Sunday Open Thread — September 2, 2007

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

The Next War of Independence: Natural Community, Natural Enterprise, Natural Economy: The Germans didn’t know they lived in a fascist state until they had been living under it for years. The world didn’t know they were in the Great Depression until it was half over. Since 9/11, Americans have slid the last few steps into a corporatist aristocracy — a corpocracy — and most of them don’t realize it, or how difficult it will be to get out of it. It controls the US economy (you can either work obediently for a large corporation that is part of an industry-controlling oligopoly, or you can struggle on the Edge of that economy). It controls the two-party Tweedledum Tweedledee political hegemony, complete with gerrymandering, vote-machine rigging, and repression of minority voting rights. It controls the land and what it can and cannot be used for. It dictates how, and often where, you must live. It controls the money and tax systems, which it uses to bail out corporate criminals (like usurous mortgage lenders) and to punish the poor and disobedient (like the victims of those lenders). All of the additional wealth created in the last generation has accrued to it. It controls the mainstream media and the education system, both propaganda machines designed to dumb us down so we don’t realize what has happened to us. Most Americans don’t realize that Orwell’s 1984 has finally arrived, so slowly and imperceptibly that few noticed. Slavery (the ‘right’ to work three mind-numbing, degrading jobs at exploitative oligopoly corporations like McDonalds) truly is now ‘freedom’, worth bombing to oblivion and then occupying every resource-rich nation that doesn’t bow to the corpocracy’s will. The corrupt elite of most of the world’s struggling nations have been bought off to stoke the resource needs of the corpocracy, and ‘free’ trade and buy-out of richer nations’ (like Canada’s) resources and politicians means global domination is within reach. This is much like the situation that led to the war of independence. Could it happen again? How might we take back our land, our civil freedoms, our self-government, our economy?

The Impatient Listener: I’ve learned to be a better listener when there’s something worth listening to. But I have trouble listening to vapid or ignorant conversation, and it shows. What to do?

Book Reviews: Ecoholic: Your Guide to Environmentally Friendly Products, by Adria Vasil, and The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Starting this week, this blog will feature 30-minute conversations, initially on the subject of “What is your model of a better way to live, and what capacities do we need to develop or re-learn to live that way?”

Open Thread Question:

How can we convince our neighbours to let us renaturalize our land (despite the fact that, for awhile, like badly cut hair growing out, it willlook dreadful) — and then persuade them to renaturalize theirs too?