Faraway, So Close: Barack in Berlin

My Berlin peeps were excited; even my mother said she wished she could go hear him.

And he spoke eloquently. “The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.” Yes.

But I didn’t love his speech. Did the Berliners love it? The video I watched stuck with a close shot of his face for all 25+ minutes, so I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them, when they stayed silent, and when they erupted into applause (at: we will finally end this war in Iraq and at: no more nuclear weapons and at: my country must take climate as seriously as you have here and at: the world is more interconnected than it ever has been).

And I found myself wondering whom this speech was geared towards. I found it… not quite in touch with the Berlin and the Germany I know.

The speechwriters clearly held the romantic notion (not uncommon among USAmericans) that Die Wende—the reunification of Germany—is a source of pure pride and joy for Germans. But in my experience it’s a fraught issue, with a good number of Wessies still upset at the drain on their resources and lowered quality of life, and a lot of Ossies missing the ideals and sometimes even the realities, of communist days. Meanwhile, many of the students in that crowd of 250,000 weren’t walking, talking, or even born when the Wall fell.

So Obama crescendoed with the glorious defeat of communism, the victory of capitalism and democracy… but the Berliners cheered far more heartily at the mention of the downfall of apartheid in South Africa.

And his opening, about the Airlift (about which I blogged a while back)… this story showcases the graciousness of the United States, taking pity on the starving people of Berlin despite the atrocities of the recently-concluded war.

What was he trying to accomplish with it? You better remember that we saved your asses? Or…remember once upon a time when we were a force for good?

I would have made the Airlift part of a resounding conclusion, to call America back to the magnanimous spirit of yore.

Yes, the historical stuff all felt a bit off—down to the mention of the Victory Column behind him as a symbol of…victory… when really, don’t we all associate the Golden Else (as Berliners refer to her), with Wim’s angels?? I think the Wings of Desire would have been a far stronger reference point than wars and victories, myself.

the planet, the people too

Where I’m headed next weekend.

FutureFuel Reads The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, by Thom Hartmann

Anthropology, philosophy, spirituality, ecology… Where does this book get filed? The keyword on the upper left corner of the back cover says Current Affairs. I guess those are current affairs; I guess it’s high time they were.

I actually bought this book after hearing Hartmann speak at Bioneers in 2006, impressed by his reasoned (intellectual) and grounded (spiritual/emotional) presence on stage. But I never got around to cracking it until I realized it might inform my current researches for Van Jones’ book on Green Collar Jobs.

Hartmann’s first goal is to explain how humanity exceeded natural carrying capacity on earth. For most of human existence, alongside every other living creature, we lived off what he calls “current local sunlight,” the amount of sun that hit the earth and got stored in plants, which fed the herbivores, which in turn fed the carnivores. Human shelter and clothing were derived from plants and animal parts too, and thus also from sunlight.

Population densities stabilized at the level which local sunlight could sustain, growing slightly when we developed herding and farming practices, which more efficiently converted sunlight into food.

Then we discovered what he calls “ancient sunlight:” coal, a material derived from plants that had stored sunlight for hundreds of millions of years. As coal replaced wood as a main source of heat, forests in turn could be cleared for food production, and global population jumped: from 500 million people around 1000 A.D. to one billion in 1800. And then we discovered another form of ancient sunlight: oil.

So while it took us 200,000 years to produce our first billion people, with the discovery of oil, it took just 130 years for our second billion, and a paltry 30 years for our third billion. Then, leveling off from exponentials into more linear growth—14 more years until we hit 4 billion, 13 more years to 5 billion, and 12 additional years to hit 6 billion in 1999. And growing.

And now there’s almost no more ancient sunlight left. Experts differ on the exact amounts remaining, but everyone is clear we’ll be totally OUT within the next 40-60ish years at current rates of usage– and increased use is predicted. Since demand and population is still growing, and since even our alterative energy technologies require oil (to produce photovoltaic cells, for example), and since we’re running out of all sorts of other things (water, metals, trees) we obviously need to Get Smart now.

Then Hartmann switches tacks entirely, in order to introduce us to the people who may hold the answer to effective resource management: the Older Cultures, such as the San, Kogi, Ik, Kayapo. He spends a lot of time debunking our Younger Culture’s prevailing narratives about these primitive peoples, and questioning our Younger/Dominant Cultural values. What is enough? What is wealth? What is growth? Who really attains leisure or contentment? Whose culture is deeper?

