Volume 55

JANUARY 2009

55. 6:    THE YEAR OF THE AUSPICES – 1968     1.28.2009

                
                                        The author, in his auspicious year

In Roman times the legions used to bring along with them a soothsayer who would sacrifice some unlucky chicken or other animal and “read” the auspices in their entrails to see what “good fortune” awaited them. Since then, auspicious has come to mean good fortune or propitious. But things can go either way.

“May you live in interesting times,” goes the Chinese saying that hovers ambiguously between blessing and curse. Most of us who have lived in this fast-paced age, if we were conscious of it, certainly have. But parts of it have been more interesting than others. Forty years ago this year might have marked the most interesting and, personally, the most auspicious. That Spring I walked out of a seminar room at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University scarcely believing that the son of high school-educated parents, grandson of Italian immigrants who came over in steerage, had just passed his dissertation defense and was a newly-minted Ph.D. Patty and I got a baby-sitter went out for a “surf and turf” dinner and saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, a rather auspicious movie about the beginning and end of things. 1968 was going t be a year of big changes in our lives.

But my personal history was well on its way to being buried in what was going on in the world. In March, Lyndon Johnson, who had signed momentous civil rights legislation that would change the American political landscape, had declined to be his party’s nominee for the 1968 presidential election because he had no solution to the Vietnam War. Earlier in the year the war had widened. The U.S. was now bombing in Laos, Khe Sanh was the bloodiest battle of the war, followed by the Tet Offensive. The My Lai Massacre and then the North Korean capture of the spy ship Pueblo, further damaged opinion about the U.S. in Asia, and along with it Johnson’s presidency. In February, Walter Cronkite of CBS, America’s most respected journalist, said American should get out of Vietnam, marking a major turning point in public opinion.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated a month later, and Bobby Kennedy, a likely presidential winner, would meet the same fate in June.

In May student riots began in France against the conservative politics of the Gaulists, joined by workers. They signaled similar riots and demonstrations in several other countries, among them, Germany, Spain, Mexico, and of course the good ole US of A. In August, from a hotel bed on my first night in San Diego, I watched the riots at the disastrous Democratic National Convention, Chicago police bashing the heads of student demonstrators and roughing up the press. The girls were asleep on the other bed, and Patty and I watched in disbelief; we were beginning our own auspicious event—our relocation to California to begin my teaching career at SDSU—and the country was in turmoil from the Vietnam war, civil rights and student demonstrations and political assassinations.

I wasn’t particularly happy to be dropping myself and my family into a place that was much more politically conservative in 1968 than it is today. But the chance to begin a new masters program in urban planning for myself, and for Patty to embark on a career in art that she had always aspired to, were worth bearing up with in a place that could not get the New York Times on the day it was printed. I had other concerns. 1968 seemed to be the year that our country had split itself into irreconcilable demographic factions—youth, parents, seniors, hippies and yuppies, regional and local interests and racial rivalries. The Voting Rights Act of 1964 had all but given the South to the Republican Party (to which Richard Nixon owed is razor thin victory). Soon the Religious Right would rise to answer the “moral turpitude” that the simple-minded saw in racial and women’s rights and uppity kids challenging authority. What was seen as a social solidarity forged in the need to pull together during the Depression and WWII was now pulled apart during relative peace and prosperity. It was the beginning of a niche society, a democracy that was capable of manipulation by focus groupers and political operatives that eventually found their highest (lowest?) form in then likes of Karl Rove. Soon enough, Watergate would confirm the notion that the system was corrupted.

That all of this should come down in the midst of my movement from East to West made that movement all the more unsettling. As I wrote some years later,* when “. . . my grad school classmates learned I had accepted a professorship at a Southern California university, their congratulations were tempered with oblique insinuations that my chosen life of intellection would plunge faster than a California sunset. . . . [that] I had opted for the land of the lotus-eaters, Birchers, naked hot tub encounter groups, Disneyland and Tinseltown. I was decamping for the intellectual wasteland of fantasy, hedonism, and ‘what-have-you-done-lately.’ In no time at all my brain would be flotsam in the surf, putrefying, like some hapless Portuguese man-o-war in a fly-infested heap of kelp. Yet, even while I was resisting becoming ‘Californicated’ with every neural transmitter I could muster, I was writing rebellious letters [this was before email] back to my old classmates (which I entitled ‘Epistles to the Frigidians’), smirking at their having to endure slushy winters, and instructing them on how to spot me on TV at the Rose Bowl. I countered their charges that I had become mentally moribund by enclosing photos of myself wearing Mickey Mouse ears while reading Principia Mathematica. . . . But in reflective moments I admitted to myself a gnawing guilt that the consciousness of ‘the Coast’ was creeping into my mind. Unfathomable psychological forces tugged at my bicoastal mind, my analytical-New York-left hemisphere rebelled against my imaginative-California-right hemisphere, and vice versa. Maybe I belonged in Indianapolis, a rebel without a coast."

Auspices, of course, are supposed to be predictive. They are supposed to give us a view of things to come. But no reader of entrails, or popular soothsayer (have you noticed that the Jean Dixon prophet types have all disappeared?) would have predicted what was to come. I was a “trained” social scientist, and my own future was as mysterious and un-apprehended as the social world of which it was a part. The only certainty of change was change itself. As I review my writings—social scientist readers of the auspices at least go “on the record”—I believe that I did better than the horoscopers and any shaman reading the guts of a Rhode Island Red, but really not that well. Seeing Martin Luther King in his casket, and Tommy Smith and John Carlos defiantly raising their black fists at the Mexico City Olympics, I would never have foreseen that, forty years on, a Black man would be elected president of the United States. 2008, an auspicious year? Time will tell.
_______________________________________________________________
© 2009, James A. Clapp
* “The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicoastal Mind,” San Diego Writer’s Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 1, July 1991, Pp. 36 -39

55. 5:   The Goodbye Hug 1.21.2009

                                                   ©2009, UrbisMedia
                                                             
I saw Obama actually give George Bush a hug a couple of times, once after his speech, and again just before Bush got on the presidential chopper to leave the White House as ingloriously as Richard Nixon left it. Bush looked little, finished, somewhat befuddled, having completed his last, and biggest, screw-up, in a lifetime of screw-ups.

