This story still makes me laugh, and more than that – it illuminates something for me , in the way that good stories do, shines a light on a corner that was a little dark for me whenever I peered into it. EAP’s photography editor, Bob Irwin, told it to me. And it really seems to me to be about…well, you see what you think it’s about, if you think it’s about anything at all.

A mutual friend of ours, an American leftist who has long lived in the UK, has been thinking about moving house. Anxious about this, as you usually are, she was talking over the possibilities with Bob, who said, “Why don’t you get one of those statues of St. Joseph and bury it upside down in the garden?”

(“What?” I said. “Oh,” he said. “You never heard of that? St. Joseph as the patron saint of moving house? You bury the statue and say a prayer? Maybe it’s just Italian Catholics, I don’t know.”)

“Anyway,” Bob went on. “You know how she answered.”
(Of course I did. Atheism is a kind of fundamentalist religion in the UK, I’ve noticed. Maybe it is in the US, too, but for some reason it doesn’t come up in conversation as much.)

“So she told me it was superstitious and ridiculous, and etc. Okay. A few days later, though, she calls me and says it actually sounds funny and kind of charming, and can I get her one of those St. Joseph statues?”

(“Don’t they sell them in the UK?” “Apparently not in Scotland. Too popish.” “Oh.”)

“Now, I’m thinking, oh, forget it, I’m not getting involved in THIS, but then one day I’m in some store, and there are shelves and shelves of these things – of these St. Joseph’s statues. The lady in the shop tells me they’re flying off the shelves, because, I mean, you know what the real estate situation is in San Francisco right now, people are burying them in their backyards right and left to try and get help selling their houses.”

(At this point we had to stop for a minute. Both of us were shouting with delight. San Francisco is the city of both Bob’s and my birth, we were both raised Catholic there, and any detail like this has a nostalgic charm and humor for us that may be hard to share with someone who wasn’t.)

“So I buy one and I send it to my friend. And she gets it, and she calls me, and she’s all pleased, and says thank you, and all.”

“So what happened then?”

“A few days later I call and ask if she buried it. But she hadn’t buried it yet.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” Bob said. “She said she was worried it would work too fast.”

There’s this fake dichotomy that drives me a little nuts, a kind of assumption that there’s an irreconcilable split between personal autonomy and social responsibility. More simply put, that the individual’s rights automatically are in conflict with those of the community. As if one is exclusive of the other, as if the two are in an inevitable war. Instead of what is actually the truth, which is that the latter springs from the former, that you can’t HAVE social responsibility and authentic communal action unless among free, autonomous, informed individuals.

With this fake split (watch for it, you’ll spot it even in dinner party conversation, let alone in the media), you get two ineffectual kinds of citizens. First you get – and we all know examples of these – those grindingly miserable “Me Generation” types who can’t find a way out of their own little bung of self…since the only authentic way out is to connect with their fellows. And then at the other extreme you get the types who give up all their own desires – and therefore their own autonomy – their own meaning, their own personhood, for the “good” of “all.” (Or in order to go to heaven, or to be a good girl or boy, or a good Democrat, or a good Republican, or, or, or…all the same thing.) Equally painful, sterile, dead.

The two – individual autonomy and communal action – have to go together, in partnership, hand in hand. The two working together come up with solutions that one side would never find on its own. And this is always true in any partnership. One side acting through suppression or repression of the other will never be as creative as when both sides are free to act together and find another way. And the people who think that to encourage personal autonomy in all citizens is dangerous (there are lots of people like that), the people who oppose the ideal of personal autonomy for every individual as being too dangerous to the polity, those people are the ones who secretly mistrust themselves, and project that mistrust onto the “masses.” It’s those people – or, rather, their point of view, that’s the enemy. Not the idea of the individual. The idea of the individual versus the community is an idea whose time has come and gone. These days, it’s individuals making up the community, so those individual units had better be as informed, engaged, and creative as they can be, because if they aren’t, the community they form is going to go belly up.

A few years ago, you may or may not remember, Macintosh ran an ad campaign that was thought to be cutting edge: big pictures of cultural “heroes,” who urged us to “Think Outside the Box.” These were pictures of people like Einstein, Picasso, and – I can’t remember if this one ever came off or if they just negotiated with Yoko Ono about it – John Lennon.

Anyway, in the midst of this expensive blitz, one night at a pleasant upper middle class bohemian dinner party, I sat next to a young and very hip professional. She mentioned these ads – I can’t remember why, but it was with enthusiasm. I was rather taken aback by this, and said that it was a foul thing that a corporation should use images and meanings that were important to me as an artist and a human being to sell some crummy product. She was shocked. Really shocked.

She gave a quick intake of breath. “Oh!” she said, and made a gesture as if she was pushing me away. “But you have to allow Macintosh the ability to compete with Microsoft!”

Even more startled, I said, “Why? Why do I have to do anything for a corporation?” I wasn’t trying to be funny or ironic, I really wanted to know. It was fascinating. But my dinner companion just gave me a dazed look, like that was too stupid a question to even answer, and tried to change the subject.

I was kind – or rather, I thought I was being kind – and I let her. I think now I shouldn’t let those things go out of a misplaced desire to get along and be liked. At the time, though, I didn’t quite realize how much this kind of rot had set into the thinking of most people I know. Two kinds of rot, intimately related. First, the confusion of corporations, or any powerful grouping, with actual living breathing individual human beings. That’s bad enough, but it’s not the worst. The second is even more insidious and leads even more to a paralysis of the social will. And that is: the identification of oneself with something or someone perceived as more powerful.

