland to a sea of sand — meaning that dry land agriculture can dry up in a megadrought in a few years. The extremeness of megadroughts, that have happened repeatedly in the ancient past, being 100 to 300 years in duration with only half of the rainfall that we received in the Dust Bowl.

Dangerous climate change changes Earth’s environment beyond the evolutionary niches of keystone species like primary productivity. When primary productivity takes a hit, not only does the most important part of Earth’s natural sequestration machine lose efficiency, but significant reduction in the efficiency of Earth’s oxygen generation machine takes place as well.

I don’t think the cost of prevention will be any more than Lord Sterns estimates at one to two percent GDP. I am also certain that any number of sequestration technologies are entirely feasible including clean coal… If, we act really soon.

How do I know that some 80% percent of Americans do not understand the definition of dangerous climate change? I don’t, but I do know that the recent Scientific American poll, a dataset that should reveal a higher level of education than most, reveals that these survey respondents would fail their Climate Change 101 class miserably. Only an eight-question survey, the telling question was #8. How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change? The response was 79.6 percent for “nothing.”

Curiously, Scientific American has removed the link to this poll from their site. Survey Monkey, however, still has the data up, unidentified. I looked at Scientific American to confirm this a couple of weeks ago when one of my oldest friends, who has gone over to the dark side, verbally accosted me with this news (once again) of the death of the AGW Conspiracy. The other seven questions in the poll are just as telling as to the profound depth of the success of the propaganda and misinformation campaign of the vested interests as the last question.

[When Bruce Melton, P.E., isn’t practicing civil engineering, he’s studying climate change and writing about it. Melton was one of eight Austinites named in the “Heroes of Climate Change” article published in The Good Life magazine in July 2007. To read more of his work on climate change, visit his website, Melton Engineering Services Austin.]

• Also see “The Price of Change,” an op-ed by James Hansen on the potential of Chinese leadership to save the planet.
• And see other articles on climate science by Bruce Melton in The Rag Blog.

The Rag Blog

All the political polls show that the American public is deeply unhappy. This was reflected in the broadly anti-government sentiment that threw out many moderate incumbents during the recent mid-term elections. The onset of hard times commonly favors new and stronger political medicine in search of restoring the previous prosperity, whether this be right, left, or radical center.

Such popular discontent is now global, but is rather more concentrated in the mature and established capitalist economies accustomed to high living standards. The USA sees increasing political dissatisfaction with growing support for the Tea Party Movement and almost half thinking that America’s best days are past. However we also see growing economic unrest in France, Britain, and Ireland, and echoed in much of the rest of the world.

The root cause of this dissatisfaction is a globally overextended, indebted market economy, unable to grow enough to pay back its debts without cheap energy. The end of cheap oil, with its current plateau and peaking in global production, means that the global economy will never recover its previous scale of material production and level of material profitability. The global lack of market demand needed to generate the previous profit is being fitfully met by increases of sovereign debt, via the issuing of fiat currency by the world’s major central banks. This is reflected in a retreat to investment in gold to preserve wealth.

Like a pack of hungry dogs fighting over scraps of meat, we now see the G20 nations trying to gain trade advantage for their national business interests and banking groups. This is threatening a global trade war leading to a contraction of total trade, probably leading to the creation of new regional trading blocks and alliances. Yesterday Greece, today Ireland — tomorrow Spain?

In the USA, as grassroots political and economic anxiety increases, the corporate media is actively promoting right wing political gurus like Glen Beck and Sarah Palin. They campaign against Washington, deny global warming, offer easy solutions mostly in line with corporate profitability, and blame liberal establishment scapegoats like Obama for a steadily increasing level of economic pain, joblessness, and political gridlock. Even with effective Republican control of Congress, there are deep internal divisions in the making.

One way to understand the core political problem is to understand that the public is economically stressed, and unwilling to tolerate much economic sacrifice. In some ways this makes sense, given that an obviously dysfunctional and unstable political coalition is in charge of managing the US economy, even while the independent Federal Reserve is struggling to be seen as nonpolitical.

Facing severe problems, any government needs to convince its public to tolerate temporary economic pain for long term benefit. It is as if we badly need an operation to restore our national health, but we cannot tolerate the pain of surgery, so we listen to the medical quacks as our health deteriorates. The problem now is that US voters no longer trust the US government to operate fairly. This is especially so after the bank bailouts, but with little banking reform.

The reality of course, is that to really actually solve our problems, we first need to somehow break through our denial of the true nature of our problem. Then we need to rekindle a national spirit of political and economic cooperation such as the US public willingly offered during WWII, and more recently the level of national unity seen under President GWBush just after the 9/11 attacks.

Our immediate prospects seem gloomy. Because of a combination of economic decline and political paralysis, we seem to be headed for a political and economic crisis of some sort, perhaps our greatest depression, with peak oil as the icing on that cake.

