Who cares how they died? It’s how they lived that matters.

A Germany-based production company has just (August 2011) released online streaming of its pseudo-new “Atlantis” documentary, featuring high-tech animations of the catastrophic destruction that engulfed the Bronze Age Aegean (you know, where Western civilization began with about 1500 years of relative peace and general prosperity). I wish I had the link for you, but threw it away in a fit of mental health. For an agglutinated slew of sea-sick examples from this genre, visit YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyDEOuAO2OU .

This particular program features the well-regarded Dr. Floyd McCoy, who really does understand what happened at Thera and makes it clear. But Good Lord, will the well-funded mainstream (History Channel, Discovery, Learning Channel, PBS, National Geographic and more) ever get tired of this virtually-worthless catastrophe approach to Minoan/Cycladic civilizations. They are worlds richer and more interesting than any of this stuff suggests. Its Wagnerian histrionics are as far from a true representation of Crete as Egypt’s priest-befuddled Atlantis tale. The genre is rightly called Apoca-Porn.

How many times and in how many ways can you see Thera explode and the tsunamis take down these landscapes and architectures, while Minoan lifeways and their visible values scarcely ever surface. How many authentic-looking but always-terrified islanders need to get blown off the screen (and I suppose, out of the way of manly history) before we realize you can only learn so much from hot winds of volcanic spew.

How many funding-checks can an educationally-senile millionaire sign for the same story over and over. This is what marketing people (without ever having asked) say the public wants—I suppose because to them catastrophe and death are what make living things interesting, and because Western behavior since Crete has been guided [sic] by Mycenaeans; meaning, a needless realpolitik of ”Raid Before Trade” and “Profit At Any Cost.” (Mycenaean civilization rose, peaked and collapsed in perhaps 1/4 of Minoan Crete’s lifetime). What’s “fresh” is what’s really old as mold in each of these remakes, tricked out in ever-more-violent new tech. The content, like a delusion in defiance of a far more interesting reality, stays fixed to numb the mass historical brain.

It’s so us. The endlessly improving techno-tsunamis that amount to standing water. A gesture to erase the longest continuous cultural period in Western history (with, by the way, the most peace and the highest average living standards) —from people whose money claims the authoritative presentation of history, while they apparently find the responsibility unbearable. I.e., that they’ll teach something, beyond the bludgeon-fact that history smashes everything.

I’d like to hear what they think they’re doing, but I doubt that they’ve wondered or been asked. Who needs the intellectual rigor or real grime of archaeology (which alone, by the way, can direct us toward facts) when producers inside the bubble, tapped out by careers in creative incest, assume that only Gotterdammerung Kreta XIX will carry the audience through each lucrative block of commercials? As a tiresome sort of American, I just have to keep remembering that (as with the “news”) the commercials are the whole point of this culture.

On one of many sojourns in Crete I spotted a particularly garish, ghoulish poster of the man-eating “Minotaur” in its Labyrinth. Seeing what Cretan people thought they had to present in order to attract hotel-tourists out to Knossos (the Vatican City of its age), I had to get calm and try to speak. This image (and “Theseus slaying the Minotaur”) is even the unit insignia posted in front of the military base near Iraklion, while actually it’s a Late Bronze Age logo from the island’s first invasion. A “political cartoon,” in Robert Graves’ phrase, that turned an ancient and complete lack of visible “kings” into the fake need for one. Hooray.

In truth, the vast majority of Cretans eschew this kind of game. But there I was, over-fond fanatical fool, respectfully explaining to the hotel staff that this was an invader’s insult to the facts. With listening and appreciation of the motive, they later took it down, although (God bless anyway) I suspect that it went back up. The tourists go in and come out in their same Mycenaean stupor, and so does the viewer of these horrifyingly-cheesy “archaeological quests.” On it goes with every globalizing year, as those tourists give less and less to Crete itself for her treasures.

We should ask what “cultural work” is getting done by these death-farces, what they accomplish—since getting to know the living culture in the program before it gets clobbered is but a wisp of their length and sadomasochistic impact. Romans and Early American newspapers called their prototypes ”blood sports” and “blood pudding.” Ritual death for the commoners’ terrorization and distraction. These productions are twins of the annual PBS tripe about (sigh, not again!) tracking down The Old Testament, Exodus, and the miracle-studded, mysterious but surely-peaceful emergence of you-know-who in the archaeology of Palestine. 

“I can’t show you, but I just know it’s all here!” gushes one of their recent narrators (with zero to show for a century of the most intensive archaeology in history). Yep, ya gotta toe the fantasy-line to keep that funding coming. Hell, if you did present what the current scientific facts amount to, what might happen to sales of our sponsors’ soap?

For that matter, what if he could show hard evidence of Old Testament fact and truth? In every atmospheric detail about Moses on Sinai, it’s clear that he’s engaged with a live volcano. Archaeology can’t even find that for sure. 

When lies begin to fail, they get bigger and more intense, insistent, violent. They multiply their dimensions, as if just enough of them at last will seal out planet Earth. Till these lies crash or Armageddon, maybe the stupefying “Bible Theme Parks” of the Holy Land today will include multi-sensory “participation rides,” like those in Hollywood for the Terminator crowds. I see a gargantuan Philistine Goliath and his goons terrorizing a roller-coaster car full of Nice Holy Truth-Seeking Consumer-Families, because of course they hate freedom.

Behind the tableau, an arm-in-arm line of sex-obsessed Canaanite women kick like Rockettes (in authentic Iron Age Dallas-Cheerleader skimp), jiggling and howling in front of a city background that shouldn’t be there. With each verse of their song a tiny army of carpenters hammer and whistle in blind syncopated rhythm as they plank together a skyline of new apartment-buildings. Cedars of Lebanon sway and swoon, yielding up choice fragrant lumber to The Lord. 

Over them all, a hulking dark idol of a Moloch with fiendish hot-coal eyes munches on a baby in a hot-dog bun. The chicks pop a mean Canaani can-can. They’re for Dad who pays for this crap and would rather be anywhere else. But once Goliath’s noggin drops (Ooooh! Aaaahh!), the Jezebels get theirs, and Moloch’s goons alike, from moral history. So ends the ride, and so re-commences the still-ongoing rescue of our benighted planet—headed by a fey, treacherous, horny but godly young hero who can really sling it.

I think this genre and its angels want to kill the Minoans, because—like Native Americans, with all their differences quarantined from “ours” in the mainstream West—they are a very bad example of fact in front of servants enslaved by fantasies.

Friends, our best boat still awaits, bound beyond Atlantis. Fake past, fake present, fake future, get thee behind us. There are far more facts and worthwhile mysteries in the lands where we really started out as human beings.

It’s how they lived that matters.

Stuck here in the mire of money-media, you can say anything you like about them (such is Freedomville), except that they really were richly, successfully there—before Greece or Israel, longer than Rome, older than Europe—digging the rhythms of cycles instead of dreaming disasters and other-where destinations.

Say anything except what might make a difference behind our living eyes.

WOOP

We the Workers of the World

WALK  OUT  ON  PROFIT 

Sincerely Proposed, If Seemingly Preposterous

*

‘The secret of happiness is freedom,

and the secret of freedom, courage.’

Thucydides

*

The empire of Profit has come round-the-world home—to “reduce,” colonize and impoverish every last working person on the planet. This means you.

It’s time to get real with the same intensity as Profit. Our human equality is outflanked by an economy whose core mechanism and values undermine law and democracy, big and small. The systemic motto has always been Profit At Any Cost. Now it qualifies also as an ecological cancer killing Earth.

Don’t know what to do? Do nothing, play the game, and what we call life (freedom) has little chance of survival—let alone of thriving, as it should—because Profit increasingly builds its advantages around and against the world’s human ideals.

We defeat ourselves each day in the very terms by which we work—in the fine print of Profit, which tells us there is no other choice.

My aim on this Labor Day 2011 is to ask you to realize and act on fact. We are not trapped.

The value of our daily work is what Profit must have. The place where we work is the central point of power to make change happen. Our power is always already in our hands. No one can take it away from us, unless we allow it.

WOOP (in 5000 words) proposes a sustained local and worldwide cooperative action to reclaim the value of our work, and for the creation of a work-based economy of equals.

A quick poll at the bottom here poses a key question. And I hope you’ll read through before you’re finally certain of your answer.

***

Find the act that reclaims the real power of your own work, help others to do so in that act, and working people win. On Earth there is no greater power than every person’s share of work—when we bring it together.

That is the soul of WOOP: informed, nonviolent, connected and courageously human workers walking out on Profit, and into a world of genuine equals—because of the integrity of each life’s daily work (pulling your weight in the world).

Beyond that burden—which is actually half or less of what you work now every day—each of us knows how to live our own happiness in a heritage of common freedom.

By freedom, I mean no more or less than doing what you want to do with most of each living day, doing no harm. By work, I mean tasks you might not do if life were a fully-free ride, without demands for survival and a sense of self-respect about pulling your weight. I feel sure you’d choose a work-week of 20 hours over the present 40-plus, if we could work it out. We can, but something’s in the way. Let’s go to the root of what profit means.

Please note—Profit is a practice, not a person. There is no reason to demonize, compel, or harm anybody. A Profiteer is addicted to Profit. An addiction is that which you cannot keep from doing, no matter how harmful, in spite of reason. Profit like addiction must always have more. Willfully unconscious to consequences, it cannot help but destroy.

WOOP presents nothing to believe in, and nothing to tear down except one addictive illusion—that the work we each do, one day at a time, rightly makes us un-equals in the world economy.

***

If others’ deprivations must be part of your rewards for work, reconsider. If you think you’ll lose your motive to work hard, produce excellence and be creative when everybody has the same access to the stores, read on.

If you think your work is harder or “worth more” than what others contribute, and that you should get exclusive privileges and rewards for it, please observe that A) Nobody can work more than one day at a time; and, B) You chose your work. I feel sure that you don’t see yourself as a martyr for the world’s well-being, that you wouldn’t want to “obligate” anyone else into acts or situations against their will because of choices you made for yourself.

 Here’s the essential WOOP challenge:

1) Act to recognize and prove the equal value of your and all others’ work; 2) Do your work well in half the compulsory time each week; and, 3) Instead of a paycheck (which now proves that you worked this week), take home an employer-certified card like the current ATM-type—which henceforth gives you equal access to anything in the store of worldwide production.

There’s no need for a nanny-state or “new world order” computer-chip in your skin. WOOP works with the standing local and macro-systems that we have—including the world’s best-ever chance to create real justice, The Constitution of the United States. We only need to change the engine’s core program, the reason and values by which we participate in every day of work.

***

Open stores! Yes, people will go crazy at first, for awhile.

Yet, what happens with almost every thing we acquire? We want it, work for it, get it, enjoy it, and then the glow and the thrill wear off—especially as we see others also having it.

Thanks to the sexy, power-soaked mirages of Profit’s public relations industry, it’s often too late in life when we realize that things don’t mean very much. People who wake up feel they have quit an addiction: I wanted, I got, I grew bored, and then I wanted more. That’s all Profit really has to offer—life as a rat turning Profit’s wheel, kept docile with rations, terror, bribe-sweets, and shiny objects.

Question: If living already makes it clear that the one real thing is how we cultivate and share ourselves—whether we live out the potentials of being human and free in our own ways—shouldn’t we be living those values now?

Would you go crazy with greed in a world of open stores after WOOP? Or is it just “other people” who’d spoil it for everybody?

A life is both unique and meaningful in the web of life because of its relationships with others. An equal day’s work enables them all to live in their million ways. Instead, we’ve been living and toiling under a myth that you produce your daily excellence only if you’re driven by competitive fear; in a competition whose goal is either unspeakable or unknown. No good hustler states his goal aloud, and no truly representative “leader” can be incapable of stating it, since the people they represent have said it first.

Work by the vast majority of people on Earth makes your life work every day, as yours does theirs. Why would most people suddenly let you down if their work brought them anything you can have?

***

We already prove our power with each day of work. Yet in return we receive less freedom, more poverty. If that is the (delusionary, backwards) case, is it not more realistic to expect real and better results from the actual power of working people’s acts together—where we are, with what we have and do?

What is more real (effective) than your work? Consider that, although constantly robbed, you still have your full value for leverage—tomorrow’s good day’s work.

Let’s take hold of a 10-year time frame. Ordinary planetary citizen-observer that I am, I have ironic confidence that WOOP will achieve its goal sooner than anything promised by world-class governments and global business, for our last 10 years of dedication and sacrifice to war and Profit.

WOOP takes back the freedom your real work creates.

***

Take perspective from a fundamental fact about human work. Anthropological science reports that “primitive hunter-gatherers” spend perhaps 15-20 hours a week at the work of meeting existential needs for food, clothing and shelter. On that basis they do whatever they like for the other 12 hours a day (with a good 8 hours’ sleep besides).

Yet, we of the “advanced” world, surrounded by work-savers and conveniences, work three times as long per week in exchange for far less (and decreasing) free time.

Why? What citizen of an advanced free society or economy would choose such a change in life’s requirements?

Economics is the big word for our daily direct exchange of work and value, which should be making well-being and freedom more of an actuality for everyone. Something is in the way (doubling-and-more the time we “have to” work)—so much so that we work in the opposite direction.

***

PROFIT

Your work (a product, a service) is a value you create and deliver in exchange for things produced by the work of other people. The value of work is its real power (from your time, strength, skill and sweat) to accomplish and contribute something. With billions of others you make the world work, exchanging work for “value-ables” produced by everybody else.

Work is a formula: Something For Something. See you tomorrow. I do not have to like you, or be like you. You worked, I worked. Now we share an equal right to receive from the world and its “store” that we created. It’s one day at a time for everybody. No one can do their job without help from others.

Something For Something works as a formula because, fundamentally, we recognize the value of each other’s contribution to another successful planetary day.

Profit, on the other hand, is by definition Something For Nothing.

Consult your Oxford English Dictionary, the multi-volume work of impeccable etymology from which all other English lexicons derive.

What you find is that profit signifies value gained from an exchange that you in no way put into the exchange. Profit, by definition, signifies an unequal exchange of value.

You profit when you take more than you give. No mountain of expert economic theory changes this.

***

After all, value that you take beyond what you put in cannot come from nowhere. Behind every dollar of Profit is the other guy with a shrinking stack of dimes. Somehow, by hook and crook, Profit derives from somebody else’s work and value.

The earliest uses of profit in English speak to its injustice. Here’s one of the very first (O.E.D. 1466): “A private profit hurts and harms a common well-being.” The editors of the O.E.D. were not social activists, or imagining a quaint organic merry old England.

Profit has a cousin tangled in among its root-words—“advantage,” which of course is a relative term. Nothing from nothing. There can be no “advantage” to one side without a dis-advantage to someone else.

Advantage is part of the profit family because it tries to signify the real-world value of what somebody gains by this corruption of exchange.

With advantages come more profits. More profits, more advantages; and ever-on, more injustice, resentment and destruction, until most people have nothing and a few control everything.

***

Where we are is only what Profit was long “designed” to accomplish and produce. Nature and human beings are inconsequent “externalities” to Profit’s formula.

This was precisely Profit’s original policy. It was nurtured in late-medieval Europe under the bad sign of Biblical Monogenesis: a sanctified grand delusion stating that only “we” (the insiders to Profit) matter, as the planetary Chosen of “God Himself.” Its means and ends were openly declared in documents sacred and secular as the rest of the still-unknown planet rolled into the view of a predatory Europe—which had gone bankrupt because of its Crusades. The one same murderous hustle goes round and round.

Discover for yourself the full original horrifying language that blessed the new gentleman-conquistadors in Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of America. The plan in their words was to force “perpetual slavery and profit” out of anything alive “discovered” outside the crazy loop. 

From these roots—a delusion of “free unlimited natural wealth belonging to no creature that matters”—comes the spiraling destruction that so resembles addiction. (Like capitalism, it really got started when Europe took up American tobacco.) Chambers of Commerce and conventional historians erected monuments around a third word connected with the tangled roots of profit, speaking of its increasingly pathological centuries as progress.

Changing a healthy planet filled with independent peoples into a poisoned one with a disadvantaged majority in 500 years cannot be progress. But it certainly was by the Profit and Advantage of a few.

And from this, the Advantaged claim no inherited advantages?

***

No surprise that unequal, unfair exchange creates resentment. Profit corrupts and exploits the basic relationship in the midst of our real working lives.

Profit attacks the real equality of work when it assigns different top-to-bottom values for each kind of it. Thus, you may take from “the store” only according to the value that a self-interested somebody else assigned to your work, in the numbers on your paycheck.

Those numbers do not reflect the full value of the work done. They are cooked, by Profit’s interests “above” you on the pyramid, and cooked according to yet another preposterously-unsustainable principle: Give As Little And Take As Much As You Can Get Away With.

So, ironically—or rather, according to the illogic of Profit—the higher you go, the less real productive work gets done (as if only certain people are smart enough to make big decisions); and yet, the higher the number that measures your access to all that gets produced. The more people you give nothing, the greater your rewards. Again we arrive at a backwards description of work’s real world. We know it has to collapse.

Lies and violence (24/7, now) make this seem to work. Like the scam of a hustler who’s got your money, it only needs to “work” one day at a time until you’re dead. As another money motto puts it: In every exchange, there’s a loser. If you’re wondering who that is, it’s you.

***

As one “dynamic young entrepeneur” actually said in a business-news interview, “In an ideal world, you pay people nothing.” Do we get it yet, that these are the “values” of Profit? Look at the Profit addicts squatting on their trillions—collecting interest, making credit scarce and costly, and workers more desperate. Do we get it yet, that Profit (by its own business-periodical admission) is no longer interested in America’s future? That Profiteers have just about had it with the idea of paying wages at all?

Sure—It’s fundamental that workers with money to spend drive the demand that creates more jobs, more growth. And since when does an addict care about reality and consequences? In the first place, nothing in nature grows forever, not a star, not a cell. Unlimited growth is a 2-word way to say “cancer.” Second—Why pay people (and tarnish those record profits) when it’s so much easier to squeeze them down into an ideal abject servitude?

If one quarter’s Profit has 10 years of consequences, so what? It’s crazy-time again. For no investment in the world pays back more than education: the average is $14 out for every $1 in, a profit margin unheard-of in any other enterprise. And yet education (our most crucial investment) is precisely the last of Profit’s plans.

If Profit is such a rational proposition, why do we keep finding ourselves ass-backwards when we try to study it closely in the contexts of known facts and observable common realities? No wonder our heads spin with trying to figure out what’s happening to us. Economically, the most advantageous kind of worker to employ is in fact an educated one. And yet according to Profit’s own clear priorities, somehow education is suspect—perhaps as an investment uniquely unlikely to produce more Advantages for the Advantaged.

We look back, around and forward, we look here and there. And once we understand what Profit is (a delusion that drives injustice), the clues and pieces rush together toward a realization. The daily aim of  our present arrangement and the goal of this “progress” is an ignorant, docile labor-force without memory or hope—captive, self-policing and asleep on an eternal wheel of production and consumption. To the benefit of an exclusive few.

People who live delusions and denials must either adjust to reality, or start forcing the world to resemble their delusions. The latter state is psychosis, meaning blind obsessive omni-destruction of self and surroundings. The addiction to Profit is now so intense that it’s devouring even its own functional basis (educated workers with money and fruitful skills). We live the consequences, while Profit goes on with a feast and a danse-macabre deep in its fortified fantasy-casino.

Only one thing measures the mastery of an addiction. You stop doing it. Profit never will stop on its own. The point of power, the nonviolent solution is on our end, in our hands, right in front of us—Stop Participating. Stop feeding the addiction. Walk out on a specious “rational selfishness,” which has reigned instead as the tragically-crazy father of public progress—outstripping progress with a walking nightmare history of needless slave-toil and destruction.

Archimedes said, “Give me the right fulcrum-point on which to rest my lever, and I can move the world.” Our individual day’s work is that point, and WOOP is the lever in our hands.

We who really work together are reality. Profit cannot survive without our work.

***

Right now, when the disadvantaged reach for resources beyond Profit’s false reductive value of their work, its combined advantages called Power act to stop them. So, as we consider WOOP action, let’s remember:

We have a standing system of law and order to back up the values we choose for our economic system. Law enforcement will also work after Profit to protect us (but in new ways, too) from the pathologically selfish and the irredeemably stupid.

Right now you cannot take from an ATM unless you have put value into it. After Profit, you won’t need an ATM. You’ll just go to the store with the card that proves you pulled your planetary weight at work this week (that’s what your paycheck certifies now, nothing more is necessary)—and meet your needs with your dignified good looks.

***

Respect the work of others as your own, and the world is yours, because it’s everybody’s. You and they produced it.

You can even still imagine that you’re better.

Maybe you think a world without Profit will make “everybody the same.” Does that mean You will no longer be You, if other people who work their best day enjoy equal rewards? What will happen to this You?

Can it be that without the ranked rewards rationed out by Profit, you’d have no cause to develop or distinguish yourself? Without those, no pride, no talents, no motive to work hard—no urge to create, no reason to do the dirty, dull or dangerous work?

Maybe you see no fit reward for what you do except special advantages, which other people (in your opinion) have not earned with their same day’s work.

Who promised that if you worked hard, others would be denied many things as part of your reward? Surely, you see the needless and odious injustice in such a proposition? Why, then, do we live according to it?

I assume you’re reading this in part because you want to understand your own real daily values more clearly. Confident in your values, you’re not afraid to hear about others. Please, then, articulate the criteria by which you form your opinion that others don’t deliver the same day’s work and value.

