Living under fascism.

From http://austinuu.org/sermons/2004/2004-11-07-LivingUnderFascism.html:

Living Under Fascism

A sermon by Davidson Loehr
7 November 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
http://www.austinuu.org

PRAYER:

This is usually the Veterans Day service. I had planned to devote the prayer to veterans because, as a Vietnam veteran, veterans are very dear to me.

But there will, unfortunately, be many more chances to address the plight of our soldiers and our veterans. This week I, and many here, grieve for the pain of Cathy Harrington over the murder of her daughter just six days ago.

Today, let us pray that all who suffer may find some peace. May all parents, relatives and friends of lost or dead children find light at the end of their dark and fearful tunnels.

May those who terrify and endanger us and our children be brought to justice.

And may we once again find or create that necessary but fragile web of interrelatedness which alone can give us both safety lines and safety nets as we go – whether bravely or timidly – into our future.

Amen.

SERMON: Living Under Fascism

You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word “fascism” in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don’t mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That’s what I am about here. And even if I don’t persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.

The word comes from the Latin word “Fasces,” denoting a bundle of sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual sticks. If it sounds un-American, it’s worth knowing that the Roman Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the chamber of the US House of Representatives.

Still, it’s an unlikely word. When most people hear the word “fascism” they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s as “corporatism,” which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago (in “The Corporation Will Eat Your Soul”), Fortune magazine ran a cover story on Mussolini in 1934, praising his fascism for its ability to break worker unions, disempower workers and transfer huge sums of money to those who controlled the money rather than those who earned it.

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. Yet reviewing our past may help shed light on our present, and point the way to a better future. So I want to begin by looking back to the last time fascism posed a serious threat to America.

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Time's up for turning on?

from Tuesday, Dec 14 The Guardian:

Trip over?

Magic mushrooms have never been more popular. More than 400 apparently legal ‘shroom’ shops have sprung up in the past two years, and growing kits have become a must-have Christmas present. So why has the government suddenly turned tough on sellers? Stephen Moss investigates

Tuesday December 14, 2004
The Guardian

Six months ago, when the NME described 2004 as “the third summer of love”, it put the benign mood down to one thing – the return of magic mushrooms. The drug idolised by cult author and psychologist Timothy Leary in the 1960s – he said that his first experience of mushrooms in Mexico in 1960 taught him more than all his years of study – was back. According to the NME, which produced a “top tips for top trips” guide, mushrooms were a safe alternative to ecstasy, and what’s more – they were legal. It was time to “turn on, tune in, drop out” all over again.

Except that nobody told the Home Office and the police, which have now declared war on magic mushrooms. In Gloucester, two local men have been charged with supplying a class A drug by selling them. It promises to be the start of a long and complicated legal battle to determine the status of Britain’s latest drug of choice. Other cases are pending in Birmingham and Canterbury – cases which the Home Office hopes will establish once and for all whether magic mushrooms are innocent, hippy-dippy playthings, or a menace to be stamped on.

The nation’s mushroom sellers are confused. Two years ago, a more easy-going Home Office sent out a letter advising them that “the growing of psilocybe mushrooms” and their “gathering and possession” did not contravene the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. It was not illegal, the letter went on, to sell or give away a growing kit, or to sell or give away a freshly picked mushroom, “provided that it has not been prepared in any way”. Recipients of the letter took it as a green light to sell fresh mushrooms, and there are now an estimated 400 “shroom” shops in the UK.

This distinction – between a fresh mushroom and one that has been “prepared” – is crucial. It is not an offence to possess or consume a mushroom, because it occurs naturally, but a psilocybe mushroom contains the hallucinogen psilocin and its byproduct psilocybin, both of which are deemed to be class A drugs under the 1971 Act. Any “preparation” or any attempt to turn the mushroom into a “product” (the Gloucester case and others like it may hinge on the definition of those words) could constitute the supply of a class A drug. Maximum sentence: life imprisonment.