Yet there is hope. Sometimes a crisis is the only way to disrupt business as usual enough to make the system receptive to fundamental change, even if wiser policies are only adopted as a last resort after the other possibilities have been exhausted. There are still voices of reason to be found, in fact all over the Internet. One policy analyst I follow and recommend is Tom Whipple, an expert on energy economics and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. [The Post Carbon Institute is essentially a progressive environmental think tank, a coalition of about thirty leading environmental policy experts in different areas with a good grip on the big picture and reasonable and appropriate policy options.]

In the brief essay below, Whipple does a remarkable job of tying everything together; explaining how the end of cheap energy, the depressed US economy, and the current political gridlock in Washington are tied together in terms of cause and effect. One can scarcely over-emphasize the need to accurately understand what is really going on, as we collectively engage in the “downsizing of civilization”.

The peak oil crisis: Did we vote ourselves to extinction?
by Tom Whipple
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The disconnect between the American body politic and reality grows larger every day.

In reviewing hundreds of pages of commentary on the election, one searches in vain for analysis that even come close to describing what is happening to the nation – i.e. we are in the midst of a massive deflating credit bubble and running short of affordable liquid fuels at the same time. There seems to be general agreement that the new balance of power in Washington means two years of gridlock. Despite an occasional bow in the direction of bi-partisanship, the new majority in the house is saying quite openly that it will work to lower taxes, cut spending, will stop any efforts to deal with climate change, and will spend the next two years investigating everything it can about the Obama administration in hopes it will be so discredited in two years that the President can’t possibly win another term. Whether this agenda is what the voters thought they would get on November 2 when they voted yet again for change is another question.

Upon assuming office, the Obama administration faced the biggest choice of any American President since Lincoln — either face up to the fact that the industrial age, with its mantra of endless economic growth, was over and start making preparations for a new era, or try to revive the economy. Apparently the new President, unwilling to grapple with the downsizing of civilization, chose to prolong the deteriorating industrial economy for a few more years by increasing deficit spending, attempting to reform health care, and resorting to various monetary tactics that may or may not keep the financial system from ultimately collapsing. The basis of the problem is that without steadily increasing amounts of cheap energy, reviving economic growth as we know it is simply not sustainable for long. Borrowing and printing trillions of dollars may briefly slow the decline, but little more.

The trillions spent on bailouts and stimulation kept the illusion of recovery going for some months, but did little to increase employment or reverse the disintegration of the inflated housing market. Some polls show nearly half of US households have been seriously affected in some manner by the adverse economic conditions, yet the administration continued to express optimism rather than realism. In November of 2009 and 2010, the people spoke and the Congress and many statehouses were populated with many new faces. In most cases these newly elected officials had even less idea how the situation could be fixed, but they were new and that gave the voters a ray of hope.

The one policy area where the Obama administration tried to make major changes was in dealing with global warming by controlling carbon emissions. It is interesting that an issue on which there should be universal agreement – saving life on the planet – managed to degenerate into an imbroglio which approaches religious fanaticism. The reason of course is that controlling emissions is now thought by many as synonymous with further job losses.

Although a stream of studies conclude that global temperatures are rising, ice is melting everywhere, and people who study such things say increasing amounts of carbon in the atmosphere are to blame, over half of America believes man-made global warming is a giant hoax. A recent Pew poll says that only 37 percent of Americans and 41 percent of the Chinese believe global warming is a serious problem. Only in Pakistan, which ironically is on the cusp of being done in by global warming, and Poland of all places, are people said to be less worried than here in the U.S.

So where is all this leading? The new House majority can’t cut the interest on the national debt, will be viscerally reluctant to make serious cuts in defense spending, and is unlike to have the stomach to make serious cuts in entitlements. Therefore, it will likely content itself with chopping a few marquis spending programs such as earmarks, declare victory, and go back to preparing for the 2012 elections. There is even a good chance that they will still be preparing when the next oil price spike occurs. If the spike is high enough and lasts long enough it could enter into the political debates in the 2012 election. But it really doesn’t matter; very high oil prices are going to do serious harm to the economy one of these days, and when they come, the realistic discussions can begin as to what we can do.

Unfortunately the most serious of all issues facing us in the long run could turn out to be the failure of the United States to exercise any sort of leadership on emissions controls. As matters stand right now the new majority in the House of Representatives seems dead set on any kind of controls and says it will do its utmost to prevent the administration from controlling emissions administratively.

Now a few years or even a few decades of unchecked carbon emissions may not be of consequence. The problem, however, is: what if, as many believe, we are nearing a carbon tipping point. Some climate scientists say that an average global increase of 6o C will leave the earth uninhabitable. Long before we get there, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, storms and what have you will make life very unpleasant for those of us still around or our descendants. Someday, those who are left will wonder just what we were thinking about when we let all this happen.

Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst and has been following the peak oil issue for several years.

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