Well, how would you feel, after looking out on a throng of people—the biggest ever to swell the sacred precincts of Washington—knowing there is likely not one person out there who would pee on you if you were on fire. And then to be rhetorically “bitch slapped” by the new guy that they all saw, the black, the white and the tinted, as they the “Great Black Hope.” There was great amazement that Barack Obama walked out of the Capitol Building to take the oath of office (screwed up by a Bush appointed, Chief Justice John Roberts), but there was no sense that he didn’t belong there, that he was not the man of moment to pick up the pieces of America. This was not the black janitor, but the bright and eloquent leader who seemed right for a job that needed someone who had the audacity to believe that a person of color had as much right to that office as any man (or woman). The world sensed that, and it was watching with amazement that America could set itself back on course.

The word “transformative” and its cognates had been summoned repeatedly to describe this event. This had not been a choice between a professional POW stuck mentally in his lost war and a nice guy with whom you might want to play a pick up game of half-court basketball; this was a choice, it seemed, between old ways and new ways, the old order and a new, if yet undefined, order, between decline and renewal. Bush’s ways, conservative Republican ways, had shown themselves, finally, after decades, to be the path to irrelevance, divisiveness and decline. It took the dead in Iraq and the dispossessed in the streets of America to prove that. It took and arrogant pre-emptive foreign policy and a greed-oriented domestic economy to nail down the foolishness of the response to 911 and the insensitivity to the devastation of Katrina. It took Terri Shiavo and Abu Ghraib to expose the depth of hypocrisy and brutality that religious and neo-con values could deliver. If America could have found its collective voice it would have been a cry for help. Now help seemed it might be on the way.

Resident PBS Republican Twerp David Brookes said Obama’s speech was a “good speech, but not a great speech,” (as if Brookes would know a great speech if it was a sharp rock and he was sitting on it). Whatever. But is was great the way Obama’s speech took apart, by allusion and indirection, the Bush, neo-con, and right wing legacy—that it was time to “put away childish things” ‘(like “mission accomplished and “bring ‘em on” and goofy crap like “faith-based” this and that); that we would return to a respect for “science” (and accept the facts of global warming, evolution, and on with stem-cell research and maybe help some people get well); that we must offer our enemies a hand peace if they will “unclench” their fists (rather than putting them is the “axis of evil”). Obama even dumped on old Republican icon Ronnie boy, “the Gypper,” saying in several different ways, not only that government was not “the problem,” but part of the solution, and that, in addition, the people were going to have to take some responsibility and role in solving our problems (maybe this means paying some taxes for better services, and stop going to the casino and buying SUVs and other consumer crap); that the Obama administration would foster development of a range of alternative energies to free us from dependence on the Bush Saudi pals and the likes of Enron. Did dim bulb George get any of this?

Did he get it when Obama alluded to the need for big plans and big expenditures to meet the huge problems and the looming exigencies that Bush created or left unattended? Bush would never understand the structural shifts that have taken place nationally and globally—right under his feet!—that will require a government with vision and boldness, not lobbyists and cronies, to fashion policies to meet their challenges.

It seems clear that Obama is a man who wants to govern with as much consensus as possible. He rejects the divisive-decider model that Bush arrogated to himself, where, if you aren’t with him, you are the enemy.

History operates by its own rules, or none. America made a big mistake allowing a guy whose claim for its highest office was that he might be more fun to “have a beer with” than Al Gore to get close enough to be appointed president by his father’s judicial appointees. This resulted in the 21st Century in America getting off to a terrible start, a return to the previous century’s right-wing, cold war mentalities that had only been put on hold by the Clinton years. The country didn’t get it when it gave Bush high approval ratings for standing with a bull horn on the ruins of 911 three days after the WTC came down—that this was his style, when he flew over New Orleans three days after that catastrophe. The people and their wimpy Democrat representatives allowed lies and deceptions, billions of dollars in waste, ineptitude, the shredding of the Constitution, the corruption of the Department of Justice, and the trashing of America’s economy and international reputation, to proceed virtually unchallenged.

Both George Bush and Dick Cheney have made much of the case that “history” will likely judge their policies more favorably than the polls have these last years. But history may just judge them as worse than they currently appear. It would be well if history had an assist from investigations, disclosures and testimonies—even indictments—so that some badly needed “truth and reconciliation” is not surrendered to the need to attend to the future.

Since they raised the subject, did history dictate that America needed to be brought so low, so far from its principles and values, that a relatively in-experienced, but charismatic, junior senator from Illinois, might seem like its “audacious” hope? Did it take George W. Bush to make the prospects of Barack H. Obama? Amazing, both American and the World, knowing the difficulties of the desolation of the Bush policies that face both, seemed buoyed (and ebullient), even confident, in the man on whose shoulders this would fall. Amazingly, Barack H. Obama seemed like the guy who belonged there, the guy who we need to be in that Oval Office, and George Bush and his ways seemed inappropriate and, appropriately, discarded. Getting to that point was the only thing Bush did right. Would you hug George W. Bush for that?
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

55. 4:     FOREIGN BABES IN BEIJING, by Rachel DeWoskin (2005) BR, 1.17.2009

                           

By way of some curious synaptic connection when, I first picked up this book, I had a reverie of a personal experience in the Chinese city of Xian many several years ago. “Are you going to the Barbeque Fashion Show this evening?” the desk porter at my hotel had asked me. There was also a poster for the event in the elevator, indicating that it would take place on the hotel roof, and that the “all you can eat” price was very reasonable. It sounded like a good idea, and at six o’clock I was up there, interested far more in filling my stomach than in a “fashion show.”

The barbeque was good, and the fashion show turned out to be—explaining why it was almost exclusively “businessmen” at the event—a show of lingerie. The announcer explained as each lovely, young Chinese girl passed among us in the steamy evening air of Xian, and with an exaggerated fashion runaway “walk,” what a wonderful idea it would be to “take such sexy lingerie home to your wife.” One after another young beauty paraded her wares among us. But the effect of the food and drink was soporific on me and I got up and left before it was over.

