Jack Burns Lives!

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.-Edward Abbey

Ah, the American Dream. An oft repeated phrase we all probably first heard in our youth. The official national myth that any hard working, honest person can and realize their dreams. Start from nothing, work your way up, save, get a starter home, maybe a starter wife and gradually increase your net worth until you reach the economic summit.

Most Americans probably don’t dream of reaching the same heights as people like Bill Gates or Ted Turner. For most of us, just having a nice home, a comfortable living and decent healthcare and education for our kids is sufficient. But like most summits, the trip to the top is fraught with peril.

2009 was a wake up call that perhaps even the most basic achievements in life are becoming more difficult to realize for an increasing number of people. Healthcare costs are astronomical, and our public education system is so bad in many large cities that private schools are now viewed as “necessities” by families that want their children to gain admittance to even moderately selective colleges and universities. And even if you’re fortunate enough to own a home there are certainly no guarantees you’ll keep it. Most of us are just one major illness away from bankruptcy and potential foreclosure, but alas, you can protect yourself from that via another miraculous capitalist invention, mortgage insurance.

Why do I always think of those bogus 19th century opportunists selling “miracle tonics” when I see an insurance salesman?

I simply don’t believe the American Dream is what was, and I don’t believe we’re anywhere close to recapturing it. It’s become a perverted lie, cast upon schoolchildren at an early age and repeated like a mantra all the way through compulsory high schools where kids are fed whitewashed versions of history, and where everything seems predicated on your ability to pass standardized tests where the odds are incredibly stacked against inner-city youth. From there, the fiends at Sallie Mae sell the concept of going into massive amounts of debt so you can get a college education and from there, a tedious, meaningless job selling cheap plastic shit manufactured in China. Credit cards, mortgages, bigger houses to house all the shit you accumulate. Then there’s the inevitable depression and anxiety followed by therapy and drugs. You’re a rat on a wheel that keeps turning but goes nowhere.

That’s no dream. It’s a nightmare.

My own dream has long been to have a small house or cabin with a reasonable amount of land for farming, gardening and livestock. My own version of the Vogelin Ranch. A refuge and a place where I can live out my remaining days in peace and a respectable level of self-sufficiency. I don’t want to see my human neighbors peering into my window from their own windows while I eat breakfast. Wren’s and Chickadee’s are welcome. I don’t want to hear their stupid leaf blowers or the hum of their swimming pool pumps. I don’t want religious nutjobs knocking on my door.

So how do I get there?

Remember the phrase “40 acres and a mule?” It was a practice in 1865 of providing arable land to African American former slaves who became free as Union armies occupied areas of the Confederacy. Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s January 16, 1865 Special Field Orders, No. 15 provided for the land, and some of the recipients received from the Army mules for use in plowing as well; the combination was widely recognized as providing a sound start for a family farm. 40 acres (16 hectares) is a standard size for rural land, being a sixteenth of a section, or a quarter quarter-section, under the Public Land Survey System used on land settled after 1785. (Wiki)

Well, that much land can cost you a pretty penny these days, especially if it’s already got a house, barn and driveway. In some areas of Tennessee, my home state, you find places for less than $300,000. I suppose if you’re in California, that sounds like a deal. But where does even that much money come from? Unless you were in the lucky sperm club and inherited it, you’d probably have to spend years working in the belly of the beast. Living in the city, working a corporate job and saving money. You had to save, a reasonable endeavor, but you probably had to have some luck along the way, and even if you do all that, you have to make a living once you find your nirvana.

If you want to move to a remote place before retirement, assuming you’re not established there, meaning, you weren’t raised in a rural area and have no connections in the area, how will you make a living to pay the mortgage? Working at the local cafe won’t pay the mortgage and everything else. Neither will farming if you’re a city slicker like me. Real estate? Sure, show the locals how to carve up what’s left of the countryside into little ranchette’s and sell ‘em off to more city slickers so the property values and property taxes go sky high. Pretty soon, the locals won’t be able to live there any longer. Just look at Teluride, Colorado. And if you decide this is going to be your retirement home, assuming you’re paying your bills with your retirement, how certain is your retirement?

