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Two Good Posts and Threads from CommonDreams.org which include comments and replies to comments from . . . me

Why We Must Tell the Truth About Torture

and

Harvey Wasserman on Tom Friedman, the one with the best back and forth between me and others.

A Call to Cowardice

My parents, now in their late 80s, are still incapable of understanding why I am ashamed of going into the Army in 1965. They don’t get it when I say that, if I had had the courage, what I would have done is stand tall and say, “Hell, yes; I’m a coward and proud to be one; I ain’t going.” Well, I was lucky. I spent 3 years in the Army during the Vietnam war, all stateside. Order were cut sending me over 3 times, but a fortuitous combination of luck and playing the system kept me out of harm's way (though no one in the military is ever completely out of harm's way).

Because I was against the war from the beginning, I used to seek out those who had just returned, take them out drinking, and listen to their stories. Believe me, a true picture of the Vietnam war has never been written or filmed. They all fall short. Some of the stories I heard were so nighmarishly sick and sickenly hilarious that they surpassed even my ability to grok them — and that takes some doing.

For anyone who wants to hear the case for heroic cowardice made convincingly, I recommend the movie “The Americanization of Emily” with James Garner and Julie Andrews (yes, Mary Poppins). It has a strong Paddy Cheyevsky (however the hell that’s spelled) script, one of his fiercest, and makes the case for saying it loud I’m scared and proud better than anyone has before or since. It’s on DVD now, after years of being unavailable. I highly recommend it.

The Cost of Costco -- Big Box Shopping

Even though Costco represents everything I hate and am against, even though it is in many ways a nightmare of consumerism on psychotic steroids – my wife and I go about once a month and I enjoy the experience. She believes, with some evidentiary support, that Mangosteen juice is beneficial to our health, and Costco is the only way we can get it without complicated on-line shipping arrangements (it can’t be “grown locally”). I get a kick out of the hour or so that I spend at Costco.

First off, I like the food samples with their immigrant women employed to prepare the samples and say, “Come and try, come and buy” – in some cases, perhaps the only English words they know. I sample everything and will unashamedly return for seconds if I like what I’m tasting. It serves as my brunch for that day.

I’m fascinated by the enormous portion sizes of the products available for purchase. We don’t own a car, so we have to shop so as not to exceed our carrying capacity. The bus ride back and forth is pretty much a straight shot, but we still have to be careful not to buy more than we can haul by hand. We are invariably the people in the line with the fewest purchases. Everyone else has their oversized shopping carts filled with huge packages of products which they will then haul down to their cars and drive home. I sometimes expect the checkers to say, “You folks can’t buy that little; get with the program,” but of course, they don’t.

We live in a city with a large immigrant population (why be coy; we live in San Francisco) and a large majority of the people shopping at Costco with us are foreign born. It’s almost like visiting the Grand Canyon – hearing every imaginable language being spoken, a product-stocked tower of Babel. And I can’t blame them for shopping at Costco. Considering the level of deprivation that they have emigrated from, it must seem like an overwhelming heaven of abundance to be able to buy huge quantities of consumer goods, and feel like they’re saving money and being smart shoppers in the process. They may have heard about global warming but concepts like peak oil are not part of their knowledge base. They are not informed enough to understand the complexities of how the manufacturing and shipping of goods to places like Costco and the other big box stores contributes to the process. Can we really ask or expect them to spend more money to buy smaller quantities grown locally so they can be “ecologically correct”?

People who criticize people who shop at Costco (and Wallmart, and Target etc., etc., etc.) do come across as elitist. Expecting “regular” folks to “get it” is unrealistic. Of course Wallmart is a bad employer and a company that spoils towns by driving business out of business through undercutting prices. We know that, but we can’t blame folks who don’t read blogs and follow current events and study the issues to do the same. They’re too busy trying to get by and asking them to forego cheap prices on principle will get nowhere.

The big box stores will go out of business if and when (I’m betting on when) gas prices and shortages make shipping the products to the stores no longer cost effective and profitable. I wonder what will become of the buildings if and when that happens. The fact that a lot of liberals and progressives disapprove of people shopping there will have no affect on the ultimate destiny of these weird and fascinating institutions.

A Terrifying Truth (article & my comment)

A Terrifying Truth by David Lindhoff, from Common Dreams 4/11/07
My comment, abridged:

To those who ask if we're doomed, my answer is: Basically, yes.

It has been thus for years. Thirty seven years ago I was expecting civilization to crash in an ecological crisis — many of us so-called “hippies” believed that. We wanted to create a new culture and transform society (the plan was to create new culture and seduce the baby boomers (then acutal babies)out from under what we then called “the establishment” — good plan; didn’t work, obviously), but only the dreamiest flower children among us believed we had a real big chance of succeeding. We had to give it a try because it was the only thing we could think of to do. In those days, when I was young, I expected the big crash to happen any second — that was the source of my hippiethink: “the future is just a fantasy trip in your head, man; now is the only reality.” Well, the big crash went on for decades without ever happening and I began to suspect I had been wrong. Maybe I should have planned for the future like all those believer-consumers who believed there was going to be one. Now I’m about to turn 62 and am a few years away from retiring with a pension that may or may not be there (see the many articles on Common Dreams about oncoming financial catatrophe), into a world where everyone who is surviving will be so busy scrambling to hang on with no time or place for compassion for “the elderly” — i.e., me and my wife.

Kurt Vonnegut, many years ago, said “Things are going to get worse and never get better again” and that’s obviously what’s happening. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t try to do what they can to reverse the situation. To give up and say, “Screw it; we’re doomed” ensures that the day can’t be saved. My tagline as Paranoid Pessimist is “I hope I’m wrong, but … ” And I do. I take no joy in what’s happening (some who think along my lines seem to, seem to have a “serves humanity right” attitude). I hope that everyone gets their act together, starts working for the common human good, uses the entirety of human imagination and innovative abilities to devise exciting solutions to all these problems, that a wave of compassion for the less fortunate (an essential component of “saving the day”) sweeps through humanity leading to a golden age. I’ll do what little I can to guide things in that direction, though no one ever listens to me (I’m a voice laughing in the wilderness).

What I can do is try to face the future with as cheerful an attitude as I can manage and try to be a pessimistic positivist, face reality without being done in by it, have hope for the future despite all the evidence that there isn’t going to be one. A challenge, but, hey, that’s what they say being human is all about. So I restart up my blog even though, when it was active, no one ever sent me a comment.

So I shall issue a challenge to humanity (like it needs one from me, or cares: Prove me wrong! Turn things around! Find solutions!