As it turned out, the organizer of the event was in the hallway, in which several of the lovely models awaited their turn alongside racks of lingerie. He stopped me and asked if I had seen anything I liked. I said I wasn’t interested in purchasing any and that I was tired and was heading off to my room. Well, then, he said, “We can arrange a private show for you in your room.” I declined, but it wasn’t until I was in the elevator that it hit me that I had just attended a thinly-disguised parade of very pretty hookers masquerading as a fashion show. It wasn’t to be the first time that things wouldn’t be quite what they seem to be in China, a placed where even the language can be read to have very different meanings.

That’s what I like about Yang Niu Zai Beijing—it is one of those books by a zhongguotong (China hand) that revels in the nuance of China and its language. For example, DeWoskin notes that the title—more about that in a moment—is Yang Niu, not Yang Nu. The latter would be “Foreign Girls,” but Niu is a girl who is a “babe.” A slight change in sound with a lot of difference in meaning.

The title is from a Chinese television soap opera that DeWoskin was recruited for quite by accident. But the producers felt that she fit the part of an American babe who seduces a handsome Chinese guy away from his virtuous Chinese wife. So Foreign Babes in Beijing is the title of this series of “feel good” TV for the Chinese: the main guy gets a chance to kick the ass of a Western guy (to counter the notion of Chinese guys as wimpy and effeminate), and DeWoskin, covered in make-up, jewelry and big hair, is Jiexi (Jesse), the American femme fatale, who gets to do semi-nude sex scenes that contrast with the image of traditional, chaste Chinese women.

DeWoskin, the daughter of an American sinologist professor who took her on trips to China when she was a child, is a Columbia graduate who returned therefore five years to do public relations work for American corporations jumping in on the Chinese economic boom of the 1990s. She came to the Jeixi role by happenstance and with only some school acting as experience but, after the release of the Foreign Babes show, became a celebrity in China. The irony was that she received only eighty dollars an episode while the show was immensely lucrative for the producers.

There is nothing in Foreign Babes of the steamy tell-all about sexually-liberated Chinese that has come out in some books from Chinese authors in Shanghai in recent years. DeWoskin even demurely deals with the description of the “nude” scene she has to do with the male lead. While she is in actuality sort of a “foreign babe” in her personal life, having had some Chinese nanpengyou (boyfriends), and frequenting the clubs and hot spots of Beijing that the Western tourist doesn’t even know exist and, most significantly, getting to appreciate the culture of Beijing and China from the vantage that fluency in Mandarin affords. Despite her main job a in public relations (she pints out that PR (piyar) means, means “asshole” in Mandarin), she moved in the pop culture and bohemian circles that were burgeoning at the time. Among her friends were emerging artists such a Zhou Wen, and Chinese rock star Cui Jian, and budding filmmakers.

Even though it concentrates on Beijing in a specific period, Foreign Babes is one of the best insights into the expat life in China that I have read. De Woskin is smart, but, even being a “China lover,” (see review of China Lover, last month) is balanced and respectful, and in many respects remains awed by the complexity of the culture. At several points in the book she repeats an observation that make in my own travel memoir, The Stranger is Me, that she feels much more American when she is in China. Her opinions and observations are sharp, measured and insightful. She provides informative explanations of how Chinese view television narratives differently than we do (125), and what is called “sideways negotiating” (141), both learned “on the job,” as well as the dynamic of change in the city itself. She seems to relish the mistakes and missteps she makes even more that the linguistic and cultural differences that make us laugh. I did when she pointed out seeing a sports jersey celebrating Michael Jordan that read “Chicago Balls.”

Perhaps most interesting were the few pages at the end which are devoted to the events of May 1999, when the U.S. (or NATO) bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, supposedly by accident. DeWoskin and her expat friends were deeply affected by the outrage of the Chinese (and equally angry at the American government). But she puts together in a few pages the best, and fair-minded, explanation of the affair and its aftermath that I have read. She since has returned to New York for more academic work, in poetry and translation. But she plans returns to China for more experiences that provide a fresh angle on ourselves as well as a foreign culture.

That put me in mind of another of my own, if less interesting, China experiences some years ago when a sore back had me in need of a massage when I was at a hotel in Chongqing. I called the front desk to order a masseur or masseuse (to avoid giving offense I asked for whichever was available) to come to my room. Shortly thereafter I opened my door to a young woman in a warm-up suit who must have been no more than five fee in height and less than one hundred pounds. I remarked that she seemed rather xiao (little) for a masseuse, but she gave me a wry smile and motioned me toward the bed. With what must surely be the strongest tiny hands in all China she proceeded to nearly kill me for forty-five minutes. My own hands were trembling when I gave her a tip. But my back felt better. Or was it that everything else hurt now? That’s China.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

55. 3:   MY CAR, MY CAR, MY KINGDOM FOR A CAR, Part 1, 1.12.2009

                 

For the past couple of years my local public radio station has adopted a new fundraising mantra—asking me to donate my car to the station in return for a “possible tax write-off” and the good feeling of helping them remain on the air and their executives pumping up their salaries. They do this a couple of times every hour: “gimme your car, gimme your car.” They keep saying it is a “clunker” that I really don’t need any more, even though it is a perfectly functional and still very stylish ’93 BMW 325i that looks much like the current model. I’ll be damned if I will give it to them unless they are going to turn it into public transit that runs close enough for me to use and takes me where I need or want to go. No chance of that. And no chance that they are going to get my car.

I am a supporter of public broadcasting, but this hectoring me for my car frankly pisses me off. Moreover, I wonder what it is they want to do with my car. I suspect that it would end up down in Mexico and probably live on for another fifteen years as a taxi, like those 1950s American cars one encounters in Havana or Istanbul. Heck, not long ago, in the salubrious, car-preserving climate of San Diego, I saw the doppelganger of my 1955 Chevy that decades ago turned to a pile of rust from the salted roads back in Upstate New York winters; this one looked like it had just been driven off the showroom floor. Now my public radio station wants me to turn over “Gudrun.” That’s the name I gave “her” when I bought “her”; named after of teacher friend of mine who lives in Hamburg (but also because “she” runs good). No way.