My aunt, recently retired, just lost $300,000 in her retirement during 2009. She’s reasonably wealthy, so that’s not a huge loss for her, but she was worried. Not enough to get her to resume practicing medicine, but people with more meager savings probably couldn’t take much of a hit before having to become a greeter at Wall Mart.

Want 100 acres so you can raise a modest number of cattle or sheep with your chickens and horses? Expect the numbers to reach closer and usually over the one million dollar mark. Sure, you can buy some dry, mesquite laden tract in West Texas for $90,000, but there’s no house and no water.

Build your own? Not a likely scenario for most Americans. We’re citified and too used to having things done for us.

Occasionally, however, you can find a good deal. Something that’s “ready to go” in so far as farming operations are concerned and that is potentially affordable. Assuming you’re willing to lease space to cellphone tower operators and hunters, which I am not. I suspect if you’re diligent and have some money, you can find a decent spot, but it’s becoming more difficult, and it’s certainly out of reach for most Americans. For those of us with a chance, because we’re smart and somewhat lucky, we bide our time in the corporate cesspool, or get a job with a real retirement plan and hope for the best.

Who’s to blame? We have to blame someone or some group, right? I say we start with land speculators and real estate agents, two of the most pestiferous, vile and despicable classes of people in the country. They thrive off uncontrolled growth and promote it without apology. It’s one of the reasons why I hate the notion of ever buying another home. I can’t stand the thought of having to deal with agents, mortgage bankers and credit bureaus. A pox upon all your houses.

There are too many people crawling all over the continent already. We’re jam packed into cities like New York, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit and Phoenix, towering edifices of steel, concrete and drywall, seasoned with inconceivable amounts of smog, traffic and noise. But such a landscape, if we can call it that, creates new industry and new profits. Anti-depressants, therapists, health clubs (since there’s nowhere to hike or do noble work like cutting your own wood), psyche wards and private prisons. Can you imagine what the countryside would look like if even twenty percent of the current population, which is over 300 million, decided to become self-reliant farmers or ranchers?

According to the United States Fact Sheet, there are over 2.2 million acres of arable land with slightly over 900 million acres used for farming in the United States, or 40.8 percent of the total available used for crops, woodland and pastureland.

That means that if even twenty percent of the total population decided to pursue the dream of being a self-sufficient farmer or rancher, they’d only have fifteen acres of the current total land used for farming, and that also assumes that they could somehow get their hands on the privately held land.

Revolution? Redistribution of wealth? Once again, do the peasants and serfs rise up against their wealthy capitalist masters and demand equality?

Which of course brings me to another issue, that of private property. The Holy Grail of the American psyche. The untouchable. You can attack or question just about anything in American culture except for the notion of private property. Even God is open game (as he should be) as evidenced by Richard Dawkin’s best selling and excellent book The God Delusion. Had Dawkins written The Private Property Delusion, he’d find himself banished to the far margins of acceptance, much like Marx, Abbey or Naess, perhaps even to the point of his name becoming a pejorative.

Despite drawing careful distinctions between terrorism and sabotage, Abbey was marginalized by the mainstream literary establishment and labeled a “regionalist.” He was never accepted by the mainstream, even mainstream environmentalists, because he wrote about attacking private property. Dare bring up evil notions like the redistribution of wealth and most folks will respond with something elementary and ridiculous like “the USSR proved communism doesn’t work” or “Reagan defeated communism.”

To which I respond by saying such a system worked pretty well on this continent for hundreds and hundreds of years. Before whites showed up, and to some degree, even after whites showed up, at least for a period of time. At least until industrial, growth capitalism took hold and fouled the watershed. No, not the pure communism envisioned by Marx. Something better. Democratic, bioregional, steady-state subsistence economies where no man has the power to dominate others. Neither to serve, nor to rule.

Until we find our way back to that, the American Dream is just that, a dream.

