Updating everything

I said in my very first post at Lotus that "my anger is the only thing that keeps me going." So you might conclude from the paucity of posts of late that I'm no longer angry or at least not as angry as I was. You'd be wrong.

I'm as angry as ever, angry at the butchers and bastards who hold the top positions in government and the economy in so many places, here and abroad; angry at the routine, institutionalized, cruelty inflicted on billions of poor around the world; angry at the renewed acceptability of racism and sexism and other forms of hatred; angry at the selfish and greedy indifference about global warming; angry at the self-centered stupidity and arrogance of too many Americans; angry about the lack of anger in too many places about too many things; angry particularly about the lack of anger among so many of the nominal left, who seem to have both forgotten about Iraq and embraced the Obama-approved FISA bill while giving as an answer to anything and everything, "elect more Democrats" even as those same Democrats betray both promises and principles. (And please don't tell me about "more better Democrats" - Obama was supposed to be the big example of exactly that.)

So the anger is still there. It's the hope that's fading. The hope that things will get better at some point in the visible future. Something over 16 years ago, in the print version of Lotus, I wrote that

[e]ven many professional grouches (like me) are actually unregenerate romantics whose sharp words are honed on the inexplicable, indefensible, yet utterly unshakable conviction that things not only can be but must be better than they are.

I'm not feeling very romantic or very unshakable these days. And when the hope runs low, so does the spirit, so does the energy. The bottom line, the actual reason there has been so little activity here of late, is that I'm approaching my 60th birthday, one of those round numbers of sufficient height to induce a few thoughts of mortality - and I find that I'm not sorry that I won't live to see the world I see coming over the next maybe 40 or 50 years.

In that world I see decreasing freedom, vanishing privacy, and the continued ascendancy of corporate and government power at home, leading to even narrower political options, an economy ever-more divided into haves and have-nots, and continued reversal of the partial progress we have made. I see increasing violence, suffering, and hunger around the world as the impact of global warming starts to really bite, leading to tides of refugees and resource wars over arable land and water - an impact that a few decades further on, even the privileged rich countries of the world will not escape. I see, that is, wider political oppression, increased war, and deepened hunger in a world facing environmental disaster. It's a dark future I see.

The only thing that has kept me from packing it in altogether, I suppose, is that there was only one time before I felt this blue, had this lack of hope, about the future. That was in the mid-1980s, a time when - with full Congressional approval - the US was deploying first-strike nuclear weapons in Europe. I said at that time that I believed that the world had less than an even chance of surviving the century, that is, there was a better than even chance of a nuclear war before the year 2000. Happily, I was wrong.

So maybe I'm wrong now. Still, I can't help but think that maybe I wasn't wrong back then, maybe there really was a better than even chance of a nuclear war - but the world beat the odds because there was enough public opposition both here and abroad to those weapons in particular and nuclear arms in general to force changes in government policy, an opposition that raged across two continents leading to the INF treaty and the destruction of the weapons in question just a few years after they were deployed. And right now I simply don't see that sort of opposition existing. To anything.

So for the moment I'm having some trouble rousing the spirit to splutter and spew my own take on, as I prefer to do, some of the lesser-noted events of the days going by. I keep seeing things that make me say "I should say something about that" but when it comes to actually doing it - I don't.

I'm going to assume I'm just going through another one of my I'm getting pretty damned sick of them low times and the spirit and it's associated energy will re-emerge at some point with sufficient force to overcome the dejection. In the meantime, I'm still here and the, I dunno, 20 or 30 of you who check in from time to time should not despair but should keep your faith despite my faithlessness and carry it on despite my letting it down. And please keep coming back: We all know how encouraging hits can be. And I will be around.

Footnote: There is a good deal of technical information online about those 1980s missiles - called Pershing IIs - and the INF (Intermediate or Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, but you have to search rather hard to find anything about the public resistance here or even in Europe (where opposition was much higher) to their deployment. And much of what you do find is suffused with Cold War crap that accepts all the mainstream premises of the US's purity and Soviet Union's (as it was at the time) perversity. This overview from CNN, precisely because it is less egregious than many I could find, illustrates the bullshit perfectly: As CNN would have it, the anti-nuclear weapons movement consisted of a bunch of well-meaning but naive boobs who were manipulated by the Soviets and a treaty was achieved not because the governments of NATO nations listened to the protests but precisely because they ignored them. A shameful and shameless distortion of history.

As a counterpoint, this is what I wrote at the time to a friend active in a peace group in the UK:

Too much of the discussion has centered on what Reagan said about Gorbachev’s response to Reagan’s reaction to Gorbachev’s initiative, ad infinitum. But in fact, it’s generally acknowledged that Reagan originally made the so-called “zero-zero” proposal with supreme confidence that the USSR would never accept it (Indeed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed on to it only after being assured of exactly that.), doing it as a means to blunt the power of the opposition here and in Europe to the cruise and Pershing II. When Gorbachev, for his own domestic political reasons, accepted the idea, the Reaganites squirmed desperately but couldn’t find a way to avoid agreeing to their own proposals.

Which means, bluntly, that it’s the peace movement that’s responsible for whatever good comes out of this treaty, because it was the strength of the peace movement that forced Reagan to make the proposal in the first place, the strength of the peace movement that gave Gorbachev the political opening to accept it, the strength of the peace movement that made it politically impossible for Reagan to dodge reaching an agreement.

They aren’t getting rid of those missiles, we are. You are. I am. [The local peace groups we're involved with are.] The millions more like us in the UK and the US and Belgium and the Netherlands and Germany and Italy are. We. Us. All of us. And I think we damned well should be taking credit for it - loudly.

But of course we didn't. And, if the paucity of historical peace-related material online is any indication, we still don't. So history gets written, it seems, not so much by the winners as by those with the finances and connections to occupy the available historical space. Another reason to be depressed.