All things were together.
Then the mind came and arranged them.
—Anaxagoras

Deep Ecology
—from boy to man to boy
Jim Culleny

At first I thought that trunk and limbs
and leaves were one which they called
tree.
But then I learned that tree was
cleaved in thirds with blades of brain
and set apart in boxes stacked linguistically.

Parsing parts from root to crown
I learned to group them categorically.
But then I noticed they were bound
like arteries and veins and heart
which would die if pulled apart
and must be one if they’re to be.

Now I see that trunk and limbs
and leaves are one which we call
tree–
and though it’s true it may be
cleaved in thirds with blades of brain
and set apart like arteries and hearts and veins
we should admit before we start we can’t do it
with impunity.

by Jeff Strabone

In the twelve years that the George Bushes occupied the White House, I can think of only one outstanding instance when their odd cocktail of nepotism, ineptitude, and lackadaisy went down easy and yielded a savoury, enduring aftertaste. It happened in 1990 when Bush père outsourced his first Supreme Court appointment to his trusty chief of staff John H. Sununu, the self-appointed Smartest Man in the World. Bush clearly had no idea who David Souter was, but what could possibly go wrong? He was cut from the granite of New Hampshire and Sununu said he was cool, so there you go.

Gordon Silverstein, my professor at Dartmouth in the 1990's, recently called Justice Souter 'the only true conservative' on the Court in the New Republic for May 1, 2009. Souter, Silverstein reminds us, has been conservative in his judicial temperament. It's the precedents that he conservatively upheld that happened to be liberal:

Judicial conservatives generally have great respect for the law, and for legal decisions that have been made. This is the essence of what is called stare decisis—let the decision stand. Upholding precedent staunches the forces of change—and typically, that generates conservative results. But when the precedent you are upholding is precedent set by the Warren Court, holding back the forces of change means enforcing liberal decisions against radical demands for change from movement conservatives.

That was not the kind of conservatism that Bush had intended.

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by David Schneider

Last Saturday night, over dinner and drinks, the President of the United States was overheard saying:

Michael Steele is in the house tonight. Or as he would say, 'In the heezy.'

Wazzup!

For the last time, Michael, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a 'troubled asset.

That's right. At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Obama killed. American humor in the commercial media, over the last decade, has largely trended toward the coarse and snarky, so Obama's delivery – mature, intelligent, and martini-dry with a hip-hop twist – was thoroughly (in a word laden with meaning) disarming. (Even as he reaffirmed Michelle's right to bear arms.)

Disarming, because journalists and Big Media – in a crisis for survival – are now reckoning with their role in the great failures of the Bush Administration, in the failures of the economy, and the failures of their own profession. All are connected. And as Obama was happy to take the heat, as well as dish it (“Sasha and Malia are not here tonight. They're grounded. You can't just take a joyride to Manhattan.”) – because he took responsibility – he opened the possibility for the press corps to say to one another, like Hardy berating Laurel (though with a sheepish grin), “Well, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into.”

The American press might have been on “suicide watch,” as Frank Rich wrote yesterday, since Stephen Colbert's monologue three years ago (surely a critical event in media history). But the news industry had been in a severe depression long before Wall Street laid its latest egg.

Print newswriting methods are like the internal-combustion engine: their basic mechanics and operating principles have been little altered for a hundred years. For pistons, gears, sparkplugs and the carburetor, journalists have the lede, the quote, the counter-quote, vocabulary set and wordcount. They're all housed in an engine-block called the inverted pyramid, a structure whose wide use in American journalism dates back to the mid-19th century. This structure has its essential uses, but I think it also has, over the long-term, determined the way we receive, process, and use information, with negative aspects.