Figured I’d at least finish this one. The second part of my post on capitalism, the system that gives so much but also comes with a terribly high price…

One simple step to improving things is to support more employee owned companies and cooperatives. Let workers share the equity and decide their fate democratically. Support companies that aren’t so myopically focused on growth. Do not support companies that activity seek to hurt other companies in support of their growth plans.

Quit sending your kids to these ridiculous business schools. Encourage them to focus on a classical education in language, math, science, history and fine arts. Teach them how to think. Who says you can’t run a business with a liberal arts education? I do. I studied mostly History and English in college, and it prepared me well for life. Throw in sufficient amounts of biology, anthropology, political science, sociology, language, and you’ll be much better off than had you majored in communications or fashion merchandizing.

You learn business as an apprentice. Take the time in college to learn to write and to develop critical reasoning skills. College should be about education, but like everything else on the planet, it’s apparently been taken over by CPA’s and MBA’s hell bent on running our colleges and universities as businesses.

And for those of you that remain unconvinced and still believe capitalism is a grand and benign as apple pie (low fat, of course), consider this. Let’s say you’re a small proprietor. The owner of the community hardware store or a locksmith. You’re making a decent living, know your customers and provide a valuable service to the community. Somewhere along the way, your community gains the attention of Wall Mart and before you know it, they’ve negotiated a deal that will provide tax breaks for them and the necessary zoning changes so cranky old Mr. Gentry can rezone his property to commercial and sell it to Wall Mart.

The rest of the story has been repeated many times all across the country. You’re out of business, thanks to “competition” and struggling to hang on to your home. You’re forced to take a job at some gawd awful plant, making shit wages for robotic, mindless, shit work. Wall Mart decides it’s time to move on to a bigger spread and gets the county to agree to widen the road and provide even more tax incentives. The former site, what was once farmland held by a single family for generations and before that, home to the Cheyenne, is now a community eyesore, an ugly, abandoned wasteland of concrete.

It’s all “progress,” correct? The American way.

No, it’s a cluster fuck, and the little guy, the average worker and homeowner is the one getting the shaft. For every executive toasting his buddies and vacationing in Southern France (thanks to those rising stock prices), there are multiple families struggling to stay on the road and out of the ditch. But the road to riches is strewn with all sorts of ugliness and unnecessary peril. It’s the ugly underbelly of the system so many people believe is so grand.

Capitalism is cruel. Don’t be fooled, and don’t think for a minute that your time will never come.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece, Unforgiven. It’s just before the final scene when Clint and The Schofield Kid are waiting for their bounty money outside of town. A discussion ensues about killing, and the very real consequences of taking human life.

Munny: It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.
The Schofield Kid: Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.
Will Munny: We all got it coming, kid.

Yes. In this system, we all have it coming.

Well, this is the end of Jack Burns Lives. I’ll be taking the site down after the next billing cycle to focus on my new endeavor.

There are things I thought I liked about capitalism. My Apple laptop. DVD’s and being able to download music. My digital camera and the Internet.

But all of these things come at a heavy price. A cost that most folks don’t consider since they see capitalism as not only benign, but enormously beneficial. For example, capitalism has produced some miracle drugs that make diseases like Rheumatoid Arthritis manageable. In this country, it’s made it possible for people from all walks of life to achieve standards of living most in the world can only dream of.

So, why am I so sour on capitalism? Why am I starting to sound like a pinko-commie bastard? What’s the problem, Jack?

The problem is the undeniable, ugly underbelly of capitalism. The stuff that happens behind the curtain and sometimes right in plain sight of everyone in the theatre. What has to happen to open markets, to fuel expansion and deliver big screen teevees to millions of American mortgage holders. What has to happen for Wall Street to continue to deliver those gaudy returns and for bankers to collect those fat bonuses.

For example, the duplicitous behavior of wealthy people that puts thousands of out of work. All an executive has to do is hit the “send” button on an e-mail for hundreds of hopeful workers to suddenly find themselves out of work, so he’ll cut expenses, make “plan” and therefore his bonus. I’m sick of hearing about single mothers having their utilities turned off while fat cats in big banks gamble with taxpayer dollars and reap multi-million dollar windfalls. I’m sick of extreme economic disparity and don’t buy for a minute that it’s “how you were raised,” or “you didn’t work hard enough.”