Now where this gets particularly insidious is when the powerful one represents itself as the Underdog. As the marginal artist. As the persecuted one. Then the temptation is to throw yourself into identification with him/her/it with the kind of self-righteousness you can feel for sticking up for the ‘losing’ side. Only the side’s not losing. The side’s not losing. It’s a shell game. When we feel good because we buy a Mac instead of a PC, or an album by Bono rather than by Phil Collins, or because we’re voting for some underdog millionaire Democrat over another millionaire Democrat who wears a tux, we’re essentially fooling ourselves. And betraying reality, too. Which denial, it seems to me, is not going to come to a good end.

Of course, the way our cultural stories go, there is, in every situation, a winner and a loser. Winners are usually evidenced by the amount of money we make. (Another cultural story: “The marketplace determines value.”) But at the same time, we love the Underdog. Only it has to be an Underdog who makes a lot of money as well. That way, it’s safe. Of course, there are a lot of contortions then on the part of rich and celebrated people, and the corporations they represent, looking to make even more money off their images, which are very entertaining, if depressing, to watch. (Helpful hints: if they’re featured in a GAP ad, they are not a real Underdog. If they use their children, or, worse, adopted children to give them credibility they are definitely not.)

We are trained, from childhood, to be desperately afraid of being a loser. To be a loser is not just to lose prestige among our fellows, but it’s followed by an even more fundamental punishment: losing one’s place at the trough. Losers don’t get money, they don’t get perks, they don’t get the admiration and envy of their fellows. Losers starve. Tough gig. If there’s one thing we don’t want to be, when we grow up, it’s one of them.

Of course, if you look at history, it’s those very same losers who were the ones who came up with the new ideas and pushed things forward. It’s hard to remember, now that he’s enthroned on every sort of calendar, greeting card, and political campaign, that Jesus was a total loser in his day. A Jew. A carpenter. A madman. No, you had to be pretty desperate to hang out with Jesus in those days. Macintosh would have shuddered at the idea of using him for some hip ad. He had to be safely dead for a few hundred years before the loser taint wore off – and then it was mainly because a soldier/emperor decided praying to him was better for winning battles than praying to that tired old sun god of the other side.

Then there’s William Blake. If you can feel any empathy for people long dead, and you read the contemptuous letters about his work written by some off the most successful artists of his day (men whose names you wouldn’t recognize), you will feel very bad for William Blake. Or Prince Kropotkin. Loser. Anarchists are always losers, even if what they have to say is very sensible and, if acted on, would probably make a nicer society than the one we have now. Or any of the early suffragette feminists. Losers. AND girls. Can’t get much worse than that.

So we all know this, don’t we, because that’s another cultural story (“follow your own truth and you’ll reap the reward”). But the cold reality of it – that the only reward you generally get for following your own truth and eyeing reality as clearly as you can – is the sheer pleasure of the creativity of that path. You’re not going to get any thanks from anyone else, so that better be enough of a reward for you.

But if it’s not – or if you’re too afraid to try and see – that leaves you with a bad conscience. And that conscience gives you all sorts of little twinges, which you try to protect against by identifying with someone or something that will protect you from all that pain. Preferably someone or something considered cutting edge, hip, comfortably marginal but not so marginal that it’s annoying to anyone who would vote for Hillary Clinton — independent but with a trust fund, if you know what I mean. Then there’s no risk.

Only problem is then, if you’ve gone that route, you’re going to be made very, very uncomfortable by anyone who did think outside that particular box. And you’re going to blame them for your discomfort. Next thing you know, you’re out there with the rest of them shouting, “Barrabas! Give us Barrabas!” And “Crucify him!” Because he’s a loser, after all, and the kind of person you really admire is that nice provincial Roman magistrate who protests that he, and not those guys getting all the honors in the capital city, is really on your side, the side of the disaffected, the side of the small. And anyway, that Pontius Pilate’s such a nice guy, didn’t he ask us, the little people, which prisoner we wanted dead, and if that Jesus guy is giving him any trouble, doesn’t that just prove he’s got to go?

I think those stories we tell ourselves about winners and losers, and about the need to compete, and about how someone’s got to be on top and someone else on the bottom, I think that’s what’s got to go. Just look where it’s gotten us, that story. We’ve ended up with a completely ridiculous and impossible story, that everyone can be rich if they try. But there’s no such thing as someone rich without someone poor. You can’t have a winner without a loser. What if instead we saved our scorn for the person who wasted their own talents and threw away their souls on worshiping someone or something more powerful than they, rather than working on their own power and helping the people around them to do the same? Now that would be the kind of story I could get behind. Although it wouldn’t do much for the corporate bottom-line.

Our old dog died last week, gallantly and slowly, but surely, on our front deck. He was old, but this last degeneration happened suddenly, like he just opened a chute door and fell down in a stunned heap at the foot of it. For a few days, he tried to fight it and pretend it wasn’t happening, but then the reality of it hit his body and he fell back into it. Back and forth for awhile. We didn’t know it was the end of the road until when he stopped eating. He was perfectly courteous about refusing anything offered him, but very firm. So then we knew it was time to concentrate on making him comfortable and keeping him company till the inevitable end. And when it was obvious he was tired and it was time to go, we sat with him and told him we loved him and told him goodbye.

He had a happy life, and his death was, in a way, happy too – if you can say a death can be happy. How many of us get to die at home, out on a warm spring day, with all of our loved ones next to us saying goodbye?

What’s struck me through this whole process of a kind of pendulum swing between life and death was the everydayness of it. During the day, the old dog lay outside on the deck, in the same spot he used in his sentinel duty. During the night, we brought him inside so he could lie on the same spot where he always liked best to sleep. Sometimes he was alert, sometimes not. Sometimes he was irritable, and sometimes he smiled faintly, and sniffed the air, as if he was smelling something familiar and good. Sometimes he seemed to be with us in his regular way, and sometimes he was in another world. But it was all very every day.

It’s the same with the way we both grieve for him. Some days the sadness about it is a tight belt around your ribcage, that feels like it’s pulling tighter and tighter, and then it ends in a few tears that pass off like a sun shower. Some days we laugh a lot about things the old dog said or had done since he was a puppy, and some days we don’t talk about him at all. Some days we talk about death, and about all the dear friends we have who are deathly ill right now, and about what it means. But it doesn’t mean anything but the everydayness of it. Which is the most important thing of all. They lie, the forces that tell us the transcendent is more important than the everyday. The most important thing about death is not that it transcends anything else, but that it happens. By which I mean, the most important thing about it, and the only thing you can say for sure, is that it does happen, that it happens to all of us and to all of our loved ones, and that there’s not much to be said in the face of it, not many words that mean much, anyway, that the only thing to be done is to continue in the everyday in the face of it: continue caring and being kind, continue wondering at it, continue saying good morning and good night and I love you and thank you and would you like something to eat now or would you rather wait? Those kind of things.

And the funny thing is that that everydayness, if clung to stubbornly moment to moment, has a meaning that seems to me to go past the personal into the general: into one’s engagement with the community, and with the political, too. Because sometimes I feel like the culture we’ve created for ourselves is one huge, brightly lit, overheated circus tent where spectacle after brilliant, overwrought spectacle takes place in exhausting sequence and profusion. All of this while real life goes on quietly outside, in the dark somewhere: people eating together, someone drinking a glass of water, a dog dying. And I feel like I just have to get out of that tent and get back out into the cool spring air where life is really going on outside.

or Another Weekend With My Conservative Relatives

A few days at the Washington D.C. Independent Film Festival convinced me once again – as if I needed convincing – that the split between Democrats and Republicans is an illusion. The real split, of course, is between careerist, no-nothing twats and intelligent, thinking people. A trip to Capitol Hill with some other filmmakers to meet with a few Congressional aides in a back room somewhere underlined this split. The Democrat aides – Alex swears one of them introduced herself as the aide to “the Congresswoman from Sony,” but I think he must have misheard – had absolutely no conception of what the interests of the filmmakers actually were, or of what real life problems might actually exist for them. In fact, real life didn’t seem to exist for these guys at all – you got the impression they were so busy running up and down the corridors of power looking and feeling important that they really had no time to let any other information penetrate

The Aide to the Congresswoman from Sony came in just as the rest of us were having a spirited discussion about the need to reform copyright law. (As one of us put it, “I’ve grown up with these images like Mickey Mouse, and now you’re telling me someone else owns them, and I can’t use them in my work? That’s like telling me some corporation owns a piece of my brain!” And he was right.) She went into a practiced speech about how the government was working with filmmakers “to get across the message that America is a good place” around the world. There was a lot of foot shuffling and throat clearing in her audience all of a sudden. “Then we show these films in places where anti-American feeling runs high, in refugee camps, for example, and…”

“Didn’t we used to call that propaganda?” someone said.

“Are you sure you don’t mean anti-corporate, rather than anti-American?” someone else said.

But she just looked puzzled. This seemed to her such a reasonable point of view, that artists should be glad, nay, thrilled, to be PAID to promote the glamour of “our way of life” – well, face it, to be paid at all — that I don’t think she really even heard the questions. She looked kind of hurt and said something along the lines of “I thought you’d appreciate that the State Department is taking what they call a soft approach now.”

(And when I recounted this story to EAP’s estimable photography editor, who actually has spent time in some refugee camps, he said, “What refugee camps was she talking about? The ones I’ve been in don’t even have electricity, much less DVD players.”)

The next aide wasn’t much better. Also a Democrat. He went on about how he could arrange a meeting for us with the Head of HBO, who was in Washington that week, and when Alex said, “What makes you think anyone in here wants to meet the Head of HBO?”, he just looked startled. “What if I’m not interested in getting in on a vertically integrated system, one that’s just a monopoly, what if I’m interested in getting on with my own work and I want you to help me?”

“What is your main issue, then?” the aide asked, aggrieved, apparently, that whatever script he had in his head wasn’t going according to plan. Why wouldn’t Alex’s main issue be that he wanted to get ahead, make more money, get more status? After all, it was undoubtedly the aide’s.

“I’d like to know why you don’t apply racketeering laws to the movie studios the same way you do to other industries.”

Now the aide was definitely appalled. “I didn’t know that was an issue,” he said looking down at his notes in some agitation.

“Well,” Alex said, “as a matter of fact, it IS an issue for an independent artist. But given the amount of power the movie studios have around here as a lobby, I wouldn’t imagine it comes up much.”

The aide muttered something about how a confrontational approach never worked, that you had to work in the system, that just saying something was wrong rather than…

“But I thought that was the American way,” Alex laughed. “I thought taking on Tammany Hall was a tradition here.” And the poor aide lapsed into silence. Did he know what Tammany Hall was, I wondered? Or was he too young? They don’t seem to teach in schools anymore that dissent against monopolized power has been considered heroic in other periods of American history…why is that, I wonder?

But then, just when we’d given up hope that there was anybody with half a brain in their head hanging around helping the Congressmen with their Great Work, we got shepherded down the hall to the office of our own congressman, to see if HIS aide was any better. I didn’t hold out much hope for that meeting being anything but a ceremonial waste of time, but, you know, I’m polite, I’m interested in seeing the inside of the office, I go along. And as our congressman is a Republican, I REALLY think this will be, how should I say, something opposite to a meeting of minds.

We cheered up a little when we got inside and were greeted by two Labrador Retriever dogs. The Congressman’s aide appeared, and I apologized for coming in and wasting his time, but he seemed a little surprised I would think it was a waste of time, which in its turn surprised ME.

“Are these the Congressman’s dogs?”

“Oh, no, these are our press secretary’s – if you want the golden one, he was a stray we found outside a few months ago, and he’s looking for a home. The Congressman’s dogs are back in Oregon; he only gets to see them on the weekend.”

Alex and I looked at each other. Oh my God, we both were obviously thinking. Real human beings. Not careerist automatons. Amazing. And the aide was not just human, he was dead intelligent, well-informed, and impressively thoughtful. When Alex mentioned copyright issues, he immediately began to discuss issues of digital rights – it turned out this was his area of expertise, in fact, and since it is obviously one of my areas of interest, I perked up and stopped daydreaming about where we were going to eat lunch. He mentioned he could set up a meeting with one aide to a congressman in a Los Angeles district, a guy instrumental in organizing government policy toward the movie industry, and when Alex said, “I imagine that guy’s completely in the pocket of the MPAA,” he laughed and said, well, it was true Al probably wouldn’t get very far with him.

So, you know, I really think that division of Democrats and Republicans is a pretty artificial one. In fact, it’s almost completely irrelevant, barring one or two disagreements about policy. The real division, aside from that one, is between people who are addicted to hanging onto a system that is paying them very well indeed to do so, and people who have enough clarity to see that this is the situation and that the situation may well be wrong.

In other words, the basic fact is that we live in an Empire that calls itself a Democracy for public relations reasons. That we are ruled by monopolistic corporations that reduce the freedom and public ownership in and of the public sphere more severely every day. The real division is between people who will not admit this no matter what, out of terror at what it would mean to their own paychecks and status, and people who see pretty clearly (or who’re beginning to see it) that this is the reality.

I thought about this later, when we had dinner with my conservative brother and sister-in-law. Now, these are two of the loveliest and most useful human beings I know. They are stable and intelligent and compassionate, wonderful parents, excellent friends and neighbors. Engaging dinner companions. Nothing wrong with them, unless you call being Republican something wrong, which, alas, what has been defined as ‘our’ side frequently and smugly does. When I saw them the year before on my last trip out, and tried to define to myself why two such stable and intelligent and etc. people could think so differently from me about the justice of the war in Iraq, I came to the conclusion that the only difference in our thinking came from our beginning premises, and that their beginning premises did not do them dishonor, unless you count trust in your authority figures as dishonorable. Because the difference was simply this: that they believed what they had been told by the authorities. I didn’t believe it. It was that simple. They believed that we had gone into Iraq as a matter of justice, to disinterestedly promote democracy and end a tyrannical regime. They believed it was a just war.

Now this meant we couldn’t have a real discussion about it then, because of course I didn’t believe any such thing. It was pretty clear to me, in fact, that American foreign policy had always been about gaining dominance and maintaining it so that American quality of life, particularly for the rich, could be kept at all costs. And it was equally clear that large parts of the world quite understandably resented such a policy and were bound to oppose it.

But things had changed in a year. And this year, the discussion had changed. The grounds of the discussion had changed. Because the actions of the authorities were beginning to show a few stresses and strains when it came to propping up the illusion that they were meant as a strictly disinterested attempt to Make the World a Better Place.

So in the excellent restaurant where we ate dinner, over oysters flown from across the country and wine from France, amidst prosperous American diners, my sister-in-law said in a troubled voice, “Do you think it would be justice just to abandon the Iraqi people now, to just pull out?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I wonder,” she said, “I think to myself: what would be the just way to handle it?”

“Well,” I said. “Let’s see.” I thought for a moment. “The just way, it seems to me, would be to say: ‘You’re wrong, you who think we’re in Iraq just to secure our domination over the world’s energy supplies. And to prove it, first of all we’ll close all our permanent military bases there.” I looked at her. “Did you know we have permanent military bases there?”

“Yes,” she said unhappily. “I know.”

“Then, I guess, we close the bases. Then we say, ‘Your resources belong to you, not to us. But if you need us for your security now, we’ll stay here until you ask us to leave. And we won’t buy up politicians who’ll pretend you want us to stay, either.” I looked at her again. “Would that be fair?” I said.

“Yes,” she said unhappily again. “That would be fair.”

“Would that be just?”

“Yes,” she said nodding sadly. “That would be just.”

We sipped our cold wine.

“Do you think we’ll do that?” I asked.

“No,” she said, looking around the room at the happy, prosperous people eating rare seafood and drinking fine wines. “No, I don’t think we’ll do that.”

“Then I don’t think we can call ourselves just.”

“No,” she said. “We aren’t just. We’re basing this life on other people’s backs.”

And that was when I knew we weren’t on different sides. We were on the same side after all.

It’s kind of depressing to think about how we all get bought off of standing together with people weaker than ourselves, people in a tougher position, people who are hanging on by their fingernails while we’ve managed – maybe – to haul ourselves up to a safer position on our knees. I can’t help thinking that when I get, in pretty much the same batch of emails, a contribution to EAP like the dispatch from the Zapatista Women’s Gathering in Chiapas, along with a couple of essays from middle class, middle aged, privileged white women – of which I am certainly one – that seem to acknowledge a world that ends about three feet on either side of their own espresso maker. I mean, I don’t want to get personal about this, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (another typical middle class, middle aged privileged white woman trait; you can tell I’m one a mile away), but let me just say that I can’t even read one more entry romanticizing a one nighter some husband doesn’t know about, or the tragedy of not being able to find oneself.

Why are we all looking? That’s what I want to know. And what exactly do we expect to find?

So, say instead of looking for yourself, you look at what the Zapatista women are doing. I mean, if you will look at it, if you don’t just yawn when you think about reading what a bunch of poor peasants in the jungle are up to, and hope secretly that Britney will have another meltdown you can read about today, or that the major newspapers will cover (my particular favorite tabloid story these days) Heather Mills McCartney’s latest. I mean, if you really looked at the report, and read it, and imagined you were there at that gathering, rather than thinking it’s just some faint story told in a low, heavily accented voice in some room far away from the one where you’re trying to give up smoking and lose weight and find a soul mate and finally get that creative life you’ve always wanted that your parents kept you from having, or whatever…if you just listen, you can feel something truly new and creative and difficult beyond our imagining happening. These women hit bottom. I mean, they had worse than nothing, they were being forced to work night and day for nothing. Bit by painful bit they are organizing themselves. They aren’t wasting time complaining about how hard it is, they just get on with it, supporting each other along the way.

And these are not women with enough money to support themselves. These are not women with every imaginable creature comfort, these are not women with health care and cultural activities abounding and plenty of pairs of shoes. These are also, incidentally, not women on antidepressants, complaining about having the children they didn’t have to have in the first place (and if I had ten dollars for every time I’ve heard some upper middle class woman complain that having children ruined her life, I’d be upper middle class myself, today). These are not women complaining the pressures of having children in private schools is too much for them to handle. These are not women complaining because they don’t have any friends.

Really, I want to be sympathetic. I am sympathetic, to a certain extent. I mean, there has to be a reason why every single rich woman I know is on tranqs, and bitterly complains about this and that whenever I talk to them. They have to be really hurting. But the reason they’re hurting – I’m just going to take a wild guess here – is because they aren’t part of something. They’re all locked up in that small, lonely room of Self.

We should all get out more. I mean it, we really should.

But you know why I think we don’t? I really think we don’t because we get bought off. That’s right – I mean it. Bought off. Get given some fairly worthless trinkets and some fairly patronizing compliments about how different we are from the others. We’re terrified of losing that pathetic advantage. We’re too scared to start looking around ourselves and say, “You know what? Wait a minute. The world is NOT the best of all possible places, and I’m going to do something about it. Is there anyone around here I can do something about it with? How do I learn more?” Nope. We’re scared then we’ll be one of the losers, the ugly, the tired, the unsuccessful, the poor boring peasants in the jungle. We’re scared we’re going to get put on an ice floe and left out to starve. (My own personal terror.) And you know what? To a certain extent, emotionally, that’s a realistic fear. But here’s something else – it’s that fear that’s causing the depression, and the need for antidepressants, and the complaining, and the passive aggression. That’s right. It’s the stifled action, the lack of strength to reach out to those around us, that causes the suffering in the first place. It really is.

I’ll give you an example. It might seem like an extreme one, but it’s not – and you can ask yourself honestly if you would have acted any differently. I was talking to a middle aged, middle class, privileged, white woman writer about possible story ideas, and she said she wanted to write about her recent trip to a poor state, in Latin America, on a press junket, and how wonderful the governor of the state was to her: letting her fly around in his helicopter with his bodyguards, setting up all sorts of freebies for her, etc.

Did she know that particular governor was trying to buy her off for some good publicity, I asked. Did she know he was involved in one of the most unsavory scandals down south in a long time, involving pedophilia, rape, and the illegal imprisonment of a woman journalist?

No, she didn’t know. But she wasn’t surprised, she said. “They’re awfully corrupt down there, aren’t they?”

Write about that, I said. Write about getting bought off.

“Oh,” she said. “I couldn’t do that. I want them to invite me back.”

The two most important books I’ve read in the last few months were The Gardens of Their Dreams, by Brian Griffith, and David Korten’s The Great Turning. This was unusual for me;  generally if I read anything less than fifty years old, I get this feeling of exasperation and waste. Most of it seems to be going over old ground. Most of it seems to be anchored in an assumed system of values that I know has gotten us into the present mess we’re in. Not these two, though.

David Korten in The Great Turning really does get it. We’ve come to a dead end, he says, and we all know it’s true, even if we don’t want to admit it to ourselves because the call to an action that might possibly and catastrophically fail is too painful to hear. We’ve come to a dead end because for all of recorded history, though not, anthropologists and archaeologists are discovering, before it, we’ve organized ourselves in a certain way. We’ve organized as a dominator culture, where the assumed value is that it’s inevitable that one-person rule over another, that one person be considered (for whatever reason) superior to another with superior rights. This is not inevitable. This is not rational. More important, this is not working. We know that, but Korten proves it quite plainly. He connects many problems, many seemingly insoluble issues, to exactly that value. And he says it’s got to change for anything else to change, too.

What’s got to change is that dominator system, where we assume that someone dominates us, we dominate someone else in exchange, and mankind as a whole gets to dominate the natural world. That all of that has got to be changed to a system that has as its basic value partnership. Where partnership between different people, and between humankind and nature, produces an alternative vision to the system of competing visions where only one wins out. When there are two different visions trying to understand each other and come into equilibrium together, that is what’s known as creativity. And it’s creativity we need now, rather than one point of view triumphing over another. Triumphing over things has got us where we are today. And how many of us really can say we like where we are? I mean, without lying to ourselves in hopes that we won’t have to change.

Brian Griffith gets it, too. In The Gardens of their Dreams, he takes an autodidact’s look at why we as a species might have gone the dominator way. It had to be adaptive at some point. To dominate and to be dominated is a pretty miserable way of life, and human beings don’t like to be miserable, or, for that matter, to make other people miserable, not if they’re healthy, anyway. But, of course, what they like even less than being miserable is being dead. So it made sense that somewhere along the line, being miserable and making other people miserable made evolutionary sense. It enabled you to survive. And in The Gardens of Their Dreams, he theorizes that early desertification of our environment by growing populations in the post Neolithic period would have produced dominator cultures. He proves it, too. But what I like especially about the book, about his work, is that he’s in the book, by which I mean he’s involved in the outcome, he has an interest in the history of things, he’s passionately trying to understand why people have given up on the idea that we can have a Garden of Eden, with men and women sharing everything with each other on an equitable and sustainable basis, here, now, on this earth, rather than having to continually preach that it will be given us in the next. So I think an academic might be made uncomfortable by his work, because academics believe in “objectivity.” That is, what we’ve all agreed is “objective,” but really isn’t,  because the point of view that you should exclude human values of love and care from your assessment of things is no more objective than the point of view that you should include them. It’s just another point of view.

My own point of view is that we need another point of view and soon. There haven’t been that many new ones floating around recently. The ones there are, I mean the real new points of view, have to be cherished for the important tools that they are. So. Riane Eisler, Jean Baker Miller, Juliet Mitchell, Jared Diamond, among others (and thank you, too, Robert Graves), and now David Korten and Brian Griffith. These guys are changing the stories we’ve told ourselves for centuries. And we’ve got to change the stories, too.

In the meantime, Brian Griffith has very kindly let us reprint a summary he wrote of his book, The Gardens of Their Dreams. So until you can get the actual book (which is easily found on Amazon), just get a look at the basic ideas here.

I went down to San Francisco for the weekend and while I was there, my best friend told me a story. He is a laid back, hardworking, idealistic teacher who spends a lot of free time working on projects having to do with the education of girls in rural Pakistan. But at the start of his work life, through a weird set of circumstances, he ended up as the head of public relations for a major law school (don’t ask). Anyway, he was good at the work, but it wasn’t for him — he used to say that he got a lot of carpet burn on his cheek from reading library books on his office floor in between promoting the interests of ‘larval lawyers’ — and one of the reasons, it’s clear to me now, why it wasn’t good for him, was that he could not, no matter what, buy into the idea that one person was any different from another person. He was born (or cursed, if you’re the kind of person who wants to run General Motors) with being unable to fool himself that there was a hierarchy of importance among the people he met. Which is doubtless one of the reasons I admire him, and why we’ve been so close for so long.

Anyway, the story. The way he tells it, the rest of his second-generation immigrant family thinks of him as the black sheep. “You don’t ever seem to work,” one of his cousins said to him resentfully, before talking in a supercilious way about the Supreme Court and how Clarence Thomas was framed by Anita Hill, and etc. (”I think he was trying to get at me,” is what my friend says now.) My friend’s contribution to the conversation was that his favorite Supreme Court Justice was Justice Brennan. “Because he came to the law school once after he’d been at the zoo, and he holed up in my office for a half hour while all these people waited in the corridor outside for him to come out. And all he wanted to talk about was koala bears.”

My friend grinned when he told me this. “What did your cousin say?” I asked.

“He didn’t believe me. He refused to believe that Chief Justice Brennan spent a half hour talking to me about koala bears.”

I thought about this yesterday when Alex gave one of the props for the last movie he made to the UPS guy. We call him the Rock and Roll delivery guy for his habit of wearing shorts and sunglasses even in 35 degree weather, and he had fallen in love with this thing in the course of his many trips up our long rutted driveway (less rutted since our neighbor Brian graded and graveled it as a surprise — thanks, Brian). The prop’s a big piece of wood on which is written: “El Rey Apartments: where excelence is king.” Alex’s production designer had it made in LA, and Al set the sign up outside our house and got a great shot of it with a fly buzzing in front to use as an establishing shot for the beginning of Searchers 2.0. And then it stayed in front of our house. The UPS guy apparently yearned after it without having the foggiest idea what it was or what it was doing hung up on the side of a twelve sided cedar house in the woods. Finally he said, “If you ever want to sell that thing, my dad would really love to have it.”

I was in my office, but I heard a startled Al say, “You know it spells excellence wrong.”

“I know, I know! My dad would love that!”