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I am not usually one to feel nostalgic. It is not my nature. But there is something about the idea of an ancient academy or a very old university that makes me long for the past. Perhaps I have been deceived by the romantic image of Demosthenes running on the beach with pebbles in his mouth, speaking beautifully over the roar of the Mediterranean waves. Or maybe the seal of the University of Heidelberg has fooled me into actually believing that a typical seminar in 1386 was conducted by a man wearing academic regalia seated in front of an ornate chancel. Whoever this important man was, he probably spoke with eloquence. At least I hope he did. I have come to imagine the classical university as being a prototypical T.E.D. conference, a place where the power of an idea was carried not only by its intellectual content, but also by the theatricality of its presentation.

Fast forward to the present in Santa Barbara, California, where I am a graduate student. Are people filled with a spirit of learning at the university? The answer is yes only if by the word, “spirit,” one really and cynically means, “weariness.”

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by Evert Cilliers

A few weeks ago I closed my account at Bank of America and opened an account at a credit union instead.

I cut my ties with one of the banks responsible for our economic crisis — one of the banks whose actions have caused countless Americans to lose their jobs and their homes, and caused many children in the third world to go hungry.

I felt clean. Moral. New.

Now I have a dream. What if millions of Americans disassociated themselves from the banks that have brought us grief?

The four biggest US commercial banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — possess 64% of the assets of US commercial banks.

These are the banks that are said to be too big to fail.

But what if millions of Americans moved their accounts from these big banks, and put their money into smaller local banks or credit unions instead?

Wouldn't these big banks then become small enough to fail? Isn't this the punishment they deserve for causing all of us so much grief?

I urge you, I implore you, I beg you to move your account from a big bank to a small bank. It is the quickest, simplest way to solve our entire financial crisis. Instead of getting a bail-out, the banks can then be allowed to fail. These banks caused us grief; let's kill them.

Vote with your money. Take it away from them. Why should you leave a single cent of your money in their greedy hands?

This is the best and most practical solution, because it is a democratic solution, executed by the citizenry themselves. It'll work way better than waving a pitchfork or a teabag.

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by Gerald Dworkin

What we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed.

–Nietzsche

It is easy enough to look back to the beginning of the century and see many ethical views that we now believe to be profoundly mistaken. Views about the rights of women, about who should vote, about separate but equal, about the rights of children to work in oppressive conditions, about the rights of patients in medical experimentation. To take only the latter, in 1963 researchers injected live cancer cells into nursing home residents, some of whom were Holocaust survivors, to determine whether the immune systems of sick individuals could identify and eliminate foreign cancer tissue as those of healthy people. Although the researchers were correct in thinking that no harm could come to their patients from the injection the fact remains that no consent was asked for.

It is much harder to look at out contemporary views and try to predict which of them will seem as mistaken 100 years from now as those above. Possible candidates include– eating meat, thinking of homosexuality as in some ways sinful or immoral, allowing the extremes of inequality of income and wealth that exist in contemporary America, allowing receipt of medical care to depend on income.

When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the defending the rights of women, a contemporary , Thomas Taylor, mocked her by writing A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (animals). The idea being that the logical implication of granting rights to women is that they be granted to animals and since the latter is absurd so is the former. So one persons drawing the logical conclusion is another person's refutation of one of the premises.

Henry Salt, in Animals' Rights, informs us that Thomas Taylor's “A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes…designed to, throwridicule on the theory of human rights…ironically lays down the proposition 'that God has made all things equal'” and “furnishesus with a notable instance of how the mockery of one generation may become the reality of the next.” (Henry Salt, Animals' Rights [1892], “Bibliography of the Rights of Animals”).

Bernard Williams advanced a thesis which might be called the relativism of distance; where distance here means is moral and conceptual rather than geographical. There had to be a possibility of a justification to those who lived with institutions which we, now, see as unjust, for them to be unjust. This is the relativism part. The fact that we see slavery now as the essence of an unjust institution does not mean that if we were transported in a time machine to 4th century Athens we could frame an argument for this position that would make sense to the slave-holders of the time. It's important to note that this is not simply a question of whether our arguments would persuade. People whose self-interest would be harmed may , for various reasons, not be persuaded they are wrong but that does not mean they are not wrong.

As Tom Nagel puts it, ” Williams believed that political theory, too, should be in a sense local, rather than universal, because it must be addressed to individuals in a particular place and time, and must offer them a justification for the exercise of political power that has persuasive force in the light of standards that are accessible to them. ”

Now one might take this in a stronger or a weaker sense. The weak sense is that those not persuaded are not to be held responsible for their support of unjust ( by our lights) institutions they are not be blamed for what they could not be expectedto see as wrong. The strong sense, which Williams seems to have held, is not just that they are not to be condemned but that the institutions are not unjust. It is not that they are just either. If one wanted to talk like Nietzsche one woulds say they are beyond justice or injustice.

But, and here comes the non-relative part, for Williams, none of this does has any implication that now, for us ( all of us), there is any doubt that slavery is unjust and that those who now support it, or condone it, are fully responsible for their mistaken views.

I believe that the issue of what might be called “moral anachronism” is a fruitful one to think more about. When do the concepts we employ in moral discourse, and the empirical situation we find ourselves in now, make it– and here the rightnotion to use is crucial– too difficult, too crazy, impossible, meaningless, pointless– for we and them to understand one another sufficiently for a certain kind of criticism and evaluation to be possible? When does the fact that our current understandings and commitments were not historically present in an earlier period get people off the hook for behavior that, today, would be universally viewed as outrageous?

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It was my fault. I’d been traveling abroad and didn’t want the real world invading my vacation bubble, so I was checking e-mail and world headlines superficially. Bea Arthur’s death and swine flu penetrated my consciousness to about the same depth. Sometime during those lazy days I followed a link or two and saw a stray headline reading “Arlen Specter to Leave Republican Party.” Amused, I logged off and continued blithely on with my day.

So silly of me. I’d assumed Specter—a centrist who not infrequently dissented from his party—was merely abandoning the Republicans, not defecting to the Democrats. I’d assumed he was primarily interested in taking a stand against the more outrageous elements of his cohort, and therefore would be loath to yoke himself to a different side with just as many disgraces in its ranks. I’d assumed he was breaking free to announce an allegiance to what’s been his de facto political philosophy for years, that of independents, and I’d assumed that as an independent Arlen Specter might be a real example of political valor So, so silly.

Perhaps we should be grateful for Specter’s candor—he split because his pollster gypsies spun his fortune and he knew he wouldn’t have survived a Republican primary challenge next season, when he’s up for re-election. Then again, he didn’t even try to conceal those motivations. But what crushed me and what made my jet-lag headache even worse when I returned home and read what was really happening was the lost opportunity Specter represented for independents.

Specter himself said switching parties will make little practical difference—he’ll continue to vote the same idiosyncratic way he always has. The newspaper graphics that listed the suddenly “realigned” Senate, with Specter’s “1” appearing in the tally of seats for donkeys and not elephants, means next to nothing, then, and odds are he’ll exasperate his new allies as much as he infuriated his old ones. (They’re already suspicious in fact.) There was zero news fiber in the whole affair, except for people who use politics to keep score.

If the name “Democrat” or “Republican” meant so little to Specter, why not ditch them? He could have made the same points he felt he needed to make about the GOP having lurched “far to the right since [he] joined it under Reagan’s big tent” in 1981. Leaving the party and remaining independent wouldn’t have had quite the emotional impact of joining the enemy, true, but walking away still would have done real damage to the ideologues in his old party.

To be crass, if Specter’s mostly interested in his own political prospects, refusing the Democrat label would have secured him far more power. He would have had both sides courting him; both sides would have had to come to him if he’d announced he wouldn’t pre-define himself and caucus with either side. It would also have signaled to both parties that snubbing or pummeling moderates might not be smart tactics. Instead, Specter heard the bad news about his polls, wet himself, and twelve or so hours later was holding up his jersey for a new team, flush with a huge signing bonus.

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