For people to make that kind of money, an awful lot of horrible shit goes down. It often requires wars to open markets, degradation of natural resources and treating other humans like piles of horseshit.

I know what goes on, because I spent years in the belly of the beast, working for large corporations. I’ve been in country club locker rooms and private bars and listened to the banter of the privileged. Was I one? No. I was a pitiful, stressed out lieutenant most of my career in the big leagues, until I finally had the good sense and good fortune to get out and attempt to create a small, democratic workplace that is in fact the antithesis of every place I’d been before.

As it stands today, people that worked hard their entire lives, saved and did their best can lose everything and find themselves in dire straits in a nano-second.

Capitalism is a never-ending game of survival. Everyday brings new challenges and competitors. There’s a cursory amount of cooperation here and there, but it’s mostly dog eat dog competition, where a constantly changing list of interlopers works diligently to put you out of business. Altruism has nothing to do with it.

They don’t care if you can’t pay for your house. You should have been better.
They don’t care if you die from lack of healthcare. Should have planned better.
They don’t care if you lose your car. Public transportation was built for losers like you.
They don’t care if you don’t eat. It’s eat or be eaten.

Anyone that dares to point out the absurdity of such a system is quickly branded and marginalized. Cast downward to a pit that’s even worse than the one designed for failed capitalists.

Why do you hate America, you commie bastard?

Like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, it attempts to cloak itself and its real nature though any number of advertising campaigns and “initiatives” ostensibly designed to help the poor, save Bangladesh, the whales and the bears, protect us from global warming, blah, blah, blah. But in the end, the only thing it’s really working to save is itself and expand its profit-making sphere.

Those wonderful profits. Our raison d’être, and the reason the biosphere is under siege.

As the poet Lew Welch once said, “…the profit motive means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy….Greed, then, and Usury (the most pernicious form of greed, the selling of money) have always been the carbuncles on the neck of America. We have never been free.”

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. We even have examples of human societies right here on this continent that demonstrate other economic systems are possible. The Manitos of Northern New Mexico, Hispanic villagers that had a pastoral, subsistence economy that functioned well for many, many years before the advent of the cash economy. There was a time when their villages were self-contained and nearly self-sufficient. There were no fences, and “the most important civic virtue for a man to have was verguenza, a self-effacing probity that restrained him from advancing himself at the expense of others.” (deBuys, Enchantment and Exploitation, The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range)

The Nez Perce lived in collections of democratic villages bound by kinship and economic well-being for all. At least until we showed up.

But I reckon the horse is out of the barn. There’s no going back to pastoral, steady-state, village life any time soon.

So, what can we do now? Part Two tomorrow….

My wife and I decided to visit our youngest child this weekend. He’s a socially concerned and active college student, and like most kids, he enjoys being away at school but also enjoys an occasional visit from his parents. We’re close and share many interests, not the least of which are books.

After a hearty breakfast Saturday morning at a local dive, we decided to check out a local used bookstore near campus. It’s a jewel of a place, with thousands of books of all different types and ages. I could easily spend an entire day browsing in a place like this, and it’s the kind of place that leaves me convinced (more than ever) that electronic books are evil. Surely the spawn of Satan or whatever Dark Lord rules the capitalist realm.

One of the first things I do in any bookstore, as if this is the real measure of its worth, is to see what the Abbey selection is like. Well, let me tell ya, this place was the mother lode. When I walked in the door, the first thing I noticed was a case full of first editions, and right on the top shelf sat a copy of Black Sun. Exciting, but since I already have that first edition and bought it for less than the $150.00 asking price at this establishment, I moved on.

