Nowhere is this all too human tendency more evident than in deniers of crisis. We would rather bury our heads in the sand than believe a catastrophe is imminent. Every time a tyrant has plunged his people into horrific oppression or a megalomaniac has launched a brutal war against his neighbours in the quest of global dominion, thousands of normally bright, responsible people have shrugged it off as an exaggeration, an overstatement, a misrepresentation. “No one could ever treat their people as badly as some allege Stalin is doing”; “No one has anything to fear from Joe McCarthy unless they’re done something illegal.” “It’s just a correction, the market will bounce back by 1930″, We were tacitly complicit in the atrocities of Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and now in Darfur because we just didn’t, and don’t, want to know how bad it is. It’s upsetting, it’s overwhelming, and it doesn’t jibe with our parochial, rosy view of human nature. For every chance to avert catastrophe with prompt and decisive action, there have been armies of deniers, “do-nothing” advocates, tellers of Chicken Little stories, working furiously to thwart action, usually successfully.

One of the latest examples of this phenomenon has been the denial of global warming and the rise of so-called ’skeptical environmentalists’ (not actually environmentalists at all, but shills for corporatist mega-polluters, dupes and paid lackeys for others with a vested interest in sweeping environmental problems under the rug). There is a huge and organized effort underway to try to play into our desire to be seduced by false comforts on the environment. It is well bankrolled and very successful. And the media play along witlessly: Far be it for them to report on an issue the public apparently doesn’t want to hear about.

In a recent article in the Guardian entitled Junk Science, George Monbiot shows exactly how it works. Please read this article in its entirety. Here’s the punchline:

The dupes in this case include UK botanist David Bellamy (influential president of the Conservation Foundation, the Wildlife Trusts, Plantlife International and the British Naturalistsí Association), as well as New Scientist magazine and the Washington Post. The ’sources’ of the data allegedly counter-indicating global warming include a huckster architect self-promoting a book on a new ice age, and wacko conspiracy theorist, hate-monger and US wingnut presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche. Once a few ‘respectable’ dupes have been set up, the corporatist spin machine goes into overdrive, citing and reciting them, until the virus has spread so far that attempts to attack it are fruitless.

The neocon Bush administration has purged itself of responsible scientists and replaced them with deniers, an essential prerequisite to maintaining ‘plausible deniability’. A recent survey by UCS indicates that new corporatist bosses in environment branches of US government are ordering employees to falsify and suppress reports and ignore regulations to sustain this deniability. This is nothing more than cynical exploitation of the public’s desire not to know.

And meanwhile, corporatist mega-polluters like the huge Koch Industries (the second largest private corporation in the US) use puppet think-tanks, lobbying and huge campaign donations to get their massive environmental crimes settled out of court without criminal charges, and to get the environmental laws they routinely violate overturned, or at least unenforced. These crimes involve hundreds of cases of poisoning of our water and our air with tons of carcinogens and toxins, and the subversion of laws and justice that would put these criminals behind bars where they belong.

Never heard of Koch? That’s OK, you don’t want to know. And corporatist shills (you don’t want to know who’s behind them, and they won’t tell you who they are) will tell you that it’s all right, these chemicals aren’t really bad for you, and they have just the junk science to support their claims. Don’t you feel better now?

Cartoon by Tom Toles in the Washington Post

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UK MP George Galloway Rips Congress: Read the full transcript of the remarks by the guy who testified in his own defence against the accusing US Senate Committee on Homeland Security, remarks that were so devastating to this bunch of witch-hunting, bullying clowns that they have been pulled from the official Congressional record. You tell ‘em, George. Thanks to Cyndy for tracking this story: Here’s her link to an interview with Galloway by Thom Hartmann.

Empowering Citizens With Film: The illustrious Canadian National Film Board has a new program,  CitizenShift, to encourage and enable documentary and investigative film projects by ordinary citizens. It’s supported by a comprehensive online site with many excerpts from films made under the auspices of the program.