If you never have, or find that you really can’t, the criteria must be Profit’s.

It’s usually the advantaged who see, in the mirror, justice and/or a merit system working just fine (under them) in a legitimate republic. Plato (whose name in demotic Greek meant “Fatso”) wanted everybody trained for war, and trained to war as the measure of human virtue, while banishing the poets. The grotesquely pot-bellied Saint Thomas Aquinas described a chief pleasure of The Blessed to enjoy in his kind of Heaven: looking down into Hell.

If you find that you want to quit your work when there are no special rewards (beyond your own equal access to everything), quit.

Pull your weight with honor another way, where you really belong, as yourself and as part of something greater. That’s where it’s at for both real living and real respect. There always will be people who want the tough and crazy work.

WOOP is a way to live for new reasons, truly yours.

***

WOOP ESSENTIALS

WOOP is a simple, long-planned, world-synchronized, sustained nonviolent action to A) demonstrate the power and value of our own and each other’s daily work, and B) make clearly visible the values of Profit that stand in the way of global human being.

Recognized or not, there are already millions of people who reject Profit’s consequences and work together to meet each other’s needs without profit or slavery of any kind. Real economies of barter, shared currencies of nonprofit exchange, third-party credit and direct credit clearing are just a few ongoing creations and methods. We already have what we need worldwide to walk out on the core-problem in our common human way. We are closer than Profit wants us to realize.

From websites and social media to local meetings and every familiar means of organizing, the first WOOP DAY and each to come would be long prepared-for and coordinated.

For example, let’s choose May 1^st—beginning at the local moment around the world when every working person completes one-half of their normal work-day shift. We might choose 12:00 noon Greenwich Mean Time for the very first action, and then watch the wave of them happen in turn around the world.

OK—So what would a WOOP action do?

After a solid half-day of your best work, you walk out of your work-place, and lift both your arms out high. Then what?

Whatever you want to do, harming no one. What makes you feel happy and free.

“See you tomorrow!” And, you mean it—because, as you’ve clearly explained to your employer, you’re proud to pull your weight in the world, and proud to work hard earning your share of it. Most people already know they can do their job’s real work in half the hours.

This is not a strike. We’re never coming back to the work-place of Profit.

***

What if I’m the only one? What if I just get fired? How would I survive on a cut to half my present wages, if that’s how “Boss” responded? They’d cancel my health-care, too!

Such would be Profit’s first demonstration of its values.

In all these cases, you’d have the cooperative support of other people through this action—friends working for the same goal, helpers and professionals of all kinds. People will survive far longer than Profit can, once WOOP truly begins to starve out its addiction to our work.

Between the cracks of Profit we already see the working rudiments, from food co-ops to health care. Unlike the “progress” that has ruled for 500 years, WOOP has a clear unifying goal and a recognizable end.

Think of the cooperation and sacrifice we have laid on the mystical altar of Progress By Profit. If Profit never has never aloud defined the goal by which alone we can measure Progress, do you think it can, wants to, or will?

Imagine what that much courage could do in a cause that is openly clear, realistic and honorable. We help each other already, and more every day without “business.” Probably half the true world economy now is off the books. (Like the wars.) If you know your long-term goal, you keep each problem in perspective.

Let’s use a question to see what might happen and what resources we’d have:

If everybody clearly knew WOOP’s values, purposes and goals, how many people out of 10 at your work-place would participate?

***

If you’ve explored this far, it might be safe to assume that there’s you and one other person. 2 out of 10 doesn’t sound like much impact. Wouldn’t Profit swat them like flies?

It would try, except that 2 of every 10 workers on the planet are equal to the value of 20 percent of a day’s world economy. Repeat around the world for even 3 of 5 business days.

Do you think Profit would notice a drop like that?

I suggest that its effect would shake the planet—some with fear and outrage, and the many with the staggering realization that our labor actually runs the world.

The next great circle of time-shifts among all the planet’s working people brings about another WOOP. Maybe this time, it’s 3 people out of every 10. Respect for real courage goes a long way.

Perhaps the terror-tactic of wholesale firings has begun. But now, Profit has to get 30-percent more out of each remaining worker to protect those margins. If they don’t measure up, they too get fired and cut loose. Business knows that replacement-workers measure up even less often.

Yesterday’s rulers have nowhere to go but more Profiteering, more compulsion, more work, more fear, more force. Because that always was Profit’s response against anybody outside the colonial walls—which now confront and threaten to close around the planet.

Instead and forever, we are walking out from the midst of those walls. They work toward a fascist fantasy of closing everybody in. Yet, we control the gate. The doorway to real living is our work. We walk in to pull our weight, and out to live our lives.

“Look, Boss, I do not produce my daily excellence because I’m competing with China. Competing for what, an empire of control in the refrigerator market? Boss, WOOP is also about your working less and your share of everything we make.”

A servant’s life and a Profit’s pittance for the world?

***

As WOOP days go on, the people still too frightened to share in it are not only working more and harder. They see that fired or penalized WOOP participants are not just surviving, but living different lives.

Some WOOP participants might succeed in arranging their new 4-5 hours a day of first-rate work. For WOOP’s duration they’d be more enabled to help its goals come true. Some might cunningly enjoy a picnic and, in all their degenerate fascist communism, play volleyball outside the work-plant’s windows. There’s food and music and a market of planetary skills and values going on.

Maybe 1 more worker eventually walks out.

Soon it’s 4 of every 10 workers. Almost half. And thanks to Profit’s own irrationality, the replacement-workers were already living lives more crushed than the regular trained workers. Replacements work for desperate money where their hearts and their best never are.

The world machine and its profits down-spike in every register. The Profit addicts are getting restless. And what can they do? Call out the police and the army, so that citizens keep working on the old terms at bayonet-point?

Will they set up road-blocks so participating doctors can’t see people who are ill? Interdict every sharing of some work or a hot meal? On the basis of what law? No Sharing?

Sooner than later, Profit wants to bargain. WOOP replies that Profit is over, and that every working person is welcome to the feast.

See you at work tomorrow?

There’s no political argument like a festival. Joy. Freedom based in our honest cooperative work.

***

Profit begins a campaign against WOOP as an action by sex-crazed terrorist-communists with unspeakable consequences for property and the children. The world regime that “fights terror” with criminal armies unleashes new divisions of divisive spin-doctors. Every kind of slur, provocative agent, and fear about the loss of “our values and way of life” gets deployed—to defend the Haves against the Have-Nots, Who Now Realize They Can Have Anything By Equal Work.

WOOP is simply the normal daily display of a working person’s responsible freedom. Profit is a vampire that withers in sunshine. It has nowhere honorable or desirable to go. The more Profit and capitalism deploy and display their true character, the more people walk out and join in the feast of life.

They know how to work with honor and they prove it cooperatively every day. But work isn’t everything, any more than Profit ever was.

As people said one morning in that iron-clad, inevitable, best-of-all-possible-worlds dreadnaught, the U.S.S.R.:

“Sorry, Boss, it’s over, and we’re not going to die. We’re going to live, all of us.”

This time we know where we’re going.

***

If we can mount 10 years of useless world war for so little that can’t be done by wiser means, we can do this and arrive at someplace real, because work is real. Groups of workers displaced by Profit tool up factories and services old and new, each person signing up for a kind of work they like. People with existing skills earn their weekly “access card” for awhile by teaching displaced people a new desired part in the economy. WOOP participants who once issued paychecks handle the cards, and their negotiability grows with every work-place linked into the action.

People displaced by a world without Profit, those whose sole work was to generate, track and promote it, also find new ways to pull their weight. Bankers, credit card companies and more—yes, WOOP means a great deal of displacement. But look at the world and see how many truly useful tasks need to get done. Displacement that leads to a more desirable life is far better than the dead-end kind so glibly handed out to millions of people now under Profit.

There’s no need for a sudden 50-percent loss of crucial services. As law enforcement and fire departments and schools begin to take part in WOOP actions, there will be more demand for new people to learn and take on those roles in shorter shifts.

Health care shortage? Half of the patients now in offices, hospitals and facilities do not need to be there. They are there out of learned or concocted dependencies that feed untold trillions into Profit.

The world is full of people who’d work like slaves to become genuine doctors and health care workers. Do you think there’s a reason why “the best economic system ever in the world” maintains a worldwide shortage of staff, medicines and treatments, while millions die? Nothing profits (or kills) like artificial scarcity.

WOOP’s goal is the opposite: real plenitude.

Nothing would really change, except the reason for being alive each day. You’d have, in the now, what Profit can and will only promise till it’s too late for you to protest that you’ve been defrauded.

You compete with cheap labor by becoming cheaper labor. Till now, social and labor movements have bargained with Profit and keep on losing. For Profit laughs in the face of protests and strikes, marches and movements that never address the core problem. Advantage finds a way around reform.

WOOP is not reform, but a permanent walk-out. We walk out on that name consumer bestowed by Profit’s public relations, and walk forward as real world citizens. We who work are the power to say, So will it be. We need to walk.

A few best doubts, and a closing grateful for your thoughtful time.

***

This work derives from long observation, from 5 years of trying to put it into words, and from every possible wide-open dialogue I could instigate on a WOOP mechanism of change. I hope that along the way I’ve spoken to reasons to be dubious of WOOP. Perhaps there are many or fatal problems invisible to my own share of human blind-spots, and I welcome your assistance. (Progress means some fool stuck their neck out.) For example:

“If mortgages and all kinds of debts from owning things no longer existed—if the only debt we’d each owe is a solid day’s work—how could I change my life out of this present slum-apartment and dead job to someplace desirable, without new injustice toward anyone?”

I only know that the world after WOOP won’t manifest overnight. That humans are endlessly creative negotiators and builders. And, that a new economy truly based on filling human needs would at least be working in that direction—instead of Profit’s. The difference is key to getting there.

A few more possible problems:

“As you said, Advantage always finds a way around reform. Some people will still control everything.”

How, precisely, when they no longer control the people who produce? And to what end? Having more than full access to the world? WOOP is certain to expose and confront many kinds of illegitimate power.

WOOP actions shower daylight on the corruptions of our equality great and small. Like schoolyard bullies outflanked and faced down at last, most tyrants fold, their cruelty and fake powers suddenly useless.

“Too many people now avoid real work (pulling their weight) quite successfully. They’d never answer as to whether or not they worked. Too many would still find ways to cheat.”

At the same time, too many people never earned their cynicism, never truly gave themselves or others an action’s chance for finding out differently.

At the least, a world after Profit would simplify what we now call law enforcement and justice. A world after WOOP is not utopia.

Compared with Profit-servitude, it will only seem that way.

***

Lastly, something about the image (doubled) at the start.

It’s a small statue from the first days of Egypt before there were Pharaohs. From a time when culture and religion were in love with nature, and the highest social value was harmony. That world gave us the word ecstacy: it means standing “beyond yourself,” face to face with the cosmos or the living and meaningful universe. Eternity now in wheels of seasons and circles of generations without end.

The Garden (or if you prefer, The Kingdom of The Lord) is remembering that we are in it.

That gesture we still see at a moment of triumph, in stadiums too when thousands do “the wave”—a human being proudly lifts their arms in a kind of cosmic hail. WOOP is a wave of workers’ power going round the world.

Think of how many aspects of human being it expresses: celebration of being alive, bold strength, inter-acknowledgment, prayer, appeal, fulfillment, gratitude, embrace, affirmation, exhilarated joy. In fact this gesture also relates to human families across real time, from ancestors to children—and, to rebirth and resurrection.

Profit was never designed to facilitate those things. Whatever its claimed intent, all around its trickle-down mixed results, Profit has worked against them in favor of itself.

That reveling figure, the spirit in the body rising, goes well with a Woop! aloud. For the capital enemy of Profit is true satisfaction.

This I’d make the basis for WOOP’s sign of worldwide solidarity. From a human past to a present and future worthy of our ancestors’ vision, courage, sacrifice, and luminous joy.

Old signs, new meanings. Prototype for a WOOP symbol? As I see it---Earth and Today poised in a delicate balance on the peak of our world's "ancestral mountain": our living home, aligned in harmony with rhythms of the lunar-solar cosmos. The mountain is Yesterday, the circle is Now, the crowning points Tomorrow. If the "W" stands for Work, Workers and WOOP like a gesture of reaching out, the crown of it all is Free Imagination, with upraised arms or open wings. Curious---do you also see a doubled human gesture, a child exultant on a parent's shoulders?

***

“Play the game,” winks Profit, “and you’ll be alright.” Profit, Advantage and Power fool us every day, till they walk away laughing from another sucker’s grave. Nothing is more sure than our own and the planet’s turn unless we act, all together now, for change.

What I most believe is that You believe in the value of your life. That you have the hands-on power you say you cannot find. And, that a life beyond Profit is our best individual chance to show the world what we’ve really got inside.

It’s in your working hands. Only you, each day, can surrender your value.

Play the game, and you end up playing games.

One thing you can say for Profit—It means business. Profit is deadly serious.

You?

***

PLEASE TAKE THE QUICK POLL!!!

(NOTE: If you vote “Other,” comment to say what that means!)

***

Here, my friends, is an invitation to really get to know what our forefathers went through in one theatre of World War II—namely the young men of the Fifteenth Air Force’s 464th Bomb Group, whose B-24 Liberator crews flew harrowing missions day after day into Hitler’s Third Reich.

This new web page features dozens of rare photographs and original documents about their experiences from start to finish—including a filmed interview with Staff Sgt. Clarence “Red” Eudaily, the original Flight Engineer of my father’s first air crew. Together one day in August 1944 over the oil refineries of Pardubice, Czechoslovakia, my father and Red Eudaily performed acts of heroism together that saved their aircraft and brought them both the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Their stories are both hair-raising and inspiring—So, come and explore!

http://ancientlights.org/fifteenth.html

Yours truly,

Dr. Jack Dempsey

Nose-gunner Jack Dempsey (right), Flight Engineer Red Eudaily (left) and a crew-friend with 'Pistol Packin' Mama" of the 15th AAF/464th Bomb Group, at Pantanella, Italy 1944. The photo from my father's collection is the only one of "Mama" with gaping holes from German flak.

Spirals inscribed at Newgrange, Ireland, 5000 years old

Listen to what “everyday people” say about The Afterlife. (First, of course, that there is one.) You can easily absorb a range of these short direct accounts of people’s Near-Death Experiences at YouTube, and via web-pages devoted to studying NDEs. For me, the most credible individuals are the least self-conscious, the people focused on trying to share their observations in plain speech, the non-evangelicals, and those with no book, lectures or counseling for sale.  

I see four points on which 99% of them agree. A) Your normal consciousness just keeps going when you die. B) You first encounter a completely dark “void,” a place where you feel not alone and, yet, very safe. C) “A light” appears, whose description is wholly benign for all these witnesses. And, D) We begin to communicate and/or “merge” with a being and/or beings who do not judge, but absolutely accept and welcome us, to a place that almost everyone calls “home.”

For contrast and perspective, here up-front is my own bottom line of direct observation—and it’s a blank. My closest NDE was a scuba-diving accident. I “drowned” so fast underwater that I simply blacked out, until I found people reviving me face-up on the beach. The last thing I saw was the sea-bottom’s grainy sand up against my mask, and one instant later (with absolute nothing in-between), someone was ripping the hairs out of my chest as they unzipped the wet-suit. According to a man there who previously had seen people drown, the colors I turned before reviving were those of someone definitely dead. To me that interval was utterly unconscious, a blank of nonexistence. 

Yet, that is not quite the bottom line. For in my experiences near death—namely, helping and holding the hands of my elders as they passed through the gates of this life, and in losses of family and friends—I have had profoundly empowering experiences beyond the normal. Moments of liberating learning that I’ll take to my grave and that correlate with independent others.

If you want to cleanse your eyes or even your soul of the things in this life that are really of no account, embrace your life’s share of these experiences with everything you have. May this offering say why.

***

Here are two conceptions of “this life and beyond” that have kept on resonating for me through years of study. In their lights—given that we of The West have such an amazingly positive non-Biblical heritage—I think it’s pathetic that we still only really bond around the needless tragedies of war and natural catastrophe. Maybe someday we’ll wonder why our barriers come down only when violence and terror smash through them. We’ll ask what has been blinding us to the fact that we need each other. Someday our terminal boredom with fearing and celebrating death will give way to celebrations of life—and we’ll find ourselves back in the arms of our most honorable ancestors.

Speaking first as a scholar of Minoan (Bronze Age) Crete, the clues suggest to me that they conceived of a gateway or door between this life in nature and whatever lies beyond it. Their “horns of consecration” marked threshold-places between the mundane and the sacred. The horned mountain was the house of their ancestors, and its horns marked the horizons of the mysteries that flank this life: where we come from and where we go. In-between, their experience of life was cyclical—a “dynamic steady state” rooted in the harmony of past and present being.

The Minoans’ door to The Beyond was simultaneously in that mountain, and at the almost-unmoving center of their night sky (the Pole Stars). They inscribed it at the central point of their wheeled crosses and spirals—the latter a path of concentric circles that, like a door, functions in two directions. The dead pass in and the being-born pass out.

If I have earned any learning as an historian of Native New England civilizations, I’ve seen a central similar thing in the way Native American traditions describe life as circles within circles. Human being happens within the cycles going on all around it. Say and pretend what we will about life’s linear goals, our life is written in overlapping cycles of interdependent forms.

We are born from our ancestors as they were born in turn, utterly helpless. Each generation matures because their elders’ lives, at peak-strength, have what it takes to help us. Then, as we rise into our places, they decline—becoming helpless again. When that circle closes, our own turns come at the front of the line. We for a time inscribe the spiral-path that circles out from and back toward the door. Behind us rise the young, both displacing us and (we hope) our own best help in what is coming in our turn. Their times too will come to engender and to fade.

I’ve come to consider those paradigms more credible than others because of their naturalistic terms. So along such lines I try to learn from a journey with my father—when I was determined to hold his hand all the way through the last turns of the circles of his life, as he headed through the door.

***

Jack was roaring healthy when he died—a fit, robust and sparky Irishman two days short of his 70^th birthday (January 23, 1922-1992). What got him was a gradual form of myeloma or bone marrow cancer. The doctors had promised my father maybe three years and, with plenty of transfusions and suffering too, he fought it for nine. He and we enjoyed the hell out of this life together before the end. It’s only true that the shadow bearing down on Jack was already lighting up the way we lived, as soon as it appeared.  

A slowly-progressing terminal illness divests a person day by day of their independence. Each of Jack’s hard-forced surrenders of his were the workaday ways of circling and spiraling in toward the gate and door, the horizon of this life. In Jack’s case, that turned out to be the local hospital where I had been born to him and my mother (1955).

What he wanted most was to pass away at home, in the home he had built and cared for every day of his family life. But the best choice at that time was that he let the hospital manage his last days of searing pain. So I watched Jack walk knowingly out the door of his home for the last time, still quite lucid then with his usual grave and merry Irish mix, and not one curse or tear. And then I was setting up a cot beside his bed in his hospital room, with no idea or care about how long I was going to live there. It turned out to be three days. He died on my birthday, and the day on which we waked him (in his golf-clothes and shoes) was his own.

***

Thanks to the hospital, that first night we wheeled in a TV with a VCR and spent two hours watching the very first print of Thomas Morton—my first documentary-film just completed at that time, and dedicated to him at the end of the long credits. My insecure and impecunious life as a writer, it’s true, had been a great worry and mystery to my father. But that film, for all its flaws, showed him that at least I had wasted my life on real substance. Jack said he was glad to think that a story of a good guy wronged was going to get told—and he smiled when he heard that I had plans for the stories of more guys a lot like that.

In the middle of the second night, Jack awoke not in any kind of distress, but suddenly very lucid and animated, eager to wake me beside him and to talk. Whatever my sleep-deprived watchman’s state, I sat up the more as I listened.

 It has to be said that morphine was part of this mixture—the wonder-drug for pain, which over time brings on delusions and psychosis. You also have to know that this was a man born of hard knocks in The Great Depression, schooled in World War II, trained and employed all his life to install New England Telephones, and without either college or one evangelical bone in his body. Jack was a “worrier” because from supporting his family at 12 years old to making sure that he and his crewmates came back from every combat-mission, he had built his good world out of taking complete responsibility for it.

Popular culture Jack enjoyed, but he certainly put no time into existential exotica, let alone NDEs. I knew my father for 37 years (my lucky number, by the way) and never before had he spoken along lines of any resemblance to the following.

Jack said he had no idea where all this came from. He’d just simply “found himself” in a place or space that he could only describe as a kind of dark void, a completely featureless nowhere, if there could be one. Then, seemingly above him, a light appeared. It seemed high and far away, but it grew brighter, and then as far as Jack could tell, it was descending, slowly, gently down toward him. In the next moment, he was being spoken to by “people” or beings whose arrival and presences he never explained or visually described.

“We are going to take care of you,” they said to him. “You do not need to worry about any little thing in the whole world.” Those were the two sentences Jack remembered, and then he struggled—but there in his bed, he made me understand him. Everything about that place and what was said to him convinced my father, like nothing else in his life, that there was not one single thing to worry in the universe.

“And you, by the way—You got a lot of balls,” he smiled. And this with half a wry look, as if admitting he might have missed something.

“What?” I said, amid amazement.

“You know. Doing the things you do,” my father answered. “They said so.”

 They? We laughed and laughed.