There are so many gems in this book that my copy is riddled with dog-eared pages, underlined passages, asterisks and exclamation points. There are far too many to convey here, so I’m just going to ask very nicely—maybe even beg you—to read the book yourself, and believe what he conveys about transformation rippling from the individual to the community to the global level, and how individual acts of grace, generosity, and gratitude can change humanity’s trajectory.

It’s Summer in the Underworld

As an adult I’ve liked the queerness of Halloween, the flamboyance and the facepaints, but there’s always been a shallowness to the occasion. It wasn’t that different than just about any weekend night in the Castro.

But this year I was invited to perform in a ritual for the pagan holiday Samhain, which takes place at this time, midway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, at the end of the harvest season. Many people consider it the Celtic New Year; it launches the dark half of the year, which ends with the feast of Beltane on May 1.

The ancient Celts—and today’s pagans—believe(d) that beginnings happen in darkness, just as we’re carried in the darkness of the womb before being born. All things have their origins in the dark, fertile and irrational underworld; seeds lie buried underground in what seems to be death but is in fact a precursor to springing to life and ultimately bearing fruit.

On Samhain, the veil between this chaotic primordial Underworld and the world of the living is at its thinnest, so we can reach out and connect with the spirits. Renewing social ties with the dead ensures a safe, fruitful future. The structures of the old year/life are ritually dissolved—just as death dissolves our identity in this world—through bonfires and acts of social disorder, especially related to social rank or gender-appropriate behavior. Cross-dressing was traditionally one of the most widespread and popular ways of expressing the snubbing of social categories.

In the Bay Area some pagans celebrate the occasion with a huge ritual called the Spiral Dance. Despite my utter unfamiliarity with it, they invited me to take a small role—to invoke South, the direction of fire and eros, with a solo hoopdance performance. I happened to have just finished a red and orange costume, layers of glittery material, ornate brocades and silks, and bootcovers of red fur. If you believe in coincidence or destiny or Intendedness, it was that; as far as I’m concerned, the hours I spent pinning and sewing brought the dance upon me. These days I avidly believe in my powers to manifest opportunities for myself.

It was only afterwards that I realized I’ve never really done a solo performance before, under spotlights and the riveted gaze of half a thousand people, with no other hoopers to share the attention. The cheering, whistling crowd reached out their arms to me as I whirled and leapt with Christabel’s small psi hoop (no real flames were allowed in the venue). I was fire, people told me after my dance. Towards the end of the ritual, after the long guided meditation that led us all to the Otherworld to commune with those who are no longer in the human world (I dedicated the night to my father) and then back again, everyone in the hall linked hands and danced together as one entity. The long long line of us spiraled and curved back on itself, chanting one verse over and over and over again, our intention to renew the earth:

Let it begin with each step with take
And let it begin with each change we make
And let it begin with each chain we break
And let it begin every time we awake.

Dropping into the glowing eyes of hundreds of dancers who swirled past me and spoke these words, I felt hope coursing through us, me. Maybe we can transform the earth yet.

23 Tons of Transcendent Candy

I’ve been down with a total ick of a flu since hooping proud at Pride last Sunday. Among other exciting activities, like huddling under a towel over a bowl of steam (this always makes me think fondly of Pete Postlethwaite in In the Name of the Father), I watched Sophie Scholl, which I’ve been wanting to see for a while. It’s based on the true story of Sophie and her brother, who were university students in Munich during the Third Reich; together they and a handful of others, mostly students, formed the resistance group The White Rose, which distributed anti-Nazi leaflets across the country in an effort to cause a national student uprising against The Fuhrer. During the interrogations, Sophie says something very close to “everyone will hate us for what we have allowed to happen; everyone will ask why we did nothing to try and stop it.”

Yup. It is a complex thing, having a German (or half-German, in my case) identity. Even the most fair and open-minded folks I know often belie – or outright state- their belief that there is an inherent tendency towards ethnic supremacy and harshness, among other ugly traits, in Germans. Despite the fact(s) that I was born in the U.S., and that my mother was only just born at the end of the war (1944), and that her father refused to join the Nazi party and was held back from klobbering the local SS-dude only when the latter threatened his wife (my grandmother), who was heavy with her third child (my mother), and that my mother’s uncle, the intellectual of the family, was a supporter of the White Rose himself and was therefore drowned by SS-officers in front of his own wife… despite ALL this, I have still felt guilty by association throughout my life. Guilty by turns, and by turns pissed off by that energy that people send me when I say I am half-German.

I recommend Sophie Scholl. Also Downfall, which portrays Hitler’s last days and how nearly everyone in his closest ranks lost respect and turned on him.