Reforming Education: Capitalizing on the success of some recent documentary features and the power of the visual media, a group of filmmakers is working with esteemed education critic John Taylor Gatto to make a damning and enlightening 6-hour documentary on formalized Western education, with a bold prescription for its long-overdue reformation.

Explaining the Red-Blue State Gap: US Conservative journalist Steve Sailer has written a fascinating series of articles on the demographic differences between red and blue states, and why those differences allow Republicans to win so many elections. The articles (Baby Gap, Marriage Gap, Mortgage Gap and Real Estate Gap) are supported by extensive statistical data. Sailer maps out a program for his beloved Bush that includes a strong anti-immigration and anti-environment platform, piping Canadian water in to make the US plains more ‘habitable’, and encouraging younger marriage and more babies. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

Rediscovering Oscar Wilde: I read The Importance of Being Earnest in high school, but only recently became aware of how many popular expressions (the one I used the other day, “nothing succeeds like excess” and “a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” among them) were penned by Wilde during his short (he died at 46) tumultuous life.. Since then I’ve discovered these Wilde gems (remember many of these are tongue-in-cheek, and they’re all more than a century old):

• Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
• Biography lends to death a new terror.
• Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
• I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live.
• Imagination is given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humour to console him for what he is.
• The problem with conversation is that the clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.
  
• A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
• One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.
• Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
• The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.
• Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
• Each time one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.
• Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
• Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.
• As soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.
• Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
• A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
• How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?
• A pessimist is one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
• It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
• Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
• I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
• One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

Cartoon by Wiley Miller from the wonderful strip Non-Sequitur.

Lakoff also explains why an appreciation of different frames is actually comforting (instead of seeing those with opposite perspectives as stupid or irrational, you start to understand where they’re coming from, and, sometimes, you get a better understanding of where you’re coming from). I worried out loud about our human propensity (a) to be seduced by false comforts and (b) to believe what we have ‘come to believe’ even in the face of overwhelming evidence of its absurdity. Such is our ability to filter out what doesn’t jibe with our preconceptions.

In the same article, I referred to Frances Moore LappÈ’s GNN essay espousing the need to move away entirely from ‘nuclear family’ frames (conservative = strict father; progressive = nurturing parent), and the need for progressives to acknowledge neocons’ willingness to use blatant lies, deception, fear-mongering and emotional coercion to meet their ends, rendering mere ‘re-framing’ an inadequate progressive response to conservative assaults on citizens’ opinions. I expressed my view that she was right, but that her (re-)frames were unsatisfying because they weren’t intuitive, visceral and engaging enough. And her argument about the ‘unethical’ nature of conservative tactics struck me as ‘crying foul’ just because the other team wasn’t playing by your rules — when the battle over public opinion has never been constrained by either principles like fairness, or accepted ‘rules’.

I recently re-read that essay, which was entitled Time for Progressives to Grow Up in light of events of the last few months, and realized I missed some of her points. She describes the neocons’ “ends-justify-means, destroy-the-enemy approach”, a brutal, manipulative and over-reaching strategy that is abhorrent to most of us of all political stripes, but the point is that it works. Killing the guy who seduced your daughter may not be legal or ethical, but it sure is effective. And that ferocity is the signature of the neocons’ high-adrenaline campaign to win the hearts and minds of the world at any cost, and is increasingly being used by conservatives outside the US as well.

LappÈ also makes the point that progressives need to call neocons to account for such extremist tactics, but warns this is difficult to do without “making those who have been manipulated feel ridiculed and put down”. This difficulty, and progressives’ reluctance to fight fire with fire (by using lies and manipulation proactively themselves) is precisely what the neocons are counting on. When such tactics are used by extremists from any side, moderation, civility, consensus, rationality and the truth always lose out. The neocons have learned this lesson from the successes of terrorists and warmongers since the dawn of civilization. Such provocation always leads to hysteria and/or escalation — and the triumph of extremism over moderation. As Oscar Wilde said, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

Is there anything that can be done to counter this tactic effectively, and to keep things reasonable? Take a look at the situation in the Middle East or Ireland and you’ll find your answer: As soon as reason and moderation look like they might win the day, all it takes is one extremist act to nullify a generation of diplomacy and reasoned negotiation. We are at heart emotional creatures more than rational ones, and passion can always trump reason. I recently argued that this passion might just push the US over the line to totalitarianism — it’s happened often to democracies before, sometimes improbably. The only answer, I believe, is to devolve and dilute power, take it away from hierarchies and move it to communities, so that no extremist group can ever accumulate so much of it that they can use it to hold a nation hostage to its own emotions, which is the situation the US currently finds itself in. You don’t defuse a barroom brawl by pleading for civility, you arrest it by taking away the antagonists’ ability to fight.