***

Early in the dark of the third morning, Jack awoke thrashing in his bed. It was a real morphine panic, a dread of falling or sinking, of letting go. All at once he wanted and could not bear to lie down, to sit up, to stand, or anything else. For every bit of his nurses’ dedication, all they might be able to do was strap him down. Instead I held my father tight in my arms, telling him who I was, just talking and helping him to breathe until he grew calm again.

By then all Jack wanted to know was that he was safe and with somebody who loved him. When he felt and knew that for sure, he wanted to lie back down in the bed.

His head was so heavy, so weary, on my shoulder. Just before we opened our embrace, he pressed a kiss into my neck below my ear, and whispered the last thing he said.

“God bless you Jack.”

At that moment, and every time I’ve remembered it since, what cracked my spirit open like a seed was the presence of a circle. Because I’d been blessed already, all my life, with him as my father.

That same day’s afternoon, I was sitting up next to his bed where he slept with my hand holding his. Skilled, scarred, patient, weathered, beaten-up, infinitely gentle, his hand was cool and growing mottled, his breathing slow and shallow.

The telephone on the night-table rang. It startled Jack’s eyes wide-open, and he looked into mine. Then he laid back, and the light left his eyes.

You can let go of a hand. But hold one in closely helping somebody along those circles toward the door, and through it, and you never lose what begins to pour through you in the process. For that I have only the clumsiest of gropings toward words.

Rocket-fuel. The full-fire plasma of Life. The geometrically-bursting dynamo of evolutionary ecstasy in every cell inside and all around me. The balls to settle for nobody’s measures but my own.

Let me try for the terms of a benign journeyman. Just don’t get in my fuckin’ way with your life-killing projects for money and “progress” and your infantile prayers for redeemers and armageddons. My holy inherited soul will walk up your face and, down your back, leave a spiral-trail carved in natural facts.

For The Garden, you see, is remembering we are in it. Free, unafraid and for living, I’m home, and on my way. I sit down at my desk and go flying, bodily, through the universe. You know what I’m saying? Kiss my entire ass, although friendship and kindness are good options too. I got this tender ferocity for nothing from my ancestors, so surely I owe someone ahead at least the same.

Stand yourself in the doorway and see what happens to the obstacles around your life-craving soul. We don’t conquer death. We learn how to laugh in its face before death laughs in ours.

People are dangerous (free) when they know they cannot lose. Feeling this, honey-child, means that we’ve already won.

***

This article is in loving memory of my little brother, Joseph David Dempsey, who died at age 12 on this day in 1969. The post-mortem report from Boston Children's Hospital states the cause: one simple little break in a plastic tube of the heart-lung machine that was sustaining Joey through open-heart surgery.

On Jeff Jacoby’s “A Sinful ‘Occupation’”

in The Boston Globe, November 2, 2011

As a former longtime subscriber to The Boston Globe—which ended when it became a self-styled “family newspaper,” and forfeited whatever teeth and backbone it ever had—I learned early-on to stop reading the opinion-pieces by Mr. Jeff Jacoby.

They were sure to do nothing but darken my day in response to Jacoby’s usual half-baked amalgam of right-wing boilerplate and Bible-based claptrap. In America, that of course is the basis for a distinguished career in “journalism,” which is also why I avoid our “mainstream” media the way I walk around fetid puddles of standing water.

This is a guy who once argued that America owes no “reparations” to either Native Americans or the children of African slaves because, while one group can be safely ignored by the American juggernaut, the other group already got their reparations when the American Civil War set them free. Astonishing—If I hurt you, and then stop hurting you (more or less), we’re even, and no harm done. That’s what The Bible’s “landmark morality” has done for Jeff Jacoby and the American Empire.

Well, I stepped in it today—I just had to read Jacoby’s latest (November 2, 2011) in The Boastin’ Glob, because of its astonishing title—“A Sinful ‘Occupation.’” Oh, shit, I thought. Oh, no. Jeff, like a deacon out of Puritan (fascist) Boston, is going to show us why the worldwide “Occupy” movement is an offense against his fondest fictions—something called “God” and “His Commandments.” Both of which for Jacoby dovetail neatly, of course (as they did in Boston), with wonder-working American capitalism and its noble plans for you and our planet.

For Jacoby, as for the sterling lover of democracy we knew in George H.W. “Poppy” Bush, the “sin” at the heart of the Occupy Movement is nothing less than—yep—“class envy.” Isn’t it clear that if these millions of pauperized working people went out and (somewhere, somehow) got themselves “real lives”—meaning lucrative business-careers which, like those of our rightful masters, raked in profits at any cost—they’d all be peacefully at home watching TV and reading The Bible, like most good docile Americans?

“Class envy is not benign,” writeth Jeff. “At its most extreme…it unleashed the bloodiest genocides of the 20^th century.” So the Occupy movement is well on its way toward “Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.”

Got that? If we let Occupy continue, it’s only a matter of time before they open extermination-camps for the rich. They’re going to keep instigating bad, bad things as well against those politically-neutral, friendly Finest of our communities’ protectors and servants, the police. According to Jacoby (and the highly professional New York Post), “from Boston to Berkeley, Occupy encampments have coincided with surges in vandalism, assault and theft,” not to mention sexual assault and rape—or at least this is “allegedly” so, according to Jacoby’s idea of an authority in the Post.

Does Jeff happen to mention that in New York, for example, it’s the police who are deliberately “dumping” homeless persons, drunks and mentally-disturbed people into the Occupy crowds? (The answer is no—which shows how much his Glob editors with their “family values” care about Jeff’s own fairness in getting his facts right.)

“All-night drumming”! “Public urination”! And, genocide! That’s what you get when people who actually want to be millionaires gather together and whine that they’re not fellow heirs to the fortunes of The Bush Crime Family. For Jacoby, they’re acting in defiance of the mighty 10^th Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.” And you know from your wonderful, uplifting Old Testament what happens to people who do that, and to nations who allow it.

And yet, I thought George Carlin had clarified that America thrives on breaking the mighty 10th—for where is consumerism without covetousness and envy?

You betcha! Why, for righteous comparison, Jacoby suggests, just look at those deeply dignified and articulate Tea Party rallies, whose goals were “limited government, personal responsibility, lower taxes, and economic freedom.” Nevermind the Jehovan fits of imbecilic rage. Nevermind the assault-rifles, the swastikas and “socialist!” screams aimed at people who couldn’t qualify as “commies” if their lives depended on it.

Nevermind those bankers destroying the working world’s economy with their bundles of shaky sharky loans and mortgages, their easy-credit paths to slavery (as in Greece), their outright corruption of every democratic government and problem-solving public initiative. They handed out candy-credit with a promise of growth in jobs to pay for it and then moved every job into slave-labor countries. 

Every meeting that matters now is held behind more closed doors and burly boys with bludgeons than ever before. Spinoza observed that when the people’s business is carried on that way, you can be sure it is not the people’s business getting done. And here’s what’s wrong for trusting Jeff: “What the Occupiers appear to want above all is to punish the wealthy, to demonize corporations, and to wallow in their own victimhood and sense of entitlement.”

After all, “limited government” means clearing the way for our job-creators and world-builders, who suffer so much “uncertainty” and needless interference from entities such as the EPA and OSHA—to name only two real reasons that America remains livable at all. “Uncertainty” is no longer tolerable to the addict called Profit inside business. Neither are wages, for that matter. “Personal responsibility” means that you, you peasant, will answer for your debts and crimes while banks, corporations and executives (those vanguards of anti-socialism except when they’re collecting bailouts or bonuses) operate with wholesale impunity.

“Lower taxes” means the high ideal of giving back as little as you can possibly get away with, for all your own gains based in the exploitation of public infrastructure, wealth and labor. And “economic freedom” means of course what Orwell rephrased as “the right to exploit others for profit.” It is absurd to pretend that our lives are truly decided by anything else. And that is the sickness against which we Occupy The World.

Jeff didn’t read my analysis and plan-proposal in WOOP. Hey, Jeff. Let’s make a list of the Top World Catastrophes during just the last 30 years, and see if the entity at fault in each was mainly Business or Government. When you consider also that the Public Relations industry and business-press have been explicitly inciting anti-government rage through all that time, you can see why Americans are so turned-around on the subject of what’s eating them alive. As Noam Chomsky has remarked, “The problem with government is that it’s potentially democratic.”

If you argue that a naïve fantasy called “the free market” and business (meaning, Profit) should decide all things in human life, you need to say openly that you’re in favor of being governed, from your workplace to your bedroom, by a self-sanctified private elite, who account to nobody (or what’s money for?). Them is ya choices. Poppy can’t save us anymore by waving the flag in bold psychosis and shouting “I don’t care what the facts are!”

So for cozy, pious Jeff, if you call the wealthy on their documented behavior—those who’ve done worse than nothing for America for decades as a means of enriching themselves—you want to “punish” them. After all they’ve done for you! You just forget about Jesus whipping the shit out of money-changers in the temple, you sinner there!

If you, your community and economy identify the parasite of Profit as the cause of your real and increasing suffering, you are “demonizing.” And if you say or try to do anything about the increasingly hopeless pit into which ever-wealthier and more powerful corporations are casting the vast majority of working people, you simply need to “get over it” and stop wallowing.

After all, speaketh Jacoby, nobody owes you anything—except the (unmentioned) bill that must come due for needless but profitable wars, for more tax-breaks at the high end, and for every hare-brained destructive cast of the dice in the planetary elite casino called capitalism.

Elite contempt for the very working people who feed their wealth is not, for Jeff, “class hostility.” For Jeff, a common-sense analysis of how we all get rich through each other’s contributions can come only from “class war fanatics” such as Elizabeth Warren. Jeff must have missed the Wall Street heels who took time to sip some champagne through their glib smirks as they gazed down from their balcony-eyrie over the New York Occupiers’ march.

Check me out on these documents. When I began working in the 1970s, the IRS tax-table said that if you made less than $1,050 in a year, you owed zero taxes. Since the “Reagan Revolution” de-regulated and downsized every living thing, you may notice that the IRS tax table has been quietly expanded downward to mine more wealth out of the poorest end and hand it directly to the elite.

For now, if you make five dollars in a year, you owe tax on it. There’s a real touch of national class. No “class hostility” there, no “radical redistribution of wealth”! Heavens, no! To Jacoby, the more you work and the poorer you get for it, the more you should feel inspired to work even more and thereby (somehow, someday) make America even greater!

 The Occupy movement, for Jacoby, stands in plain and doomed defiance of The Tenth Commandment’s “moral and social hygiene.” It protects us, that is, like a political and economic condom, from “innumerable other evils”—whilst in the midst of a “norm” called fucking our neighbors for a buck.

“It shouldn’t be surprising,” quoth Jacoby, “when a movement that obsesses with what rich capitalists earn, rather than with what they produce, starts treating other people’s property and persons with contempt.”

See? The man can’t help but get it backwards: after all, he follows and prays to a model of the world that’s uniquely backwards too. The Occupy movement is precisely concerned with what rich capitalists “earn and produce”—the answers being Much For Very Little, and Worse Than Nothing. Where is Jeff’s troubled spiritual conscience about that other Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal?”

Get backwards behind me, Satan! You should be “obsessed” with celebrating all that rich capitalists “produce” for everybody’s benefit. If those businessmen didn’t organize our world for us, where would we be! Answer honestly now, for Jeff’s sake: Ask yourself, Have they treated your “property and persons with contempt”?

If not, stay low. They just haven’t gotten to you yet.

Jeff say, You should be grateful, and learn from the fates of many peoples who were not—for example those unhygienic Canaanites and Philistines, who failed to recognize God’s people and his mighty-mysterious hand when good ol’ Israel came down from the Near East’s highlands to somehow, in miraculously peaceful fashion, become the lords of their already-inhabited coastal country.

No cultural or literal “genocide” about that—even if scientific archaeology is still thrashing to otherwise explain this extraordinarily-sudden transformation of that landscape. The Old Testament itself spells out what happened in copious blood. Now we’re told that while The Bible is all true, this part somehow isn’t—or, it’s like, sort of kind of, symbolical-allegorical, like. Even by that so-called argument, the “conquest of the Promised Land” is at the very least one of the ugliest wishes ever written out.

Be grateful, saith Jeff, to your masters—whose ethics, honor and industry “God” has clearly rewarded with dominion over all the Earth, and over your never-sufficient and ever-more-fruitless work-day and future. This, you understand, is a “spiritual” and “moral” argument that just happens to line a few elite pockets with cash, and your conscience with blinders, sound-proofing, and a numb-numb drug of choice.

If you can’t be grateful, at least be quiet, and invisible! For Jeff Jacoby, in his preposterous wisdom, has a Biblical dream for you. And if you don’t appreciate that, the blood-caked jowls of his Lord of Ethical History will soon be teaching you a sore lesson.

Go home, Occupiers, before you destroy us all! “With the help of God and a few policemen,” as James Joyce’s father might have said to Jeff, there’s still time to save American Profit from the wages of sin.

“If ye do not well, sin lieth at the door,” quoth Ye Scripture. You’ve got to realize that you saw Virtue itself sipping that champagne and gazing down on you, with the pleasure of a heavenly Saint Thomas Aquinas gazing into Hell.

Go home, Occupiers, be normal! Above all, watch TV! Who wants to be a millionaire? You do, if you’d just be honest with yourself. You can trust Jeff, he knows, it’s in The Bible! If you don’t know how to be normal anymore, read more Jeff Jacoby, and absorb the moral methodology by which he shamelessly shills for good ol’ American greed. You’ll find it as rigorous and uplifting as that of the Boston Puritans—whose “city on a hill” divided its time between exterminating “savages” and banishing anybody without the proper, docile, hard-working, never-covetous JudeoChristian attitude.

As a matter of fact, within a generation of those first Puritan church-communities in America, the vast majority of the population found itself “outside of the communion”—which most of all enabled your getting any share of the (colonial) wealth surrounding everybody.

Thanks, Jeff! Good job, Boastin’ Glob! And God, I hope I’ve learned my lesson.

Stronger Speaking: Simple Seasoned Steps

to Fundamental Confidence

         Pure exhilaration—More than a decade of it now as I’ve been teaching effective public and professional speaking to college students and clients. Every time I start afresh, it’s back to square one with a new group or person whose minor and sometimes-major habits of speech are disempowering them—usually and first of all, with those too-universal killers of attention and meaning: like, um, ya know, and up-talk (or, the constant question-tone?).

Call and leave yourself a 2-minute message about your day.

At the start of it, state your full name.

Then, next day, call back and listen to it.

Did you state your name in a “question?”-tone of voice?

Reverse that to a downward-ending tone, and hear the difference.  

If you have 250 words with which to move your life forward,

and 146 of them are blank noise, what are your chances?

           If I see transformations in these people all the time (and I do), it’s because of each “generation’s” frank feedback. What worked and what didn’t on the way to these new powers in your speech? So this is a short sharing of the most basic, key changes most people made, and some of the simple techniques that got them there.

          For the record, the age of The Dale Carnegie Speak Like An Authoritative White Man Program is bygone. The central point is to clean up and to keep refining how you play your own unique instrument of expression: your voice and language. Together they vibrate who you are and what you intend out into the world.

        A recent student with a beautifully musical full name asked whether she should introduce herself, in interviews and first-meetings, without the music. Somewhere in there is the secret of all speaking. For if she wants to trade her music for that killer job, that will describe what she’s signing up for in the chilled-down saying of her name. I told her to keep the music—Like a true charm, it will guide and guard her against any job that kills it.

       I observe that every person who makes even basic changes begins to express something powerfully their own and no one else’s. Some of them shake the room like inspired evangelicals, and others speak the meanings of half a novel in the lifting of one hand or just an eyebrow at the right times. What amazes is the endless variety of real expressive power—so I hope this offering helps to liberate yours.

       If we don’t get to work together, you’ll find more advanced ways to do that in 21^st Century Speaking: Power Toward Every Goal, which is available at my professional website Ancientlights.org.

Let’s go!

***

     Performance Anchors are basic elements of excellence that every public speaker must have. Starting right here, you must deal for real with each basic aspect. One point at a time, be 100% sure you have conquered this first Chapter each time you speak. Do that, and right away you stand out from the herd, without seeming to try: the world’s first clues of your first-rate standards in all things.

      Basics first. This offering from is a primary check-list to apply every time you get ready to speak. Conquer a few basics, and then your brain and your style are 10 times more free of the petty obstacles and worries that hold back your real powers.

***

Your New Motto, the Bottom Line of Confidence:

ANYTHING BUT HOMEWORK CAN GO WRONG.

      You’re in the audience as a speaker falls right on his face before the first word. But he gets up and delivers a talk that changes the world before your eyes. There’s no doubt of the substance in the style. You take it home because it gives you more real command of the subject. So, what do you remember of the evening? The power of the talk.

       It’s the same each time you speak. Above is your new motto and new first assumption as a speaker. Let’s explore why. First:

Nothing changes about the world when you get up to speak.

      You feel safe when you’re in the audience. You’re with, and hidden by, a group. Its eyes are fixed on someone else. You sit in the chair of a judge, with (of course) your own perfect calm mixture of wide-awake open mind and intelligent skepticism.

       You pity and admire a speaker just for being up there, so exposed, but going for it. Most people in an audience are more or less like this.

       They do not disappear or turn vicious when you get up there.

       Remember that “you” are still in the audience—all those curious and mostly-supportive people as real as yourself. If you A) know what you’re talking about, and B) work with all your best practice behind you to communicate, nothing that matters can detract from your effectiveness.

     From now on, speak with this first fact in your bones.

     From hecklers to bomb-scares, Anything can go wrong and do you no harm as a speaker—if you meet the essentials for which you are responsible in a first-rate speaking event.

      What are those responsibilities?

***

HOMEWORK, & PRACTICE ALOUD

     Homework and Practice Aloud work together in a circular process that grows more powerful each time you come through it.

     Homework is the process by which you discover (and learn how to demonstrate) answers to questions that people can judge for themselves. It’s all to your confidence and power that most people work the opposite way—starting with an opinion built from unexamined assumptions, and shoring it up with a few select authorities.

          There are criteria for demonstrating Homework (to come). Here, understand that Homework enables you to demonstrate substance—a reasoned and real contribution to your subject. All the tricks of language go to hide this when it’s lacking. When substance is there, you can’t lose.

          Homework answers three questions in clear solid terms:

A) What facts, and varying views of them, do people need to grasp this subject?

B) What must they have learned when they forget 85% of what you’ve said and shown? And,

C) How does each part of the content drive that home?

          Practice Aloud brings the physical body to bear on the brain-work above. Half of a powerful speaking experience is a physical event. So you absolutely must include Practice Aloud to make the most of its benefits.

          How can you claim them?

          You can think all day and write all night. Words will go round and round and convince each other (and finally, you) of their deep sense. Then, when you speak them aloud—especially to someone else—you instantly know what’s good, and what has to be far better.

          Ernest Hemingway called the human ear “a one hundred percent foolproof shit detector.” When you sit in an audience, you instinctively know fluff from substance. So, stop letting go of that skill just because it’s now you who is speaking. When you know that a sentence or point isn’t good enough, face the message and take real action.

          Your ear is not only your best merciless editor. It’s part of your body, which—as the complement of your scientist’s brain—is the artist in your speaking style, who brings every perfect nuance into the event.

          Much more to come on how that works and happens and grows. First, recognize another way that Practice Aloud empowers you.

          The human brain in some conceptions has two sides—again, the cool rational scientist and the emotional, intuitive artist. So, at any given time along your day and preparation process, you’re in one mode or the other. (Sleep is a third mode, too: go over a talk just before your day’s rest, and next morning you bring a sharp editor to work.)

          Make an ally of this by doing your Homework and Practice Aloud at different times, in different moods, and in different environments. (You can call it Mood Editing.) It seasons your speaking with all the different aspects of yourself. Some sessions improve content, and some improve strategies, rhythm and style.

          Each Homework/Practice cycle tells you how to grow more powerful. The main points here:

*Anything but homework can go wrong.

*The audience is as ready for me as I was for other speakers.

*I’ve done my absolute best homework. I have diligently practiced aloud again and again.

*On these grounds, I have earned an expectation that I can trust: Whatever happens, it’s going to be my best.

***

Basic Performance Anchors: Next Steps

Switch On

          You don’t have to be a perfect speaking being. Half of language is about the pleasures of bonding. We go crazy unless we have places to talk without rules and high-end standards.

     The point is to know the difference that most people don’t. There are times for pure play, and times when you speak to advance your life—to land a business loan, to meet the dean, or deliver substance to your peers. Not to mention interpersonal affairs.

     From now on—in Practice Aloud, and before you aim to speak with power—raise a hand to your temple, and turn on a Switch there.

When the Switch is on, we speak only our best.

          Your Switch puts an end to habits that rob you of power:

     Most of all, waste in our words. If you have 250 words to impress the world, but 170 are “Like,” “Um,” and/or “You know,” it’s over. These dead-air sounds have other guises, too—for example, “Well,” “So,” “Then,” and “And” itself.

       Dead-air noise is a plea, the crudest of place-holders in a talk. What it speaks is lack of real confidence. Does blank meaningless noise between words and sentences keep people listening? In fact, the opposite is true (more on this). 

          Difficult, but crucial—The Switch also means no more of the “Question Tone?” Some call this “Up-Talk?”—when the tone or arc of every phrase? and sentence? seems to be posing a question? Worse, it sounds timid? Tentative, and immature?