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Breathtaking idiocy.

Respond to this article atMs. Wright’s forum

Standing up for soldiers with ‘Bumper of My S.U.V.’

Tuesday, December 14, 2004 Posted: 10:26 AM EST (1526 GMT)

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Billboard) — Leave it to sunny Chely Wright to turn an ugly situation into a popular — and meaningful — song. Now, that song has helped her land a new label deal.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Wright — an established singer and performer — was driving the Nashville streets when a motorist in a minivan behind her noticed the Marine Corps sticker on her bumper. Wright’s brother is a Marine who sent her the sticker before he shipped off to Iraq.

The agitated woman began honking, swerving and flicking her lights. “I look in the rear view, and she’s flipping me the bird, hard,” Wright says. “I thought I cut her off, because I’m a really bad driver.”

When the woman finally pulled up next to Wright and motioned for her to roll down her window, she gave the artist an earful of opinions about the war in Iraq.

“Your war is wrong,” Wright remembers the woman screaming at her. “You’re a baby killer.”

She went home and immediately wrote a song about the incident, “The Bumper of My S.U.V.” She put a demo of the song on tape, then tucked the tape in a drawer and promptly forgot about it.

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Symbols reference book.

Dictionary of Symbols
by Carl G. Liungman

List Price: $21.95
Paperback: 608 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (December 1, 1994)
ISBN: 0393312364

From Library Journal
Never before published in the United States, this authoritative four-part history, dictionary, and index of non-iconic symbols is a revision of the author’s Symboler , published in Sweden in 1974. Part 1 concisely traces the historical development of symbols since their first appearance about 20,000 years ago, then develops several topical themes: astrological, hobo, and Nazi symbols, as well as modern business logotypes. Classification by form is difficult due to the diversity of symbols, yet about 1500 are painstakingly classified into 54 groups in Part 2 where the history, derivation, and meanings are described for each. In Part 3, verbal descriptions, e.g., “peace symbol,” comprise the easily used word index. There are some oversights in the index (e.g., astrological signs, which are treated in some detail elsewhere, only appear sporadically), but this is not a major criticism. Part 4, a graphic index, references information in Part 2 by shape and form. All historical periods and geographical areas are treated. Engineering symbols are deliberately excluded. There is nothing else quite like this well-researched work; other titles are older or specialized. Although useful for scholars and specialists, this is excellent for general reference.

COURTESY D. REEVES!

Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters.

Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters

By Mark Benjamin
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Washington, DC, Dec. 7 (UPI) — U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era.

“When we already have people from Iraq on the streets, my God,” said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. “I have talked to enough (shelters) to know we are getting them. It is happening and this nation is not prepared for that.”

“I drove off in my truck. I packed my stuff. I lived out of my truck for a while,” Seabees Petty Officer Luis Arellano, 34, said in a telephone interview from a homeless shelter near March Air Force Base in California run by U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans.

Arellano said he lived out of his truck on and off for three months after returning from Iraq in September 2003. “One day you have a home and the next day you are on the streets,” he said.

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JERRY MANDER: Technology is never "neutral"

Megatechnology: An Interview With Jerry Mander

by Scott London for Friction Magazine

December 10, 2001

“Megatechnology” is a word that appears quite often in your writing. What does it mean?

I use the term “megatechnology” to describe a new reality where many technologies intertwine to create new technologies. For example, we talk about computers as if they were a single technology, but in fact they are intertwined with many, many other technologies. So it’s no longer possible to relate to the computer on a one-to-one basis. We live in a new kind of global environment where everything is mediated by technology. We are interactive with it every minute of the day. We are in a car, or in an office with all kinds of machines, or relating to computers, or watching TV, or walking down the street (which is also a form of technology). So, we are constantly relating to it. We live in a technology environment, a technosphere.

What do you think that does to us?