That takes me back to LappÈ’s other quibble with Lakoff — the use of nuclear family metaphors to contrast frames. She argues for a new, broader frame of Strong Communities:

Regular readers of How to Save the World know of my passion for communities, and I do believe this is a psychological improvement over ‘nurturing parent’. And LappÈ does provide a host of examples that suggest there is a great appetite for moving much more human activity and authority (and hence power) to the community level from the state level (and to some extent even from the family level, at least for those who appreciate “it takes a village to raise a child”). Both conservatives and progressives share a loathing for hierarchy and bureaucracy, although they see them through very different frames.

But as I noted in my earlier article, in fairness to Lakoff, he suggests progressives use precisely these community-based re-framings to further appreciation and support for the ‘nurturing parent’ cause; nurturing parents, I suspect he would argue, instinctively ‘get’ the value of community in supporting the learning, nurturing, responsibility to all, and egalitarianism that are so dear to the progressive movement.

And the term ‘community’ does not (yet at least) mean the same thing, or as much, to many of our planet’s citizens as it does to us, who see its value in social networks, global communications, self-governance, ecological thinking, citizen boards and open source. To most of the world, especially those on the other side of the digital divide, community may more likely mean claustrophobic small towns, violence-obsessed neighbourhoods, dying farm villages, ghettos (of different types), despair and even tyranny (from warlords or tin-pot community dictators).

So I don’t think we’ve yet found the right frame that will bridge the chasm that extremists and isolation have opened up between conservatives and progressives. As much as LappÈ might want us to choose an ‘adult’ metaphor, I suspect that the best bridging metaphor might be another family one: Legacy for Our Children. The fact that 90% of the inhabitants of this planet want an average of 2.8 children each threatens us with extinction. But it also ensures that creating a healthy, happy world for those children is an issue almost everyone, of every political stripe, really believes in and can agree upon. And most importantly, it provides a platform for dialogue that is as close to ‘frame-neutral’ as we could hope to find.

Most gatherer-hunter cultures do not lay a guilt trip on their members at the moment of death, acknowledging that for every creature, both the body and the spirit are recycled in some way when we die. Death is acknowledged as part of the cycle, and is not cause for undue mourning or moralizing. Death, and the recently dead, are treated with great respect, and survivors honour the dead not by endless grieving but by living a full life.

Our culture takes a much more cowardly and perverse approach to teaching us about death. On the one hand, our ‘entertainment media’ bombard us with thousands, even millions of images of death, almost all of them ‘bad guys’ who deserved to die. This is a depraved way of numbing us to the importance and sacred nature of life and the arbitrariness of death, and overlaying it with a fake morality. When we witness thousands of fake deaths, almost all ‘deserved’, how are we expected to react when we see one in real life, generally undeserved? We are simply incapable of handling it, or processing it. Our ‘trained’ reaction is that it’s unfair, wrong, that only the bad die, so this must be some kind of terrible mistake. Instead of acceptance, then, we respond with anger, we want vengeance, someone to blame.