         “They say it’s going to rain today?” “I think you’re on fire?” “You make a brilliant point?”

         See Middle Voice below for more on getting rid of Up-Talk. First, here’s how to create a Switch that’s strong and reliable:

        Pause More, with a Breath; Work in Shorter Sentences; and, Slow It Down. Start “high” in your voice-range, and end each sentence low. The richer style you want will return (or grow), but without these killers.

       Accomplish one “clean” sentence at a time. Start from the higher “bright” end of your range, and you have nowhere to go (short of comedy or hysterics) except down in tone to the finish. It gets easier fast, and the differences make you want more.

      Deal with these small problems, and you stand out in every group in both diction and rhythm. You draw the world in without seeming to try.

      Start from where you are. A dictaphone or recorder will not lie about where you need work in the basics. Put your Switch on—and leave yourself some long phone messages. Talk about your day or a movie, tell a story or a joke. Then call back a day later—and be honest about how clean or “noisy” your best speaking presently is.

      Two very important tips about your Switch:

A) Your Switch goes on just before you start speaking, and stays on until after you sit down again—especially through deceptively-informal Q&A, Discussions or Interviews!  

B) If you tell a story that includes dialogue, be sure to use “He/She said”—or better, action verbs (for examples, “yelled,” “whispered,” “announced”). Never use “He/She was like…” or “He/She goes….”

     These Anchors work together to root your performances in confidence. The Switch is a commitment to speaking powerfully or not at all. With groups, I interrupt a speaker when their Switch quits, and ask them to pause and start again. I wish you could hear their peers’ applause when they clear a problem. And I know they’d clap the same for you.

     Alas, I’m not there to annoy you directly till you change. So these next Anchors of equal import show you more of how to install, maintain and strengthen a Switch of your own.

Breathe!

          When early humans hid from predators, they held their breath. We became hard-wired to stop breathing when afraid. So it’s easy to see why people “go blank” just before or during a talk.

          If you cut off oxygen to your body and brain, they interrupt whatever you’re doing to demand more. If your mind goes blank before or during a talk (in spite of your best homework and practice), check this first. You likely need deeper, more sustained, rhythmic breathing.

          In starting practice (with Switch on), take at least 10 long deep breaths (part of Grounding, next section). You’ll feel your nervous system calm down, flush with a fresh oxygen supply. Then, after each sentence, take another deep breath to fuel the next.

          Meet this constant need, and you free up brain-cells to help with what matters. Like a poet, you gain a natural (breath-based) rhythm in the way your sentences unfold. And, you demonstrate (without seeming to try) the confidence to take your time. Plus, a slower pace lets your listeners savor every word and inflection of your talk—the mark of a person sure of the value of their talk.

Grounding

          Life animates us with wild (hard to control) electro-chemical energies. Speaking makes bio-energies surge. Ignore or deny them and they cause (at least) a stiff locked-down posture, that fails anyway to control them. They create nervous “tics” that disconnect the body from a talk’s intended messages (rocking in place, tapping a pen, fishing in pockets, toying with hair, crossing feet). These distract your audience and yourself. There’s a better way.

      The point of Grounding is to find your own physical, bodily ways to rise to and integrate life’s crazy energies into your performance.

          It’s time to speak. You’ve done the Homework and Practice. Your Switch goes on. Your Breathing is deep and rhythmic. And still you feel over-charged with abundant but uncontrollable nervous energy.

      Imagine those forces as a magnificent horse that nothing in the world can tame or hold back. This horse is coming your way, right past you—or, over you if you block its path. What do you do?

      Start running in the same direction—and jump on! You don’t stop it, or miss it. You rise to it, match its pace and power, become one with it. From there, it carries you like pure inexhaustible energy toward your goals.

      How? You must physically explore, identify and do what works for you: your own best bodily ways to rise to and integrate (rather than resist or hide) this source of power.

       With decades of classes and public talks, I still need that Switch and deep Breathing. And, I ground: clap my hands and/or slap them to my sides, or shake fists on the air. When I can, I sing out, or strut a few measures of music that I call kick-ass. Waiting visibly on a stage, I gently wring my hands, or open and close them from tight to loose and stretched. I breathe even more, police my best posture—and see myself still sitting in that audience.

       Yet, there’s always more crazy energy left over. To that I give myself in getting up to speak (what choice is there?), and it fills the first minutes with a Let’s Go enthusiasm.

       Life’s energies enable and empower you. So, welcome them in. Get Playful. You’ve got it when you “shake it off” like an athlete, and no longer feel divided between a top-form speaker and a nervous animal.

      There is only you, “psyched” up into a full-alert state with a calm, poised, ideally-playful center. You’re good, you have earned the right to know it, and you’re ready for the room, whatever the outcome.

      What physical acts lift you up and keep you in that state? Athletes smack and smash into each other. In their state, it feels good.

      Find your own private experimental space, and:

      Imagine—You’re on in less than 5 minutes. You need that high-alert state with a calm core, now. You want to be the center of a storm.

      Let your body do what it needs to do—until you and that nervous body are one being. Clap. Jog in place. Trust the level where this feels good, and learn to go there by refining what worked.

      Each time you hit this state, claim the reward: consummate it with a smashing delivery of (for example) a song, a poem or some magnificent language that makes you feel alive.

      There are more ways to know when your Grounding rituals work. Nothing improves your speech more than experience and experiment.

      Create a question that needs answering where you are. Do the homework and offer your peers a talk about the findings. Afterward, invite tough feedback on two fronts: How well did your message itself get through? And what were the strong and weak aspects?

      Experiment with these Anchors in all your different speaking situations: dinner table,  workplace and with peers.

      Observe—and each time, connect the Grounding-actions used with your best results. What worked for you: slapping hands to your sides? A few jumping-jacks? The whole process guides you to the best few.

      Above all, welcome that wild horse. Rise to the riding of it. Summon and deliberately match (release and allow) its powers—It’s You. Jump on, hang on and let it carry you through that talk. You mean business.

***

      Homework. Practice Aloud. Switch On. Breathe. Ground. With these first 5 Performance Anchors, we move toward guiding our raw living powers to our goals.

      Let’s backtrack for one moment. If you take the floor as a jumpy and unsettled presence, work again through the first Anchors to avoid this first impression. Deal for real with them, or they sap away power.

     If you settle down into your best style after the first few minutes—having realized that nobody threw anything at your head—realize that A) There’s a need for more Breathing and Grounding beforehand; and, B) You want to know more about what creates your best.

      What are you feeling by the time you hit your best? Consider yourself lead singer in a band: it’s got to be your best from the first. From here on, that is the level where you need to start speaking every time.

      Identify what kinds of Grounding bring you to that state, and apply them. The reward for all this “pre-game” is that in every different speaking circumstance, you have your own sure Anchors for success.

***

Middle Stance, Middle Voice, Middle Face

          These Anchors are three simple norms—of body, sound, and demeanor—which you establish in your own way, and then from which you depart and return throughout a talk. Begin from these basics, and then the ways you play upon them become the basis of your art and style.

      Middle Stance is a strong relaxed posture with feet slightly apart, arms still and loose at your sides. Begin from here, and you wipe the whole expressive slate clean for yourself and the audience.

      It only takes a moment if you wish. Then, if you have Grounded yourself properly, every change of footing and gesture that you make, to vary this “blank slate” of a norm, is one of two things.

      It’s either A) natural and unconscious to you, but still appropriate to what you mean; or, B) a deliberate and artful element of meaning, emphasis and expression.

      Plato and Cicero created catalogues of moves and gestures that evoke certain meanings or emotions with the body. “Hands out on the air” often amplifies a question or a plea. A few strides toward one part of the audience add drama (if appropriate to meaning) on all sides. Arms akimbo can declare a decisive point: a look up, exasperation.

      Start to notice and keep a list of moves and gestures you find especially effective—in dance and sculpture, painting, film and theatre, performance, talks and more.

      Try them where they might match your meanings. For example, in the margin of your outline for a talk’s points, make a note to try one deliberate gesture with each main point. All that’s unique to you will make them yours. At the same time, you raise the odds of connecting with different people in an audience who know a like physical language, and with those who key most on visual messages.

      Middle Voice is your own comfortable middle range or normal tone of voice—loud and clear enough to be heard by every person where you speak. Push it out from your lower diaphragm, with purpose-anew, for each new sentence. Soon, it’s second nature.

      In formal circumstances, this means a volume like a lawyer’s in a court. In closer settings, it means a bit louder than normal, too. The common-sense standard is that everyone can hear each confident word.

      Middle Voice works in the same way as Middle Stance. You establish a “normal” basic tone, and then depart and return to create effects that enrich your talk with levels of meaning.

      By all means (again)—Breathe, and Begin each sentence “high” in your range, to end it “low.” Make each new sentence flow gently downward in tone, like a waterfall with three levels. Start high to add energy: it refreshes a listener’s attention. Along the middle, take your time and unfold those first-rate details. Finally, descend in tone and bring the whole meaning home—as if you’ve arrived at the waterfall’s deep pool.

      Higher tones conjure suspense, or signal a key question. Descending tones create momentum, authority, gravity: they guide us along a process or to a solid conclusion. They can also set up irony and anti-climax.

      Middle Voice reveals how many voices you have, and can acquire. We’ll see more of how these three Anchors take great speaking toward music, and more—toward a 3-dimensional symphony.

          Middle Face links you powerfully to the Neutrals. Never forget: the Neutrals are watching. Neutrals are the major share of almost every audience. (We’ll see why.) Neutrals as such are the people most free to decide where truth is among many speakers.

      If your face shows a sour, snide look of ridicule as you listen to others or invite them to speak, you tell the Neutrals that you aren’t one. If you quote from or talk to others with mockery, the Neutrals see and resent your attempt to bias them with your face, tone and treatment. What you try to inflict on someone else tells about you.

      Whatever happens in a talk, discussion, debate or argument, your face and demeanor express the same equanimity. You present your best self: a person calm and balanced, seasoned, wide-awake, feeling good—pleasantly professional. Focused for work, and flustered by nothing.

          We’ll return (Chapters 2 & 4) to the Neutrals as powerful speaking guides. Henceforth: Always present allies, opponents and the audience with the same Middle Face and demeanor—and most of all, if someone attacks you on personal grounds.

      Breeze past it (and see Combat Skills in Chapter 5). Return to the point that matters to the Neutrals. You never go wrong that way, because it’s public service. It also drops the indignity back onto its speaker, without your lifting a finger.

***

Eye Contact for Everyone

      This Performance Anchor is as crucial as the others. It helps you every time you apply a simple principle, based (like those above) in a kind of golden mean.

          Too much or too little Eye Contact disturbs your connection with listeners. The golden mean is the same if you have one listener or millions. The easy, reliable and effective approach is to make Eye Contact a constant cycle through your speaking event.

          First, one-on-one talks and interviews. Begin each sentence with eyes (in your Middle Face) connected. Toward the middle of each (or, every other) sentence, as your voice descends, let your eyes blink and roam downward, rather than up or “around”—as if working through a rich reflection. At last with your conclusion, re-establish eye contact: it adds confident emphasis. It says you’re ready to go on and open right there to a question or response.

          Walk into a larger speaking situation, and you have one goal for Eye Contact: Start to finish, let not one single person be left out of the event. Again, the Neutrals are watching.

      Locate the person at each extreme position of the audience. Create a visual cycle or sweep that includes every single person present: side to side, and front to back. Each repeated connection sustains their attention and interest, and links you to the Neutrals.

     Henceforth, you sweep every point (each pair of eyes) between those extremes. Connect your Middle Face as you can with each person for about 2 seconds: then move smoothly to the next through your cycle. Whether this means moving just your eyes, your head and/or your whole body, do what it takes to sustain this rhythm all the way.

      We need to work flexibly with the fact that some peoples and cultures prefer less direct Eye Contact in speaking. Yet in most cases, the world expects it—clear and bold. Rise to it.

      Can you show what you’re talking about, so others can judge it for themselves? If so, you’ve earned the right to look people first and often in the eye and deliver. Do not be afraid to “scare” them just a little, with the confidence you earned by your Homework and Practice.

      After all, they’re doing it to you! It’s your invitation forward.

***

          Let’s see how well you command getting ready for your best. What are the 9 Basic Performance Anchors you just read about?

          See how well (in every sense) you can explain each Anchor—aloud, and/or with a listener or recorder.

          Each time you get ready to speak, check in with and apply these 9 Performance Anchors in the order shown. And you will stand out with the best in every group without seeming to try.

          If you need a bit of fear, consider: These are “only” the speaking standards of tough competitors and would-be peers ahead of you.

          We close with the Basic Anchor that enables the most progress with them all, in the least time—if you invest some.

***

The Power(s) of The Pause

      We learn to drive slowly. First we earn real command over each element: then we bring them together to produce a smooth ride, neither timid nor reckless. With experience, the basics become second nature. We grow seasoned, and then cruise at our own speed to our destinations.

          Slow, It, Down.  

          Keep Your Lips Together till you’re truly ready to go on. Pause. Breathe, Ground, and ponder in silence. Then resume.

          Yes, our world hates to wait. But when you pause, and then deliver exactly the right words, people are grateful for the substance. They appreciate the very rare speaker who shows trust in their patience and respect for their attention-span.

      When substance arrives, people forget the wait. Indeed, they come to enjoy the next interval of suspense before something worthwhile.

          A Silent Pause is A) Safety from careless errors; B) Time to breathe and gather what’s next; C) a subtle confident challenge to your listeners; and, D) a part of 3-dimensional rhythm and impact (Chapter 3).

          Slow, It, Down. When you Practice Aloud, add in Silent Pauses (and Breaths). At first, you may sound stiff or pompous. That will change for the better. The point is to regain control—until you command each word, phrase and nuance along the downward tone of each sentence.

      Silent Pauses help the most with all these anchors and improvements. Pauses grace and enrich speech. Dead-air noise and pure speed never will.

      But people speak fast! If you pause, they think you’ve stopped, or they just interrupt. Yes—and so we return to the core of speaking issues, as exampled at the beginning by the student with the musical name. For you have to stand in the shoes of your own speaking-space and style. Let no one move you from your best. When they interrupt, let them—and then, carefully (without notice of interruption, not even with “as I was saying…”) return to your last full sentence. Because you paused, listened and then still got it right, they’ll remember it—and get the hint that talking with you is worth waiting for.

       Or, they won’t. And that’s where speaking well may start to separate you. You’ll look for the pleasures and results of new levels of speaking and listening, and leave old dead-ends behind.

          With a Check-List of these essentials for every speaking-situation coming your way, you gain in the confidence that unlocks your real powers. This is what you must conquer just to cut it in this never-fiercer world of job-competition. And I wish the poet well who is also in you.

http://ancientlights.org/

http://writeandspeakpowerfulenglish.com

Eve Helene Wilkowitz, 1959-1980

     In the spring of 1980 I’d just begun to live as a writer (age 25) in New York City. “Up until that age, I had no development at all,” said Herman Melville: “I date the beginning of my life from that year.” In central ways over three decades since that spring, I have felt the same thing.

New York! The breathing howling dynamo of American literary tradition, grimy, grand and alive to the last hidden street-corner. You stepped out your door every morning and swam out into living, and if one sense was shocked by some revolting daily revelation of human being, the other four senses didn’t care—they were drunks getting drunker by the breath on every sight, smell and sound, all of it reverberating intensified off the city’s endless canyon walls. Every mile each day was different, every person seemed to belong in a movie, and sometimes the whole packed-in human river flowed along almost in silence—until the next few minutes of utter pandemonium exploded into any hour, a convincing reminder of the madhouse under the imperial city of the world.

Drop something while you walk to your first freelance-writing job, it’s gone. Leave a door open, a key unaccounted for—forget it. Miss those signs that you’re starting to stick out like a mark and you’ll become one. And that’s the way it is: New York as usual the most intense example of whatever you want to talk about.

So here’s the mystery posed to me one Spring Friday night in 1980:

Having dinner with Eve Helene Wilkowitz, then a near-21-year-old publishing secretary working through school toward social work—a vibrant, charming, warm-hearted woman with dark eyes and long strong legs who loved her younger sister and was helping her to survive the recent death of their mother at a young age.

We eat, see a movie, walk the midtown city night holding hands and talking, talking. There’s no doubt we’re in love for the six electric weeks behind us. In fact we’ve just said it aloud to each other for the first time, and already talked some plans about moving in together. Under that, there’s more, and a ringing in my ears: The One. The One.

So there we are back at my midtown mouse-hole of a place, late, the city thrumming and quiet all around while those first exquisite deep kisses of a new beginning married us to Spring. In fact, I wanted Eve to stay the night with me instead of her usual—a ride on the night’s last Long Island Railroad train, back out to her then unhappily-shared apartment in Bay Shore.

I made it gently truly clear that I meant Sleep, and Eve believed me. So, she told me her real reason for why she had to go. She was not feeling well at all, with her ongoing period just then—she needed rest before she had to face some Saturday responsibilities. Then, she smiled, she’d be back to spend the rest of Saturday with me. Very promising, that smile.

So there we were, still making out as the near-midnight time for that last train kept approaching. I could not kiss Eve enough, and the funny thing from there is that while I did so, she proved so needful of real sleep that she was starting to nod off right there in my arms. Completely vulnerable, warm, tender, breathing deeply, resting. Safe.

I could respect her wishes, and wake Eve up in good time to take her across town in a taxi to Penn Station. She had never allowed me to ride the train all the way home with her—it was a beastly journey and Eve the work-commuter and NY native felt absolutely in command of it: there was “no need. I know everybody.” Still I always pressed to go till I nearly made her mad.

On the other hand, counseled my amorous 25-year-old New York writer’s intensified brain, I could pretend to fall asleep too. Just until the last train was sure-gone. Then she’d discover what a paragon of loving patience I could often pretend to be.

I woke Eve up and took her to the train. She slept with her head on my shoulder while the taxi tossed and rattled both of us, driving insanely down empty late-night Thirty-Fourth Street for the Station’s West Side.

The little argument about riding out with her erupted again right on the platform, and that was that. There were, after all, people around—a minor flood in the Station basement was tangling up a home-bound crowd from some Madison Square Garden sport event. I let her go.

Down the stairway Eve stepped, and she disappeared.

So have I wondered these 32 years: what was right? If I had not done as Eve had asked, not awakened her to take that train, she would be alive. I respected her wishes, and she isn’t.

No hope of anybody knowing where she was all that following weekend. No hope of filing a Missing Persons for at least 24 hours and till all known contacts were exhausted. So, I waited and chewed myself to pieces, until the following Tuesday morning.

“Mr. Dempsey, this is Detective Palumbo with Suffolk County Police Department out on Long Island. We’d like you to jump on the train and come out here today, while we work on this Missing Persons.”

So, I went, afraid as I was to leave the phone. And after a whole day of dark faces and riding-around’s to many locations never seen before, nor understanding why I was seeing them, they sat me down where I looked at Eve’s own chaotic kitchen for the first time, and told me she was dead. They watched the blood fall out of my face.

Eve “went missing” somewhere along her long route—from Pennsylvania Station, through Babylon and out to Bay Shore, Long Island, where at the station she always counted on a local taxi for the last leg of dark streets home. She was held alive for three days, and then murdered early that next Tuesday morning—and her body, her killer(s) dumped in the backyard of a suburban-style family home not three blocks from the place where Eve had lived.

When I got back to my room that evening I sat still in the dark all night. When the sun came up I started writing out every breath of our six weeks. In two days it was 86 long-hand pages.

As the last friendly face Eve probably saw, I was in the prime suspect category for awhile. By chance, a medical student who’d sold me his used stereo showed up to deliver it, with his father, early that Saturday morning of Eve’s disappearance, and they described my disheveled crawl out of bed to meet them. Later, a lie detector test wrapped in cables and mirror-windows—and years later in the 90s, two further New York detectives simply appeared one afternoon in the driveway of my home north of Boston. We talked the case all over again, which is to say they helped me talk and gave out nothing, and they swabbed my mouth for a DNA sample. I was amazed and grateful that they were still in action about this.

And yet—nothing. Except everything. It’s good to observe how their science and these humanities converge: upon the value of a single human life. Eve made me a man. And a writer.

I’m now—or rather, for 15 years I’ve been writing—a second novel that takes my old Minoan Cretan tribespeople of Ariadne’s Brother into the larger ancient world, where as we now know, they came face to face with the Israelites in the days of their emergence into history—the time of Samuel, Saul and David. Not one single agent or publisher will so much as go near this, the story still bleeding in the lines of our daily news. And yet this thing day and night will not let me go, undone.

For all the guidance Eve has given me these years since that broken Spring, I feel her with me now like a protectress—because from having loved her as I have, the world will know there is not one single bone of anti-Semitism in my being. I am going to interrogate my tradition, fact with fiction, fiction with fact. And where have you been, O my fathers, my tradition, to say or do one thing for this your daughter? What honors were bestowed on woman in her name? What tigers walk our nights born and growing from your insane imaginations against Life?

Here is something “final” I know. For all the walls I’ve walked and worked through in this life of mine now doubled, It—the matter of Eve—stands. A cosmic iron wall. It will never be gone. It will never be comprehended, and never be rectified. As Oliver LaFarge’s Laughing Boy sang out to the canyons of his grief: Time will not change it.

When I breathe it’s a spear in my chest that makes shattering music. When I walk, I drag it with me. When I talk it is listening. When I walk it’s behind, ahead and around. When I read it offers footnotes. When I stumble and fall it’s the laugh while I get up.