Ironically, on October 14, 1986 I broadcasted the first of some seventy or so Public Radio commentaries on KPBS-FM. I had asked Karen Kish, the then producer of an afternoon magazine-style program called San Diego On Air, why they did not have a segment that dealt with cities and urban life. “Go write one, come back, and we’ll see how you sound,” she said. Titled “The One-Horsepower Solution,” it was an essay about the automobile, as compared to the horse, the first of about sixty essays I wrote and broadcast on the station back in the days when it didn’t covet my car. A lot of miles have been driven since then, and a lot of gasoline gone off into carbon emissions, and a lot of increase in cost, most of it recently, has been added to a barrel of crude. The essay is reprised below as the first part of some pieces re-examining the automobile, its pros and cons, and its alternatives.

Here it is:

Enduring a breakdown (of the mechanical sort, that is) on the freeway is frustrating enough experience; but sometimes one most also suffer the gleeful barbs of passing motorists whose own vehicles are, at least momentarily, in good working order. At a recent such misfortune I heard one passing motorist shout, with some Doppler effect, a remark I had not heard in years put to drivers of disabled automobiles: "get a horse!" Rather than getting me angry, it got me to thinking. It has often been remarked that Americans have a love-hate. relationship with the automobile. There are several ways in which that observation might be interpreted; but one candidate is that people love their own cars and hate everyone else's, for it's all those other cars that make using ours more difficult to enjoy. There's no need to recite the wealth of statistical data that announce that most every city, and particularly those like San Diego, are in for more crowded streets and freeways, scarcer parking space, and are heading in the direction of that dreaded new phenomenon, "gridlock." There is ample experiential evidence for all those who must daily venture into the land of the commuter.

The automobile has been the bane of urban planners since it came within the economic reach of the average American. It is acceptable in planning circles to become resigned to the popularity of the automobile, but still rather heretical to credit it with any improvement in the quality of urban life. Yet it was as a welcome alternative over its immediate, comparable predecessor--the horse and carriage (not mechanized mass transit)--that the automobile was first received in the early years of this century.

Consider the original pollution problem: in 1875 London had to remove 1,000 tons of manure from its streets every day. New York City had a population of over 120,000 horses at the turn of the century, which produced a daily 130 ton hill of manure. Manure-laden streets, in addition to olfactory offense, bred billions of flies that carried some 30 different diseases, some quite serious. Further, they attracted large numbers of birds, which cancelled out the advantage of their insect diet with their own considerable droppings. For a time the manure, which made good fertilizer, was carted to nearby farms; but, as nearby farms were rapidly pushed further out it soon became unprofitable to do so, and manure was often dumped into river Horse urine, which couldn't be collected, added to the pollution, and made streets treacherous to horses and humans alike, often resulting in injuries. At the turn of the century as many as 15,000 horse corpses had to be dragged off the streets of New York and Chicago every year. Statistics on horse and carriage accidents were also not insignificant. It is reported that in the late 19th century, Paris was averaging700 deaths and 5,000 injuries each year from capsized coaches and runaway horses.

The autophobe has plenty of data to counter these statistics. The annual carnage on America's present-day streets and highways dwarfs Paris' turn of the century accident rate. Pollution from automobiles may ultimately have more ominous impacts than the horse. And dead horses are at least biodegradable. But on a horsepower for horsepower basis the horse may be the worse polluter.

Much of the progress of urban life has been purchased from the lesser of evils. But one of the measures by which we have gauged this progress has been by the freedom and ease of geographic mobility—closely related to social mobility—that our cities and societies afford us. The car beats the horse and carriage by more than a mile on this account.

Humankind has long exhibited a powerful propensity to free itself from the bounds of time and space; but there have always been costs to be paid. For a time, as I watched the characters on TV's "Star Trek" beam themselves all over the universe, I thought that the ultimate answer might be "teleportation," where you step into a pod in one place, reduced to atomic particles, then beamed to the destination pod, where your particles are re-assembled.
Then I saw the remake of the movie, The Fly.
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© 1986, James A. Clapp. Aired KPBS-FM, Public Radio, October 14, 1986

55. 2: ONE-ON-ONE WITH THE “O-MAN” 1.7.2009

                  

                                                              © 2009, UrbisMedia

Barack Obama on 60 Minutes told us that he wants to fix the country, that he will take actions to do so and, if it they don’t work, he will find policies that do work. That assertion sounded innocuous enough, and politically apposite. But it touched a different nerve with me because it relates to a subject that I taught for over thirty years in a graduate seminar in Planning Theory. To students who took than seminar, our president-elect would have sounded like a “disjointed incrementalist.”

OK, stifle that yawn for a moment longer; I’m not hauling out some old lecture notes to unload on you. What I want to address, is what kind of philosophy of policy is Obama going to pursue, because I am getting some different messages from the guy I voted for when he says things like he did on 60 Minutes. Now, admittedly, Obama wasn’t all that specific about most of his policy positions during the primaries or the campaign. It’s not a good idea to get too specific and get himself pinned down. But he tended to sound like a man with vision, with a sense of direction for the changes he was calling for. In my terminology, I pegged him as a “rationalist,” a guy who went with facts and information, who tested policy ideas against prevailing theories. (I don’t think he will go consulting Rev. White) He sounded enough this way to give conservatives the idea that they could start calling him a socialist who would be leading us toward some soviet-style government that taxed us for the very air we breathe.

So his sounding like an “incrementalist” caught my attention. Was it a response to the socialist charge? An attempt to defuse it? Because it is conservatives who tend to be incrementalists, because “incrementalism” is a conservative way of approaching policy and problem solving. By that I mean that incrementalism means taking small, short-term, careful steps towards policy, not bold and comprehensive approaches that are rooted in broad, long-term solutions. Sometimes this is called the “science” of “muddling through.” Conservative, supply-side, economists would argue that it is preferable to allow the market, or consumer preferences, to work these things out.