Well, just as other creatures co-evolve with their environment, we are co-evolving with our technologies. In nature, creatures evolve by adjusting and reacting to other creatures. It used to be that way with human beings as well. But now we are co-evolving mainly with machines. Our compromise with them is that we start to become like them—we have to become a little like them in order to use them.

What do you mean?

I mean that if you’re going to play a video game, for example, the point is to speed up your hand-eye coordination. The better you get at the video game, the faster your hand-eye connection. What you are doing with your hands and eyes is involving yourself in the computer program. So you are creating a cycle of actions and reactions with the computer technology. As your awareness and your nervous system become tuned to the computer, you are changed accordingly.

This is true of any technology. Look at television, for example. To watch television is to take in images that are artificially created for a specific purpose. By carrying these images, you begin to turn into them. That’s basic to education and to all experience: as you ingest your environment you begin to evolve with it. In the case of television, you are evolving on the basis of carefully selected and programmed images, so you are getting acted on in a very aggressive manner. Television turns you into its own images. It rearranges your mind.

A point you make quite often is that technology is not neutral, as many people presume. It may seem neutral when we look at it in purely personal terms—the personal benefits of a computer, for example — but from a broader social and political perspective, technology actually changes our reality in dramatic and sometimes dangerous ways.

We need to understand how technology affects the whole system. Although we may find computers to be very helpful, or television to be entertaining, or cars able to move us rapidly where we need to go, these things also have serious effects on the environment, on the speed of life, on the way we think, on how we view ourselves, on how we react with nature, and on how power changes in the system. All of these are systemic changes; they are things that happen in the system as a whole.

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"Musicians may never get quite that high again."

THE MAKING OF ASH RA TEMPEL & TIMOTHY LEARY’S ‘SEVEN-UP’

An edited version of this article appeared in the April 2003 edition of Mojo.

On the night of September 12th 1970, Dr Timothy Leary escaped from jail. He climbed a tree in the exercise yard, jumped onto the roof of the cellblock, and shimmied along a telephone wire until he was over the fence. Half way along the wire his glasses fell off, and a patrol car drove underneath him, yet somehow his escape went undetected. Within days he would be flying to Algeria, with a fake passport in the name of McNellis and a bald head as his disguise. The California Men’s Colony-West at San Luis Obispo was a minimum security prison, but it was still a brave and daring escape, especially for an ex-Harvard Professor of Psychology just a few weeks shy of his 50th birthday. The authorities were shocked to find him missing; he was in the minimum security prison because his psychological profile showed a docile man who was not an escape risk. But Leary had found it easy to trick the psychological tests, as he had written them himself many years before. He was embarking on a fugitive life that would be full of glamour, excitement and danger. And, although he could never have guessed it at the time, he was going to record one of the era’s strangest and most ambitious albums: Seven-Up, with Ash Ra Tempel.

Ash Ra Tempel were formed in Berlin in 1970, thanks in part to the impressive size of Pink Floyd’s old speakers. Schoolfriends Manuel Gottsching (guitar) and Hartmut Enke (bass) had been playing together since they were 14. They called themselves the Steeplechase Blues Band, and originally covered British bands like the Beatles, Small Faces or The Who. Before long their music would evolve and they would concentrate on improvised blues instrumentals.

The Berlin music scene was tiny at the time, so when it came time to get some new equipment, Enke set off for London. Here he found four massive speakers that had previously been owned by Pink Floyd. Somehow Enke managed to single-handedly load these huge cabinets into taxis, trains and a ferry, and get them back home. “From that moment on we had the biggest equipment in Berlin!”, Gottsching remembers with evident glee.

Klaus Schulze (drums) had recently left Tangerine Dream when he stumbled into Enke and G??ttsching’s rehearsal room. Upon seeing the size of their cabinets he immediately suggested that they form a band together. The three went straight to a pub and within half an hour Ash Ra Tempel was born. Schulze not only gave the trio their new name, but he introduced them to the co-owner of Ohr Recordings, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser.