Because, you see, I remember that I cried every day for about two years, and one day I just seemed to crack open completely. It was the highest joy you can imagine with a kind of deep rolling ocean of sorrow underneath it. It was the furthest reach I had ever experienced of my capacity to care about another person. I remember sheer amazement, a sense of infinite connection, with every luminous speck of dust precisely in place, and most of all gratitude. Seems that I’ve measured “eve”-rything else in life by that time and moment.

Is poetry defiance of death? So are flowers. The first below (al qui quiere!) came out of living alone in Crete in the 1990s. As I took off from home and family to write again my loving father smiled as if I cut the throat of his happiness in going, and I went. A harrowing time, first affiance and book-contract likewise in wreckage, and absolutely on track still through 15 years/2,000 crazy pages of Minoan manuscript. The second—and, such as they are—what I still feel every Spring with these flowers at my feet.

To Life! I hope they help put murderers in jail.

***

She Is [circa 1991]

The name by which I reach toward Forever,

the Earth beneath me and the Star above,

the strength I find still there through every weather,

the memory that we are born to love.

I died with her. We were reborn together,

she within my heart, and we live on.

This must be why so sweet, and bitter

it is to burn like sun and moon in one.

Eve means Life; and now I cannot lose,

because to feel this fire is to have won.

She’s past them: I, not yet; but O my Rose,

You will prevail by what our lives have done.

***

Equinox ‘04

Three days through an underworld of rape,

this was the blue dawn hour

when my Evie left the world,

twenty-four years

this morning.

I have curled my strength

around her sleep,

I will kiss her

hands and eyes

until they trust the world again.

*

Royal-purple crocus breaking

tender through the snow.

This morning we found

Eve Helene lying on the ground.

No thought,

no word

is adequate for either.

But

gentle things will rise,

however hard the vernal day,

however cold the sun.

***

     Yes indeed—Occupy began to change the national conversation. And now? I wonder where the vast majority of American citizens can, perhaps, agree.

     It seems unlikely the Pentagon is going to stop such profitable daily business until American citizens surround it and block that flow of counterproductive waste and needless blood.

     The private corporation that sells money to The United States, the so-called Federal Reserve, is not going to let go of all its golden sinecures until American citizens bodily interrupt its generations of economic manipulation, fraud and crime.

     Wherever we listen, we hear Americans say that the U.S. Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court are not going to resume and fulfill their representative and Constitutional functions until they all stand face to face with citizens who are demanding—unconditionally, now—that they do so.

     One further observation you may share. Surely the childishly limited, corporation-rigged national discussion on display in these 2012 debates between Robamney and Robamney is not the discussion we desperately need to be having. The most practical and coherent vision of where we need to go—as a species hoping to survive, not just as Americans—spent the 2nd debate evening shackled to a chair with her Green Party VP.

     Flash: Out of the ashes of a Depression caused by unregulated speculation, it was FDR’s New Deal and the GI Bill that built the world we enjoy—from the weekend to health care and the minimum wage. The Green New Deal’s strength is its simplicity. Cut the war budget and actively invest in peace. Invest in education (which generates more return than any other venture), create a green economy and a 21st-century civilization—which will begin to end the age of oil and resource wars, and so begin to address climate change. Those are interconnected solutions that make practical sense. If Robamney, Robamney and the criminally corrupt DNC/GOP duopoly had any better ideas, you’d know it by now.

     ”Gentlemen, nobody wants to cut the defense budget!” gushed the distinguished clown Martha Raddatz—doing her patriotic part to confine the discussion to nonsense.

     Given how long these problems have been worsening through the criminal neglect of our “leaders,” consider afresh the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1968, in the year of his assassination. King’s plan was for a direct democratic nonviolent people’s march on Washington DC—the beginning of a global struggle for economic and other kinds of justice. Only a carefully homegrown but global movement could possibly deal with the global-scale assaults on workers, rights and nature by the Profit machine. And so King’s words are more relevant than ever.

     I hope that a generation who knew King’s life and felt his loss will recover all his inspirational power toward a direct and determined revival of his plan—a peaceful, positive, practical plan from a vision that will not and cannot be turned away.

From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last book of essays,

“The Trumpet of Conscience,” 1968:

This from “Nonviolence and Social Change”:

     …Of course, by now it is obvious that new laws are not enough. The emergency we now face is economic, and it is a desperate and worsening situation. For the 35 million poor people in America—not even to mention, just yet, the poor in other nations—there is a kind of strangulation in the air. In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way. The problem is international in scope. And it is getting worse, as the gap between the poor and the ‘affluent society’ increases.

     The question that now divides the people who want radically to change that situation is: can a program of nonviolence—even if it envisions massive civil disobedience—realistically expect to deal with such an enormous, entrenched evil?

     …I intend to show that nonviolence will be effective, but not until it has achieved the massive dimensions, the disciplined planning, and the intense commitment of a sustained, direct-action movement of civil disobedience on the national scale….

     …The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.

      Beginning in the New Year, we will be recruiting three thousand of the poorest citizens from ten different urban and rural areas to initiate and lead a sustained, massive, direct-action movement in Washington, D.C. Those who choose to join this initial three thousand, this nonviolent army, this ‘freedom church’ of the poor, will work with us for three months to develop nonviolent action skills. Then we will move on Washington, determined to stay there until the legislative and executive branches of the government take serious and adequate action on jobs and income.

     A delegation of poor people can walk into a high official’s office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands. (If you’re poor, if you’re unemployed anyway, you can choose to stay in Washington as long as the struggle needs you.) And if that official says, ‘But Congress would have to approve this,’ or, ‘But the President would have to be consulted on that,’ you can say, ‘All right, we’ll wait.’ And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary.

     If you are, let’s say, from rural Mississippi, and have never had medical attention, and your children are undernourished and unhealthy, you can take those little children into the Washington hospitals and stay with them there until the medical workers cope with their needs, and in showing it your children, you will have shown this country a sight that will make it stop in its busy tracks and think hard about what it has done.

     The many people who will come and join this three thousand, from all groups in the country’s life, will play a supportive role, deciding to be poor for a time along with the dispossessed who are asking for their right to jobs or income—jobs, income, the demolition of slums, and the rebuilding by the people who live there of new communities in their place; in fact, a new economic deal for the poor.

     …I have said that the problem, the crisis we face, is international in scope. In fact, it is inseparable from an international emergency that involves the poor, the dispossessed, and the exploited of the whole world.

      Can a nonviolent, direct-action movement find application on the international level, to confront economic and political problems? I believe it can. It is clear to me that the next stage of the movement is to become international.

     National movements within the developed countries—forces that focus on London, or Paris, or Washington, or Ottawa—must help to make it politically feasible for their governments to undertake the kind of massive aid that the developing countries need if they are to break the chains of poverty. We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.

     But movements in our countries alone will not be enough….So many of Latin America’s problems have roots in the United States of America that we need to form a solid, united movement, nonviolently conceived and carried through, so that pressure can be brought to bear on the capital and government power structures concerned, from both sides of the problem at once. I think that may be the only hope for a nonviolent solution in Latin America today; and one of the most powerful expressions of nonviolence may come out of that international coalition of socially aware forces, operating outside governmental frameworks.

     …In practice, such a decision would represent such a major reordering of priorities that we should not expect that any movement could bring it about in one year or two. Indeed, although it is obvious that nonviolent movements for social change must internationalize, because of the interlocking nature of the problems they all face, and because otherwise those problems will breed war, we have hardly begun to build the skills and the strategy, or even the commitment, to planetize our movement for social justice.

     …In this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis: it is an imperative for action.

Chief One Bear and ‘English’ representative at Wessagusset ceremonies 2004

On Saturday, April 6th, 2013, the town of Weymouth—only the second permanent English settlement in Massachusetts, and a founding-place of the public town meeting—held a gathering of Native and other American citizens determined to listen to each other.

This “little salt water cove,” called Wessagussett in Eastern Algonquian, was the place where, 390 years ago in the Spring of 1623, the “Pilgrims” of Plimoth Plantation sent their man at arms Captain Myles Standish, to ambush and kill several outspoken Massachusett leaders under the guise of a diplomatic council and feast.

After centuries of controversy and blame—ironically, over a place thoroughly neglected through those times—in 2001 the site of Wessagussett was cleaned up and re-opened as a Memorial Park and Nature Walk. (Take a beautiful walk through in this short video at YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EZ5BOQYvPk .)

Then in Spring 2004, here at the meeting of Sea Street and Willow Avenue, came the first ceremonial “Laying Down of Arms” between Native people and representatives of the Pilgrims’ first English neighbors. (You can see more about that day with the Ancient Lights link just below.)

So, this 2013 gathering was a next step forward: a “Day of Recognition” that brought about 100 people of many backgrounds to the site. Quietly a Native man walked circles around the great circle, “smudging” everybody with smoke from sweetgrass burning in a shell. A ceremonial fire burned close by the drum of the Quabbin Lake Singers, and their voices and drumming honored everybody’s ancestors, to open the bright afternoon of open-minded listening and talk.

It was Thomas B. Adams who, as President of Massachusetts Historical Society, observed in 1970 that “the world cannot afford to bungle its diplomacy.” Adams spoke back in time to his family forebear, Charles Francis Jr., whose 1892 Three Episodes of Massachusetts History had studied the slaughter at Wessagussett, only to find it merely typical of American frontier necessity. So this day’s recognized Native and academic historians came together determined to follow Thomas, rather than Charles, into the future—with a common ground of new understandings to refute the claim of inevitable violence.

Below is the 20-minute talk I had the privilege to deliver as one of many voices. I had first studied Plimoth (1620) and Wessagussett (1621) as part of graduate studies at Brown University, creating a new edition of New English Canaan (1637/2000) and the biography of its author Thomas Morton—both of which involved Wessagussett history. The link and the contrast was that Morton’s infamous Merrymount (1624) used different older methods to establish successful relations with the same Massachusetts people whose families had been injured at Wessagussett. So I’d gone back into events from 1621-23, whose historiography underwrote the national frontier story, and published Good News from New England and Other Writings on the Killings at Weymouth Colony (2001). You can see a full time-line and web-page about these events at http://ancientlights.org/tl3.html .

Finally—because these “Crazy Pages” are to really speak my mind—I offer these frank observations. The original “Pilgrims” of Plimoth (and the secular “Strangers” with them alike) wished very much that “rude” and “uncouth” Wessagussett would just go away. It was after all an economic rival (like Merrymount), and most of its mainstream-English people made a laughing-stock of Plimoth’s frontier-evangelical fantasies—their dreams of “reforming” New England’s “howling wilderness” and “savages” which, in fact, for a century had carried on a cautious imperfect transatlantic coexistence.

Unfortunately and incomprehensibly likewise, today’s “living museum” of first-rate professional scholars and “interpreters” at Plimoth Plantation continue to ignore the increasing tide of informed dialogue, real understanding and civic recognition at Wessagussett. Take your education-starved family to Plimoth for a day, and there’ll be worlds to learn from the church and fort and Main Street to the Wampanoag Village.

But you won’t see, on the palisade of Plimoth where “It’s Always 1627,” the piked-up head of the Native spokesman who was “pre-emptively” assassinated, in the midst of both sides’ terrified misunderstandings and mistakes. And you won’t see the linen cloth that Captain Standish dipped in the blood of his victims and posted like a first flag on top of those fortifications. You won’t hear either about the seasoned man who laughed and called them altogether “needless,” or about his 1627 May Day Revels, or his ongoing transatlantic trust and toleration. (Come to Maypole Hill in Quincy on May 11th, and you will!)

Morton invited Plimoth folk along with “all comers” to his feast. If they showed up, they remembered a dancing chorus of decadent furies and fairies too naive to know that their unlikely frontier success had doomed them. Plimoth since and to this day has ignored all like invitations to both plantation-sites, and even the skilled interpreter who handles the role of Myles Standish decided, after all, not to attend this Day of Recognition.

Why? It was Charles Francis Adams Jr. who wrote that “there is something appalling in the consciousness of utter isolation”; and, that in such a needlessly mistaken mental state, “it was impossible that [the 'Pilgrims'] should not exaggerate the danger.”

Back then, it seemed to be Plimoth families at stake. But history, public teaching, and public presentation have to know and go forward on the fact that that danger is over.

What is it, then? Wessagussett seems to be something that not even PBS, not even the BBC, not even The History Channel will touch (all of whom have filmed Plimoth stories there, with full casts of interpreters)—not with more than superficial and “tragically necessary” moments inside very familiar bigger stories.

And yet, this place was the first to teach, through its exculpatory histories, what became the full-blown Puritan approach to Native America; and that was the ground floor of national policy assumptions. Myles Standish and the stern bungler of Salem, John Endicott, became the ham-handed teachers of the next colonial comers’ men-at-arms. Those greenhorns made a fiasco of their extermination-war against the Pequots, and you can see this for yourself at http://ancientlights.org/mysticfiasco.html .

Their ministers, governors and gentles were the authors of the histories soon to be read in schools for three centuries after them. So, to see how deeply Wessagussett lives in our national psyche, make yourself a list of crucial errors in its story: ignorance of the landscape, short-sighted priorities, uninformed plans, neglect of Native languages, inability to tell “them” apart, little idea of Native warfare, and fear-based actions that just kept on needlessly creating new enemies (all of this in tandem with shelf-feet of sad, haunted, imperial hagiography). If those sound like familiar blunders, we see the legacy from 1623. If education can’t or won’t find ways to address the whole story, we will keep on bleeding others and ourselves for the sake of an icon.

It’s silly, because the full facts are out there now: the first shock is that all these people were flawed, and not, in C.F. Adams words, either culture-bearers or “partially developed, savage human beings.” It’s strange, because people where you talk with them are starved for complex history. It’s needless, because very few see “Saints” in any part of the story anymore: their icons validate willful ignorance, hypocrisy, and/or convenient historical elision. And it’s insulting, to Native and other citizens alike—as if, once again, this is all just too painful and uncomfortable for the children.

2020 is coming, the “Pilgrims’” 400th anniversary. Who’s going to tell it in the round?

Well, this is the kind of thing we do—and we hope, someday, you’ll join us.

*******

Good afternoon. Weeg-Waman: Welcome. First, it is meet to thank our friend Jodi Purdy Quinlan, who brought this Memorial Garden into being 12 years ago. Welcome back, to those who remember the first memorial gathering here, 9 years ago, with our dear late friend Chief One Bear. We welcome and appreciate, too, the descendants of Massachusetts and other tribes-people who honor this place with their presence. And, Welcome all who come to share this Day Of Recognition.

The end of all our wandering, said the poet T.S. Eliot, is to come home and know the place for the first time. So, in these 20 minutes, let’s open our eyes—to Weechagaskas, Wessaguscus, or Wessagussett, the “little salt water cove” in Algonquian. A good place to live, to sit, to listen and ponder, with fresh water, deep soil, easy access to the blessings of the sea and three rivers: the Fore, the Back, and the Monatiquot.

This day, we look at Wessagussett in time. It’s a beautiful, peaceful garden, set aside for the purpose of remembering where the peoples of two continents met, and began to try to live together. And, this is a garden that has bloomed from a place of murder.

This is the site of a fatal misunderstanding at the root of our story. So, while this day in civic terms goes to recognize all our forebears and ancestors, it is also an act, toward all our elders, very much like what students do in the highest honor of their teachers.

We, like time and life, are going beyond them. We cannot undo the past. We can do better. It is what our best teachers want from us, and for us. It’s part of what makes each one of us American.

The soil of Wessagussett tells about extraordinary people: very different people, on the front line of a human frontier that was new to all of them. They had extraordinary strengths, courage, and freedom, and they were under extraordinary pressures, in the midst of their meeting.

The curtain really rises with a melting Wisconsin Ice Sheet, about 13,000 years ago. We still dredge up mastodon-teeth off Martha’s Vineyard, and Native stories tell of walking to visit relatives in Nantucket. We have finds of artifacts like old family-heirloom-collections, including every period of their life here—the oldest “Paleo” points, the brilliant “Archaic” tools from the Blue Hills to Quincy’s Caddy Park, and the beautiful things created in the “Woodland” days—which brought on the great gardens of Massachusetts Fields, and the times we now call history.

This goes to the long memory behind Massachusetts peoples and their neighbors. By the age of their settled-in villages, most of them called the Great Spirit Kiehtan. They understood the world of nature as a balance of differences, wholly alive: infused, to the waters and stones, with spirit.

They knew their lands and kinsmen through their mothers—including the Massachusetts’ Great Squa of Mystic, who outlived the Sachem Nanepashemet; and her sister of the Neponset band, named Passonagessit. Economically, Native New England lived by a barter system, with local and region-wide trails and waterways. And their family groups appointed Sachems, who spoke for them in matters of diplomacy, justice, trade—and sometimes like the rest of the world, in conflict. We know there were bad-blood rivalries among the Wampanoags, Narragansetts and Massachusetts. But, as in Europe of the time, that was the exception, not the rule, among peoples who were closely intermarried.

By the 1600s, at least 5,000 Massachusetts people were living in 5 main bands from the North to South Shores: the Saugus, the Mystic, the Neponset, the Ponkapoag and the Cohanit. From north to south, this coast is covered with the shell-heaps that mark the places of their seasonal feasts and festivals. And by that time, about 250 European ships were visiting these shores each year to fish and trade for furs where they could.

The Massachusetts’ close connections, though, also carried European diseases, and after 1618 there were only about 1,000 Massachusetts left. It was Plimoth’s great scholar Nanepashemet who compared this to the nightmare-impact of a nuclear weapon. Suddenly, generations were gone, and the region’s tribal relationships were thrown into new imbalance.

Among the survivors was Passonagessit’s son, the many-named Chikatawbak, or “House Afire.” By the 1620s his people had moved down the Neponset River from Unquity to seaside Moswetusett. At his sides were at least two very capable men, called Pecksuot and Wituwamat: they were pneise, or in Winslow’s words, men “of great stature and strength, but discreet, courteous and humane, who scorned theft, lying, and all manner of base dealings.” Their abilities combined the political roles of Sagamore or sub-chief with the healing and visions of the Powah, along with leadership where conflict called for diplomacy.

DeRasieres described such men as “eager and free in speech, fierce in countenance, but tempered with courage and wisdom.” Such was Plimoth’s Wampanoag friend Hobbamok. As will appear, it may have been a status also hoped-for by his fellow Tisquantum. And within those roles was a tactic called brinksmanship—a daring use of language and threat as the left hand of conflict resolution.

Consider that, if men like Pecksuot and Wituwamat reached their 30s by the 1620s, they were shaped by decades that brought more French and English strangers to these shores, along with “plague” and encounters that turned increasingly bad. It seemed that a century of older transatlantic ways—called “fair means” in English, and described by Chikatawbak as reciprocal gifting, socializing, and trade—was breaking down, under European pressures and Native New England’s new imbalances.

The young Pecksuot and Wituwamat could have met Gosnold, and Martin Pring, Champlain and Challons: Captains Argall, and Harlow, and John Smith himself, around 1614, who skirmished and killed people at Cohasset and Patuxet, future Plimoth. When the infamous Captain Hunt kidnapped at least 19 people, including Tisquantum, these two Massachusetts pneise knew about it.

Pecksuot himself, talking with a French crew shipwrecked on Cape Cod, was told by one what his holy book saw: Native peoples soon being driven from their lands. Was that why Pecksuot and others, soon after, attacked and burned another French ship in Boston Bay, upon “some distaste” given them? Now, all-told, we have an idea of why Pecksuot and Wituwamat were so out in front of encounters with the newest strangers. These English made it clear that, this time, they meant to stay.

The great majority of these colonists were varying degrees of Christian: underground Catholics, mainstream Anglicans, or outright Protestants against their government and church. From sailors to soldiers and gentleman-investors, in their cosmos the Creation had “fallen” into sin, and in consequence, their religion focused around The Bible’s Old Testament, and an ancient Middle Eastern rabbi named Jesus, whom they believed would return one day to separate good from evil forever. In William Bradford’s words, “both reason and nature” excluded women from leadership. Meanwhile, these English family groups, centered around fathers and patriarchs, were going through different kinds of separation: leaving behind the medieval manor-farm with its common dining halls, living on lands and in households increasingly subdivided by social class, by economics, and by political and religious ideologies.

Economically, as Early Modern capitalism emerged from medieval ways, England was closing off more and more common lands for a new class of investors in the wool industry. While many protested, thousands of people roamed the land “penniless, naked and starving.” Thousands of hardened English soldiers were back from the wars against Spain, such as Humphrey Gilbert, John Smith, Myles Standish, and possibly Phinehas Pratt of the first Wessagussett men. Altogether, the stresses on England were making it too easy to run over any Native American rights in their ancient land. After all, they had no cattle. The first corporate ventures’ profits were meager, but the rivaling powers of states, aristocracies, and investments kept finding new means for them. America was already becoming a kind of safety valve for European problems.

At the bottom were the parish boys, youths without other hopes who answered calls from King James’ Council For New England for sailors and settlers, and signed themselves into years of indentured servitude. By Plimoth’s time, more than half these youths were dying each year in the malarial tobacco farms of Virginia.

There were still more distinct English groups: the mostly-secular families like the “Strangers” who came with Mayflower, interested only in a homestead-share of a colonial enterprise. That was also one goal of the evangelicals known as Separatists or Puritans. Such were Plimoth’s William Bradford and Edward Winslow, whose family groups, dedicated to dissent from state and church, left their first exile in The Netherlands to avoid fitting into an insufficiently-Biblical Dutch culture. If they could not endure the Dutch, the choice of a “wilderness,” filled with ideas of “savages,” tells us about their will to isolate themselves, if that was what it took to live their uncorrupted values.