The next thing I knew, Al was in the house on the phone to his producer saying, “I hope we’re not having any reshoots, Jon, because I just gave the El Rey sign away to the UPS guy to give his dad for Christmas.” Pause. “Nope, he didn’t know it was a movie prop, he just liked it.” Pause. “You’re right, I should tell him about the fire department benefit.”

Because I’m on the board of our local volunteer fire department, and we’re having a fundraising screening of the film at the local university. I found them when I was searching around for a place to host it. I tried the local movie theater first. They sent me to the local film festival. Here I ran into trouble. I could not get — COULD NOT GET — the people there to understand what I was doing. They persisted in thinking I was trying to get the film into the festival. It was really kind of comic, at the end. They very kindly agreed to have the film in the festival. But no fundraiser. No, they told me, they didn’t do that. After all, they couldn’t put their name to just anything (yes, those exact words were used). At which point I said cheerfully, “Oh, well, let’s not worry about it then.” Which I swear I don’t think they heard. It was so beyond them that I could be more interested in my local fire department than a film festival. (Mind you, given how many film festivals I’ve schlepped myself to versus how many fire departments have saved my house from burning down, I can probably be forgiven for valuing one over the other.) Also, they were so apparently impressed with the honor they were doing me that they forgot it might not be what I myself wanted in the first place. The university’s Provost, on the other hand, said simply, “Oh that would be so much fun.”

It was the koala bears all over again. The film festival could not imagine a conversation about koala bears. But the university could.

Now there are a lot of pleasures in editing EAP, but the main one is getting to find all these people who would rather talk about koala bears. It’s like one big dinner party where everybody puts their elbows on the table because they’re so intent on what they’re saying. And they’re not worrying about anything else except those koala bears. Except maybe if they’re ready for another glass of wine.

So I think there’s this divide. There are the people who find it obvious that Clarence Thomas DID say there was a pubic hair on Anita Hill’s coke can (”of course he said it, it’s too much like what a real person would say”), and there are the people who cannot imagine it of anyone wearing a judicial robe. There are the people who just like stuff because they like it, and there are the people who like it because you can sell it on Ebay. There are the people who want to have fun and who count that as real life, and there are the people who only think life’s real when you’re miserable and striving and fighting for a position in some imaginary hierarchy.

I don’t know about you, but I know what side I’m on. There’s this big conversation going on about koala bears out there, and I figure anyone who wants to have fun can join right in.

I went up to the book fair Wordstock, in Portland, on the weekend, to meet up with some really feisty independent publishers and figure out where EAP is heading next. And I learned a few very interesting things:

1.) the independent publishing scene in the Pacific Northwest is really vibrant: all ages, subjects, kinds of books. But what all the small publishers have in common is a belief that solidarity with each other is better than competition. In other words, the ethos in the Pacific Northwest independent publishing community seems to be “if we don’t hang together, we will certainly hang separately.”

2.) people don’t use their cell phones as much in Portland as they seem to in every other city in the world. I literally never saw one being used in the whole of the book fair, the whole weekend — except that of one woman, who went all the way out on the street to use hers. I have no way of explaining this phenomenon, unless it’s that people in Portland prefer to talk in person, for some unexplained reason. Maybe it has to do with the pioneer settlers. That seems to explain most things in Oregon.

3.) free public transportation has a way of getting people to talk to each other as they move around the city — if only to say things like, “isn’t this great that this is free?”

4.) if you want to be an independent publisher, you’d better be prepared to never make any money. You might break even (if you’re lucky), but you’re never going to get rich.

5.) if you’re an independent publisher in the Pacific Northwest, you appear to be a very happy, friendly, idealistic type person. I have no idea if this is a correct observation, or if I only ended up in conversation with the happy, friendly, idealistic type hanging out at the book fair. Anyway, there are a lot of them up there.

6.) any of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be read to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. An eighty-year-old poet told me this. And it turns out to be true. Alex and I tried it the minute I got home. Pick a poem, any poem, and see for yourself.

For the longest time, the difference between celebrity and fame gave me trouble.  I knew there was a difference — I could feel there was a big one — but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.  Fame, and its manifestations, seemed reasonable to me:  a beautiful voice celebrated, a brave act recounted, a moving story told.  But celebrity just kind of made me sick…queasy…uneasy in my own conscience even, when I guiltily enjoyed reading about it in the tabs.  I knew it was toxic; I just couldn’t figure out why.

I really thought about it for a long time, and for the longest time without getting anywhere.  What was the difference?  I knew that fame was, in theory, for something, while celebrity was for being celebrated.  Baby steps.  But there was a lot more to it than that first supercilious, facile judgment.  For one thing, celebrity had an obvious gladiatorial aspect to it.  You knew, when you were reading in a fascinated way about Britney Spears and how beautiful, rich, talented, etc. that she was, that what you and everyone else was really doing was watching her go into the arena to face spiritual death…and probably, as everyone sees now, lose.

Then one day, I did get it, or at least part of it.  Suddenly, the way answers come to things you’ve been thinking about, frustrated and sure you’ll never find the solution, for a long time.  It was just sitting there right in front of me, and, as usually happens with this stuff, so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t understood it all along.

Celebrity is a function of domination, while Fame is a function of community.  What I mean by that is there’s the structure of hierarchy, where somebody’s on top and somebody’s on the bottom.  And there’s the structure of community, which is lateral, horizontal — somebody might have more talents, or even more goods, than somebody else in the same community, but nobody has any more rights than the other.

This second structure has always pretty much been confined to small groups, and groups on the margins…at least since the matriarchal partnership societies of the Neolithic period that we’re just beginning to get a real look at.  But it’s that ideal of community that got carried by all those valiant little groups through history that saints and most real artists have cried out for as long as humans have had a voice.

It’s easy to see that fame is a product of community.  Fame refers to a position that’s been acknowledged in that community:  a poet who’s roused it, a sculptor who’s portrayed its ideal, a general who’s saved it from an enemy.  There’s no promise of domination involved, not in fame’s pure form.  It’s simply an acknowledgement of special gifts and a practical honoring of them.

But celebrity’s different, isn’t it?  You don’t have to have done anything of use to be a celebrity — in fact, it’s much better if you haven’t.  Celebrity is the promise that some lucky people will be higher up in the hierarchy than the unlucky ones below them.  It holds out the promise (since it doesn’t involve much real talent) that YOU can be higher than someone else…and force those below you to carry your own inevitable painful feelings of helplessness, inadequacy, and humiliation.  We all have those.  But celebrities, so we’re taught, can push them off on the Humbler Mass.  And if they can, there’s a promise that so can we.  That’s the secret of what celebrity is for.

This is how you can tell that the principle of domination is involved:  when there’s no apparent goal to an interaction.  No real purpose.  Not one that anyone’s admitting, anyway.  And the reason no one’s admitting that the secret goal of celebrity is to hold out the promise that you, too, might someday be able to dominate if only you bear the yoke of being dominated yourself for awhile, is that everyone feels guilty about wanting to shove off what’s rightfully theirs to deal with on the first unfortunate person who isn’t strong enough to shove it right back.

Celebrity, and the promise of it, is the secret release mechanism for much invisible anguish in our society — the secret promise that you’ll be given the right to dominate others if you accept the yoke of domination yourself.  And we hate the people who’ve been given that right ahead of us.   So we love to see them go down in the most humiliating way possible.  Because that puts US on top.  We wouldn’t have been so stupid, if we’d been them.  We would have been better.  So that comforts us even in our own state of humiliation and helplessness.  This is completely obvious if you read the tabloids with even minimal attention:  the loathing for the celebrated comes through on every page.  Ever read the special features on celebrities picking their noses, showing their cellulite, caught with toilet paper stuck on their shoes?  Of course you have.  And admit it — you enjoyed it, too.

Devilish, isn’t it?  Quite cunning, when you get to thinking about it, the whole system.  Because anything to do with domination is the enemy of community.   And the present media is set up to pretend to love the virtues of community, while promoting domination at ever turn.  Have a look with that in mind, and you’ll see fast enough what I mean.  The much-vaunted concept of ‘journalistic objectivity’ is often just a cover for the idea that the writer, and the reader, are somehow better than the person or the thing written about.  The writer invites the reader to be the subject along with him/her…and the thing written about is the lowly object, on which it is allowed to exercise all one’s feelings of superiority.

A great example of this is any article that implies that those poor towel heads in the Middle East just have no idea of what real democracy stands for.  Which implies…hmmm…does it imply that the writer and the reader DO have some idea?  That would be very comforting indeed, if there was any truth in it.

Have a look, I mean, just have a look in today’s paper, and you’ll see examples of this kind of supercilious ‘objectivity’ all over the place.

Which is why I was so startled to read Chris Colin’s work in the San Francisco Chronicle — first, Pool Boy to the First Family, which he’s kindly given EAP permission to reprint this month.  Of course, I read it for the subject matter, which predictably cracked me up, and for the politics, with which, equally predictably, I completely agreed.  But those aren’t the things that stopped me dead in the middle of the piece, wondering, “Who is this writer, exactly, and why have I never noticed him before, and how in HELL did he get this kind of thing past the gatekeepers at the Chronicle?” 

What stopped me was the fact that Chris was IN the article, as a part of it, not as an ‘objective’ observer.  The piece, I guess you could say, comes out of its frame.  The writer hasn’t just ‘found’ the subject…he knows him.  He knows his brother.  He went to a wedding with the guy.  He’s part of the same community with him. This is not just an entertaining story about Bush’s pool boy, this is a report of something real, and real thoughts and feelings of real people by someone who is a part of the group he’s reporting on.

This is rarer than you might think.  Alex and I were talking it over, and he said, “But isn’t that what the New Journalists did?  Isn’t that what Hunter Thompson did in Fear and Loathing?”  And I thought about that and said, “Not the same thing, though related.  What the New Journalists [Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, among others] did was put themselves in the frame, but as superior participants.  We were invited, along with them, to feel superior to the disgusting people they reported on.  They weren’t a sincere part of the community they told us about.  They were above it, and they invited us to be above it, too.”  It was an important step, but it didn’t go far enough.  It was still in the system of domination, not in the one of community.  It was saying:  “We can dominate these assholes, because we are better than they are.”  Whereas what Chris Colin’s article said was, “We’re all in this together.”

Now that’s revolutionary.

There are two kinds of writing.  Well, there are two kinds of art, really.  You might call them the Imperial Form and the Community Form.  The Imperial Form aspires to hang out with Sting and Trudy in their villa in Tuscany, discussing global warming and the handicapped in a glow of self satisfaction, helped along by lashings of 100 year old Scotch.  The Community Form says we’re all in this together, and gets down to talking about how and why.  Celebrity is definitely a tool of the Imperial Form.  It’s big, it’s grand, it’s flashy.  It’s seemingly invulnerable, like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.  But give me the smaller, quieter, humbler joys of the Community Form every time.