“When we started there was no audience for German groups in Germany”, Kaiser told the International Times in 1974. “The business was controlled by British and American groups. In Germany it is illegal to be a group’s manager. After three weeks [of starting Ohr] I got asked to go to the government office and they said, ‘You do something which is not allowed. If you go on you have to pay 30,000 marks fine'”. The problem was that a manager tries to find work for his band, but in Germany only the Arbeitsamt, or labour exchange, is allowed to arrange work for people. Even today a manager can only operate with special permission from the Arbeitsamt. Kaiser managed to get around this problem by going into business with Peter Meisel, who then ran Germany’s biggest music publishing company.

But it wasn’t the lengths that Kaiser went to create a music industry that made him such a revolutionary figure in German music. It was the type of music that he signed. The German bands that did exist copied English and American rock. Kaiser believed that it was possible for German musicians to create an entirely new sound of their own. “In 1970 there were no German record companies interested in German music”, he explained, “We showed the German People that they can trust their own music”.

Ash Ra Tempel had dropped the blues influences from the Steeplechase Blues Band, but they had kept the love of improvisation and experiment. They signed to Ohr and released their first, self titled LP before Schulze left the band to start a successful solo career. Schulze was eager to leave the drum kit behind and experiment with the emerging technology of synthesisers. But he remained on good terms with Gottsching and Enke, and they would collaborate again many times in the future.

Wolfgang Mueller took over Schultze’s drumstool and the band recorded their second album, Schwingungen (‘vibrations’). By now it was clear that something special was happening. The music flowed from the blissful and serene to the urgent and dark. It seemed forward looking, concerned with a bright future rather than an ugly past, and it justified Kaiser’s belief in a new and original German music. English journalists would later group Ash Ra Tempel together with many varied and different German bands under the dismissive term ‘Krautrock’. But soon Kaiser found his own label for the new sound. This was Kosmische Musik, and it was the music of Paradise.

When it came to producing a follow up to Schwingungen, the band had the idea of collaborating with an American underground hero of theirs. “We wanted to make an album with Allen Ginsberg”, remembers Gottsching, “because we had some text by him on the sleeve of our first album. But Allen Ginsberg was nowhere to be found!”

Meanwhile, Leary had arrived in Switzerland, the birthplace of LSD. Switzerland is comprised of a number of semi-autonomous districts called Cantons, and as long as Leary kept moving from Canton to Canton, without staying in the one place for too long, he knew he would be safe from extradition to the United States.

To the outside world, it seemed that permanent exile in Europe could have appealed to Leary. “In Europe we have been contacted by several elitist, aristocratic, thoughtfully decadent drug taking groups of older people”, he told Oz magazine in 1972, “who follow traditions which trace back through French poets, German mystics, elegant hashishines, silk-satin opium adepts. It’s a deep, wise old continent and quite together at the moment”.

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Puppets gone wild.

From the Dec. 1 New York Times:

A 60’s Psychedelic Tale of Youth Conquering All (the Revolutionaries Are Puppets)
By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF

In a small theater on the grounds of the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, across the street from the hundreds of art dealers offering works this week at Art Basel Miami Beach’s international fair, a very different kind of art event is selling out. For seven performances starting today, packed audiences will watch 10 marionettes strut, scheme and rock out to the music of Sonic Youth, among others, as they send viewers back to the 1960’s in a bitingly funny and psychedelic piece of puppet theater, “Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty.”

When the veteran conceptual artist Dan Graham first thought of creating the piece, he had no idea that marionettes would have stolen their way back into pop consciousness.

The makers of “South Park” hadn’t launched their apocalyptic movie satire “Team America: World Police,” now in theaters, with its marionette supercops conquering a toy-size Kim Jong Il. Even Spike Jonze’s screw-loose hit film from 1999, “Being John Malkovich,” with John Cusack as an existential puppeteer who mysteriously enters Mr. Malkovich’s brain, was still to come.

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