Incrementalists tend to distrust comprehensive theories and models. Not only do such theories remind them of threatening notions such as those proposed by Mr. Marx ad Mr. Engles, but conservatives argue that there is not enough “information” (as they do for example about global warming) upon which to base broad, long-term decisions upon them. Hence, they would recommend to try something small, treating an aspect of the problem (like bio-fuels).

There is an oft-quoted saying of Daniel Burnham, the architect in charge of the great Chicago World’s Fair at the end of the 19th Century. Burnham said: “Make no little plans, they have not the power to stir men’s blood.” The Senator from Chicago cum President Elect spoke ceaselessly of the need for change, but was that change to consist of a myriad of disconnected alterations and about faces in different dimensions of public policy? Or, was it suggestive of a notion that he has in mind the re-constitution of the institutional infrastructure of America; a restructuring of the interrelationships of those institutions—education, work, health, commerce, art, foreign affairs, security, urbanism and environment, and governance—that would be viewed holistically and as potentially reciprocally synergistic. (Yeah, I know, that sounds like that liberal dreamer speak to any conservatives out there.) But what I am suggesting here is that incrementalism tends to view things in parts, not systemically. That is why we don’t get proper attention from them on issues such as global warming, which they tend to see as a cycle rather than, as scientists are telling us, is leaning toward systemic breakdown.

What would a comprehensive, systemic perspective mean? Well, first a re-constitution of what these days we pejoratively call the bureaucracy to perform an intelligence function rather than a self-preserving servant of the interests of K Street and the preservation of the power of the party in power. The intelligence function might also require the purging of some of the strictly political appointees who have been placed in the bureaus over the past eight years whose roles have been the manufacture and management of “intelligence.” This will take time and diligence, but it is absolutely necessary. One need not recount the malfeasances of the CIA (WMD intel), FBI (botched domestic security), and Justice departments (waterboarding), the rendering of facts in the Departments of Interior and others, or the placement of school cronies or department head’s who publicly professed “gut feelings” as a basis for decisions, to indicate the gravity of the need. This is not to say that decisions can be made without political dimensions—any decision is a choice, and choosing is an intrinsically political (although not necessarily ideological) act—but the substantive merits of the decision cannot be irrational (that is, counterfactual).

The purpose of the intelligence function of governmental bureaus is prediction and analysis (some have executive functions) without which there is little capability to steer the ship of state toward it goals.

But it is the goals of an administration that are the chief difference that separates rational-comprehensivists and incrementalists. The former tend to hold to the notion that there is a general public interest, a commonweal, that can be the beacon to guide the policies of the state. Incrementalists, on the other hand, see society as composed of many different, and competing, interests, often irreconcilable with one another, and that there exists no general public interest. Hence, a rationalist might argue that a national health care program is in the interest of all because say, the eradication of communicable diseases would be an obvious benefit, whereas the incrementalist might argue against having to share the cost of a national program with people who cannot pay their share of it, or who do not attend to their own good health. Moreover, since most policy choices have ideological dimensions, such choices often raise concerns that policies aimed toward the enhancement of a general welfare are inherently socialistic. We witness just such charges in the recent presidential campaigns in which Obama’s notions for medical care as well as his tax policies were characterized by his opposition as socialism. Ironically, even when Obama employed the phraseology “share the wealth of the nation” as an argument for the redistributive aspect of his proposed tax policy, that very benign phrase was called “playing Robin Hood” and socialism.

But there is a second aspect of the importance of goals, what might be called the visionary dimension of setting of goals. Vision must be a combination of the realities revealed by the prognostic aspects of the intelligence function, but also the realistic picture of where we need and want to go, and what can be realistically achieved. That vision should be consonant with the stated principles of the nation as specified in its Constitution and Bill of Rights. We can see just how far we have drifted from any such vision in the recent administration. Vision must involve the integrative and synergistic aspects of policy formulation. This is where the rational-comprehensivists greatly deviate from the incrementalists. For example, educational policies need to considered in terms of projections of a future work force determined by need and international competition, and by research and development needs. A future work force with enhanced prospects also intersects with aspects of health policy, housing, and environmental concerns. Thus, approaching substantive policy areas not as discreet, case by case, issues, but at intersecting and even reciprocal needs and concerns, requires an executive have a peripheral policy vision—the way a good basketball player sees “the whole court”— and leadership that can both express these in terms of sound policy frameworks, but also communicable national goals. It is important here to emphasize that I am not talking about a strictly management enterprise—management is not vision.

So, what has this to do with Obama? Well, his campaign was run on a rhetoric of change, not just change from the status quo, which was (and is) regarded as miserable by four-fifths of the American public, but with the implication of soothing proactive, something with the suggestion of a vision. Two questions have been building. One is whether he will begin to put together a comprehensive vision of the future direction for the country, whether he even has one. The second is whether he will even be able to articulate such a vision through the haze of the smoke and ruins of the Bush legacy, a legacy that is tantamount to a scorched earth policy.

I see Obama as poised between the polarities of rational-comprehensive and disjointed-incrementalist modalities of policy formulation. It is the latter that will have the greatest gravity because we have become inured to it and because there are salient and most insistent matters demanding attention. Deconstructing the Bush debacle piece by piece might be necessary, but not sufficient to affect the change inspired by the Obama campaign. Not Bush is an attitude, but not a policy. Bush crippled our country, but he did not kill it off. The politics game is all that much like basketball, but it needs a quick point guard to change the approach and tempo of the game, somebody who “see the whole floor.” If you watch how this guy plays basketball, you will notice at once his ability, as we say, to “go to his left.”

Now, how well can the O-Man go to his Left when it really counts?
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

55. 1:      THE ‘BABO’ GOSPELS: AN INRODUCTION       1.4.2009

                                                                                                                                     © 2008, UrbisMedia

To other readers. One of my “resolutions for 2009 is to complete a book dedicated to my five grandchildren. It’s tentatively titled THE BABO GOSPELS (“Babo” is the sobriquet my grandchildren call me). Since they live in San Francisco and Connecticut, I don’t get to communicate with them in person as much as I would like. But I want them to know my views on faith and religion because they will grow up in a world, both domestic and international, in which religion will play, in my view, an inordinate roll in public life. They may not be able to understand much of it now, but they will someday. Meanwhile, through eventual publication, I hope to make it available to others. The following preambles the book and explains my reasons for writing the book.

To my grandchildren, 

Babo wants you to know at the very outset that one of the reasons I have written this book for you is that, while we are obviously not from the same generation, or share many of the same life experiences, we are also markedly different in terms of religious upbringing. I was deeply “immersed” in religion as I grew up, but you have been raised with little or no metaphysical environment in the home or school. Nevertheless, religion, belief and faith are all around us. Not just at Christmas, or Easter, or Rosh Shoshana, or Ramadan, but in between these times, in too many ways and forms to enumerate. No matter, you would have to be bereft of senses not to know that.

Religion, faith, and belief raise big—and importantly—questions and issues about life, death, and the way we should conduct ourselves in between. You will not be able to escape these questions, not just because there will be people around you who will raise them, and there will be other people who will want to persuade you to accept how they have answered them, but also, because these questions have a metaphysical dimension, they extend into the realm of what is unknown and unknowable. So, by just being human, you will come to wonder about such questions. Questions like “why am I here?” Or, “does my being here have any purpose?” And, “what happens to me when this life is all over?” And a lot more questions.

I wrote above that we come from very different religious experiences. You were brought up like your mothers, in what would be called “secular” homes, homes where the answers (or at least responses) to life’s questions were addressed and discussed from the perspective of the rational, not the mystical. We did not seek answers in scripture and revelation, but in science, history, logic and reason. This is the kind of home in which you are being raised, too.

That is a good thing, and I applaud it. But it also means that you are a further generation removed from familial contact with someone with my experience, that you will not be exposed—at least in a proselytizing way—to indoctrination by institutionalized religious thought. But outside the home such thoughts and influences will be all around you; in some of your friends and schoolmates, people with whom you work, teachers, bosses, political representatives, even people who might become dear to you. Some of them might think they have the advantage of you, that their “faith” makes them special, even superior to you. At their worst, some will consider you “unholy.” You will know from reading history—or even the Bible—what this can lead to.

That is why I have written this book for you, because I have the “advantage” (although it seems odd to express it in that way) of having been raised as a Roman Catholic. Having been educated in Catholic schools from first grade through college I grew up believing that I was of the “one, true” faith, the faith that God intended that we all believe. I pitied, or mistrusted, or was suspicious of anyone who was so unfortunate as to not have been baptized a Roman Catholic. So I know how religion can engender prejudice, and separate people rather than bring them together. I also, from the first, seem to recall a nagging, and unexpressed, sense of indoctrination. I knew that I was supposed to believe what I was being told to believe, but I knew my mind was unsettled. I felt like I was “going through the motions” of being a good Roman Catholic.

I quit the Roman Catholic Church in the early 1960s. You don’t really “quit” as such, there is no resignation form or anything like that, you just stop showing up and putting money in the collection basket (that, they really care about). My last sufferance was the bumbling homily of a local tongue-tied parish priest that was just too much to bear. I felt so sorry for the guy. He should have been a Trappist monk; they take a vow of silence and I am certain he would have served out his days in aphasic contentment.

The next Sunday morning I slept in.  I had a tremendouse sense of guilt, but it got easier, like quitting a bad habit.  I was in grad school, living, literally, in a garret room, with nobody to record my failure to make my Easter Duty, no parents around to please that they had done their duty and raised a nice Catholic boy. The closest I have since got to a Eucharist is a pepperoni pizza (1).

The next time I was compelled to go to church was to get married, more than a year later. Your grandmother, Patty, who attended Catolic schools as well, went to mass for a while, attending the campus Newman Center with other liberal and attenuated Catholics, but she soon joined my “fallen away” status of her own and complete accord. She was an artist, and spending her Sunday’s covered in clay, or paint, or exploring creation with a camera, was a better “spiritual experience” than listening to some hackneyed homily.

The 1960s were a time when there was an abundance of metaphysical energy to fill the self-induced void. There was plenty of company in my apostate status, and some were doing the “inner- searching” thing with various forms of pharmacological assistance. But drugs were not for me. I never liked not being fully conscious and in control. Some friends experimented with the newly popular LSD in the “Church of the Perpetually “Stoned” founded by the high priest of altered states, Dr. Timothy Leary. Others tried to go native with the “Yaqui way of knowledge,” (2)  induced by peyote and mescaline. If there was a god to be found, he would be in some tripped-out haze and probably look like a drummer for The Rolling Stones. “Joints” were routinely passed around at various social gatherings. But I wasn’t about to exchange one opiate for another. The word at the time was what are you “into.” People might be into something one week and into something else the next. “Trip” was the term for being on drugs. A lot of people were “tripping,” but few of them seemed to be getting anywhere.

There were other potential substitutes for my discarded Catholicism. It might have been “encounter groups,” people sitting around spilling their guts out to strangers who would rush to hug them; or diving into hot tubs at the Esalen Institute up in Big Sur, a warm-up to hooking up with some complete stranger for the search for the big orgasm. It could be sitting in a room full of dim-wits at an EST training session (3), squeezing your legs together to keep from pissing yourself, and calling one other “assholes,” and paying big money for the privilege of re-casting yourself into really fitting that appellation. It could be dozens of other spin-offs in the rollicking self-awareness movement that rolled over California like a tsunami of psychobullshit. For some, it filled in the void left by the unmooring from the traditional faiths that took place in the liberating 1960s, a period that conservatives still regard at the Lexington and Concord of America’s “culture wars.” The first “shot” in those ongoing wars was literally a little pill, the birth control pill invented by Dr. John Rock, that was fired across the bows (or would that be balls) of the Roman Catholic Church. Liberating it was, but many people were clearly disoriented by its centrifugal forces and quickly set about seeking cosmologies and lifestyles to ”re-center” themselves. It was the early “new age,” a period that is now in its second flowering, fertilized by the “tapping into the inner-self” nonsense of an assorted cast of self-anointed gurus, phonies and fakes hawking the snake oil of easy self-fulfillment and material riches.

Traditional religions were disintegrating. There was a new and profitable relationship between God and mammon. In the 1980s, Reaganism made it OK to be greedy and get rich (sort of a retro-Calvinism that reasoned that if you were rich then that’s what God wants you to be). Millions joined in the resurgence of Christianity a la the television “prayboys” like the Bakkers, Swaggerts, Falwells, Dobsons, Warrens and Robertsons. This was the great counter movement against the liberal legacy of emboldened minorities, the women’s movement, sexual liberation and media’s fracturing of the (mythical) solidarity of the American family. Men were seeking out their “fire in the belly” manhood rites to counter their emasculation on the sharper edges of feminism. Sexual swingers, it was turning out, tended to more conservative people than liberals. Many liberals, not sure that there really was going to be an eternity, set about perfecting their bodies to make them last as long as possible. As usual, true to the essence of American culture, there was a buck to be made everywhere; the core faith—capitalism—seemed well intact and thriving on the novelty of it all.

Somehow my inborn skepticism shielded me from it all. It took long for anything to “take” with me, and by the time I finished reading and thinking about the validity of a new cosmology or lifestyle it was usually out of fashion or replaced by the next one. But there was no going back to my Catholic roots; I had worked too hard to be free of their entanglements. Yet there is never being totally free of them either. They are my roots, and as you can never resign from the Church, I could never not be Catholic. There is a certain indelibility to being educated and indoctrinated within the Church—once Catholic, forever Catholic. Even today I can meet complete strangers who have been “raised” Roman Catholic, even from other countries, and there is an affinity with them, a Catholic connection, that transcends almost all other cultural dimensions. It is the indoctrination at an early age; other religions have it as well. I am glad that you are being spared it, but you need to know about it.

It is not so much the “sacramental” or the ceremonial that sinks into one’s spiritual marrow, but the “culture” of Catholicism, a culture that is captivating in many respects and owes much to its theatricality. The Roman Catholic Church has costumes, and rituals, music and art, and that greatest of all dramatic theme—the battle between good and evil. The essence of drama is conflict, and the battle for the soul of humankind is perhaps the greatest dramatic theme. That’s entertainment, and the new Christian churches are doing their best the emulate it. They will never match the Sistine Chapel, the Ave Maria, or Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman, and Gregory Peck and Spencer Tracy playing nuns and priests in movies I knew the Protestants would never really understand.

Curiously, my departure from the Church engendered a new interest in religion, not so much a search for a new one to replace Roman Catholicism, but a liberated, critical-historical interest in the nature of belief, into the uncritical credulities of faith. I read works by biblical scholars such as Hugh Schonefeld (The Passover Plot), Donavon Joyce (The Jesus Scrolls), Elaine Paigels (The Gnostic Gospels), works on the “historical” Jesus, by Michael Graves, historical novels such as Gore Vidal’s Creation and James Michener’s The Source, Malachi Martin’s The Final Conclave, even edgy stuff like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the precursor of The Da Vinci Code. I looked at religious art, listened to the music and missas, read of the lives of saints and popes, long monographs on Mary and Mary Magdalen, even the writings of Josephus, the First Century Jewish turncoat. It was almost all very interesting, but there were no accounts of, from, or about anybody who had been to “the other side,” who had had a real audience with The Deity, the Father or the Son, or the flaky one, the Holy Ghost. Not one, single, sane, person. Nobody, not the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Ayatollah, or Sister Ignatius, my first grade teacher, knew one single shred of evidence, knew anything more than me. Everything on which the great faiths were based was made up, conjured, imagined.

I never recovered my faith—if I ever really had it in the first place—but I did get some insights that gradually evolved into a sort of modus vivendi composed of bits and pieces from here and there. A good part of it came from that First Century radical Jewish rabbi, Yeshua bar Yusef (a.k.a. Jesus Christ). We shared a liberal-progressive spirit, and a feeling for the underdog. My concoction was neither entire, nor communicable enough to comprise what passes for Christianity today, or this essay would be a solicitation for funds, an urging to bomb and woman’s clinic, or an email to a congressional page asking him if he likes to play leap frog in the shower.

Much of my metaphysical odyssey took place before the resurgence of Christian Fundamental Evangelism in America. I had come to my accommodation with the believers: they can leave me alone, or I would do my best to make them wish they never brought up the subject. They could have their faith and I would even fight for their right to have their faith, but I would try to be an evangelist’s worst nightmare--a prince of doubt-ness.

Why? Because evangelists just can't live and let live, believe and not aide un-belief. No, they have to take their faith into the classrooms, into the legislatures, into the streets, into the media. America has to be “a Christian nation” and our laws have to become subject to Christian principles (which, if they were true Christian principles, might actually make us a better nation). Our leaders have to pray in public and proclaim their faith, and wear cross pins next to their lapel flag pins. They have to plant giant white crosses on our public hilltops. They want to tell women what they can do, and can not do, with their bodies, they want our kids to believe the world was created in six days, and Noah could actually fit all fauna on a barge, they want to judge the worthiness of science with the mumbo-jumbo of people who speak in tongues and see the face of The Virgin in the guano deposits on the side of a parking garage. They want to deprive homosexuals of their rights and keep public monies from being spent on condoms for the HIV-ravaged African states. They want to take us back to the Dark Ages, before the age of Enlightenment. And when they do that, they aren’t just people of faith anymore—they are the enemy of reason. I realized that it no longer mattered if I went to church on Sundays, but it did matter very much to me that there were people who wanted to make my whole country a “church,” and this “church would be open 24/7.

In short, I have “been there,” to a place where you might consider going, or be evangelized into going. That is your decision, but I want you to read what I have written before you make that decision. I want you to read the thoughts and opinions of someone who loves you, who is concerned with your happiness, and who wants you to make your decision as an informed person, not out of fear, coercion and certainly not out of ignorance. The only thing I wish to gain is your happiness, peace of mind and a good life. As you will see, I think that you can define this for yourself and do not have to accept what has been prepackaged for you by various religions. This may take some courage on your part because religious belief is, as I also maintain, rooted in fear, fear of the unknown and, sometimes, you might feel that it is easier and safer to join the crowd than to go it alone. But you will also see that there are plenty of people with questioning, independent minds. You will not be alone.