In addition to nearly every Abbey work, they had several jewels that made the trip home with me:

Appalachian Wilderness, The Great Smoky Mountains, Eliot Porter and Edward Abbey, 1973
Mother Earth News, “Edward Abbey’s Parting Shot, An Excerpt from Hayduke Lives!”, Nov./Dec. 1989
Mother Earth News, “Edward Abbey: The Ethics of Eco-Sabotage“, May-June 1984
Desert Images, Photos by David Muench and text by Edward Abbey, third printing, 1987 (this is, of course, another one of the large coffee table books…a massive one)
Coyote In The Maze, edited by Peter Quigley, a collection of essays and literary criticism of Ed’s works

The Mother Earth News Interview is incredible. Ed discusses his views on monkeywrenching and the difference between monkeywrenching (sabotage) and terrorism, his views on cowboys and ranching, the effects of industrial capitalism and even religion. It’s a must read if you’re an Abbey fan and somehow missed it or haven’t seen it in years.

It’s here, so enjoy….

Happy Birthday, you grumpy, inspiring, enviro-meddling bastard.

With every year that passes, it seems as if we need you even more. You’d say “bullshit,” of course, and say we don’t need you. All we need to do is get up off our fat asses and do something ourselves.

I agree. Yes, we’re pretty much failures. We tried (half ass effort…at least for some of us), but we didn’t get it done. We’ve let corporations take over damn near everything. Washington and Wall Street have merged. “Green” might as well have its own stock symbol. The pestiferous capitalist killing machine has expanded.

And we’re now terrorists. We used to be monkeywrenchers or saboteurs, but we allowed the powerbrokers to up the ante, take control of words and their meanings, the press, our schools our freedom. And as of last week, we allowed ourselves to be plunged directly into fascism by a bunch of old white guys wearing black robes. We have private police, private prisons and greedy profiteers sucking the life right out of everything.

But what could we have done? What would you do? I reckon about all we can do is retreat into small enclaves, protect what we can, take care of one another and prepare the survivors to emerge from the ashes and rebuild The Land of the Free. Be like medieval monks, inscribing the whole sordid tale to paper in the hope someone intelligent will find it and take heed.

I haven’t given up hope for The Great Uprising, and I’d happy risk it all to be part of it. I’m going to die anyway. Might as well die doing something interesting and not end up in a corporate hospital with tubes hanging out of every orifice. I dream of millions marching on Washington and taking it back for the people. Throwing out the interlopers of freedom and replacing them with a federation of cooperative bioregions. Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch, a dream, but sometimes a dream is all that keeps you going. It’s all that keeps you from throwing in the towel, running to the hills and cowering in a cabin like Ted Kaczynski.

That, and my family and my friends. I’m here for them, human and non-human, and will happily fight on to protect them from the aforementioned enemy.

ONWARD

Jack Burns

I’ve always found myself fascinated by images that show emerging plant life in landscapes recently burned to crisp by volcanic eruptions. Even out of what appears to be sheer and utter destruction, life abides. Like a snake shedding its skin for a new scaly coat of armament, the earth renews and recreates itself.

For those of us still reeling from the mind blogging Supreme Court decision this week, I offer hope. Yes, hope, that little word Obama used to sway us like a Pied Piper and lead us to believing change was coming to America. We got change, alright. Just not the kind we hoped for.

With this week’s decision, the Supreme Court essentially killed any notion that the United States was a democratic nation and gave full notice that we were in fact a corporate state. A fascist nightmare run by greedy, callous people, mostly Christians, possessing nuclear weapons and guns with Bible verses inscribed on their sights. Their mantra is growth and profit, and for those that can’t keep up, well, you get kicked to the curb to suffer. Shoulda prayed more, I suppose.

It didn’t take a battle or revolution to do it. All it took was five appointed people, people appointed by rich and powerful men, and a few short paragraphs within the context of a nearly 1000 word document to kill America, Land of the Free.

Not a single shot was fired.

The silver lining is this. Perhaps this once unfathomable turn of events will hasten the demise of what we mistakenly believed was representative democracy and give birth to real democracy. Our generation will bear the brunt of the ugliness, as will our children, but perhaps our grandchildren (or for some, great-grandchildren) will live to see a much more democratic, sustainable society. Maybe even a semi-pastoral, anarchistic society based on the egalitarian principle of mutual aid.