Finally, at the top were the investors—-aristocrats on, or close to, The Council for New England. Their capital interest was profit, even by way of illicit gun-trade, with the best American pelts and furs. Such were the men who scolded the decimated Pilgrims for not returning Mayflower packed with commodities; and “middling” gentlemen like Thomas Weston, who was working for his and the Council’s interests.

And so let’s turn to the key moments on the way to what happened here. It may surprise you, that the most decisive error was at the very start. When Plimoth rose from the ashes to a major agreement with Wampanoag and Massachusett groups in September 1621, what did it stipulate? One thing—that all of them were subjects of King James. For this to have any meaning for Native people, it could only mean they were allies, expected to turn to each other in matters of conflict and justice.

However, the paper bore no Narragansett marks. They did not appreciate their old rival Wampanoags and Massachusetts seeming to have a new upper hand in European trade. It’s a tribute to Tisquantum’s help in all this, that the Narragansetts blamed him. So, they got their cousins at Nemasket to kidnap and shake up Tisquantum. Had they wanted him dead, they’d have killed him. But out marched Captain Standish to the needless rescue, wounding several Native people.

And still, the peace held around that year’s Thanksgiving. Now came the Fortune, with the first 35 of Weston’s men, and “scarce a bisket-cake amongst them.” The central mistake was soon to come, from a no-doubt shaken Tisquantum, and from Captain Standish.

You see, into that winter of 1621, the Narragansetts tried diplomacy again. But the men they entrusted made it a fiasco of bitter words, and in came the famous bundle of arrows wrapped in snakeskin.

Read Winslow’s first pages carefully. He says, that warning was for Tisquantum. But he, perhaps to protect himself, turned the warning into a threat to the whole plantation. So, first thing, Plimoth sent out Hobbamock’s wife. She found no bad feeling or intent in local villages. Yet, from late November into February, Plimoth fortified. They built a palisade in fear of the Narragansetts and, we can only suppose, of their local Native kind.

This meant that most manpower would not be planting food, and it forced more desperate encounters in the coming months. Fortification also alienated Plimoth’s own chief ally Wampanoags. “Many insulting speeches” started to hamper the older transatlantic ways of dealing with trouble—which we’ll hear from Chikatawbak himself.

In Charles Francis Adams’ view, it was impossible for Plimoth, in such self-isolation, not to magnify the danger beyond the facts.

Early that Spring 1622, Tisquantum was close again to being killed, when straight in came the Sparrow, full of more Weston men for Wessagussett. Governor Bradford turns his story to the English, for now he had his hands full of more men with no supplies. But he did see, right there, Native men turning away “in a great rage.” To them, it must have seemed clear that there was no real idea of shared justice. Soon, events would unfold to show them this again, and again.

A few weeks of bad blood passed. June 22 brought 60-70 more of Weston’s men on the Charity and Swan. Somehow out of their scant provisions, they did gift Chikatawbak for permission to live on this chosen ground. But by all accounts, they had few applicable skills. They built no storehouse, because they planted no crops. According to the outsider Captain Levett, they spent most of their time building “castles in air.”

Survival meant that they could not help but intrude into Native food sources, from shellfish to ground nuts and game. Now imagine the impact of summer’s news that, far south in Virginia, the Powhatan had risen up against the English, and slain about 400 people. Standish increased Plimoth’s “training days,” with booming shows of arms. And the tinder just kept building in everybody’s midst.

Wessagussett’s first leader Richard Greene died. His successor John Saunders soon sailed for supplies from Maine’s fishermen, but he never came back. The trajectory was more and more desperation in young men all but abandoned by their superiors’ incompetence and negligence.

Some tore into late summer’s Native corn harvest, and more did so through Autumn. Who would deny that most merely wanted some kind of new home and life here? Yet, where they tried to adapt, they were foiled. Some drowned in the salt flats, exhausted by digging shellfish. Some collected firewood for local village food. Three put their boat-wrights’ skills to work, and one found a Massachusett wife. But these men in the middle were scorned by their fellows as quasi-traitors, and by Native people as scapegoats for their ongoing, unanswered grievances.

So began that desperate winter of 1622, as Bradford, Winslow and Standish made astonishing voyages round the region, doing their best to barter food from Native villages. But, in their own reports, at every stop, there were Native people to be heard about wrongs committed, crucial food-stores stolen, and hunger of their own. What we find is Captain Standish threatening violence over a missing string of beads. Englishmen laughing in the face of Native peoples’ best diplomatic gestures.

No surprise that Wituwamat and Pecksuot gave Standish an earful of feedback, more than once. These words, half-understood by ears that were willfully closed, became a “threat.” On both sides, and between, was what the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole recently called the empathy gap: the failure to imagine how another party might react to something that would drive oneself to rage and maybe violence. 

Could things get worse without exploding? That December, an English ship, half-foundered off Cape Cod, decided to make the best of it by stealing furs, food, and people from the Nausets. If we know this only from minutes of a Council For New England meeting—through a report, relayed from Natives, by a Mass. Bay trader named Leo Peddock—we may be surprised if, by now, there was no “Native conspiracy” to end both colonies altogether. You be the judge, with the last indications we have.

Make a list of the months of rumors and alarms from Tisquantum and Hobbamock, and you can feel every Plimother’s head swimming with worry for their families. A court today would dismiss both players for their obvious failures to keep track of self-serving lies. Then, Tisquantum died suddenly that winter, and Plimoth lost another central help. Every avenue of diplomacy was either closing, cursed by luck, or bungled in anger.

That’s why we need to hear the most grounded and reasonable voice that spoke straight into these troubles. Somebody had to step forward, and try old means, to give resolution its fighting chance. Here came Sachem Chikatawbak, with a skillfully oblique show of strong, armed braves to Wessagussett: angry, but ready to talk.  “Well, Pecksuot—Tell him, if he be angry with us, we are angry with him.”

Not the right response.

“Englishmen,” Chikatawbak said. “When you came into the country, we gave you gifts, and you gave us gifts. We bought and sold with you, and we were friends. And now, tell me, if I, or any of my men, have done you wrong. Some of you steal our corn. And I have sent you word, times without number. And yet, our corn is stolen. I come to see what you will do. All Sachems do justice by their own men. If not, we say, ‘They are all in together.’ And then, we fight. I say, you all steal my corn.”

The English “stirred their arms.” Chikatawbak “went away in a great rage.” And then—Listen. “At this time, we strengthened our watch, until we had no food left.” It was Wessagusett now in the Plimoth boat.

 Honorably, Governor Bradford stopped a desperate Wessagusset proposal to take more food outright from Native families’ stores. Winslow’s diplomacy and doctoring for Massasoit brought a new “conspiracy” charge out of Hobbamock, whose list turned every ally on Plimoth paper into an enemy: including Nemasket, where Winslow stayed pleasantly on his way home.

The final choice—for a “pre-emptive strike” led by Standish, who was boiling in his brain against Wituwamat and Pecksuot—was sealed with the arrival of so-called intelligence from Wessagussett’s Phinehas Pratt. And not one historian, from Bradford to Philbrick, has scrutinized this final spark, even as they cite it.

Pratt was writing decades later to get a kind of “retirement” from Mass Bay, and long after all the other eyewitnesses were gone or dead. He proudly recounts his assault on a merely-saucy Massachusett woman for no apparent reason. When she cursed him out with a threat that braves would repay her bruises, Pratt struck off for Plimoth with her words.

Oh, yes—just before Pratt left, Pecksuot offered Pratt his own son, Nahamit, as a guide; for which, read “hostage.” Pecksuot wanted this naked “lie” of conspiracy exposed. Pratt refused, and slipped away.

Clearly, parlay was still possible, because that was the stated purpose of this Wessagussett meeting. Pratt says that 10 or 11 armed English arrived here with Captain Standish, and Hobbamok: the day was our April 5^th. The next day came Wituwamat, with a brother of 18 “following in his steps,” and Pecksuot, with “another” man, maybe his son.

Philbrick at least brings out the assassination-mission on which Standish carried himself. He was determined to kill and terrify as many Massachusetts as possible, at the dawn of the English tradition called “one bloody good lesson.” Tellingly, he was shocked that Wessagussett’s own men seemed to feel no danger around them. But, Wituwamat saw the rage in Standish’s eyes, and told him to “begin whenever he liked.”

Where Standish “liked” was not in the open, toe-to-toe, but seated, at a closed-in feast of pork—offering, perhaps, some soothing liquids. The Captain seized Pecksuot’s own knife hung at his neck, and witnesses found it “incredible how many wounds these two pneises received before they died.” When Wituwamat and his brother were dead at other hands, Standish cut off his capital enemy’s head. Outside, they hanged “another,” and sent orders for killing two more by “another Company.” Then Standish, “to make spoil of them and theirs,” killed one more, and one fellow escaped him. A running skirmish, round a hill near here, came to one man wounded and a torrent of mutual rage. When Standish, back at Plimoth, showed the head around, a number of terrified “confessions” came forth. But it was too late to save the 2 or 3 Wessagussett men who were killed in the villages, where they had tried to do their best.

Pratt, by that summer, took part in more assaults and abductions at Cape Ann and Dorchester. A visiting Captain Emmanuel Altham saw Wituwamat’s head piked on Plimoth’s fortifications. Beside it hung a cloth dipped in his blood as an “ancient,” or flag. And Altham heard people wonder what had happened to their trade. Winslow knew.

“This sudden and unexpected execution…so terrified and amazed them, that they forsook their houses, running to and fro, living like men distracted, living in swamps, and so brought manifold diseases amongst themselves. Very many are dead; as Canacum, the Sachem of Manomet; Aspinet, the Sachem of Nauset; and Ianow, Sachem of Mattakiest. Certainly many of late have died, and still daily die. Nor will it easily cease, because through fear, they set little or no corn.”

Soon, three more Massachusetts people drowned, just trying to bring peace-presents to Plimoth. So the count went to at least 10 Native people dead, and 2 or 3 English.

Together now, we look. What we see is as much as historians can ask for by way of an experiment. First we have an imperfect but working set of methods in the first transatlantic century of contact. Then, the Plimoth approach. But what happened, the very next year, with the same Native people? They met some new English, men with a mind for those old ways. And together they made it work. Better than ever, until Boston arrived.

It wasn’t Utopia. Just mutual respect. Come see for yourself, because you are invited to Maypole Hill in Quincy on Saturday May 11^th, 11am to 2, where Merrymount became the most notoriously “wrong” example on the books. True, it only worked for six years—but the cause of its end was not within itself. Maybe this year, the Maypole’s 389^th, we’ll get the Plimoth folks to come and let their hair down.

And now, having looked with all our courage, this is a place to be proud of the town that rose from the first. A town whose town meetings built the foundation of democracy. A town that faced the fines and whips and exiles that punished their religious independence. And a town with the strength to comprehend its ambiguities and teach them to the public, rather than hope, as of old, that Wessagussett will go away. We are the unafraid proof that it will not. We want sophisticated children.

Sisters and brothers, here today, where all of us have lost our “saints,” we are come home, with new eyes. This is Recognition Day. The walls are down. See the garden again. This beauty is inside us, and around us. This is what goes on. Not fear. Not the lack of understanding.

What can close this better than the prayer of our great late friend, Chief One Bear, Raymond Tremblay, who grew up in this area, and helped the healing here in 2004: a man whose “merry jests and squibs” sustained his relentless dedication to cultural memory, and new learning.

“Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds, and whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me! I am small and weak. I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things you have made, and my ears sharp to hear your voice. Make me wise, so that I may understand the things you have taught my people. Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock. I seek strength—not be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy: myself. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands, and straight eyes; so that when life fades, as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame.”

This garden blooms from our learning, from this frontier-American place that made us, and makes us. The garden is living the recognition that, together and always, we are in it.

*******

In Spring 1623, the diminutive and fiery Captain Myles Standish piked the severed head of Massachusett spokesman Wituwamat on the palisade at Plimoth. In Spring 1923, a bolt of lightning blasted the head off his statue high atop the “world’s tallest historical monument” (to “Captain Shrimp”) at Myles Standish State Park in Duxbury. 

*******

Is your college or university educating students with less-than-minimum-wage Adjunct Professors? Here is a measure by which to judge, as they are now at least 50% of American college faculty.

By the way, professors paid on the cheap do not equal cheapened education; not at least in the classroom. There certainly are consequences, for students and families who pay ever-higher tuition. But Adjuncts bring doctoral depth to their classes. I for one, with four published books/two documentary-films in my field and awards for articles and teaching, am only typical of Adjuncts with qualifications as good as those of full-time tenured faculty.

But we are not there to teach from our core expertise; rather, it’s to turn the great central wheel of low-level courses that only (ahem) enable college students to function. Even so, knowing how crucial that is, we embrace it with heart con gusto. So excuse this work’s approach to teaching which I myself dislike—reducing this vocation to units of time and money. I have to find a way to see past the people for a moment, and into the skeletal economic structure by which I work. It seems to be a broken system that keeps an Adjunct broke.

One other note of crazy context. I write from the Massachusetts cradle of American learning, in a New England as rife as it gets with college rivalry for reputation and real-world achievement. Graduate schools just keep turning out first-rate teachers (because they just keep wanting to use them in the process). And yet a few years ago, we had a “teacher shortage.” So the Commonwealth somehow imported ambitious young teachers from the Philippines and splashed their pluck all over the media. It was much more quiet when they all went home. They’d found that they couldn’t afford to live here. At the time I was passing through post-grad bankruptcy.

So—You be the judge of the facts of an Adjunct Professor’s circumstances.

What if a school paid an Adjunct Professor the minimum wage of $7.75/hour per student? If you will imagine that rate rounded up to $8.00/hour per student, I’ll forget that each class is actually 1¼ hours. But let’s put every bit of this on the classroom clock: no paid prep-time or student meetings. If I’m not directly teaching a class, I’m not paid.

I teach 40 students in 1-hour classes, twice a week. Let’s say that each student pays me $8.00 for each 1-hour class. Each week of the course, then, each student pays $16.00 for our 2 classes.

A full-semester course totals 15 weeks. So each student pays $240.00 for the course (15 weeks x $16.00). This (40 students x $240) leads to a grand total of $9,600 before taxes.

Now, double that total (because I teach 2 semesters per year), and my annual income before taxes would be $19,200.

Hold those figures. Now the reality check.

In 2012, Bentley University paid me $4600 per course. Double that—as we did with the 2-course total just above—to $9200. And we see that this is $400 less than what I’d make at .25 cents above minimum wage per student.

With the same numbers laid out above in 4 courses per year, my actual last year’s pay totaled $18,400 before taxes. So for last year, I received $800 less than what I’d make at .25 cents above minimum wage per student.

Update: Thanks to Australian Claude Renaud’s comment below, here is a summary that corroborates these findings. On the facts above, I teach 80 students per year, for $18,400 before taxes. That yields $230 per student. Now divide that by the number of classes (29) for each student. (And Bentley has been increasing the number of classes/semester as part of improving its own Accreditation standing). $230 divided by 29 yields between $7 and $8 per student per class. So we’re back more or less to the American minimum wage.

None of these figures include course design or class planning; regular detailed student feedback, grading, student meetings or mentoring; course improvements based on semester evaluations; recommendation letters that launch students forward into careers or graduate programs; teaching-skills development, course-related research, or faculty contributions.

Much less do they value my education, training, or experience. My employer and I rightly agree that a professor who does not do all those things shouldn’t last one year. And yet, like the bi-annual contract that on my end is meaningless if they cancel it, those pillars of teaching count for zero, while schools increase tuition and self-promotion every year. The only field of education jobs growing faster than the haggard but profitable hordes of Adjuncts is—administration.

I can’t explain how frustration and anger turn into even more dedication to my students, but they do. If I can’t be on campus every day for them because I have survival-bills to pay, they have my cell-phone number and email. I do hours of meetings before and after classes, and they never wait long for help. The truth is, I’m hooked on pushing them forward to success, but something is picking my pocket and theirs too while we work.

Now this is irony. If our schools paid Adjuncts a living wage, we’d be there on the weekends building with our own hammers and nails.

Bentley University is considered part of the “higher end” of Adjunct compensation. So most Adjunct Professors at American schools are paid and supported in their work far less.

This is why, to me, Adjunct Action—a New England regional effort to create a union, working with the SEIU—means something new is in the air.

We are not our employers’ foes or service-workers’ rivals: we are enabling partners to both, and to full-time faculty alike. Yet, clearly, we cannot hope even for enforcement of existing Labor Relations laws. Resolutions from the MLA and sympathies from AAUP have cut no ice for decades. And it’s Adjunct Professors who are out in the cold on every level of American higher education. Our only choice is to cooperate on a regional, mutually-supportive scale, to re-establish rightful control on the value of our labor.

Our struggle must come to the same realm of hard-ball economics that we have faced. Our strength is a choice for self-respect over the fear of speaking and moving to help ourselves. In that, we’re going to find many allies unlooked-for, and students have come forward as the first.

Just as strong are the demonstrable facts of how much core value we contribute to the schools we want to build. But you can’t build lasting value on short-term poverty and long-term invisible hopelessness.

Enough? The power we truly possess, as more than 50% of college faculty, has got to act. And because it’s real, it can be clearly demonstrated. Maybe we’ve had enough serfdom, and fear. Maybe it’s time for a different kind of Parents Day on every campus. We are our schools, and we can prove it.

Here (from our Adjunct Action/SEIU symposium last weekend) is the activizing question: Do you want things to change or remain the same?

“Y’all can have yer focus groups!”

As we say in Maine, Howdy Y’All! Hope you enjoy your guided tour of the G. Dubya Bush Memorial Lie-Bury. No refunds.

The Bush Lie Bury presents a ekkle-lectic collection. You are now passing between replicas of the great grinning skulls of Prescott and George H.W. Bush mounted here in the Hall of Ancestors (Barb still sleeps with the originals to keep warm).

First to greet you among our photos in honey-sepia is a young Barb Bush (old even then, but fresh from the gargoyle-facade of Notre Dame) emparting her beautiful mind to Lil Dubya by teaching him to hate to read. Here with these decorated documents you can admire the future Decider’s “C with Highest Honors” academic records. Laid out here are Dubya’s original silver coke-spoon, and his military service sheet on the head of a golden pin.

This is some bubble-gum he spat out crossing Harvard Yard for the limo outa fuckin’ Cambridge. Here’s a tiny Texas Rangers jockstrap and (drinking) cup, a gift from all the good fine taxpayers, and a miniature oil-rig clock that stops dead at random but spits gold coins. Here with a film-clip are some of the hanging chads rescued from election-recount by loyal GOP thugs in Florida: watch them smash the place up for Duhmocracy.

Here are the “three Shakespeares” Dubya sort of read, and the crotch-stuffing from his “Mission Accomplished” flight suit. For the right price or a fat donation, historians can browse a priceless trove: the collected memoranda of Dubya conferences to restore chaos in the Middle East. And this mannequin stands bedecked in the original design Dubya chose (shackles, black hood and orange prison-garb) for his Gitmo guests. Pull the figure’s chains to hear his prejudicial preen at a press conference: “They’re vicious killers, and they’ll git a fair trial.” 

Here’s My Pet Goat upside-down on a WTC pedestal (it’s still smoking!). This is a travel-vial of the triple-strength Prozac that sustained years of Laura’s purty vapid grin. As you see from Laura’s own awards, when she wasn’t working tirelessly to stop the revisions of schoolbooks, she was allowed to talk beside the White House Christmas Tree. (Press to hear her annual drool: “Evera year Ah thank it’s the purtiest Christmas Tree, but this year, Ah thank it’s the purtiest Christmas Tree”).

Take a turn on the toilet-seat where Dubya thinkified a plan to privatize Social Security, and wipe with the original memo stained with his tears and spit. Next, recovered from the White House lawn is the red-bank-oyster Dubya spat for the national camera. Watch this looped tape of the 15 times that Poppy Bush smacked Shit-for-Brains upside the head. In this shot at left, Dubya swears that Osama will be hunted down, and here at right he shrugs it off, while at center is the FBI poster not charging OBL with 9/11.

Here’s the world’s shortest film clip as Dubya visits veterans maimed in his needless wars. Press this button to hear his visionary explanation of “an Iran without Iranian influence. I mean Iraq.” Here’s the spit-up pretzel that almost choked Fearless Leader, with ol’ Barney stuffed on point beside it. This is either Dubya preparing to speak or a deer in Texas headlights. Mounted in a rococo silver frame is Take-Charger hacking down some o’ them ol’ Texas mesquite bushes, spreading civilization as he goes.

This is a wax diorama with figures of the entire Bush Administration thanking Dubya for not letting them be “drug into” the World Court. This scrotum-curdling display of lead busts—from right to right, Condi (Vader) Rice, Growlin’ Big Dick Cheney, Don “Ate The Canary” Rumsfeld and Mike “Skeletor” Chertoff—portrays how they taught Dubya their world-capturing smiles.

Here’s a scale model of Dubya pissin’ on a lamp-post marked “Bourbon Street,” but it’s not in New Orleans (caption: “Heckuva Job!”). Don’t miss the bandage from Dubya’s cheek when he fell down on an election-night bender. Here’s the gallery of Dubya’s paintin’s, featuring his everyday Happy Time Tubby, and half a nude self-portrait through bathroom fog. Here’s the fifth of Jack from Dubya’s Oval Office desk, and the golf club he swung while telling terrorized America to go shopping.

Yep—He done us proud. All in all, what you’ve seen is a true national suppository: a gatherin’ to testifah to a mendacious murderin’ moron whose life and consequences prove to the world how much you can mis-accomplish with so little. May it increasify as compost for The U.S. Constitution.

Y’All run ‘long, now. Take yer pitchers (we sure will) ‘longside the main entrance Welcome sign:

IT’S ALL TRUE. No laughing. No crying. No reading. No thinking. No questions. No conscience. No problems. Y’all can have yer focus groups! Fool me once, shame on—whatever! Have your money ready.

Is our children learning?

The mountains of Crete and their great caves have drawn every kind of pilgrim since Minoan times. This short film that I hope to post here or link to very soon (shot in May 2012) takes you down into Dikte Cave, which by tradition is where Minoan human beings first emerged into the world and, as Karl Kerenyi notes, was the place where, with new-lit fires, music, chant, dance and ceremony, they rekindled their cosmos each New Year’s Day with the rebirth of the sun on winter solstice.

Wait, if you have to, until the latest loud and laughing horde of bus-borne tourists have had their turn and gone: still your mind and heart, and Dikte Cave will take you back in time. Short flights of slick stairs zig-zag down into the dark. Overhead, mountain-swallows and fork-tails shriek and dart trading perches among massive limestone crags: you smell the mossy beards of lichen that hang down into caverns of green stone, and feel the chill of icy pools of water in the galleries below. When you can no longer see the entrance, you’re less than half-way to the bottom.

Afterward, when you’ve spent time in those depths, you climb back out and take a first green breath of the great plateau of Lasithi, ringed with its mountains far below the mouth of the cave—the living opposite of the dark, wet, cold and oozing walls that just surrounded you. The Minoans felt the powers of these deep and high places to the point that they gave their best architecture features of caves and mountains. But Dikte Cave bestows a gift that every person can take home and remember like medicine: the memory of a sacred silence at the still turning center of the world.

As the cave’s absolutes strip away your senses, the imagination fills in. You can stand still down inside there for awhile, and then turn around to be startled by some figure in molten stone that seems to have crept right up next to you. I wonder if that’s why I see a profoundly strange winged figure in the photo below, looming out of the back wall of this great cave’s deepest gallery. If you can make out a face just above-center in the photo, the outspread arms and belly and the figure’s great stony crown seem visible too. Actually standing there, you wonder if it’s not going to turn its gaze your way and start to move.

This is a passage from People of the Sea (Chapter 2 at Ancientlights.org) that takes a Minoan man, Deucalion, into Dikte’s depths:

          Down, and torchlight showed the ceilings growing fangs of every color, livid like the things inside a body. Down, and in the first grotto, pillars big as oaks, man-shapes, pregnant crones oozing water, mock-faced hunchbacks, guardians to pass: your own sounds loud and louder the deeper you sank in underground. I went past some monstrous multicolor thing growing off the wall like liquid rock, with a thousand labial grooves across its jaw; and tucked in almost every groove, some rusting prayer, a tiny Labrys of green bronze, little animals in votive clay or people’s limbs that needed healing. Sealstones cut with signs of their visions. I turned, and found a being at my side…

            The thing was to breathe as the caverns took you down, one upon the other, and closed dark silence round your crackling torch. There was icy water to wade now, but dittany-incense rising past me for the world. Where the floor rose up again, the walls turned, and beyond was a massive crevice leaking light…

          She was seated at the cross-legged feet of a shape five times her size coming out of the wall: wings outspread but ragged, older than time, and a face of molten rock half-crone, half-insect like a mantis. I froze, like prey…

The Minoans’ caves and their high peak-sanctuaries were places of complementary meanings and powers: their family ancestors were below them in the mountain and above them in the cycles of the sun, moon and stars. In between was their living world and ours. I think they loved these places as threshold-points between the worlds, where their forebears felt closer and more alive. These were families who lovingly tended their ancestral tombs for centuries. It seems they were making the most of our little human time in the sun, between where we came from and where we are going…

All I know is that every trip to Crete is a rebirth—a new measure of gratitude and value in the place and time where you are.

***

          This hand shook the hand of The Doors’ keyboard-player, Ray Manzarek, as I met and talked with him at a trade-show appearance south of Boston in the mid-1990s. For me, by proxy, it shook Jim Morrison’s hand.

I hated to have to wash it later, but that afternoon the steamy film star Traci Lord was promoting her book at the table next to Ray.  No matter—My whole body still remembers back to the night when a 15-year-old lapsed catholic, at his first-ever rock ‘n’ roll show, felt that astounding wash of sound and ceremony pouring out of The Doors—live at Boston Arena on Friday night April 17, 1970.

          This was not long after Jim’s ridiculous arrest in Florida. The Doors, despite the tight rich power and new range of their latest Morrison Hotel album, were already losing most of their booked gigs to America’s morality-circus. The nation busily napalming Vietnamese villages in order to liberate them was concerned about its children’s spiritual health. Was that why The Doors couldn’t get into the best Boston venue back then, the original funky Boston Garden with its 15,000 seats? At least we were sure to get a down-and-closer show at the half-sized Boston Arena, on St. Botolph Street—though it stood in an area of town that my good ol’ Irish Dad, with his urban roots, considered not the best for a youth already gone astray.

Well, he drove me and a first-band-mate George through spring rain into Boston that night to see these “Four Sad Bastards” (his name for The Doors on seeing their first album-cover). So there we were, working our way down to the floor and into a wide potential riot-ring filled with rows of loose folding chairs. The hall was like a great naked gymnasium hung with Beanpot Hockey banners, and while it had the same rotten-circus-peanuts odor as the Garden, the Arena air was full of a smoke sweetly strange to our clueless nostrils.

          An unmemorable blues trio opened the show. Behind their set, John Densmore’s drum-kit (including a pair of skin-drums across his toms), Ray’s lean keyboard and bass piano, and Robbie’s skeletized Fender Bandmaster guitar-head were enough to upstage anybody, and The Doors’ 10-foot-high blue and silver “wall of sound” amp system kept the main act’s promise on show. People were waiting only for that to come alive.

The same fate met the next act, folk singer Gordon Lowe, whose seated set of songs and acoustic guitar faced waves of chants for Doors, Doors, Doors! and bursts of unkind applause that meant “You’re done, get off the stage!” Poor guy. The high moment of Lowe’s show was when he said he felt “Jim’s presence” close behind him. 45 minutes later there was a growing bustle with cameras flashing out of sight below the rickety stage stairs, and the whole place stood up roaring.

You can hear Jim and the band bursting into the light on the CD of this night’s two shows released in 2012. “Alright!” he howls in his warm-ups to the rowdy welcome. “Alright! Why shouldn’t I feel good?”

          And off they launched into the lead track of Morrison Hotel, the rolling rhythms of “Roadhouse Blues.” Robbie’s guitar, Ray and John all sounded sharp as a tiger’s tooth, but the only disappointment that night (and on the CD) will ever be the Boston Arena P.A. For Jim sounded most of the time as if he were crooning through a soup-can on a string, except when he really cut loose. Of course, the up-side was that the P.A. was a system separate from their wall of sound, and that was going to crown the second show when The Doors decided to play “all night” and the Boston Police cut the power—to everything except the microphone. It made for a classic cursing Exit-Stage-Whatever for Morrison, whom Ray at last swept into his arms and off the boards as drunk as a boiled Irishman from shooting at least a case of beer through two shows. “Fuck this place!” The lion’s last Boston roar.

Back in that adolescent trance, in the presence of a national-impact band who didn’t give a shit how they looked, who took poetry and sex and art and the Earth and the body and the whole human spirit seriously, I had nothing like a critical eye and ear. Densmore in his tank-top looked lean as a cat and his slash and splash were as electrifying as his studio tracks. The whole building moved with Ray’s big blond lock of hair swaying over the keyboards while his long knuckly fingers bounced and stabbed. Robbie paced, turned and communed with the rafters, slicing his luminescent lines through the songs on his Gibson SG, and Morrison pranced and skittered, jiving along the edge of the stage and giving women’s outstretched hands just enough to hope for one good grab. “Eat me!”

Listening now, it’s clear that Morrison was sloshed getting out of the limo. The CD’s second song “Ship of Fools” shows him forgetting and mumbling half the words while the band turned it into their best moondance of a jam. But it fetched them only mild applause, and things turned musically worse with their next concert standard, a medley built out of “Alabama Song,” “Back Door Man” and “Five to One.”

Jim hardly bothers to sing “Alabama.” In the studio “Back Door Man,” there’s a particular snake’s tongue flicker of Densmore’s high-hat in each measure, which that night flattened into basic blues, and while Robbie’s guitar-leads stood out in this medley (was he the first to play in two-hand-tap style? For I saw him doing it that night), by “Five to One” it seems that the four of them are losing each other, as if nobody wants to solo while Jim dallies far too long with the ladies in the shadows. “Aah wanna love ya, bay-bay”—whether that meant her or ourselves was unclear while Jim riffed into a list of procreative positions (“Wrap yah legs aroun’ mah head….Gotta go out get fucked uhhhp….”)—all of it met with, again, some modest applause.

Well, that was sure to piss off The Doors, and maybe that was why they came back hard in “When the Music’s Over.” The first half alone was about 15 minutes long with the three instruments pouring out fierce fire. The whole thing seemed to totter in the too-long almost-silence that Jim left through the middle—but then, after his plea for the Earth, the climax was altogether shattering. I still haven’t heard a rock’n’roll singer say it better:

What have they done to the Earth?

What have they done to our fair sister?

Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her,

Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn, and

Tied her with fences, and

Dragged her down…

           And when will the next shaman riding a wave of new music and politics dare their people to sing it and say it and live it and breathe it: “We want the world, and we want it—-Now!” I haven’t heard one since.

You can hear, on the CD, that The Doors were working to hold onto the still-sharpening edge that the music of Morrison Hotel gave to Jim’s sung poetry. I know they considered themselves a blues band, but for this one fan of Doors and blues, their chops only sometimes stood out on blues ground. See if you agree as you hear out the rest of the show, but they didn’t play to the flame of “Love Me Two Times” or their new mattress-pounding “Maggie McGill” (in either show, although the later crowd got their best new blues with “The Spy,” “Build Me A Woman” and “You Make Me Real”). Here instead began a long plateau of shuffle and Eastern-toned dervish improv that more or less fizzled into some of Jim’s new poetry—until he came bursting out of the dark in a single spotlight and shrieked, “Wake up!” Truth to tell, it scared the hell out of me.

The Lizard King had arrived and The Doors ripped and screamed and hammered through the central stretches of his “Celebration,” from Waiting for the Sun. And with one long final howl (“the cool, hissing, snakes of raiiiiin….”) and a snare-shot from Densmore, they took off into “Light My Fire,” hammering the first show closed with a pair of long first-rate solos from Ray and Robbie. Again, I saw Krieger blistering through his finger-picked lead in two-hand-tap style, and I don’t know of an example of the technique earlier than that.

What you don’t see with the CD is Morrison shooting beer after beer (after beer) all this time, his lurching staggers to and from the mike, his fighting off the hands that caught his sweater by the shoulder and almost pulled him off the stage, and again Jim laughing at the edge-biting women who kept jumping volleyball-high to grab his crotch (“What do you want? What would you do with it, baby?”). You don’t see Jim sitting down half-slumped against Densmore’s dais to philosophize when he took the level of “Light My Fire’s” middle down (“Plenty a’room, plenty a-room, y’all just get out there and populate….”) And the boy back then did not likely reflect on how those jokey words from a weary star spoke back to the worsening fate of Jim’s fair sister.

But something lit Jim’s fire in the end. For next we knew, he was up and he stumbled his way to the microphone stand, unscrewed the long shaft from its base, and then began to almost-hurl it like a spear straight into the crowd. He faked this move again and again and in the dark middle audience we saw half-rows of chairs get pushed aside by people trying anything to not get speared. Then, Morrison took the steel shaft by one end and started to smash his way right through the stage floor.

He just kept smashing with the shaft, and it was bent like an archer’s bow when he bent back again to shake it high above his head and faked more throws down into his tribe. Green as I was, I knew his alcohol-loosed rage was his anger come to a head, the anger that darkened his words and their music, born and lost in a Roman wilderness of pain. Morrison tossed his lightning-bolt  away, and found his mike, but only barely managed to finish, with little of the crescendo the song and show deserved. Musically they had long moved on. But Lord only knows how Jim could come back out and blow the roof off the building with the second show.

Looking back now, no less grateful for their music, it seems this was one of those nights when, as Densmore rued, The Doors just never knew which Jim was going to show up, the incompetent drunkard or the practiced poet of Dionysian inspiration.

George and I came out into the melee of Boston’s St. Botolph Street. It was now a clammy night of April rain and, just across the street, there was a serious fire in the huge apartment building opposite the Arena. Fire engines, turned-out residents, ambulances, news report crews, cops and all were now being inundated with rowdy glassy-eyed Doors fans headed for the next whiskey-bar. It was like a scene produced by Jim and/or that music, like a visual coda saying “See?” to the vibrations still with us.

“Where you been? Let’s get the hell out of here!” my father said.

All in all, Boston Arena got both Jim Morrisons that night—with a band giving everything they had. Jim, Ray, Robbie, and John—Thank You.

            One of the less-noticed scholarly conferences this year was at least unusual. For how often does a long-lost major manuscript, particularly that of an idiot, come back to light from the ancient Western world? Now that most of the murder-trials have cleared up over which PhDs would translate it into modern tongues, the half-mad Book of Peristalsis returns with a hemorroidal vengeance, to blow the dust off professors and their classics-shelves alike.

According to the conference host, Doctor and Professor for Life Hans Klammy of The Institute for the Study of Ancient Idiots by Later Ones (ISAILO, Alcatraz), Peristalsis (1000?-950? BCE? Oh, what the hell) is thought to have been the son of an early Greek mother from Crete (there were also many late mothers) and a Philistine father (with some nice habits, too), who plied his wares in the eastern Mediterranean in the early Iron Age. “We’re pretty sure Peristalsis used a boat,” said Klammy. “But this guy was a walking poison-pen. We only knew about his work from idiots of Classical times, so this is a true find. And, it’s mine. On sale in the lobby.”

The work emerged several years ago as Doctor Klammy was unwrapping some fish. He noticed what could only be the picture-like (and very smelly) signs of an ancient writing system. When he showed the script to fellows at the Institute, every one who could get near it affirmed its authenticity, just to get away from it. So, the Institute’s tech-experts came to the rescue, filling their hot-tub with Chanel #5, bleach and a touch of Guinness to leach the manuscript back into workable shape. Then the wheels of translation and publishing started to turn, and this minion of mockery began to speak again, 3000 years after everyone told him to shut up.

But why was that? We hunted more information around the conference floor, and then spotted Senior Lecturer (there are no Junior ones) Fritz Mazo among the few on their feet. “Ahh, Peristalsis. Peristalsis, ahh. Ahhh,” Mazo intoned through his imitation-sable beard. “What?”

“Peristalsis witnessed the rise of full-blown Western kleptocracy with its kings. As such he was ostracized as a killjoy, a real pill, a pain in the ass of criminal power.  This was a maverick, a horse never broken to the rule of smelly old men,” injected Dean of the Institute Ima Mann, who said she was deeply involved with the font and page-numbers for the publication. “And they didn’t even have saddles back then. Want some more metaphors?”

Scholars said that until now, the best evidence of Peristalsis had been only another legend, one of the direct inheritors of this tradition: a Greek of Classical times called Sotades, who reputedly composed scurrilous verses against the nascent Athenian empire, and saw them all burned before the aristocrats (already no strangers to mass murder for money) threw him also into the fire, in concern for the city’s youth.

“We haven’t been sure if Sotades existed, either,” added Mann, “but it was said that Peristalsis was his master and rhetorical suppository.” Dean Mann then twisted her whole face sideways to demonstrate the infamous sotadic smirk, which made her resemble Dick Cheney with gas.

Ancient linguist and Idiot Emeritus Norm L. Freek delivered the keynote address from a rusty guard-tower, and assured this reporter that he’s only fifty-three. It seems that Peristalsis, as a young boy growing up in Crete, learned that his lineage had included a Minoan princess. This really depressed the youth as he helped his mother hawk seaweed at beach-resorts to Mycenaean tourists, the families of warlords who took their tans between rounds of chariot races, bloodsports, face-stuffing and pillage.

So it was that when Peristalsis’ seagoing father showed up again, he hid himself aboard the boat among a shipment of alimentary medications. There, he started to write, with a stick for his first stylus and, shall we say, unsavory ink. This couplet is accepted as his earliest work:

So long, sword-loving mainland mother-fucks:

Reap what killing teachers sows, you schmucks.

        Once Peristalsis’ father and the crew stopped tossing the boy overboard, they took him under their wing, hoping to suffocate him. But the plucky stowaway took all they could dish out, and at last they spared little Peristalsis, unless they needed a drag-anchor. Times were hard.

Dr. Freek insisted that multiple Aegean, Canaanite and early Hebrew writing-figures used in the manuscript point to Peristalsis’ eclectic school-years as the bung-boy of a hermaphroditic lord in the Near Eastern port of Ascalon. The city was then a bustling seaside entrepot of multinational cultures, trade, and fist-fights, which is altogether weird because Charlton Heston’s Moses is looking off into empty land at the idiotic end of The Ten Commandments. Anyhow—By the time of his manhood, Peristalsis was master of his father’s boat. This worked well as he was kicked out of every port where he opened his mouth. And still the dogged craftsman ploughed on, breaking new ground even at sea. He improvised new patterns in his rhymes:

Our mothers’ lands were households feeding kin:

Your fantasy called profit smashed right in.

You business-pricks who cheat the farm and Earth,

You’ll find out starving what your gold is worth.

        “Peristalsis’ world was changing,” Dr. Klammy noted in his interminable contribution to the conference, “Everybody Duck, Here Come the Kings: or, How to Make a Buck Till We Find the Philippines.”

“’Peri,’ as we fond fellow-idiots style him, had just begun to prosper on the Black Sea trade by way of windy Troy,” Klammy said. “And then his old enemies showed up for their one last big hurrah—the sack of Troy, which of course turned into the Mycenaeans’ own complete exhaustion and bankruptcy, besides Brad Pitt’s most unbearable film.”

Dr. Freek, who by then was drunk on fermented oak-moss, added: “Peristalsis watched with glee while the mainland warlords took each other down. Ahh, but little did he know that this only opened the Greek duh-duh-door for the dimwitted duh-duh-Dorians. Some say Homer himself took up from Peristalsis’ leavings. I have noted, in the index to my revised addendum footnoted in the coda to the afterword of my definitive history, Freek’s Greeks, that Achilles’ first epithet for the ‘great’ thug King Agamemnon was, ‘You wine-sack.’”

Hence the next turn of life for Peristalsis as an omni-exile. For some time after, marked by the rotting of his boat, he became a forest-dwelling nobody, a drop-caste, seeking out wild consolations in the Near Eastern hills beyond the newly-planting Philistines. Up there, he encountered the dyspepsia, cultural wreckage and fermentation left in Pharaoh’s wake—for Egypt’s wars with the Hittites to control this land, which belonged to neither one, had exhausted both of them and everyone between.

So far so good, great kings.

You’ve robbed and killed and now you’re finished too.

Hot poxes on the lords who kiss your rings,

and think us born to build and clean their loo.

        “What Peri means in this insufferable quatrain,” observed the portly imported German scholar Fritz Tweedle, “is that in Canaan, the new crop of would-be petty kings wanted all these lumpen-folk hiding in the hills for slave-labor projects, for their own little dim day of glory. Indeed, many of these brigands had personally mooned Ramses The Third. I have slides.”

Thus, among these Canaanites, who chose exile over slavery to an asshole (defined by Professor Klammy as “a failed human being”), Peristalsis immersed himself in the kindred spirits of a real old-time religion—a pantheon of goddesses and gods that made his head spin worse than the music, but in a good way.

After all, the whole universe and Earth and Moon and Sun were still alive and awake spinning all around them through an eternal now of cycling seasons and stars and desires and there were “fertility cults” whose ways added up to making life good for children and from birth to joyous polyamorous ceremonial feasting and fucking with an occasional rumble and beyond death too there was a luminous river running through and shining out of everything so that being alive was, all in all, not bad, if you kept your shorts and burnoose loose, though there wasn’t even a ceiling-fan.

Through its last agonizing day, the conference explored Peristalsis’ late years. He came down into the coastlands again and there were Philistine farms and olive groves and towns well-advanced in their first-generation designs and music as wild as the hills interweaving with Aegean flavors too, and rites and festivals holding every fractious fuck together, girls and boys of all description marrying up and not a king in sight. They liked pork-ribs wine and seafood and being left alone and competing to see who could throw the craziest cosmic party. Perhaps surprisingly, this might have been the end of Peristalsis as the idiotic poet he had been.

For where, now, could he ply his old obsession—indeed, the idiotic tradition he had created—with so few calculating, brutal, parasitic slobs entrenched on thrones, camouflaged in gold and too much Old Spice? Ironically (another first in the Iron Age), Peristalsis had found a measure of content in Palestine, but he might have lost his voice. He’d never so enjoyed a civilization that lacked cruise missiles. The Philistines had settled mostly quietly into lands that old empires had broken, and called themselves lucky to be Pharaoh’s policemen on the East-West trading highways. At least it kept that perennial pompous putz off of everybody’s back.