I am not out to snatch your soul, or convert you to anything other than open-mindedness. As I have said, there are many big questions to which there are no knowable answers. Of these I cannot offer, as no one can, any proofs. But there are also many questions in religion and faith for which there are answers, different answers that are offered by scripture, revelation and outright myth. I will address both types of questions in the following pages. Since my essays on these topics have been written at different times and different moods you will find them ranging from satirical to angry. You will also find that I give the greatest part of my attention to the “faith of our fathers,” Roman Catholicism, because I was raised in that religion, and I as had the most profound effect upon me. But I probably will also offend (sometimes intentionally, I must admit) other religions as well, in my quest to be, as some might say, “ecumenical.”

You certainly have heard the adage that “knowledge is power.” It is, but so is ignorance a source of power. Ignorance often leads to fear, and fear, as we know, is the fundamental impetus to religious belief. This is not just some benign observation. Let me cite the instance of a circumstance that began right here in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the 1970s when a church called The People’s Temple was founded by a madman named Jim Jones. The details are all part of the historical record, but the end of this was that the rhetorically powerful and psychologically paranoid “Reverend” Jones eventually removed his flock to French Guiana where he got hundreds of them to commit mass suicide, some of them slitting the throats of their own children. This might seem shocking in the late 20th Century, but it is only one, a minor, example of the closeness of religious beliefs to delusion, madness and murder and mayhem throughout history. Do not underestimate the power of religious belief in the lives and behavior of some people and the blurry lines that they can draw between what they regard as “good” and “evil,” the authority they can arrogate to themselves to act on what they believe is “the will of God.” Religion is about power; never forget that. And your best defense against the sinister use of that power is knowledge.

Here I need to make an important distinction. My quibble is not so much with faith as it is with religion. Faith, I think, comes somewhat naturally to humans. I see it as somewhat primal, an urge to put some kind of “known” on the unknowable. So where there is a vacuum in knowledge, we seem to readily substitute belief. So, if somebody wants to believe that, say, rainfall is the saints crying, I don’t have a problem with that. Belief can come from that wonderful human capacity for imagination, and from the gift of narration, that enrich life. Believing in something can be comforting to some people. I, personally, like some of the stories that come out of belief, but they are not as satisfying as the joy of discovery, as enriching of life as real knowledge. I prefer realism to fantasy, knowledge to superstition, truth to faith. Let me be clear about one thing; I have no interest in trying to destroy anyone’s faith. Faith in a god is not a bad thing; it’s like when kids have imaginary friends. But people pushing their faith into other people’s face is not about faith, it’s about power, the power to control and exploit. Never forget that when somebody approaches you with a smarmy halleluiah smile, and a “Wow, have a got a great new God for you,” answer with Babo’s favorite epithet—Bahfungool! (4)

My quibble is with religion, which in some sense is the “business side of belief,” the economics of metaphysics. Religion happens when belief becomes codified and a “professional” class of intermediaries creates itself. This is when you get people who claim to talk directly to god or the gods, or who claim to have been “called” by their deities to reveal to you what God really wants you to do with your life, one aspect of which is to provide monetary and material support to these self-anointed priests, rabbis, gurus, pastors, lamas, shamans, and such. From the beginning of wonderment these types have squiggled themselves in between people and their beliefs the way a virus gets into a cell. And, as I will allege later on, they wedge their way in with fear. This fear can allow the virus to infiltrate every aspect of your being, body, mind, and they will allege, soul. If you allow it, they will own you, body mind and soul. It will control the way you think and act—out of fear.

But I am getting a little ahead of myself here, because I will elaborate this theme in many of the following pages. My purpose here is the distinction between faith and religion, because sometimes people use these terms interchangeably. As I wrote above, I have no problem when somebody believes that rainfall is the “saints crying.” My problem begins when another religion says that rainfall is the saints peeing. Even that doesn’t bother me much until one or both of these religions say that the other’s rainfall belief is blasphemous to their belief and sets about putting the others to the sword. You will recognize this human tendency runs wide and deep in our brief and sordid history. War has many causes, but religion trumps all others.

So, I am not out to destroy faith; I’m not even out to destroy religion, although I wish they would all just go away. We probably can’t be human without the first, but we could be better humans, I maintain, without the second. My intention is to be a cognitive antibody that takes on that fear-mongering virus, gives you a fighting chance to be your own person, to be curious rather than submissive, to use your own mind to search for truth. The packages (religions) are all out there and I don’t want you to ignore them. Look them over, because I believe that the more you do, with scrutiny and without fear, unafraid to laugh at their inherent silliness and their delusional liturgies, and you will see that none of them, not a single religion, from Animism to Zoroastrianism, knows anything, I mean anything in an epistemologically valid way, more than you do at this very moment. They made it all up!

If I can get you to open your mind to that starting point, I shall have done my job as your Babo. And, of course, a curse will be called down upon me, and I will not know salvation and be raised into the heavens at the “end times,” but and my evil seed will be cast to the depths where the incubus and succubus writhe and burn and . . . well, you get the idea; there are ways they try to frighten you. If it wasn’t so scary to some people, it would be funny. I hope I can show you the funny side, seriously. I will resort to it frequently in the pages to follow. Religion, you probably have already discovered, is not big on humor and laughter.
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©2008 Sebastian Gerard
1. If I recall correctly this is the requirement—under pain of mortal sin—that you make a confession and receive communion at least once a year. Or am I confusing that with the requirement that you not bite the ears off your chocolate bunny until the angel has rolled back the stone on Jesus’s tomb?
2. A boring exegesis by Carlos Casteneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1985)
3. Erhard Seminars Training, a scam conceived by a guy named Jack Rosenberg who changed his name to Werner Erhard.
4. Actually, this is an Italian-American ghetto bastardization of the Italian va fa en cul. Literally, it means “go shove it.” Accent on the last syllable.