I’m one of the few hold outs that still embraces Edward Abbey’s ideals. That anarchism is not a romantic fable but a viable, tried and true alternative for organizing human society.

What’s next? I tend to agree with Keith Olbermann’s assessment on things. The first step is to insert paid for politicians. To a lesser degree, we’ve had that for some time, but we’re entering an age where no one can win without the correct corporate imprimatur. Goodbye Dennis Kucinich. Then, once the whores are in place, their corporate pimps will instruct them to roll back all sorts of environmental regulations, and we’ll see development and industry running amok. The real Dark Ages lie ahead.

As that starts to collapse, violence will erupt. Corporate brutality, state brutality, desperate people roaming the streets. Perhaps not too far from scenarios envisioned by Cormac McCarthy or Edward Abbey. Police forces will be privatized and rule with the cudgel and the boot.

Eventually, however, the corporate toadies will go too far. To help expand their reach, they’ll probably try to privatize parts of the military, but I have faith that wise generals will see through this ruse and draw a line in the sand. One thing about West Point men is they know history. They won’t be fooled by a bunch of necktie wearing power brokers any more than Smedley Butler was fooled. A few will drink (a few have already) from the poison chalice, but not all. So, instead of a Civil War like we had in 1863, you could see a State vs. Corporate war. What’s to keep Lockheed from hiring its own pilots? Blackwater from expanding to unheard of levels? They’ll have their appointed Congress critters to help them! They’ll be oaths of allegiance to the company and to God. I can imagine all sorts of scenarios where this could get beyond butt ugly over the coming years.

Remember, these are people that have already leveled threats like “We’ll bury you with our money.”

Think that’s unimaginable? Who would have thought 25 years ago we’d be dealing with this catastrophe? Emma Goldman, Edward Abbey and a few other marginalized radicals and dissenters probably saw it coming but not too many others. Never underestimate what people will do when billions of dollars are at stake.

I believe we’re at war. I believe we’re fighting to keep freedom alive in our bleeding country. I believe anyone that cares about freedom and that doesn’t want to see our country turned over to corporate, fascist bastards needs to stand up and be heard. We need writers, agitators, creative subversives in art, music and even high tech to wage war against this onslaught of idiocy sweeping the country. Now, more than any time since the time of Jim Crow, we need warriors. People willing to peacefully stand against the tide and refuse to flow with it. We need people to light the way and establish a sound path for future generations.

We need a massive injection of common sense, and we need it now, and if you’re a praying sort, pray these evil bastards hang themselves with their neckties.

“Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.”

“I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.”
-Chief Luther Standing Bear

When confronted with the choice of reading The New York Times or watching the varying array of avian life outside my kitchen window, the decision was simple. Bankruptcy, war, terror, homelessness or the Tufted titmouse, Prairie warbler and Downy woodpecker?

It seems obvious to me the nobility of their simple lives far exceeds that of most men and is equally if not more so deserving of our attention.

It’s good that we have our non-human friends to free our spirits from ugliness of civilization. Especially those of us trapped in cities of concrete, steel, sirens and mayhem. They remind us there is another world, a simpler more beautiful place. And while winter gently cloaks the South in a blanket of grayish cold death, colorful life still abounds. Yellows, reds, blues. They’re all there, hiding in the cedars, pines and holly. In the remains of last summer’s wildflowers and in the blueberry. In the towering, leafless oaks, hickory and elm.

In the season when depression gains its firmest root, these little creatures bring calm and lasting joy. And while there is no meaning to their existence or even to my own, life is, as its often said, what you make of it. We can choose to live cooperatively or we can choose to make life a Hobbesian hell, a struggle against all, for all.

Why is that? Why are humans so prone to petulance and determined to wage war on all life? Why do so few see the needed beauty and necessary role of the warbler or of the lynx? What’s wrong with us that we seemingly place greater value on televisions and cellphones than that of a living things?