The Reich’s atrocities are/were unforgiveable–and it’s important to remember how grey and complex every fraggin situation is. The findings of the Milgram Experiments of 1960s, often mentioned in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture images, showed how pathetically obedient the average person is: “Even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

A couple days ago I intended to write here about the Berlin Airlift, aka Operation Vittles, which began on June 26, 1948, and involved US, British, and French planes dropping tons of food, medicine, and other supplies into Western-occupied Berlin, which was blockaded by the Soviet Union for just about a year. (Soviet strategy was to weaken Germany to render it incapable of another war, while the US, with France and Britain, felt Germany should be rebuilt as a solid economic center of Europe postwar.)

After seeing the desperation of the German children in the blockaded area, one swell pilot named Gail Halvorsen came up with the whimsical idea of tying candy bars and bubblegum to his handkerchiefs and dropping these tiny parachutes from his plane for the kids. The press spread the word and soon American children were donating candy to the effort— then corporate contributions kicked in, including 11,000 yards of linen cut to handkerchief size and 1200 rolls of Lifesavers from the Life Saver Corp. According to the Chicopee Herald, newspaper of Halvorsen’s hometown in Massachusetts, “each of the 22 schools in Chicopee set time aside for sewing the handkerchiefs into miniature parachutes. Each student was required to donate one day per week making candychutes.”

When I lived in Berlin, I lived around the corner from the Tempelhof airfield, which was the drop-site for US-occupied Berlin. There’s an ungainly monument there that commemorates the Airlift, the first segment of a concrete bridge arching from the ground towards the sky and abruptly truncated there, reaching up. When my dad passed away (he’d lived his last years in my mother’s country of birth), I knew immediately that the cemetery just down the street from Tempelhof was the place for him, facing this symbol of how we USAmericans transcended judgment and bitterness, and extended assistance to those in need.

Contrails

I flew at the safe altitude of tribe.net for a month before gaining the courage to launch the rocket here. The following emissions were generated in those flights of fancy, with the net drawn taut under me by my fellow freaks and hoopers at tribe.

NO CHOCOLATES WERE INVOLVED
(originally posted 31.05.07)

May 31 is the day on which the legendary ride of British noblewoman Lady Godgyfu is commemorated. You might know her better as Godiva, the Latin version of her anglosaxon name, which means “gift of God.”

Godgyfu lived in the early part of the 11th century. She was an active philanthropist, and did much endowing of monasteries like the Benedictine’s in Coventry. We should bear in mind it’s not as if she had a lot of other choices of organizations to support: the non-profit sector of 11th century England was not quite our behemoth of today. Plus, as one source puts it, in that era, the Benedictine Monasteries contributed so significantly to education, culture and goverment that the years from 550 to 1150 could be called the Benedictine centuries–in Europe, I hasten to add. So she wielded her privilege for some good.

Her fabled (and probably mythical) ride also stemmed from her bleating heart. Over and over again she had begged her husband Leofric to stop taxing the poor people of the town of Coventry, but he stubbornly refused. Finally, worn down, he offered a deal that he surely thought she’d never take: if she would ride naked through the streets of town, he would grant her request. She called his bluff, and rode buff. He kept his word and abolished the taxes.

I’d like to propose a similar deal to the lawmakers in our nation’s capital: I’ll mount a steed and ride around Capitol Hill in the nude, in return for the passage of a couple pieces of legislation. Just off the top of my head, here’s what I’d expect in return for my first ride:

*Δ*immediate US ratification of stricter emissions standards than in the Kyoto Protocol
*Δ* a nice fat progressive income tax whereby wealthier folks pay a higher percentage than those with less income. Oh, and a laying to bed of any thought of repealing estate taxes—for the mental health of the children of the very rich if for no other reason.
*Δ*a zero waste goal, how about by 2020. Zero Waste goes beyond recycling to eliminate subsidies for raw material extraction and waste disposal, and holds producers responsible for the entire life cycles of their products and packaging.
*Δ*the establishment of the Department of Peace, focused on nonmilitary peaceful conflict resolutions and violence prevention at home and abroad

My second ride will be offered for universal health care, marriage’s removal from the realm of government (thus, equality of opportunity for the full spectrum of couplings) and other equally sensible things.

So, who’s with me? The hottest ladies out there, I mean you, since I think we’ll attract the most attention and possess the most cleavage…I mean leverage.

And can someone contribute horses to this effort, and get them to DC? Please contact me immediately.