Modern organized religions cruelly exploit death to extend their power over their brainwashed members. If you lived a bad life, as assessed by some ‘higher judge’, you are condemned to an eternity of pain and anguish. If you fail to get last rites you cannot be admitted to heaven. When someone bad dies, it is divine will, and everyone else who misbehaves or doesn’t abide by the one true religion had better watch out. When someone good dies, it is because they were too good for mere mortal humans, so they were called to a divine purpose in heaven — No chance for a ‘put-down’ of those left behind is ever missed. And worst of all, we are told that all those who died are eternally watching us, passing judgement on everything we do. Death is not treated as an intrinsic part of the wondrous cycle of life, it is judgement day. And religious services encourage us to wallow in grief: The body is prettied up and displayed to a crowd who are encouraged to get as worked up as possible in their grief while some priest explains the ‘meaning’ of death. Then people are asked to come up and tell stories about the deceased until they break down. Finally, the body must be buried intact, wasting valuable land for pomp and ritual and depriving waiting patients and science of organs and cadavers that could save other lives. This, according to organized religion, is how we ‘respect’ the dead. Don’t let these leeches get their hands on my body.

And if we dare try to end a life when medical science can possibly extend it, even if that life is full of constant anguish and suffering, even when life has effectively ended (as in the brain-dead), organized religion and organized government rush in and prohibit us from doing so.

We may see millions of fake deaths on film, but our culture doesn’t want us to see any real death. Governments and the media are complicit in not allowing us to see the deadly consequences of our wars and acts of violence: No pictures of dead and dismembered Iraqi children lying in the rubble of aerial raids can be shown to the home audience. Even pictures of flag-draped coffins containing our own dead troops are forbidden. Those who have the temerity to die outside of the hospital or the nursing home are rushed to the morgue before anyone can see them.

The combination of this obsession, moralizing, denial, ignorance and exploitation of death only serves to increase the fear and trauma we feel when we actually encounter it. But if we just spent a short time thinking critically about it, talking to one another about it, and learning from nature, we could liberate ourselves from death’s exploiters and reduce its fear and trauma to us, and show a lot more genuine respect for the dead in the process. If we did that, except for those hopelessly under the control of organized religion, we would probably do the following:

1. Prepare a living will for ourselves and encourage our loved ones to have one as well, to ensure that no extraordinary or grotesque measures can be taken by doctors or politicians or religious freaks to keep us alive against our will.
2. Complete an organ and full-body donor form so that on our death our bodies are able to be used to make others’ lives better, and not become part of the human body landfill sites called cemeteries.
3. Work to expand right-to-die and right to assisted suicide legislation.
4. Talk with friends and family (especially children) about the simple truth of death and the folly of allowing it to be handled by exploiters and fear-mongers. Strongly discourage loved-ones from holding large, circus-like funeral and memorial events, and encourage instead simple, short, private and individually-selected acts of remembrance.
5. Refuse to patronize films and television programs and video games that trivialize and moralize death and violence (in action films, it’s usually the evil-doers that die, painfully; in horror films it’s usually the sexually promiscuous).
6. Patronize media that refuse to censor (or self-censor) information and images of death. War is only possible when the citizens who accede to it cannot see its ghastly consequences. This isn’t sensationalism, it’s telling the truth.
7. Use our new and fearless knowledge of death to inspire us to live our lives to the fullest, instead of allowing our ignorance of it to be exploited to repress us.

Photo from The Memory Hole

What happened to these people when they grew up? Talk to young people and they almost all would prefer if life were free of dress codes and uniforms. Is this really just “a phase they’re going through”. Or do we really get inculcated with the conformist propaganda of our culture as we get older, and go from being part of the solution to part of the problem? And is there perhaps a bit of jealousy involved (”I have to/had to wear a uniform so it’s only fair everyone else should too”)?

The official propaganda from the US Government is that uniforms for schoolchildren improve discipline and concentration and reduce violence, theft, and peer pressure, and also ‘red flag’ outsiders and gang members. There is absolutely no compelling evidence for this claim (and even some striking evidence to the contrary), so why would the government make such claims? Because they want their citizens to be obedient, passive, and as much alike as possible. This is why the military demands uniforms, taken to an extreme degree, even though varied attire would be harder for enemy troops to spot. Employers, of course, want the same thing. So, I suspect, do a lot of parents.

What is the matter with us that we don’t see uniforms and dress codes for what they are: An attack on our freedom and individuality, an attempt to make us conform and behave as much alike as possible, to be as much alike as possible? It shows how perceptive ee cummings was when he wrote: