Op-Ed

Harvey Wasserman’s newly published “Solartopia!” is a breath of fresh air, blowing — well, whipping, at Great Plains velocity —across the thinking person’s vision of the future. What a gift this book is: an informed, science-savvy vision of tomorrow that isn’t an eco-nightmare.

Rather, it’s an enthusiastically optimistic look at a rational, very green near future. (To order, go to solartopia.org.) The setting is 2030; the premise is a flight in a hydrogen-fueled airship from Hamburg to Honolulu, with Wasserman serving as tour guide and eco-historian as we watch the world unfold beneath us and gradually learn about the death of King CONG, the joyous global proliferation of rooftop gardens and how all those giant wind turbines wound up off the coast of Holland, among much else.

King CONG, an acronym of Wasserman’s coinage — Coal, Oil, Nukes, Gas — is the fossil-fuel addicted junkie-beast we think of today simply as reality, but to the relaxed narrator of “Solartopia!,” this beast, which in 2007 seemingly runs the world and holds it hostage to its appetites, is nothing more than a historical curiosity.

Bill Moyers has put together an amazing 90-minute video documenting the lies that the Bush administration told to sell the Iraq War to the American public, with a special focus on how the media led the charge. I've watched an advance copy and read a transcript, and the most important thing I can say about it is: Watch PBS from 9 to 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 25. Spending that 90 minutes on this will actually save you time, because you'll never watch television news again – not even on PBS, which comes in for its share of criticism.

Find a house party where you can watch the show and take action:
http://www.freepress.net/content/partysearch

Many days after the mass killings at Virginia Tech, grisly stories about the tragedy still dominated front pages and cable television. News of carnage on a vastly larger scale -- the war in Iraq -- ebbs and flows. The overall coverage of lethal violence, at home and far away, reflects the chronic evasions of the American media establishment.

In the world of U.S. mainline journalism, the boilerplate legitimacy of official American violence overseas is a routine assumption.

“The first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence,” George Will wrote on April 7, 2004, in the Washington Post. But three years later, his Newsweek column laments: “Vietnam produced an antiwar movement in America; Iraq has produced an antiwar America.”

Current polls and public discourse -- in spite of media inclinations to tamp down authentic anger at the war -- do reflect an “antiwar America” of sorts. So, why is the ghastly war effort continuing unabated? A big factor is the undue respect that’s reserved for American warriors in American society.

The great green bandwagon that has come of age this Earth Day has been a very long time coming. With Rachel Carson's 1963 Silent Spring and Earth Day 1970 and the first arrests at the Seabrook Nuke in 1976 and the decades of writing and marching and organizing and fundraising, the landmarks to a growing green consciousness are epic.

The past fifty years have seen the rise of the movements for civil, gay, and women's rights; for an end to nuclear bomb testing and atomic power plants; for peace in Vietnam, central America and Iraq; for the right to open access and accurate vote counts in elections that cannot again be stolen, and much much more.

These national and global campaigns have been accompanied by never-ending battles at the grassroots, against Jim Crow, for equal housing, against local polluters, for paper ballots, and for an ever-growing range of vital causes that demand human attention if we are to retain our rights and dignity.

This on-going grassroots fervor is the essence of democracy, the lifeblood of our ability to survive and grow.

Today, another specific cause---this time the environment---has finally become fashionable.

“We have morality on our side….”
---William Blum

Ironic words flowing from the pen of a man who has devoted forty years of his life to hard-core dissent against the United States, the most moral nation in the history of civilization.

We are a nation founded upon bedrock principles of Christianity.

Would Christ not have approved of chattel slavery, the Native American genocide, and the millions of “savages” we have slaughtered to expand our borders and to maintain “Pax Americana?” Those who have died to sustain our peace and prosperity were but martyrs for a cause greater than themselves. In a sense, each one of them was a little Jesus.

The Democratic leadership in Congress wants the war to be around in 2008 so that a Democrat can win the White House by "opposing" the war.  Congressman Rahm Emanuel has explained this to the Washington Post.  The ONLY way to convince the top Democrats that this calculation is wrong is to promote in the presidential primary the only candidate who is trying in every way possible to end the war now.  If we do that, the Democrats will understand that they cannot wait until after November of 2008 to end the war.

The news went straight to the Dad Zone of my heart and I thought about my 20-year-old daughter finishing up her junior year in St. Paul, Minn. I thought about book bags and attitude, tentative career plans and those uncomfortable plastic chairs with the flip-up elbow rests — the stuff of a young person’s becoming — and then I went numb with grief.

On the most ordinary of ordinary days this week, on a different campus but in my mind the same campus, the future was shattered with a methodical popping noise.

While the horror is still fresh, before we have satisfied ourselves with superficial understanding and moved on — oh yeah, another loner with a gun — I invoke this prayerful meditation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”:

With over 1400 local events, the April 14 National Day of Climate Action, www.StepItUp07.org, offered a national wakeup call, with citizens in every state raising their voice. But even as we build on this powerful day to move forward, we need to talk about why it’s been so hard for Americans to recognize the climate issue’s urgency.

It is not election season.  It is citizen activism season.  The eternal election season is draining all sorts of energy away from our democracy.  And it's not just the corporate media promoting it.  Activist groups like Moveon.org are involved.  Not just Moveon, many groups are buying into and promoting the idea that an election (like a mushroom cloud) is imminent.  Those interested in promoting third-party candidates are among the most passionate promoters of this deadly notion.  But Moveon is among the largest.

Tuesday night, MoveOn held a "virtual town hall meeting" asking candidates for US President about the war in Iraq.  Some of the candidates are in Congress, so their views on Iraq are of interest to those busy working for peace. 

MoveOn Director Eli Pariser introduced the online video by saying it would allow members of the moveon community to participate.  But the interviews with the candidates had been prerecorded.  The participation consisted of the prior submission and voting on questions to ask. 

As the media fills with whimsical good-byes to one of America's greatest writers, lets not forget one of the great engines driving this wonderful man---he HATED war. Including this one in Iraq. And he had utter contempt for the men who brought it about.

Kurt Vonnegut was a divine spark of liberating genius for an entire generation. His brilliant, beautiful, loving and utterly unfettered novels helped us redefine ourselves in leaving the corporate America in the 1950s and the Vietnam war that followed.

Having seen the worst of World War II from a meatlocker in fire-bombed Dresden, Kurt's Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, cut us the intellectual and spiritual slack to seek out a new reality. It took a breathtaking psychic freedom to merge the interstellar worlds he created from whole cloth with the social imperatives of a changing age. It was that combination of talent, heart and liberation that gave Vonnegut a cutting edge he never lost.