This was the conference moment that led both people in the audience to the forty-six scholars’ major point—that an idiot, one might say, is one who will not be ruled by a murderous hollow kleptocratic culture, because it isn’t one.

What saved Peristalsis from cosmic harmony came along just in time. Into the vacuum, a rival and very different school of idiots was rising. There had never been anything like them, and that’s a quote. The Canaanites heard, and trembled in their pants.

…This will be the manner of the king who shall reign over you. He will take your sons, appoint them for himself, for chariots and to be his horsemen, and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint himself captains over thousands, and set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make him his instruments of war.

He will take your daughters to be confectionaries, to be cooks, and bakers. He will take your fields, your vineyards and olive yards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take your men- and maid-servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen.

        In the folks whose supreme abomination was idolatry, Peristalsis the poet found himself more than outmatched. Did he live to wonder why nobody listened to that guy, either? For, you guessed it—Starting with their first king “like kings of other lands,” in two mysterious centuries this new tribe of idiots had ethnically-cleansed away most of the Philistines. Of course they had options: they could be slaves, they could leave, or they could die, and the new folks would be happy to facilitate.

Circles and cycles and dynamic interweaving cultures would henceforth devolve into a worse-than-useless succession of frothing madmen waving flags toward nowhere (Utopia), generating “progress” toward a goal that, today, is still as unspeakable as the name of its volcanic god—who acts like a smelly old man whose bush is burning.

And lo, in appreciation of the new management, good old Pharaoh soon came smashing back through the country to clear that tribe’s strangle-hold on the highways. Same crazy notion, same bloody pattern, same outcome in ashes: incompetent gangsters taking over millennia of life and enduring, themselves, maybe two or three hundred years. Thanks, guys. Heck of a job.

Peristalsis was living through an already-failed experiment that had only gone round and round in a vain death-dance of natural defiance dragging everything with them. What unifies his wretched scribbling(if anything) is that the history-progress scam will go on till everything is dead unless people put it in its place in the mud with other reptiles called Rex. We have only one more apocryphal nugget, that Peristalsis passed at last in a cheap pension on Mykonos with the first sotadic grin frozen on his face.

But that new Near Eastern school of idiocy was nothing if not tenacious. Its main competition arose only much later in the days of Plato (a.k.a., “Fatso”), when Athens was holding festivals to thank Dionysos (the one demigod for a really good time) for not coming to visit. They had their own imperial “good soldier” reasons tricked out besides to banish poets. Having kicked all the angels out of town, they filled the forests with monsters, who soon ran over Massasoit and Tecumseh, then “settled” California.

Peristalsis may yet find new audiences in America, where the heirs of his foes have carried on the story with righteous frackin’ zeal. Coming soon is the 1620-2020 anniversary of Plimoth Plantation, whose dedicated loons called Separatists (i.e., separated from everything in their own psychotic-evangelical brains) and patriarchal Puritans, modeling themselves on schmucks of old, went off the deep end—burning the country’s first English idiotically visionary poet out of house and home, hoisting him off the continent in a cow’s harness, and then launching a mystical flaming fiasco at Native Americans. At living Native Anybodies, all the way through Saigon, Palestine and Kabul, until this plutocracy of putzes came round the planet and dipped its sucking-straws into the last people likely to fight back as long as they have celebrity cable.

Clearly, if Peristalsis the man teaches anything, it’s that it’s one thing to be an idiot, and another to pioneer new ways to build or stumble into an insane idolatry of fascist selfishness and call it freedom. Perhaps he can speak from the lines of his last leaving:

When lo, you violent creeps, who live to lie

‘gainst human hearts and souls, have done your worst

We’ll heap your graves with fetid offerings high

And dance the living circles we loved first.

         “We’ve honored worse. Thank you, one and all, and remember I take MasterCard,” pronounced Doctor Klammy, and the conference was adjourned into police custody.

HAPPY THOMAS MORTON DAY!

Well, Matt Damon is busy with leotard-fittings to play Aqua-Man, but someday Boston and New England are going to claim their real-world first heritage with a worthy film about the life, misadventures and achievements of our first English poet and naturalist among this continent’s first peoples, our first multicultural rascal and political exile, Thomas Morton of Merrymount.

True Revelers are too few these days. Morton was the primeval precedent for locking them up. To the dance of money, the last wilderness they’re taming is in us.

(“I Knew Right Away He Was Not Ordinary”)

        These memories of Chris Pfouts—fiction-writer, editor of multiple magazines devoted to the arts of tattooing and motorcycle culture, multi-talented craftsman, life-adventurer, and generous friend of man and beasts of all kinds—come more than two years after his passing (June 2013). I only just learned about it, because while our friendship of several years was an intense one in the way of fellow writers—starting way back in New York City in 1986—we had gone our ways and lost touch by the mid-1990s. That was my fault, and Chris’ decision, which I’ll explain in due course. On my side, anyway, the best of the friendship went on through after-years, teaching and encouraging me to rise to my very best as a man and writer, and his passing away will make no difference in that relationship.

        In 1986 a mutual freelance-writing friend had invited each of us with many others to his annual Easter gathering at his New York home, and that’s where I met Chris—a versatile, merrily opinionated fellow scribbler who was the picture of the biker gang-leader you’d never want to meet in a dark alley: he must have been 6-foot-five from the long thick hair down his shoulders to his motorcycle boots, with a broad lean build of California surfer steel, a quick bright smile and piercing stare, a goatee gracing his rough rocky features, and always a beer in his formidable mitt.

        Chris loved to laugh, especially right through anybody’s pompous pretensions. He loved rough ruthless honesty, and he knew how to listen before he drove his wit through your brain, gut, or both. While I was writing for educational textbook publishers, Chris wrote for and edited various motorbike and tattoo magazines: two of his primary passions, not to mention his love for hard-hitting literature, hand-crafting jewelry, and his ever-growing collection of vintage children’s toys, most lately including a “Mr. Machine” fresh out of the 1960s box, whose acquisition tickled him like a giant kid. Before the day was out, we each knew that the other was struggling to write our first serious books, and we made a pact to swap manuscripts and feedback. Having noticed that Chris came to this half-dressy holiday gathering in jeans and a T-shirt, it was too late to escape the pact when I saw at last the “Psychotic Reaction” tattoo on his bicep.

        Plowing my way through the ancient-world research for a literary historical novel, these first impressions made me dread Chris’ sometimes-brutal bluntness—and yet I wanted to know if the work could stand up to it, and if I could rise to his comments and his friendship. In fact, Chris went into thoughtful, open-minded detail far beyond anybody else’s reactions, he told me plainly what he thought I should hammer harder and what I should drop, and I daresay the work gained tremendously from his response.

        Meanwhile, Chris’ novel—called Music From A Cement Piano—knocked me over with its energy and eroticism, its sharp randy dialogue, its lovingly obsessive detail and humor, spare but rich style, and its trio of main characters who all seemed to have been carved out of sides of Chris himself. The narrator was indeed the image and voice of my new friend with his range of interests and talents, from breaking motorcycles down to the bone and rebuilding them to his gift for turning any bit of scrap-metal into novel jewelry, while he and his mate—a powerfully sexy and vibrantly outspoken half-black woman—shared the joys of house-sitting at the former California residence of actress Carole Lombard.

        The passion between them was no more or less than living life richly each day, exemplified by the first pages’ scene of their drinking and fucking in Lombard’s swimming pool. The central complication arose from the third character, whom I remember as Carl—a crude-brained local landscaper whose failing marriage to an overweight wife he called “Mushy Fuck” led him to start spying on the lovers through their Hollywood hedgerows. Chapter by punchy chapter alternated between the lovers’ steamy life-delighted joys, and Carl’s pathetic intensifying spiral of pornographic peeping and personal misery. Page by page, I knew that Carl wasn’t going to be satisfied till he somehow laid his grubby hands on her, and/or their luscious lives—and by the end, told with just as much gusto as the rest, Carl’s insane invasion of their world cost him his own. The words tour de force came to mind, and Chris was just as grateful as I was to have his work enjoyed and taken so seriously.

        I’m not sure how many times Chris tried to get Piano published—I greatly hope that this outstanding book eventually does see print—but I failed the same likely number of times with my own work, and we kept each other going as writers will. Chris’ various New York apartments were big quasi-industrial spaces where he could spread out his projects and passions: he loved all kinds of exotic mechanical junk, rare crazy records, and always there was a half-assembled motorcycle splayed out in his living-space, his dream to build/restore for himself the perfect vintage Indian Chief. Then, by the fall of 1987, I got the lifetime-opportunity to leave New York for the Greek island of Crete (about which I was writing), and Chris’ letters kept his usual sparks flying as he bounced from gig to gig, writing constantly in multiple modes and, like me, fighting for that break that could launch the life we really wanted—answerable to nothing except our skills and arts.

        When I came back from that dreamlike year of writing by the sea in Crete, I bounced next for a year to Portland, Oregon, where my engagement with a terrific woman broke up on the rocks of my virtual unemployment; and, not wanting to live in New York anymore, I next bounced back to my family home north of Boston, while Chris left the city for new freelance horizons in Pennsylvania. His letters said he found it as drab and dull there as a rusty muffler, and eventually he returned to New York City. Soon I’d bounced again, back to Crete on my own for another year of trying to finish that goddam novel and land a European publisher for it—and Chris, to my great surprise and pleasure, came over to see what this Greece thing was all about for two weeks in that May of 1991.

        He had meanwhile sent me the much-appreciated company of some of his favorite half-whacked tunes collected on cassette: it opened and ended with “Hot Rod Lincoln” versions by Johnny Bond and Commander Cody. The rest of the list was pure Chris-company that kept my isolated spirits up: “Out With The Girls” and “Fujiyama Mama” by Pearl Harbour, “Six Days On The Road” by Dave Dudley, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (by “Dylan Is God”), Captain Beefheart’s “Plastic Factory,” “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Them, “Big Balls” by AC/DC, three Black Sabbath tunes (“Ozzie Fuckin’ Rules!”), and the creepy-funny “Transfusion” by Nervous Norvus.

        None of those tourist-pussy Vespa’s for Chris: he was going to ride a decent bike or forget it, and I deferred to become his rider as we took to Crete’s seacoast and mountain roads, with him driving and me guiding the tour. Chris instantly loved the island’s semi-desert high country and bright blue sea, the fresh food and warm-hearted people, the blasé way in which everyone enjoyed the almost-naked beach customs and topless sunbathing European nymphs. Chris couldn’t stop often enough to photograph the new-to-him language of Greek highway signs: for example, a simple exclamation-mark before a hairy turn or hazard which he translated roughly, “Hey stupid, wake the fuck up!” He also loved the little roadside shrines that usually marked where somebody had been killed by careless driving: more than once it was nothing but Chris’ sharp eyes that saved us from plummeting down into some hairpin-turn’s ravine or into a road-collapsed pot-hole. “Oh, look!” he’d say pointing at one with his best Curly-voice from The Three Stooges. Chris was also rich with always-spot-on lines from books and songs for every occasion: talking about a certain slim romantic hope of the day, he laughed with Dylan, “I still can’t remember all the best things she said!”

        As we stopped someplace to swim and eat, I saw for the first time Chris with his shirt off, and almost fell over when I saw the ultimate writer’s tattoo across the huge expanse of his back: he’d never mentioned having it, but there was the biggest and most detailed image I’d ever seen on a human body, a shapely brunette in leopard-skin bra and tights leaning back on an old Remington typewriter whose rendering made you think you could tap the keys. And that, baby, was Chris’ muse: the woman who’d never get off his back.

        There was also a kind of new caution in Chris, who was now holding off from more than a couple of the Greek and German beers he liked so much, and the explanation for that also came from his flesh. Chris had been shot, in the leg, one night during his last year in New York, and the scars from the hell-hole hospital operations he’d endured to save it were horrifying. His manly reticence meant I’d never heard about it, and would get no real details until he published Lead Poisoning: 25 True Stories from the Wrong End of a Gun later that year. But I do know that he came through it not only thinner and more cautious, but more subdued, having looked—as he’d almost bled to death on that Brooklyn street, shot by a neighborhood crack-dealer—into the face of the real Reaper.

        The essential facts: one summer night, living in his usual big-and-cheap-rent kind of place in Brooklyn, Chris stepped out across the street to the local bodega for some beers. He’d casually dropped his latest bag of trash into a curbside can, and as he then stood waiting in line in front of the bodega’s bulletproof window, he watched a local young crack-dealer rip his trash-bag out of the can, come across the street with it, and pour its contents all over the street in front of him. “Yeah?” Chris shrugged to him. “What are you gonna do now?” The reply was, “I’m gonna do this, motherfucker,” and the shit-for-brains pulled a pistol and shot Chris in the leg. Chris, by chance having dropped his trash on top of the dealer’s street-side dope-stash, went down, then managed to crawl as he bled back up the stairs to his apartment, and had the terrified presence of mind to call a friend before he dialed 911—so that, in case he went into shock, he could be sure that his Emergency call wasn’t a delusion that left him to bleed to death. Chris only just barely survived at all, and several restorative surgeries put him through a god-awful gauntlet of the medical care that mostly-impecunious Americans typically receive.

        Before Chris went back home with his usual armload of projects, plans and career-hopes—about which he was willing to confess more discouragement than ever before—he told me, “You’ve really found a great place here, Jack: make the most of it, and do whatever you have to do to get that damn book out there.” One last night, we were roving around chasing semi-close encounters with stunning young Cretan women in the thick of the crazy streets of Heraklion. “That woman is five quarts of sex in a gallon jug,” he quipped; dismissing a try to talk with another because “I’d just be disappointed when I see the grass-stains on her knees.” At last, Chris came out of a music store with a Thanks-for-the-visit gift for me, a rare cassette of very early Dylan songs. Inside it, he wrote a line from Dylan’s “Isis”: “I knew right away he was not ordinary.”

        So, Chris and I kept on keeping in touch. He grew his working network of writing/editing jobs (he styled himself “Top Hat” as an editor), and managed some time in northern Europe in that connection, speaking out against racist remarks he once heard with a riposte something like: “Yeah, put black people down all you want, Fritz, and you can thank them later for all that jazz you love but never created, and all the other things you’ve ripped off from their souls and cultures.”

        But before much longer came our parting of the ways. How? Well, Chris had written another novel, called Birdsong Street—which for me was his half-despairing complete indulgence of his darker side, concerning an anonymous urban wreck of a landscape centered around a street laid out like a Schutzstaffel S, where every man and his guns were a law unto themselves and whose denouement was a full-blown Texas-style war between its gangs and the police. “I’ll kill anybody who tries to change this place,” said his blood-soaked lead character near the end. It was a far cry indeed from Cement Piano: I told Chris why it so dissatisfied me and why I felt it was less than I knew he possessed. That didn’t go over very well. He was increasingly fed up with trying to please anybody—even as the joy of his discovering that he had a full-grown daughter living in California lit up his life in deep and unexpected ways. Just as we began to drift apart I could hear, out of that and his trip to get to know her, a profound warmth and wonder in Chris that I’d never quite heard before. He was crazy about her, elated as ever I’d seen him that she dug him, too, for exactly who he was.

        Secondly, in my own career-despair, I’d applied and been accepted to Brown University Graduate School, thinking there might be a life in teaching (there isn’t, thanks to business, of course). To keep my blood wild in the stately soul-freezing halls of the Ivy League, Chris generously sent me Lester Bangs’ exuberant collection of rock’n’roll essays called Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, inscribing it thus:

Dirty Doctor Dempsey Drags Boffo Bangs to Brown: Result is Distaff Delirium & Femme Fatalities—Antics for the Annals of Academia. If History is Bunk, who gets the top and who gets the bottom? Doc, I don’t feel so good. Chris Pfouts, August 2 1992: the dirt on the edge of the book is a bonus.

        The next year, as early high hopes of a new life sank into the grad-school-grind’s realities, I wrote to Chris expressing my dour disappointments. His terse reply: “I get more cheerful letters from guys in prison.” And he was right, I knew it even then—but it took me years to bust through all that and get life going again. Meanwhile, we fell out of touch. And while I kept the best eye I could on Chris’ doings via the Internet, I could never coax him to reestablish our connections. I don’t blame him one bit for walking away from my privileged whining—not one bit. But I always will regret that I blew the friendship this way, that we had gone our ways after years that did so much to bring out my best as a man and writer.

        Chris, I will always miss you, always appreciate how much of yourself you shared. Stay with me, because I need your courage and guts, your refusal to bow before anything, your multi-sided creativity and joy in life to which anybody living should aspire. I’m only proud to be one of the many who knew, appreciated, and loved you like a brother.

        When I thrill to the wild Cretan thunderstorms over the mountains where I live today, I’ll know it’s you, roaring across the sky at last on that mighty Indian Chief you always dreamed.

*****

Happy Summer Solstice!

Announcing publication of a small (50pp) color-illustrated booklet The Knossos Calendar: Minoan Cycles of the Sun, the Moon, the Soul and Political Power, published in English and Greek versions by Mystis Editions:

http://www.mystis.gr/en/books/view/to-hmerologio-ths-knwsou

The Knossos calendar / Mystis http://www.mystis.gr Description. Minoan Cycles of the Sun, the Moon, the Soul & Political Power. AUTHOR’S NOTE. Minoan civilization returned to the sun over 100 years ago.

In 2001, UK archaeologist Lucy Goodison demonstrated a core feature of Minoan astronomy in plain sight all along. The throne of Knossos—which stood for over 1500 years circa 2500-1400, inscribed with a solar disc and lunar crescent—is positioned to be touched by the light of Winter Solstice. With Summer Solstice sunlight also built into this chamber, this can hardly be other than the Minoans’ essential prime counting-anchor for the New Year Day of their central calendar.

A New Moon at Winter Solstice (as we saw last December 2015) pairs the sun’s and moon’s cycles at their newborn beginnings; and today in the sky is their paired complement of a Full Moon at Summer Solstice, with both bodies at their cycles’ peak. From here (hot as it is), the sun begins to fall again toward shadow, and so does the month’s moon. These doubled pairs of events repeat every 8 and 1/2 years, and a huge body of evidence suggests that this was the central Minoan reconciliation of solar and lunar time.

Along this cycle, the sun presents 18 solstices (9 Winter, 9 Summer)—and, month by year, the moon’s particular phases are highly regular along the way between them. Hence, as generations of observation and teaching went on, this was a very practical calendar, whose uses ranged from agriculture to the Minoans’ highest and deepest mysteries, woven in rhythms of light and shadow.

Why, after all, did “Minos” (or Minoan leaders) reign for a uniquely limited “8 or 9”-year term? In the sacred arts of Knossos, there was a predeliction for doubling significant features (even the blades of their central symbol, Labrys the double axe). And, this doubling had its match in their astronomy, as their cycles of solstice lights were matched by shadows of the greater 18/19-year Saros Eclipse Cycle. (The first written record of predicting an eclipse, circa 5th century BCE, is called the beginning of Western science.)

As many other scholars explore the bases for the timing of Olympic Games, for the cycle of time in Homer’s Iliad/Odyssey, and for the central functions of The Antikythera Mechanism, they independently detail the same calendric periods. There simply was no other possible place than Minoan Crete to have begun and bestowed so much understanding.

This little book includes all the central evidences, while Calendar House: Clues to Minoan Time from Knossos Labyrinth (free at Ancientlights.org) presents the full range of studies demonstrating the patterns of Bronze Age Crete’s sacred astronomy.

Thanks, and a wonderful Summer to all—

Jack Dempsey

      Since August 2011 when I published WOOP: We the Workers of the World Walk Out On Profit, the people who do the world’s work every day (You) have continued to work harder, get poorer and become seemingly more powerless—because, of course, there is no bottom or limit to the subjection intended for us by the Profit System (https://jackdempseyhttps://jackdempseywriter.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/woop-we-the-workers-of-the-world-walk-out-on-profit/).

      This is also fundamentally because working people have continued to believe the lie coming at them 24/7 from Profit—that they have no real power to change course. This, even as Profit must have them working every day, like a powerful vampire who actually depends on willing victims.

If you believe that is your “fate,” you might want to know what other people think.

At the end of WOOP I asked a simple poll-question: “Is private Profit the best way to promote everybody’s progress?”

Here are the results (and I did not vote!):

      Total Responses/Votes: 36

      EMPHATIC NO: 22 votes (or 61.11%)—“because taking more than you give [Profit] does not add up.”

      MAYBE WE NEED A NEW SYSTEM: 6 votes (or 16.67%)

      Add those two figures (total 77.78%): THREE OUT OF FOUR people support active cooperative change or at least believe another way is possible. 

Not a single respondent expressed belief in the maxim of Profit that “selfishness drives me to meet other people’s needs.”

The remainder (6 votes or 16.66%) voted “Other” without any comment whatsoever.

So, What are we going to do about it? Do you understand yet that your daily relationship with Work is your greatest point of real power? Business knows it. 

As the Capitalist Profit System continues to lie, steal, conquer, kill and destroy the Earth to “prove” itself—as you look at your only “choices” in either Shillary, or Donald-Everybody-Duck—we might want to look again at what really is happening to us, and what we still really can do about it. May these words from Thucydides at the head of WOOP‘s original page challenge and inspire you to act, with all other human beings, on behalf of your own life and the life of the only planet we have.

The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage.